Juniper from Portland, Oregon


Dear Santa,

My name is Juniper and I am eleven years old. I live in Portland, Oregon, where it rains a lot, everyone has strong opinions about coffee, and my teacher says we are living through a critical moment in Earth's history. I have been thinking about this a lot. I have three questions.


Is Earth actually in a final countdown and if so how much time is left?

Why is Oregon shaped the way it is?

Why do some people not believe things that scientists say are true?


Thank you.


Juniper Mae Kowalski


Portland, Oregon

Dear Juniper,

Juniper is an excellent name for a child from Oregon, where the western juniper grows across more than three million acres of high desert in the eastern part of your state and has been growing there for longer than Portland has existed. I want to start by saying this because your letter carries the weight of someone who has been worrying, and I want you to know before I answer anything that the person reading your letter has been flying over this planet for several centuries, has watched it in every season from every angle, and still finds it — your planet, your Oregon, your rain-soaked extraordinary city — worth every second of the route. Now. Your questions.

Is Earth in a final countdown?

Juniper, I am going to give you an honest answer because you are eleven years old and you asked honestly and you deserve better than either panic or false comfort.

The Earth itself is not counting down to anything. The Earth is four and a half billion years old. It has survived five mass extinction events, the collision that created the Moon, several ice ages that buried the entire surface in glaciers, and a period called the Late Heavy Bombardment when asteroids hit it so frequently and so hard that the surface was essentially molten rock for millions of years. The Earth is not fragile. The Earth is one of the most resilient objects in the solar system and it will be here long after every problem currently worrying your teacher has resolved itself one way or another.

What is genuinely in a countdown is not the Earth but the particular version of Earth that human beings have built their civilisation on — the stable climate, the predictable seasons, the sea levels that have allowed coastal cities to exist, the agricultural conditions that allow eight billion people to eat. That version of Earth is under genuine pressure from the release of greenhouse gases that have accumulated in the atmosphere faster than natural systems can absorb them. This is real. The science behind it is among the most thoroughly reviewed science in human history. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has produced thousands of pages of evidence reviewed by thousands of scientists across dozens of countries, and their conclusion is consistent: the changes are real, the causes are human, and the window for limiting the most serious consequences is narrow but has not closed.

Here is what I want you to hold onto, Juniper, because this matters: a narrow window that has not closed is not a final countdown. It is an urgent invitation. The difference between those two things is everything. A final countdown ends regardless of what you do. An urgent invitation changes depending on how many people show up and what they bring. More people are showing up than at any previous point in your lifetime, including people your age who will inherit the decisions being made right now and who are making very clear that they intend to have a say in them. That is not a countdown. That is the beginning of something.

Why is Oregon shaped the way it is?

Oregon's shape is a collision of geology, rivers, politics, and a surveyors' compromise made in the nineteenth century that everyone involved found slightly unsatisfying, which is how most borders get drawn.

The northern border — the straight line along the 46th parallel that separates Oregon from Washington — was established by the Oregon Treaty of 1846, which divided the Pacific Northwest between the United States and Britain along a line of latitude that was chosen primarily because it was easy to describe in a legal document and roughly split the disputed territory. Nature had nothing to do with it. The Columbia River, which you might expect to form the border since it is the dominant geographical feature of the region, does not follow the 46th parallel and was therefore ignored by the negotiators, which the Columbia River has never been asked to comment on but which seems like an oversight.

The southern border with California and Nevada follows the 42nd parallel, similarly chosen for its geometric convenience. The eastern border with Idaho follows a more complex line negotiated when Idaho Territory was created in 1863, involving the Snake River in its northern section and a surveyed meridian in the south. The western border is the Pacific Ocean, which drew itself and requires no explanation.

Inside those borders, Oregon contains more geological variety than almost any state in the union. You have the Coast Range, the Willamette Valley where Portland sits, the Cascade Range with its active volcanoes, the high desert plateau of eastern Oregon, and the Klamath Mountains in the southwest that are geologically unrelated to everything around them and appear to have simply arrived from elsewhere and decided to stay. Oregon is shaped the way it is because human beings drew lines on a map and geology did whatever it wanted inside them, which is a fairly accurate description of how most places work.

Why do some people not believe things that scientists say are true?

This is your social studies question and it is one of the most important questions anyone can ask in the twenty-first century, and I want to answer it without making anyone a villain because the true answer is more complicated and more useful than the villain version.

People do not believe scientific consensus for several different reasons that are worth understanding separately.

The first reason is that science communicates in probabilities and uncertainties, and human beings find uncertainty uncomfortable. When a scientist says "we are 97 percent confident that," a significant number of people hear "there is a three percent chance they are wrong" and focus on that. This is a feature of human psychology, not a character flaw. The brain is wired to notice exceptions. Managing that wiring takes practice.

The second reason is that some scientific conclusions require people to change something — how they travel, what they buy, what they eat, what they vote for, what their livelihood depends on. When a conclusion is inconvenient, the brain works very hard to find reasons to doubt it. This is also a feature of human psychology. It is called motivated reasoning and every human being does it about something. The question is always: what are you motivated to not believe, and why.

The third reason is that trust in institutions — universities, government agencies, media organisations — has declined significantly in recent decades, for reasons that are not entirely without foundation. Institutions have sometimes been wrong, have sometimes been slow to admit it, and have sometimes served interests other than the public good. When trust breaks down, the information those institutions carry becomes harder to separate from the distrust of the institution itself. Rebuilding that trust requires institutions to be more honest about uncertainty, more transparent about process, and more willing to say "we were wrong about this" when they were, which some are better at than others.

The fourth reason — and this one matters — is that deliberate misinformation exists and is well-funded. There are organisations and industries that have invested significant resources in creating confusion about scientific consensus on specific topics, not because the science is uncertain but because the policy implications of accepting the science are commercially inconvenient for them. This has been documented. It is not a conspiracy theory. It is a business strategy, and it has been effective. The Union of Concerned Scientists has documented this playbook in detail if you would like to read further.

What do you do with all of this, Juniper? You learn to ask: what is the evidence, who gathered it, how was it reviewed, and what would it take to change the conclusion? Those questions do not guarantee you will always reach the right answer. But they make it considerably more likely. They are also the questions that scientists ask, which is why science — imperfect, self-correcting, occasionally slow and occasionally wrong and always trying — remains the best method human beings have for understanding the world they live in.

Your teacher is right that you are living through a critical moment. Critical moments are uncomfortable. They are also the moments that define what comes next, and what comes next has always been shaped by the people who refused to look away from the uncomfortable thing and asked the right questions about it. You are doing that at eleven. That is not nothing, Juniper. That is, in fact, quite a lot.

Merry Christmas from the North Pole, where the ice is real and the view of your planet from up here is still, on every single pass, one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen. It is worth protecting. The people trying to protect it are worth supporting. You appear to be one of them. Good.

Your friend,


Santa Claus


The North Pole

P.S. You did not send a wish list. If the answer is books, the North Pole already knows. If the answer is something else, write again. The address is always open and Portland rain is no excuse for a short letter. https://santaclaus.top/is-earth-actually-in-a-final-countdown/