This is Crumble. He is two years old, a lockdown cat. He is also now very well settled as a house cat. He is not the cuddliest of cats; he like playing tag and hide-and-seek more than settling down for movie nights. Occasionally, he likes a good play fight — as long as he is the one winning.

So the other day, when it was really hot, I asked him, “do you know about climate change?”

It was hot. Sun blazing, grass all brown, no wind, but the trees all seemed to be doing well. A couple of years back in a week like the one we are experiencing now, the tree on the left of the picture suddenly shed all its leaves.

My friend Richard who knows more about these things than me told me it’s water-stress and is nothing to worry about; it’ll come back next year. As you can see, it has.

In his answer there is a lesson here about climate change. 

And so there is, and Crumble answered it for me

Crumble looked at me when I asked him. By now, I speak reasonable Crumble. He was basically saying, “Why do you ask? It is happening. That’s all there is to it.”

Crumble has already accepted it and is moving on. He does think about whether things will come back to normal or not next year. It will simply be whatever it will be. 

Climate change is already here and losses are inevitable

And so this is our problem with climate change. We are unable to accept that losses are already happening and more losses are inevitable. Instead, we want to fight it. We think we can still prevent it. We make it about good versus evil, survival versus extinction.

To accept it is already here is too daunting for us. 

I went for a walk with my friend from Mexico today. It was scorching hot. We caught up about our families, our jobs, and eventually our conversation drifted to climate change. He asked how can we get people to see the overwhelming evidence and the scientific data that proves something must be done about it?

And I told him, even as you ask that, you too are denying. He looked at me puzzled.

Climate change is a loss we have yet to grieve over

Climate change does not care whether we 

Climate change affects us in ways we have not even thought of, and we know instinctively and emotionally it threatens more than just polar bears and glaciers. It is already creating losses we are already happening.

Prices are going up everywhere. This is not something that can be the result of policies in one country or even a war between the two largest countries by land area in Europe. It is caused by something that is global.

Food prices are going up because places where we are growing food is becoming too dry or too wet. 

Covid was global. The US worries they do not have enough vaccines to treat the spreading monkey pox. Ghana is reporting the first case of the highly infectious deadly Marburg virus. 

Climate change does not care if people believe the evidence or not. We would like to think that if 

It simply progresses on. It does not care if anyone has read the IPCC reports, or even if the report was written. The glacier still melts no matter whether is anyone to record it. My friend is in denial for thinking that knowing the evidence will make a difference. It won’t. 

But there are other forms of denial. When I asked Richard about my tree and he responded that it will be fine, he is in part right. Equally, we were both in denial. We were hoping that it will be okay. Next year, the tree will be the same. The truth is more summer like this and the tree will be weakened until one year, when it happens again, it will not recover. It is a dead tree standing. 

We do not want to accept that. So we do not say that it is climate change which is causing the hot summers. We prefer to say it is wind from Africa. There is always a reason we can point to. However, it is like what happens when there is a lot of traffic outside school gates – children get injured. Each time it happens, there is a driver or maybe even a child at fault, but it is too much traffic that makes it inevitable that accidents will happen.

But the denial goes deeper

When 

inflation

oil

food

crops

what we use crops for – biodegradable stuff, medicines, clothes

and that takes us to bargaining

and when we bargain, we get angry

why are they not doing it?

why are governments not doing it?

but in doing so, we deprive ourselves our own power to take action to help ourselves

we locked into actions that refute the fear others feel

until we get to depression