Reply To: Climate Crisis: Our Last Chance
“The Uninhabitable Earth”
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/feb/27/the-uninhabitable-earth-review-david-wallace-wells
Hyperbole or realism? The book might be well worth reading and reviewing.
“…Wallace-Wells identifies a tendency, even among those of us who think we are already sufficiently terrified of the future, to be strangely complacent about the figures…There’s also a temptation, when thinking about climate change, to focus on denialism as the villain of the piece. The bigger problem, Wallace-Wells points out, is the much vaster number of people (and governments) who acknowledge the true scale of the problem, and still act as if it’s not happening…if you are surveying the topic from a privileged western vantage, it’s easy to overlook how bad things have already got, to accept the hurricanes and the heatstroke deaths as simply the unfortunate nature of things. In this way, Wallace-Wells raises the disquieting spectre of future normalisation – the prospect that we might raise, incrementally but inexorably, our baseline of acceptable human suffering… You could call it alarmist, and you would not be wrong. (In the closing pages, Wallace-Wells himself accepts the charge as “fair enough, because I am alarmed”.) But to read The Uninhabitable Earth – or to consider in any serious way the scale of the crisis we face – is to understand the collapse of the distinction between alarmism and plain realism. To fail to be alarmed is to fail to think about the problem, and to fail to think about the problem is to relinquish all hope of its solution…”
Sounds familiarly like the debates we have on this thread, don’t you think?