The owner of the Blue Monday acknowledges that climate change is going to have dire consequences, but avers that the wealthy (he was born into a family fortune, and has been a millionaire for all his adult life), while probably having to endure sundry inconveniences, such as greater outlays for personal security, will simply retreat to fortified compounds in relatively temperate climes (“Montana or Alaska”). He sees a die-off of perhaps half the world’s population, but points out that this will be mainly in Africa, India, the Middle East, and that the victims will be people who are already having miserable lives. I asked him to consider the great social and economic dislocations that would accompany these cataclysmic developments. What will your wealth be based on at that point? How will you pay for your fortified compound and your ex-Mossad security contractors? By trading stocks? “You don’t understand the invisible hand,” he replied.

The other fellow is a cheerful catastrophist. For as long as I’ve known him, about fifteen years, he’s been beating the carbon drum. I should perhaps mention that his background is scientific/technical—he was a chemist by trade—whereas the boat owner’s a retired attorney (environmental remediation or, as he used to put it, “I work for the Mafia”). The catastrophist says that an altered climate can be dealt with, but that the erratic weather that accompanies it will make industrial agriculture on the scale it is practiced today impossible, and that the consequent food shortages will make the populace irascible, leading to civil disorder, etc., etc. I’ve long suspected that he would, in one or another of his worst-case scenarios, perish with considerable equanimity as long as there was someone within earshot to hear his last words: “I told you so.”

And I’m thinking, geez, guys, can’t we just sail the boat?

I can’t claim special competence in this area, but in an attempt to lighten the mood, I suggested that the earth had survived worse than anything humanity is likely to throw at it (e.g., the Chicxulub impact event), and the doomsayer shook his head and said no, what’s coming will be a hundred, a thousand times worse: the only life that will survive will be the deep-sea organisms around the hydrothermal vents, and at that point I felt that the conversation, if not the Blue Monday, had run aground, and went to break out the cooler full of beers and sandwiches.

cordially,