This week, my most fashion-forward friend declared that the eighties were “BACK! BACK!” (N.B. fashion-forward people become quite animated when identifying a runway trend, and nearly always shout the last word of their declaration twice, in majuscule.) As I, an unremarkable dresser, am in the habit of forgetting that my friend is fashion-forward and occasionally mistake her current fondness for flowing capes as tribute to Super Girl, or possibly nuns, I answered, rather foolishly, “I know, right? It’s like everybody is talking about like they were back when Madonna was cool!”
As it turns out, she was referring to padded shoulders, conjunctivitis-pink eyeshadow and stone-wash denim. All cruelties imposed upon my gender 30 years ago, all things I sought, sometimes failed, to avoid. One trend I did, as a youngster in that flashy decade, successfully avoid, however, was the fear of nuclear war. This was for two reasons, the first being a sense of human hopelessness: If they did it, then, they did it, and I’d know about it perhaps for an instant before my central nervous system turned to goop. The second was more rational, if just as pessimistic, and had been explained to me by a particularly good history teacher.
One trend I did, as a youngster in that flashy decade, successfully avoid, however, was the fear of nuclear war.
Just why my old Cold War teacher Mr Dean was working for an inferior state school and not in a senior international relations post is anybody’s guess. Perhaps he simply enjoyed teaching, a trade in which he excelled. Or, perhaps his realism was just too brutal, even for big-time bureaucracy. He did brutally explain to us teenagers, in our pink-infection eyeshadow and ugly jeans, why we should just stop worrying about nuclear war.
“I absolutely encourage you all to go to disarmament rallies, of course,” he said, which was the sort of thing teachers were permitted to say to their students back then. “Nuclear weapons are the greatest technological evil this world has yet produced.” Then, he looked at me and said, “Yes. Even worse than your awful eyeshadow.” He went on to urge us all to agitate in the streets for nuclear decommissioning and then he said something very strange, especially in a time we were otherwise taught to hate “The Russians”.
I learned that afternoon that I could despise both the fact of these weapons and that many of the twentieth century’s most productive minds had spent their ingenuity on death.
“It’s just a bloody good thing those Russians have weapons, too. We should be glad they stole the recipe. What we have now is MAD, or mutually assured destruction. This means, no one will detonate these mass killers. Not, unless, they are the kind of weirdo who wants their entire nation also blown to hell within seconds.”
This was ice-cold comfort, but comfort nonetheless. I learned that afternoon that I could despise both the fact of these weapons and that many of the twentieth century’s most productive minds had spent their ingenuity on death. But, I also learned that MAD was an effective stalemate, and one that would prevent the USA from again deploying its unthinkable cruelty on human populations, as it had done in the nation of Japan, not once, but twice. And, according to some scholars, said Mr Dean, for no military reason at all, given the war had been all but ended.
“You don’t get to rule the world economy without melting foreign cities full of innocent civilians,” he said. Again, the sort of thing your teacher could get away with saying back then.
Since the horror of 1945, none of the nations who have armed devices have again unleashed this absolute horror. Sure, Kim Jong-Un and Trump talk a tough bomb game. But the likelihood they’ll end the world by using their codes is just north of non-existent. Nuclear battle is all or nothing. In this respect, it is like the outrageous wardrobe of my fashion-forward friend.
The world will not end with a bang, to mangle the old poem. Instead, it will end with a whimper. Or, more likely, with the sound of a few billionaires gasping for air, which has long since been privatised, on top of a mountain in the middle of a large land mass where they have been dodging the destruction wrought by a century of their industry that has belched emissions into the atmosphere and caused death by drowning of entire populations, ruined large scale agriculture and thawed out the frozen tundra of the planet, leaving the entire planet smelling, apparently, .
I happened to have a few wines with a very reputable climate scientist—don’t ask how I got to invited to enjoy such esteemed company.
You may wonder why I am filled with long-term, if not short-term, dread today. This is because I happened to have a few wines with a very reputable climate scientist—don’t ask how I got to invited to enjoy such esteemed company. I don’t know either, and I suspect that it was a clerical error.
Anyhow, I have been in a state of paralysis since this highly respected person offered me his candid Cabernet assessment in a private room of where the world would soon likely be if industry was not immediately prevented from exuding harmful emissions, and if we didn’t find a mass carbon drawdown solution by last Tuesday.
I have read books about climate change. I have attended lectures. I do not have respect for many “experts”, including and especially economists and politicians, but I have always admired the men and women of CSIRO in particular who have, in the past, offered their assessment of a world that is choking.
What it took to make this matter urgent was a casual chat with a person with a load of doctorates who needed a Cabernet or three before he told me what he really thought.
Somehow, none of this—and not even the unprecedented weather events we see in , Texas and other places—ever really shook me. What it took to make this matter urgent was a casual chat with a person with a load of doctorates who needed a Cabernet or three before he told me what he really thought.
Science continues as it has in some quarters for so long: a bunch of people read tedious things, perform laborious experiments and proceed only in knowledge, not in dogma. This work, and the fact that many choose to believe it is a “conspiracy” and not science behaving as normal, keeps our climate scientists, for much of the time, in a rational cautious state. A decent red can change that. They will tell you about the urgency if you ask them. They will give you a number for the predicted death toll and murmur something about how they are working with the military to prepare for the conflict that will follow such a local, devastating weather event.
I am not much of a drinker. That night, I am very glad that I decided to drain a glass. I would never have felt so keenly that there are now scientists across the world working just as hard to save the planet as there were scientists in the US of the 1940s devising the means for its end.
Many people committed to action on climate change have devised many strategies to have the work of science understood by so many of us, that we demand our leaders act not with just a few pretty promises about targets, but with all of the energy and hope for life within them. Some of these action groups have strategies that are successful.
But to these activists, I would like to propose another tactic. Let’s have an annual “Get a Climate Scientist a Good Bottle of Wine” event. Nothing has transformed my attitude to climate change as much as that jolly evening. Sometimes, it is in the friendliest and most informal company that our minds are changed and our determination sharpened.
