I am currently stuck in Denver, Colorado. All flights out of Denver International Airport, including mine, got canceled yesterday due to a blizzard. I haven’t been around snow that much during my life, but apparently this is one of the worst blizzards on record in Denver.
I was at a ski resort about 100 miles from Denver, and I took a shuttle yesterday [while my flight was still active] from the resort to the airport. On the way, my flight got canceled, and luckily the driver took me and the other passengers to hotels. The driver was a very friendly, positive guy and happily conversed with us during the trek. I was the last passenger to be dropped off, and when we were about a block away from my hotel, we got stuck. The driver yelled, “Fuck!” and tried to get the shuttle moving a few times with no success. I’m not sure how that went for him, but I walked through the wind and snow into my hotel.
During that drive, we saw cars spinning out, a minor accident, cars being towed, and multiple vehicles stuck in the snow. I looked out the window most of the time and, before the blizzard got really bad, I watched some tiny specks of snow land on the window here and there. And that’s just what it was, a speck. A tiny piece of snow that I could squash between my fingers. And yet, I thought, it caused all this. Cars stuck in the snow, people stuck in a city a thousand miles from home, roads closed, businesses closed, the airport and train stations shut down. Basically, human society, in this area, shut down. All from this from a bunch of tiny specks [and a lot of wind].
And I started thinking about other things like that. Carbon dioxide is an extremely tiny speck. So much smaller than a speck of snowfall. But since we’ve pumped so much of it into the atmosphere in the last 100 years, that insignificant speck has caused, and will continue to cause, much more damage than shutting down a city for a couple of days. In the U.S., extreme weather events are on the rise, and this is a result of this tiny speck that is carbon dioxide [and methane]. Hurricanes and wildfires are getting bigger, more destructive, and more frequent. Harvey, Maria, and Irma were extremely destructive, both in damage costs and human lives. California’s three worst years for wildfires have been in the last five years.
Ice is melting, sea levels are rising, certain highly populated areas will become uninhabitable for humans. And it’s this little fucking speck. So small you can’t even see it.
That was pretty sad so I started thinking of another example: the sun. The sun is the biggest speck in the solar system, but it emits specks even smaller than carbon dioxide. Specks so tiny that they don’t have mass or volume. Photons. Light is our source of energy, which, you know, we need for living. This infinitesimal speck is the reason we have human civilization at all. And that’s pretty incredible. Flowers, trees, insects, mice, snakes, tigers, humans, we all need that continuous supply of that tiniest of specks. Of course there’s plenty of other specks involved, but the photon is the ultimate source of all we love and enjoy. It is the greatest speck in the universe.
Lefty Forrester 