The Lifeboat-less Cruise Ship (a Climate Change fable)

Today, October 15, 2009 is Blog Action Day 2009. The topic is Climate Change. My entry follows.

Suppose you're on a luxury cruise ship (with no lifeboats) a thousand miles from anywhere.

While you're sipping your martini and sunbathing, an announcement blares over the loudspeaker. "This is your captain speaking. We've got a leak in the ship. We're all going to drown unless we get to the bottom deck and start hauling out the water as fast as it comes in. We need everyone's help!"

Being a sane, smart, non-suicidal person, you race to help, screaming for everyone else to do the same. On the way, you pass a batch of people still sunbathing. "Didn't you hear the captain?" you ask, liberally sprinkling your question with profanities too vile for this family-friendly blog.

They laugh at you. "That captain is full of crap. This ship isn't sinking."

What would you do? You could call them more vile profanities, but they are essential to your survival, so you'd want to use every manner of persuasion to get their help. You could kick them overboard so the ship had less to hold up, but that would waste time, which, according to the captain, is running out.

That's the challenge of Climate Change as allegory. Let's extract the meaning.

The captain represents the expert scientists who tell everyone there is a problem. You (starring as yourself) being sane, smart and non-suicidal, conclude the captain is an expert and knows what he's talking about. After all, you trust him to pilot the ship while you sleep, get drunk, watch bad dinner theater and marinate your privates in a hot tub alongside complete strangers and their privates. You're living every day with a trust that the skipper knows his stuff. It would be absurd to suddenly doubt his ability to judge the vessel's seaworthiness.

The arrogant deniers in the story represent, well, arrogant deniers.

I know, I know. We should respect others' opinions, but science isn't a question of preference or taste. Acknowledging Climate Change is a matter of everyone believing the experts that they rely on for everything else in their lives (scientists) from car safety to medicine to food production to whether or not a container labeled "microwave-safe" really is, on and on and on.

Can we please give scientists priority on matters of science?

Back in the day, I read science magazines a lot. I still do, though not as much. Back then (and now) all the science magazines spoke about global warming as a fact. The popular news didn't speak of it a peep. That changed when Al Gore hit the scene with An Inconvenient Truth and raised the alarm on Climate Change. Suddenly all the political (non-scientist) opponents of Mr. Gore, who have never ever discussed science in any depth, are speaking like Doctorates of Meteorology, claiming with absolute certainty that Climate Change is a hoax. I believe their dislike (or jealousy) of Al Gore has clouded their judgment.

This is what is so terrifying about Climate Change. We need everyone's participation to reverse, slow or mitigate its effects, but some people just can't stand the fact that Al Gore was the messenger. That's one psychological breakdown of Climate Change denial, but there are alternate explanations.

For example, the denial might be rooted in a disconnection with the earth and a lack of understanding of its connectedness. It's hard for short-sighted people who have never poked their heads beyond the confines of their own asses to worry about Climate Change. So what if an iceberg melts? They say. It doesn't affect my water supply. Who cares if honeybees die? I can always just go the store and get food.

Wouldn't it be great if someone wrote a book about this Earth-ignorant psychosis and titled it Where Did This Come From?

Whatever the reason for the denial, we need to overpower it. We all must appreciate the planet's fragility and act to protect it. Sadly, chucking deniers off the planet isn't possible, and we could use their help confronting global warming meaningfully.

Deniers, if Climate Change doesn't (at least to your perception) directly affect you now, it will. Look at it this way: if the planet floods and the atmosphere cooks, you won't be able to claim the moon landing was a hoax, or that Obama was born in Kenya, or that putting profit above health is a splendid idea, or hate liberal tree-huggers like me. You won't be able to do jack, because we'll all be dead. So can't we agree on this ONE thing, please? You can still hate me, just PLEASE stop denying Climate Change and work toward eliminating it with what you eat, what you drive and who you vote for.

That might go down in history as the most bizarre sales pitch ever, but in keeping with our nautical theme, I say "any port in a storm" because we need "all hands on deck."

A cruise ship without lifeboats may seem strange or contrived for the point of the fable, but I disagree. It's a perfect description for our one and only planet.

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Larry Nocella writes The Semi-True Adventures of Lar blog at LarryNocella.com. He's the author of the novel Where Did This Come From? The world's first CarbonFree(R) novel according to Carbonfund.org. The book is available on Amazon.com as a paperback and Kindle eBook. It is also available for other eBook readers.