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It struck me recently that, in order to properly understand global warming, you must be able to think of the Earth and its climate in two diametrically opposed ways at the same time.
First, it's necessary to get your head around the concept of how immense the climate is in relation to you and your little life - to grasp how small and fragile the human body is and how relatively feeble in relation to the climatic systems that surround us. You need to realize in your gut how devastating nature can be: how implacable - how ferocious - how uncaring - how devastating.
At the same time you have to be able to step back - far far back - and see the Earth as that pale blue dot Carl Sagan spoke of. You have to be able to see that its one small closed climate system is being irrevocably altered from within with relative ease by a single species swarming across its surface - us. And you have to understand the immensity of space in which our planet twirls - the huge distances to even the closest planetary bodies to which we might hope to flee, and the near impossibility of our being able to move there in time to escape the horrors that will soon be unfolding here if we don't take immediate and sustained action to reduce emissions and halt or reverse the already well-entrenched warming we've caused.
This is something of a difficult feat, at least until you've practiced it for a while. It isn't easy to hold two simultaneously discontinuous and mutually exclusive seeming ideas in your mind at the same time. But that's what is required of us to do when we think about climate change: because both of those things are true, and both of those images of Earth are necessary to truly comprehending the situation that we've emitted, deforested and overpopulated ourselves into.
More below the twirling tangerine tangle.
Let's take the second point first. Look at the picture at the top of this post. It was taken by Apollo 17 in 1972, and the incredible beauty of that iconic image of Earth hanging in space never ceases to astonish me.
Our local star, the Sun, is about 865,000 miles in diameter. By comparison, Earth's diameter is 7,917.5 miles - 109 times smaller than the Sun. And the Sun is 93 million miles away - so far away that photons of light take 8 minutes (traveling at 299,792,458 meters an hour, remember!) to reach us. Pluto, in our own galaxy, is so far away from the Sun that light takes more than 5 hours to reach its surface!
Our Moon is 238,900 miles away. Mars is 249 MILLION miles. And that's nothing compared to the Earth in relation to the rest of the Universe. Our galaxy - which is one among perhaps 100 billion in the known universe - is made up of 100 billion stars! The sheer immensity of space is utterly astonishing.
Now think about the climate - about the atmosphere of Earth, which keeps us safe from the near-vacuum of space, from cosmic rays, and from extremes of heat and cold.
If your hand were large enough to cradle the globe in that picture, your thumb would be large and powerful enough to simply wipe the atmosphere off its face. Space, as it is officially defined, begins at 100 kilometers above the Earth's surface. That's 62 miles - or about the distance from the lower tip of Manhattan to Milford, New Jersey.
The envelope of atmosphere which makes life possible is incredibly fragile from one perspective. But the havoc it can wreck via wild and inhospitable weather, including droughts, hurricanes, tornadoes, torrential rains and flooding can be immense.
So why is this important? Why do we need both perspectives to properly comprehend what's happening on Earth with climate change?
We need to understand how small our home is in comparison to the immensity of space that surrounds us. This small, isolated, lonely planet is all we have. There is truly no where else to go - nor is anyone coming to save us! We are not getting "off world" to Mars or a moon colony anytime soon. Someday, perhaps, we will be able to move away from home. But not in time. And certainly not in the numbers required to save everyone on Earth. How would we manage the incredible task of moving 7 billion people to the Moon, for instance? Or to Mars? It beggars the imagination - as does the idea that we might some day soon develop the capacity to move some of us to another planet - and then CHOOSE who could go.
And from the other end of the lens, it's important to think of climate as the terrifying destructive natural force that it is because, frankly: nature bats last.
Take flooding. It's said that it takes only 6 inches of moving water to sweep a grown adult human off their feet. I can attest to how terrifying it is to have your vehicle trapped in flood waters, having been on the beach in Oregon once when a rip tide came in. If we hadn't gunned it - fast and hard - we'd have been swept out to sea. We made it off the beach and to higher ground, but with only about 2 minutes to spare. We reached the ranger station and sent help to the other couple who'd been there - tires sunk in the sand, and unable to drive out. It was ghastly.
Extreme weather events are on the rise. The deadly heatwaves of this past summer are not going away. The horrific flooding that ripped through Texas, California, and South Carolina is an example of "stay tuned for more," and the UN has deemed flash floods a major global threat.
Coastal inundation from sea level rise has begun and will continue. People in their millions will be displaced from low-lying areas, including many major, heavily populated cities, if we aren't somehow able to summon the collective will to work on the issue of climate change (including adaptation and mitigation) NOW.
Communicating about climate change from both the macro and the micro perspective is a vital part of our challenge. The average citizen must be shaken and astonished with the realization of this duality. The truth is that we are both citizens of a lonely planet in an immensity of space from which there is no escape - and vulnerable as living organisms to the terrifying, deadly power of the changing climate here on Earth. The two concepts are opposite and interlocking sides of the same coin. They cannot be separated - and both must be fully understood.
Carl Sagan famously called this planet a "pale blue dot." Seen from space, that's what we are - a tiny, pale blue speck against the vastness of our galaxy, millions of miles from the nearest planet that - in a future we haven't figured out how to reach yet - MAY be a refuge for a tiny fraction of the citizens of Earth.
And on Earth's surface, inside that pale blue atmosphere, it may soon be a killing zone, with punishing droughts, heat waves that melt pavement, raging wildfires, massive and deadly flooding, and mind bogglingly enormous tropical storm systems raging across our oceans and making devastating landfall with metronomic regularity.
Both perspectives are necessary understand, and both are equally urgent to communicate.