Climate Realities

We seem united only in the fact that we refuse to face the reality of global climate change.

There is a new Red Flag warning in a report just issued by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It has been greeted by…crickets. Thanks in part to the Former Guy’s histrionics/fundraising, his self-proclaimed indictment and arrest, replete with the request for his minions to protest, dominated the news cycle.

I was interested/repelled to see the once unchallenged leader of American broadcast journalism, the CBS Evening News, completely ignore this story in favor of leading with the former Cry-Baby-In-Chief expressing his outrage over being held accountable for breaking the law. Next, they reported on the weather (but not the climate), and then highlighted a couple of grisly murders. They never got to Ukraine, and barely touched on the meeting in Moscow between Russia’s Putin and China’s Xi. As if to put the final nail in the coffin of a formerly respectable and informative national and international newscast, they featured a story on a house-fire in some small burgh. All told, it looked like a higher-budget local newscast. I found myself waiting for the obligatory goofy sportscaster in the not-exactly-matching tie and sport coat.

They mistakenly feel the need for ratings and revenue demands that they abandon seventy-years of quality journalism to appeal to the base instincts of their dwindling audience. This tactic makes them no better than Fox News, which has recently, by way of sworn testimony in the Dominion Voting Systems libel suit, been publicly exposed as so craven as to lie about or ignore true events, instead pandering to their audience by showing what they tune in for, which is propaganda, not news.

I didn’t catch the ABC World News Tonight broadcast that night, but lack confidence that the number one news outlet on television did a substantially better job of covering the real lead story—climate change. ABC has long been committed to the 25-54 women who watch Good Morning America, and tends to lean toward the sensational. Their newscast can feel like a promo for their true crime exposés on 20/20.

NBC is a little better. They usually cover the news and relegate the sensationalism to Dateline, their 20/20 clone. At least on the night in question they actually bothered to mention the impending climate crisis. As my home here in Southern California receives the 12th blow from the atmospheric river that has dominated our normally mild winter, I’m both grateful for the unprecedented amount of rain that is relieving our severe drought faster than one would have thought possible, and distressed at the national network news business that now covers weather but not climate.

From a really good online news source, Semafor (it’s free, and I highly recommend it), according to the IPCC’s report, There is a “rapidly closing window of opportunity” to keep warming below the threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius, but the world has “multiple, feasible and effective options” to do so, according to the report. The discussions went overtime because of a dispute surrounding whether to emphasize carbon-capture technology, as oil-producing nations like Saudi Arabia suggested. the Financial Times reported that critics argued it was a way for those countries to stick to business as usual. The report’s authors ultimately noted the role carbon capture could play, but said that it came with “feasibility and sustainability concerns.” They’ll issue their next report in 2027, where, if we don’t act quickly and decisively, it will come from the new underwater headquarters of the United Nations.

An ongoing problem here is that climate news—all the Celsuius calculations and sciencey stuff—is boring. It is ill-suited to our short attention span world. It needs a good teenage Tik Tok dance if it is to get any traction.

It’s time to “think different,” like Steve Jobs. When faced with the choice between stand-alone products, and ones that worked together, he chose an integrated product line and managed to build the most innovative and valuable company in the world. Of his friend and friendly rival, Microsoft co-founder, Bill Gates, he said, “Bill became the wealthiest man, but his products weren’t integrated.” We need to stop nibbling around the edges, and develop integrated strategies to mute climate change.

For a bunch of allegedly “woke” people, the left is extremely hard to awaken. The right is busy pooh-poohing the doom and gloom forecast by these reports—especially the current one that deems the planet is in real trouble, and says if we don’t answer the alarm in the next few years, life as we know it on earth will morph into series of crises, each bigger than the last. It’ll be like one never-ending Hollywood disaster flick come to life-threatening life.

And what if the experts are wrong? Then we will have spent hundreds of billions with nothing to show for it except cleaner water, cleaner air, and healthier children.

©2023 Jon Sinton