Myth: There is nothing you can personally do to stop climate change.
Fact: There is something you can personally do, but you didn’t do it.
Myth: Our children will wander tornadoswept wastes strewn with the shards of a great civilization.
Fact: Typhoon-swept wastes will be more common.
Myth: Earth’s climate has changed naturally in the past, so modern climate change must also be a natural process.
Fact: Modern climate change is caused by human activity. For evidence, look at all that footage of smokestacks spewing methane, which then cuts to a timelapse of a big traffic jam and over to a lush tree in a field rapidly desiccating as a lonesome elk walks by, and then a polar bear tumbles off a melting ice floe and is surrounded by plastic piranhas from a kids’ game that ended up in a landfill, and the child who owned it is sitting bereft in a sandbox, and the angle widens to show that the sand is actually a desert where an old-growth forest once stood, and we zoom in on a determined ant struggling across sun-baked rocks, and what’s he carrying? A scrap of paper that says “Al Gore.”
Myth: It’s a beautiful day today.
Fact: We’re all gonna die.
Myth: Between heat waves, hurricanes, fires, and floods, every summer will be a deadly reminder of our failed stewardship and darkening future.
This story is from the September 11, 2023 edition of The New Yorker.
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This story is from the September 11, 2023 edition of The New Yorker.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber? Sign In
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