Month 8, Day 31: Can I Keep It? It Followed Me Home!

The New York Times is doing good reporting on Pakistan. Climate Change is of course the rhinoceros in the living room — rarely mentioned and carefully tiptoed around.

Tumultuous though it is on the ground, Pakistan’s disaster unfolds in slow motion from this side of the globe. A newly homeless population greater than New England’s, a nation’s resources destroyed, an epidemiology textbook’s worst-case scenario — these may seem abstract from a comfortable distance, but we ignore them at our peril. In our newly-created Anthropocene epoch, catastrophes like Pakistan’s can unfold anywhere. By definition, freakish weather events are unexpected; the conditions foretold by climate scientists will make accurate prediction increasingly difficult (which perhaps is one of the reasons many meteorologists are loath to accept the evidence for anthropogenic climate chaos). Pakistan’s suffering holds a message to all the nations of the globe: the storms of the coming centuries are here, and we must change our ways of living if we are to last them out.

Warren Senders