Guest essay by Eric Worrall
VOX author David Roberts is worried we shall never wake up to the need to address the climate crisis, because we will just get used to it.
The scariest thing about global warming (and Covid-19)
“Shifting baselines syndrome” means we could quickly get used to climate chaos.
By David Roberts @drvoxdavid @vox.com Jul 7, 2020, 9:20am EDT
For as long as I’ve followed global warming, advocates and activists have shared a certain faith: When the impacts get really bad, people will act.
Maybe it will be an especially destructive hurricane, heat wave, or flood. Maybe it will be multiple disasters at once. But at some point, the severity of the problem will become self-evident, sweeping away any remaining doubt or hesitation and prompting a wave of action.
From this perspective, the scary possibility is that the moment of reckoning will come too late. There’s a time lag in climate change — the effects being felt now trace back to gases emitted decades ago. By the time things get bad enough, many further devastating and irreversible changes will already be “baked in” by past emissions. We might not wake up in time.
That is indeed a scary possibility. But there is a scarier possibility, in many ways more plausible: We never really wake up at all.
No moment of reckoning arrives. The atmosphere becomes progressively more unstable, but it never does so fast enough, dramatically enough, to command the sustained attention of any particular generation of human beings. Instead, it is treated as rising background noise.
…
We adjust; we can’t help it. If we wait for ecological change to thrust itself into the consciousness of ordinary Americans, we may be waiting forever.
Shifting baselines apply to several other social problems
Once you start thinking in terms of shifting baselines, you start seeing them everywhere, not just in ecology.
What is the unending debate over the “normalization” of Trump but a debate over shifting baselines? President Trump has degraded and discarded longstanding norms of presidential behavior with astonishing speed and recklessness, but it has proven incredibly difficult for the press and the public to assess his record based on pre-Trump baselines. This is why people are always asking, “What if Obama did this?” They are trying to ask, “Why have we shifted our moral and political baselines so quickly?”
…
What if Americans simply accommodate themselves to thousands of coronavirus deaths a day? As writer Charlie Warzel noted in a recent column, it’s not that different from the numbness they now feel in the face of gun violence. “Unsure how — or perhaps unable — to process tragedy at scale,” he writes, “we get used to it.”
…
Read more: https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2020/7/7/21311027/covid-19-climate-change-global-warming-shifting-baselines
If the climate crisis is just another problem to be addressed, rather than an existential crisis which eclipses all other considerations, then it has to compete for attention with other societal problems.
There is no evidence climate change is an especially important problem, no evidence it deserves special attention, given the long term drop in the annual number of deaths from weather related disasters.
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Coming from a part of the world where May blizzards were nothing out of the ordinary and no one ever suggested it was “weird,“ I’ve lived with climate chaos my entire life. I’m sure most of us know that the worst hurricane to ever make landfall in the United States was 120 years ago bu as I’ve always said, nobody had figured out how to monetize the weather yet, never mind use it as a rationale for oppression.
Mods,
If you could please find my comment #3031552 from the bitbucket thanks in advance. Nothing in it should warrant its disappearance.
Seems WordPress has some filters to keep out pertinent COVID criticism of certain Demorats.
Disappointing article.
He started reasonably well. Opened with Global Warming(tm), managed to devote a solid paragraph or two on Orange Man Bad, named dropped someone we have never heard of both to reinforce his social circle and make us feel inferior for not being as well read as him and then… well… Fluffed the landing.
Where was the racism? Where was the male toxic? Where was the gender equality unironically intertwined with the call for those who reject gender norms to be recognised? Not a single Toxic Man Baby or InCel or suggestion that you can’t comment on The Last of Us Pt 2 (aka Golf Simulator 2020) until you have played the full game?
Honestly David is going to get the Cancel Police kicking in his door at 3am if he keeps this up.
Also I will deal with Climate Change by buying a new jumper. Until then I have loans to repay.
For sure, practically a lukewarmer 😉
What’s the point of posting this Vox political bloggers opinion piece here? It just get’s people riled up. You could fill WUWT to the brim with cr@p like this all day and everyday, but why?
Nobody cares what this dumb@rse thinks, there’s no value to it, and he’ll probably get a perverted kick out of it.
Look at this guys twitter and you can see he’s just a lefty shill for a political party,
David Roberts tweet:
“The thing about a human skidmark like Cucker Tarlson is, he wins when we talk about him. He wins by being mentioned in the same sentence as an honorable person like Tammy Duckworth. He wins by having his constipated face on TV at all. If he crosses your mind, he wins.”
The real shifting baseline are the lies and the cries of doom the Climate Liars like Roberts are telling. Tell a lie (the bigger the better) often enough, and it becomes the truth, paraphrasing Goebbels. In fact, I just had a great idea: there should be a prize awarded each year for the biggest, baddest Climate Liar. It could be called the (wait for it)
Goebbel Prize.
“I just had a great idea: there should be a prize awarded each year for the biggest, baddest Climate Liar. It could be called the (wait for it) Goebbel Prize.”
I like that idea!
Now, does the person nominated need to be a deliberate liar, or does a dupe (useful idiot) qualify? We’ll have to work that out. No doubt there will be plenty of “qualified” nominees, even if limited to deliberate liars.
The temperature outside my house goes up and down nearly 11°C every day, the insolition varies by more than 1000w/m², the atmospheric moisture can change by more than 22g/m³ and the wind can switch directions in 5 seconds with a total delta of 12m/s without any need for a storm’s presence.
