Earth’s hair is on fire – where’s the mainstream media?
April 10th, 2008 by Jim JustBill Henderson at Truthout wonders why there’s no hint in the mainstream media that we’re facing a global climate emergency, the likes of which humanity has never before seen.
The emerging vision of how climate change is likely to unfold is that it won’t be gradual or linear. Rather, human-made forcings could drive the climate system beyond tipping points such that change proceeds out of control – where both polar ice caps melt completely, sea level rises by 75 meters, and conditions become fiercely inhospitable to humanity and most of the species with which we share this small blue planet. Political and economic business as usual is far too slow. Nothing less than a systemic reconfiguration of the global economy is required to avert this calamity.
There has been minimal, almost nonexistent mainstream coverage of the “tipping point” scenario even though its main proponents – James Hansen and his NASA climate science team – have released several papers explaining this nonlinear vision of climate change focusing upon the unpredicted rapid melting of the polar ice caps.
Today’s nascent climate change mitigation measures, including carbon taxes and cap and trade, remain completely within the gradual, linear, conventional wisdom. This level of mitigation does not address the big ice sheet melt as a crucial tipping point. No governments anywhere – not even those governments that have led in acknowledging climate change as a real and serious problem – are even remotely considering mitigation measures of an immediacy and scale needed to try to return atmospheric CO2 emission levels below the 350 ppm level necessary to maintain Earth’s climate system intact. Avoiding radical climate change seems an impossibility within our present political and economic systems.
The report Climate Code Red, published in February, .characterized the climate change as an emergency requiring immediate action beyond the capacity of political and economic business as usual. Climate Code Red may be the most important document published so far this year. But it received no mainstream coverage at all, not a single mention – let alone pertinent critical coverage.
Hansen lays out the science behind the “tipping point” scenario at his web site. He argues that paleoclimate evidence and ongoing global changes imply that today’s CO2, about 385 ppm, is already too high to maintain the climate to which humanity, wildlife and the rest of the biosphere are adapted. To avoid tipping Earth’s climate into a different state, we’ll have to reduce atmospheric CO2 back to 350 ppm.