Lest We Forget Because Remembering is Hard.

 

We don't remember very well. 

It's human nature to forget even the not so distant past and, instead, consider the present as normal. There's a term for it - "creeping normalcy." 

Usually, creeping normalcy is of no great significance. Who cares if we don't remember double-knit leisure suits? Some things are best forgotten. There are times, however, when allowing the present to obscure the past can blind us to what's really going on. This is particularly relevant to how we react to the climate emergency.


Weather disasters have become five times more common since 1970, due in large part to climate change, according to a new report from the World Meteorological Organization (WMO).

“The number of weather, climate, and water extremes are increasing and will become more frequent and severe in many parts of the world as a result of climate change,” WMO Secretary General Petteri Taalas said in a statement. “That means more heatwaves, drought, and forest fires such as those we have observed recently in Europe and North America.”

Of the 77 weather-related disasters to strike between 2015 and 2017, 62 show the influence of human-caused climate change, the report found. And the pace of climate change is now accelerating, portending more catastrophic disasters in the years to come, according to a scientific assessment from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released in August.

The new report found that storms and floods were the most prevalent disasters, with storms causing the deepest economic losses. The five costliest disasters ever are all hurricanes that have struck the United States in the last two decades. The United States accounts for more than one third of all losses caused by weather, climate, and water hazards.

Droughts accounted for the gravest human losses, with severe droughts in Ethiopia in 1973 and 1983, Mozambique in 1981, and Sudan in 1983 were responsible for some 650,000 deaths.

I periodically invite my contemporaries to flashback to the climate we enjoyed in the 60s when one might work an entire summer on achieving that perfect tan. It was quite a ritual. Today all it takes is a couple of hours under a hot summer sun and you're microwaved. Progress? I don't think so.

We used to have "freak storms," the sort of severe weather events known for their rarity. Once in a century this or once in 50 years that. Now they appear every decade, sometimes every few years. Creeping normalcy steps in to quell what should be alarming. It dulls our senses.

It's not all bad. We've become really good little survivors. We find ways to adapt to some of these hazards, for now, a little while anyway. As these threats grow in frequency, intensity and duration, we need to throw increasing amounts of time, effort and money into staying ahead. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Cognoscenti Syndrome

  There is a group of people I think of as the Cognoscenti, people who are well educated, very informed and of rapidly diminishing relevance. Their ranks include writers such as Chris Hedges and Glen Greenwald. These are people who have honed an almost Puritanical value system, readily finding fault in any direction. They are scathing in their attacks on Republicans and Democrats alike to the point where they become nihilists. They don't endorse. They prescribe. This is where they fail. They're unable to advocate for anything that might resonate with the public whose interests they argue are being trammeled. Donald Trump was bad but Joe Biden is scarcely better. This is where their elitism comes in.  74 million may have voted for Trump but, hey, they didn't know any better. The mob that stormed the Capitol. They were just victims of the system venting their frustrations. All the racism, bigotry, xenophobia, misogyny, white nationalism - inevitable side effects of their oppr...
Read more

The Gun We Point at Our Own Heads

Image
  If you're sitting at a table and there's a loaded pistol in front of you, do you pick it up and point it at your own head?  Probably not, unless something has gone terribly, terribly wrong. How would you feel if someone else was holding that pistol to your head? But there is a pistol pointed at our heads and, unless we do something about it, we're goners. It's not a Glock. It's fossil fuels and the industry is slowly squeezing the trigger. Proven fossil fuel reserves are sufficient to generate 3.5 trillion tons of greenhouse gas emissions .  Russia and the United States each have massive reserves of fossil energy sufficient to push humanity through the 1.5C heating limit, sometimes called the "carbon budget."  I have it on reliable authority that Washington and the Kremlin aren't getting along very well these days. After all, if you won't hold the line on nuclear proliferation, you might not be inclined to voluntarily give up a major source of na...
Read more

Who Asks "Why?"

Every time there's a conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians, all we hear is 'why?'  Why, as in, whose fault is this? It's easier to affix blame if you can truncate the event. Pick a convenient start date, something recent. In this case we'll make it either the Israeli eviction of Arabs from Jerusalem or the scuffle that took place outside the mosque in response. If those don't work, let's go for Hamas launching unguided rockets into Israel. That's even better because it tags Hamas with the blame. The nice thing about this approach is you can just keep using it. It goes on and on, just as it has for the past half-century since the '67 war. You can even date this whole mess to the beginning of the occupation of the Palestinian territories. The Israelis are said to have called these periodic wars, "mowing the lawn." The idea is that, every now and then, you have to take these Arabs to the woodshed. And then you keep your powder dry unt...
Read more