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ninety-seven percent a you all believe the world is doomed, right?” She doesn’t bother correcting him. 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.
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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. Does she sometimes ask herself, Why go on? No. She asks that question every day.
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The novelist kept a hand on Dr. Weather Girl at all times and watched Rowan with suspicion, as if he was afraid Rowan might steal his cheerful girlfriend—which made Rowan want to get the job so he could steal the novelist’s cheerful girlfriend.
We are well into the sixth great extinction, possibly worse than the comet that wiped out the dinosaurs, and, as Dr. Eastman says, “Polar bears are done, and whales, and, really, all the big fauna. And that includes us.”
There is no historical precedent, and therefore no response to such a disaster (this turns out to be the theme of a short story that Dr. Anders is writing) because literature, even dystopian literature, is by nature humanist, the markers of human civilization (love, kindness, intelligence) serving as baselines for basic good, for equilibrium, when in fact, human civilization may be “nothing more than a clever infection.”
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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.
