Which brings us to ‘sustainability.’ This concept popped up in the eighties, not long before Carlin’s famous monologue. In the paper, ‘Sustainable development – historical roots of the concept,’ history professor Jacobus A. Du Pisani notes that sustainability was floated to describe the need to develop new ways of living which, in short, wouldn’t result in ecological or economic disaster. There was a growing awareness that Earth is a determinate place, resources are finite, and what the human organism could put up with is limited, too. Then, a sustainable future was one in which people didn’t take more than the planet, the economy or human beings could give. Now, sustainability is the word we roll out to describe everything, from recycling coffee pods to buying a Tesla – or making products more efficient. 30 YEARS OF FAILURE In 1988, Nasa scientist James Hansen appeared before the US Congress, giving his now legendary testimony on climate change. Hansen – and Nasa – didn’t warn the
emember the George Carlin joke about shell shock? The legendary comedian was an
ardent student of how humans use, and misuse, language. In a famous piece of stand-up, he observed how people – citing Americans specifically, but the phenomenon is probably universal – mould terminology over time to shield themselves from uncomfortable truths. Carlin explains that the word ‘shell shock’ was used in World War I to denote the psychological and neurological shattering experienced by soldiers in the trenches. He goes on to describe how the terrifying poetry of ‘shell shock’ was replaced in World War II with the gosh-I-need-a-nap diagnosis, ‘battle fatigue.’ During the Korean War, the term was upgraded to ‘operational exhaustion’ which, says Carlin, “sounds like something that might happen to your car”. Finally, we have settled on the hyper- professionalised ‘post-traumatic stress disorder,’ which, as ‘PTSD,’ is something perfectly at home in the mouth of any YouTuber. As in: “Did you catch
Hereditary ? That movie totally gave me PTSD.” (Not to make light of Hereditary – this writer had to seek professional treatment after seeing it.) The point of Carlin’s monologue is that we can fool ourselves into
assembled statesmen of future global heating. He said, “the greenhouse effect has been detected and it is changing our climate now”. Hansen’s talk sparked a flurry of action. In 1992,
CLIMATE CHANGES HAPPENED FASTERTHANPREDICTED
the UN held its Conference on Environment and Development, which resulted in its Framework Convention on Climate Change. The first Conference of the Parties (COP) to address climate change assembled in Berlin in 1995. In 1997, COP 3 resulted in the famous Kyoto Protocol, in which countries committed to reducing greenhouse gases. Fast forward 30 years, and the science Hansen cited has all played out quite predictably. The basic theory of how CO2 warms the atmosphere was understood in Victorian times. Eunice Foote published her paper, ‘Circumstances affecting the heat of the sun’s rays,’ showing the greenhouse effect of CO2 and water vapour in 1856. In 1896, Swedish Nobel laureate Svante Arrhenius put precise numbers on the global warming which a given amount of additional atmospheric carbon dioxide would cause. There have been some adjustments in the science around global heating. Changes in the climate have happened faster than earlier models predicted, and the reality of climatological tipping points, where there is a rapid and irreversible alteration to the climate – regionally or globally – are now appearing in predictive models.
thinking we are addressing a problem by changing the words we use to describe it – when, in fact, we are just pushing it further away. At the time, Vietnam War veterans were a highly visible segment of the country’s homeless population. Carlin submitted that if the upsetting term ‘shell shock’ had hung on, maybe the country would have been more likely to give traumatised veterans the help they needed.
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