Global Warming in the News

Global warming is a subject which frequents our media in all of its forms, though unfortunately, it usually appears in a way meant to scare its readers/listeners about global warming, which is not always the best way to encourage people to take action. 

The image below is an article which was printed in The Independent, on February 3rd 2007. This particular article is a perfect example of the ways in which the media uses various devices to portray climate change as threatening - which although is not wrong to do, it is the ways in which they choose to do so which cause the topic to seem exaggerated and purely written about to make headlines.

So how does the article do this? Let me count the ways. 

1) Short, snappy title of "FINAL WARNING". Given the article was written in 2007 and this is not the last time we heard about global warming, it is very obviously not our final warning. 

2) The opening statement. By telling us "the world will be a hotter place by 2100", The Independent allow its readers to relinquish some of the fear they have so readily been holding onto for one simple reason. They'll be dead by the time this happens. Although this is not necessarily a comforting thought for some people, for others, it releases them from the responsibility of caring as they won't be around to deal with the consequences. 100 years is not a very long time at all in ecological terms, but it is more than a humans life spam. Thanks to the fact that the peril they are warning about is not imminent (personally I'm very sure people would only start to take climate change seriously if a 'Day After Tomorrow' scenario occurred), the seriousness of the situation is diluted in the readers eyes.

3) The ominous use of ellipsis. Found at the end of the two lines, this also serves to exaggerate the terror we are supposed to feel.

4) The well chosen colour scheme. The images of fire as the background for these are very eye catching, making the reader stop and look at the text covering them. They also link well to the idea of the Earth heating up which is the basis of the article, albeit in a dramatic way. It is this drama which ultimately takes away from the focus of the article by presenting the idea of the Earth burning - which is not something scientists studying global warming believe to be a possibility. The almost apocalyptic connotations implied by the picture of fire raises expectations of the level of seriousness of the situation, and lets be honest, there isn't anything that's as serious as the entire world being on fire, so the content of the article can but pale in comparison. 

5) The step-by-step destruction of the planet. The article reduces the ruining of the world to '5 simple steps'. These bite-size chunks, though more digestible for the reader, do not necessarily give the balance they need in order to understand the full extent of the situation.

Some people reading this will think that I am being more dramatic than the article, and they are not necessarily wrong. The difference in our dramatisations of the situation is that the seriousness of global warming takes a back seat to presentation in The Independent's article, whereas I am being dramatic because of an awareness of the severity of our predicament. 

Maybe I am reading too much into it, it's only an article after all. However, this is the format in which the majority of the population gain their information about global issues, so surely, how it's presented to them is exceptionally important. The points I have picked out are all things which were put there on purpose by the writer or the editor. The picture, the title, the segmentation of the process through which our planet will be destroyed, all of it was designed to catch our attention. To that effect, they have succeeded. But, and this is the sceptic in me shining through, I am not convinced that the format and phrasing of this article will have done anything to persuade their readers to change their habits and routines in order to prevent these outcomes. This may simply be because no form of resolution or change was offered to them. At no point in the article was there a "in order to prevent this, we as a global community can..." The question which really needs answering, is was this missing because The Independent omitted it, happy with their scaremongering piece of news; or because in actuality, no one really knows just how much the global community needs to change to stop this from happening? 

Which is worse, your media trying to terrify you just to make headlines, or the fact that even leading scientists in the field which is the biggest threat to civilisation since the Ice Age?  

Aokigahara - The Sea of Trees

There is a forest in Japan called Aokiogahara which is famous as a popular suicide spot. This association has been attributed by some to 1960 novel Kuroi Jukai (Black Sea of Trees) by Seicho Matsumoto, though it is known to pre-date the novel.

The relationship between this particular forest and suicide is said to stem from Japanese mythology - it is said that demons haunt the forest, and the souls of all who die there have permeated the soil and the trees, creating paranormal activity and preventing people from leaving. There is suggestion that the practice of ubasute (literally translated as 'abandoning an old woman' - allegedly in the past elderly or infirm were taken to a remote or desolate place and abandoned) though this has never been confirmed. Japan have stopped publishing the number of suicides which occur there in order to stop publicising the area. 

There has been a short documentary made about the forest which looks at why people have chosen the forest to commit suicide in. The density of the trees causes the forest to be almost absent from wind and wildlife and it known for being exceptionally quiet. But do people choose to die there because it is peaceful, beautiful, because they want to be at one with nature? Or because it is a popular place, because other people have taken their lives there, which reinforces the idea of it being a good place to die?

For those who want to leave this world in the midst of nature, I can understand why this would be a choice place to do it. Although eerie, the forest is beautiful. There is something comfortingly familiar about walking through an old, dense forest such as this. There is an assumption that you will be connected with the surroundings of wherever you die. However, the way these people die is so unnatural that it raises questions as to whether or not they will actually be connected with it properly. (Of course all this depends on your belief system...) Personally, I don't think that where you die has as much impact on whatever happens to your 'soul', as how you die. Dying naturally is the best thing for you, when it is your time to go your mind, body and soul are ready to be separated. (Dying naturally can include in accidents - such as car crashes - it's just the universe saying it was your time.) Whereas you choosing when and how you die, that's changing everything. Nothing is prepared, nothing is ready. By taking their life in a natural setting, maybe people hope they can counteract this imbalance... 

