Reply To: Climate Crisis: Our Last Chance
I suppose the issue is distinguishing between scare-mongering and a timely warning. Is it the case of the boy who cries wolf or the person who presses the alarm bell when s/he spots smoke but has not yet seen the fire.
Lesley Rankin is a researcher at the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR). This is a Crisis: Facing up to the age of environmental breakdown,
http://www.ippr.org/research/publications/age-of-environmental-breakdown
She discusses the type of response that should be made to climate change.
“…We must simultaneously resign ourselves to living with what environmental breakdown has already occurred (and which is inevitable in the future because of time lags in natural systems), and fight tooth and nail to prevent the crisis getting rapidly and significantly worse. Instead, we’re largely behaving as if everything is fine, and merrily continue business-as-usual…”
“…Environmental campaigners have historically used urgency and optimism, urging us to ‘act now, while we can still solve the problem’. Those who advocate this approach point to the need to avoid ‘turning people off’ with an ‘apocalyptic’ story, and being accused of ‘doom-mongering’, especially when uncertainties in forecasting appear to ‘disprove’ warnings.
A more honest message, however, both about the situation we’re in, and the emotions it triggers, might be more useful. A catastrophic prognosis and a call to action may feel incompatible (why try to resolve something that is already so disastrous?), but to do so reflects the conflicting emotions which environmental breakdown inspires – despair, followed by grim determination.
This framing offers people the opportunity both to face up to and process the bad news, and a sense of agency to address it… ”
“…This is a move from optimism to courage and hope – an understanding of hope not as blind faith, but as a commitment to a cause, without knowing whether it will come to pass. We must be open-eyed that some disaster is inevitable, but that the costs of inaction are also the benefits of action – “wars will break out, the planet will heat up, species will die out, but how many, how hot and what survives depends on whether we act.”…”
FROM
https://www.redpepper.org.uk/the-age-of-environmental-breakdown/