THE TOWNS, THEY WERE NOT READY FOR THESE “CLIMATE RELATED FLOODS”
By Bruce Piasecki, author of Doing More with Less, and the Fable 2040
THE TOWNS, THEY WERE NOT READY FOR THESE “CLIMATE RELATED FLOODS”
By Bruce Piasecki, author of Doing More with Less, and 2040: A Fable
Are we really ready to imagine the difference between climate storms and regular storms?
I have long passages, (find them in most of the last four chapters of 2040), devoted to this questions of understanding and denial.
More importantly, Daniel Sherrell’s new book Warmth: Coming of Age at the End of Our World is centered on this question. In his actions, and in his Fulbright and his writing, at a mere age of 30, Sherrell asks us why we deny, and why he feels troubled about bringing a child into this world. More brilliantly, he connects his generation’s sense of grief with the need for a grace-based set of discoveries regarding climate change, and climate action.
More and more humans need to find answers to this question of our reluctance to learn and to respond to threats like flooding, heat exhaustion, poverty, and distant disasters.
This short Medium.com entry provides you with some access to available medical information and reasoning about how we must master this issue of social cohesion and social action on climate change. Sherrell may provide the new type of meditation needed to spur his generation; but here I think doctors can play a key role in getting over the hump for a full spectrum of people.
Read the book Warmth: Coming of Age at the End of Our World when it becomes available.
You can listen to a sample of Warmth here.
In short, Sherrill represents a new generation of serious and gifted writers devoted to these questions of why we have not acted since 1990 on climate change. Check out his Ted talk below and find him both more sophisticated and nuanced than the prophets of doom.
I find the common but popular apocalyptic writing of the past decades on climate change (1970 to 2020) do not provide us the graceful momentum of forward motion. Dread and doom provide the grounds for paralysis. This new issue — severe weather and climate migrants — requires both a ground game of short term wins, and an adaptive persistence described in Warmth.
But when I learned again today of the storms in Europa, my heritage, I began to ask this first opening question again. Are most human voters capable of making a distinction that sticks between the usual storm and climate induced storms?….. Denial is one thing, we can ferret out the wrong hearted and the wrong through policies and market forces. But the inability of the human psyche to acknowledge emerging but manifest change is another can of wiggling worms.
I could not address this head on, in terms of policies, corporate assignments, or marching. So I took to Fable to capture the issues.
This morbid news of Europe’s floods, with more than 100 Dead, and over 1300 migrants missing, reminds me that storms have been a part of the human condition for so long, we may not be able to handle the actions required to address the difference between extreme weather and normalized denial that climate change has worsened these patterns.
THE DENIAL OF NUMBERS, THE DENIAL OF SCIENCE
The reason these storms are happening more frequently is well known: A warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture, more and more powerful rainfall. Meanwhile, the average human psyche remains relatively constant, after fact, like a forlorn Northern star.
What can we do about this?
- The first thing is to recognize it.
2. The thing is to talk with friends and family about it.
3. Then it is important to realize that doing more with less, what I call competitive frugality, is an important part of the answer that you can control.
Sure the 27 nations of Europe have established a bold goal of 38.3 percent renewable energy within nine years, by 2030. But doing more with less gets us there faster.
And now I suggest a few further things to do:
4. Establish forums in government, cities, and in the press that can ferret out when climate storms decimate an area.
Any nation must establish investigative units that provide punitive pressure against those continuing to foster false “denial” stories that say things like: “These storms are no different than what Grandmother tells us about.” We cannot allow rural and river near or coastal populations to remain unprepared.
5. What do I mean by investigative units? Well, each of the top 100 papers in each nation should have “climate” literate investigators that can ferret out and report on the causes and frequency, while they educate their publics about the deniers of needed policy.
We need a whole new generation of writers dedicated to how business can provide a engine of positive changes for cleaner, cheaper energy that the government can not. Citizens can be given superior products that have Environmental Social and Governance tags to them, but not all citizens can be inclined to “buy better.”
6. Therefore we need those that can educate us on Business and Society.
OUR ANNUAL FIVE THOUSAND DOLLAR BUSINESS AND SOCIETY AWARD
We need to recognize this new genre of the 21st century; the business and society researcher, and the business and society writer. When I began writing on climate change in 1990, less than four percent of the national news even covered the issue as a “warning” let along a “threat”. And no one back then, except a handful, indicated that there would be roles for citizen scientists, writers, governments and businesses in the search for answers. I should not say no one: The Union of Concerned Sciences was a great first source for my Simon and Schuster book, as were NOAA scientists and key academics. But you first had to do steps 1 to 4, before you got to the buzz of the issue. You had to see there was a role for business in accelerating the search for answers to climate change. In business, we now refer to the answers to climate change representing the largest procurement logic for innovation issued in human history.
Let’s See Some Scientific Parallels Between Covid and Climate Storms
This is one of the central concerns explored at the end of 2040, the Fable.
As I was writing it, our nation is learning to acknowledge how much ignorance of science leads to an extension of the harm of Covid-19. Today, at least ten percent of the public knows that reports indicate that at least 99 percent of the people dying now in hospitals from covid related matters are not vaccinated. What are we to do to reach those other 90 percent of our citizens?
Even one of the Kennedy’s is now famous for being a vaccine denier.
Draw an important parallel here to climate storms, and the complexities of seeking corporate and social responses to climate change.
THE MEDICAL CONSORTIUM ON CLIMATE AND PUBLIC HEALTH
Please go to www.docsforclimate.org. This information rich platform is supported by five years of solid research led at George Mason University, with a little help from researchers at other institutions like Princeton and Yale.
While I happen to be on the Board of Directors of this impactful non-profit, I want you to profit from its existence. Here is a sample of a recent fact sheet we produced for the staffers of every Congressional office, and for the top 40 medical societies in North America. It is science based: I now share the core findings with you in a nutshell quoted below:
“CLIMATE IS A FUNDAMENTAL DETERMINANT OF HEALTH”
As a result of previous and existing policies, low-wealth communities and people of color are more likely to be affected by:
- Heat Illness: Living in urban “heat islands.”
- Exacerbation of heart and lung conditions: more exposure to pollutants.
- Asthma: Higher existing asthma rates and more exposure to fossil fuel pollutants due to living locations.
- Traumatic Injury: More likely to live in substandard housing, experience traumatic injury from extreme weather ailments, and have less access to required medical care.
- Water/Food-borne illness: More exposure to sewage backups and subsistence fishing.
- Allergies: Less access to proper medical care
- Vector-/Insect-borne disease: Greater exposure to insect-borne diseases and less access to medical care.
- Emotional Stress: More likely to experience the physical harms and loss of people and property from extreme weather.”
I end this direct excerpt from our Medical Consortium here. There is an emerging set of similarities between the deniers of climate storms and the deniers of Covid.
Freud suggested, and I hope he is right: “The voice of the intellect is a soft one, but after continual rebuffs, it shall be heard.”
Bruce Piasecki
President/Founder, AHC Group www.ahcgroup.com
New York Times and USA Today Bestselling Author and Speaker
For additional perspectives: www.doingmorewithlessbook.com
