Compiled by Dick Bennett https://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2024/02/omni-climate-memo-mondays-167-february.html
Dana R. Fisher Saving Ourselves: Climate Shocks to Climate Action (on climate inaction). Julie Hollar. Grossly Inadequate Reporting by the Mainstream Media of the Climate Emergency.
“Saving Ourselves: From Climate Shocks To Climate Action”
By Michaela Herrmann, DeSmog. PopularResistance.org (2-15-24). Professor Dana R. Fisher’s new book, Saving Ourselves: Climate Shocks to Climate Action. Dana R. Fisher argues that there is a realistic path forward for climate action―but only through mass mobilization that responds to the growing severity and frequency of disastrous events. She assesses the current state of affairs and shows why public policy and private-sector efforts have been ineffective. Building upon years of research on activism, democracy, and climate politics, Fisher explores the state of the climate movement today to understand how radical direct action is evolving as the climate crisis worsens. In an interview with DeSmog’s Michaela Herrmann, Fisher outlines why she thinks “severe, durable climate shocks” will be required to shake the world out of the fossil fuel status quo once and for all. She draws upon years of data gathered from climate protests…. -more-
JULIE HOLLAR . “Humans Might Be About to Break the Ocean? Don’t Stop the Presses” [You couldn’t if you wanted because they’re not running they way they should!]. (JULY 31, 2023).
When a new peer-reviewed study (Nature Communications, 7/25/23) announces that a crucial Atlantic Ocean circulation system, a cornerstone of the global climate, may collapse as quickly as two years from now, you’d think news outlets might want to put that on the front page. The AMOC (Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation) moves warmer water from the tropics to the North Atlantic, where it cools, sinks and returns down the US East Coast. Its collapse would be a “climate tipping point” with, as the British Guardian (7/25/23) explained. . . .
The New York Times (7/26/23) was one of the only major outlets to put the news on its front page, with a well-reported piece by Raymond Zhong. It also did better than many, mentioning “human-driven warming” in the second paragraph, and paraphrasing a scientist that “uncertainty about the timing of an AMOC collapse shouldn’t be taken as an excuse for not reducing greenhouse-gas emissions to try to avoid it.” That scientist, Hali Kilbourne, was given the last word: “It is very plausible that we’ve fallen off a cliff already and don’t know it,” Dr. Kilbourne said. “I fear, honestly, that by the time any of this is settled science, it’s way too late to act.” Yet even here, no connections were made to concrete policy options, and no policy experts or activists were quoted to offer them. The only other front-page US newspaper mention FAIR could find in the Nexis database was in the Charleston Post& Courier (7/25/23), which similarly made no connections to policy.
In the context of a summer of extreme climate events, including unprecedented heatwaves, ocean temperatures and wildfires, we desperately need a media system that treats the climate crisis like the five-alarm fire that it is, and demands accountability from the politicians and industries—not least the fossil fuel industry—driving us off the cliff.