Hot day: What stories will our children tell about the global changes already afoot?

Like most kids her age, my 4-year-old niece Amelia loves fantasy--princesses and mermaids figure prominently--and she makes up countless stories that blend, in willy-nilly and silly ways, what she knows of the world and what she can't yet perceive. Among the things she doesn't know are those I can't help dreading that she will, soon enough, figure out.

Throughout human history, of course, we've told ourselves stories to explain the unknown and unknowable. For natural disasters--earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, epidemics--various tropes recur, especially that of punishment visited upon us by angered gods. In her book, AIDS and Its Metaphors, Susan Sontag wrote, "From classic fiction to the latest journalism, the standard plague story is of inexorability, inescapability. The unprepared are taken by surprise; those observing the recommended precautions are struck down as well." Along with their inexorableness, she notes, "plagues are invariably regarded as judgments on society." Sontag's purpose was to rid AIDS of the stigmatizing metaphors--of inevitability and of punishment for impurity--that obscure the biological disease process.

Past epochs of massive climate change are prehistoric; we know them from evidence gathered in rocks and ice and bones. We have stories of cataclysmic disaster, like the Biblical flood that floated Noah's ark, but no historical experience of global climate change on the scale that many scientists believe is coming. Psychologists have suggested that our species has not evolved to respond to such long-term threats; we are instead wired to react quickly to immediate danger. Uncertainty as to the exact nature of the threat complicates our psychological responses--which run the gamut from avoidance and angry denial to can-do optimism. I also recognize the guilty glee I take in relating the latest scary finding. It is not easy to avoid the allure of the abyss.

As a childhood Baptist, I heard my Sunday school teacher's reassurance that I would ascend into Heaven during the Rapture, escaping the apocalyptic inferno that would consume the unsaved. Despite undeniable satisfaction in being among the chosen, I found myself more horrified than elated, knowing friends and family members were damned. The secular version of this turn of mind casts climate change as punishment for capitalist profligacy and callousness toward the natural environment. Both tales dance with death and give cold comfort against the escalating evidence of global warming. There is my niece to think about.

John Harte, who has been studying climate change for three decades, and is profiled in Flower Power, told me that scare tactics have proved ineffectual in convincing people to act on the dangers of climate change. And we don't honestly yet know, for example, if there's a tipping point when Greenland's melting ice will slow or stop deep ocean currents, freezing most of Europe. What is important, Harte says, is that we act, that we do what we can to slow the process.

Although nature is likely indifferent to our need to find meaning in global climate change, we may well require new morality tales--ones more clear-eyed than divine punishment--to carry us forward. They have already begun to take shape: Californians conserving our way out of the last energy crisis. Public officials overcoming partisanship to pass more stringent carbon controls. Economists and entrepreneurs devising less oil-dependent policies and enterprises. Engineers creating technologies that foster conservation or create new sources of fuel. Individuals and families challenging themselves to use less energy. No fantasies, these are stories of people and societies rejecting both popular cynicism and tempting apocalyptic visions to marshal their ingenuity and their better selves to take up perhaps the greatest challenge to face our generation, and those to come.

Kerry Tremain, Editor

Joining forces: This special issue of California was produced collaboratively with Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. A conference organized in May by Dean Orville Schell and the Berkeley China Initiative, The China--U.S. Climate Change Forum, provided us with up-to-date research and expert opinion. The heart of the issue, including our international reports on affected areas, was supplied by journalism students participating in a class on climate change led by Sandy Tolan with Energy and Resources Group professor John Harte. We also were grateful for the assistance of our colleague, the accomplished editor and writer Roger Cohn, who shepherded and shaped the school’s contributions, aided by Meghann Farnsworth. Howard Foster and John Radke from the College of Environmental Design provided valuable help by conceptualizing and producing innovative maps to chart real and potential greenhouse effects. Our interns, Erik Vance and Julie Rehmeyer, who joined us from the UC Santa Cruz science writing program, and Amy Goldwitz, a graduate student at the journalism school, worked especially hard to bring the science of climate change to life in the issue. I would like to express my appreciation to all the students (who took to the editing process like seasoned pros), to Sandy, to Roger, and especially to Orville, who made this collaboration a successful one. For more of what it produced, including audio-visual features, please go to www.californiamag.org. --K.T.