[News] Why are the crucial questions about Hurricane Harvey not being asked?

[Anti-Imperialist News]

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/aug/29/hurricane-harvey-manmade-climate-disaster-world-catastrophe?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other 



  Why are the crucial questions about Hurricane Harvey not being asked?

George Monbiot - August 29, 2017
------------------------------------------------------------------------

It is not only Donald Trump’s government that censors the discussion of 
climate change 
<https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/aug/07/usda-climate-change-language-censorship-emails>; 
it is the entire body of polite opinion. This is why, though the links 
are clear and obvious, most reports on Hurricane Harvey 
<https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/hurricane-harvey> have made no 
mention of the human contribution to it.

In 2016 the US elected a president who believes that human-driven global 
warming is a hoax 
<https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/may/14/donald-trump-climate-change-mentions-government-websites>. 
It was the hottest year on record 
<https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2016/jul/11/we-just-broke-the-record-for-hottest-year-9-straight-times>, 
in which the US was hammered by a series 
<http://www.mercurynews.com/2016/12/26/fire-and-rain-california-drought-eased-but-not-over/> 
of climate-related disasters. Yet the total combined coverage for the 
entire year on the evening and Sunday news programmes on ABC, CBS, NBC 
and Fox News amounted to 50 minutes 
<https://www.mediamatters.org/research/2017/03/23/how-broadcast-networks-covered-climate-change-2016/215718>. 
Our greatest predicament, the issue that will define our lives, has been 
blotted from the public’s mind.

This is not an accident. But nor (with the exception of Fox News) is it 
likely to be a matter of policy. It reflects a deeply ingrained and 
scarcely conscious self-censorship. Reporters and editors ignore the 
subject because they have an instinct for avoiding trouble. To talk 
about climate breakdown 
<https://www.theguardian.com/environment/georgemonbiot/2013/sep/27/ipcc-climate-change-report-global-warming> 
(which in my view is a better term than the curiously bland labels we 
attach to this crisis) is to question not only Trump, not only current 
environmental policy, not only current economic policy – but the entire 
political and economic system.

It is to expose a programme that relies on robbing the future to fuel 
the present, that demands perpetual growth on a finite planet. It is to 
challenge the very basis of capitalism; to inform us that our lives are 
dominated by a system that cannot be sustained – a system that is 
destined, if it is not replaced, to destroy everything.

To claim there is no link between climate breakdown and the severity of 
Hurricane Harvey <https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/hurricane-harvey> 
is like claiming there is no link between the warm summer we have 
experienced and the end of the last ice age. Every aspect of our weather 
is affected by the fact that global temperatures rose by about 4C 
between the ice age and the 19th century. And every aspect of our 
weather is affected by the 1C of global warming caused by human 
activities. While no weather event can be blamed solely on human-driven 
warming, none is unaffected by it.

We know that the severity and impact of hurricanes on coastal cities is 
exacerbated by at least two factors 
<https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/aug/28/climate-change-hurricane-harvey-more-deadly>: 
higher sea levels, caused primarily by the thermal expansion of 
seawater; and greater storm intensity, caused by higher sea temperatures 
and the ability of warm air to hold more water than cold air.

Before it reached the Gulf of Mexico, Harvey had been demoted from a 
tropical storm to a tropical wave. But as it reached the Gulf, where 
temperatures this month have been far above average 
<http://www.climatesignals.org/node/7158>, it was upgraded first to a 
tropical depression, then to a category one hurricane 
<http://time.com/4917127/hurricane-harvey-timeline/>. It might have been 
expected to weaken as it approached the coast, as hurricanes churn the 
sea, bringing cooler waters to the surface. But the water it brought up 
from 100 metres and more was also unusually warm 
<https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/08/did-climate-change-intensify-hurricane-harvey/538158/>. 
By the time it reached land, Harvey had intensified to a category four 
hurricane <http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/aboutsshws.php>.

We were warned about this. In June, for instance, Robert Kopp, a 
professor of Earth sciences, predicted 
<https://www.princeton.edu/news/2017/06/29/climate-change-damage-us-economy-increase-inequality>: 
“In the absence of major efforts to reduce emissions and strengthen 
resilience, the Gulf Coast will take a massive hit. Its exposure to 
sea-level rise – made worse by potentially stronger hurricanes – poses a 
major risk to its communities.”

