Destinations known | As global warming becomes ‘global boiling’, world headlines underline the reality of climate breakdown
- This summer has seen the hottest June and July, the hottest day on Earth – a record broken 16 times in a month – and huge wildfires, storms and floods
- Headlines from around the world offer grim reading, underscoring the need for dramatic action to combat the climate emergency
Mainstream media are often accused of two key failings when it comes to covering climate breakdown and the threats it poses.
Even though most climate-related disasters are well covered – “extreme weather events across the globe this month have already featured on more than 114 front pages in at least 84 newspapers, published across 32 countries,” Carbon Brief reported on July 25 – rarely is it explained clearly enough that those disasters have been exacerbated, in some cases caused, by the fossil-fuel emissions we’re pumping into the atmosphere.
Secondly, it is rarely expressed that if we want our societies to remain functioning in any recognisable form, this mother of all existential threats must be a consideration in every major decision made from here on in, with obvious implications for tourism.
It would no doubt amaze Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius – who in 1896 predicted that changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels could substantially alter the surface temperature through the greenhouse effect – that 127 years later, with evidence all around us, his successors are still trying to convince sceptics that climate change is real, is in significant part caused by human activity and could have horrific consequences for us all.
