Climate Change: an update on the Emporer's New Clothes.

In 2007 when I first heard the movie: The Inconvenient Truth as someone with a political science degree what I was immediately struck by was the implications not stated: that if we were going to have sea rise and drought that we would have mass refugees and wars over resources like water and fertile land- in short death and suffering on a large scale.   I have been working on climate issues steadily ever since, but still even as I watched the carbon inching up I have been waiting for it the "future" human impacts.

I am also aware that the corporate controlled media has been doing an amazing cover-up on climate change. It is is amazing how you can impact public awareness about something by simply NOT talking about it. Naomi Klein reports that in all of 2010 the 3 major networks did a total of 32 stories on climate change.  Let's face it, just about any gossip about a movie star gets more coverage than that.  I sort of scream at my tv and radio in despair as they report on the drought in the SW and the forest fires, telling how bad they are but without ever a mention of climate change.  It is like some bad episode of the Emperor's New Clothes.  However, since I read alternative media and mostly stuff about climate change, I did think that when the mass deaths started happening from climate change I would know.

I noted the deaths from the hurricane's and the stubborn insistence by some that no single hurricane can be attributed to climate change. I noted also the absence of talking about increased frequency or higher high water marks of these hurricanes.  I noted the death's from fires and earthquakes and tsunami's  and again the line "none can be attributed specifically to climate change as these occur naturally". I was reminded of the tobacco companies line for so many years that cancer could not be attributed to smoking since it has many different causes, and how years later we would learn that they suppressed for decades the studies that did link smoking to lung cancer.  Even once it was linked, they argued that a particular case of lung cancer could not be linked to smoking.   No not if we continue to ignore all that we know- then we will indeed be vulnerable forever to the "whims of the Gods".

I noted with my usual frustration that the deaths of hurricane Sandy were far more real and concerning to Americans than the deaths of the people of Haiti when their country was struck.   Are the lives of people far away or with brown skin or with not much of a house to begin with actually less valuable to us than mostly white strangers who live in far better houses in our own country?  I drove through parts of WA where miles and miles of "evergreens" are brown and dying because the beetles are no longer killed by winter frost and are infesting the trees and killing them.   I cursed the media for not covering that at all.

But still I was waiting for the reports of climate wars, ones caused by refugee influxes, or fighting over scarce water or food during drought.   But the ones I knew about were caused (so I believe) by religious differences, ethnic/tribal infighting, over throws of dictators, etc.   I like most Americans had bought the explanation of "Arab Spring" as a wonderful uprising of democracy - people saying enough to oppressive rulers, all started by a common food cart peddler immolating himself in protest. Then I watched The Years of Living Dangerously the series on climate change that has been playing on cable's Show Time channel.  

First in one episode they communicated the idea that the Syrian war has actually taken place because after the worst drought in years the starving farmers, having gotten no relief from the government, rose up in arms. Then in a later episode it was explained that the Egyptian revolt, televised from Tahrir Square over throwing President Murbarak, also presented as the end of a 30 year dictatorship, in fact corresponded to a year in which world wide droughts had so reduced the wheat available for import to Egyptians that it had left the poor in Egypt literally without bread.  In fact, I remember listening to an NPR story on the radio where they were interviewing farmers in the Midwest whose whole crop had failed and then a policy person who explained that American would feel little impact in grocery costs because the US produced so much food that it would simply reduce our exports.  I remember thinking then:  "Well that is not without impact, the impact is simply being exported".

But now slowly as I listened to this episode of The Years of Living Dangerously, it penetrated:  "People were fighting as result of climate caused droughts leading to famine".  Oh yes, we can celebrate if crisis' are bringing down governments that do not care about their people....but the Climate Wars have begun. Suddenly I realized that like the people watching the parade with a naked Emperor in it, that it had taken someone shouting out "he has no clothes"  ("Or it is a Climate War") for me to finally see what my brain has already known.   Too slowly grock the obvious because the power's that be have been telling another story; the one they wanted me to believe and not the Truth.

Quaker's have a long tradition of "speaking truth to power" and speaking truth to powerful people when it is not convenient.   So Friends who are you going to speak the truth too about the already arrived global warming?  How are you going to deliver the truth?  How will the truth change you? and How will you let your life speak?