Unnatural Disaster
The recent fire catastrophe that befell the Hawaiian city of Lahaina is one of those odd news stories that tends to leave you stunned at every level. While recent developments and “news” aren’t frequent subjects of this blog, this item struck your humble blogger as particularly worthy of attention. If for no other reason, then for the ritualized reporting on it.
The modern media environment, with its persistent need to get your attention, cannot seem to escape the urge to nag readers on familiar subjects*. This is one lesson from the disaster, as gleaned from the news. By way of example, this report scolds its readers for the AFP:
The fires follow other extreme weather events in North America this summer, with record-breaking wildfires still burning across Canada and a major heat wave baking the US southwest.
Europe and parts of Asia have also endured soaring temperatures, with major fires and floods wreaking havoc. Scientists have said global warming caused by carbon emissions is contributing to the extreme weather.
There can hardly be a conclusion of less practical utility than this one—except perhaps as a profession of faith. In this narrative, there is a single source of all bad weather unleashed upon the human race: a failure to believe in the right things. If only we had believed in anthropogenic climate change, we might have downsized our family cars and taken up commuting by bicycle. Then, perhaps there wouldn’t have been such a thing as unpleasant weather leading to disaster.
The reporter and his or her editors had a choice of what things to include in the write-up. In this case, they clearly feared some readers would dislike any omitted mentions of human-caused global warming. Professions of faith, even in secular society, are for the faithful, after all. They don’t really serve to win over converts. The Devil can only be overcome if enough people harden their thoughts and rhetoric against Him. “Let us demonstrate how this is done,” the faithful seem to say.
Sure, this might be nit-picky. But if you aren’t a member of the climate change faith, you find the repetition of these lines tiresome. Yet there were plenty of other news reports on the disaster that refrained from such tangential observations in a major story, to be sure. After all, it was an awful event that came out of nowhere, demanding some explanation as to how it happened, no matter how superficial. And yet the conclusions as to the climate-change cause could have been copied and pasted from every other weather-related story. They might just as well say, “The Devil worked His evil today because not enough believers believed hard enough to stop Him.”
In the secular world, there is still a strong need to believe in something as a matter of faith. And the belief that we are being punished for the mortal sin of living comfortably lies barely beneath the surface in our quotidian news reporting.
*Any resemblance to this blog’s tendency to bang on stridently about a few topics is purely coincidental.
I tend to avoid the details of sad major stories. I just know there was a horrible fire on Maui at a place I had hoped to visit one day and that 50+ people died. There's too much "depressing" in life so I limit my intake and don't search out the details. The headlines are enough for me.
My wife and I are at the end of our Finland journey and heading back to the US tomorrow. It’s been excellent in every way. They have very short summers here and people are out trying to enjoy every minute of long, warm days. Experiencing a pretty well lit sky at 11pm has been a first for me. We took a ferry to Tallinn, Estonia for a day trip and saw incredible old architecture that reminds me how young the US is. But I miss the creature comforts of home and I’m anxious to depart.