I came across this today. It’s a short story I wrote for a writing competition about global warming. The page says I was 13 when I wrote it, which means the story would have been written around 2007/8. The writing style is really clunky and I don’t know what I was thinking with that last paragraph but I was surprised how many little details still feel relevant.

I’ve scanned the full story and posted it below, only blanking out personal information. (My former name is not secret, nor is it difficult to work out) If you have trouble reading from the image, scroll down to find the text version.

The Small Town and Global Warming

By Julian Pichelski
Age 13

When People first heard of climate change most people thought it was a lie, a hoax, a con. One village was different, they believed in climate change from the beginning, they believed the stories about the O-zone layer, flooding and they began to formulate plans.

Everyone gathered in the town hall and the mayor opened the floor to ideas. “We could build a wall around the town to keep the floods away.” said one man, everyone agreed this was a splendid idea and began construction immediately.
Over the next few months trucks carried bricks to the town and slowly a wall formed. However it was not until a few days later, when they found a flaw in their plan, they realized little sunlight could get into the town, so crops and plants started to die. So they knocked the wall down.

They knew that their town was now, once again, defenseless against global warming. So the next day they held another town meeting, and the mayor opened up the floor to suggestions. “We could move our houses to the tops of the trees in the forest.” Suggested a young boy, surprisingly the town thought this was a marvelous idea and called a huge crane to lift all the buildings carefully onto the tree tops. However, a couple of hours after finishing, the trees started to strain under the weight and simply collapsed. It took months of machinery to fix the town, none the less, the mayor held yet another meeting.

“We could re-build the town underground.” Suggested one man, everyone thought this was a wonderful idea, but before they could start a voice in the back shouted “Stop!” Everyone turned, the voice came from a young lady, she began to speak. “Stop trying to come up with short-cuts to protect the town from global warming, instead why not stop global warming from getting worse, over the last year your polluting machines have been working non-stop contributing to global warming not to mention the forest being destroyed.
So stop all this stupidity and make this town eco-friendly!”
Everyone laughed and began to build the town underground.

And that goes to show you that there will always be people looking for an easy way out of global warming. Sadly there is no easy way out, we all have to work together to stop global warming. Thank you…