התמונות, שצולמו מתחנת החלל הבינלאומית, פורסמו בעמוד הפייסבוק של תחנת החלל וזכו לעשרות אלפי לייקים. בתמונות ניתן לראות את מדינת ישראל כולה ללא ענן אחד בשמים, את הכנרת ואת ים המלח. צפו בתמונות המרהיבות

ישראל כפי שהיא נראית מתחנת החלל הבינלאומית (צילום: בארי וואלמור)

האסטורנאוט ברי וואלמור התעורר בבוקר יום חמישי האחרון, בוקר חג המולד, כדי לחזות בנוף מבעד החלון שבתחנת החלל הבינלאומית. התמונה שנגלתה לנגד עיניו הייתה מעוררת התפעלות - מדינת ישראל כולה ביום בהיר לחלוטין ללא ענן אחד בשמיים. וואלמור מיהר לצלם את המחזה המרהיב והתמונות הועלו לעמוד הפייסבוק של תחנת החלל הבינלאומית, על מנת לשתף אותן עם מאות אלפי העוקבים אחר העמוד.

בתמונות ניתן לראות את מדינת ישראל כולה ביום בהיר לחלוטין, ואף את שכנותיה - מצרים, ירדן , סוריה ולבנון. כמו כן, התמקד וואלמור בתמונותיו בכנרת ובים המלח.

CREDIT: Shutterstock

I do heart New York. But I don’t heart the new climate logo and slogan from Milton Glaser, the creator of that iconic NY logo.

Certainly the climate movement needs some rebranding. So we’re looking for a few good climate slogans in order to reach out and touch someone. Carbon is forever, after all, but our attention span ain’t. And only you can prevent warming-driven wildfires, well, you and the political leadership of the major polluting nations.

We need to think different. But we’re not. Sadly Glaser’s very widely criticized effort — a mostly black earth with the tagline “It’s Not Warming. It’s Dying.” — falls into the “not thinking different” category:

Where to start? First, the Earth IS warming!!! From a basic messaging perspective, nothing is worse than reinforcing the denier’s nonsensically anti-scientific “we’re not warming” frame by constantly repeating the line “it’s not warming.” Let’s hope the disastrous hashtag #itsnotwarming dies a peaceful death in its sleep.

Second, making the Earth the centerpiece of any climate campaign is just a not-good idea. I’ve been saying this for many years — see my 2008 Salon piece, “Let’s dump “Earth Day”: Affection for our planet is misdirected and unrequited. We need to focus on saving ourselves.”

But don’t take my word for it, take climate PR guru David Fenton’s, in this 2014 interview headlined, “Want everyone else to buy into environmentalism? Never say ‘Earth’.”

What matters to most people is what happens to human beings — generally human beings they know. The environmental movement’s major messaging blunder in the past two decades has been failure to make clear that preserving clean air and clean water and a livable climate is about saving people, not something abstract (to most people) such as saving the environment or the planet.

Third, relatedly, the Earth is NOT dying. The stable climate that made modern civilization possible is dying and as a result people are dying — and it’s going to get unimaginably worse if we don’t act ASAP. None of that is captured in this passive and pessimistic slogan.

I wrote back in my 2008 piece, “I don’t worry about the earth. I’m pretty certain the earth will survive the worst we can do to it.” Climate activists “care about stopping global warming because of its impact on humans.”

Many others have said the same thing. Grist notes in its critique of Glaser: “Arguing that the earth is dying is serious error and will probably do more harm than good” because it keeps things focused on the abstract and off the real victim — people. They quote Neil deGrasse Tyson on climate change: “Earth will survive this … Earth will be here long after we render ourselves extinct.”

This new campaign further claims that “It’s Not Warming. It’s Dying” is “The most important fact on Earth.” Or, rather, “THE MOST IMPORTANT FACT ON EARTH.” Not.

The most important facts are, as climate communications pollster and researcher Anthony Leiserowitz of Yale put it recently, “it’s real; it’s us; it’s bad; scientists agree it’s happening; and there’s hope.” I might suggest, “it’s bad for people” and “there’s hope if we act quickly” — but the point is “It’s Not Warming. It’s Dying” misses all those key points and in fact even reinforces the notion that it isn’t happening and/or that it’s too late to do anything about it. It omits the fact that we’re the cause and hence we’re the solution. Indeed, it exudes fatalism, since it implies the Earth has an incurable disease and is near the end of its life.

Fourth, the logo itself reinforces the fatalism. The blackness has replaced the greenness over almost all of the earth (except, strangely enough, Antarctica). So it would appear to be a visual representation of a planet in the later stages of dying.

Slogans can be a very worthwhile idea for branding (as I discuss in my book) — but that assumes you know what your brand is and that it is a marketable one.

Here, rather than the upbeat and attractive “I heart New York” slogan/logo, we have a downbeat slogan and not terribly attractive logo. Back to the drawing board, literally.

For those who want some ideas for better logos, a good starting point would be the dozens proposed by Climate Progress a few years ago (see here and here).

Just do it!

That’s the question answered by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway in their excellent and unique new entry in the emerging Climate-Fiction genre, “The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View From The Future.”

This is not CliFi like the nihilistic movie “Snowpiercer” or the book version of “The Hunger Games,” with their epic fights to the death and absorbing human drama.

