Day 0

Paris draws historic events like flies to a corpse. (That's a morbid metaphor, but there's been plenty of death here.) The city has the benefit of being very, very old--so old that it was never established so much as settled around 250 BC--and in those long years, it has seen revolution after revolution. Knowing that, it's an appropriate site for COP 21. I can only hope that the 195 attending Parties will inhale the Parisian air and feel compelled to take drastic action.

We took advantage of the free public transit today and did some sightseeing. The Eiffel Tower barely had a line, and it wasn't because of the wind or the gray skies. The city inhaled and hasn't let out its breath since the attacks. It felt wrong to walk between the Tower's hulking pillars without shuffling past the masses. I could have done cartwheels.

In short: it was a quick journey to the top.

My view from the Eiffel Tower. I should know what this building is, and I don't.

We stopped in a French McDonald's. I displayed excellent foreign relations skills by holding up the line and being confused. The food was largely the same, with less salt.

Filsan and Morgan insisted on seeing the catacombs. I started shaking halfway down the winding staircase. The initial journey through blank limestone halls had me half-panicked. Ironically, I calmed down once we entered the actual graves. An enthusiastic tour guide pointed towards the worn skulls, repeating "bullet" whenever he found a hole, and showed us plague-deformed foreheads. I was so excited that I gasped when I found jaw bones. (Most of the walls were formed only by tibiae and jawless skulls.)

A few skulls. I liked finding the slight variations in bone structure, like the width of the eye sockets.

The skull-ridden catacombs and the Eiffel Tower have a powerful thing in common: symbolism. I've seen countless prints of skulls and piles of t-shirts featuring the Eiffel Tower. The silhouettes of both these objects are internationally familiar. I think this is what makes these tourist traps compelling. Very rarely do I see a real human skull, and I have never seen them piled together in the thousands. Today was the first time I was able to touch the Eiffel Tower. These objects and their shapes carry so much weight in our culture, and it was thrilling to be physically near them. The Eiffel Tower and the catacombs are startlingly real. I felt like I was meeting a pen pal for the first time.

Paris welcomed us with open, if tense, arms. Guides in green pointed us towards the COP 21 shuttles next to soldiers brandishing huge guns. The conference's registration process was painless, and I don't anticipate any problems using the metro. A lot of the transit system has been groomed to serve the visiting Parties. The city, wounded by the attacks, has scabbed over well.

We'll all have to be as adaptable as Paris if current emissions commitments don't change. The best that the world can promise still gives us a global temperature rise of over 2 degrees Celsius. This risks putting millions of people on islands or coastlines underwater, widening the range of disease vectors, and threatening biodiversity. Want to read a horror story? Skim the IPCC's Fifth Assessment Report. It's a summary of global climate data up to 2014, and it's not optimistic.

My badge says "Observer". I'm worried that it's predicting my future. I don't want to observe carbonic acid melting all the calcium carbonate in the ocean. I don't want to observe my country abandoning climate refugees at the border. I refuse to stare at the world when it falls apart. I know I'll take action when I'm older and qualified, but will those in power today even bother?

This conference has thousands of variables with thousands of possible outcomes. Am I going to observe a solution, or a disaster?