How do people respond to ‘signals’ regarding their health and well-being?
Some people will refuse to respond, such as these smokers I saw outside a hospital a few days ago (where I was visiting my daughter, thankfully now discharged after a nasty infection; not coronavirus).
There is a large sign ‘Strictly No Smoking’, that is routinely ignored.
And what of people who read Richard Littlejohn and others, for years in the Daily Mail, Daily Telegraph, The Spectator, etc., railing against the ‘nanny state’ or ‘elf and safety’ ?
Large swathes of people are effectively inoculated against alarm, and will not respond to signals, even if a megaphone was put to their ear.
These are the super-spreaders of denial and complacency.
I am not talking here of professional dissemblers in the climate realm who make their living trying to undermine the scientific consensus. Those who write opinion pieces claiming, wrongly:
- more CO2 is good for us because plants will flourish (Matt Ridley);
- or claiming ocean acidification is non-existent (James Delingpole);
- or that it’s the sun’s fault (Piers Corbyn);
- or that we are about to enter an ice age (Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph every 6 months for the last 10 years) .
Like stories of Lord Lucan sightings, these lazy opinion formers simply dust off the old rubbish to serve it up again, and again. Year in year out. It pays the mortgage I suppose. And when they tell people what they want to hear – that we can carry on regardless – there is no shortage of chortling readers. Ha ha ha. How very funny, poking fun at the experts.
No, I am not talking about these dissemblers, but rather, the mass of those who have been reading this rubbish for 30 years and are now impervious to evidence and scornful of experts.
And there is an epidemic of such people, who believe
no need to be alarmed, staying calm and carrying on regardless
It is not just health or climate change, but is applied universally. For example, the Millennium Bug was apparently overblown according to these people (having seen the code that needed fixing, I can assure you, it wasn’t).
However, those who deal with addressing threats are in a no-win situation: if they act and prevent the worst happening, then people – who are largely unaware of what is being done behind the scenes – will say ‘you see, it wasn’t a problem’. If they didn’t act, then guess who would get the blame.
Yet when people do raise the alarm, such as when parents wrote letters complaining of the risks of the vast colliery tip adjacent to the Welsh town of Aberfan, they are often brushed off, and the result was a disaster that lives on in our memory (see Note).
Now we have the Covid-19 virus.
It is no surprise that there have been many saying that people are being unnecessarily alarmed; and the message is the same – we should ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’.
It’s just like seasonal flu, don’t worry. It will disappear soon enough.
These are often the same people who rail against ‘climate alarmism’.
Man-made global heating will be orders of magnitude worse than Covid-19, across every aspect of society – food security, sea-level rise, eco-system collapse, mass migration, heat stress, etc. – and over a longer timescale but with increasing frequency of episodic shocks, of increasing intensity.
Unlike Covid-19, there will be no herd immunity to climate change.
But we have the ability to halt its worst impacts, if we act with urgency.
We cannot quarantine the super-spreaders of denial and complacency, but we can confront them and reject their message.
I wonder, as the mood seems to be changing, and experts are now back in fashion it seems, could this be a turning point for action on climate change?
Can we all now listen to the experts on climate change?
Can we Keep Calm, but Take Action?
(c) Richard W. Erskine, 2020
Note
There was a collapse of part of the massive colliery spoil tip at 0915 on 21st October 1966 The main building hit was Pantglas Junior School, where lessons had just begun. Five teachers and 109 children were killed in the school.
As one example of numerous correspondence prior to this, raising concerns, was a petition from parents of children at The Grove school raising the issue of flooding undermining the tip. This was passed up through the bureaucracy, but a combination of the Borough Council and National Coal Board failed to act. As the official report noted in unusually strong words:
“As we shall hereafter see to make clear, our strong and unanimous view is that the Aberfan disaster could and should have been prevented. … the Report which follows tells not of wickedness but of ignorance, ineptitude and a failure in communications. Ignorance on the part of those charged at all levels with the siting, control and daily management of tips; bungling ineptitude on the part of those who had the duty of supervising and directing them; and failure on the part of those having knowledge of the factors which affect tip safety to communicate that knowledge and to see that it was applied” (bullet 18., page 13)
1966-67 (553) Report of the tribunal appointed to inquire into the disaster at Aberfan on October 21st, 1966
EssaysConcerning 