Apocalypse-now. And discommunication

• 

• 

• 

For anyone who still tries to deny the reality of man-made climate change, and its devastating consequences, the terrible fires sweeping the West Coast of the United States should be the final proof they need to abandon their beliefs.

Today El Pais (Signs of Apocalypse)* lists half a million people evacuated, 15 dead and dozens of missing. The temperature in Death Valley last year reached an all time world record high of 54.4 degrees C. Meanwhile previously stable climate cycles have started to fluctuate wildly and dangerously.

It’s not as if El Pais is a woolly green polenta-and sandals journal of way-out environmental activists. It’s a sober reflective essentially centrist outfit whose overwhelming mission is to lower the temperature, at least in politics. Shame they can’t do it in Oregon. Tonight Sir David Attenborough considers the wider aspects of the problem on BBC*

Which is another case in point. That most anodyne of institutions is now the subject of vituperative outpourings of hate and bile, with its defenders beginning to occupy equally entrenched positions. Same for Black Lives Matter. Extinction Rebellion. Brexit. Why the collapse of reasoned discourse, and the advance of discommunication, where people just yell at each other, learning nothing, teaching nothing? We believe that our most empirical communicant, Mr Peter Seymour of Hertfordshire and a magazine called The Hill may have stumbled on the beginnings of an answer.

https://elpais.com/opinion/2020-09-12/senales-apocalipticas.html (some will need a translator app)

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-54118769

#climatechange #globalwarming #sirdavidattenborough #californiafires #oregon #discommunication