COVID-19, 2020's Emergence As A Disastrous Climate Year, And Shifting Baseline Syndrome
One plague, when big enough, occludes others, and the coronavirus pandemic has, for six months now, almost fully eclipsed the very real, very large, and very pressing threat of climate change. Even as the United States normalizes a pandemic plateau producing roughly a thousand deaths every day, with continuing national failure to contain the spread of the disease becoming maddeningly familiar old news, COVID-19 is still preventing us from seeing clearly the wreckage being done by global warming, particularly elsewhere in the world, in parts of the global South where Americans and Europeans prefer not to look.
Since the beginning of the year, billions of locusts produced by climate disruptions to local weather patterns have descended in clouds of as many as 80 million insects on some of the world’s most food-insecure regions, chewing up the croplands of the Horn of Africa, the Sahel, India, and Pakistan, pushing perhaps 5 million people to the brink of starvation and threatening the livelihood of as much as 10 percent of the world’s population. Just months after a historic cyclone “pummeled” the country, about a third of Bangladesh was underwater from torrential rains and flooding, while temperatures across the Middle East soared above 120 degrees Fahrenheit. In Iraq, where it reached 125, the heat wave was compounded by power outages depriving Iraqis of air-conditioning that was, in these circumstances, almost literally a lifeline. Last month, as many as 38 million were evacuated to avoid hundreds of simultaneous river floods in China, where some regions received twice as much rain as normal in June and July, and where the massive Three Gorges Dam was sufficiently stressed by the excess rainfall it has produced fears, likely premature, that the epic dam itself might collapse. In the Atlantic, there have been already nine named storms this season, a mark that is typically reached only in October, and the updated NOAA forecast for the remainder of the year projects between three and six major hurricanes, and a total of 19 to 25 storms — meaning there’s a decent chance we will fully exhaust the English alphabet in our naming of storms and move on to Greek. As a whole, the hurricane season is expected to be twice as intense as “normal.” In the midst of a pandemic, in a country that can’t muster the logistical capacity to control it, we will be functionally facing down two serious hurricane seasons at once. And the president is now, ahead of those likely disasters, literally pilfering FEMA’s disaster-relief funds to cover the very minimal amount of unemployment insurance Senate Republicans are unwilling to provide.
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n another sense, of course, especially given how much longer climate change will remain with us, turning away from one set of terrifying news to focus on another set represents a deeply distressing moral, intellectual, political, and managerial failure — marking one pathway by which previously unthinkable environmental horrors become unfortunate but accepted features of the modern world. Even as the world wakes up to climate change — a recent survey, for instance, found a record-high 81 percent of Britons worried about warming — the speed with which we seem capable of normalizing disaster seems to accelerate, too. Last June, fires in the Brazilian Amazon were a multiday international news story and a geopolitical scandal that led to would-be strongman grandstanding between Brazil’s climate-troll president, Jair Bolsonaro, and sanctimonious French president, Emmanuel Macron. This year, as of June, the fires are 20 percent worse. You have probably not read or heard about them. The European heat wave of 2019 made headlines around the world; right now, in France, the temperatures are considerably worse, indeed the worst they have been since 2003, when that summer’s heat wave killed at least 50,000 across Europe. Excepting that summer, this one will be the hottest France has seen since 1873. You probably haven’t heard much about that, either. Last year, record melting of the Greenland ice sheet — 80 billion tons in about a week — was passed around social media as a terrifying climate portent. This year, an ice shelf the size of Manhattan — Canada’s largest — suddenly collapsed, with more than 40 percent of it breaking off in a single day, but was not met with the same kind of general alarm or interest. You get the point.
This process of normalization was not unforeseeable, and yet it is nevertheless disorienting to be living through it, watching extreme weather and natural disaster big enough to once define whole local generations become merely regrettably grim wallpaper to the ever-scarier and more immediate news we doomscroll nightly. “This is the yowling torque muffled by the bland-seeming phrase ‘climate apathy,’” I wrote a couple of years ago, “which may otherwise feel merely descriptive: that through appeals to nativism, or by the logic of budget realities, or in perverse contortions of ‘deservedness,’ by drawing our circles of empathy smaller and smaller, or by simply turning a blind eye when convenient, we will find ways to engineer new indifference.”
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https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/08/what-climate-alarm-has-already-achieved.html
