You may have noticed that the United Nations’ international climate panel has quietly set aside its most catastrophic global warming scenario. We are not moving toward it, despite the fact that China and India continue to open new coal-fired power plants at a relentless pace.
Any attentive reader can easily conclude that what the media presented to us — and what justified all those sweeping and often irrational measures — was never truly on the horizon. Yet that should not obscure a second question: How terrible would it actually have been if it had come to pass?
The fulfillment of the most critical scenario would have been so dreadful that you might not even have recognized it as such. At least I would not have. Farmers would have shifted to grain varieties now cultivated in Austria and northern Italy. Forests in the lowlands would have become predominantly deciduous, while spruce stands would have retreated to higher elevations. Snow on ski slopes would always have been artificial. Professor Martin Konvička described this in considerable detail at one of our seminars. He noted as well that certain insect species might have disappeared from the territory of the Czech Republic, others would have emerged, and the landscape overall would likely have become more humid.
Notice, however, how this rhetorical device operates. A relatively ordinary reality is described, yet it is surrounded by intense emotions that do not naturally belong to it and that historically were reserved for famines or devastating epidemics. This is how dozens of issues across the political spectrum are framed — and it works remarkably well. In the end, it matters less what facts are being discussed than what emotions they provoke. That is a question shaped by the media and by the uniformity that develops inside social circles and ideological bubbles. When my friends consistently attach certain emotions to something, sooner or later I am likely to do the same.