Yeah, and I have been guilty of a distorted sense of the
timescales. Certainly 1990 – 2006 seemed to me, living in SE England, a
time of rapidly accelerating climate change impacts and I felt at that time
that things could unravel climatically any day. And you know, that may well
still be true. The 2003 heat wave wasn’t predicted. We simply do not know
what tomorrow will bring.
So I am something of a social constructionist. Assuming two
degrees is a dangerous limit is a myth, a social construction. Two degrees
could be fine (though I doubt it). I.5 degrees could be the end game. Thing is,
if we accept we do not know, instead of assuming experts have the answers, then
we should all be involved in a collective and democratic debate about the risks
we want to take in this state of complete ignorance. It is not valid to
construct climate change as a scientific phenomenon which can be managed
through instrumentalist epistemologies, technological interventions, and slight
modifications to our behaviour as consumers.
From: Discussion list for the Crisis Forum
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Alastair McIntosh
Sent: 24 November 2010 13:01
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Cold spell coming ...
Yes,
Chris, I think that's the issue. It's about people's perceptions ... the kinds
of issue Mike Hulme raises in his writing, the issue of differing perception
planes, though we have to be careful that doesn't lead us into "climate
change as social construction" postmodernism.
I
think that a mistake made by much of the green movement, taking Lovelock and
Hansen too much at a simplified face value, has been to not factor in
sufficiently the timescale of climate change. By 2007 a lot of people were thinking
that disaster was looming tomorrow. Various movies exploited that
mis-perception. Events like New Orleans also fed it. Trouble was, it all led to
parts of the green movement being not sufficiently frank that the melting of
icecaps takes hundreds of years, not years. That is why "The Age
of Stupid" always worried me - it had the timescales all awry. The reason
they left out of the public message, or even distorted as with the film just
mentioned, was the imperative to wake people up But the downside is such
things attuned the public to the wrong temporal wavelength, and the consequent
problem we're now having to face is they've gone back to sleep even more
determinedly than before!
A.
From:
Discussion list for the Crisis Forum [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On
Behalf Of Christopher Shaw
Sent: 24 November 2010 12:39
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Cold spell coming ...
Thanks for raising this point Alistair, been on my mind for a
while. Another cold winter, for the UK at least, will set the climate
change debate back years.
Of course weather is different from climate and of course
climate change is global , and so one mustn’t extrapolate from the UK
experience to the rest of the world.
However, one must also recognise people operate in a very
immediate frame, both temporally and geographically. Reminding people of the
weather/climate distinction, the UK/world distinction will be of very limited
impact. This attitude, this privileging of immediate experience over scientific
and political discourse is antecedent to discussions of denial or the
reproduction of the neo-liberal/industrial order. It is just that, at
instinctive level, we are not built to give priority to the interests of an African
child who will be born two generations hence over our own immediate desire to
go on holiday, buy a car, whatever it may be.
So, for all of us concerned about the stalling of the climate
change debate, I think we need to articulate a response other than the
accurate, but inadequate, one offered by Alistair here.
From: Discussion list for the Crisis Forum
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Alastair McIntosh
Sent: 24 November 2010 11:49
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Cold spell coming ...
The Met
Office are forecasting and early and possibly prolonged cold spell. As the
IPCC's next climate change meeting at Cancun starts in 5 days' time, this may
be used by sections of the press and climate change contrarians as further
"evidence" that global warming is a scam.
Such a point
fails to distinguish between weather and climate. In January this year, UK and
some N. American temperatures were away below average, but the Earth as a whole
was 0.6 degree above the average since satellite documentation began
in 1979.
For the
impending cold snap, here is a link to a BBC weather item that graphically
displays how the N.E. Europe is currently entering a cold spell, but note that
the warm air just moves elsewhere. As such, this is a regional weather
variation and must not be confused with the global climatological picture. View
the video at:
Alastair.
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