Does Anyone Care About Climate Change?

The baffling array of unintelligible buzzwords that escape the lips of PR character Stewart Pearson in The Thick of It draw one of two reactions: pure anger or blank apathy - not dissimilar to the general reactions elicited upon hearing the banal chestnuts: green, sustainable and climate change.

Eyes glaze over; suddenly climate change represents a whole raft of green ideas too frightening to contemplate. A slideshow of images swirl ferociously around your consciousness featuring eco friendly men with dreads snuggled sweatily against naked hippies in unsanitary tree-houses.

Renewable makes you think of those kooky little tyre-fronted notebooks fashioned from a sad Peugeot’s past life, or putting tea bags on the washing line “for another day.”

Then the worst one: climate change, all that guilt-tripping and finger pointing. I wont fork out on an electric car when there are middle class mummies dropping off their little ‘uns in gas guzzling 4x4s with heated leather seats.

The world we live in is threatening enough with the perils of poverty, nuclear power and terrorist attacks, without worrying about the weather as well. We are British, how would we make benign small talk if the weather became one in a long line of issues that gave us the willies?

The World Bank predicts that if emissions of Greenhouse Gases continue as they are the world’s temperature will raise by 4°C. 4°C increase is all very well when you’re sunning yourself in Tenerife, and it would be appreciated while scraping stubborn frost from your windscreen. But 4°C irreversibly for the whole world is all devastating heat waves, food production risks and rising sea-levels rather than a dreamy 4°C when you can’t get out of bed. The results will be catastrophic on a scale we have never seen before.

The problem though, is that climate change is a buzzword for the layman. It doesn’t incite the widespread panic that “war” or “terrorism” does, we don’t have the emotional reaction elicited from “famine” or “poverty.” Obama may have addressed Climate change in his second inaugural address with typically emotive language, arguing that ignoring climate change “would betray our children,” but all too often the human has to see it to believe it. 

While writing in his Telegraph column, Boris Johnson observed anecdotally that January snow made it awfully difficult to imagine that the world is gradually heating up. Many will focus on the narrowed eyes and concerned impression of an impassioned Al Gore on the television while thinking about how he’s aged since that near miss with Bush amongst the confusing myriad of “greenhouse gases” and “scientific evidence” jargon.

Perhaps new terminology is needed; something along the lines of: The-World-is-Heating-Up-Too-Quickly-Due-To-Us-Humans-Unless-We-All-Do-Something-This-Planet-Will-Go-On-But-Everyone-On-It-Will-Die. It needs a bit of work.