Have you noticed how the trees aren’t changing color? How only at the final stretch of autumn has the world cooled down? This will not be an isolated incident of 2018 – a mere shock and then back to our regularly scheduled program – this will last until the end of time. This phenomenon is aptly called climate change, and the world is sluggish to come to terms with it.

I remember when I was a child: the first day of autumn, a chill swept through Long Island and leaves fell with ease. Now it’s like pulling teeth. It’s sad to think that the oranges and yellows and reds of fall will not be experienced by future generations – that jumping in leaves will be a foreign concept from the past; that chilly Halloweens will be unheard of; that autumn specials on TV will feature greens of a seemingly everlasting summer.

For all these nostalgic reasons, I adored autumn and the following icy winters. Even winters have been sparse – barely any snow fell, and when it did, it became a puddle soon after.

Something is wrong.

As you have learned and forgotten, this is the work of climate change. This change in our world is completely our fault – some people’s greed outweighs the survival of all the species on earth – and that includes us. It may be hard to believe, but we are one out of many species on earth. We all have a right to it. As a species we have abused the earth that was gifted to us billions of years in the past.  

The earth is now heating at an unprecedented rate – man-made storms sweep the nations and we just became numb to it. We have become passive in our own survival. Our neanderthalic ancestors would shake their heads at us – their honed senses were meant to keep us alive, not cause our own demise.

What can be done to rectify this situation? No one really knows. The time to save our Earth has a deadline and the due date is soon – 2030 is only about a decade away and we have done nothing but argue politics and economics. This is our reality – and we have to get used to it, or be submerged under water in the coming years.