27 JULY

NO CONTENT YET –

POSSIBLE CONTENT IF RELEVANT TO TITLE –

THE TIMES TYPIFIES THE BRITISH ELITE’S INDIFFERENCE TO CLIMATE CHANGE.

27 July 2018 – Tom Whipple, science editor, of The Times, typified the nonchalant, self-confidently superior attitude of British intellectuals to catastrophic climate change, writing an opinion piece entitled “No need to panic about our heatwave planet” that

“….may be in 50 years, as we enjoy sundowners on our terraces watching the sun set over a parched lawn, the words “British Summer” will no longer be a joke. Glumly talking about the weather and carrying a brolly in July will be a fond folk memory, a pastiche of Britishness as far removed from our actual lives as bowler hats and red phone boxes. And in some ways that will be fine. As a species we will muddle through.”(1)

Chaitanya Kumar, Senior Policy Adviser for the Green Alliance, reflected the despair felt by many academics and activists over the way elite media have continued to downplay the existential threat to human existence from global warming.  In a letter to the editor of The Times Kumar reminded the paper’s readers that climate change was “not something we should greet with resignation and a cocktail.”(2)

There had not been a word by Whipple about even the likely short term impact of climate change over the next three decades in raising sea levels and flooding vast areas of the developing world, creating tens of millions of refugees, spreading famine to vast areas of Asia and Africa. That is no surprise in a corporate funded newspaper because while Britain’s per capita carbon footprint, thanks to the influence of big business on public policy, is one of the highest in the world, the initial impact of climate change will be hardest felt by developing nations and those in Britain who already struggle to afford food, up to several decades before its effects finally threaten the end of all organized human existence.

FOOTNOTES

1. Tom Whipple, “No need to panic about our heatwave planet,” The Times, 27 July 2018, p22.
2. Chaitanya Kumar, letter to the Editor, “Climate change survival and energy policy,” The Times, 30 July 2018, p22.