Hiroshima - a foretaste of the power of fossil fuels

T

he destructive power of the fossil-fuelled 20^th Century reach something of a pinnacle 70 years ago when a war-inflamed America dropped an atomic bomb on Japan’s Hiroshima.

Hiroshima after it was bombed
on August 6, 70 years ago

Just three days late, the devastation of Hiroshima was repeated at Nagasaki, by chance as the target city of Kokura was blanketed by cloud and so the decision was made to dump the plane’s deadly cargo on Nagasaki.

Associate Professor, International Education and Learning Unit, Nossal Institute for Global Health, School of Population and Global Health at University of Melbourne, Tilman Ruff, writes on The Conversation about this life changing moment.

Read Professor Ruff’s story - “Ban the bomb: 70 years on,the nuclear threat looms as large as ever”.

Little did we know at the time, but the destruction unleashed on those Japanese cities was little more than a foretaste alarming and damaging energy of fossil fuels.

Looking back to understand tomorrow

Aristotle - he has
the key to
understanding
our future.

It seems we will need to go back to the ancient philosopher Aristotle to increase our chances of combatting climate change.

Conveying something as abstract as climate change to most people demands the inventive use of metaphors and it was Aristotle he said that the ‘greatest thing was to be the master of metaphor’.

The connection to Aristotle and metaphors was discussed in a Climate Progress story headed: “Earth’s rate of global warming is 400,000 Hiroshima bombs a day”.

That is wonderful metaphor, but the shock of Hiroshima reverberated around the world nearly 70 years ago and most able to best influence our behaviour had not been born and so it oddly means little.

The reality of a changing climate is so remote from the minds of most, that they will only understand what it means when it is effectively too late to respond.

Imagining a nebulous 'thing'

Climate change for most people is a nebulous thing.

One bomb caused this massive devastation
at Hiroshima - climate change is releasing
the equivalent amount of energy every day.

It cannot be touched, felt, smelt or seen, except for when we are visited by an extreme weather event, and rarely is that ever attributed directly to climate change, rather just a “nasty turn in the weather”.

A senior lecturer in Communications and Media Studies at Monash University, David Holmes, set out to conclude how we imagine climate change.

His finding, or at least a report on his work, appears today on The Conservation in a story headed: “Four Hiroshima bombs a second: how we image climate change”.

The headline was for impact and to harness a reader’s attention.

Holmes certainly achieved his aim, but then a story on Climate Progress headed: “16 of your favourite things that climate change is totally screwing up”, reduced the conversation to more day-to-day matters.

The demise of those “favourite things” are what will really make people take notice.