The word “stupid” keeps popping up in connection to climate change.
First, members of the Plane Stupid pressure group took over Stansted Airport in a protest against greenhouse gas emissions from aviation.
Then, at the UN Climate Change Conference in Poland, there was a screening of the film The Age of Stupid that apparently attracted ‘zillions‘ of people from NGOs and even some country negotiators.
The film stars Pete Postlethwaite as a man living alone in 2055, in a world gone badly wrong.
He spends his days watching news reports and other video clips from 2008 — and wondering, why didn’t we act to stop climate change? OneClimate.Net has a short film about the screening.
These are two very different approaches to the same problem.
The Age of Stupid’s team is using entertainment and comedy to show the seriousness of climate change. Plane Stupid’s protesters are taking more direct action, and George Monbiot, writing for the Guardian, argues that they are right.
But as Richard Black of the BBC knows only too well, the protest led to the cancellation of flights to Poznan, host city of the UN climate summit.
This made it harder for NGOs to put pressure on governments and for journalists to report what was going on there.
And as Rajendra Pachauri, head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change stated this week, the UN negotiations are the “only show in town”.
At the summit and elsewhere, many people are fixating on limiting global warming to no more than two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.
But Pachauri pointed out that this is a totally arbitrary target, devised not by scientists but by the European Union.
He warned that even a two-degree rise would cause serious impacts — especially for the world’s poor.
In his opening speech to this year’s conference, Pachauri said a two-degree rise would committed us to sea level rise of 0.4 to 1.4 metres due to the thermal expansion of water alone.
That’s before any melting icecaps and glaciers add to the volume of sea water.
His concerns were echoed in Poland by negotiators from some of the countries most vulnerable to climate change — the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) — which are urging faster emissions cuts to prevent a rise of more than 1.5 degrees.
“At the rate at which we are going, Barbuda will be fully submerged in the next 50 to 60 years,” warned Ambassador Diann Black-Layne of Antigua and Barbuda, last week in Poland.
If these messages don’t gain traction, we might find ourselves sleepwalking into a two-degree limit that feels like good news for EU policymakers, but is a disaster story but for the people of low-lying island nations.
Protesters and film-makers and vulnerable countries and communities are still all chasing the elusive message that sticks and leads to an end to the stupidity and the wilful ignorance of the best available scientific advice.
