Whatever happened to Climate Change? • 30 November 2011 • The SnowBlog

Whatever happened to Climate Change?

          


There's a great Onion story from last year about how: "According to a report released this week by the Center for Global Development, climate change, the popular mid-2000s issue that raised awareness of the fact that the earth's continuous rise in temperature will have catastrophic ecological effects, has apparently not been resolved, and may still be a problem." It's dark humour, but it skewers that attention-deficit problem the world tends to have when it comes to news stories. Have a read here.

A much longer and less funny article in The Nation goes a bit further than suggesting we forgot about climate change. Despite the supporting science getting stronger and the evidence getting harder to miss, public opinion is heading in the opposite direction. What percentage of Americans believe that burning fossil fuels is changing the climate? Here are the poll results in three different years:
In 2007: 71% of Americans recognised man-made climate change was real.
In 2009: 51% believed it was real.
In 2011: 44% believe.
Wow. Likewise the media have been backing away from the issue. In 2001, American TV networks ran 147 stories on climate-change. By last year the number was down to 32. Celebrities buy fewer Priuses and Vanity Fair have long since abandoned their 'annual' Green issue. The article I'm referring to is probably TL;DR* for most of you, but it's here and contains a fair bit of information that's, you know, important to the continued well-being of our species. (The printable version gets rid of all the ads and page breaks and it's here.) 

It's breathtaking, really. We need massive, globally-coordinated action to fix this nonsense and the only people who seem organised and vocal on this subject are the oil companies and a few right-wing billionaires claiming the whole thing's a hippy plot and that ten-thousand climate scientists are fudging their figures as a way of getting grants. Come on, humanity. Fixing the world could be fun! And I don't want to spend my old age living in a cave eating grubs . 

* In case you don't know, TL;DR is disparaging interweb lingo for 'Too Long; Didn't Read'  
Rob