Normalising the climate emergency

We are not boiling the frog. We’re boiling ourselves - Story 67

Over the weekend, flipping through The Guardian, I found myself looking at another familiar photograph of Richmond Park’s famous deer - majestic, serene, endlessly photogenic. Their antlers have become a kind of shorthand for a certain kind of Britain, one that’s overrepresented in the pages of our national newspapers. Another image from a London park. Another nod to a quietly London-centric gaze.

When I glanced at the caption, my suspicion was quickly confirmed. Richmond Park again. But it was the final line of the caption that truly gave me pause. Quoting the Met Office, it read:

With the footprint of climate change, you can expect it to add a degree or so to the values we would have expected.

‘A degree or so.’ Just like that,.

It’s worth remembering what the world agreed to in 2015 at the Paris climate talks: to urgently slash global greenhouse gas emissions, to keep the rise in temperatures “well below” 2 degrees Celsius, and to strive for the far safer threshold of 1.5 degrees. In the formal language of The Paris Agreement, nations committed to

substantially reduce global greenhouse gas emissions to hold global temperature increase to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and pursue efforts to limit it to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, recognizing that this would significantly reduce the risks and impacts of climate change

Every fraction of a degree, scientists warned, would mean the difference between survival and catastrophe for millions.

Now, almost a decade later, a casual mention buried under a photograph suggests that an extra degree is simply… expected.

There was no banner headline. No alarm bells. Just the unassuming normalisation of the unimaginable.

Climate change isn’t sneaking up on us. It’s here, and we’re getting used to it. That’s the real danger. Not that we’ll be boiled alive, like the proverbial frog in water warming too slowly to notice, but that we’ll see the water boiling and carry on regardless, just reading the captions.