It's like the floppy disk.....

Grist has a frightening story with the headline If you’re 27 or younger, you’ve never experienced a colder-than-average month which is pretty amazing when you consider that climate change has been in the headlines for about 30 years and we are still arguing about it. But it bodes ill in another way, most of the world is under 30, and the shocks to the system is what is considered normal. So given that, will there be a motivation to change things. My sense is that there will be a new kind of climate change denier, and they will turn and acknowledge that climate change is happening, but so what? And these will be the ones where the challenge is harder, because they are not wrong, because they are asking a chocolate vs vanilla question now. And the choices are nihilism vs life. Those who argue that it doesn't matter are breaking the genetic contract with their offspring. The youth will only have hints to a less chaotic life, like icons of Floppy Disks on computer programs to save your work, they have no idea what use to be there, just the function. The question is save what and when?

"I never wanted to be right..."

I have an incredible affection for New York City, and it crushes me to see how much misery it is going through. I was so excited that they were going to run the New York City marathon, as almost an act of defiance that life will go on, and I was crushed when they canceled it. The NYC marathon was one of my most amazing experiences of my life and I remembered the joy of completing it. I know it is the right thing to do, but I still have hope.

I am apoplectic at continued denial that we are changing our planet in unexpected ways, and that even the brightest of us are obsessed with our insignificant conveniences, and insist in a consumption drive existence that threatens our existence. That's a lot of what this blog has been about. And it gets a few visits, and I have met some fantastic people as a result. But in the end, it's crickets in how little has changed.

I was taken that even the most bold gesture as covered in the New Yorker "Talk of the Town" column covered the work of Eve Mosler who created a fascinating piece of art called "The High Water Line" where she went around New York City's borough of Brooklyn with a chalk line maker illustrating what would be the high water mark of a 100 year flood. And looking at the pictures of where she chalked and where the debris was, she was not wrong. In Mosler's own blog post titled I never wanted to be write is she rightly explained, that she did not prognosticate, she simply made visual what many have found out through the act of conducting research.

The crime is not that we ignore the warnings, it's that we are ignorant of the way the world works. I was in a conversation with someone at work and she mentioned "well won't everything be fixed by next week" and I was aghast at the incomprehension of what it takes to repair the physical world. I asked "is New Orleans all fixed from Katrina?" "Have you ever rebuilt from a house fire?" and then she seemed to realize how silly her assertion was. The digital world has created the illusion that it's possible to fix things easily. Perhaps it's that illusion that causes us to discount making any real change to our actions?

This is a terrible price for being right.