A primer for kids about climate change

The LORD God took the man and placed him in the garden of Eden, to till it and tend it — Genesis 2:15

By Dr. Steve Moffic

MILWAUKEE, Wisconsin — About seven years ago, I went to the local grocery store after my granddaughter Hannah was born. As I was paying for the groceries, the clerk asked me as usual, “Paper or Plastic?” to pack my groceries in. But this time was different. To my surprise, I could not answer right away because I started to wonder: what would be best for this new baby? Did it matter to her life whether it was paper or plastic? Or, was this a stupid question?

By now, I know the answer to that question is very important to her and my other grandchildren, now 11, 9, and 5 years old. In fact, it is important to all children, even if the answer is still not quite certain. Neither plastic bags or paper bags are good for the environment we live in. It is best to bring our own bags, but even so we have to keep them clean so they don’t get too dirty with germs that are bad for our health. To save energy, we should wash them by hand. But why make such a big deal out of something as simple as carrying groceries?

Recently, a 12-year-old friend of my 11-year-old grandson Noah seems curious about why. He has become more interested in climate change and wants to know more about it. Noah, too, has been interested. What can
I tell them?

Now, entering the teenage years is hard enough. Your body changes more quickly. You feel different. You start to think more about what is important in life. But now, you also have to think about how the climate and environment we live in is changing. When I was 12, some 56 years ago, all I was concerned about as far as the climate goes was whether it was nice enough to go outside and play.

Now it is different. Here is what I think Noah’s friend and every budding pre-teen and teenager should know.

You already have a head start in making your future better. That you ask about climate change means you are not denying that it is changing for the worse. Too many adults still don’t believe that.

Maybe you also understand that it is people that are making our climate get warmer than ever. How do we do that? In our desire for more and more energy from fossil fuels like oil, we are releasing too much carbon into the air.

What happens when too much carbon is in the air? Year by year, the earth slowly warms. Ice melts and our water rises. The everyday weather seems to get more unstable, causing worse storms, flooding, and fires. All sorts of living things struggle for survival and many die off. You may have heard of one of the animals at risk: polar bears. In many places, farmers will have trouble growing the same crops in the same places, so food supplies will be threatened. More particles in the air from pollution, which is often bad in big cities, seems to harm our brains.

These changes may mean that people may someday have to move to different places, like the ”polar cities” that some futurists have talked about. Now, we are beginning to call the people who might have to move north in the future as ”climate refugees.”‘ Of course, some people who now live in cold climates may even welcome warmer winters, but most of the people in the world will not.

In other words, like we humans get a fever when we are sick, the Earth is beginning to get a fever because the environment is getting sick.

There is a legendary experiment that shows what can happen when we slowly warm the water. I don’t think you will do this experiment at school, but it is easy to understand anyways. If you take a living frog and throw it into boiling water, it will jump right out. But, if you throw a frog into warm water, it will stay there. Then, if the water slowly warms, the frog will still stay there, hardly noticing the change in temperature. After awhile, it will be cooked to its death, never realizing what danger it was in.

I hope we humans don’t act like frogs. That’s why I wrote a letter that was published in TIME magazine a few years back. I said that like in that frog experiment, it would be better to use the term global boiling instead of the less worrisome global warming. I also wrote in the letter that as a psychiatrist, I know that is is hard for humans to be worried about an uncertain climate 50 years from now. Our brain is made to much more easily respond to immediate danger, like a car coming at you or your parents threatening to punish you. It is easy for us to deny problems that we don’t want to solve or feel are too difficult to solve.

But you and the rest of us do have the ability to overcome this tendency and to change our behavior. What can you and all your friends do? Ask your parents to save energy. Ask them to vote for politicians that are concerned about the environment. Get your teachers and schools to study climate change. Be sure to play outdoors a lot and enjoy all that nature offers. Eat more food grown near where you live. Read the Dr. Seuss
book about The Lorax. Read in the Old Testament about how we are supposed to take care of the earth, not to destroy it. Watch the new cli-fi movies like ”Godzilla’.” Write letters to your newspaper. Communicate on-line with other children all over the world, for even making changes for the better in the United States is not enough. This is a global problem, so countries like China and India have to help, too.

I started to change very late in my life. I had been very wasteful up to seven years ago. But you can change much earlier, right now. It is your future that is at stake!

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Dr. Moffic is a retired psychiatrist, a board member at Congregation Shalom in Milwaukee, and father of Rabbi Evan Moffic at Congregation Solel in Highland Park, Illinois.