Off to Portland for a few days, to deliver my annual presentation for the City/PSU Transportation Course. I always try to add something topical, taken fresh from the news.
Here’s an example from the Nov. 7 Globe and Mail, found in one of the rear pages of the ‘Life’ section where they slot Social Studies – a compilation of eclectic items that, I guess, don’t have a home elsewhere in the paper.
It was there I noticed a small item down in the lower left: “Hot air and global warming.”
Here’s a quote from the item:
The global output of heat-trapping carbon dioxide (has) jumped by the biggest amount on record … “The new figures for 2010 mean that levels of greenhouse gases are higher than the worst case scenario outlined by climate experts just four years ago.”
Nothing there worth putting in the front section, much less on the front page, is there?
And then, not so coincidentally, this item from yesterday’s New York Times (Nov 9):
To repeat: “An epic magnitude rarely experienced …”
So what to make of this? Why would a national journal like the Globe effectively trivialize such a consequential story? And why would the Times not make a rather obvious conection?
Or to put it another way, asked by Stewart Brand of Jared Diamond, author of Collapse, his examination of why societies fail:
How can people be so dumb?
It’s a crucial question, with a complex answer. Diamond said that sometimes it’s a failure to perceive a problem, especially if it comes on very slowly, like climate change. Often it’s a matter of conflicting interests with no resolution at a higher level than the interests— warring clans, greedy industries. Or there may be a failure to examine and understand the past.
Overall, it’s a failure to think long term. That itself has many causes. One common one is that elites become insulated from the consequences of their actions.
There’s a connection to transportation here, particularly as it’s playing out in our current election. Can you guess?
In the meantime, I’ll be back on Monday.
OMG Gordon…kickin’ old school! I don’t know anyone who’s actually touched the Globe and Mail or any other non-commuter paper in years. Good for you!
HUGE kudos for being a strong voice in the fog Gordon! I only hope that other folks finally wake the hell up and quickly. The International Energy Agency report this week is quite the shocker:
“The world is likely to build so many fossil-fuelled power stations, energy-guzzling factories and inefficient buildings in the next five years that it will become impossible to hold global warming to safe levels, and the last chance of combating dangerous climate change will be “lost for ever”, according to the most thorough analysis yet of world energy infrastructure.
Anything built from now on that produces carbon will do so for decades, and this “lock-in” effect will be the single factor most likely to produce irreversible climate change, the world’s foremost authority on energy economics has found. If this is not rapidly changed within the next five years, the results are likely to be disastrous.
…
The “lock-in” effect is the single most important factor increasing the danger of runaway climate change, according to the IEA in its annual World Energy Outlook, published on Wednesday.
Climate scientists estimate that global warming of 2C above pre-industrial levels marks the limit of safety, beyond which climate change becomes catastrophic and irreversible. Though such estimates are necessarily imprecise, warming of as little as 1.5C could cause dangerous rises in sea levels and a higher risk of extreme weather – the limit of 2C is now inscribed in international accords, including the partial agreement signed at Copenhagen in 2009, by which the biggest developed and developing countries for the first time agreed to curb their greenhouse gas output.”
http://gu.com/p/338gc