by Tom Phillips
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| October in Siberia |
Flying from New York Tokyo Canada Alaska Siberia and Russia Kamchatka peninsula. The topography was normal – mountains and valleys, rivers of ice – but the weather was not suited to civilization.
Meanwhile we read
in the New York Times that by the year 2100, the Persian Gulf may be too hot to support human life –
that spending even a few hours outdoors would overtax our capacity to ventilate
and hydrate our bodies.
What is to be
done? Amidst all the hand-wringing and doomsday scenarios, one notion keeps poking at my mind.
Would it be wrong to suggest that as global warming increases, it
will open up new areas for human habitation, even as it shuts down others? It's
too late to undo the effects of 150 years of industrialization. So we may have to do what humans have always done – migrate in search of greener
pastures. Such pastures are already opening up – e.g. in Greenland , the ice-capped continent that now has a
growing season on its southern fringes.
Three of our
daughters have already migrated to cooler climes – two to Seattle, one to the San Francisco Bay Pacific
Ocean protect
cities from excessive heats and flooding.
But why not go all
the way? Twenty years ago, a fellow writer at CBS News announced she
was quitting and taking off for Alaska
A Google search reveals that she eventually got both – becoming a public affairs officer for the US Fish and Wildlife Service, writing and photographing the great outdoors of the biggest, most northern state.
Commending such a step is not to minimize the damage and suffering that are inevitable from
global warming, or to suggest that nothing needs to be done. There is no easy solution for many people, particularly the poor in low-lying tropical countries. But
for the human race as a whole, we may have to move, or die.
A hundred years
from now, the Persian
Gulf could be
uninhabitable, and Florida
Or to quote Calvin and Hobbes: Yukon Ho!
