Climate change reporter outlines the social context of the crisis
March 11th, 2009 by cdunaganElizabeth Kolbert, who has been reporting on climate change for “The New Yorker” magazine, says our political, scientific and economic system may not be designed to deal with “slow-moving catastrophes” like global warming.
In a question-and-answer interview published today by “Yale Environment 360,” Kolbert makes some important points about why governmental officials, news reporters, scientists and average citizens are failing to address the crisis adequately. I’ve pulled out some key quotes, but I recommend that you read the entire interview.
Kolbert quoted Sen. John McCain, who had this to say on the subject: “It’s very unclear whether our political system can deal with a problem like this because usually we wait for a crisis and then we deal with the crisis, and that’s just not the way climate change works. You can’t deal with it once the crisis hits.”
Because the Bush administration failed, for the most part, to take climate change seriously, it is easier for many people to ignore the problem, Kolbert says.
On the news media’s role, she said, “I think that the media has contributed to the general sense of it not being an urgent problem because it’s not the lead story of the paper every day. It’s a very hard issue for the media to deal with precisely because the news business is about news — it’s about something that happened yesterday. And global warming is just happening all around us all the time, and it’s going to continue to happen and it doesn’t present itself as news very often.”
On the question of why scientists don’t spend more time convincing the public about climate change: “They have some of the same problems that journalists have, which is that scientists are interested in introducing something new in their work. They want new results, new information. They want to break new ground. They need to do that to get funding, really. And global warming, the fact that global warming is happening, that is really old news in scientific circles. It’s just a settled question in scientific circles. So scientists moved on to other issues having to do with climate change…”
On the idea of turning the debate over to economists and politicians: “I think that’s a big mistake because when you read a lot of economic analyses of climate change, you are struck with a very worrisome sense that the economists don’t understand the science, don’t appreciate the gravity of the situation. And they don’t seem to be factoring in the notion of we’re not talking here about small, inconvenient changes that are not worth changing our lifestyle to avoid. We’re talking about a desolate planet, not really in that long a time, okay?”
And on the role of individual Americans: “It gets back to this issue of whether the public believes in science, which, to be honest, we do not. You can still find a lot of people who don’t believe in evolution, okay? So we’re talking about a country that has a very lax relationship to science. And what you need in order to grapple meaningfully with global warming is to believe that this is not a speculative thing. This is the way geophysics work, and we have established that very clearly both in a laboratory setting and on the ground — and we need to take very seriously these predictions.”
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On a related topic, New York Times reporter Andrew Revkin says climate skeptics at the second International Conference on Climate Change this week in New York are not as unified in their thinking as they were at the first conference last year.
Scripps Interactive Newspapers Group
March 11th, 2009 at 8:33 am
I think we are almost unable to deal with the fact that our current economic model runs against anything we might do to to improve our global warming picture. The short term profit motive and mandate to consume makes it impossible to show the economic value of caring for the planet. We are set on a track of consuming to drive economic growth until we have nothing left. It’s a constant frustration to hear that it’s our duty to buy more and have confidence in the very market that is driving us to extinction. While our economic model fails, we push other countries to buy into the same failing model, all for short term gains.
I think the comment about science is interesting. I think the true test of if you believe the science and global warming predictions is if you are willing to buy low lying property or are staying there if you already own some. I see lots of people who say they believe the sea is going to rise looking at property in the flood plain.
March 11th, 2009 at 6:33 pm
“I see lots of people who say they believe the sea is going to rise looking at property in the flood plain.”
Kind of like a city(s) wanting to build a tunnel on the waterfront…run by liberal mayors.
March 11th, 2009 at 7:13 pm
Global warming would be more believable if someone more honest than Algore was the primary spokesman.
March 12th, 2009 at 4:53 pm
cynic has bought into the Al Gore villification scam. Steven Chu and James Hanson are among the vast majority of scientists speaking for the unambiguous opinion of the scientific community. The IPCC, the Nat. Academy of Sciences, NOAA and every other organization of geophysicists and meteorologists has concluded that it’s real and anthropogenic and coming at us fast. I just wish pointing that out would motivate and mobilize people to work together to make the many changes in how and where we live to even begin to reverse the trend toward heating up the planet until it’s unlivable, at least for large mammals like us.
Unfortunately we seem to only learn from our tragic mistakes, and even then some continue to avoid scientific realities. We can expect 100′s of millions of climate refugees compounding the 100′s of millions of economic casualities overwhelming all levels of governments and social systems like food production and distribution, and even then some won’t make the connection with global warming or peak oil or over-population or our culture of over-consumption or any other reality that has been clearly forecast by scientists for decades. CO2 ppm in the atmosphere needs to be below 350 to begin to stablize the climate, but it’s increased over 2% last year to about 390. Got waders?
March 12th, 2009 at 5:07 pm
Correction: Make that …over 2ppm last year to about 390.
March 15th, 2009 at 7:49 pm
Not everyone wants to live at water level.
I’ve admired homes along the Indianola Spit for years and once had the opportunity to buy a property there at a good price. Thoughts of a tsunami after a quake stopped me.
A global warming water rise isn’t appealing either. I don’t own waders.
In my opinion… Sharon O’Hara
March 16th, 2009 at 6:28 pm
“A global warming water rise isn’t appealing either. I don’t own waders.”
I wouldn’t worry about much, Sharon. Like Mother Earth said above. if the water was really going to rise that much, would we still be building waterfront tunnels in Bremerton and Seattle? Would we be worrying about wake damage in Rich Passage?
The earth is in charge and will do what it wants.