Elisabeth Eide sends short travel essays from a train journey through Europe, with side glances toward the climate summit in Belém, Brazil.
We are getting ready for the long train south through Europe. It is November—a month that is hard to love here in the high North, and all the easier to escape. We wade through leaves losing their brilliance and huddle against the dark afternoons.
We pack warm clothes and follow the news as Hurricane Melissa reaches Jamaica. On the meteorologist’s screen, it looks like a gentle, colorful spiral. But people are heading to shelters.
The students evacuated after the landslide at Carl Berner in East Oslo are being allowed to return home, after reassurances from the geologists. Climate, the commentators have said. Climate.
We trace our Interrail route and note that the UN Secretary-General has delivered yet another desperate appeal. The summit in Belém draws closer. Speaking from Kuala Lumpur, he targets the fossil fuel producers, the junta in Myanmar, and the global elite. Very few elites have taken the Paris 2015 agreement seriously, limiting global warming preferably to 1.5 degrees.
Already in 2018, the UN climate panel published a report showing the difference between 1.5 and 2 degrees of warming. It was dramatic, yet received little attention. Half a degree sounds small, almost negligible. However, as the planet is about to pass the 1.5 degree warming, the small difference has already meant devastating change for the world’s coral reefs. Bleached white and colorless, they exist in ocean areas where temperatures are rising faster than on land.
We have kept a newspaper clipping, a photograph of a coccolithophore. It, too, looks pale. Magnified, it appears covered with tiny, circular, crocheted plates. Bjørn Vassnes in Klassekampen explains: coccolithophores are single-celled algae, smaller than a speck of dust.
But together they are strong. They remove carbon from seawater and release oxygen. In the ocean, they do important work—just as corals do in their own way. They are minuscule, invisible. And vital for the climate. The international Coccolithophore Day was on October tenth.
Ten years ago, I met the climate researcher Hervé Le Treut in Paris. He had been traveling in his own region, South-western France, in the run-up to the Paris climate summit with its grand ambitions. There, he discovered that people became engaged in climate questions when they understood it had to do with defending what they loved: their own surroundings, the unshakeable mountains, the familiar rhythm of the seasons.
Can we learn to love the coccolithophores?
I keep the newspaper clipping, slip it into my notebook, like a small travel mascot.
Elisabeth Eide is a writer, journalist, and Professor Emerita at OsloMet – Oslo Metropolitan University. She is the co-chair of the global network MediaClimate.
