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Climate change: our wilful blindness

By Lyn Bender - posted Monday, 11 March 2013


At the approaching wave of the Asian Tsunami, the sea drew back as though mustering its full fury. Like a gigantic creature drawing breath before giving a mighty overpowering roar until it returned and swallowed all in its path. .

Many people failed to read this signal, or perhaps thought they might outrun the big wave, and rushed to gather the fish that had been left high and dry on the now exposed extended sandy shore. They perished as a gigantic wall of water overcame them.

I am reminded of this phenomenon by the number of people who have expressed delight at Melbourne's hot and tropical summer of 2013. How great to be basking in a Sydney like summer in Melbourne .The bougainvillaea in a pot on my balcony is thriving.

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But this summer is the hottest ever recorded. It is part of the predicted trajectory of global warming.

To be enjoying the warming, is like applauding weight loss as a terminal illness progresses. Who hasn't wanted to be thin and live in the tropics without moving a muscle?

In likeminded mode, mining magnate, Clive Palmer recently announced his Titanic Mark 2 dream; in New York declaring that one good thing about global warming, is that there will be less icebergs in the Atlantic Ocean

It is a double irony that the voyage of the original Titanic has come to be seen as emblematic to mankind's hubris and failure to prepare for likely disaster. Like planet earth, it had been seen as too big to fail.

It has been a very hot summer in Australia, a summer of extreme events, and dubbed 'The Angry Summer.' The Climate Commission indicates that 123 weather records have been broken.

Professor Tim Flannery, Chief Climate Commissioner reports that we now in effect have a "climate is on steroids" and that we are entering new territory.

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This is a worldwide phenomenon. More frequent and more intense events are cascading as predicted by climate scientists

But denial is also a world wide phenomenon

Al Gore, dubbed 'warmist' 'alarmist' by climate denialists, could be laughing all the way to his next temperature graphs if the inconvenient truth were not so rapidly becoming the awful inescapable truth.

In 2005 many mocked Gore and his slideshow that showed Manhattan could be underwater due to storm surges. In 2012 he was able to superimpose pictures of the effects of Hurricane Sandy showing Manhattan awash

A blogger, Gabrielle Sierra, wrote about the floods in Manhattan Beach.

Her mother had quipped in response to evacuation warnings. We're not going. "If a tree falls I want to be here to hear it ."We are out of sliced ham, my mother tells me over the phone That is my biggest concern right now" After the flood she reports her mother saying. 'We didn't expect it to be that bad "

As the signals get louder and seemingly unmistakable, we seem to get more blind and deaf. Like the woman living in Manhattan Beach we cannot comprehend the scale of a disaster until it is on our doorstep.

When confronted with impossible truth in the abstract, complex psychological protection comes into play. This is especially likely when we feel powerless to alter the course of a horribly unfolding scenario. We bargain. It won't be that bad. They will fix it somehow. It can't be that dire or they would do something about it. It's just a political beat up.

We deflect or distract and concentrate on problems we can manage. We worry about the economy. In short we avoid and deny the real dilemma. Like an alcoholic who keeps drinking, or a person with lung disease who keeps smoking, we reassure ourselves, that all is normal, by repeating old habits. Going on as usual.

This deafness and blindness is mirrored in our conversations dialogue and arguments.

The big events are seemingly unnoticed as we dissect and decry the latest mean and arrogant thing said by politicians. We focus on the minutiae of the small picture.

In contrast there has hardly been any attention paid to the progress of humungous fires in South Australia, We are paying far more attention to smutty jokes about Prime Minister Gillard spending five days in Rooty Hill Western Sydney.

The citizens of Western Sydney are portrayed as suffering great hardship with house prices starting at $400,000 and over an hour to commute to work for some.

Climate change will make all our current lives seem like the Garden of Eden, even for those caught in congested traffic, in western Sydney. Meanwhile, we continue with our guiding paradigm of infinite growth, on a finite planet; as we anticipate the next century. The recent Commonwealth Asian White Paper, ignored Climate Change and its impact on its projections.

The fires this summer, in NSW have burned out 42,000 hectares; that's the size of Barbados. The South Australian fire has blackened 400,000 hectares, which is almost twice the size of the ACT.

But this fire has to be left to burn as it is impossible to fight.

But are we worried? Not while our small world can be contained in its air-conditioned capsule and we have the coal-fired power to watch the television and be rendered numb to reality.

We may be reassured by the doubt and confusion given to the science by faux and some actual scientists in the pay of big coal. This has been documented by Naomie Oreskes in her book, Merchants of Doubt.

The same scientists who deliberately cast doubt on the science of ozone, acid rain, asbestos, and tobacco are campaigning against the science of climate change. Their achievement has been to add to the delay in action in all these death-producing phenomena. More lives have been lost, while more environmental destruction has been allowed to occur. Our failure to become alarmed and to take precautions and to act against climate change is profoundly shocking and dangerous.

A lasting example of this remains with me, of the young woman, reassuring her mother on the phone, as the fires of Black Saturday approached. They were staying. They had a fire plan. She was monitoring the fire reports on her computer, the air-conditioning cooled the house and the children were happily watching episodes of playschool. The fire struck an hour or so later. They all perished.

There is some talk of adaptation, as though climate change will get to a point and remain there; somehow becoming manageable. This is an extravagant illusion.

Humans are masters of adaptation. But if we fail to reduce emissions all our efforts at getting by, are doomed to fail.

Cassandra in ancient Greek mythology was given the gift of true prophecy, but the curse of not being believed. Many Cassandras are warning us that it is time for civil disobedience and opposition to coal and fossil fuels. But we are largely not heeding the warnings.

Our fragile infrastructure systems, and bodies would be devastated by the predicted 4 degrees of warming by the end of the century, as the Earth's services and eco systems collapse.

Extreme weather and food and water insecurity could all become the new normal.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and its thousands of world scientific experts have got it wrong. Yes climate change is happening, but much faster than had been predicted.

We need to wake up and demand action. Many are concluding that civil disobedience is the only rational response to this gargantuan threat, concludes Professor Mark Jaccard of the IPCC. Jaccard is currently writing a book 'Deluding Ourselves to Disaster'.

The softly softly don't scare the horses approach is not working.

We must face the reality that we have no place to flee. Earth is all we have.

My 93 year old mother, whose family wisely fled the Nazi holocaust approaching Poland in 1937 maintains, "Nobody thought it would be that bad. Nobody wanted to believe it."

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About the Author

Lyn Bender is a psychologist in private practice. She is a former manager of Lifeline Melbourne and is working on her first novel.

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