Shocking Climate-Change Update (As If the News Could Get Worse)

Rebecca Solnit at the TomDispatch holds out the candle for us:

Just when no one needed more lousy news, the U.N.’s weather outfit, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), issued its annual Greenhouse Gas Bulletin. It offered a shocking climate-change update:   the concentrations of long-lasting greenhouse gases in the Earth’s atmosphere (carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide) rose at a “record-shattering pace” from 2012 to 2013, including the largest increase in CO2 in 30 years - and there was a nasty twist to this news that made it even grimmer.

While such increases reflected the fact that we continue to extract and burn fossil fuels at staggering rates, something else seems to be happening as well. Both the oceans and terrestrial plant life act as carbon sinks; that is, they absorb significant amounts of the carbon dioxide we release and store it away. Unfortunately, both may be reaching limits of some sort and seem to be absorbing less. This is genuinely bad news if you’re thinking about the future warming of the planet. (As it happens, in the same period, according to the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication, parts of the American public stopped absorbing information in no less striking fashion:  the number of those who believe that global warming isn’t happening rose 7% to 23%.)

So consider this a propitious moment for a major climate-change demonstration, possibly the largest in history, in New York City this Sunday. As the WMO’s Secretary-General Michel Jarraud pointed out, there is still time to make a difference. “We have the knowledge and we have the tools,” he said, “for action to try to keep temperature increases within 2°C to give our planet a chance and to give our children and grandchildren a future. Pleading ignorance can no longer be an excuse for not acting.”

Expert opinion (for once) is not divided.

Only terminally perplexed.

Eight years ago, climate communications expert George Marshall picked up a copy of The Independent from his doorstep on a Saturday morning. Looking at the front cover of that magazine, he said, got him thinking about the “peculiarities” of climate change.

In bold letters the headline read “The Melting Mountains: How Climate Change is Destroying the World’s Most Spectacular Landscapes” and inside it outlined how alpine tourism is at risk with roughly 50 years left before a warmer climate begins to claim the snowpack.

Marshall said what really struck him was what he saw next. “It was the Saturday newspaper, so I picked it up and out falls the travel supplement. The travel supplement is dedicated to visiting those spectacular places before they go, entirely by the medium of international flights.”

“There’s something peculiar in this and I had a long conversation with my wife about it:  how there’s this disconnect between the concern expressed on the first three pages and the hedonism expressed in the travel supplement.”

He laughed, “What did Oscar Wilde say? We all kill the thing we love.”

George Marshall:  Compartmentalizing Climate

Marshall works as director of projects at the Climate Outreach Information Centre in Oxford and manages climatedenial.org, a website dedicated to understanding psychological responses to climate change.

His first book, Carbon Detox:  Your Step by Step Guide to Getting Real About Climate Change, was met with a lot of positive fanfare when it was published in 2007. But facing these new complexities of climate change led Marshall to write his second book:  Don’t Even Think About It:  Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change, just released three weeks ago.

From Neoliberalism to Climate Denial:  “You must start with beliefs. Yes, always with beliefs."

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