So I’m in the hospital emergency room with a very aged relative with a dodgy ticker, and I’m doing what I can to offer some shred of comfort, stroking head, clasping hand, chatting about this and that.
And I’m looking at the digital monitor, displaying readings from various intensive care technology. And I watch as the arrhythmia, the irregular beating of the heart, clearly shows itself if you stop to look at the display for long enough.
But none of the staff stay long to check the monitor. They flit and fly and keep the whole ball rolling. The blood works will tell the story, as will the chest X-ray, and the chest examination, but the digital monitor goes unnoticed, apart from those few seconds an hour when the observations are recorded.
We have at our disposal countless thousands of pieces of evidence of Climate Change and Global Warming, if we care to look at them. The satellites, the biological surveys, the water supply reports.
The long painstaking work of centuries of faithful weather station keepers, noting the daily highs and lows and the prevailing weather of the day.
The marine surveys, the bird surveys, the tree research. We’ve done so much data collection, and there are countless web pages devoted to the results of the analyses.
There’s the insured losses data, the disaster relief data, the hydrological survey data, the Arctic data.
But hardly anybody’s watching. Our principal media are not painting the picture for us.
Climate Change should be front page news every day, in every publication, on every channel, on every programme, there should be at least a once-a-day Climate Report.
Instead, there is radio silence. It’s as if the problems do not exist. The electronic monitor is counting and tracing a close shave with mortality. And nobody’s watching.