It's OK to Shout Fire on a Crowded, Burning Planet

A version of this article originally appeared in Newsweek.

There is something distinctly unpleasant about being told that the world around you is collapsing. There is something distinctly unpleasant in finding out that the “elites” (you know, those loathsome people who went to school to study science when the rest of us were either stumped or unambitious), were right 50 years ago when they saw the planet warming and had the audacity to say something about it.

At the time, everything seemed just fine. We’d just passed the Clean Air and Clean Water acts that reshaped our landscape and changed the air in my childhood New York from a miasma to a delightful stew of clear skies and a faint hint of the buses’ diesel exhaust.

We even had a crying Native American for gods’ sake, federally paid to tearfully ask us to clean up our trash. What more could the planet ask for, anyway?

Much has changed in 40, 50 years. Temperatures are rising on the land and, perhaps even more worryingly, in the ocean. Ocean currents that have been in business for thousands of years are on the verge of collapse. Swimming in the ocean off southern Florida is no different than taking a nice salty warm bath. Smoke has filled the skies of the United States as Canada burns like never before.

The same fires are raging across Europe, on the island of Rhodes, where a Colossus no longer stands, and across the Mediterranean with its wine-dark seas. The same is happening across Asia, where most people live.

These things are no longer long ago or far away in the future. The stuff of the future is the stuff of today. Your favorite post-apocalyptic movie has already begun, the credits are over and the fight for survival is on. You can put your fingers in your ears and go “lalalalalallala.” You can look at your children and tell yourselves that their lives are going to be just like yours have been up to this point.

You can say all that climate stuff is a bummer and people panicking are panicking for no good reason. You can say it despite having no counterargument to that panic other than just hoping people will all just chill out. But I wonder what else a person could possibly want to give them a frisson of reality?

The people who know said that temperatures would rise: They have risen. Around the world people are dying in the heat and parts the Middle East are becoming literally uninhabitable.

They said that there would be droughts: There have been massive droughts across the middle and south of the United States (where denial is highest for some reason) and around the world.

They said there would be floods: And in New York and Vermont and across Asia, including a deluge that ate Pakistan, there have been floods.

They said that there would be fires like we have never seen before: There are fires around the world unlike any we have seen before.

I’m not someone who likes to believe in individual responsibility for the climate crises. Frankly, I hate taking it. I like to leave things up to others, to the government and the gods. I didn’t invent the internal combustion engine. I didn’t start manufacturing underpants at a size and scale that takes up half the world’s resources. I don’t use more plastic than any other average American does. I won’t kid either of us and say I use less.

But I would argue that, should I not exist, the world’s road to hell would be unaltered. That’s where we’re going and we’re going there with or without me—or you. There’s probably not a thing you can do about it, not even if your name is Greta Thunberg. You’re too small, the problem is too large, and we’ve waited too long.

I’m just not sure that means you can ignore the reality of what’s happening or that you’re better off if you do. I’m sorry you’re tired of hearing it. It stinks to live on a planet that’s going up in flames. It’s horrible to have to think about whether you really want to put children into this world.

Around this paragraph you’re looking for redemption. Clearly, if I’m writing this, there must be redemption coming. But I’m not sure there is. The United Nations—that bastion of sloth—has long set the goal of preventing increases in global temperatures from reaching 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit above what they were before the industrial revolution. And they’ve said that it would be bad for us to hit that temperature before 2100. We’re now hitting it within the next few years. By 2100, we’re talking about 8 degrees or more in the United States, and this isn’t the warmest place out there.

So, there’s pretty much nothing you can do about all of this beyond buying a more efficient air conditioner and praying the electric grid doesn’t go down around you.

But hope is hard to lose. Humans don’t work that way. Even in the depths of the Holocaust, Jewish leaders had plans for how to improve their people’s lives as they died of starvation. In the Warsaw Ghetto, right before liquidation, there were plans to build a new bridge to make it easier for the dying to get to their slave-labor employment.

You can always do what I did and buy an electric car, knowing that in 10 years, as long as everyone else buys one—everywhere—you’ll have made something of a difference. I don’t think it’ll help much, but at the same time I do feel a bit better when I run the air conditioning while idling on a summer’s day.

But maybe ignorance is bliss for you. You’re under no obligation to wear glasses just because you can’t see. You’re under no obligation to see all the signs of a cheating spouse. You’re under no obligation to see that the light in the tunnel is an oncoming train.

And maybe it’s more fun that way.

This views expressed in this article are the writer's own.