Politiken has published a thought-provoking and somber series on the climate struggle through thorough and perspective-driven journalism. The series is titled: ’What Happened to the Climate Fight?’. When you reread the series, the answer seems quite clear: We lost it.
The scene was set on April 12 with a survey of 216 climate scientists. Here, an overwhelming majority expressed that they have given up hope of keeping the global temperature rise under the critical 2 degrees and generally held a deeply pessimistic view on climate developments. Yet this pessimism does not seem to have rubbed off on the general population. Politiken’s analysis on April 21 reveals that Danes have also given up the fight — implicitly indicating that they have lost some of the engagement that dominated their attitudes and concerns just a few years ago. The number of concerned individuals has dropped from 60% to 52%, along with the willingness to live in a climate-friendly manner. This is happening precisely at a time when climate changes have accelerated further, the extent of climate disasters has escalated, temperature records are being broken, and the Arctic ice cap is melting at an alarming rate.
