Tipping points

In perusing items from local news releases to national advertising campaigns, we can’t help noticing that our River Reporter Climate Change Challenge is only one of what seems to be a veritable spate of pro-green, anti-global warming initiatives that have come out in recent months.

During the 2000 Presidential campaign, Al Gore was warned by his advisers not to discuss global warming—that kind of fringe loony talk, it was deemed, would only put people off. Now Gore has virtual rock-star status talking about nothing else. Some kind of tipping point seems to have been reached, and we’ve been wondering what created the change.

One possible answer came to us while viewing the devastation wrought by a violent localized storm that took down numerous large trees near Hankins, NY last week. It was only the most recent in a series of extreme weather events the area has suffered, from the three “100-year” floods that took place in the space of 18 months to the flash flood in Roscoe, NY only a few weeks ago. What with freak storms and flooding here, record droughts in the American Southwest and Australia and melting permafrost in Alaska, there are now enough people who have personally witnessed the increasing violence of weather extremes that they can no longer be persuaded to believe that nothing is wrong. Anti-global warming advocacy groups (funded largely by ExxonMobil and other corporate energy players) are asking us to choose between believing them or our own two eyes, and we are opting for our own two eyes.

With regard to any public controversy, it is human nature to form our opinions not on the factual or logical merits of the argument but by what makes us comfortable. As long as the consequences of global warming were evident mostly on paper, what made us most comfortable was to believe it wasn’t real. But now that we have personally experienced that something’s amiss, the desire for comfort starts working in a different direction. Instead of believing that the problem isn’t there, we are disposed to think that it is there—and that we can do something to make it go away.

That’s why the major fallback argument of the anti-global-warming crew is unlikely to gain much traction. This argument concedes that the climate is changing, but claims that human actions are not responsible. That would mean it’s not something we can slow down. But the “we can’t do anything so we don’t have to do anything” argument won’t work to increase the comfort level of people sorting through the ruins left by flood, storm or drought. Even if it were true, the deep human refusal to believe that there’s any problem that we can’t fix makes it a public-relations loser.

The shift between the period when human nature worked against a belief in global warming, to working with it, creates the tipping point.

It is not only with regard to global warming that we have seen such a shift recently. The issue of medical care may be another case in point. The number of people who have been uninsured, are insured but have had coverage denied, or who have been bankrupted by medical costs even though they are insured, is now so high that our own two eyes are telling us something different than the bill of goods the healthcare industry is trying to sell us. And having acknowledged the problem, we will not easily be persuaded that more of the same is a winning strategy. Hence, the inevitable attacks on Michael Moore’s movie “Sicko,” an indictment of the healthcare system, by the healthcare industry, are not likely to have the same success as the advertising campaign that deep-sixed the last attempt at reform in 1993.

It would be nice to live in a universe in which fact and reason, rather than a desire for comfort, regularly dictated public opinion. Failing that, however, it is good to know that human weakness is balanced by some strengths that seem to pull us through in the end regardless: a stubborn resistance to being told we don’t see something when we do, and our overriding conviction, once we have experienced that something is wrong, that there must be something we can do to set it right. That’s the stuff of which tipping points are made.

Also in this issue:

• My view: Residents must be heard

Dr. Punnybone

Heir a Parent