Bill McKibben encouraged the audience at the GROWNY event last Saturday (11/13/2010) to “get outside and enjoy the outdoors.” Rather than one of those cheery nature-lover slogans, McKibben’s statement had an ominous component to it. Get outside and connect with your environment because it is changing, changing so quickly that you will never have it as good as you do now.
Most politicians and even the public ignored his warning that the planet was warming up in The End of Nature published back in 1989—though there was certainly enough indications that humanity was warming the place up. In Eaarth, (published 2010) Earth has changed so much since the publication of The End of Nature that it’s a changed planet from the one it was a couple of decades ago, to one that is warming so quickly that humanity is going to have to adapt—or perish.
At the event McKibben didn’t talk about the depressingly true litany of environmental degradation that he describes in Eaarth Instead, he described the even more depressing and alarming changes in our environment because of human-caused changes since the publication of Eaarth—only a couple of months ago. Floods in Pakistan (warmer air holds more moisture), droughts, increase frequency and severity of storms and the loss of Arctic and Greenland glaciers are happening far quicker than scientists predicted.
This isn’t climate porn:
“The "apocalyptic" way in which climate change is often portrayed in the press and on government websites succeeds only in "thrilling" people while undermining practical efforts to tackle the problem, according to Labour's favourite thinktank, the Institute for Public Policy Research.” 'Climate porn' blamed for global warming 'despair'(8/06/2006) The Guardian
Climate Change is the real deal; it’s happening quickly; and, it’s happening in your neighborhood. It’s happening despite the slog of articles, public statements, and despite those who for some reason or another just don’t want the public to ‘get it’ on the repercussions of putting billions of tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere for the last couple of centuries. You would think it would be pretty straight forward: a lot of greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide, methane) go into the atmosphere (burning coal, wood, gasoline, natural gas, etc.) since the Second Industrial Revolution, have it all checked out by the majority of scientists over twenty years, and then suck it up and change our planet-heating ways.
Yet, it doesn’t seem to work that way. Climate Change, despite its overwhelming acceptance by the majority of scientists, isn’t popular. In present day politics, culture, and phenomena that I’ll call ‘conventionalism’, climate change seems to be a sinister plot, a conspiracy against our way of life and the fossil fuel companies. The last straw for the public’s patience seemed to be Climategate:
“Over the last few weeks, in the run-up to the official UK release of my new book "A User's Guide to the Crisis of Civilization" on October 4, I've been inundated with angry and often exasperated claims that one of the key crises I address in the book - human-induced climate change - is merely a myth, lacks serious scientific evidence and/or is the sinister result of deliberate "scare-mongering." My experience is that public opinion is now seriously confused about the science of climate change and that increasingly people either feel they fall into an agnostic camp or categorize themselves as wholesale "skeptics." Recent polls of American public opinion in August found that as much as 45 percent of people believe that global warming "is caused by long-term planetary trends," while only 40 percent are convinced that "human activity is the main contributor." The Real ClimateGate: Getting Over the Nonexistent "Email Scandal"
And so instead of addressing Climate Change in a responsible and thoughtful way, there’s going to be a great big fight for the hearts and minds of the public to ‘get’ Climate Change:
“Hacked emails from climate researchers at the University of East Anglia caused a storm last year. Now scientists say it's even harder to convince the world of the reality of climate change” Published on Sunday, November 14, 2010 by The Observer/UK Climate Change: Science's Fresh Fight to Win Over the Sceptics
You can listen to all the arguments in the media about who says what, or note the catchiest phrase by the group with the most money, or you can do what McKibben (creator of 350.org) suggests: go outside and see for yourself.
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