Hold onto Your Hats and Glasses Folks...

"It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything." -Tyler Durden

So this is what climate change looks like. Orange and eerie. Ash from California wildfires, greatly exacerbated due to longer, hotter dry seasons and unprecedented droughts, has drifted into Colorado's atmosphere. The sky is yellowish-orange; the sun, hazy orange; the sunset, spectacular and orange; the moon, an uncanny, big orange pumpkin, all night long.


Today I realized it's happening. Climate change is here. It's no longer a scary but remote possibility of a dramatic and dangerous future some scientists warned us about. It came. Just like they said it would, it came. I'm not even discussing this with AGW-deniers anymore. Why bother? It's pretty obvious, to anyone who wants to see, that the emperor has no clothes, that climate change is real. It's already here, kicking our asses and getting a little bit worse every day.

I took a drive through the mountains near Golden the other day and saw mile after mile of dead pine trees, the same sight one can find all across the state. The mountain pine beetles, flourishing due to milder Rocky Mountain winters, killed them. Nearly all of them, and judging by the rapid progress of the blight in the past couple years, the beetles will kill the holdouts soon. Already in some areas, on some mountains, not a single green tree remains. From Mexico into Canada, the Rocky Mountain forests are all dead and dying. Soon, those millions upon millions of acres of now orangish-brown forest will burn. It will be bad. The ecosystem will not recover, many people will die, and millions of people all across the country will breathe polluted air from orange-colored skies for years on end. That means you and me.

The world is coming to an end. That's the best news I've heard all day. Don't get me wrong, I don't want it to happen, not even close, but I had a really bad day. Two foreclosure notices, a repo man trying to find my car (I thought I was current!), six overdraft fees and no cash coming in anytime soon, my ulcer is acting up, a bad date last night...I could go on, but I don't want to bore you. I'm no woe-is-me victim of life. I just had a bad day, and somehow the thought that the world is coming to an end actually, weirdly, cheered me up.

Here's the thing: I'm not religious, but I believe in the soul, an afterlife, and reincarnation. I must have known, at least to some degree, what I was in for when I decided to choose this particular life at this particular point in history. If, in fact, the world is coming to an end, I must have known this ahead of time. That's too big to miss when you're planning out a lifetime. I must have had my reasons for coming.

For example, I'm sure there will be lots of opportunity for personal growth in the coming years. And perhaps some of my random-but-so-far-mostly-useless survival and leadership skills will come in handy someday. If nothing else, it's going to be a wild ride, like one of those terrifyingly-old wooden roller coasters where you swear you saw some missing bolts on the way up and you're positive that it eventually will fly off the tracks at fifty miles an hour and you just hope you're not in it when it does. Except that in this case, every living thing on earth is riding in the same cart, and we've already flown off the tracks, but we just haven't completely smashed into the ground just yet.

I've finally accepted that I may die a terrible death, possibly along with everyone else. I sure hope not. I'm doing what I can to prevent that, including, perhaps most importantly, maintaining hope in the face of very long odds. But there it is. Maybe it's for the best; maybe modern life isn't sustainable or even all that great to begin with. Maybe some things need to end in order to create a new beginning. Regardless, it's going to be interesting. And anyway, if we are past the point of no return, then I guess I don't have to worry about my credit score for too much longer.

Let me put it another way with this story. Last weekend I saw a live theatrical performance of Dial M for Murder, a Hithcock movie, at a cozy, local theater. My two friends and I lucked into front row seats, despite our last-minute purchase of tickets. (Spoiler alert...) At the very end, when the bad guy got busted in his own parlor, he looked around and enjoyed one last moment of relative freedom while everything still retained the appearance of normalcy. He downed a glass of whiskey, undoubtedly his last, and then the play ended on the assumption that the police shortly hauled him away, ultimately to the electric chair.

They say we're headed for upwards of a 6 degree Celsius (10 degree Fahrenheit) increase in global temperature by 2100, and possibly a lot more, since we're already way ahead of schedule. Does anyone really believe any ecosystem anywhere can survive even a third of that? Not likely. Have you looked at the sky lately? We're not faring so well with the 0.9 degree Celsius increase we've already experienced. Maybe it's time to take that drink of whiskey.

While that was probably the best natural ending to this post, I like Fight Club as a better civilization-ending-as-movie-ending-as-essay-ending. (Another spoiler alert...) In the last scene, the narrator/protagonist stands hand-in-hand with his girlfriend, watching the destruction of modern civilization unfold from their vantage point of a large window in a high-rise office suite. Too late to stop the anarchy he unwittingly caused, and with a gaping self-inflicted gunshot wound still smoking in the back of his head, all Jack could manage to tell her was, "You met me at a very strange time in my life."

Yup.