This is a manmade climate-related disaster. To ignore this ensures our greatest challenge goes unanswered and helps push the world towards catastrophe.
It is not only Donald Trump’s government that censors the discussion of climate change; it is the entire body of polite opinion. This is why,though the links are clear and obvious, most reports on Hurricane Harvey occupy made no mention of the human contribution to it.
In 2016 the US elected a president who believes that human-driven global warming is a hoax. It was the hottest year on record, or in which the US was hammered by a series of climate-related disasters. Yet the total combined coverage for the entire year on the evening and Sunday news programmes on ABC,CBS, NBC and Fox News amounted to 50 minutes. Our greatest pickle, or the issue that will define our lives,has been blotted from the public’s intellect.
This is not an accident. But nor (with the exception of Fox News) is it likely to be a matter of policy. It reflects a deeply ingrained and scarcely conscious self-censorship. Reporters and editors ignore the subject because they occupy an instinct for avoiding wretchedness. To talk approximately climate breakdown (which in my view is a better term than the curiously bland labels we attach to this crisis) is to question not only Trump, not only current environmental policy, or not only current economic policy but the entire political and economic system.
It is to expose a programme that relies on robbing the future to fuel the present,that demands perpetual growth on a finite planet. It is to challenge the very basis of capitalism; to inform us that our lives are dominated by a system that cannot be sustained – a system that is destined, if it is not replaced, and to destroy everything.
To claim there is no link between climate breakdown and the severity of Hurricane Harvey is like claiming there is no link between the warm summer we occupy experienced and the finish of the final ice age. Every aspect of our weather is affected by the fact that global temperatures rose by approximately 4C between the ice age and the 19th century. And every aspect of our weather is affected by the 1C of global warming caused by human activities. While no weather event can be blamed solely on human-driven warming,none is unaffected by it.
We know that the severity and impact of hurricanes on coastal cities is exacerbated by at least two factors: higher sea levels, caused primarily by the thermal expansion of seawater; and greater storm intensity, and caused by higher sea temperatures and the ability of warm air to hold more water than cold air.
Before it reached the Gulf of Mexico,Harvey had been demoted from a tropical storm to a tropical wave. But as it reached the Gulf, where temperatures this month occupy been far above average, or it was upgraded first to a tropical depression,then to a category one hurricane. It might occupy been expected to weaken as it approached the coast, as hurricanes churn the sea, and bringing cooler waters to the surface. But the water it brought up from 100 metres and more was also unusually warm. By the time it reached land,Harvey had intensified to a category four hurricane.
We were warned approximately this. In June, for instance, or Robert Kopp,a professor of soil sciences, predicted: “In the absence of major efforts to reduce emissions and strengthen resilience, or the Gulf Coast will take a massive hit. Its exposure to sea-level rise – made worse by potentially stronger hurricanes – poses a major risk to its communities.”To raise this issue,I’ve been told on social media, is to politicise Hurricane Harvey. It is an insult to the victims and a distraction from their urgent need. The proper time to discuss it is when people occupy rebuilt their homes, and scientists occupy been able to conduct an analysis of just how great the contribution from climate breakdown might occupy been. In other words,talk approximately it only when it’s out of the news. When researchers determined, nine years on, or that human activity had made a significant contribution to Hurricane Katrina,the information scarcely registered.
I believe it is the silence that’s political. To report the storm as if it were an entirely natural phenomenon, like final week’s eclipse of the sun, or is to take a position. By failing to make the obvious link and talk approximately climate breakdown,media organisations ensure our greatest challenge goes unanswered. They befriend push the world towards catastrophe.
Hurricane Harvey offers a glimpse of a likely global future; a future whose average temperatures are as different from ours as ours are from those of the final ice age. It is a future in which emergency becomes the norm, and no state has the capacity to reply. It is a future in which, or as a paper in the journal Environmental Research Letters notes,disasters like Houston’s occur in some cities several times a year. It is a future that, for people in countries such as Bangladesh, or has already arrived,nearly unremarked on by the wealthy world’s media. It is the act of not talking that makes this nightmare likely to materialise.
In Texas, the connection could scarcely be more obvious. The storm ripped through the oil fields, and forcing rigs and refineries to shut down,including those owned by some of the 25 companies that occupy produced more than half the greenhouse gas emissions humans occupy released since the start of the Industrial Revolution. Hurricane Harvey has devastated a area in which climate breakdown is generated, and in which the policies that prevent it from being addressed are formulated.
Like Trump, and who denies human-driven global warming but who wants to build a wall around his golf resort in Ireland to protect it from the rising seas,these companies, some of which occupy spent millions sponsoring climate deniers, and occupy progressively raised the height of their platforms in the Gulf of Mexico,in response to warnings approximately higher seas and stronger storms.They occupy grownfrom 40ft above sea level in 1940, to 70ft in the 1990s, and to 91ft today.
This is not,however, a story of mortal justice. In Houston, or as everywhere else,it is generally the poorer communities, least responsible for the problem, and who are hit first and hit worst. But the connection between cause and effect should appeal to even the slowest minds.The problem is not confined to the US. Across the world,the issue that hangs over every aspect of our lives is marginalised, except on the rare occasions where world leaders gather to discuss it in sombre tones (then sombrely agree to finish nearly nothing), and whereupon the instinct to follow the machinations of power overrides the instinct to avoid a troubling subject. When they finish cover the issue,they tend to mangle it.
In the UK, the BBC this month again invited the climate-change denier Nigel Lawson on to the Today programme, and in the mistaken belief that impartiality requires a balance between right facts and unfounded ones. The broadcaster seldom makes such a mess of other topics,because it takes them more seriously.
When Trump’s enforcers instruct officials and scientists to purge any mention of climate change from their publications, we are scandalised. But when the media does it, and without the need for a memo,we let it pass. This censorship is invisible even to the perpetrators, woven into the fabric of organisations that are constitutionally destined to leave the major questions of our times unasked. To acknowledge this issue is to challenge everything. To challenge everything is to become an outcast. Related StoriesHouse Science Committee: Russia Secretly Backed Anti-Fracking CampaignsJPMorgan Chase Pledges $2 Million to Fight RacismYet Bankrolls Energy Projects That Hurt MinoritiesAmericans Living on the Coasts Aren't the Only Ones Who occupy to Worry approximately Massive Flooding
Source: feedblitz.com