To raise this issue, I’ve been told on social media 
<https://twitter.com/GeorgeMonbiot/status/902117703292420096>, is to 
politicise Hurricane Harvey. It is an insult to the victims and a 
distraction from their urgent need. The proper time to discuss it is 
when people have rebuilt their homes, and scientists have been able to 
conduct an analysis of just how great the contribution from climate 
breakdown might have been. In other words, talk about it only when it’s 
out of the news. When researchers determined, nine years on, that human 
activity had made a significant contribution to Hurricane Katrina 
<https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10584-013-1011-1>, the 
information scarcely registered.

I believe it is the silence that’s political. To report the storm as if 
it were an entirely natural phenomenon, like last week’s eclipse of the 
sun, is to take a position. By failing to make the obvious link and talk 
about climate breakdown, media organisations ensure our greatest 
challenge goes unanswered. They help push the world towards catastrophe.

Hurricane Harvey offers a glimpse of a likely global future; a future 
whose average temperatures are as different from ours as ours are from 
those of the last ice age. It is a future in which emergency becomes 
the norm, and no state has the capacity to respond. It is a future in 
which, as a paper in the journal Environmental Research Letters notes 
<http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa6cb3>, disasters 
like Houston’s occur in some cities several times a year. It is a future 
that, for people in countries such as Bangladesh, has already arrived, 
almost unremarked on by the rich world’s media. It is the act of not 
talking that makes this nightmare likely to materialise.

In Texas, the connection could scarcely be more apparent. The storm 
ripped through the oil fields, forcing rigs and refineries to shut down 
<http://www.reuters.com/article/us-global-oil-idUSKCN1B802D?il=0>, 
including those owned by some of the 25 companies that have produced 
more than half the greenhouse gas emissions 
<https://b8f65cb373b1b7b15feb-c70d8ead6ced550b4d987d7c03fcdd1d.ssl.cf3.rackcdn.com/cms/reports/documents/000/002/327/original/Carbon-Majors-Report-2017.pdf?1499691240> 
humans have released since the start of the Industrial Revolution. 
Hurricane Harvey has devastated a place in which climate breakdown is 
generated, and in which the policies that prevent it from being 
addressed are formulated.

Like Trump, who denies human-driven global warming but who wants to 
build a wall around his golf resort 
<https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/nov/17/donald-trump-ireland-golf-resort-wall-climate-change> 
in Ireland to protect it from the rising seas, these companies, some of 
which have spent millions sponsoring climate deniers 
<http://www.exxonsecrets.org/html/index.php>, have progressively raised 
the height of their platforms in the Gulf of Mexico, in response to 
warnings about higher seas and stronger storms. They have grown 
<https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/08/harvey-offshore-platform-oil-gas/537960/> 
from 40ft above sea level in 1940, to 70ft in the 1990s, to 91ft today.

This is not, however, a story of mortal justice. In Houston, as 
everywhere else, it is generally the poorer communities, least 
responsible for the problem, who are hit first and hit worst. But the 
connection between cause and effect should appeal to even the slowest minds.

The problem is not confined to the US. Across the world, the issue that 
hangs over every aspect of our lives is marginalised 
<https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/aug/03/climate-crisis-media-relegates-greatest-challenge-hurtle-us-collapse-planet>, 
except on the rare occasions where world leaders gather to discuss it in 
sombre tones (then sombrely agree to do almost nothing), whereupon the 
instinct to follow the machinations of power overrides the instinct to 
avoid a troubling subject. When they do cover the issue, they tend to 
mangle it.

In the UK, the BBC this month again invited the climate-change denier 
Nigel Lawson on to the Today programme 
<http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-40899188>, in the 
mistaken belief that impartiality requires a balance between correct 
facts and false ones. The broadcaster seldom makes such a mess of other 
topics, because it takes them more seriously.

When Trump’s enforcers instruct officials and scientists to purge any 
mention of climate change from their publications 
<https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/may/14/donald-trump-climate-change-mentions-government-websites>, 
we are scandalised. But when the media does it, without the need for a 
memo, we let it pass. This censorship is invisible even to 
the perpetrators, woven into the fabric of organisations that are 
constitutionally destined to leave the major questions of our times 
unasked. To acknowledge this issue is to challenge everything. To 
challenge everything is to become an outcast.

• George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist

-- 
Freedom Archives 522 Valencia Street San Francisco, CA 94110 415 
863.9977 www.freedomarchives.org
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://freedomarchives.org/pipermail/news_freedomarchives.org/attachments/20170829/ce0aa911/attachment.htm>