Steve Olson

The campaigns to remove the names of 19th century racists and colonialists from buildings and monuments raise a troubling question for today’s political and business leaders: How will history judge those who would consign future generations to a world severely damaged by climate change?

When U.S. Sen. John Calhoun described slavery as a “positive good” in 1837, abolitionists had already documented the many ways in which slavery was anything but good. When the British businessman and politician Cecil Rhodes wrote in 1877 that “it is our duty to seize every opportunity of acquiring more territory,” colonialism was already under attack as immoral and counterproductive.

If any issue is as morally fraught today as slavery and colonialism were in the 19th century, it is climate change. Scientists have been warning for more than three decades that continued release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere will lead to catastrophic changes in the earth’s climate and ecosystems. Yet humans are now releasing about twice as much carbon from fossil fuels as in 1980.

Betting against the predictions of climate scientists essentially amounts to betting against the laws of physics. As the atmosphere becomes more opaque to the infrared radiation given off by the earth’s surface, the planet inevitably will warm. Sure, a small group of contrarian scientists thinks that some sort of countervailing mechanism will offset the warming. But they have little or no evidence to support their convictions.

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As essential life support systems begin to fail, people will ask whether the crises they are confronting could have been averted. Inevitably, they will focus on the politicians and business leaders who impeded action when the warnings became clear. If those decision-makers are already dead, they will be condemned posthumously, as Calhoun, Rhodes and other past leaders are being condemned today. If they are still alive, they will be asked to account for their actions.

I recently came across a similar case of retrospective condemnation, though on a smaller scale. When Mount St. Helens began to rumble and spout ash and steam in the late winter of 1980, the governor of Washington, the prominent scientist Dixy Lee Ray, established danger zones around the mountain to keep people away from potential eruptions. But the danger zones were much too close to the volcano, largely because Ray and other government officials did not want to disrupt the Weyerhaeuser Co.’s logging of the old-growth forests it owned right next to the mountain.

When Mount St. Helens violently erupted on May 18, 1980, only three of the 57 people who died were inside the danger zones, and two had permission to be there. Ironically, the only victim of the volcano who was breaking the law was the one person people tend to remember from the eruption: the cantankerous octogenarian Harry R. Truman, who refused to leave his lodge on the northern flank of the mountain.

Ray’s failure to establish adequate safety zones tarnished her legacy as the first woman governor of Washington. (She also was an early climate change denier.) But Ray, who died in 1994, was lucky. If the volcano had erupted on a weekday rather than a Sunday morning, 10 times as many people could have died, including hundreds of Weyerhaeuser loggers in the surrounding woods.

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Today’s climate change deniers cannot expect to be so lucky. Exactly how climate change will play out remains to be seen. Already, troubling signs of the traumatic and often unexpected consequences of a warming world are appearing: massive die-offs of starfish off the coast of the Pacific Northwest, a geologically sudden increase in sea level, enhanced flows of refugees from parts of the world stressed by warmer temperatures and drought. The leading Republican candidates for president, Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, have also led the field in their resistance to climate science and remedies. If one of them is elected and blocks action, the consequences — for him and for the planet — could be severe.

In her new book Great Tide Rising: Towards Clarity and Moral Courage in a Time of Planetary Change, Oregon State University philosopher Kathleen Dean Moore calls for the use of moral reasoning, where people “affirm what they think is true or good or right and then, the crucial step, back their claims with reasons.” Future generations will apply that standard to us. We would be wise to apply it to ourselves.

Steve Olson is a Seattle-based science writer. His latest book, Eruption: The Untold Story of Mount St. Helens, was published this month.

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