Wednesday, September 16, 2009

Climate porn - I'm cumming!


Further to the earlier piece about the opinion of the BBC's Richard Black that "the language of catastrophism, chaos, doom - whatever you like to call it - has actually sobered up, in the UK at least, having peaked about three or four years ago," Climate Resistance also wonders just how much this is true.
Thirteen months ago, the New Economics Foundation, with a group of other organisations including the UK’s Green Party, launched its 100 Months campaign, claiming that:
We have 100 months to save our climate. When the clock starts ticking, we could be beyond our climate’s tipping point, the point of no return.
In January, the Guardian reported James Hansen’s claim that the
President ‘has four years to save Earth’ - US must take the lead to avert eco-disaster.
Last month, John Beddington, the UK’s Chief Scientific Advisor foresaw a global environmental crisis in 2031:
As the world’s population grows, competition for food, water and energy will increase. Food prices will rise, more people will go hungry, and migrants will flee the worst-affected regions.
Earlier that month, Paul Kingsnorth and George Monbiot did battle in the Guardian over whether the eco-apocalypse was inevitable or could just about be prevented if human nature could be contained by state institutions.
And:
2009 also saw the release of the film, The Age of Stupid, which claims to be a documentary, but is in fact a fiction set in the future, charting the fall of civilisation as it was torn apart by Gaia’s wrath.

Unsurprisingly, The Independent undermines Mr Black's claim:
Expressing the same symptoms of disorientation, here are some headlines from the Independent over the past year.
Is the Independent less shrill than it used to be? Hardly.
And The Guardian:
Back in March, we wrote about the coverage of the Copenhagen climate discussions in the Guardian, most of which was written by David Adam. The following headlines all appeared in the same week:
  • Global warming may trigger carbon ‘time bomb’, scientist warns.
  • Caught on camera: The Greenland tunnels that could speed ice melt.
  • Sea level could rise more than a metre by 2100, say experts.
  • Severe global warming will render half of world’s inhabited areas unliveable, expert warns.
  • Europe ‘will be hit by severe drought’ without urgent action on emissions.

Oh, an interesting observation about The Independent in an earlier post at Climate Resistance:

Back in 2006, in the BBC article featuring the IPPR’s criticism of climate porn, the Independent’s deputy editor, Ian Birrell defended his paper thus:
If our readers thought we put climate change on our front pages for the same reason that porn mags put naked women on their front pages, they would stop reading us
No sooner than his words were spoken, the readers of the Independent decided to express their own independence:


In fact, our models suggest that the Indy will go into negative circulation in Summer 2018:



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