Guest essay by Eric Worrall
A green journalist is in despair that most people prefer playing trendy computer games, rather than listening to his urgent warnings about the imminent green apocalypse.
What will it take for us to pay attention to climate change?
Australia’s coastline has seen massive changes in the past six months, 2015 was recorded as the hottest year on record, and 2016 is shaping up to be even hotter. Former Sydney Morning Herald journalist Bob Beale laments that nobody seems to be taking any notice.
My Facebook page prompts me to say what is on my mind. Actually I’m feeling quite wretched. I have a very bad dose of solastalgia, a term coined by my friend Glenn Albrecht, an environmental philosopher.
Solastalgia is feeling homesick while you are still at home, a melancholy brought on by the loss or degradation of a treasured environment. My solastalgia is for my country, indeed for my whole planet. I’m asking myself, what exactly does Earth need to do to get our attention?
To be bluntly colloquial, it’s very bloody real, it’s right bloody here, right bloody now. It’s about as serious a challenge as we can face. We really urgently need to be all on the same page about this.
No, really, what the heckedy-heck does it take to make us truly sit up and notice the massive changes going on in the natural world around us? It’s a travesty that so many people are fixated by staring at their so-called smart phones in a search for imaginary Pokémon creatures, while the real plants and animals of the world are turning up their toes in their billions.
…
Our civic leaders, our intellectuals, our politicians, and our mass media are playing Pokémon Go with us. When we try to reflect on, to consider and absorb the significance and meaning of these disasters, they blur our field of view by invoking phantoms to distract us. Indeed, they are worse than negligent, they are complicit. They know what needs to be done, but it’s so much easier to deflect, distract, deny and delay.
Here’s a word I just made up to describe our politicians in action on climate change—stagnertia.
A pox on all of them. A pox on them for leaving unattended and untreated the raging fever afflicting our planet.
One more time I ask, what will it take?
Perhaps if “massive changes” were actually happening, people would listen. Fantasising that the climate apocalypse is already upon us, when it is completely obvious to normal people that nothing bad is happening, simply undermines the already tattered credibility of climate advocates, and opens a widening gulf between deep greens and the people they hope to influence.
The green blob is rather like an evangelical preacher who predicts the Second Coming, names a date, and has it pass, and still tries to claim he was right all along.
Is it not the case that the heat released from the ocean (El Niño/La NiNna cycle) and which briefly warmed the atmosphere is now well on its way to the vast darkness of space making 2015/2016 global cooling events rather than warming events? I mean, how else can Earth shed ocean heat except by moving it through the atmosphere and then to space? This has been a good thing the AGW alarmists should be celebrating.
That condition is a mental disorder called “Liberalism”. And it really gained traction at the end of WW II in Britain, when they summarily chucked Churchill and his elitist war-mongering ilk, in favor of a kinder, gentler sort of nanny state. Or so I gather, I suppose I could be ill informed.
Exactly. The trouble is these folk think anyone who doesn’t feel like them are stupid. People know this and no one likes being labelled stupid.
For me, the most alarming bit of the posting is that there exist in our world folks who label themselves as “environmental philosophers.” Sad, so sad.
I think Bill McKibben could have coined that term. Better by far than, when asked, having to respond “gossip columnist”. (He penned the “Talk Of The Town” column for The New Yorker.)
For the poor so called journalist, I have the solution to end his misery.
May I suggest self immolation which will have a side benefit of “raising awareness” as well as ending his emotional distress. It will also end the emotional distress of those who have had to listen to his plaintive bleating.
Unfortunately it would add some BTUs to the biosphere at least on a temporary basis.
Brains, Paul,
Job Title inflation has been around for – well – probably forever.
Certainly my cousin’s local supermarket has two Vice-President – Peas.
One VP-Peas, Fresh; the other – Frozen [no, not the Dismal Pix one!].
And some of our more forward-looking local authorities employ Pre-Used Chattel Recycling Officers – Bin Men.
Auto – wondering if Bum Boatie could be upgraded someday soon!
It would appear in this matter the people are taking their cue from climate scientists.
Unlike politically correct and oversensitive Progressives, most people do not want to focus intently on what is wrong with their world, but would rather get as much *enjoyment* out of the world as they can.
Needs a Pokesong..
We have had a ‘massive change’ from the ‘predictive models’, given to us from high.
We are supposed to be in eternal drought.
No one told the planet.
http://www.news.com.au/national/nsw-act/developing-lows-set-to-lash-parts-of-the-east-coast-with-a-months-rain-falling-in-one-day–including-sydney/news-story/ab77a391f7a685ad858c9d13191fe82e
Actually, Catastrophic Man Made Climate Change and Pokémon have a lot in common…..The both revolve around imaginary Monsters….
he has played just about every hysteria card in the pack, surprised sea level didnt get a direct run. I wonder what this guys ideal world looks like? something like the Truman Show were nothing ever happens and nothing changes. He had one good thought in the article but didnt follow through “I could go on—but what’s the point?”
Quote of the Day:
Beales
Hat tip: yarpos!
#(:))
Aw, poor bugger!
