By David Schaller
If you have been outside lately, you understand that things are amiss in the climate. Weather patterns present us one extreme after another, and the results have not been pretty. Here in Arizona, intense storms, drought, wildfires, blowing sand and dangerous heat continue to conspire against us and these are occurring with the unpredictability that climate science now forecasts. The economic damages, property loss, human suffering and ecological disruption, not to mention the great uncertainty from extreme weather patterns, pose a “new norm” that few of us welcome.
Many say that the current paralysis over climate action heralds our downfall, that we’ll never agree on what to do or why and that we will miss the opportunity to minimize the threats staring at us if we do not act. To that, let me suggest that a consensus is possible on the need to take action on climate change… But only if we don’t call it “climate change.”
Let me explain. I’d like to talk about a fascinating Canadian motion picture, The Great Warming, which was released in 2004. It had the misfortune of being swamped at the box office by An Inconvenient Truth with its big dollar publicity campaign. This was a shame as The Great Warming contained the formula for engaging a diverse society in finding common ground on climate change action. And it is as persuasive now as it was a decade ago.
The Great Warming featured a convincing argument from an executive with Swiss Re, the second largest reinsurance company in the world. He called climate change a huge risk that his company may ultimately choose not to insure. The movie also showcased former CIA Director James Woolsey speaking on the national security threat of climate change. Next, the former vice president of the U.S. National Association of Evangelicals offered that climate change action was another form of “creation care” that his members were prepared to embrace. Even a medical doctor spoke to the health implications of climate change, bringing climate action to a very human and personal level. You could not imagine a more diverse group of interests all finding common ground on climate action — as long as they could just use their own language.
More recently, Rod West, executive vice president of Entergy Corporation, has said, “I could give a rat’s cheek whether you are a true believer [in human-caused global warming] — as business people you need to pay attention to risk. How do you go about assessing the cost of doing nothing?”
And Brig. General Mark McLeod, U.S. Pacific Command, said recently, “Seventy percent of the bad storms that happen in the world are in the Pacific. Call it climate change. Call it the big blue rabbit. I don’t give a hoot what you call it — the military has to respond to those kinds of things.”
What they are all telling us is that if we can just get over the need to convince everyone that we have the only way to describe the problem, we might get somewhere. It’s really not about insisting on our frame of reference as much as allowing others to select their context of engaging climate action in the language and imagery that means something to them.
In turn, we may well see a majority of Arizonans and indeed Americans finding reason to support stabilizing our atmosphere against the threat of whatever we each choose to call it. Too much is at stake to get proprietary about what to call things — even when it comes to the atmosphere.
David Schaller is an energy and environmental security consultant and Board Member of the Southern Arizona Green Chamber of Commerce in Tucson.
Read more environment articles at greenlivingaz.com/environment
