WRITING A COLUMN in 2023 is a peculiar privilege, in the sense that it feels a lot like chronicling the end of the world. 

Global news this week was dominated by two stories that matched each other for their cinematic enormity, as well as their doom-laden significance.

The first: the destruction of the Kakhovka dam on the Dnieper River in a Russian-controlled area of Ukraine. The details of how the dam came to be destroyed remain unclear, but will doubtlessly be closely examined in the coming weeks by those with the expertise to do so.

What seems beyond argument however, is that this dam would not have been destroyed had Russia not commenced and committed to its entirely pointless and bloodthirsty invasion of Ukraine in February of last year. 

Whether the destruction of the dam was rendered by explosives as part of a military strategy, or a result of disrepair brought about by being in the hands of forces whose purpose is not to diligently maintain the infrastructure of the territory they’ve invaded, is not what will be remembered in years to come. 

Instead, it will be just another chapter of this strange volume in time, when a global climate crisis is shunted from view by the avaricious behaviour of bad actors. 

Which brings us to our second story: historically bad wildfires in Canada producing enough smoke to block out the sun hundreds of miles away along the US eastern seaboard. 

New Yorkers were warned to remain indoors or wear masks if travelling outside as the very atmosphere around them became toxic. Flights were downed, baseball games were cancelled and everything looked like it had been run through the filter that Hollywood films use when they want to evoke poverty.

Make no mistake. These are the starkest, most catastrophic images to come out of New York City since 11 September, 2001.

Over 10.6 million acres have already burned in Canada, roughly 15 times the annual average of the last ten years. These fires are attributed to the Arctic warming nearly four times faster than the rest of the world (and it’s not as if the rest of the world is warming slowly).

To put it mildly, neither event inspires confidence for the future of our planet, or our species. On the one hand, we have ecological disasters that are only becoming more frequent, more disruptive, and more deadly. On the other hand, we have the wanton lust for power, land and control that tempts world leaders into bloodletting and conquest.

And stuck in the middle is us — the people who don’t really feel like we can do anything about any of it.

Alamy Stock Photo Alamy Stock Photo

I suppose it should be obvious by now that this will not be the kind of column where the author recounts amusing anecdotes from his weekly trip to the supermarket, or an interesting remark made by a colleague at a barbecue. 

Reeling in the Years 2023 could well be replaced with an hour of climate-related catastrophe footage while that Everybody’s Gotta Learn Sometime song from the traumatic old road safety ads plays on a loop.

People who think of themselves as sensible tend to prefer sensible language. Language that warns people, that urges them to action, feels sensationalist to the “let’s just get on with it” demographic.

Unsurprisingly, these people also don’t like to panic. They certainly don’t like to be told that the world is ending, even as the walls close in more inevitably with each passing season. 

Can we blame them? Acknowledging the reality of the world we inhabit is not easy. It’s frustrating, it’s frightening, and worst of all, it demands action. It demands that we cast aside our preferences as consumers,  as air travellers, as motorists, as voters, and as peaceful people who would rather not spend our Saturdays taking to the streets and gluing ourselves to the gates of Leinster House and throwing soup over paintings in the National Gallery. 

This week, the European Commissions’ Copernicus Emergency Management Service (EMS) issued a warning stating that Ireland is at an extreme risk of wildfires. 

On Thursday, secretary general of the United Nations’ World Meteorological Organisation, Professor Petteri Taalas, said: “Thanks to an already high concentration of carbon dioxide, we have lost this glacier melting game and sea level rise game.”

As far as Taalas is concerned, there is no return to the relatively stable climate we enjoyed in the last century and the centuries before. It is a new world now. The day after tomorrow is here, and it’s unseasonably hot. 

As global temperatures rise, wildfires will increase across all continents, the air will become harder to breathe, food will become harder to produce, life will become harder to manage.

It is simple common sense, and not pessimism, that tells so many of us that this state of affairs is guaranteed to get worse instead of better. Those who run the world, the kind of people who prioritise profit over planet, the kind of men whose greed bursts dams, might have some people fooled yet as to the nature of the future that faces us.

But everybody’s gotta learn some time.