‘You could fry an egg on the sidewalk here…if it wasn’t already boiled in your pocket…’
(Originally published in the Western People on 2024-10-15)
2024-10-09, Live reporting from CNN, as Hurricane-force winds pelt west coast of Florida.
‘You could fry an egg on the sidewalk here…if it wasn’t already boiled in your pocket!” As I self-congratulated myself on my wit, an actor colleague from South-Korea looked at me with a mixture of incomprehension and pity, ‘why are you cooking eggs on the…ground?’. Realising he now thinks I live in Skid Row, I changed the topic from the recent insanely hot weather in L.A. to talking about the insanely wet weather in Ireland but his confusion only worsened, ‘where is ‘Ahland’?’. So I put my accent back in its box and decided to pay more attention to the Casting Director leading the class.
At the same time last Wednesday, Hurricane Milton was barrelling towards Tampa Bay in Florida and KOMO4 TV’s Shannon O'Donnell warned viewers of the imminent arrival of her oddly personified hurricane, ‘Here you can see his movement right past Tampa, that’s where he came in…he did lose strength, now a category 3 storm instead of the monster category 5 we had just a few days ago...and boy by this time tomorrow he will be high-tailing it out across the Atlantic’.[1] Aside from imbuing her weather forecasts with personality (giving Milton a rather out-of-place jaunty persona), Chief Meteorologist O’Donnell also (carefully) advises interested university students on how to discuss climate change in weather forecasting – especially when climate change deniers attack in force during any announcement which even remotely links severe weather events with human-induced activities.[2]
Despite seeing evidence with their own eyes of ‘one-in-a hundred-years’ or ‘record-breaking’ weather events all over the globe, a vast number of Americans refuse to believe that human-made climate change is occurring. Instead they regard the ‘green agenda’ with suspicion and hostility, being peddled by Bill Gates / George Soros backed communists/environmentalists/liberals/LGBTQ++/socialists (take your pick). Many such deniers surely live in the path of the latest record breaker, Hurricane Milton, which pushed a storm surge onto the Florida coast with destructive winds and a foot and a half of rain falling in places. He badly affected many communities still dealing with the destructive aftermath of his predecessor, Hurricane Helene, of only a few weeks ago, which itself claimed 228 deaths over several south-eastern states.
Because of this public backlash against climate science, harnessed by opportunistic politicians or pundits, many public officials run scared from suggesting that the increased number and intensity of storms, enduring rainfalls or droughts may be tied to the scientifically-proven warming of the earth due unprecedented amounts of carbon dioxide and methane in the earth’s atmosphere. Donald Trump has ridiculed climate change as a ‘hoax’ claiming at an August 2024 rally in Pennsylvania, that ‘The oceans will [only] rise one-eighth of an inch over the next 400 years’.[3] Yet in 2016, Trump International Golf Links & Hotel at Doonbeg used climate change as a key argument in seeking approval from Clare County Council to build sea barriers, arguing that the Irish government's assumption of a steady erosion rate of the coastline through 2050 failed to account for the effects of climate change! Trump's company even warned both the county council and local residents about the risks posed by climate change and the need for coastal protection works.[4]
As I had tried to inform my actor classmate, California saw record-breaking temperatures during September, with downtown Los Angeles reaching over 44 degrees. The melting point of an Irishman is 27 degrees and for several days the air outside our apartment hit 42, with consequences for the sweating Mayoman slowly going insane inside. Yet some lunatics were repeatedly using the electric clothes dryers in the communal laundry room on our apartment complex floor. Not alone were we experiencing a peak surge event – as kindly notified by Glendale Water and Power, encouraging us to ration our energy usage during the hottest part of our day — but you could have thrown a wet towel in the air and it would have combusted by the time it fell back to earth. This senseless waste of resources further addled my sleep-deprived mind, as the oppressive night-time heat seeped into every pore and I took to the internet for some understanding – and found a TED Talk by an unusual Australian.
David Finnigan is no ordinary playwright. He has carved out a unique niche for himself, blending award-winning theatre with science—climate science in particular. His work illuminates the intersection of art and science, using the stage to tackle big ideas. His 2024 TED Talk, on the psychology of climate change, is one of those eye-opening moments that makes you question everything, especially when he turned the mirror on himself and his audience (and me).
Finnigan shot to fame—or infamy, depending on who you ask—with his satirically titled play, Kill Climate Deniers. The title alone sparked a right-wing backlash but not just from the usual media pundits. Instead, many ordinary, regular people — not fossil-fuel lobbyists — took intense umbrage with his work. Finnigan was baffled: Why did his play spark such passionate outrage? So he decided to do something radical and listen to his critics. In conversations with these climate deniers he learned something intriguing. It wasn’t the science they really disputed—it was the consequences. Deniers saw climate change within a broader conspiracy, engineered by a shadowy global elite to erode freedoms, force population migrations, choke rural communities and control what we eat. At first, he dismissed it all as paranoid fantasy, but as Finnigan thought more about it, a revelation struck him. Not that climate change is a hoax—far from it, but that deniers are correct in recognising that the world is changing in fundamental, irreversible ways. Large-scale migration is inevitable, unsustainable communities will disappear and our diets will evolve — and deniers see it happening.
But here’s where Finnigan’s insight takes a sharp turn. He turned his attention not to the deniers, but to those of us who *do* accept the scientific consensus, the so-called ‘believers’ in climate change. We talk about sustainability, shop locally and use ‘green’ products. But, Finnigan argues, we're also living in denial by behaving as if our future will still resemble our past. We still fly several times a year and use petrol cars when we could walk or cycle. We preach the gospel of recycling and organics but drown in single-use plastic, use Roundup, clear unsightly hedges and kill wildlife that gets in our way. We bang on about climate change while tossing clothes into the electric dryer during a heatwave (okay, not so much in Ireland). We are educating our children for a world which already does not exist. We’re soft deniers, Finnigan says, because we’ve accepted the science but not the consequences. ‘If you believe something, but act as if you don’t — do you really believe it?’ he asks, challenging the very foundation of modern environmentalism.
This isn’t just a moral critique of the climate-conscious middle class. Finnigan’s point digs deeper. In our denial, we’ve allowed ourselves to think that small, individual actions such as banning plastic straws or recycling tins and bottles will solve a problem that is already rewriting the rules of human existence. Meanwhile, those we mock as ‘deniers’ may reject the science, but they at least understand the scale of what’s coming, even if their interpretation is laced with conspiracy. As Finnigan sees it, those who champion sustainability while ignoring the seismic shifts we’re about to face are the real deniers. The longer we cling to this illusion of business-as-usual, the harder the crash will be when reality hits. Perhaps the real question isn't about who believes in climate change, but who’s ready to face its unavoidable consequences.
[1] https://youtu.be/78KSZ6GPqvQ?si=Q57ixF6Z__6IvCFt
[2] https://www.kuow.org/stories/from-upper-level-troughs-to-omega-blocks-uw-students-learn-to-talk-about-the-weather
[3] https://www.factcheck.org/2024/08/trump-revives-and-further-decreases-his-absurdly-low-estimate-of-sea-level-rise/
[4] https://www.politico.com/story/2016/05/donald-trump-climate-change-golf-course-223436