The German Magazine Der Spiegel as much as the environmental activist group B.U.N.D. used a melting globe for expressing climate change. Now critizism is at hand; scientists and journalists alike find this topos of describing climate change to tough. The world is not melting apart, and cities like New York and Venice will not be flooded until 2500 A.D.
"Help! The globe is melting!" Cover of last week's Spiegel
Ad of B.U.N.D, a German NGO heading in the same directionMarco Jaeger, top scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research however pointed out during an event of BUrda Publishing House, Climeaid, that it would be barbarianism if this would happen. "What would our successors say, if they got to see New York in a submarine in 3000 A.D? They'd say to themselves: Why did they let this, their own culture go down?"

The critics say - as they did when the Diesel advertisment that for instance shows a flooded Rio de Janeiro came out - seeing parts of the earth flooded - people would get used to that image and would do nothing to comabte climate change.

Ever thought (but never said) Californian weather in Germany wouldn’t be such a bad thing? Don’t worry: you are not the only one taking global 'warming' as, in that extent, good thing. German biologist Josef Reichholf now said in an interview for the magazine Der Spiegel, that’s actually the natural way to think: “Biologically speaking, we are children of the tropics”! Wherever we go, we artificially create our own comfortable climate (through cloths etc.) – 27 degrees Celsius. That simply means: a milder climate won’t pose problems for mankind as a whole. We are flexible enough to change accordingly to the conditions around us. The same is also true for most plants and animals. But Reichholf goes one step further: his thesis is that warming temperatures in contrast to common knowledge promote biodiversity. He paints the picture of flourishing new habitats growing in numbers in the future parallel to global warming – if we manage not to destroy them through human intervention right away.
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Foto: Denis Vallan