Weekend Reading - NYT Magazine, Climate Change Edition

You can read it right here. The New York Times Magazine this weekend tackles the urgent problem of climate change. On offer, an item on how mosquito-born diseases including zika are set to worsen; how the island city state of Singapore is coping with sea level rise; a cautionary look at geo-engineering measures; sea level rise and America's east coast.

Then there's a piece from John Mooallem, "Our Climate Future Is Actually Our Climate Present," in which the author asks "How do we live that the world we knew is going and, in some cases, already gone?"

The future we’ve been warned about is beginning to saturate the present. We tend to imagine climate change as a destroyer. But it also traffics in disruption, disarray: increasingly frequent and more powerful storms and droughts; heightened flooding; expanded ranges of pests turning forests into fuel for wildfires; stretches of inhospitable heat. So many facets of our existence — agriculture, transportation, cities and the architecture they spawned — were designed to suit specific environments. Now they are being slowly transplanted into different, more volatile ones, without ever actually moving.

Some communities will face new problems and varieties of weather; in others, existing ones will intensify. Already-vulnerable societies — the poor, the poorly governed — may be stressed to grim breaking points. Consider the mass starvation in South Sudan, Nigeria, Yemen and Somalia, where a total of nearly a million and a half children are predicted to die this year — and that climate change is projected to worsen the kind of droughts that caused it. Consider, too, a 2015 Department of Defense report, which framed climate change as a geopolitical “threat multiplier” that will “threaten domestic stability in a number of countries,” and cited a study showing how a five-year drought in Syria contributed to the outbreak of the current conflict there. Nonetheless, denial is coming back in fashion among the most powerful. We have a president who dismisses climate change as a hoax, and a budget director who belittles government programs to study and adapt to our new reality as a “waste of your money.”

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We seem able to normalize catastrophes as we absorb them, a phenomenon that points to what Peter Kahn, a professor of psychology at the University of Washington, calls “environmental generational amnesia.” Each generation, Kahn argues, can recognize only the ecological changes its members witness during their lifetimes. ...In Houston, Kahn found that two-thirds of the children he interviewed understood that air and water pollution were environmental issues. But only one-third believed their neighborhood was polluted. “People are born into this life,” Kahn told me, “and they think it’s normal.”

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On the most fundamental level, Kahn argues, we are already adapting to climate change through a kind of tacit acquiescence, the way people in a city like Beijing accept that simply breathing the air outside can make them sick. “People are aware — they’re coughing and wheezing,” he told me, “but they’re not staging political revolutions.” Neither are we. And, Kahn went on, we risk imprisoning ourselves, through gradual adaptation, into a condition of “unfulfilled flourishing.” A wolf becomes a dog, genetically; it wants to fetch tennis balls and sleep at the foot of your bed. But imagine a dog that isn’t yet a dog, that still wants to be a wolf.

Does "environmental generational amnesia" explain how, in a world where climate change casualties will soon mount at rates of a million or millions a year, our own prime minister remains so bitumen-friendly. Justin doesn't care, not enough anyway. Certainly not enough to keep his promises, the solemn pledges that carried him to power. He looks around and sees the Canadian public asleep and he knows he can do as he likes while we're napping. And when your eyes do open, he'll shoot you that winning smile and offer to pose with you for a selfie.

Trudeau can sit there with his thumb up your ass but events are overtaking him and us. There's also been a wave of recent articles scraping away our indifference to expose what's really happening, what we're causing in places conveniently out of sight, out of mind.

Michael Klare writes of climate change as genocide. Meanwhile a study commissioned by the German Foreign Office finds that climate change will fuel the next wave of terrorism.

In the drought-ravaged region around Lake Chad in central Africa, food and water shortages, near-economic collapse, and weak governments are providing a ripe recruiting ground for Islamist fundamentalist group Boko Haram.

“In north-eastern Nigeria, the region closest to Lake Chad and where Boko Haram is strongest, 71.5% of the population live in poverty and more than 50% are malnourished … This kind of economic deprivation provides an ideal breeding ground for recruitment by Boko Haram.”

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The Global Military Advisory Council on Climate Change has warned the impact of global warming will drive massive refugee movements of an “unimaginable scale”, and that climate represents “the greatest security threat of the 21st century”.

Really, doesn't it make you wonder, when there is so much change happening, much of it out of control, how our government can dare to conduct itself as though it sees none of the danger, none of the suffering and death, directly attributable in no small part by fossil energy? I've heard what they said going back to 2015, even earlier. They understand what's happening. They know what's going to happen. 

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