It's a Living Hell: Climate Change and Middle School

Many of the voices in the US Congress and the UN negotiations sound like adolescents when discussing climate change. And I feel like a mother facing a whirling dervish intent on derailing a healthful supper that could sustain the entire family.
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Reading updates about the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Durban, South Africa, felt discouraging to me, with the United States seemingly out-of-touch with the reality of global warming. But I experienced a nagging sense of familiarity as US legislators at home and negotiators abroad ignored scientific truths, communicated through hyperbole, and used obstructionist delay tactics.

Then I heard my almost 13-year-old daughter Maya yell from her bedroom, "I told you 17 times to turn out the light!!!!!"

It hit me: many of the voices in the US Congress and the UN negotiations sound like adolescents when discussing climate change. And I feel like a mother facing a whirling dervish intent on derailing a healthful supper that could sustain the entire family.

Appeals to rational logic and the common good are useless in these domestic situations, often prompted by my daughter's need for power or her fear of change. (Don't get me wrong: I absolutely cherish my middle schooler 99% of the time, but we've all learned the impact of the 1%.)

Within the short span of 24 hours, as I awaited an outcome from the talks in Durban, I witnessed three parallel behaviors:

Communicating through hyperbole
The day before a science project was due, my almost 13-year-old exclaimed to her 6-year-old sister Annie Sky: "You ALWAYS mess with my stuff. Now my model of a cell is RUINED!!!" (The 3-D model was not ruined but had been touched. Let's face it: a ball of Rice Krispies treats that looks like a cell is hard to resist.)

Showcasing a similar addiction to exaggeration, a YouTube video circulated that same afternoon with comments to the UN delegates by Senator James Inhofe, from Oklahoma, the most senior Republican on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. He claimed to be "standing up against global warming alarmism" and shared the "good news" of the "complete collapse of the global warming movement."

Using obstructionist delay tactics
In my home, these tactics typically occur at bedtime with the goal of avoiding a deadline: "Brush my teeth? It's only 7 o'clock. I'll wait until 8 o'clock. Besides I'm not brushing my teeth until Annie Sky brushes her teeth."

Likewise, the US became the obstructionist bully of the UN conference, pushing for a 2020 deadline and refusing to concede to a global treaty to decrease greenhouse gas emissions until China and India did as well. "What is really frustrating to see is this conference is again hijacked by the Ping-Pong game between the US and China," said Jo Leiner, leader of the European Parliament delegation to the talks.

Ignoring reality
My seventh-grader volunteers at a day care twice a week, plays the piano, and shares my ability to overhear conversations in public. "How can you listen so well to children, music, and strangers, but ignore me?" I asked this week. "Oh it's easy," she replied, happy to explain. "If I don't want to hear what you are saying, your voice gets kind of fuzzy in my head."

With climate change, many of our leaders possess that same ability to ignore the scientific consensus that human activity is the cause of global warming. Last week, the New York Times reported that global emissions of carbon dioxide rose by almost 6% in 2010, the largest absolute increase in any year since the Industrial Revolution. Yet in his statement, Senator Inhofe bragged to the UN climate change delegates: "You are being ignored."

The hundreds of protesters who stormed into the halls of the climate talks realize that we ignore these truths at the peril of the world as know it. "I am speaking on behalf of the United States because our negotiators are not," said Abigail Borah, a Middlebury College student who took the floor, disrupting US envoy Todd Stern's comments.

The living hell that persists as a stereotype of adolescence does not have to be our reality for confronting climate change. Delegates worked for days on a European Union proposal for a new global commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, yet the three biggest polluters -- the US, India, and China -- stalled progress until the talks went into overtime.

Finally on Sunday, the conference reached an agreement to extend the Kyoto Protocol, develop a Green Climate Fund, and mandate that all countries sign a deal by 2015 to cut emissions no later than 2020. Unfortunately, many critics say the agreement lacks the substance to curtail the impacts of climate change.

"It's a strange world when the US is aligning with China and India to block action on global warming," said Jake Schmidt with the National Resources Defense Council. Unless we can harness mature, rational thought to confront climate change, our world will become even more unpredictable with every year, with impacts on food security, water supplies, sea-level rise, and catastrophic weather events.

In contrast, raising a teenager in today's world will seem like a walk in the park.

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