The Witness Chronicles, September 28, 2024
How ‘climate change’ was erased
The Weather is Not ‘Normal’. Why Are We Acting As Though It Is?
The biggest story of our lifetime is going on and no one cares
I started writing about the climate in 2000, but I have been following this unfolding story since the seventies when I studied something called scenario planning (more on that in a bit). I had a blog called Burner Trouble, which no one read. The idea was to document the changes, large and small, negative and positive, that global warming was creating in our society.
That was twenty-four years ago and my assumption was that this story would become the number one event in our lives, eclipsing everything else. Another assumption was that this was not coming, it was here and accelerating rapidly into the new normal.
I was wrong about the former and right about the latter. Serious climate change is here, many years before predictions, but we are effectively pretending it is not and this is all normal.
This week Hurricane Helene hit the entire southeast region of the US. This thing was a monster Cat Four storm with a 15 foot storm surge, torrential rains, 130 mph winds, and it was 500 miles wide. Even today, when it reached far into the mainland it was still a tropical storm. But it has expanded to 1300 miles wide and is currently affecting one third of the country.
Nothing normal about that.
But not a peep about climate issues from either Presidential candidate. And not from any politician in Florida and the other hardest hit states. It is as if the entire concept of global climate change was erased. Actually that is exactly what is happening.
Back in the sixties, the oil and gas business, aka fossil fuels, was run by seven companies known as the Seven Sisters. Their names have changed over the years and there have been consolidations, but this cartel of private businesses and governments, including our own, still controls the vast majority of our energy resources.
This isn’t just big money, this is the biggest money by far. And they have known since back then exactly how this climate change catastrophe would unfold, and when. That’s where scenario planning comes in. This is the practice of researching possible future scenarios, good and bad, and developing plans for coping with them.
Scenario planning is in wide use these days but it was invented by those Seven Sister oil companies way back when. They had to be prepared to protect their extremely valuable business at any cost. And there were two choices: move away from a business that was not sustainable or cover up what they knew to be the truth.
We all know which choice they made and maybe someday historians will discover how much money they spent to do the largest and most effective coverup in human history. They effectively bought up all the political and media coverage and somehow killed the biggest story of our lifetimes, a story that is now killing millions and ruining lives all over the globe.
So far Helene has killed over 40 people but there will likely be many more as the floods recede.
And no one is taking it seriously.
After 25 years of watching this unfold, I question whether I should even try to write about this because no one seems to care, even when their homes are underwater or being consumed by fire or mudslides, not for the first time.
As a society there is a lesson unfolding right in front of our eyes and we are simply ignoring it. Yes, there are many people trying to get the story out and a lot of technology emerging that can replace fossil fuels, despite the oil companies’ massive bribery, but they have won the awareness war so far.
And so effectively that we don’t even care about what they have done.
BTW, there is another disturbance in the same region of the Caribbean where Helene formed this week and the conditions which created that monster are still in place. It has a 30% chance of becoming a tropical storm by next week on the same path as Helene. 30% is considered low by media standards but statistically that is a large chance of another major Hurricane hitting the same places now reeling from Helene.
How much more will it take for the topic of climate change to become the major story of our lives? Don’t hold your breath.
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Consumption/over-consumption is the, ("grass roots"), problem. Driven by the greedy - who just want to sell more stuff and make more money. All of that money that's spent on advertising, isn't being wasted. Our generation, (same ballpark as you, Martin), have been subjected to that advertising our entire lives. We just see it as normal. And we see it as normal to "follow their instructions" and:
- go out and buy stuff that we don't need;
- use more of the planet's finite resources than we should;
- worry more about how we smell, (or how our house looks), than the destruction of the planet.
Fundamentally though, the problem is how we measure the success - of individuals, businesses, the economy, et al: Growth. We have been brainwashed into thinking growth is not only good - but essential. Our measure of success has been skewed by those that can profit from it. And, so far, I haven't heard a single politician saying "growth is the problem - not the solution".
I recently saw the movie "Don't Look Up". Although the subject was not climate change (it was about a fictional asteroid projected to hit earth) it accurately depicted people's ignorance, gullibility, greed, and/or indifference regarding the impending disaster. Spoiler Alert: it did not end well.