Connecting the Dots of this Climate Change Crisis

    Across the world, people are seeing and
    believing the evidence of manmade global
    warming. Only the media don't get it

By Bill McKibben
Guardian (UK)
May 4, 2012

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/may/04/connecting-dots-climate-change-crisis

The Williams river was so languid and lovely last
Saturday morning that it was almost impossible to
imagine the violence with which it must have been
running on 28 August 2011. Yet the evidence was all
around: sand piled high on its banks, trees still
scattered as if by a giant's fist, and most obvious of
all, a utilitarian temporary bridge where, for 140
years, a graceful covered bridge had spanned the water.

The YouTube video of that bridge crashing into the
raging river was Vermont's iconic image from its worst
disaster in memory, the record flooding that followed
Hurricane Irene's rampage through the state in August
2011. It claimed dozens of lives, as it cut a more than
$1bn swath of destruction across the eastern US.

I watched it on TV in Washington, DC, just after
emerging from jail, having been arrested at the White
House during mass protests of the Keystone XL pipeline.
Since Vermont is my home, it took the theoretical - the
ever more turbulent, erratic, and dangerous weather
that the tar sands pipeline from Canada would help
ensure - and made it all too concrete. It shook me bad.

And I am not the only one.

New data released last month by researchers at
Yale and George Mason universities show that a lot of
Americans are growing far more concerned about climate
change, precisely because they are drawing the links
between freaky weather, a climate kicked off-kilter by
a fossil-fuel guzzling civilization, and their own
lives. After a year with a record number of
multibillion dollar weather disasters, seven in ten
Americans now believe that "global warming is affecting
the weather."

No less striking, 35% of the respondents reported that
extreme weather had affected them personally in 2011.
As Yale's Anthony Laiserowitz told the New York Times,
"People are starting to connect the dots."

Which is what we must do. As long as this remains one
abstract problem in the long list of problems, we will
never get to it. There will always be something going
on each day that is more important, including, if you
are facing flood or drought, the immediate danger.

But in reality, climate change is actually the biggest
thing that is going on every single day. If we could
only see that pattern, we would have a fighting chance.
It is like one of those trompe l'oeil puzzles where you
can only catch sight of the real picture by holding it
a certain way.

So, this weekend, we will be doing our best to hold our
planet a certain way so that the most essential pattern
is evident. At 350.org, we are organizing a global day
of action that is all about dot-connecting; in fact,
you can follow the action at climatedots.org.

The day will begin in the Marshall Islands of the far
Pacific, where the sun first rises on our planet, and
where locals will hold a daybreak underwater
demonstration on their coral reef already threatened by
rising seas. They will hold, in essence, a giant dot -
and so will our friends in Bujumbura, Burundi, where
March flooding destroyed 500 homes. In Dakar, Senegal,
they'll mark the tidal margins of recent storm surges.
In Adelaide, Australia, activists will host a "dry
creek regatta" to highlight the spreading drought down
under.

Pakistani farmers - some of the millions driven from
their homes by unprecedented flooding over the last two
years - will mark the day on the banks of the Indus; in
Ayuthaya, Thailand, Buddhist monks will protest next to
a temple destroyed by December's epic deluges that also
left the capital, Bangkok, awash.

Activists in Ulanbataar will focus on the ongoing
effects of drought in Mongolia. In Daegu, South Korea,
students will gather with bags of rice and umbrellas to
connect the dots between climate change, heavy rains,
and the damage caused to South Korea's rice crop in
recent years. In Amman, Jordan, Friends of the Earth
Middle East will be forming a climate dot on the shores
of the Dead Sea to draw attention to how climate
change-induced drought has been shrinking that sea.

In Herzliya, Israel, people will form a dot on the
beach to stand in solidarity with island nations and
coastal communities around the world that are feeling
the impact of climate change. In newly-freed Libya,
students will hold a teach-in. In Oman, elders will
explain how the weather along the Persian Gulf has
shifted in their lifetimes.

There will be actions in the cloud forests of Costa
Rica, and in the highlands of Peru where drought has
wrecked the lives of local farmers. In Monterrey,
Mexico, they'll recall last year's floods that did
nearly $2bn in damage. In Chamonix, France, climbers
will put a giant red dot on the melting glaciers of the
Alps.

And across North America, as the sun moves westward,
activists in Halifax, Canada, will "swim for survival"
across its bay to highlight rising sea levels, while
high school students in Nashville, Tennessee will
gather on a football field inundated by 2011's historic
killer floods.

In Portland, Oregon, city dwellers will hold an
umbrella-decorating party to commemorate March's record
rains. In Bandelier, New Mexico, firefighters in full
uniform will remember last year's record forest fires
and unveil the new solar panels on their fire station.
In Miami, Manhattan, and Maui, citizens will line
streets that scientists say will eventually be
underwater. In the high Sierra, on one of the glaciers
steadily melting away, protesters will unveil a giant
banner with just two words, a quote from that classic
of western children's literature, The Wizard of Oz:
"I'm melting" it will say, in letters three-stories
high.

This is a full-on fight between information and
disinformation, between the urge to witness and the
urge to cover up. The fossil fuel industry has funded
endless efforts to confuse people, to leave an
impression that nothing much is going on. But as with
the tobacco industry before them, the evidence has
simply gotten too strong. Once you saw enough people
die of lung cancer, you made the connection.

The situation is the same today. Now, it is not just
the scientists and the insurance industry; it is your
neighbors. Even pleasant weather starts to seem weird.
Fifteen thousand US temperature records were broken,
mainly in the east and midwest, in the month of March
alone, as a completely unprecedented heat wave moved
across the continent. Most people I met enjoyed the
rare experience of wearing shorts in winter, but they
were still shaking their heads. Something was clearly
wrong and they knew it.

The one institution in our society that is not likely
to be much help in spreading the news is . the news.
Studies show our newspapers and TV channels paying ever
less attention to our shifting climate. In fact, in
2011, ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox spent twice as much time
discussing Donald Trump as climate change. Do not
expect representatives from Saturday's Connect the Dots
day to show up on Sunday's talk shows. Over the last
three years, those inside-the-Beltway extravaganzas
have devoted 98 minutes total to the planet's biggest
challenge. Last year, in fact, all the Sunday talk
shows spent exactly nine minutes of Sunday talking time
on climate change - and here is a shock: all of it was
given over to Republican politicians in the great
denial sweepstakes.

So, here's a prediction: next Sunday, no matter how big
and beautiful the demonstrations may be that we're
mounting across the world, "Face the Nation" and "Meet
the Press" won't be connecting the dots. They will be
gassing along about Newt Gingrich's retirement from the
presidential race or Mitt Romney's coming nomination,
and many of the commercials will come from oil
companies lying about their environmental efforts.

If we are going to tell this story - and it is the most
important story of our time - we are going to have to
tell it ourselves.

___________________________________________

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