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Framing the Crisis

In the future, we might look back on 2018 as the year in which the imminence, and presence, of climate change reached new levels of public consciousness, at least in the UK and Ireland. In March, a disordered polar vortex pushed a band of freezing weather from the Arctic in a westward arc around Europe. The thrillingly named ‘Beast from the East’ froze transportation and stranded villages as it dumped drifts of snow (in some places thirteen feet deep) from Kent to the Cairngorms. At the same time, the popular media reported a peculiar warming at the pole. ‘Wacky weather makes Arctic warmer than parts of Europe,’ wrote reporters at Reuters, while in Carbon Brief, Robert McSweeney noted that temperatures in Siberia had been as much as 35°C above average in February and March. At the Danish Metrological Weather Institute, climate scientist Dr Ruth Mottram observed temperatures of or exceeding 0°C for ten consecutive days—the third time this has happened on record (the other times were 2011 and 2017) (Sweeney 2018). It wasn’t so much the extreme weather itself, but the intensity, frequency and unpredictability of these events that caused the greatest concern. A fewmonths later, theUK and Irelandwouldbake in 30°C heat, as a periodof hotweather lasting from June to August broke average temperature records previously set in 1979. Nostalgic comparisonswith the 1970s heat wave quickly evaporated as themedia circulated images, based on NASA climate modelling, which demonstrated that the heat wave wasn’t a freak event localised in northern Europe, but consistent with the globally disrupted climate of a warming planet (Badshah 2018). Fires broke out on Saddleworth Moor, Greater Manchester, and across Northwestern Europe, as parks and moorland turned brown under the sun (a phenomenon captured from space by NASA’s Terra satellite, see Patel 2018). Each day, as I watched and listened to the BBC report on the relentless heat wave, I asked, along with many others glued to their screens in concern: why aren’t they talking about climate change?’ ‘Balanced’ reports showed UK wine growers speculating about fabulous harvests, while sun cream industry representatives rubbed well-oiled hands together as they announced record trade. The media seemed to favour this narrative of losses and gains, as some industries and species were dubbed ‘winners’, and others (like butterflies, caterpillars, and most of the UK’s temperate crops), ‘losers’ (BBC News). Framed as generous benefactor or unwitting opponent, nature (here meaning ‘weather’) rose like a deus ex machina, spreading rewards or punishments seemingly at random. Paradoxically, intertwined with this aura of unpredictability was a counter fantasy of absolute predictability and control. Framing the heat wave as a check-list of calculable losses and gains helped to reinforce an ideology of absolute control that was inherently ecophobic. With such information, so the good news story went, next year we can plan better and capitalise on the hot, dry weather. But, as Simon Estok has pointed out, ‘the more control we seem to have over the natural environment, the less we actually have’ (Estok 6). GREEN LETTERS: STUDIES IN ECOCRITICISM 2018, VOL. 22, NO. 3, 231–235 https://doi.org/10.1080/14688417.2019.1571739