End Times Gospels And The Performative Agony Of Children: Climate Change Edition

On the despair of the denatured

Saint Greta is disgusted with all of you

Whether the weather is warm, or whether the weather is hot, we’ll weather the weather, whatever the weather, whether we like it or not.

Earth, it turns out, is not a perfected, self-sustaining Eden after all, but a complex biosphere in which subtle climate balances, and shifts in those balances, have always limited or driven human expansion. Homo sapiens left Africa, primarily by watercraft and along the Indian Ocean shore, to spread across the planet, because global sea levels rose. Mesolithic hunter-gatherer practices flourished in the Neolithic because of the Younger Dryas event. The Sahara has flourished with humanity and then dried up again, over and over, many times.

What we are doing as a species right now will be at least as transformative. We are making a world for our children’s children. Nuclear or renewables or both? Is growth sustainable? Should we switch to electric cars? What about plastic straws? Transformation is coming, we can …