Richard Martin reports that this years edition of the State of the Climate Report came out this week from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the news is not good. As expected, 2014 was the warmest year in recorded history. Global atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide reached an average of 397.2 parts per million for the year, just below the 400-parts-per-million threshold considered by many the point beyond which disaster lies. Note 400 has been reached in 2015. Sea surface temperatures are higher than ever, and average sea levels rose to a record high. Summer snow melt in the Arctic now occurs nearly a month earlier than the average in 1998 to 2010. Nearly all the indicators point in the wrong direction.
The relentless grimness of such reports has a numbing effect, leading to a new psychological diagnosis - climate defeatism. With the international climate talks in Paris just three months away, many activists, overwhelmed by the inexorable progress of climate change and the utter inability of the world governments to slow it, have started to throw up their hands, retreating from a struggle they no longer believe they can win.
The most famous recent example is the British author and environmentalist Peter Kingsnorth, whose embrace of carbon-fueled pessimism was featured in a New York Times Magazine article last year. He further outlined his views in Orion magazine with a nose-thumbing essay called Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist. In it he bid farewell to activism - he said - I withdraw, you see. I withdraw from the campaigning and the marching, I withdraw from the arguing and the talked-up necessity and all of the false assumptions. I withdraw from the words. I am leaving. I am going to go out walking. - Read on, a good read...
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