Back in the nineteen nineties, which seem like yesterday and decades ago all at once, a teacher friend warned me about climate change. She was a generally quiet and low key individual so her emotional description of what was coming if we did not change our ways caught my attention even as I silently felt that she was in the throes of an emotional outburst. Contemporaneously one of my sons-in-law began beating the drum of  impending danger with regard to climate as well. Because I was still quite busy with caring for my family and advancing in my career I found such information to be interesting but hardly life changing. Like most people I ignored the signs and kept moving forward with my life. Somehow I did not feel the least bit responsible for the strange weather patterns that seemed to be just another quirk of nature. 

A few years back one of my grandsons who is quite bright and earnest began informing us of his views on what was happening on the earth. He spent much time researching climate and the human impact on it, becoming more and more convinced that natural disasters would be more and more frequent and consequential. He worried that if we did not plan immediately we would one day be caught in a worldwide migration to places that were more comparable with human survival. He spoke of purchasing land in a part of the world that might suffer less than others when the worst began to happen. He felt that having members of of the family live near one another would provide a variety of skills that might become necessary as society broke down. It all sounded a bit like a dystopian science fiction thriller except for the fact that my grandson provided actual facts and showed us trends that were disturbing. Since then I have seen terrible incidents occurring all over the globe.

I have witnessed first hand the changing nature of the seasons. I remember February as a time that was cold day after day even in a southern place like Houston, Texas. As a young girl I walked to school in the proverbial days of freezing. We rarely had snow but winter meant bundling up in heavy coats, wearing hats that covered my ears and donning gloves to keep my hands from becoming too cold. We turned on the heater in our home in November and our Christmases were mostly cold. From January through February we knew that winter was a certainty that sometimes even included snow. 

These days I hardly ever have to use my winter gear beyond a few days here and there. This past February felt more like spring on most days rather than the traditionally coldest month of the year it had been in my youth. We had to cover our plants once this year but mostly spring arrived earlier than ever. The changes are more and more noticeable and I often think of the science minded people who were so insistent that we all had to do something to stem the tide of the damage that had already been done to our earth. 

Over fifty years ago Exxon enlisted the expertise of notable scientists to determine the effect of fossil fuels on our planet. The details that emerged from the research predicted with certainty much of what is happening today, but the mega company chose to fire the researchers and hide the report when they might have been pioneers in changing the way we all live. They literally chose instead to launch a campaign of disinformation that lied about the impact that we humans have on the natural world around us. Those who were like my friend, son-in-law and grandson were made to seem foolish and perhaps a bit hysterical. We all went on ignorantly unaware of the monster at the door.

As I watch millions of acres burning out of control in my home state of Texas I feel regret that I did not pay more attention to the warnings that should have been apparent to anyone with a willingness to consider the evidence. We humans were slowing making our beautiful earth more and more sick. It was so much easier to look away and assume that we would be able to fix any problems with our human ingenuity when the time came to finally react. Sadly, we may have gone too far in our profligate ways to prevent great loss and suffering as dangerous weather events become more and more of a reality. Perhaps we would have been better served to listen to those whose only interest in predicting what might happen had been to help us all. 

The evidence of climate change is all around us and yet it is not the big issue that it should be. If we are worried about human migrations now, we should be even more concerned about how they will look if vast areas of land become uninhabitable. We must understand that sources of water are drying up, making human life in the places they serve less and less likely to be sustained. It is possible that in the coming decades we humans will witness changing dynamics in where and how we are able to exist.

Surely the issues surrounding climate change should be paramount in determining how we live from day to day and whom we choose as our political leaders. Other countries are actively preparing for the difficulties to come while we Americans are mostly stagnant in our efforts. A wave of anti-scientific thinking will be our destruction if we do not join together now to protect our world from ignorance. We can no longer push away the scientific experts and hide the evidence in a vault pretending that all is well. We are in a race against time that should have begun more than fifty years ago. The question is whether or not we are willing to attempt to catch up to where we need to be or if we will wait until disaster is our everyday reality. The fires are burning and we have to do more than just put them out. Will we wake up before it is too late?