Thoreau Farm

The New Yorker goes deep on geoengineering. Is this what it looks like when our Very Serious media take the climate seriously?

[UPDATE, 5/10/12: NASA’s James Hansen has a hard-hitting op-ed in today’s New York Times, which shows us what it looks like to take climate seriously. “Global warming isn’t a prediction. It is happening,” he writes. Describing near-term scenarios, he continues, “If this sounds apocalyptic, it is. This is why we need to reduce emissions dramatically.” Bottom line: “The science of the situation is clear — it’s time for the politics to follow.”]

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Back in March, just after we launched this blog at Thoreau Farm, I asked David Roberts of Grist in an email exchange what it would look like if our “Very Serious mainstream media” (as he likes to call it) started taking climate change seriously. If you missed it, the resulting exchange is worth reading (and was cross-posted at Grist).

Well, it may not have led the evening news (or even made it into your newspaper), but this past Saturday, we got to see what it looks like when ordinary citizens — all over the planet — take climate change seriously.

May 5 was the first “Connect the Dots” Climate Impacts Day, the latest “global day of action” spearheaded by Bill McKibben and 350.org. The idea was simple: thousands of people, in communities around the world, who are already feeling the impact of global warming got together for group photos, holding homemade “dots,” and sent them to 350.org. There, they joined a spectacular — and often moving — photostream at ClimateDots.org, “connecting the dots” between extreme weather and climate change (as scientists are already doing), and calling for action. (I organized an event in Wayland and spoke at the event in Concord, where more than a hundred people gathered at the Old Manse, right next to the Old North Bridge. You can see a great collection of photos from around Massachusetts at 350MA.org, a new statewide grassroots network that I’m helping to organize.)

One kind of “climate action” I didn’t see or hear mentioned on Saturday is the highly controversial (some say crazy) idea of “geoengineering.” For that, though, you can turn to this week’s issue of The New Yorker, its splashy “Innovators” issue, and a big piece by Michael Specter titled “The Climate Fixers.”

Everyone should read this piece, or at least the first two sections. Not because it adds terribly much to the well-covered topic of geoengineering (i.e., human manipulation of the atmosphere to counter the effects of climate change), but because Specter’s opening pages are as close as anything I’ve seen, in a “Very Serious” publication, to what I call the “WE’RE F****D. NOW WHAT?” framing of the climate story. A framing, in other words, that begins to level with readers about the extremity of the situation. Continue reading →