The wheels on the bus… another climate metaphor

Thinking a bit about metaphors at the moment, how they are cognitive affordances – make some ways of ‘doing’ easier, others harder.

So, on climate change

Human civilisation is in “the bus”. And the wheels on the bus, as every parent knows, go round and round.

And for a long time the bus didn’t really, in climate terms – at least globally – go anywhere. Sure, empires fell because the weather changed, deltas silted up, salt blah blah. But that’s just the natural variability that the denialists like to bleat on about.

Let’s say the bus is – to morph the metaphor – the last couple of hundred years. And you’ve got a small number of white people in the nice seats. The people of colour are largely forced, at gun point (with some help from epidemic diseases) to the crappy seats at the back of the bus, next to the exhaust pipe and far away from the air con.

And the driver of the bus is quite taken with the feeling of power when he (and it is usually a he) puts his foot on the accelerator. The bus goes faster, the nut behind the wheel feels like he is All That.

The bus picks up speed. Then comes the Great Acceleration from the 1950s onwards.

Then some of the smarter passengers are looking at the map of the road ahead and not liking what they see – the bridges seem to be out, and there seems to be an enormous cliff ahead. Some start clearing their throats, trying to get the drivers attention. But he’s got his headphones on. Some scream of imminent doom and that bit is remembered later by those who want to keep going faster and faster, to dismiss all warnings.

The wheels on the bus go round and round, but they’re heading towards a cliff. Finally even the bus driver has to acknowledge that the road ahead might be bumpy. That’s his euphemism for the bus speeding off the cliff and plummeting onto the rocks below. “bumpy.”

The scientific passengers, and far too few of the people in the comfy seats are begging the driver to slow down. Even, gasp, stop. The time to slam on the brakes is before the bus goes off the cliff.

We passed that some time ago, I fear.

The driver of the bus isn’t really paying a whole lot of attention to anything around him. He’s just looking at the speedometer, measuring his worth and the worth of everything on that one metric.

Now the bus is sailing through the air. The speedometer is still telling the driver lovely things. Everyone else who is looking out the windows has feelings of dread.

While the bus was still on the road, it was at least possible to imagine slamming on the brakes, or sticking our feet through the floor and digging our heels into the dirt, as if in The Flintstones Done early enough, the cliff might have been avoided. Might.

What now?

Now we’re at the stage of running to the back of the bus, smashing the back window with a handy ball-peen hammer there and shooting a grappling hook out, hoping it climbs far enough to catch on to something solid on top of the cliff. And then hoping that the bungee cord from the hook to the bus has enough elastic to slow the bus before it hits the rocks. It’s a cartoonish hope Everything suggests we’re going to smash. We look at the bungee play out. BECCS, NETs etc.

We look down the bus through the windshield. Soon the driver will take his hands off the wheel, and raise his arms in a comedy futile protestation.

The bungee starts to stretch… The acceleration of the bus seems to be slowing – or is that just what we want to feel?

The rocks beckon…