Requiem for a Species - 17 June 2010
A few days ago I was sitting in a chair next to my father's hospital bed. Chronically unwell with pulmonary fibrosis sitting on top of emphysema, this winter brought along a bout of pneumonia, so that the small amount of space left in his lungs filled up with a foul infection. His heart raced off the scale, so they had to defibrillate him with those paddles you see in hospital emergency shows. He got through that crisis and is now gradually returning to his usual state of unwellness.
As I sat with him in hospital, the overwhelming emotion, I have to admit, was sheer terror: mine and his. I sat anxiously in my chair, a picture of stress, eyes glued to the numbers on the cardiac monitor. The numbers seemed to be going all over the place, then it would beep and a horrible feedback-loop set in. The beeping created anxiety, which increased Dad's heart-rate, which created more beeping.
In the years before he gave up smoking, Dad knew that all of this was a possibility. His own father had succumbed to a long, slow lung disease at 60. And yet Dad kept smoking until he actually became unwell.
In his new book, Requiem for a Species, Clive Hamilton points out that dealing with climate change is rather like dealing with the dangers of tobacco. For a long time, simple scientific information wasn't enough to make people change their behaviour. The situation wasn't helped by a tobacco industry intent on defending its own interests, just as today we have the coal and fossil fuel lobby doing the same. (Hamilton points out that some of the very same people and organisations defending tobacco have today turned their efforts to sowing doubt over climate science).
But why is it that the rest of us, without trillions to lose, are failing to face up to climate change? Hamilton suggests that humans evolved to confront risk that was staring them in face; future or possible danger is just a little too abstract for most people. Even when confronted with overwhelming scientific evidence (smoking damages your health; carbon emissions cause global warming) people tend to take refuge in denial. Fortunately, the truth finally broke through on tobacco, although not before much damage was done. We can only hope the same will happen with global warming.