I’m in Rochester, New York, my hometown, today. I don’t get here much and it’s been a while since I last visited. I can still find my way around, more or less. I have the experience common to ghosts when I look for things where I expect them to be and see they’ve been replaced by something else. Makes me want to moan and rattle my chains.
Rochester is less Rochester than it used to be. Places that used to be unique, landmarks of my mind, have been replaced by pre-fabricated chain outlets. Miles and miles of curbside commercial districts scraped away and superseded by pasted-in swathes of Everywhere Else.
Rochester is a factory town. In my youth, Rochester was known for making photographic film and carburetors, two products we never imagined would be obsolete so quickly. So economic crisis is not new here, but this current iteration will hit hard nonetheless. In the coffee shop where I type this, locals banter about the housing market.
“How many houses for sale on your street?”
“Just one, but ask me again in four days.”
“I’m gonna sell my boat. Dunno how much I can get for it, but I’ll take what I can get.”
I’m here to give a talk about environmental issues at a local college. I’ll touch on a number of issues, but of course global warming overarches all issues, just as the economy overarches the coffee shop conversations about real estate and the price of boats.
Climate scientists I speak with have the same feeling about their work that we’re all having these days about the economy. We’ve fallen off a cliff and have not hit bottom yet. The longer we fall, the harder we land.
We try to rely on computer models and past experience to predict the course of climate change (just as we do with the economy). We take data, plug it into the model and see what the prediction is. The problem in the last few years is that the new data – new, surprising data – is coming in so fast that by the time we’ve updated the computer model, it’s already inaccurate and has to be redone.
Most of the crucial data is not readily observed by Americans. The shrinking polar icecaps, melting glaciers, deep-sea warming, melting permafrost in Siberia, Canada and Alaska, methane seeps in the Arctic Ocean.
On the other hand, unseasonably early tornadoes rip through Oklahoma. We read about 200 Australians killed by wildfires. Here in Rochester, I drove around in heavy fog yesterday as the 50-some-degree temperatures vaporized snow banks. As I type, rain whips at the windows. In Rochester, in February. Rochester, the home of the bone-numbing winter.
So what do I say to a roomful of 18-22-year-olds tonight?
“Yours is an unlucky generation. You’re about to enter the job market when there is no job market. By the time the economy gets straightened out (if it does), even more severe global warming effects will be upon you.”
“Unlike previous generations of college students, you are not the leaders of the future. You will have to be the leaders of the present, starting right now.”
“If there is a benefit to all this calamity, it’s that it clears the slate for your future, because you’ll have to remake the world. You’ll have to design a sustainable world that is more than just rhetoric. You’ll be the generation that figures out how to live in a post-global warming world.”
“My generation had the last chance to avoid the tragedy. We failed and for that, I apologize.”
Everything Converges
I’m in Rochester, New York, my hometown, today. I don’t get here much and it’s been a while since I last visited. I can still find my way around, more or less. I have the experience common to ghosts when I look for things where I expect them to be and see they’ve been replaced by something else. Makes me want to moan and rattle my chains.
Rochester is less Rochester than it used to be. Places that used to be unique, landmarks of my mind, have been replaced by pre-fabricated chain outlets. Miles and miles of curbside commercial districts scraped away and superseded by pasted-in swathes of Everywhere Else.
Rochester is a factory town. In my youth, Rochester was known for making photographic film and carburetors, two products we never imagined would be obsolete so quickly. So economic crisis is not new here, but this current iteration will hit hard nonetheless. In the coffee shop where I type this, locals banter about the housing market.
“How many houses for sale on your street?”
“Just one, but ask me again in four days.”
“I’m gonna sell my boat. Dunno how much I can get for it, but I’ll take what I can get.”
I’m here to give a talk about environmental issues at a local college. I’ll touch on a number of issues, but of course global warming overarches all issues, just as the economy overarches the coffee shop conversations about real estate and the price of boats.
Climate scientists I speak with have the same feeling about their work that we’re all having these days about the economy. We’ve fallen off a cliff and have not hit bottom yet. The longer we fall, the harder we land.
We try to rely on computer models and past experience to predict the course of climate change (just as we do with the economy). We take data, plug it into the model and see what the prediction is. The problem in the last few years is that the new data – new, surprising data – is coming in so fast that by the time we’ve updated the computer model, it’s already inaccurate and has to be redone.
Most of the crucial data is not readily observed by Americans. The shrinking polar icecaps, melting glaciers, deep-sea warming, melting permafrost in Siberia, Canada and Alaska, methane seeps in the Arctic Ocean.
On the other hand, unseasonably early tornadoes rip through Oklahoma. We read about 200 Australians killed by wildfires. Here in Rochester, I drove around in heavy fog yesterday as the 50-some-degree temperatures vaporized snow banks. As I type, rain whips at the windows. In Rochester, in February. Rochester, the home of the bone-numbing winter.
So what do I say to a roomful of 18-22-year-olds tonight?
“Yours is an unlucky generation. You’re about to enter the job market when there is no job market. By the time the economy gets straightened out (if it does), even more severe global warming effects will be upon you.”
“Unlike previous generations of college students, you are not the leaders of the future. You will have to be the leaders of the present, starting right now.”
“If there is a benefit to all this calamity, it’s that it clears the slate for your future, because you’ll have to remake the world. You’ll have to design a sustainable world that is more than just rhetoric. You’ll be the generation that figures out how to live in a post-global warming world.”
“My generation had the last chance to avoid the tragedy. We failed and for that, I apologize.”
© 2009, Mark Floegel