By idealising Nature, these people believe that retreating into it to die will help them spiritually. Whether or not this is true is something we can never truly find out, but it is clearly a dangerous thought process which lead them there, highlighting the difficulties with idealising Nature. 

Here is the Vice documentary I referred to earlier:

Global Warming and the Polar Vortex as explained by Hank Green

Ok so Hank Green is not a scientist. He is however, someone with an abundance of common sense and he has a way of explaining things which means more people can understand them. I like Hank, he's sensible and down to earth and realistic. It's hard to find in a vlogger.

The stuff Hank is talking about is exceptionally relevant to us today, and I have to say I agree with him. I think that the name Global Warming is very deceptive and confuses most people as to what is going on. But I also think that no matter what we call it the majority of people will still not be interested in whatever it is that's actually happening.

The global temperature rising by 4 degrees Celsius overall might not seem like a huge amount. But (to steal an idea from Barbara Kingsolver's Flight Behaviour), if your body temperature rose by 4 degrees, you'd be dead. I completely agree with Hank that the weather anomalies are not the way to think about global warming, as they don't give us a realistic view of what's going to happen. His way of thinking about global warming does make a lot of sense and I think it would help a lot of people to actually understand the process of what is happening to the world around us.

This is the kind of thing you should show people to make them start changing how they live

There isn't much that needs saying about this video. Its message and purpose are clear. I just hope that the more people who see it and understand it, the more people who will be willing to change their habits.

The original post was uploaded two years ago and is Midway's last video on vimeo. In the description of this video however, there is a promise of a feature film set to premiere early 2014. Have a look at his other videos - http://vimeo.com/25563376

Deforestation

We all know the saying  that a picture is worth a thousand words, so I hope a global satellite image of the amount of forest the Earth has lost and gained over the past 12 years is worth a lot.

The article below, published by the BBC two days ago, shows the countries who are cutting down on deforestation (please excuse the pun), and those who are allowing it to continue.

 The net loss of forest in twelve year over the globe is 1.5 million square kms. That is the equivalent of losing approximately one England sized chunk of forest every year. That doesn't sound ideal really.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-24934790

The Apocalypse - Post 1 - General Grievances

So we ended our two hour seminar today talking about apocalyptic literature, a genre which I am fairly wary of for a number of reasons. (As you can see from the post title, this is not the only time I will talk about the apocalypse. It is a big part of environmental literature and could not possibly be covered in one text post.)

Apocalyptic literature, whether books or films, is always theatrical, fantastical, and downright unbelievable. And this poses a very real problem for environmentalists when the causes of the apocalypse are environmental - e.g. from climate change - as rather than making climate change seem like a realistic possibility, it makes it a horror story which can only happen in a writers imagination.

When you try and define "apocalypse" and get past the religious definitions (I shall return to them in a later post), the OED defines it as "a disaster resulting in drastic, irreversible damage to human society or the environment, esp. on a global scale; a cataclysm". The problem I have with this definition is that it does not seem big enough. Although it is on a global scale, it is not total, i.e. there are always survivors. Even in Cormac Mccarthy's "The Road" where the entire plant population is wiped out - in itself impossible but for now I will let it slide - humans survive. Or in Stephen King's "The Stand", there is a percentage of the population, however small, which is miraculously immune to the deadly virus which wiped out the rest of the human populous. This is what I mean by making it seem fantastical. These things could happen, it's true, however what could not happen is that people survive. Humans are adaptable, we are survivors, I cannot deny that, but the chance of even 1% of the population being immune to some incurable disease they have never been exposed to is so monumentally tiny that it is negligible. By drawing their inspiration from the almost completely implausible, writers are guilty of making the very feasible fall into the category of dramatic speculation.

Look at the film 2012 as an example. If you haven't seen it - spoiler alert - the whole world floods. This does not lead people to believe that the whole world could actually flood. It does not do this because the idea of that happening to you, to your family and friends is just too terrible. Your mind will not let you think about something so horrific because it is personal, but also because it is too big. It is an idea that we cannot comprehend. It is this same reason that these things are set within our lifetimes and not 1000 years in the future, it's too much for our imagination. But that's another post entirely...

My Mission Statement

I am of the opinion that we are surrounded by environmental crises. Not all are global in scale, some are irreversible, and the majority - if not the entirety - are the fault of humans. Scientists and people more ecologically aware than myself are currently debating whether or not we have reached the tipping point of global warming, the tipping point being the point of no return, i.e. the point where humans have ruined the Earth and its atmosphere to such an extent that there is no way of reversing the damage. This is a reality. The debate is not how many decades we are from reaching this point; it is about whether or not we have already passed it.

The more worrying fact is that there is a large proportion of the population who claim to care about the environment, which have absolutely no idea about the current state of affairs. I cannot claim to be an expert on the subject, but I’d like to think my knowledge surpasses the average persons on this particular subject. This leads me to wonder how much it is that people actually know and care about the environment, but also why they only know or care that much. Is it because there is not enough information on the subject publically available, or is it because the information is not intellectually accessible to many people, or is it simply that there is so much attention paid to it that people stop listening, stop caring, and tune out the constant nagging of the local council to recycle your tin cans and plastic bottles?