Climate porn doesn’t help
I never thought I’d find myself agreeing with so-called ’shock-jock’ and conservative columnist Andrew Bolt but I just read his article in Melbourne’s Herald Sun, Warming to a religion.
SCARIER than global warming is that even — even? — our top academics exaggerate so wildly about it.
No, I’m not talking again about Tim Flannery, our Australian of the Year, but of his former friend and colleague, Mike Archer.
Archer is dean of science at the University of NSW, where, you’d hope, he teaches students to stick to the facts. But this week he wrote an apocalyptic piece on global warming for the Sydney Morning Herald, warning of a Noah’s flood:
“For example, if the Greenland and Antarctica icesheets melt (which they are doing in spectacular fashion), sea levels could rise, as they have done many times in the past, by 100m. If that were to happen, forget the metre-in-a-century mantra, and forget half of Sydney, along with most of the world’s coastal populations.”
Got it? Forget the seas rising a metre by 2100. Says Archer, the melt of Greenland and Antarctica is so “spectacular” our beach by then will start at Eltham.
Bolt doesn’t deny that the ice sheets are melting, and he doesn’t deny, in this story anyway, that climate change is caused by human activity. But he does point out that the IPCC report makes no claims of 100 metre sea-level rises. And you know, he’s probably right. Indeed the worst the IPCC reports is a possible 65 metre rise if the ice were all to go.
Of course 65 metres is still a lot but really, dwelling on, or hyping the disaster is just climate porn. I have no interest in people getting their rocks off on natural disaster, its ghoulish.
Almost all animals have 3 basic responses hardwired by evolution in the face of danger. The “fight, flight or freeze” response is triggered in the face of danger, as anyone whose ever been held up at gunpoint would know. In the face of a danger so extreme as global climate change this same response kicks in for people when they really face up to it.
Climate change seems too big to fight, there is nowhere to flee to, and so many people just lock up, paralysed by a primal terror they barely even acknowledge, and just blank it out. How could it be true.
Part of our role at Carbon Planet is to thaw that freeze for people and help them realise that they can be part of the fight, and hyped up claims of global terror don’t help. The reality is bad enough already. — DS
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