Mr Beale really is imagining things. Last Monday I revisited 4 beaches south of Adelaide in the Gulf of St Vincent that I used to enjoy as a kid 55 years ago. All have a reef near shore and the tide was out. These reefs used to be only visible at low tide with just a few inches exposed at low tide. Well shock horror, the reefs were visible last Monday exactly like 55 years ago. “Massive change” is a deliberate untruth by an easily programmed humanoid. This guy deserves his self imposed depression.
Peter Hannam at the SMH pushes the AGW line with a breathtaking new discovery.
‘When Charles Dickens, the English novelist, was detailing the “soft black drizzle” of pollution over London, he might inadvertently have been chronicling the early signs of global warming.
‘New research led by Australian scientists has pegged back the timing of when humans had clearly begun to change the climate to the 1830s.’
Well, Peter Hannam, Leonard Nimoy begs to differ…..
“In 1977, the worst winter in a century….”
(youtube)
CO2 UP. WARMING STOPPED.
Just who do the Dickens do you think you are kidding, Hannam (and your scientists-for-hire)?
… who the
doDickens …. grrAnd your smart phone has more computing power than a mainframe from the 1970s.
Scientists know more now than they knew then.
Yes, Troll Yush. They know that the hottest temperatures of the 20th century were in the 1930’s and they know that there was, indeed, a cooling trend in the mid-1970’s to mid-1980’s. And they also know that there is not one piece of data proving CO2 (much less, the ~ 4% emitted by humans) causes global climate change. They also know that the climate models are unskilled. And many other things which, apparently, you have yet to learn.
Heh, likely, you are not a troll, but a sockpuppet, just messin’ (in German).
Re: the “in German” — yes, dear Deutsche speakers, there is no word spelled like that in German. My interpretation of Y’s “name” is based on treating it as if he were drunk, thus, slurring his words: “Jush {German word for talking crap pronounced as a drunk would pronounce it}.”
Peter Hannam has made statements at the SMH in his articles that can, and were, easily refuted. None of his alarmist articles allows comments anymore. The man is an uninformed fool.
Iconicman
Enjoy
http://joannenova.com.au/2016/08/experts-surprised-to-discover-what-skeptics-have-known-for-years-world-has-been-warming-for-200-years/
Australia’s coastline was very well mapped by none other than Captain James Cook. It should be an easy job to compare his maps of the East Coast to that of today. I understand there is little difference.
Didn’t even know pokeman was a game. And yet I would still prefer playing pokeman to worrying about a non-issue.
And, people also pretend that global warming is not a problem.
To address Just Messin’ (in German):
The data says that the AGWers are the ones living in fantasy scienceland.
The science realists, such as Dr. Richard Lindzen, know that the observed warming is well within natural variation:
Source: https://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/06/13/dr-richard-lindzens-talk-at-eike/
Source: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/03/30/lindzen-on-negative-climate-feedback/
Re: Sockpuppet Yush’s name:
The “in German” is based on treating the “name” as if Yush were drunk, thus, slurring his words: “Jush {German word for talking crap pronounced as a drunk would pronounce it}.” = Just sch…in’.
Jim,
And, people also pretend that global warming is a problem.
..there, I fixed it for you.
Jim Yushchyshyn: “And, people also pretend that global warming is not a problem.”
That’s because it isn’t, of course. Two or three degrees of warming will be an almost completely unmitigated blessing.
Oh, and in any case, mankind can no more significantly alter the climate than significantly alter the time the sun rises and sets.
So you can stop sleeping on your incontinence sheet and gobbling antidepressants and get on with enjoying the bounties that a few more ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere has bestowed on the ecosystem.
If we are going to waste our time with none sense things, it might as well be fun like Pokemon Go instead of some climate change claim I don’t even see even happening.
Pokémon: noun: a Rastafarian Proctologist
I don’t have all that angst figured out myself? I haven’t lived in England since 1977 but it just didn’t seem bad to me back then. I had to show a passport when I left the country, everyone had them, no one needed a visa to go anywhere you’ actually want to go this side of the iron curtain and the EU didn’t fix that.
I went back most recently in 97 and couldn’t find a decent chip shop anywhere, and I looked. For me bangers and chips are what Americans used to think McDonalds was. Tragic. And beer? What happened to beer?
If Brexit helps England be England again it’s worth anything you need to sacrifice.
missed a closing bold tag after “looked”. Sorry.
Even “green” politicians play Pokémon. This happened recently at a defense hearing in the Norwegian parliament when the leader of “Venstre” a Liberal party spent her time playing Pokémon. This party is probably the most obsessed of the Norwegian party in global warming hysteria. She recently succeeded in introducing an extra plan seat fee on all commercial flights of about 10$ a seat.
https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=sv&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.dagensps.se%2Fnyheter%2Fpolitik%2Fpartiledare-jagar-pokemon-go-pa-jobbet%2F&edit-text=
IMO, when Australia finally goes all Mad Max, Bob Beale will not have a super-charged 452 V-8 road machine or be the clever, if nerdy, auto-gyro pilot. He’ll especially not be the brilliant diminutive pig farmer who understands the value of usable methane in a post apocalyptic society. No, he’ll be one of the bound, leather-clad hood ornaments of the evil gang leader.
And then there’s sharks and surfers claiming headlines.
http://www.arte.tv/guide/de/051911-000-A/hai-alarm-im-surferparadies
How to link to climate.