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Climate change. It’s everywhere. In newspaper headlines, that is. But also in everyday neighbor-to-neighbor talk. It’s as though, suddenly, everybody finally grasped Al Gore’s “Inconvenient Truth,†and joined a consensus that we humans need to do something to avoid disaster. Note that Gore’s global warming slide show presentation, launched on a lecture circuit in 2000, was released as a blockbuster movie in 2006. That was 15 years ago. What if people had acted decisively back then? Was that too much to expect? Humans don’t respond that quickly? Gore’s first book on the subject, Earth in the Balance, went on the New York Times bestseller list in 1992, 29 years ago. Will short-sightedness always prevail?
His book An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power, came out July 28, 2017, four years ago. By then, some people around the globe had begun to act decisively on already-unfolding climate change. Corrales Comment offered on-the-scene news reporting from the crucial United Nations climate change conference in Paris in December 2015. This was the only New Mexican news medium to provide that first-hand coverage, which can be read at our website www.corralescomment.com. Corrales Comment will report from the UN climate conference in Scotland this coming November, assuming pandemic restrictions allow. The crux of the UN’s 26th Conference of the Parties (COP-26) convening in Glasgow will be to “increase ambition†by every nation on earth to implement steps to dramatically reduce planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions.
In 2019, as COP-25 got underway in Madrid, the executive secretary for the UN’s climate change programs, Patricia Espinosa, explained, “This year, we have seen accelerating climate change impacts, including increased droughts, storms and heat waves, with dire consequences for poverty eradication, human health, migration and inequality. “The world’s small window of opportunity to address climate change is closing rapidly.†That was 2019. Since then scientists have recorded temperatures of 118 degrees F in the Arctic region, unprecedented heatwaves in the Pacific Northwest, a mega-drought in the Southwest, extraordinary flooding in Germany, accelerating disappearance of glacial ice in high mountains around the globe and crop failures resulting in mass migrations, among other climate crises.
Readers of the Albuquerque Journal learned July 19 that birds are dying of excessive heat in the United States, Australia and South Africa. On the same day, The New York Times reported that huge wildfires in Russian’s normally frozen north “have been made possible by the extraordinary summer heat in recent years in northern Siberia, which has been warming faster than just about any other part of the world.†These days, The New York Times publishes several climate change-related articles in nearly every issue, often at the top of the front-page. Other major papers do the same. The Times’ lead story July 15, for example, was headlined “Europe Lays Out Stringent Plan in Climate Fight. Challenging the World: Curbing Fossil Fuel Use With Penalties for Noncompliance.â€
The next day, it published an op-ed article titled “We Can’t Afford to Be Cheap in Fighting Climate Change.†The conservatively liberal newspaper’s lead article in the Sunday Times, July 18 carried the headline “Climate Change Comes For the Wealthy Nations. Brutal Heat and Deadly Floods Show World Unprepared to Cope with Extreme Weather.†Inside the same edition, a banner headline reads “Floods Thrust Climate  Policy Onto Center Stage of German Politics.†It’s not just East Coast newspapers. The Albuquerque Journal headlined “Heat Wave in US, Canada Devastates Crops, Livestock†above a sentence in the second paragraph explaining “What’s happening in parts of the U.S. and Canada shows the damage climate change is wreaking on agriculture.â€
The same week, the Journal carried a front-page article warning that “New Mexico Is Grappling With a Mega-Drought†and pointing out that “Rising global temperatures, a consequence of greenhouse gas-induced climate change, make drought worse by affecting regional snowpack.†The journalistic trend has even made its way onto lifestyle pages. In the July 17, New York Times, the headline “You Can Live To Fight Climate Change†was followed by a sub-head that “Individual Choices in Lifestyle and Investing Can Have a Positive Effect on the Environment, Experts Say.â€