Even so, Oreskes and Conway don’t spare the apocalypse: “The human populations of Australia and Africa, of course, were wiped out.” But they aren’t trying to portray the impact of the climate apocalypse on individuals.

Part history, part science fiction, the book grapples with what I expect will be the greatest puzzle to the countless future generations who will suffer terribly — and needlessly — for our greed and myopia:

To the historian studying this tragic period of human history, the most astounding fact is that the victims knew what was happening and why. Indeed, they chronicled it in detail precisely because they knew that fossil fuel combustion was to blame. Historical analysis also shows that Western civilization had the technological know-how and capability to effect an orderly transition to renewable energy, yet the available technologies were not implemented in time.

So why didn’t knowledge lead to action — or, rather, to the relatively low-cost actions that could have averted centuries of misery? The authors offer several reasons. They blame a rigid adherence to “free-market fundamentalism” — the notion that the market will solve all problems and that government can’t play a positive role. They blame scientists for being too reticent to spell out the dangers clearly.

And, you won’t be surprised that the authors of the now-classic book “Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming” also blame the group they label the “carbon combustion complex”:

A key attribute of the period was that power did not reside in the hands of those who understood the climate system, but rather in political, economic, and social institutions that had a strong interest in maintaining the use of fossil fuels. Historians have labeled this system the carbon combustion complex: a network of powerful industries comprised of primary fossil fuel producers; secondary industries that served fossil fuel companies (drilling and oil field service companies, large construction firms, and manufacturers of plastics and other petrochemicals); tertiary industries whose products relied on inexpensive fossil fuels (especially automobiles and aviation); and financial institutions that serviced their capital demands. Maintaining the carbon-combustion complex was clearly in the self-interest of these groups, so they cloaked this fact behind a network of “think tanks” that issued challenges to scientific knowledge they found threatening.

One of the central ironies of the book is that the freedoms enjoyed in modern Western civilization are destroyed by our failure to prevent catastrophic climate change, a failure caused in large part by those neoliberals, conservatives, and libertarians who placed personal freedom (and hence anti-government laissez-faire capitalism) above all other values. Climate Progress has been discussing this tragic irony for many years.

In the future Oreskes and Conway lay out, climate change leads to widespread drought, food shortages, rapid sea level rise, riots, civil strife, a migration of more than a billion people and widespread use of martial law — all things that require a strong-centralized government. They write:

The ultimate paradox was that neoliberalism, meant to ensure individual freedom above all, led eventually to a situation that necessitated large-scale government intervention.

As an aside, that is an “irony” and not really a “paradox.” There are a handful of such miscues in the book. For instance, the book ends with a “Lexicon of Archaic Terms,” which cleverly includes “capitalism” and “cryosphere,” but, puzzlingly, also includes “greenhouse gases,” which is a term I would expect to become far more commonly understood in a super-warm future.

But overall the book is well done. My biggest complaint is that it is too short, a little over 50 pages in the main text. Since it is derived from a Winter 2013 paper in Daedelus, it could have been fleshed out more.

For instance, the authors write:

… In 2023, the infamous “year of perpetual summer” lived up to its name, taking 500,000 lives worldwide and costing nearly $500 billion in losses due to fires, crop failure, and the deaths of livestock and companion animals.

The loss of pet cats and dogs garnered particular attention among wealthy Westerners, but what was anomalous in 2023 soon became the new normal.

Why exactly did so many pet cats and dogs of wealthy Westerners die in 2023? The authors don’t say, but the implication seems to be that there wasn’t food for them. But if so, that really needed to be spelled out since it isn’t obvious that would happen in real life. At least in this country, we have such an abundance of food — and we waste nearly half of it (and burn 40% of the corn crop in our engines) — so I’m inclined to think that people would make fairly simple changes to their diet and to the food/ethanol production system rather than let a substantial number of pets die, at least through this kind of one-year event.

But this is really a quibble — the book is so thought-provoking, I’d like to see more of it. Indeed, the issue of if and when most Westerners might abandon pets as we destroy the planet’s ability to feed the human population is just the kind of thing science fiction should make us think about.

We already feed much of the world unsustainably — using (up) ground water for irrigation in large parts of the world, for instance. We are in the process of Dust-Bowlifying (or inundating) some of the world’s richest agricultural land, as the authors discuss. So if continue on our current path of unrestricted greenhouse gas emissions then post-2050 we will have a population of 9 billion or more and a planetary carrying capacity far below even current levels. Would we really maintain 180 million (!) cats and dogs in this country alone under such circumstances? For that matter, would we still convert a large fraction of our crops into fuel for our cars, and would we maintain the same kind of meat-based diet even though that can require 10 times as much acreage and water as a vegetarian (or insect) based diet?

The only thing that is certain about the future is death and taxes and multiple, catastrophic impacts on humanity if we continue on our current greenhouse gas emissions path. How humanity might deal with all those terrible impacts hitting at once is something we all need to think about.

What is science fiction today will someday be the history of real, live people — billions of them. Kudos to Oreskes and Conway for finding a creative way to talk about the immoral choice we are making today and how those billions of people will suffer for it.

מנהלי הקרן, שבמשך יותר מעשור תקצבה גופים ירוקים במיליוני דולרים, הודיעו ש"יוקצו כספים נוספים רק ב-2014". הסיבה: כנראה שיקולים פנימיים בארה"ב