Image by Alexey Komissarov from Pixabay

“Dad, what’s Golden Gate bridge?” Jordyn looked up from the report he was reading at his daughter Nila.

“What was that, Nila?” Jordyn asked.

“What’s Golden Gate bridge?” Nila asked again.

“It’s a rusted old relic in the Pacific Ocean,” Jordyn said. “Used to be a major bridge in old San Francisco, before the quakes and wildfires took out California.”

“California?” his teenage son Myles asked scornfully. “That sounds like a made up name if I ever heard one.”

“Look it up, Myles,” Jordyn said wearily. Myles was at that age where he thought he knew everything and it was very exhausting dealing with him. Myles pulled up the information on his computer.

“Whoa, California was real,” Myles said.

“So was Florida,” Elaine, Jordyn’s wife, said. “That’s gone now too, thanks to all the category five hurricanes we get in that region yearly. They evacuated the last people out of Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, and the Carolinas about seventy, maybe eighty years ago now because it just got too expensive to keep rebuilding down there when a new string of hurricanes wiped everything out every year.”

“Aren’t category five hurricanes normal?” Myles asked.

“We used to get category two and three hurricanes,” Jordyn said. “Or even tropical storms. Constant category fives is something recent.”

“Why all the changes?” Nila asked.

“Well, the quakes in California weren’t new. Everyone knew something was going to drop half the state into the ocean eventually,” Jordyn said. “It was only a matter of time. As for everything else, well, you should have learned about climate change in your classes already.”

“We did,” Nila said. “They said that’s why we don’t see snow in winter anymore.”

“That’s one of the side effects of it, yes,” Jordyn said. “There’s a lot of complicated stuff that goes on in climatology, sweetheart. Unfortunately, people didn’t pay attention when we could fix it. Now we can’t and we’re stuck.”

“Dad, aren’t you a climatologist?” Myles asked.

“I am,” Jordyn said. “And yes, Myles, we’re still looking for ways to fix this. Or to improve what we already have in place to deal with what’s happening now.”

“Is it going to get worse?” Myles asked.

“I don’t know, Myles,” Jordyn said. “People finally started listening to the scientists and a lot of things changed drastically. However, it was a case of too little too late and the damage was done. We’ll have to see.”

“I’ve heard they’re looking at colonizing the moon and Mars,” Myles said.

“They’ve been talking about that since your grandparents were teenagers,” Elaine said. “They still don’t have the technology.”

“Oh,” Myles said. “It would be awesome, wouldn’t it?”

“Don’t use awesome,” Nila said, giggling. “It makes you sound so weird.”

“I like it,” Myles said. “It’s retro.”

Jordyn wondered when words like awesome became retro. He just shook his head and went back to his report. He had a presentation in two days and he needed to lock down some of the newest information for it before he went before the politicians yet again to try to scrape up more funding for their research. It was a never-ending battle to try to save the world, but for his children he’d keep trying.