Posted on 09/21/2017 8:05:52 AM PDT by Oldeconomybuyer
... Climate change is both too near and too far for us to be able to internalise: too near because we make it worse with every minute act of our daily lives; too far because until now it has been something that affects foreign people in foreign countries, or future versions of ourselves that we can only conceive of ephemerally.
It’s not surprising, then, that some years ago climate activists switched to a message of optimism. They listened to studies that showed optimism was more galvanising than despair, and they began to talk about hope, empowerment, and success stories. They waited for some grand extreme weather event to make the final pieces fall into place. Maybe the submerging of New Orleans would be it; maybe some of the rich white people who were battered by Hurricane Sandy would use their privilege to demand action. Maybe Harvey or Irma would cause us to snap out of our stupor. It hasn’t happened.
In Britain we’ve seen floodwater inundate entire villages; a pub that became a thoroughfare for a swollen river. This is what catastrophe on our doorsteps looks like, and perhaps it’s time we link these images to climate change with as much gusto as the fossil fuel industry denies it.
Could the language of emergency work? It has never been tried with as much meteorological evidence as we have now, and we’ve never had a target as clear and unanimous as the one agreed in Paris. The one thing I know is that the events of the last few months have changed the game, and this is the moment to start debating a new way to talk about climate change. It may be that if the time for a mass movement is not now, there won’t be one.
(Excerpt) Read more at theguardian.com ...
How many of those years were they unable to detect what would have been named storms because they didn’t happen to have any ships out there in the ocean in that area at the time?
Our ability to track things certainly has gotten much better, but still we can’t predict them.
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