Over the past few years I have had a sense of ongoing low level dread over the state of the world's climate. I'm not a scientist nor a climate blogger and my interests in writing usually go to other areas, as do many of yours I'm sure. Contrary to the common right wing view point that we liberals wish for environmental catastrophe in order to impose communism or Sharia, I really would rather this whole issue wasn't a problem, that somehow physics allowed us to send unlimited amounts of carbon and methane into the atmosphere and have no particular effect on the planet.
But I can't ignore it, and I can't leave this fight only to the climate bloggers and other specialists. This is the fight of our century and what we do here as a species will define human history for centuries or millenia hence in a way that almost nothing else happening today in the political debate can be said to. In the most comprehensive review of the costs and consequences yet attempted, the 2005 UK Stern Report initially figured it would cost 1% of world GDP to solve the climate crisis, but could cost up to 20% of GDP in between 50 and 100 years. I think inherently when you, through whatever methodology, however rigorous and conservative arrive at a catastrophe as big as that, you cannot have any assurance the costs would stop there. A one-fifth reduction in world GDP could quite easily itself cause any number of spin off effects that Stern could not include in his report. It could collapse civilization as we know it. As his best case scenario for "business as usual", he predicts a permanent 5% GDP loss. Compare this to the Great Recession, which caused a decline of 0.8% of world GDP in 2009 from 2008 for a sense of what this would mean. It's difficult to describe without abusing superlatives.
It's clear that our leaders around the world have failed. We are still nowhere near a real, enforceable and actionable treaty that will see the world's polluters do what it really will take to reduce emissions to safer levels in time to avert the tipping points where our actions almost no longer matter.
This fight is going to require all of us in an ongoing capacity. Not 100% of our time, but not 0% either. We can't leave it to the scientists and climate activists and bloggers to do the heavy lifting alone. I am asking for more of us liberals and progressives to take seriously our role in this, which is to build the worldwide public opinion consensus that makes action a political necessity for politicians of any stripe. We tried electing a Democratic President and a large majority Democratic Congress. The House did its part and passed a risky bill. We have no reason to believe the President would not have signed that bill, but the House of Lords stopped it. We tried to get the aristocrats to change their self-imposed stupid rules so that they could do things like take the actions needed to save civilization, but no dice either.
This needs to an ongoing dull roar. We can't just blog and talk about climate topics when the major media choose to make the subject "news." We need average politically uninvolved people to see discussion of the climate crisis everywhere they go. This is how the social media manipulators work to drum up phony public opinion for whatever their wealthy backers want, but in our case it will be sincere and true.
That's what Warming Wednesdays is an attempt to start. We have to start somewhere and I've never tried anything like this before. Here's all that's needed: Commit to writing one post a week wherever you post about climate change every Wednesday. Re-tweet someone else's post on climate. Visit the comments section of your local non-partisan news source to battle the climate deniers. Call or write whomever you call or write to. Whatever form your participation in politics and public opinion influence normally takes, on Wednesdays do what you already do but on climate instead of your usual interests to move the needle on climate, to let others know this issue is important, and our wealthy stupid leaders are slow marching the rest of us into calamity because the twits think they're rich enough to ride it out, or still stuck in the neoliberal free market worship mindset which assumes that somehow someone will find the magic bullet that solves the climate crisis and make a lot of money doing it.
If you tweet, I suggest the tag #WW (in an homage to Follow Fridays' "#FF") which when I looked didn't appear to have any generally agreed upon meaning. That others may use it is all the better, since they'll see what you write about climate. We don't have to reach every hard core denier and paid contrarian, just everyone else who take their cues as to what is important based on what others around them are saying. A lot of politics is social. The topic complicated and well meaning people get put off it by the ranks of absurdly dedicated deniers posting their obsfucation and sophistry everywhere to foil the consensus. We need to make their efforts futile as their claims and denial get laughed out of every room and thread.
I've made my humble attempt to start it at my home base, and made a few tweets. I hope you will join me.