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The great climate silence: we are on the edge of the abyss but we ignore it
‘How can we understand the miserable failure of contemporary thinking to come to grips with what now confronts us?’ Photograph: Piyal Adhikary/EPA
After 200,000 years of modern humans on a 4.5 billion-year-old Earth, we have arrived at new point in history: the Anthropocene. The change has come upon us with disorienting speed. It is the kind of shift that typically takes two or three or four generations to sink in.
Our best scientists tell us insistently that a calamity is unfolding, that the life-support systems of the Earth are being damaged in ways that threaten our survival. Yet in the face of these facts we carry on as usual.
Most citizens ignore or downplay the warnings; many of our intellectuals indulge in wishful thinking; and some influential voices declare that nothing at all is happening, that the scientists are deceiving us. Yet the evidence tells us that so powerful have humans become that we have entered this new and dangerous geological epoch, which is defined by the fact that the human imprint on the global environment has now become so large and active that it rivals some of the great forces of nature in its impact on the functioning of the Earth system.
The great climate silence: we are on the edge of the abyss but we ignore it by Clive Hamilton, Guardian, May 4, 2017
The Reality of Climate Change is a global warming documentary about many of the problems and the solutions to the climate crisis.
Material was sourced from various sources, ranging from Carl Sagan outlining climate change back in 1990, to Roland Emmerich's 2004 pre-production of The Day After Tomorrow, the 2006 documentary Global Warming: What You Need to Know, and content from more recent times.
This is a pre release, if you have suggestions for improvements, feel free to post it in the comments.
A revised version will add more content about extreme weather, Ocean environments, on agriculture and wildfires.
The Reality of Climate Change (pre release) by Climate State (CS), YouTube Video, April 26, 2017
Adam White, a research fellow at the libertarian Hoover Institution, said in an interview that just as the Obama administration created websites that advanced its agenda, Trump’s aides are trying to place their digital stamp on the government.
“I don’t blame the Trump administration in many ways for rebooting the websites,” White said.
But he added that federal officials should be careful in how they make changes since, unlike shelving a library book, updating a website can lead to the loss of factual information.
“We need, as a society and a government, to find a way where old facts stay accessible and transparent,” White said. “I think it would be a mistake for any new administration, not just this administration, to come in and wipe the slate clean.”
The EPA just buried its climate change website for kids by Juliet Eilperin, Energy & Environment, Washington Post, May 6, 2017
Arctic sea ice extent has trended in record low territory for months. Credit: Zack Labe
Arctic Sea Ice Keeps Scraping the Bottom of the Barrel by Brian Kahn, Cimate Central. May 3, 2017
In her New Republic article, The Rise of “Kinder, Gentler” Climate-Change Deniers, Emily Atkin wrote:
This is a form of climate-change denial: It denies the need for action, which is, like climate science, based on overwhelming evidence. Slate’s Susan Matthews takes it a step further: Stephens’ is not denying climate science per se; he’s denying the reliability of the whole scientific process. “Stephens does not call a single fact into question throughout his piece,” she writes. “Instead, he’s telling his readers that their decision not to trust the entire institution of science that supports the theory of climate change might actually be reasonable.... Trust nothing, he urges, for nothing deserves trust.” John Cook, a professor at George Mason University’s Center for Climate Change Communication who has studied public perception of climate change extensively, believes this type of denial is especially dangerous because it pretends to be balanced—thereby confusing people into apathy. “When you throw conflicting pieces of information at people, they don’t know what to believe, so they stop believing in anything,” he told me.
The Waggonwaybreen glacier in Svalbard. Photo: Andreas Weith
The Glaciers are Going by Renee Cho, State of the Planet, Earth Institute, Columbia University, May 5, 2017
The Center for Public Integrity, founded in 1989 by Charles Lewis, is one of the United States' oldest and largest nonpartisan, nonprofit investigative news organizations. It is also the winner of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting and the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting.
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Posted by John Hartz on Sunday, 7 May, 2017
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