Buried beneath news of COVID, a past president, and a soon-to-be ex-governor, America barely seems aware of the dire new climate report.
By Peter Dykstra Environmental Health News
The 2021 report from the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) went well beyond the relatively sedate tones of its prior assessments.
Impacts of climate change are already here, and some are “irreversible” for centuries, or even millennia, to come.
The IPCC counsels that strong actions – i.e., the kind we seem unwilling to take – are imperative, and the need for action immediately.
America’s print leaders are largely waking, with the New York Times regularly giving up page one real estate for more climate coverage. The Washington Post and the Associated Press are not far behind.
But American TV news? Not so much. On Monday, when the report was released, the CBS Evening News played the story fourth from the top, after COVID-19. The other news developments—Trump’s continuing travails and Cuomo’s potential resignation—topped the show. There’s no doubt that all three are lead-story-worthy, as were the monumental wildfires in the U.S. West, Arctic Siberia, Greece, and Turkey, and the epic rain and flooding in Germany, particularly since such weather calamities are a part of the climate outlook. A week earlier, temperate Portland, Oregon, hit an otherworldly 118°F, while Canada hit its all-time high.
The other networks were only slightly better. Then, by Tuesday, Andrew Cuomo’s resignation dominated. By Wednesday, climate news had vanished from the networks.
Well, not all of them.
If a world without more floods, droughts, and lethal heat waves does not sound like the world you want to live in, Fox News has its own take. Fox’s in-house comic, Greg Gutfeld, gifted us with ten minutes of climate mirth.
His hallucinatory conclusion? Since a recent report said that more Americans die from excessive cold than excessive heat, we should welcome global warming as a lifesaver.
So, where does this leave us?
Well, we should acknowledge that we are screwed. Partly. The IPCC tells us that we’re too late to stop many of the long-predicted impacts, but not all. Pushing the long-promoted remedies – clean energy, EVs, and so much more – can steer us away from the worst case. But pair that optimism with a steely pushback against climate deniers, who still hold sway with too many in office.
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