Here's how I explain global warming.

If you don't believe that pumping millions of tons of chemicals and smoke and garbage into the air, the earth and the sea has any effect on the world, think about your trash.

Let's say you decide to quit putting your garbage in plastic bags, putting the bags in a plastic bin and then wheeling the bin out to the curb on trash day.

Instead, you decide to just throw your garbage out one of the first-floor windows of your house. After all, it's your house and your yard. Besides, you've got a half-acre lot, and it's just you, your wife and two kids.

So, that's what you do. All the garbage goes out the window. Soda bottles. Beer bottles. Whatever you scoop out of the cat's litter box. Dirty diapers. Half a lasagna that didn't turn out so well. Products your wife uses that she never mentions. Banana peels. Watermelon rind. Cardboard, paper and plastic.

You'll be all right for a couple days. No doubt. Two weeks, and the smell gets powerful, and the rats come.

How about if you do it for a year? Five years? Ten?

How long before the house is unlivable?

I'd say a year because I'm feeling generous, and I hate rats.

Well. Humans have been throwing their garbage out the window since we evolved into creatures that could create any more pollution than our dung and, eventually, our bones.

The Industrial Revolution meant we could burn millions of tons of coal and dump factory residue into the nearest lake, and we invented gasoline and plastic. The garbage kept flying out the windows, and we kept pretending our half-acre lot was big enough.

As an elitist newspaper columnist, I'm now supposed to go on a rant about how everyone needs to buy an electric car and not use plastic straws, and how disposable diapers should be illegal.

I'm not going to say that because I think we've turned the corner on climate change. I don't think anything we do is going to help. It's too late.

Roll back the clock, Scooter!

Don't recycle anything. Start building 1950s cars again, solid sheet metal, six miles to the gallon. Quit carrying those dorky reusable bags to the grocery store. Paper AND plastic, please!

No more wind or tidal or solar energy, only big, coal-burning power plants. Throw your empty Styrofoam coffee cups out the window of your big car. If you can figure out how, wear plastic clothes.

Remove all regulations from business. You want to dump mercury into the river? Go ahead.

This isn't a planet. It's a party!

I'm 65. I smoke, and in my younger years, I wasn't exactly sensible with the booze. My lights could go out in four or five years. I don't have kids, and why the hell should I care what happens to your great-great-grandkids? You're the dope who wanted kids AND central air conditioning, and an SUV the size of your living room.

Things are getting worse, and they're getting worse faster than they used to get worse. That street only goes one way.

Yeah. I got no hope at all for your great-great-grandkids.

The only hope I have is that, when the last of our kind has choked on the air, or burst into flames, when there are none of us left on the planet, the next drop of rain that falls will be just a little bit, just a tiny bit cleaner, and that will continue until even the radioactive waste has lived its last half-life.

And what the hell. Maybe the next fish that grows legs and climbs out of the water will evolve into something smarter than you and I.

Marc Munroe Dion's latest book, a collection of his best columns, is called "Devil's Elbow: Dancing in the Ashes of America." It is available in paperback from Amazon.com, and for Nook, Kindle, and iBooks.

Print Headline: The end of the world party

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