By Brett Keegan
Contributing Writer
Say what you will about science, but if you want modern medicine or technology, you can’t pick and choose empirical facts. They operate beyond opinion and form the framework of what most consider “reality.” So when 97.1 percent of the scientific community believe humans have a role in climate change, according to a study this summer, we should pay attention.
But climate change doesn’t seem all that important in the media, despite the UN Climate Change Summit last week and surrounding “climate marches” around the world. It rarely trends on Twitter or Facebook and remains buried in the ticker-tape of 24-hour stations. True, Leonardo DiCaprio’s brilliant speech at the summit did make the rounds via Upworthy, but Leo can only go so far.
This is a problem.
With climate change buried in the media, we lose an important perspective: History shows how humanity has pillaged, oppressed, and murdered itself since its earliest records, but throughout this chaos, Earth’s climate has remained fairly consistent (save for the Medieval Warming Period and the Little Ice Age). Climate change threatens this. If unchecked, it hampers our ability to live on Earth, perhaps indefinitely—something this violence never did.
Even the more conservative predictions forecast droughts, epidemics, extreme weather and flooding. These broad sweeps may lack texture, but California residents losing homes to wildfire and those along the East coast still scarred by Sandy will provide a story. So will thousands of others losing homes to global flooding or desertification.
This sounds daunting, but the physical reality of this problem requires our attention. Since empirical facts operate outside our human sphere, the problem won’t go away if we ignore it. For it to change, we must change.
The final episode of Carl Sagan’s 1980s science series “Cosmos” ends on a note of activism, with the turtle-neck wearing cosmologist asking, “Who speaks for Earth?” Indeed, we ought to ask this today: Who speaks for Earth? Clearly not companies belching greenhouse gasses, governments subsidizing the coal industry or media covering sensational stories.
We’re used to speaking for ourselves or our nationality, not for Earth. But with science programming, like Neil deGrasse Tyson’s rebooted Cosmos, and science blogs peppering the web, scientific literacy is growing. This scientific literacy and the worsening threat of climate change may help us accept this outlook.
We can change light bulbs, “go green,” and even sign a few Change.com petitions, but substantial change can only come if we realize our physical reality: that we live in a fragile collection of ecosystems, rock and biomes called Earth, drifting in a universe where more galaxies exist than people. At this point, everyone we’ve ever known through history, tyrant or savior, has lived here and only here. We don’t yet have the tools to settle elsewhere.
We may want to believe that this reality can fold to our convenience, but it won’t. Once we realize we are part and parcel to this same Earth, we may, as Sagan puts it, “deal more kindly with one another, and . . . preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.” Or we can persist in harmful habits and reassuring fables, facing the fallout. The choice, despite difficulties, is clear.
