Twenty Years

How bad will climate change be? Is it irreversible? And if so, how much time do we have before we're all in really big trouble?

For one answer to these questions, turn to the last page of the November, 2008, U.K. "Harper's Bazaar," where British designer Vivienne Westwood, she of the famed corset dress, plugs her "Art Manifesto" (www.activeresistane.co.uk). Click to enter and look to the far right for an interview by Decca Aitkenhead with Jame Lovelock (reprinted from "The Guardian," March 1, 2008). The 'maverick" climate scientist is best-known as the father of the Gaia Hypothesis, the theory that our planet is "a self-regulating super-organism," an idea which, according to the article, "forms the basis of almost all climate science."

What is Lovelock's answer to the questions above? Bad, very bad. By 2020, less than a dozen years from now, he expects extreme weather to become normal. And it's too late to do anything about it.

In a nutshell, Lovelocks thinks we're fucked, pardon my French. When the interviewer asks what he would do if he were her, the octogenarian answers, "Enjoy life while you can. Because if you're lucky, it's going to be 20 years before it hits the fan."

From an individual perspective, his advice makes perfect sense, regardless of global warming. None of us knows how many hours we have left. Most of us plan our lives assuming that we will wake up tomorrow morning and the next and the next for decades to come, but most of us also know that this assumption is just that, an assumption that can be shattered by an earthquake, an aneurysm, a terrorist attack. If nothing else, enjoying life is an antidote to the fear of our individual mortality.

But collective mortality is another matter. As the mother of two adult children who are just beginning to carve their way in the world, who have always talked about the children they someday hope to have, my stomach clenches reading Lovelock's words. How does one plan for a future of mass chaos? And yet this is already the case in much of Africa where climate changes such as desertification and viruses like HIV have combined with human greed and hatred to produce large-scale death and destruction. While the rest of us might prefer to think that Africa's fate is far removed from our own, Hollywood is already busy imagining what might happen when the icecaps melt.

So how do we reconcile the need to live our everyday lives, with their individual dramas of hopes and dreams, loves and losses, with the knowledge that we may all be living in the equivalent of Darfur sooner rather than later, in this life and not in some future circle of hell? Perhaps Lovelock is right and it's already too late, but it seems to me that we have a moral obligation to try to stop the rising tides. It's time to put the environmental crisis, not the credit crisis or the Middle East crisis, front and center on the international agenda. And at the same time, try to enjoy each and every moment.