Floods or Fires, Take Your Pick
Is This the New Norm?
Have you noticed, or is it just me? The world is either burning or flooding. Those are our two choices. Take your pick — drought-induced fires or nine inches of rain in twenty-four hours.
Extremes. The new norm is extreme weather.
Words like unprecedented or once-in-a-lifetime appear in almost every headline about weather events all across the world. It’s weird, eery, conjuring apocalyptic chills that run down our collective spines.
No wonder end-of-the-world-extinction movies and series are so popular these days. It’s cathartic to watch it play out before our very eyes.
I walk around in a daze. It registers in my brain as something foreboding, but I can’t seem to make sense of it. Nor does the feeling last. I’m left instead with a numbness in my brain that helps me get through the day. I’m not in denial, but I have no idea what to do any longer.
The days of talking about what’s to come are over.
It’s here. We’ve taken very little collective action in the last 30-plus years, and now it feels like we’ll never catch up. We had our chance, but we blew it.
I hope I’m wrong. I hope someone somewhere will step up to the plate and lead the way, someone with enough charisma to hold the full attention of the entire world. That’s what we need. Sure, I can recycle, own one small car, be a minimalist when it comes to consumption, or stop flying. But I know that it will be a mere drop in the bucket. This is a world emergency. It’s bigger than my tiny bag of trash. It’s going to require massive cooperation and a solid plan, neither of which we’ve been very good at achieving as a species.
In the past few weeks alone, the southwest has been experiencing brutally high temps that linger for weeks, whereas Vermont is flooded. They’ve never seen anything quite like it. But when a region gets 9 inches of rain in 24 hours, that’s not normal. Our infrastructures were never designed for such a deluge.
Of course, Canada has been on fire, and air quality has been impacted by that. Time for those hated masks again? Did a worldwide pandemic prepare us for the future where protective breathing paraphernalia is now part of our fashion statement?
There was a time when climate deniers were quite vocal, proud of their ability to stop the country from preparing for a safer future. The rest of us who believed the science patted ourselves on our backs whenever we placed the recycle bin curbside on trash pickup day. Hey, we were contributing our small efforts, and every little bit counts, we told ourselves.
The naysayers are still out there, some occupying positions of power, but as more and more insurance companies are pulling out of hard-hit states like Florida, Texas, and California, it’s becoming harder and harder to verbally attack the scientific predictions. After all, if big business thinks something is going on and, God forbid, is losing MONEY, well, maybe something really is going on.
Plus, we’ve entered a different era.
This is no longer the age of the science prophecies. The devastation is now a reality. How many times should we rebuild, spending tons of tax dollars just to have people move back to the very places that were destroyed?
MONEY talks.
So even old hardcore climate deniers are beginning to lose patience with a steady stream of extreme weather patterns. They may still refuse to believe that this is human-caused, but they can’t deny that the only thing that’s predictable about the weather is an onslaught of record-smashing events almost every week.
Of course, there’s a collective level of denial that is playing out before our very eyes. The problem is so big and so devastating and so scary that we can’t face it. A least we can’t afford to think about it 24 hours a day. Our attention span is not strong enough to do that. We’d crack under the pressure. Plus, we have no idea what to suggest even if we had the power to dictate change, which we don’t.
What we need is a worldwide level of commitment to developing collaborative plans that are designed to be implemented now, not twenty years down the road. The world now requires a level of cooperation that has never been seen before in the history of humankind.
Yet, we’re all in this together. We share this planet, our food sources, and water. If we don’t get serious about fixing this problem now, things will get worse.
We’re constantly trying to predict whether we’ve reached the tipping point. Isn’t that in and of itself kind of weird? What do we want? Are we bartering for just a few more years of wasteful living? Is that all we want? Just another decade of living like time is still on our side as we continue to enjoy our decadent lives?
I don’t know. I wish I did.
As the great awakening begins to unfold, where do we go from here? If we are to go by what happens in science fiction movies, we don’t wake up in time to save ourselves. Ugh! We get up one morning, and the tipping point surprises us with events that force us to run and hide and watch the life that we knew disappear before our very yes.
This is one time that I hope the science fiction writers are wrong. Am I hoping for a miracle? Yes, but no. I would love someone or something to miraculously fix this problem for us, but it doesn’t work like that. Problems require problem solvers, and that’s our role. No god or angel or even demagogue will step in and save the day for us. We’re a creative species with lots of ideas, but we’re also selfish and stubborn. Our big old brains often sabotage us even if what we’re refusing to do could save our lives.
It’s a crap shoot, and I’m wagering a bet each time I start a new day.
Teresa is an author and professional myth buster. You can find her books on Amazon.
