Dinosaur Dreaming. Gail Collins-Ranadive
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Is that a snowball being lobbed in our direction, that ultimate mockery aimed at the scientific reality of anthropogenic climate disruption? Now we’re being pelted with snowballs, each of them representing the latest assault on our attempts to deal with the climate crisis: the international climate agreement, the national clean power plan, the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines, state and local renewable energy portfolios, the mileage standards for cars that would reduce emissions.
As the list grows to include offshore and arctic drilling, and leasing public land for fossil fuel exploration and exploitation, snowballs smack us and break apart at our feet, hissing like snakes. A growing pile of slush is turning into mud that is so slick and slippery we’re losing our footing as the fossil fools surge forward. I struggle to keep my balance. Or wake up.
This can’t really be happening! Somewhere in my nightmare my mind knows it is simply processing the latest findings that warn we have barely the rest on my lifetime to turn this planetary crisis around.
Submerging into the nightmare again, I catch the glimpse of a rainbow. As if the Sun has our backs, a prism of color streaks across the dark cloud above the heads of those who’d destroy our world. They cannot see it.
The rainbow carries me into my waking life, until, on my morning walk, an actual rainbow graces the misty sky and awakens my imagination. Rainbows have long symbolized hope for humankind, from the Greek goddess Iris carrying messages along its bridge between heaven and earth to the Hebrew god promising Noah to never destroy the earth again.
This time it’s we humans who are destroying the world. With tipping points and feedback loops looming, we’re at a place of no return to the “just right” climate that brought us forth and sustains us. And I’ve grown so weary and become so demoralized over this that my inner and outer worlds have become heavy, a hopeless grey. I’m ready to give in and give up.
Then all at once my grey spirit shape-shifts into a dove that whistles by. Is it in my dream or in my day? It doesn’t matter. In the dove I see a dinosaur that learned how to fly, and this remnant of the last mass extinction begs to be a metaphor to help prevent the next one.
Options for responding include flight, fight, and freeze, plus the uniquely human ones of figure out and fix it. A lifelong student of nature and human nature, I choose to believe that our species can and will wake up and take action. Never mind that the perpetrators would have us accept that it’s too late to do anything that would disrupt their profits.
We created this crisis and we can solve it. My arms stiffen in defiance of all odds. Don’t dare tell me we won’t rise to this challenge! Fear turns into fury and awakens a fierceness that frightens me.
Focusing on the rainbow as it refracts seven facets of the problem, I see the solutions that are embedded within each. We don’t have to go the way of the dinosaurs, and the human experiment need not end in the blink of this cosmic moment!
1
“We’re the first generation to feel the impact of climate change, and the last generation that can do something about it.”
—Gov. Jay Inslee
How did the human species get itself into this existential mess? Sadly, my own generation has been complicit in creating the predicament.
I confess I was so completely oblivious to the problem that I can’t even recall seeing the big green Brontosaurus on display at the New York World’s Fair back in 1964. Did I even visit the oil company pavilion that featured their signature mascot and showcased nine life-size replicas of dinosaurs as a ploy for promoting their gasoline?
Frankly, dinosaurs probably wouldn’t have grabbed my attention or remained in my memory; those huge beasts were something my brothers were into and comprised the biggest words in their vocabularies. As for my sisters and me, we simply wouldn’t have been impressed with putting a dinosaur anywhere, let alone in a gas tank, a marketing claim based on the false premise that the world’s oil reserves were laid down when dinosaurs roamed the earth.
Yet even back when I was a teen there was scientific evidence suggesting the dangers of burning gasoline, wherever it came from. In fact, research on the effect of CO2 on the climate had begun as early as 1824, when the atmospheric greenhouse effect was first discovered. According to the information found in ice cores, for 800,000 years after the age of the dinosaurs atmospheric CO2 ranged between 180 and 290 parts per million. When earth’s atmosphere reached the right levels of gases needed to support the ecosystem upon which life as we know it depends, mammals evolved to eventually include us.
But slowly, insidiously, as we humans embraced burning fossilized sunlight as a source of energy for warmth, transportation, and growing and preparing food, we didn’t realize that this blessing came with a curse.
When the industrial age began in 1750, CO2 parts per million were stable at the 280 PPM level. By 1824, they were steadily rising, and by 1860 the effects were actually quantifiable. In 1896 it became clear that coal burning could lead to global warming, and by 1938 it was found to already be starting. Research advanced rapidly after 1940, and in 1957 the public was first alerted that fossil fuel burning was “a grandiose scientific experiment” being carried out upon climate.
But by then, a fossil fuel burning car had become part of the American family, my own included. What a blessing our blue and white station wagon turned out to be—my father didn’t have to ride two buses to get to work, my mother no longer had to phone in her weekly grocery order, then wait for its delivery, then send back what wasn’t right. We didn’t have to call on a relative to drive us to the hospital for our latest childhood ailment. And we could take Sunday drives out into the country, as well as spend my father’s vacation week making day trips to the beach or the wild animal farm or the amusement park. Life was good!
My partner Milt remembers back when his grandfather plowed the family farm with a team of horses, and then when he shifted to the “horse-power” of a tractor that ran on gasoline after WWII.
By the time of the 1964 World’s Fair, atmospheric CO2 was pushing 315 ppm. Did we know? Should I care? By 1971, when I was driving a mid-size station wagon so that my own two small daughters could sleep in the back on long trips, Exxon oil company’s own scientists had confirmed the emerging consensus that fossil fuel emissions could pose risks for society, and began “exploring the extent of the risks.”
Meanwhile, I think our burnt orange and white station wagon averaged 8 mpg, but gas was inexpensive and not an issue. Then in 1973 the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) disrupted oil supplies in response to an Israeli war backed by American weapons. The resulting gasoline shortage had us waiting in long lines for $3 worth of gas at a time, odd-number license plates on odd days, even numbered ones on even days. A fifty-five mile an hour speed limit was imposed to further conserve gas. The U.S. economy went into a recession. and the American public began to pay attention to oil.
In July 1977, a senior scientist in Exxon’s Research & Engineering division warned company executives of the danger of atmospheric carbon dioxide increases from the burning of fossil fuels, and reported that there was general scientific agreement at that time that the burning of fossil fuels was the most likely manner in which mankind was influencing global climate change. CO2 levels had reached 339 parts per million.
I was out of the country by then, accompanying my U.S. Army officer husband on a tour of duty with NATO in Germany. While we were stationed in Europe, I worked on a degree in Peace Studies, trying to create options to wars that put my friends and neighbors into harm’s way. Geopolitically, we were caught up in the Cold War between two nuclear super powers. But while I was attending a seminar at the U.S. Army Russia Institute in Garmisch, Germany and listening to civilian and military experts coolly discuss Mutually Assured Destruction, I had no idea that another potential Armageddon was already unfolding.
A 1979 paper presented to President Carter signed by four distinguished scientists warned that the time for implementing policies was passing; global warming would probably be conspicuous within 20 years, and enlightened