“It’s like watching something you love fall away and you’ll never get to reclaim it. Some people have never experienced such a devastating loss. How do you rebuild? Where do you start?”
“Yes, I do not know how long our country will survive as the polar caps melt, the oceans rise and cover our islands. When the ocean rises enough, it goes into our fresh water, contaminating it and making it unfit to drink. Most of our citizens are spending a lot of their time trying to build walls to keep out the floods, but it has proved to be very difficult. It is probably impossible to save the islands.
“And they don’t want to leave. Their hearts and spirits are tied to the land and to our people. I don’t think my mother and father would ever leave. They are our elders, and they can’t imagine starting over somewhere else. Maybe when you are young, you can flee, but—”
“How long before you think all the inhabitants will have to be evacuated?”
“Definitely before 2040, unless the world changes its behavior towards destroying the climate.”
After visiting Tarawa and several smaller communities, Tom had flown back to the United States. His next opportunity to gather first-hand accounts was Lake Ontario years later in the summer of 2016. Lake Ontario stretches 310 kilometers, spanning the U.S. border with Canada between the state of New York and the province of Ontario. The last in the Great Lakes chain, Lake Ontario serves as the outlet to the Atlantic Ocean via the Saint Lawrence River.
There he’d met Joyce and Hilda Scott. They had sat in their living room. They had told Tom they would have loved for him to see their backyard, which was at one time 300 yards from the lake. Tom remembered looking outside the back and noticing there was virtually no backyard. It was only a matter of time before their home was underwater. As a result, there was no way to sell the house. Who would want to live in a place that was going to be underwater? They were both retired teachers and had bought a small home northwest of Rochester, New York. They had purchased their home in 1980. At that time their back yard extended for 300 yards until it reached the lake. Unfortunately, around 1990 they had woken up one morning to find the water was only ten feet from their house. Many of their neighbors’ homes had been flooded and abandoned. The lake had risen due to the water release from the Moses-Saunders Dam, which also sent water into the St. Lawrence River.
“Can you imagine what it’s taken to get some common sense water management? The water level of the lake is in the hands of the International Joint Commission, not the state. So, you can imagine the board of six people, with three Canadians and three Americans, have to compromise and are slow to react to flooding, but I keep hearing they’re trying to increase lake outflows, over two million gallons every second leaving the lake. That’s still not going to be enough of a drop overall, according to the experts,” said Hilda.
“We’re just sitting ducks while public hearings and politicians smack their lips about the ‘new normal,’ creating reality TV-styled opinions about different plans minus their red tape and bureaucracies. So, we just prepare with more sandbags? Please! Now, the Army Corps of Engineers has stepped in.”
“Took a while. No way we know how often this is going to repeat and how the adjustments are going to prevent devastating damage for everyone,” said Joyce.
Joyce and Hilda had said they had no place to relocate at their advanced ages. All of their money was tied up into the house that could be flooded shortly.
Joyce said, “It would actually be better off if we died before the next flood came. We will be homeless if we live long enough.”
Tom’s next stop had been Tangier Island off the coast of Virginia, often considered America’s first climate change casualty. This island has lost about two-thirds of its mass. Most of this has occurred in the past fifty years as the ocean levels rose and increased erosion. Many of the homes there are now underwater. Some families had lived there for 200 years. They were primarily fishermen. Some of the people living there had spoken to Tom about the erosion of the land. Most doubted that they could remain there after twenty more years. What was interesting to Tom was that, unlike other locations, most of the citizens left on Tangier did not believe that climate change was man-made.
After a few more visits to places around the United States and Canada, Tom had seen enough to know that climate change was real. He was appalled. Only a week before he’d left his job at Boeing, he had visited the National Weather Center in Atlanta. The data from the Weather Center also showed considerable deterioration in the climate. He studied the data compiled over the years. Hurricanes and tornadoes have been occurring with high frequency and strength. Summers were becoming warmer, and winters were becoming colder. Clearly, this was leading to more widespread damage both on the coasts and inland. Tornados in locations where there was no history of tornados touching down were suddenly happening and destroying homes and businesses. People had moved there years ago thinking that they were free of natural disasters and now everything they owned had been destroyed.
Tom had decided to disclose many of his findings from around the world to various conferences dedicated to climate control he’d attended this past year that all culminated in this conference he was preparing for in Chicago. Coupled with all of the human disasters being experienced, he couldn’t believe the number of animals that were suffering in different climates and how powerless it made him feel that enough people didn’t care about their welfare. While many people believed in everything he spoke about, others were too stubborn to admit that he might be right. Many people who agreed with him did not put forth ambitious enough plans to reverse the trends.
He couldn’t stop thinking about what he’d seen in Tangier, Lake Ontario and Kiribati, well, at least he could believe it. What he didn’t tolerate was how politics had reversed course and climate change had not, given how easy it was to see how many lives and lands were going to suffer the consequences. If his father had become a casualty of recklessness and concealment of the major harm he’d been exposed to, he sure as hell wasn’t going to continue to wait and see what he, Jeff, Joyce, Hilda and folks were going to be exposed to as tornados forged new paths.
He arrived in Chicago, headed to conference and delivered his presentation with many people impressed and happy that Boeing was one of the business executive delegates willing to convene with professionals from the government, academia and non-profits. He had booked an evening flight home. He needed to get started on his plans.
After a short flight, he drove home. Although Sam always loved greeting him when he returned from his travels, Sam would be asleep by the time he got home. Besides, Tom was more interested in seeing the expression on Sam’s face when he showed up after talking to President Trump in person in a week.
Chapter 3 – All Part of Growing Up
Sam Burns, Aurora, Colorado
Sam was only seven years old at the time Donald Trump became president. Despite his age, he had noticed the change in his dad’s behavior after watching Donald Trump. He knew almost immediately something was bothering his dad, call it son-father intuition, and knew his dad was not going to tell him anything about the problem. Like most parents, his mom and dad wanted him to be happy and have a normal upbringing. Sam had no idea what the future held, not many seven-year-old children do, but he knew he could trust his dad to make decisions for him. His dad was always giving him praise and encouraging him to be better. It seemed his dad was always focused on him and not on his sister, Sophie, so much. Sam had asked his dad about that and the response was always the same.