The Way the World Ends (Warmer, #1)

by Jess Walter

Sometimes, when she returns stateside like this, Anna has the urge to grab people and shake them from their stupors. Do you not see what’s happening? Melting polar ice, deforestation, acidifying oceans, calving of glaciers, sea levels rising, epochal floods and storms, mass extinctions, ancient diseases released from the permafrost. It is a complete collapse of delicate environmental systems on every level and front. Not in some hazy future—now. Just watch the news: hurricane follows hurricane, coral reefs die, island nations slide into the sea. Anna has the urge to yell at the students, to yell at her sister (You want me to get bangs?), at her parents (Freeze my eggs?). She has the urge to scream at a whole distracted nation.

Anna smiles, and for the six-thousandth time, explains that an overheated planet will manifest itself many ways, that while polar areas heat up, temperate areas are likely to see an increase in storm patterns.

One hundred percent of legitimate climate scientists believe the world to be on the verge of irreversible collapse, but yes, a small percentage remain unconvinced that human activity is the primary cause of the potentially devastating rise in greenhouse gases and global temperature.

Among climate scientists, especially those who have spent years in the field, they jokingly refer to it as “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. She knows scientists who have become drunks, who have dropped out and moved to the desert, who have committed suicide.

These students were no doubt just as bright (and dim) as kids from Connecticut and California, but many were starting in a logic hole because they came from deeply religious families and would need to be brought along slowly. (No, Zebidiah, according to carbon dating and, well, everything, the world is a bit older than six thousand years.) If he got his dander up over a little snake handling or Ten Commandments or the worship of AK-47s or a phrase like climate zealot, he would no doubt make trouble for this associate dean.

Yes, right on!

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?

Marvin Gaye + Do Not Disturb = middle-aged people having sex.

“Oh, I get that,” Dr. Poole says. “You bang your head against a wall screaming, ‘We’ve got to do something,’ and what does your country do? Vote in a bunch of corrupt science-denying assholes.”

“It’s like we’re hastening the end,” Dr. Anders adds. “Like, as a nation, we’re choosing to blow our kids’ inheritance.”

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.

He looks around the room and feels like he’s glimpsed some secret adult truth, the ain’t-no-Santa-Claus cynicism with which these scientists view the future.

—Projections of a catastrophic two-degree-Celsius increase are essentially baked in, the last four years the warmest on record, and only a miracle, or some unforeseen technology, will keep the planet from a humanity-destroying four-degree-Celsius increase.

Back at the Desk of What the Hell Does It Matter Anyway, Jeremiah fills out his last log report. He shuts down the computer and sits quietly for a moment, thinking about the night. He feels sick, like a kid who has heard more than he was supposed to hear. It’s one thing to hear adults say there’s no Santa. But to hear there’s no Future? Swift kick to the soul.

In the church, they insisted that the meek would inherit the earth, but Jeremiah has been meek for a good twenty years. This clearly falls under the heading of false advertising.

He wants to yell at his small-town red-state high school science teachers for leaving out a few pertinent details—like the fact that the planet is screwed.

He’s seen the headlines about climate change for years—but never quite registered the full picture. It always felt theoretical. But the storm, this news—the religious kooks are right: we really are living in end-times. It’s as if he’s only ever seen the pieces and never the whole puzzle. It’s—it’s—

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?

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. And to be asked that question by this kid, here in Mississippi, where people died fighting for basic civil rights?

“You’ve got to give them hope!”