Our Last Chance to Preserve Life On Earth Is Slipping Away

This excerpt was reprinted from the book Last Chance: Preserving Life on Earth by Larry J. Schweiger with permission from Fulcrum Publishing.

In the Absence of Light

A few years ago, we invited a group of low-income children from urban Pittsburgh to visit a distant natural area in Fayette County, Pennsylvania, for an owl watch. As night fell, the children became startled as they got their first glimpse of the myriad bright stars set in a clear, black sky. These kids had never seen a night sky in the absence of ambient light. Urban haze and light pollution had completely blocked their view of the heavens and dimmed their sense of the magnitude of creation.

Shallow news coverage causes most Americans to underestimate the urgency of the threat of global warming. Television’s failure to adequately cover the climate threat, along with the deliberate opacity created by massive oil and coal advertising, masks the vivid realities of the situation, much like the haze and light pollution blocked out the reality of the night sky for those urban kids.

The television has been described as a weapon of mass distraction. On hearing about the methane leaking from the Siberian Sea, one Canadian blogger mockingly wrote, “Runaway climate change? Massive methane release off Siberia? Nah, let’s talk about Wall Street instead!” Meanwhile, on “the upper decks of our ‘Titanic,’ everyone is worried stiff about a crisis on Wall Street.”

Denial is a too-common human tendency, especially around global warming. On June 23, 2008, twenty years since he first warned Congress that human activity was causing the earth to warm, James Hansen warned that a “wide gap has developed between what is understood about global warming by the relevant scientific communities and what is known by policymakers and the public.”

I have often wondered why so many media outlets have developed an excessive and endless fascination with fallen stars, kidnappings, rapes, and other violent crimes to the exclusion of news that we can actually use. Perhaps it is because Americans en masse watch that mindless stuff over and over again, thus supporting it and demanding more of it. Besides, that type of “news” is simple and cheap to produce and does not take a rocket scientist to present. Tabloid journalism, replayed continuously for days, weeks, and months on end is apparently profitable. “Infotainment” is not journalism. Networks and cable channels focus on making news shows more entertaining to pump up ratings that link to greater advertising revenues. Former vice president Al Gore described this in his book The Assault on Reason as “a new pattern of serial obsessions that periodically take over the airwaves for weeks at a time.”

Apart from the direct influence of coal and oil advertisers, I fail to understand why the news media ducks or ignores these terribly important stories. In September 2006, Katey Walter, leading a US-Russian team of scientists, published an important paper in Nature warning that melting permafrost in Siberia, covering more than 10 million square kilometers of Russia, is releasing five times the amount of methane previously estimated by scientists. Walter compared the melting Siberian permafrost and the massive amounts of frozen methane that could be discharged as “a (ticking) time bomb waiting to go off,” threaten the world’s climate.

You would think Walter’s shocking findings would be newsworthy. Well, you would be wrong. While Radio Free Europe, the BBC, and NPR found it newsworthy, the mainstream US media was completely distracted by mindless pursuits. At this same time, network and cable channels were in a frenzy, with satellite trucks gathered in front of the Boulder, Colorado, district attorney’s office to report titillating details of JonBenét Ramsey’s warped admirer and supposed killer, John Mark Karr.

Another instance in a long line of US media failures occurred on December 12, 2007, when Wieslaw Maslowski, a research professor at the Naval Postgraduate School, told a large gathering at the American Geophysical Union meeting that the Arctic will be ice-free sometime during the summer of 2013. Disappearing Arctic ice threatens to amplify global warming, yet Maslowski’s troubling findings were not covered by any of the networks, not even CNN. Instead, US viewers were preoccupied with the strange behavior of Drew Peterson in the disappearance of his fourth wife, Stacy.