Sunday musing...
This piece about the aftermath of the #StormBoris floods in Czech, Poland, Austria etc:
" “How many more wake-up calls are needed?” asked Kurt Seinitz, a columnist at the tabloid newspaper Krone, on Monday. “What else needs to happen to make people aware of the need for urgent action against global warming?” "
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/sep/21/austrian-city-st-polten-faces-up-to-scale-of-damage-left-by-deadly-flooding
...lead to the thought that although extreme weather changes due to global warming have very large impacts, the rate of change -- despite being instantaneous on a geological timescale -- are long enough on a human timescale that their power to affect public attitudes towards adaption and mitigation actions is far less than we might hope.
When catastrophic regional floods like those return once a decade, rather than once a century, it will only take two or three cycles until it's established as normal. People will say, well, we've had these huge floods / ridiculous heatwaves / droughts / storms once a decade all my adult life; it's nothing new.
The peri-warming climate of my early life in the last decades of the 20th century will be a vague, functionally mythological image in the collective consciousness of history -- like life without mobile phones, or mass horse powered transport, or washing clothes by hand.
This ties in quite neatly with Dr Jeff Masters' observation that gigantic extreme weather disasters haven't moved the dial on public demand for emission reductions so far (and thus are unlikely to do so in future.)
Video version: https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2024/09/video-can-a-colossal-extreme-weather-event-galvanize-action-on-the-climate-crisis/
Slightly longer, more discursive version: https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2024/07/can-a-colossal-extreme-weather-event-galvanize-action-to-respond-to-the-climate-crisis/
#climateCrisis #globalWarming #adaptionAndMitigation
#PoliticalTechnology #climatePolicy
