Climate and the immediate future of children; and the health of the elderly
The high-profile hostility to any kind of climate mitigation and ecological politics has been well-documented here. Sometimes its caught-up in the general waffle about the ‘culture wars’ and hatred of any progressive policy around gender or sexuality or identity, but sometimes its just outright incomprehension.
Here Kevin McKenna writes (apparently in all seriousness) for the Herald (‘Does anyone actually give a Friar Tuck about reaching net zero?‘): “These are the millions of Scots who get on with their lives quietly and diligently outside the tiny political and media silo who insist that this all matters to their everyday existence.”
That thing called the environment you see is just an obsession of the metropolitan elites/wokerati/middle classes etc etc (delete as appropriate).
McKenna continues explaining: “I’m in the fortunate position of having a job where I encounter daily many of the people who form yon legendary and elusive “rich tapestry” of our beloved nation. Not once, in the many years I’ve been doing this, have I ever heard a punter say “I’m really concerned about the climate emergency”.
I mean this taxi-driver drivel masquerading as journalism doesn’t stack-up. New polling out this week clashes with Kevin’s reporting. The study, undertaken by Climate Outreach and More in Common, is an update to 2020 research conducted by the two non-profit research organisations, alongside pollster YouGov and the European Climate Foundation. It reveals that the majority of the British public wants politicians to do more to tackle climate change and decarbonise the economy. The survey of more than 5,000 people across England, Scotland, and Wales found that more than 60 per cent of people in Britain want political parties to move ahead with net zero efforts. Funnily enough ecological survival is quite popular.
But what’s behind the sort of posturing you see from McKenna and his colleagues? It could be just clickbait or generational ignorance, but few of them are THAT old to use that as an excuse. He goes on: “Those who derive a handsome living from the climate emergency sector can afford to focus on sustainability because they’ve accessed income streams freeing them from the everyday worries of real people. That is not to suggest that ordinary Scots don’t care about the future of the planet. Just that they care more about the immediate future of their children; the health of the elderly and infirm in their families and the wellbeing of their communities.”
I like the idea of all those folks living it up in the lucrative ‘the climate emergency sector’ [!] but I like also the dissonance between people caring about “the immediate future of their children; the health of the elderly and infirm in their families and the wellbeing of their communities” and Net Zero – as if these things weren’t somehow inherently linked with the climate breakdown.
What do you think this woman is doing Kevin?
I wonder if she gives a Friar Tuck about reaching Net Zero?
The Washington Post wrote of the image: “The challenge now is fighting off despair, and few images have captured the despair of climate change as powerfully as a photograph made Sunday in Greece. An elderly woman from a mountain village on the island of Evia holds her right hand over her heart, her mouth is open, her eyes closed. With a wildfire consuming a forest behind her, she stands before the world like a wailing chorus member from a tragedy by Aeschylus or Sophocles.
The photograph was taken by Konstantinos Tsakalidis, as massive blazes forced residents to flee towns and villages by ferry. Fueled by a brutal heat wave, the fires on Evia — a large island connected to the mainland by a narrow strait — have been burning for days.
Tsakalidis’s image works on every level. Its content is harrowing and its construction powerful. The woman’s anguish and fear are framed by the geometry of two garden walls that force our eye past the foreground of her pain deep into the background, where a house lies in peril. There’s hardly time to register details, the well-tended trees in the well-kept yard, the rounded stones carefully laid on the walls that lead to what is presumably her home, perhaps a place where she has gathered a lifetime of memories. The diagonals make the eye race to the fire, just as the fire races to the house.
But the photograph also works at the symbolic level. As the image circulated Monday, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its most dire report yet on the destruction our planet faces if we don’t limit the emission of greenhouse gases. As headlines blared the word “alarm,” this woman personified collective fear: What she is suffering, we will suffer; what she has lost, we will lose. She lives on an island called Evia, we live on an island called Earth. The people in her village have been forced to flee. Where will we go if the fire comes for us?”
The drama series Extrapolations (streaming on Apple TV) tells a pretty accessible story of the problems facing the next generations of human and non-human life on Earth. They imagine new widespread medical conditions like the debilitating ‘summer heart’. The science does seem to suggest that humans are likely to experience increased cognitive debility from climate change, somewhat worrying since our collective intelligence doesn’t seem to be functioning particularly well as is. Children will be increasingly damaged as foetuses. Old people will have escalating future shock on top of other conditions. Perhaps thats what McKenna has, although I suspect I’m being too kind.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extrapolations_(TV_series)
I recommend Extrapolations though I haven’t finished the series yet. Reviewers including the Guardian seem to dislike it, so maybe it’s doing something right. Especially as it features extinctions in a way that might make those reviewers uncomfortable. It’s more international than some similar science fiction shows I’ve seen, though ‘climate change’ remains a small genre (tiny if you exclude shlock catastrophe movies).
