Making History

History is made every day. We get to hear about it all the time. Sometimes it's on the big stage, like when nearly two hundred world leaders gathered together to hammer out an agreement on climate change. Since there are one hundred ninety-five countries, one hundred ninety-six if you count Taiwan, that means that pretty much everybody got together and agreed that we would all like to work on limiting greenhouse gasses and slow global warming. "We've shown that the world has both the will and the ability to take on this challenge," said our President, the leader of the Free World. This was history, every bit as much as the time we beat back those aliens who came to bury us and consume our planet.

Of course, that could be because that whole alien thing was fiction, and it was a whole lot more exciting to watch science and the military-industrial complex come together in the forms of Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum to figure out a way to blow up those creepy looking crawlies than watching all those suits and ties yammering on about parts per million. The good news is that nothing blew up in Paris while they were busy negotiating. It should also be pointed out that when all those space ships that came crashing down, there was probably a pretty massive impact on the environments of the cities nearby. It probably looked a little like Beijing. In real life. If you look at pictures of China's capitol, and don't find yourself wondering about how science fiction figures into our current history, you probably don't know the main ingredient of Soylent Green. Spoiler Alert: It's not measured in parts per million.

With Charlton Heston dead, we are left to figure this mess out on our own. President Obama will now set about the mundane task of trying to convince a Republican dominated Congress of climate deniers that we really do need to stop doing some of the things that we had been doing prior to this and start doing things in a more environmentally clever way. There won't be a lot of laser battles other special effects, but there will be some history made. It just won't be as cool as the kind they make in Hollywood.