Columnists generally write for two reasons: to nudge leaders and introduce ideas. Hopefully, they also entertain and educate.

During my career as a journalist, there have been a number of issues that I’ve worked on (sex trafficking, maternal mortality and the genocide in Darfur) where the awareness and attention have made an issue more prominent and brought more thought and resources to improving the situations.

One issue where increasing attention hasn’t made a difference is climate change.

Last week, as we in Hawaii watched the continental U.S. suffer through heat, floods and fires, we all kept an eye on Calvin knowing that there was no place that was safe from natural disasters. 

A friend in Dallas wrote in a letter to me last week about “the painfully dreadful and exhausting grip of the Texas heat. It’s nauseating to deal with, the suffocating heat and its ability to keep you locked inside for weeks on end.”

He’s just one of millions that are envying the temperate climate we have in Hawaii.

As the extreme heat, fires and flooding take their toll on a wide swath of our planet, I’m wondering how this will impact Hawaii. What’s the worst-case scenario for our island home?

I’ve seen first-hand as a journalist throughout the years when leaders and societies haven’t considered what the worst-case scenario could be, and how they should react when it all goes wrong.

I’m afraid that if we aren’t using enough of our imaginations, it’ll leave Hawaii flat-footed and unprepared when reality inevitably catches up with us. 

Calvin passed to the south of us last week, and Hawaii sighed in relief. However, we know natural disasters won’t always miss us. 

Earlier this summer, “Rediscovering Hawaii’s Soul” was shared at the Council for Native Hawaiian Advancement convention in Las Vegas. The project brought together many of Hawaii’s top leaders to contemplate different possible outcomes. 

There were four scenarios and timelines proposed. In one of those scenarios, ‘Ua’a, a climate disaster strikes Hawaii and the botched response leads to Hawaii declaring independence. 

However, in that scenario, and the three others, there is no mention of what climate crisis and natural disasters in other parts of the world could mean for Hawaii. 

Is Hawaii ready for those desperate for relief from the heat and the rising seas moving to our (currently) much more livable climate?

The notion that Hawaii will be spared an inundation of people (beyond the ultra-wealthy) moving here because the cost of moving here is based on isolation and unaffordable housing is a real head shaker.

We have heard the cries of Cassandras for decades, yet little has been done to stem the impending crisis. I wish our leaders and influentials would have been scared by fiction into taking more action.

I wish more of people had read Kim Stanley Robinson’s “The Ministry for the Future” with its horrifying opening scene of a wet bulb event in India, or the third section of Hanya Yanagihara’s “To Paradise” where cooling suits are needed in Manhattan, or John Lancaster’s “The Wall” about Britain’s response to rising seas. 

It has been uncomfortable to watch the Apple TV series “Extrapolations” with my teenager. His generation is right to be disappointed with the world we’re handing off to them. 

I’ve been thinking back to a missed opportunity 20 summers ago. I had covered the American invasion of Iraq and then turned my attention to getting into shape for a reporting trip to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The plan was to hike through an area the Bush administration had labeled “a nothingness,” and therefore, should be used for oil drilling.  

I was based in Paris then, and on training hikes through the city I sweated as I would have back when I was lawn mowing in the middle of summer in Texas as a high schooler. 

I didn’t realize then that I didn’t need to go all the way around the world to cover the climate crisis: the heat wave that hit Europe that summer killed far more people than the war in the spring.

Recently, I dug up a letter to the editor from the International Herald Tribune from August 2003:

“When reading that the summer heat wave in France may have killed 3,000 people, I could not help recalling the similar death toll of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. The latter events instantly triggered a transformation of U.S. domestic and foreign policy, whereas unusually hot weather elicited little more than a feeling of helplessness in Europe,” wrote Paul Bodnar from Budapest. “It is time governments and individuals recognized that climate change is as serious a threat to national security as terrorism.”

There’s just one problem with the letter: the death toll of that heat wave was later understood to be much more horrific. At least 15,000 people died in France, and more than 70,000 were killed across Europe. It was one of the 10 deadliest disasters of the first two decades of the century.

French and European leaders were literally on vacation during the heatwave. Little was changed to prevent future climate disasters there or elsewhere in the world.

Just like everyone else, Hawaii is susceptible to natural disasters, especially if the tradewinds don’t hold up. We don’t have a great margin for error.

What’s needed at a time when the world is dealing with more and more extreme weather is imagination from leaders, global perspectives for a global problem, and far more foresight and preparedness.

Civil Beat’s coverage of climate change is supported by the Environmental Funders Group of the Hawaii Community Foundation, Marisla Fund of the Hawaii Community Foundation and the Frost Family Foundation.