When I look at old family photographs I play a game of picturing 'what happened next?' Did my grandmother turn and walk back inside the house? Did my grandfather go to a bar? And what did they all say to each other after the photographer had clicked the button, come out from under the black cloth?
But more than that. Did they have any idea of what was to come next? In many cases photographs were taken (as it happened) not long before a family tragedy or economic loss, or a major turning point. It would be good to plunge into the photograph and warn them - hey, that investment you are planning? Don't do it. The trip you are packing for? Don't go. The woman you are about to meet? DON'T MARRY HER.
On a larger scale than just the minor doings of my family, I feel the same way about photos of people celebrating Christmas or New Year's Eve in 1913 or 1938. There is a sense of a geography about to change, a world about to change, irrevocably, and these people in their silly hats drinking champagne, arms around each other, singing, are about to find their worlds turned upside down. What they thought was certain, well-founded, built on firm foundations, everlasting, would melt away in the fire of war within a year. Some of them at least would die in war, others would lose the loved ones they stood arm in arm with.
And now another date to add - 1990. Why 1990 you ask? Well it is a convenient year to settle on as a turning point in global warming. Not a year like the others when the dogs of war were let slip, but the year when the four horsemen saddled up perhaps. It is the year when there is yet another upturn in CO2 levels, and it is the year chosen in the Kyoto agreement as having the level of CO2 we should aim to return to. It isn't the year global warming started, but it is the year we should have declared war on global warming, but didn't.
So New Year's Eve 1989. Where were you, and what were you doing? Celebrating with friends at a party or restaurant? A quiet night with the family? Out watching fireworks somewhere? Do you have photographs of happy smiling people, champagne glasses in hand? People who knew what the geography of their world was all about. Polar bears here, penguins there, regular rainfall in this corner, snow in that winter, rainforest on those hills, some hot days in that summer.
Oh there were conservation issues to worry about like air pollution, and destruction of forests, and extinction of species, and rivers being dammed, and toxins in food. But they were worries set against a world which was known, a world which could again have a clean safe environment if we all worked hard at it. Not a world which was about to melt in the hot sun, change fundamentally into something never before seen by human beings. A hot and desolate world. A whole world which may look like parts of Europe had looked in 1918 and 1945. And a world in which the environment could increasingly directly cause the deaths, through heat waves or storms or droughts, of those happy people.
So I wish I could say to those people, on the eve of 1990 - 'Come on guys, climate change is underway, get a protest movement going. Get angry. Influence politicians. Turn things around.'
But I can't, so I can only look at old photos, and think of what might have been. If only.