OK, so I haven’t been anywhere near as diligent with these blog posts as I had originally intended. Life, work, play, husbanding, and parenting take up a lot of time. Who knew? Oh yeah, and there was that whole pandemic thing. But my biggest fan — i.e., my daughter — asked me to start it back up. And who am I to refuse a request like that?
To be fair, she is perfectly entitled to an honest explanation of what is going on in the world. Parents have long made a point of complaining about having to clean up their children’s messes, but where it matters most, the roles are reversed. The changing climate is our mess. We properly tell our kids their actions have consequences, but they’re going to spend their adulthood dealing with the consequences of their parents’ and grandparents’ actions. This issue is not going to go away — not in our lifetimes to be sure, and most likely not in theirs either. But we can still do plenty to ease our children’s burden.
The first thing we can do is inform ourselves, so that we can make better decisions and also give our children the knowledge they need to go further than we will have time to do. And that starts with dialog. Scientists like me who have a background in climate try to share what we know with the public, but we still need to do a better job. In particular, we need to be persistent in the face of people who would have you disbelieve the thermometers, and the CO2 monitors, and all the dots that a great many scientists have connected in 200 years of investigation.
Of course, we’ll also need to act on what we know. That may seem like a daunting task. But all of us who are parents have tried to instill in our children a sense of responsibility. More cynically, plenty of us have criticized younger generations for acting like they’re spoiled and entitled, or for not caring enough to do hard work to accomplish what needs to be accomplished. Well, it’s time for us to put our money where our mouths are.
