Talk Climate Change to Me
What candidates are talking the talk? And the hockey stick still stands. ISSUE 12, April 4, 2019
30-SECOND TAKEAWAY: If you blinked, you missed talk of climate change in the 2016 presidential debates. Jay Inslee wants to change that in 2020. | The “hockey stick” climate-warming graphic freaked people out in 1999. But 20 years later, it’s even stickier. | And if you’re just tuning in, here are some climate change Twitterati to follow. | Speaking of freaking out, in 1959 “On the Beach” woke people to a nightmare post-nuclear war world. A “cli-fi” fiction evangelist is looking for a climate change “On the Beach” wakeup-call. | Plus, a cartoon. But you’ll have to read on for that.
ONE | ‘I love it when you talk climate change…’
Presidential candidate Jay Inslee wants to spend a lot more time talking climate change. | Lukas Blazek photo, unsplash.com
It’s a shockingly teensy number. A total of 5 minutes and 27 seconds were spent on climate change across all three 2016 presidential debates (about 2 percent of the overall time). You can be sure there’ll be heaping servings of climate talk in 2020. But to really swing the spotlight, check out the climate-change-presidential candidacy of Washington State governor Jay Inslee. His campaign website leads with the war-has-broken-out-size-headline: “This is our moment to defeat climate change.” Inslee was talking climate change years before it became top-of-mind across the land. Check out his 03.04.19 interview with Rachel Maddow
TWO | The Set-up
Climate-change candidate Jay Inslee has also been using social media to underscore the laser-focus of his campaign. This was definitely not an April Fool’s joke tweet.
THREE | The Follow-Through
High-profile climate scientist and climate change Twitterati clan chief Michael E. Mann spied a clever opportunity to make what amounts to a Twitter rim shot.
Mann’s sidewise tweet is, of course, referencing the famous “hockey stick” graphic, a seminal climate change four-alarm-fire signal, in a 1999 research paper he published along with Raymond S. Bradley and Malcolm K. Hughes.
The graphic turned 20 this March. Meteorologist and science blogger Dan Satterfield recently wrote about how the graphic upended received wisdom. It has stood the test of time through the gold standard of research — replication.
The stick was a powerful image showing how fast our planet’s temperature was rising compared to the stable climate of the past 1000 years. In 1999, there were a large number of people who insisted that the planet was not warming at all, and some even insisted that a new ice age was looming! The hockey stick showed clearly that we were indeed warming, and that something bad was happening to our stable climate. Twenty years have passed, and the hockey stick has stood up against the firestorm of criticism it elicited. (Read this.) Most of that was from people with no background in science.
Satterfield noted that climatologist Stefan Rahmstorf posted to Twitter on 03.15.19 an updated version of the hockey stick:
The stick is even sharper now and gets more so every year. It now shows how unusual the last 100 years have been. In his book, Brian Fagan (the renowned archeologist) has called the stable climate of the Holocene, “The Long Summer“. All of human civilization developed in the stable climate of the last 6,000 years, but the data clearly shows that a real heat wave is headed for humanity and we are running out of time to deal with it.
FOUR | Tweet This Way
If you’re just getting your Twitter feed up to climate change coverage speed (it really is one of the best places to stay abreast of the matter), check out the Climate Reality Project link of key folks to follow. Here’s a hand if you have your Twitter feed up: @MichaelEMann, @ayanaeliza, @DrShepherd2013, @KHayhoe, @EstherNgumbi, @ed_hawkins, @climategeek, @dgebregiorgis, @CAugustenborg, @PKashwan, @coralsncaves, @icey_mark, @JacquelynGill, @anttilip, @twilamoon. (Got other suggestions? Include them in a comment.)
And speaking of climate-talking presidential timber, check out the “2020 Climate Test” at the 350.org website of environmentalism guru Bill McKibben. Spoiler alert: Inslee, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Kirsten Gillibrand are the only candidates so far who earn three green checkmarks: 1) Support of the Green New Deal; 2) Keeping remaining fossil fuels in the ground; 3) agreeing to a “No Fossil Fuels Money Pledge.”
FIVE | “On the Beach” of Climate Change
I’ve written before how the movie version of Nevil Shute’s “On the Beach” freaked me and an entire generation out with its horrifically imagined vision of how — after a global nuclear war — residents of Australia must come to terms with the fact all life will be over in a matter of months. Dan Bloom, an evangelist for “cli-fi” fiction — climate change science fiction that wakes people up — published a recent column on the need for a “cli-fi” “On the Beach.” Bloom quotes an eerily evocative paragraph written in 1959, but that could be speaking directly to the fever dreams and climate change alarm of 2019:
One film critic wrote in his 1959 review of the Kramer movie that “the basic theme of this drama and its major concern is life, the wondrous thing that man’s own vast knowledge and ultimate folly seem about to destroy. And everything done by the characters, every thought they utter and move they make, indicates their fervor, tenacity and courage in the face of doom. Mr. Kramer and his assistants have most forcibly emphasized this point: Life is a beautiful treasure and man should do all he can to save it from annihilation, while there is still time.”
PS | You Promised Cartoons!
I did. If this free newsletter was forwarded to you, please subscribe (and read past issues) at: changingclimatetimes.substack.com. Feedback welcome! Be well | Changing Climate Times Concierge and Curator Douglas John Imbrogno | douglasjohnmartin AT icloud.com