I sincerely doubt having the temp go from 1°C to 34°C in 3 hours every day with torrential rains would even make me blink.
There were no spelling errors in this post.
Does anyone actually think we can control the weather? We can’t. Does anyone think that we can control the climate? We can’t, BECAUSE climate is an average of weather over 30 years. If you can’t control weather, you can’t control climate. Co2? Huh? A trace gas that cannot possibly impact the weather, thus the climate. What a house of cards this whole Co2 thing is. Blame the IPCC – it is their only JOB to identify how humans are causing climate to change. If we aren’t doing it, then they don’t have a job. Talk about protecting your job – what would you expect them to do? Their claim that humans can control the climate miss the point that we would have to be able to control the weather FIRST.
From the article: “For as long as I’ve followed global warming, advocates and activists have shared a certain faith: When the impacts get really bad, people will act.
Maybe it will be an especially destructive hurricane, heat wave, or flood. Maybe it will be multiple disasters at once. But at some point, the severity of the problem will become self-evident, sweeping away any remaining doubt or hesitation and prompting a wave of action.”
You have it correct: At some point the severity of the problem will become self-evident. If there is a problem.
The problem with the Alarmists promoting this scaremongering is the weather is not doing anything unusual, so there is no problem that becomes self-evident.
The Earth has severe weather all the time, around the globe, but it is nothing unprecendented. For every severe weather event we experience today, we can find one just as severe or even more severe in the past, when CO2 was not an issue.
The real problem for the Alarmists is the weather is not cooperating with their scaremongering. The Alarmists are crying Wolf, when there is no Wolf. And then they wonder why people are not worried about the Wolf.
From the article: “What is the unending debate over the “normalization” of Trump but a debate over shifting baselines?”
The Left debates whether they should describe Trump as a human being or not. They feel they can’t “normalize” Trump because if people see him as a normal human being then others might vote for him.
So nothing about Trump can be seen as normal by the Left. They equate Trump to Adolf Hitler, and saying anything complementary about Trump, is to them, the same thing as saying something complementary about Adolf Hitler.
They have demonized Trump in their own minds so much that they can’t think of him as a normal human being. The entire Left is immersed in this Huge Delusion. The radical Left does not live in the same world the rest of us live in. They live in a world of self-delusion.
It must be horrible to look at the world the way a Leftist does. It is obviously mentally debilitating, and probably affects their physical health, too. They may really go off the Deep End if Trump wins in November. Lots of counseling needs to be arranged in advance.
There’s an old saying that still rings true:
Conservatives see liberals as stupid.
Liberals see conservatives as evil.
Oh, they’ll go off the deep end all right. In fact they did the moment he announced his candidacy, and what’s happening right now in places like Seattle and Portland is just the dress rehearsal for what will come if he wins again. Mark my word.
The “Hitler” trope is particularly good; I’ll always fondly remember Louis CK saying that Trump is the same as Hitler – just before it became public knowledge that he was exposing himself and whacking off in front of young women he cornered at parties. Celebrities: your moral and intellectual betters! 😀
Fluid flow is turbulent.
Climate is chaotic.
TOGETHER WE CAN STOP THIS!!
Homo sapiens have had approximately 200,000 years to “get used to” the extremes (climate chaos) of Earth’s climate under the current Quaternary “Ice Age”.
Over the last 800,000 years, the interval from global “glacial” conditions to global “interglacial” conditions and then back to global glacial conditions averages to be about 100,000 years. Thus, humans have experienced about two full glacial/interglacial cycles.
“If we wait for ecological change to thrust itself into the consciousness of ordinary Americans, we may be waiting forever.”
This is the phrase that jumped out at me. ‘ordinary Americans’ are the problem. They need to be taken care of by those who are not ordinary. ‘Ordinary American’ is code for ‘deplorable’; it is code for ‘too stupid to be allowed to vote’. IE, democracy is the real problem.
Fran, don’t overlook the fact that “ordinary Americans” is likewise code for “ultimate source of funding”.
The real issue then, for politicians and the-sky-is-falling activists, is how to extract that funding while at the same time keeping the “ordinary Americans” from participating in the process.
Along these lines, I am reminded of this quote:
“The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money.” — Alexander Fraser Tytler (but frequently misattributed to Alexis de Tocqueville)
Like we’ve “got used” to snow that “was never going to fall again”?
This is why people are always asking, “What if Obama did this?”
I haven’t every met anyone who always asks “what if Obama was still doing stupid shit?”
But just for the hell of it, what would the mainstream media do if Obama:
*said there were 57 States in the Union?
*choreographed a very quiet delivery of a billion dollars in cash to a foreign country?
*claimed that a Presidential Act was illegal … and then did it anyway?
*slipped $500 million to the UN two days before he left office?
*used the IRS to target and slow political groups he disagreed with?
* Said out loud, in public: “No, no. I have been practicing…I bowled a 129. It’s like — it was like “Special Olympics”, or something.”
*said Hawaii was a part of Asia?
*used the DOJ to spy on journalists?
*used the FBI to spy on a opposing party presidential candidate?
What did “they” say when Obama did all of the above?
“That is indeed a scary possibility. But there is a scarier possibility, in many ways more plausible: We never really wake up at all”
And a possibility even scarier than that is this: We wake up to the reality that the climate scare is just bunch of Hoo Haa. There is no there there. Kind of like Oakland California. (Gertrude Stein)