Warming to reality
It is one of those weekends where you are left wondering if politicians really are a lower species. The missing link between man and ape even. Regardless of which side of centre they came from, or the party the run with, no matter what they do, they always seam to act in a counter intuitive manner.
Take for example the latest summary from the upcoming IPCC Fourth Assessment Report. If the news wasn’t bad enough before, now they are suggesting that the great barrier reef is going to be all but gone by 2020. Australia is going to get drier. Droughts will be broken with floods and more destructive cyclones. The Murray-Darling will be totally screwed - with or without us. A point on contention in the report was the statement that most of the effects of climate change will be borne by the worlds poorer people. It is hard to imagine how long Australians can remain “rich” without a reef, water, rain forests and some kind of agriculture.
This all sound very gloomy, but it gets worse. Keep in mind that in the wee hours of the morning leading up to the release of this summary, government representatives were meeting with scientists and thrashing it out over the exact language of the report. Some countries didn’t like the fact that the summary suggested that there will be large impacts on the poor. Others didn’t care for the emotive language used. Thats right, the spin doctors had been up all night massaging the message ensuring that you will be only be alert, not alarmed.
Former merchant banker (monkey spanker) and Environment Minister Malcolm Turnbull responded to the report by saying that this is nothing that they haven’t heard before. I guess this means that we should expect to hear anything that we haven’t heard before from the government on this issue. More hot air, less action. More spin, less substance.
Scientists are not the only ones guilty of using emotive messages to try and get the message across. The television news services were using a bit of it too. The usual montage of industrial instillations to a grim soundtrack, kind of like Koyaanisqatsi on bad acid. However, I suspect all that this does is cement the idea in Joe Average’s head that its up to government and industry to solve the climate change problem.
Sure it might be a little easier to get a few hundred politicians and the 100 biggest polluters sorted out, but the reality is that it is up to all of us to solve this problem. Big industry doesn’t exist without consumer demand. The same exits for government policy. If nobody wants to step up to the challenge, as a species are we really worth saving?
