My friend loved saying it. In fact, my friend used to love saying it a lot. “There is no such thing as global climate change.”
He would say, “We humans are so arrogant to think we are powerful enough to affect the Earth’s climate.” Or he’d point to a really cold day in January and say mockingly, “See how we are heating up the Earth?”
My friend was in Bristol for a couple of days this past week, checking up on his elderly mother and letting her know in person that he is alive and well.
My friend and I had not seen each other in nearly twenty years. Thankfully, he hit me up on Facebook for us to eat a bite of lunch together while he was in Bristol. When we met up I immediately asked him about the devastation caused by Hurricane Helene in Asheville, his adopted hometown.
“Asheville is not there now, Ben,” he told me, holding back tears. “Asheville is gone. My house and my downtown business are gone, too. I have nothing left. Not even my beloved cat. I couldn’t find her.” He paused for a moment and looked away, as if still looking for her in the flood. “The water. It all just came up so fast. I could not believe how fast. Right before my eyes.”
My mind raced back to the time we were last seated together in downtown Bristol. It was nearly twenty years prior. I remember it so well. The topic had turned to global climate change. My normally mild-mannered and polite friend had become plum enraged and downright indignant. “Ben, you teach science. You should know better. You should know that it’s all political!” he ranted. “Coal and oil are the only way to go to keep our economy strong. Burn, baby, burn and drill, baby, drill!”
I replied, “The Earth knows no politics. The climate is changing. Really, really fast. We need to go easy on the planet or some really bad things are going to begin to happen.”
I tried to relay to my friend how so much evidence was pointing us (even “way back then”) toward a more volatile climate that was coming our way; more frequent and much bigger wildfires, widespread fresh water shortages, and … bigger and stronger and more frequent hurricanes - hurricanes that would wreak massive havoc far from the shore where they landed. No place would be safe from climate change, not even our beloved mountains.
My friend kept saying, again and again, “There is no such thing as climate change.” (It was as if he said it enough it would somehow make it true.)
My friend was/is a very intelligent human being. That’s what was frustrating me the most about his adamant denial. How could he possibly ignore all the insurmountable growing evidence, including the damning realization that we humans are primarily the root cause of it all (largely through our burning of fossil fuels)?
I could understand him not researching all the evidence if he were not so smart. But he was/is smart. Very smart.
I allowed myself to become so frustrated that I grew as angry as my friend. I snatched up a nearby napkin and forcefully wrote the following words on it; “There is no such thing as climate change.”
I waved the napkin in front of my friend’s face and said, “I’m gonna keep this. In twenty years let’s meet up again. I’ll bring this napkin. If global climate change is not plain-as-day evident to everyone by then on a massive scale, I will eat this napkin right in front of you. Gladly. Just please let me use some mustard to help ease it down.”
My friend laughed and said, “And if global climate change IS plain-as-day by then, I will eat the napkin. How about that?”
(When all else fails, injecting a little humor can be a wonderful way of assuaging an argument between friends.)
So. When we met up this past week, guess what yours truly here brought along with me?
That’s right. I brought the napkin. Well, no, not exactly. I brought a “replica” of the napkin. You see, I seem to eventually somehow lose things. And I can’t even blame it on a flood. I just lose things over time. So I grabbed another napkin and rewrote my friend’s famously repeated words on it. “There is no such thing as climate change.”
As I drove to meet him for lunch, I have to admit I was at least a tiny bit looking forward to the look on my friend’s face at the moment I would lay the napkin out in front of him. I remembered well his indignant rage of years ago, and I felt a self-righteous gleam of self-justification swelling up within me. I had even stuffed a couple of packets of mustard into my pocket to aid my friend in his eating the napkin.
But once he began talking so emotionally about all he had just lost to Hurricane Helene, I just couldn’t do it. My friend had suffered enough. Why pour salt (or mustard) in his wounds now? As the very wise writer of the Book of Ecclessiastes advises us, “To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven.” Now was neither the time nor the place to pull out that napkin.
(As Mom used to say, “Being kind is even better than being right.”)
Yet my friend gave me hope - great hope - for the future. In spite of his misfortune, he began excitedly talking about “green” energy, something he would never have done all those years ago. I nearly fell out of my chair when he began talking about how our entire economy is going to soon shift away from one of “destroying” the planet toward one of “healing and restoring” it.
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