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McKibben writes: "Today, 5/5/12, people around the world are volunteering, documenting, educating and protesting to support communities on the front lines of climate change."

Cyclists met at St. John the Divine Cathedral for The Blessing of the Bikes and then rode downtown to join other riders in lower Manhattan. (photo: Sam Newman)

Too Hot Not to Notice?

By Bill McKibben, TomDispatch

05 May 12




I watched it on TV in Washington just after emerging from jail, having been arrested at the White House during mass protests of the Keystone XL pipeline. Since Vermont's my home, it took the theoretical - the ever more turbulent, erratic, and dangerous weather that the tar sands pipeline from Canada would help ensure - and made it all too concrete. It shook me bad.

And I'm not the only one.

New data released last month by researchers at Yale and George Mason universities show that a lot of Americans are growing far more concerned about climate change, precisely because they're drawing the links between freaky weather, a climate kicked off-kilter by a fossil-fuel guzzling civilization, and their own lives. After a year with a record number of multi-billion dollar weather disasters, seven in ten Americans now believe that "global warming is affecting the weather." No less striking, 35 percent of the respondents reported that extreme weather had affected them personally in 2011. As Yale's Anthony Laiserowitz told the New York Times, "People are starting to connect the dots."

Which is what we must do. As long as this remains one abstract problem in the long list of problems, we'll never get to it. There will always be something going on each day that's more important, including, if you're facing flood or drought, the immediate danger.

But in reality, climate change is actually the biggest thing that's going on every single day. If we could only see that pattern we'd have a fighting chance. It's like one of those trompe l'oeil puzzles where you can only catch sight of the real picture by holding it a certain way. So this weekend we'll be doing our best to hold our planet a certain way so that the most essential pattern is evident. At 350.org, we're organizing a global day of action that's all about dot-connecting; in fact, you can follow the action at climatedots.org.

The day will begin in the Marshall Islands of the far Pacific, where the sun first rises on our planet, and where locals will hold a daybreak underwater demonstration on their coral reef already threatened by rising seas. They'll hold, in essence, a giant dot - and so will our friends in Bujumbura, Burundi, where March flooding destroyed 500 homes. In Dakar, Senegal, they'll mark the tidal margins of recent storm surges. In Adelaide, Australia, activists will host a "dry creek regatta" to highlight the spreading drought down under.

Pakistani farmers - some of the millions driven from their homes by unprecedented flooding over the last two years - will mark the day on the banks of the Indus; in Ayuthaya, Thailand, Buddhist monks will protest next to a temple destroyed by December's epic deluges that also left the capital, Bangkok, awash.





This is a full-on fight between information and disinformation, between the urge to witness and the urge to cover-up. The fossil-fuel industry has funded endless efforts to confuse people, to leave an impression that nothing much is going on. But - as with the tobacco industry before them - the evidence has simply gotten too strong.

Once you saw enough people die of lung cancer, you made the connection. The situation is the same today. Now, it's not just the scientists and the insurance industry; it's your neighbors. Even pleasant weather starts to seem weird. Fifteen thousand U.S. temperature records were broken, mainly in the East and Midwest, in the month of March alone, as a completely unprecedented heat wave moved across the continent. Most people I met enjoyed the rare experience of wearing shorts in winter, but they were still shaking their heads. Something was clearly wrong and they knew it.

The one institution in our society that isn't likely to be much help in spreading the news is... the news. Studies show our papers and TV channels paying ever less attention to our shifting climate. In fact, in 2011 ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox spent twice as much time discussing Donald Trump as global warming. Don't expect representatives from Saturday's Connect the Dots day to show up on Sunday's talk shows. Over the last three years, those inside-the-Beltway extravaganzas have devoted 98 minutes total to the planet's biggest challenge. Last year, in fact, all the Sunday talk shows spent exactly nine minutes of Sunday talking time on climate change - and here's a shock: all of it was given over to Republican politicians in the great denial sweepstakes.

So here's a prediction: next Sunday, no matter how big and beautiful the demonstrations may be that we're mounting across the world, "Face the Nation" and "Meet the Press" won't be connecting the dots. They'll be gassing along about Newt Gingrich's retirement from the presidential race or Mitt Romney's coming nomination, and many of the commercials will come from oil companies lying about their environmental efforts. If we're going to tell this story - and it's the most important story of our time - we're going to have to tell it ourselves.





Remember that making the world better begins with responsible action.

- The RSN Team

+6 # bluepilgrim 2012-05-05 17:28
Pedantic note:


He doesn't mean tromp l'oeil; he means anamorphosis.


(You have to know these things to be a socialist -grin-)
+13 # Willman 2012-05-05 21:04
The repubs are like the flat earthers of long ago. They will not admit any problems with our human induced climate change until it is too late. There is simply too much money in it for them to be deniers rather than believers.
Thanks Bill for another stirring piece.
+5 # Granny Weatherwax 2012-05-06 08:48
Upton Sinclair

(And yes, you have to be a socialist to know these things)
+3 # Peacedragon 2012-05-06 07:41
Replacing one word in a sentence fellow peacenics know well; All we are saying is give the earth a chance.
+3 # Granny Weatherwax 2012-05-06 08:43
As long as laissez-faire capitalism has the upper hand in this country nothign can be done.
This is one of the roles of a real government of the people, for the people and by the people: it has no shareholder to claim benefits other than the people and it has no "others" to externalize costs to.

Sorry there IS a role for government beyond being shrunk enough to be dragged in the bathroom and drowned in the tub, Grover.
+4 # Eliza D 2012-05-06 14:13
Thank you Mr. McKibben for your valor and diligence on behalf of our small planet. Thank you for your willingness to be arrested when some of us cannot afford to be. You have no idea how much your actions mean to some of us.
