According to John Lennon, borrowing the NRA’s rewording of a Charles Schultz title, “happiness is a warm gun.” Unsurprisingly, the song is about sex, and coming in under three minutes, I hope for Yoko Ono’s sake that it was not revelatory about anyone’s endurance, but this is a matter for the celebrity news to have attended to. I have never been a fan of the Beatles—the destruction of any device playing “Yellow Submarine” within my hearing ought to be mandated by law—but I do see an opportunity to expand on the concept of a firearm with a temperature elevated above ambient.
The sad fact is that many in the gun community express disbelief about or outright reject the science of climate change. This may be changing as more of my fellow leftists realize the value of being able to defend ourselves against those who would do us harm, but there is still a strong association between out in the open gun ownership and holding a variety of right-wing views, including, alas, the conflation of scientific understanding with political opinion. Somehow, scientists working for academic institutions are lying for vast sums of money, while fossil fuel executives struggle to get by while telling the truth, or so I am routinely told, as least with regard to the first half of that financial statement. I am also asked to believe that dealing with climate change is merely a ploy to get socialism enacted—I wish—or is some kind of demonic plot to turn people away from worship of a particular god to adoration of the trees—again, would that it were so. How much better off we would all be if the political right had listened to Margaret Thatcher’s speech in 1990, rather than seeking to fulfill the dangers of which she warned us, sounding for all the world like Carl Sagan both with regard to the science and to the sense of duty to future generations.
The indisputable fact—indisputable in terms of facts and logic—is that since the start of the Industrial Revolution, human beings have been pumping heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere, and we are witnessing a rise in global average temperatures as a result. That this warming is causing more severe weather events, increasing desertification of crop lands, flooding of coasts and islands, and growing risks to human civilization is a conclusion about which the confidence is beyond reasonable doubt. The evidence for these is clear.
I get why many Americans refuse to acknowledge this. Scientific reasoning can be easy or hard, depending on the amount of mathematics involved, but it does take time to learn, and our schools do a poor job of teaching it. Being concerned about what will happen to the planet in the future is not something that believers in an imminent rapture can bring themselves to achieve. And the solutions to climate change will in large measure require governments around the world to take action together—i.e., solving the problem sounds like globalist statism.
But the world currently has almost eight billion human beings living on it, with projections expecting an increase to over eleven billion by the end of this century. Why does that matter? Some 267 million of the current total live in areas that are less than seven feet above sea level. More than five hundred million live on land that is in danger of becoming deserts. More than five million human beings die per annum due to heat, and that number is rising as we raise the global average temperature. And if my readers need a symbol of the devastation that we are perpetrating, here are wild koalas coming up to humans to beg for water.
Why does this matter to gun owners? Rampaging marsupials may not be too difficult to deal with, but I am not aware of any million-round magazines being sold anywhere. Those hundreds of millions of human beings who are being pushed off their land and plunged into desperation will not starve quietly as the salt water rises over them. The migrations of peoples that grew out of factors including climate shifts and population growth in central Asia ultimately brought down both halves of the Roman Empire, and that was during a period when the number of humans on the planet as a whole ranged from two hundred to five hundred million. Waves of people from lands ruined by climate change would push new waves from neighboring territories until the whole world comes seeking whatever areas can still provide food and water.
I am told that the best way to survive a gun fight is not to get in one in the first place. This piece of advice certainly applies to avoiding sketchy bars in the depths of the night, but it works just as well as a recommendation for dealing with climate change while we still can mitigate and eventually reverse its effects.
The zombie apocalypse may be an entertaining fantasy, but if we continue turning up the heat of the planet, it will turn into a civilization-ending disaster for which no personal weapons are a defense.
The reality is, no intervention we have now will affect this, beyond turning to nuclear power for most all electrical generation, and that's sadly not going to happen to any significant degree.
We're sold "Accords" like Paris, which turn out to be simply plans to carve out breathing space for the economies of India and China but do nothing to address the underlying issues they are causing. It's a political show, almost a religious sacrament at this point, and far too many believe it's a good faith effort to deal with the issue.
Climate change initiatives strongly parallel most gun control measures - ostensibly to "solve" an issue, but in reality simply not capable of addressing the issues they claim they are tailored to fix.