This Year is the Tipping Point for Climate Change
So Put It on the Front Page Already
So after writing my heart out on why climate change should be a key focus of both human rights and environmental activists, not to mention every living and breathing human on the planet, I was a little discouraged this week.
If you check the front pages of three of the largest human rights groups (hrw.org, amnesty.org, fidh.org) today, you will see no recent story on climate change — it’s as though it’s not happening this week. True, the New York Times ran an editorial on how super-yachts harm the climate, while Fox News reported that Republican lawmakers got a memo urging them to refute the UN findings on climate change (from the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a group tied to right-wing donors and the tobacco and energy industry). But if you google “news” for climate change in the U.S., the big story this week, appearing in almost every major US news outlet, appears to be that climate change is causing more home runs in baseball.
Seriously.
Is it just hard for writers here to focus on climate change when spring is in the air? Or is everyone worried that the IPCC report I wrote about is going to paralyze us with dread. It is dry as a biscuit but certainly isn’t sugar-coated.
Here are some relevant excerpts from the summary report headings, in the trademark stiff diplomatic style (bold added):
Hard and soft limits to adaptation have been reached in some ecosystems and regions. Maladaptation is happening in some sectors and regions. Current global financial flows for adaptation are insufficient for, and constrain implementation of, adaptation options, especially in developing countries (high confidence). ….
Risks and projected adverse impacts and related losses and damages from climate change escalate with every increment of global warming (very high confidence). Climatic and non-climatic risks will increasingly interact, creating compound and cascading risks that are more complex and difficult to manage (high confidence). ….
Climate change is a threat to human well-being and planetary health (very high confidence). There is a rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a liveable and sustainable future for all (very high confidence). ….The choices and actions implemented in this decade will have impacts now and for thousands of years (high confidence).
Translation: What we are doing now is not enough and poor countries are hitting the wall on how much they can adapt on their own. Greenhouse gas emissions are cumulative, guys, it gets exponentially harder to climb back to target if you slacked off even a bit last year. The Paris Agreement’s goals are extremely likely to be exceeded, with even more drastic consequences for our health, the extinction of many species, massive human death and displacement and global economic collapse. Already there is lasting damage, but it will require will require drastic action, right now, to prevent the worst-case scenario.
Pause here on the quotation’s last sentence about the choices we make now. This is the first point I was hoping to make last week: of all major human rights challenges in the world to take on this year, climate change is probably our NUMBER ONE in terms of tipping point. If we don’t act now, untold millions may die, and those who survive will have a much harder, more dangerous world. What this means is this story should probably be on everyone’s front page for the foreseeable future, every day, so that taking the painful and necessary actions on climate change are inescapable in terms of morality and reason.
Then consider my translation of what this report really says. David Wallace-Wells wrote about both this oncoming apocalypse and the difficulty of conveying it viscerally in scientific language in 2017, in a piece that was criticized for being both too dark and not dark enough. This raises the question of what sort of stories are most useful to grab attention and motivate action? There’s a strong argument that too much doom and gloom just paralyzes and makes everyone want to tune out and do crossword puzzles. But optimism can also be associated with passivity — as in the faith science will create technological solution, or God will save us, or variations on “leave it to others” thinking. There is also reason to believe that different angles appeal to different constituencies — with liberals more energized by positive stories, and conservatives more by fear-arousing ones.
Plainly, we have to aim at every constituency and especially the policy elite in the developed world, as well as the rest of the planet. The key message is not just that it is possible to stop climate change, but this is what everyone can do to make it happen. And that requires daily coverage and messaging, as well as educational interventions, street action, political movements, recounting the failures and triumphs and casualties. Messages do not take hold if they are not repeated endlessly. So far the media (and the human rights media) are falling down on the job.
So as not to be too dark, I’ll share that my mood was lifted by seeing The Guardian review Simon Sharpe’s book on how the world could reduce emissions Five Times Faster and Time publish Simon Stiell’s excellent summary of the IPCC report’s policy prescriptions: align global finance flows with climate goals and launch an accountability revolution. There are roadmaps, and a bunch of old ladies in Switzerland are on it, bringing the first climate change case to the European Court of Human Rights. Eight other governments are joining Switzerland to oppose the case, which is fast-tracked for a decision this year. Let’s get this onto more front pages and keep accountability — rather than baseball — front and center!
