The Bare Minimum

There are aspects of the Climate Crisis that are intellectually, emotionally and psychologically challenging. But even to get to the more complex aspects just of the facts of what's happening requires understanding and accepting apparent divergences or even apparent paradoxes that aren't all that new.

But in the public discourse, we're failing even at that.

At the moment--which in some ways is the worst possible time--Climate Crisis skepticism appears to be growing, based on two bits of demagoguery that seems to be accepted at face value. The first has to do with errors in some data and conclusions by climate scientists, and several purloined emails among climate scientists that suggest attempts to push a conclusion.

It's not an unprecedented trick to use one error or deception to call into question unrelated data and an overall conclusion that these errors or deceptions don't really affect. But in this case, we seem all too ready to fall for it.
One of many articles about this--this one in the New York Times-- say basically what all the sane ones do: while they do their "on the one hand this and on the other hand that" reporting of the charges and counter charges, they conclude that, regarding the 2007 UN report quantifying the reality and danger of the Climate Crisis, "The general consensus among mainstream scientists is that the errors are in any case minor and do not undermine the report’s conclusions."

The more recent and in some ways more depressing assertion is that the big snows in the Eastern U.S. prove that Earth is not warming, and the Climate Crisis is phony. Again, the Times states what has been repeated over and over again before: particular weather events aren't evidence for or against climate change, except that "Most climate scientists respond that the ferocious storms are consistent with forecasts that a heating planet will produce more frequent and more intense weather events." In fact, the most authoritative federal report on climate last year predicted more frequent and larger snowstorms in the northeastern U.S.

It's the kind of paradox that's funny in an uncomfortable way, but to take it as serious evidence that the planet isn't heating, is just willful ignorance. It doesn't require a major step in thinking. Not compared to the steps involving lag times, feedback loops, tipping points, etc. We don't have to understand the intricacies of ocean temperatures and air currents that result in more snow in one spot when the Earth gets hotter. We just have to understand that it happens, and that it isn't nonsense.

There is even a possibility--still a live one--that greenhouse gas heating will cause a climate jolt--called rapid climate change--that could shift ocean currents to bring a sudden Ice Age to parts of the globe. This more robust paradox was not thought too complicated for moviegoers to understand, as it was the premise of so far the only Climate Crisis disaster film, The Day After Tomorrow.

If people can't think their way through these bare minimum steps, we're going to end up destroying the planet we know and that some of us love. But it's probably not so much a problem in understanding as in acceptance. We're still stuck in the first stage of grief for our dying world: denial.

And by concentrating on this fluff, we're ignoring several realities, one of which is also staring us in the face: we're apparently not prepared to cope with these kinds of crises. The snow has paralyzed the East, Native Americans are freezing in the West, homes are being swept away by mudslides in southern CA, and then there's Haiti, where torrential rains are coming, on top of the struggle to cope with the earthquakes' effects. All this is apart from the largely unreported consequences on peoples' lives as well as the landscape, all over the world, due directly to global heating.

And speaking of Climate Crisis fictions, in the first volume of Kim Stanley Robinson's trilogy on the subject, the U.S. government begins to take the Climate Crisis very seriously after Washington is flooded. So it is a tragedy of the absurd that the actual flooding of Washington comes in the form of snow, and we're not smart enough to see the connection, or sane enough to admit it.