Climate Memo Mondays #22

 

22.  Climate Memo Mondays, 5-10-21

U.S. got 1 degree warmer, data says (Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, May 05, 2021. SETH BOREN­STEIN.  U.S. got 1 degree warmer, data says   Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, May 05, 2021.  Read more...

Speechless?  What words to define simultaneous Pandemic and Climate Change?

    One of the functions of words is to enable us to be less ambiguous, more exact, less vague, more explicit in describing and understanding our experiences.  It’s part of our efforts to be more truthful in conveying the diverse particularities of life.    

        The label disaster has been widely recognized as inadequate to describe global warming, and catastrophe and calamity would be more accurate.  The Inuit have some 50 words for snow; the Scots, apparently, 421, depending upon how you define “word” and “lexeme.”   So surely we need an at least equally precise vocabulary for making distinctions among the kinds and degrees of ruin.  We are a long way from achieving that.  An erupting volcano is a disaster for the nearest town overrun by lava, in contrast to the covid 19 virus that swept the world in 2020-21.  What shall we name that?   A catastrophe?   The Spanish flu of 1919 killed an estimated 50 million people: what word for that?  A calamity?    But it was eventually, not ended, but managed by vaccine.   

     If you combine climate and pandemic when happening simultaneously, what word in the English language will be adequate?    Emergency?  Didn’t Biden use that word for the pandemic?  What name (or names) is proportionately accurate for coronaclimate?    Chaos? 
    But what shall we call chronic coronaclimate, as described by Andreas Malm in Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency?

     The study of the precise vocabulary for snow itself took hundreds of years, and continues (although snow is disappearing), so I expect with great hope our lexicographers are now busy collecting a dictionary for pandemics and climate change.   We do need it.  For how can we think without words to particularize our extraordinary variety of experience?

      What other words have you heard or seen?  What words would you add to define coronaclimatechchronicemergency?   Or cornonaclimatewarschronicemergency?

Dick  4-15-21

 

Overheated: How Capitalism Broke the Planet — and How We Fight Back by Kate Aronoff.  2021.
Publisher’s description (on book cover):
This damning account of the forces that have hijacked progress on climate change shares a bold vision of what it will take, politically and economically, to face the existential threat of global warming head-on.

It has become impossible to deny that the planet is warming, and that governments must act. But a new denialism is taking root in the halls of power, shaped by decades of neoliberal policies and centuries of anti-democratic thinking. Since the 1980s, Democrats and Republicans have each granted enormous concessions to industries hell bent on maintaining business as usual. What’s worse, policymakers have given oil and gas executives a seat at the table designing policies that should euthanize their business model.

This approach, journalist Kate Aronoff makes clear, will only drive the planet further into emergency. Drawing on years of reporting, Aronoff lays out an alternative vision, detailing how democratic majorities can curb polluters’ power; create millions of well-paid, union jobs; enact climate reparations; and transform the economy into a more leisurely and sustainable one. Our future will require a radical reimagining of politics—with the world at stake.