The Way the World Ends (Warmer, #1)

by Jess Walter

“It’s very common,” she says, “mistaking weather for climate. Weather simply reflects climate in a certain time and place.”

“pretraumatic stress disorder,” but the feelings themselves are no joke: anger, hopelessness, depression, panic—a recurring nightmare in which you see the tsunami on the horizon but can’t convince anyone to leave the beach.

as if Mississippi were the backwater of all backwaters, as if there weren’t morons and willful ignorance in blue states like Oregon too. In fact, sometimes the smug self-satisfaction of Portland (as if a new Tesla will save the planet) is the worst thing she can imagine.

An ignorant orange grifter was elected president and turned science denial into official government position.

Jeremiah smiles: well-meaning white liberals telling a shy gay brown kid to go antagonize a bunch of small-town southern police officers.

But is Jeremiah willing to die for this? He wouldn’t mind actually a year or two of being gay before getting beaten to death for it. Or even being arrested. It’s easy for these professors to push his civil disobedience, but he’s the brown kid who would have to go out into the job market next year with a conviction on his record. How does that tend to turn out?

She tells them about a Swedish study that found that each American child brought into the world means another fifty-eight metric tons of carbon dioxide. To offset the carbon footprint of one more American baby, 684 teenagers would have to become impeccable recyclers who gave up air travel for the rest of their lives.

Is this the way the world ends? Of course, it’s an impossible question, a paradox because it is both a complete certainty and utterly unknowable, both as undeniable and as incomprehensible as the beginning of the universe or the creation of life.

It’s as if the whole once-a-century storm were just a dream, a scary story told around a campfire. Is it any wonder we are pulled so quickly from our sense of doom, from sorrow and desperation, in such a world as this? Who could believe that in such overwhelming beauty exists such fragility?

she pictures students protesting the now-weekly school shootings with their perfectly reasonable request to apply some basic common sense and rational thought, to do something—to enact some basic gun laws—and how demoralizing it must be to see those same adults shrug helplessly at the backward, illogical politics, to act as if nothing can be done when clearly everything can be done.

God, she realizes, we haven’t done anything. We bitch at conferences or we write papers, or we make antigun placards or we march on a specified day, or we put on a pussy hat or we protest for an hour, but then we go back to work, back to watching TV, back to lives of petty gossip and distraction.

There are four basic rules of thermodynamics that govern matter in the known universe, but after that day, Rowan will propose a fifth, Shit can always get weirder,