I suspect that McKenna sees himself as one of those ‘grown-ups’ more concerned with ‘every day living’ than the damage we are doing to the bio-sphere. Maybe he thinks that his God (he’s very big on God) will intervene at the last moment, like in some action movie, and save us from disaster. I won’t be around to see this all play out and am somewhat thankful for it. But I could weep for the youngsters who are in no way responsible for this and, if they protest, are told, by the likes of McKenna to ‘grow up’.
He really must be a prize fud that McKenna. Either that or he’s a total shill and nothing more.
“Those who derive a handsome living from the climate emergency sector…” Can Kevin point us to where these jobs are advertised please?
Everyone I know who is working to mitigate climate change is doing so for free, or for very low, voluntary sector wages. Of course, Kevin knows this. The trope that “THEY are all making a fortune from this…” is a well worn alt-right diversionary tactic. Kevin will be paid, s’all that matters.
“Getting on with life” is precisely what people concerned about the environment ( everyone I know is, and deeply) want to do. “Getting on with death…” is what Mr McKenna is promoting.
“Those who derive a handsome living from the climate emergency sector”
Such as those that build renewables……..which deliver lower cost elec to “ordinary people” than – fossil fuels.
Mckenna, talking drivel because he knows nothing – Having never learned to either open his eyes or think.
https://bellacaledonia.org.uk/2024/04/22/climate-and-the-immediate-future-of-children-and-the-health-of-the-elderly/
Like more than a few others, my immediate reaction to seeing this published photograph was “The Scream” by Eduard Munch. It is a stunningly powerful photograph, and a metaphor for humanity’s predicament as you correctly judge. The colour is apocalyptic. I recall seeing the result of the Black Summer bush fires in Australia in 2019 here in New Zealand. The sun was reduced to a glowing Martian-red disc no brighter than a sodium street lamp, the very air was cold and damp, this in summer in NZ in the mid-day, the hills were obscured by an orange miasma, and I could literally smell the smoke – this from 2,500 miles away from those fires. I didn’t have the trauma of our anonymous Greek lady, but I did feel seriously affected, a pervasive sense of foreboding of seeing something so unnatural and threatening. The feeling stuck with me for several days.
I don’t know what we do about very stupid, arrogant people who deny the obvious and deny the science. They are mostly older white men, at least the ones I’ve met have been. Two of the most strident – one was a radical socialist and Scottish independence activist I met on a walk in Northumberland, and other a right wing medical colleague of mine here in New Zealand. It’s not that they had doubts about global warming, it was a total, emphatic, almost resentful denial of the reality of global warming science and happening. My socialist fellow walker put it like this “mankind has no more effect on the planet earth than a flea on the hide of an elephant” Oh, I said, and if that flea is carrying Yersinia pestis? (Plague – I am a retired GP). He just gave me a dirty look and marched forward at great speed on his long lanky legs, leaving me to ponder more slowly behind. I never saw him again. .
Strange, isn’t it. The science of global warming is actually pretty simple, and has been known about for nigh on 200 years. and can be understood in its essentials by an intelligent and interested 12 year old. The science is straightforward, has as I say a long history , and the evidence is becoming mountainous – as Georg Monbiot has put it, it requires a determined mountaineer and searcher to find the few glimmering fragments of climate science contradictions in the rubble of these mountains. Climate deniers regularly accept infinitely more complicated science every day of their lives. Every cell phone carries the science of Einsteins theory of relativity, of Plank’s quantum theories, of Maxwell’s equations, complicated mathematical equations and calculations understood fully by only a few on the planet, the engineering of minutest structures mere atoms across, and literally rocket science for the GPS etc. But when has anyone ever come across a “cell phone denier?”
So this is much more than simple denial of a straightforward science and reality, but something much deeper. I don’t know exactly what it is, but I could posit a serious and abiding emotional investment in a certain way of thinking, a strong self-interest in preserving the status quo, an acute fear of change and a deep and abiding resentment that anyone should ever get the denier to change. Conspiracy theory is a useful retreat too. An environmentalist I don’t know, Bill McKibben, is quoted in Wiki as suggesting two forms of climate denial, the first being the (Republican) outright denial of science and measurement, and the other a denial of the “status quo” sort, the sort that allows people to suffer that very common human failing “cognitive dissonance”. The good politician who’ll say, yes, it is a problem, we are doing something about it, only, as in the UK and Scotland to approve of more drilling for oil or take other actions or non-actions in direct contradiction to the previously stated view. .
Robert Gifford wrote (again I quote from Wiki) Robert Gifford wrote in 2011 “we are hindered by seven categories of psychological barriers, also known as dragons of inaction: limited cognition about the problem, ideological worldviews that tend to preclude pro-environmental attitudes and behavior, comparisons with other key people, sunk costs and behavioral momentum, discordance toward experts and authorities, perceived risk of change, and positive but inadequate behavior change” – I think he covers all the bases here, and allows any interested person a wide choice of pathology.!
