The climate change and pollution debate is a dull and crippling bore

Tree making its own trail. Illustration: HikingArtist.com

Most people don't feel personally connected to climate change issues. Michael Cosgrove thinks humor and satire would bring them in.

Which is the odd man out among pedophile priests, racism, World War ll, an oil-polluted seabird, AIDS and Michael Jackson’s death?

The answer is that if you google “jokes” followed by any one of those subjects you will find page after page of jokes about it. Any one of them, that is, except the oil-polluted seabird. There are no jokes about oil-polluted seabirds.

Don’t get me wrong, a photo of a bird covered in oil is not at all funny to see. Nor is watching a video of the side of a glacier falling off due to global warming.

But there again, global warming is not funny, nor is racism. So why can and do we make jokes about the latter but not the former?

The English, of which I am one, have always been proud of their black humour and refusal to fall into the bourgeois and bland repression of political correctness. We think that humour is a release valve that stops us going mad from the sheer seriousness of the world and the seemingly insurmountable problems facing it.

That sentiment was well summed-up by Rufus Wainwright when he said: “There is no life without humour. It can make the wonderful moments of life truly glorious, and it can make tragic moments bearable.” With hindsight it would appear that he forgot to add “...except when it comes to global warming.”

So why is the climate debate so cringingly stultifying and terminally off-limits to humour?

Maybe all the humour was sucked up out of the ozone hole years ago by that big hoover up there in the sky. Or could it be that humour is soluble in water and is thus disappearing fast into the dark and cavernous depths of the ever-increasing surface area of the world’s seas and oceans?

We don’t know the answers to those questions of course, but we do know that Copenhagen has become a stifling hot air circus, a barren and pointless battlefield for statisticians who are as insignificant as are most of their figures, a pompous sanctuary of faux seriousness and humbug platitudes.

The press is doing no better. Most of what is published on climate change is a yawn-inspiring and mind-numbing sedative, with page after page of pointless points of view, self-righteous editorials and endlessly tepid rehashes of the “Climate talks in trouble” or “Copenhagen braces for climate protests” themes. Not to mention the sprawling plethora of badly presented and largely self-contradictory “Interactive Climate Evolution” features. All of it would send even my horse to sleep (if I had one and if he could read.)

And of course no climate issue worth its salt exists without its obligatory cohort of threateningly-clad-in-black demonstrators wearing black bandanas whose essential and climate-helping job it is to try and smash up as many shops and cars as possible whilst screaming at the top of their lungs for the end of the corrupt world order.

Well, to be honest, and I know I may have a weird sense of humour, I find all that rather amusing. Don’t they all realize how ridiculous they all look up there in Copenhagen and how much of a turn-off – how counter-productive -- they are for so many millions of people?

Where are those classy and down-to-earth politicians who could make this debate more accessible to people with a little humour and good common sense? Winston Churchill would have had a field day if he were alive today, joking around irreverently and inviting them round for cognac and cigars before putting the dots back on the i’s and people back in their places with his cruel but irresistible mix of vicious humour and merciless attacks upon wooden language and hypocrisy. Mind you, nowadays his cigars would be considered to be a genocidal threat I suppose because of the smoke, and he would be refused admission. How ironic for a guy who was instrumental in defeating those responsible for the greatest genocide in modern history.

If the politicians can’t bring themselves to loosen up, where is the press, which normally does it for them? I have always believed that a good and balanced press includes a healthy dose of self-derision and de-dramatization in order not to leave the playing field of life open uniquely to pessimism and a 1984-style dull and colourless perspective. 

It would also be wonderful to see Greenpeace organizing a kind of techno-rave demo world tour, along with a humourous campaign on their site consisting of irony and slick humour. That would be much more likely to get people onboard, instead of, as happened last week in France, invading Parliament. It seems highly improbable that the vast majority of citizens, ordinary citizens going peacefully about their affairs, are going to be convinced by that kind of egocentric and petulant stunt, and the same goes for the antics of many of the mass-hysteria demonstrators at Copenhagen.

C’mon, be honest. Can you really see your grandma climbing nimbly up the walls of a nuclear power plant? Or how about your dad, bounding over the foam-licked waves, his bronzed torso fearlessly exposed to the whipping wind as he courageously steers his tiny and fragile rubber dinghy into the path of a massive petrol tanker?

Everyone knows that the best way to get kids to read more and eat their greens (no pun intended), and get people to vote, and workers to enjoy their jobs, and patients to fight illness, is to offer them ways of making the challenge more palatable. And one major tactic used to do that is to get people involved in the process by using a little light humour and a positive attitude.

In that context, the climate debate has failed miserably. Let’s face it, the whole thing is becoming excruciatingly boring and tedious, with the only people commenting the excruciatingly boring and tedious press articles accompanying it being the excruciatingly boring and tedious extremes on both ends of the debate. No one seems to be noticing that most of the general public – in other words the biggest segment of the population, the one which is in the middle and being ignored – is not buying, by and large.

And that is not funny at all, because if those involved in climate debate can’t make the issue reach out to ordinary people, (people who like to be informed but who also have jobs to go to and children to bring up, remember them?) whatever agreement may be reached in Copenhagen will be compromised by future electorates who will be more interested in their take-home pay than slavishly following the latest directives issued by pretentious intellectuals, self-aggrandizing political leaders, and angry misfits.

It’s high time for some scything irreverence and witty punch lines here. Some pithy sketches on the undisputedly funny side of scientific disagreement, a withering tirade of Monty Python-inspired lambasting of the caricatural status quo which dogs all climate summits, a gut-bustingly funny enraged demonstrator character or two by cartoonists. Anything to take down the temperature and get more of the many people who have currently adopted a wearied on-the-fence position interested in the planet and its future.

I was going to start the ball rolling myself with a joke about the Amazonian rain forests, but when I googled it there were no relevant results.

In any case, whatever I say may well turn out to be completely irrelevant before long because the way things are going (as Lennon would surely have said, knowing his marvellous sense of humour) we’ll all be dead of boredom long before the deteriorating climate gets us.