Month 12, Day 9: Okay — YOU Think Of A Clever Headline For This One

I’m played out.

The Vancouver Sun covers a story about the increasing frequency and intensity of wildfires. Needless to say, that’s yet another symptom of climate change, and one which will add its own further push to the accelerating processes that are going to make life for my daughter much more awful than I want to think about.

The feedback loop in which climate change accelerates wildfires which in turn add carbon dioxide to the atmosphere is a terrifying example of the ominous future that awaits our children. The fact is that global heating is the single gravest existential threat facing the world today, and one that our present international order is particularly ill-equipped to handle. If specific climatic symptoms had specific causes, it would be easier to make reciprocal agreements between affected nations, but the climate system doesn’t work that way; the effects of a warmer troposphere are felt all over the globe, often far from major sources of greenhouse gases — as in the case of Pakistan, a nation whose contribution to CO2 emissions is negligible, but which is still reeling from disastrous flooding. Just as climate change ignores national boundaries, our response to this common enemy must be cooperative in nature and planet-wide in extent.

Warren Senders