Irish Examiner View: No time to wallow in climate fear

Code-red alarm can’t be ignored

Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee in John Hillcoat's The Road, based on Cormac McCarthy's Pulizter Prize winning novel.

Our understanding of climate change has changed so much since the American Cormac McCarthy published The Road in 2006 that his Pulitizer-winning novel is now seen in a far darker, more unsettling context than it was just 15 years ago. 

Set in a post-apocalyptic world, the book was a parable-cum-warning about how delicately balanced our world is and how very thin the veneer of civilisation might prove if - or when - societies implode. Though it did not mention cannibalism, last week’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report was every bit as unsettling as McCarthy’s work; more so as it represented the conclusions of science rather than the creativity of one of the day’s best writers. It is coincidental that McCarthy’s ideas came together while he was in Ireland but it is not at all coincidental that we face the scale of threat he described in The Road - one described as “code-red” by the IPCC report’s authors. It is not hard to imagine either that McCarthy foresaw scenes so grim that he chose not to include them in case he overwhelmed readers.