Some say the world will end in fire,

Climate change has been on my mind lately, and not just because of the recent release of the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports or Mr. Bush's courageous defense of privilege and the status quo at the G-8 summit. Certainly the IPCC reports are sobering, even when couched in middle-ground scenarios perhaps better at drumming up consensus than predicting future changes accurately. Indeed, a recent article in Science found that predictions from an earlier round of IPCC reports were, if anything, too conservative when evaluated against subsequent measurements of actual changes. The point is academic, surely, when the world's largest polluter--and greatest beneficiary of greenhouse gas pollution--is refusing to make sacrifices from which developing nations are exempt. All in the name of justice and a level-playing field! We truly are led by clowns.

Yet the real reason that I've been ruminating about climate change has to do with a class I taught recently. It was an undergraduate field course conducted in Iceland. Although we weren't technically in the Arctic, I took advantage of our surroundings to talk specifically about Arctic climate change, since effects there are already and will continue to be more dramatic than in most other areas of the world. Imagine: in this century, the Arctic Ocean is expected to become seasonally ice-free, doffing its 14-million-square-kilometer toupee of ice every summer. Permafrost is already melting, belching massive quantities of methane, a far more effective greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide over 100-year timescales, into the air. Land ice is also melting at much faster rates than expected, causing sea levels to rise and, along with the decline in sea ice extent, increasing the amount of heat retained on Earth rather than reflected back to space. These processes in turn are expected to accelerate warming trends, as well as to have difficult-to-predict effects on global ocean circulation, much of which is driven by water density differences established near the poles.

It has become commonplace to describe the Arctic as the planet's canary in the coal mine. A better analogy, however, would compare the relationship between what's happening in the Arctic and the expectations for the planet as a whole to testing whether bath water is dangerously hot by dipping your head into it.

One point I tried to make to students was that climate change is not simply a scientific issue. We cannot tackle this problem without thinking about our social and political structures and about our ethical responsibilities to ourselves, our contemporaries and the future. Do you think, I asked them, that the Inuit--or for that matter, the residents of oceanic islands being wholly submerged beneath rising seas--are major producers of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere? Is there not cruel irony in the fact that the countries and peoples that have contributed least to the anthropogenic causes of climate change are the same ones least able to cope with those changes? Doesn't the same injustice apply to the future? Those who have yet to exist will bear the brunt of our indulgence now. Will they be wrong when they say of us that we didn't give a damn?

Many of my students seemed unimpressed. One common reaction was apathy: "There is not much that can be done about it." An alternative, more alarming response was simply to take whatever catastrophe I forecast and one-up it, at the limit embracing even our own extinction: "We are a foul species," one student said. "Good riddance." A third student reached into the American bag of rugged individualism to advocate that all anyone can do is "buy a gun and learn how to farm." Note that, despite their apparent differences, despondency, self-condemnation and self-reliance each ended up justifying the same collective inaction, if not a final, flagrant act of foulness.

It's true that little or nothing can be done--provided, of course, that we're unwilling to make dramatic changes in our lives right now, with or without government support. What's preventing each of us from reducing his or her consumption of fossil fuels by 25 percent this year, by another ten percent the following year, and again by ten percent the year after that? Would it be uncomfortable? Yes! Would our standards of living still be much higher than the global average? Yes! Can it be done? Yes! What's preventing each of us from patronizing businesses, institutions, even political parties that take climate change seriously, and boycotting those that don't? Or from establishing our own nongovernmental institutions to begin preparing for the unavoidable consequences of climate change, such as decreased water availability, food shortages, more violent storms and massive refugee crises, so that resources and plans will be in place when the shit really starts hitting the fan? Just because our government is wasting the few decades of lead time that it has doesn't mean that we should too.

There's nothing original about the solutions that my students came up with. Each is ultimately predicated on a failure of imagination, a failure that in many ways is encouraged by our politicians and our lifestyles--if it isn't the very attraction of them. How useful will a single gun be when your neighbors are starving or without water? What awful suffering will accompany the extinction of even a foul species? To write or speak about a catastrophe is far easier than to imagine it. Curiously, this same failure of imagination also serves as the alibi to so many other of the world's injustices. After all, slave labor doesn't need to be imagined to wear shoes; tortured corpses of Iraqis needn't come to mind when filling up the tank; beef tastes fine without conjuring a mental image of the panic of the slaughterhouse. Perhaps, then, we must act as if we could imagine.

Let me tell you: the gross inequities and the massive suffering upon which our first world lifestyles are founded are not unrelated to climate change. They are part and parcel of climate change, both in terms of its human causes and its foreseeable consequences. Imagine that. We live an illusion fueled by the planet's resources, mineral, animal and human. To a degree, how that illusion ends is up to us.

End it will.