THE HAMMER OF THOR… AND LIZ AND BARBRA AND GEORGE AND KAMALA
Lately, I’ve returned to my roots in investigative journalism. I’m trying to get to the bottom to a recurrent episode of collective madness where every four years a marauding posse of celebrities, media figures, and supreme court justices go rampaging through the political landscape w...
The NBC Evening News featured the California drought and the newly declared state of emergency as their second item in the program tonight (Jan. 31, 2014). They covered all the bases – an orange grower worrying that his trees would die, the expert opining that this was the worst drought in anyone’s lifetime, one of the driest January’s ever recorded, etc – all except one that is. They never mentioned that the drought might well be related to climate change.
Well over a decade ago, Richard Seager of the Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory first published a study predicting that the shifting of the precipitation zones further north in a warming world would lead to extreme and persistent drought in the Mediterranean (dry summer, subtropical climate) regions of the world, including the American southwest. I was in contact with Dr. Seager a couple of years ago after an earlier report on the southwest drought on the CBS evening news because that report also failed to mentioned the global warming connection. He said that he had spoken at length about the role of global warming during the interview, but none of those comments made it into the broadcast.
If, as Richard Seager has argued in the world’s leading scientific journals, climate change will likely lead to intensifying drought in these regions over the next 100 years, don’t you think viewers of the network news broadcasts might like to hear that perspective? Or, are we to get a drumbeat of news items over the next decades, itemizing the toll of the droughts, but never exploring why they might be happening?
The American Meteorological Society names Fire and Flood its book of the year for 2023, awarding it the Louis J Batton Author's Award.
"Eugene Linden wrote his first story on climate change, for Time magazine, in 1988; it was just the beginning of his investigative work, exploring all ramifications of this impending disaster. Fire and Flood represents his definitive case for the prosecution as to how and why we have arrived at our current dire pass, closing with his argument that the same forces that have confused the public’s mind and slowed the policy response are poised to pivot with astonishing speed, as long-term risks have become present-day realities and the cliff’s edge is now within view.
Starting with the 1980s, Linden tells the story, decade by decade, by looking at four clocks that move at different speeds: the reality of climate change itself; the scientific consensus about it, which always lags reality; public opinion and political will, which lag farther still; and, arguably, most importantly, business and finance. Reality marches on at its own pace, but the public will and even the science are downstream from the money, and Fire and Flood shows how devilishly effective monied climate-change deniers have been at slowing and even reversing the progress of our collective awakening. When a threat means certain but future disaster, but addressing it means losing present-tense profit, capitalism's response has been sadly predictable.
Now, however, the seasons of fire and flood have crossed the threshold into plain view. Linden focuses on the insurance industry as one loud canary in the coal mine: fire and flood zones in Florida and California, among other regions, are now seeing what many call climate redlining. The whole system is teetering on the brink, and the odds of another housing collapse, for starters, are much higher than most people understand. There is a path back from the cliff, but we must pick up the pace. Fire and Flood shows us why, and how." From Catalog Copy