Wiki goes on to discuss cognitive dissonance, well done Wiki, but I’ve been saying that for years….
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychology_of_climate_change_denial
Worth a read, I don’t know if other resources are better, but a useful start. Of course, and I haven’t read that far, fossil fuel companies have been spending tens or hundred of million of dollars on confusing the world’s citizenry on the science and measurement of climate change. They don’t have to prove the science “wrong”, merely implant sufficient doubt to render a dysfunctional and inadequate response to this existential threat. Advertising, propaganda, spin, it all works. They’ve copied the pioneering work of confusion as disseminated by tobacco companies. They’ve also bribed many scientists and politicians.
Another resource can be found here – the interested reader will be able to find many others, I’m sure.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/denying-the-grave/201901/climate-change-denial
Max Plank’s dictum that “A scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.’ is probably familiar to most here though again it doesn’t explain why otherwise intelligent people such as fellow scientists presumably, should show such inflexibility of thinking.
Ultimately I think it comes down to deeply held political principle and moral precepts – as my two examples show this doesn’t have to follow a left-right divide ,. but that climate change isn’t just a science but it comes with an order, it demands an action and that is the problem, such is a direct challenge to these beliefs and must therefore be countered in any way the denier is comfortable pursuing – pour scorn on the science, or the scientist, or the measurements, appeal to personal experience, state a conspiracy, prophesy the end of advanced society, posit a fascist Green takeover. etc. etc. and if you don’t get the message through the first time, keep repeating ad infinitum. .
@John Monro, because the effects (on human habitation zones) will be uneven, particularly in lifetime of currently-living humans, many humans may believe they will be winners from climate change. However, they are likely to deny climate change as a strategy (otherwise be seen as pro-catastrophe for others). Their picture of ‘winning’ may be less or more rational. Some suspect Russian leadership of wanting several aspects of global warming to unlock Siberian and Arctic resources, just as some Brits look forward to warmer summer holidays and a booming wine industry (I just saw the cartoon on Wikipedia after writing this), neglecting systems complexity etc.
Others seem to be looking forward to the End Times, and want the human world to split into neat Us versus Them lines, and the science, objectivity and potential for complex international relations of climate change is a threat to this religious orthodoxy, and even though they may not actually care about the world burning, they want it to be on God’s terms.
Perhaps a neglected area of study is the psychology of non-humans in reacting to climate change. Some animals have already made adaptation, migration and mitigation the basis of new behaviours. Even then, extinction looms for many species, and ecosystems may be stressed to collapse.
The dangers are what will the psychology of a climate denier turn to as their world catches fire and they feel they have little less to lose?
Thank you, SleepingDog, two interesting additional motivations in climate deniers or contrarians which I didn’t think about on this occasion.
1) Thinking of a personal or community benefit from climate change? Russia, Canada anyone? Even Arrhenius wondered at the time of his calculations before the turn of the twentieth century if there might be a benefit to his own rather cold or tepid country of Sweden, so it’s not a new idea. But it is sociopathic, because you have then to ignore the unsurvivable conditions being inflicted on millions or billions elsewhere. And even sociopathy doesn’t work, because won’t these millions and billions be knocking at your door and demanding entrance? .
2) End of Times cultists? Hadn’t though of that. I suppose there’ll be a few, but I would wonder if in any major number. .
The two motives you discuss illustrate and add to the variety of psychology around this matter, but I’d wonder in the scheme of things, if that important among the majority of climate deniers or contrarians. I would still pose the problem as being one of resistance to change, especially self interest – perhaps as simple as wishing to drive an iCEV, or continue burning coal in you power industry because it’s cheap and available, or you are part of Mearsk shipping line or you have a thousand cows to milk here in NZ – pretty nearly every activity on the planet now depends on fossil fuels, and there are lots of very rich people with the money to spend to persuade a receptive and for the most part pretty ignorant population of the problems they’ll have if climate activists get their way.
I treat the matter as a practical joke of cosmic proportions played on mankind at his creation. Homo sapiens, the universe’s first species “naturally selected” to be endowed with intelligence enough to make massive use of its planet’s resources, but just not quite enough intelligence to be able to do so wisely. And being so, I am convinced that humanity will not deal adequately with global warming, and all the other scourges we inflict on nature, overpopulation, sixth extinction, pollution etc. and we will inevitably suffer increasingly dire existential consequences that will be beyond our capacity to deal with. I am 77 years old, but my grandson is 2 years old – I just have to fear old age for myself, but for my grandson will old age ever be a fear for him?
PS I don’t subscribe to Apple TV, so I won’t be able to view “Extrapolations”