Quite a coincidence of deadline dates:
– October 31: Halloween.
– October 31: clocks turn back, from Daylight Shifted Time to natural time, in Europe.
– October 31: COP26, the 26th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, starts in Glasgow, to run till November 12.
– October 27: the British chancellor of the exchequer announced his annual budget.
American clocks change on November 7. For clear information and my opinion on this interference with time, see https://www.universalworkshop.com/clock-shifting-times/
Mars and Venus laugh at Earth for doing this. But they are ready to welcome Earth into the club of desert planets.
Everything depends on COP26.
The world is on track, very definitely according to the UN’s latest climate report and the consensus of climate scientists, to become hotter than in pre-industrial times by – not 1.5 degrees Celsius, which could just possibly be safe, nor 2 degrees, which would be disastrous, but by 2.7 degrees. That means, spread throughout the atmosphere over the 510 million square kilometers of the Earth’s surface, a vast pile of heat.
Runaway heating means, for instance, Arctic ice sheets replaced by open water, which being darker absorbs heat faster; permafrost under Siberia melting and releasing methane, thirty times worse as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Irreversible feedback loops.
If we keep on this track, billions will starve. Climate refugees will storm Fortress Europe and Fortress USA, both already in chaos. If you are a parent, what’s the point? – your child will not live in a garden world. If you are a poet, what’s the point? – there will be no more books.
The track can be altered, the trend reversed, if we use less (or no) oil, gas, coal, eat less meat, whose production mows down forests and sends up methane; our individual behavior helps, but only the behavior of governments is sufficiently powerful. They can save us if they not only promise but begin actions to reach net zero carbon dioxide emission, and not by 2100 but by 2030. Almost all of the 198 governments sending delegates to COP26 have pledged too little and aren’t keeping to their pledges.
Boris Johnson, the prime minister of the country that has gained the honor of hosting COP26, badly wants it to be a success. That partly depends on Britain’s own credibility as a climate-reform leader. He has said it is “touch and go.” How right he is.
On the eve of the conference, his own chancellor, or holder of the purse strings, Rishi Sunak (a multimillionaire by inheritance), announces a budget which, instead of investing in renewable energy or raising taxes on fossil fuel, cuts taxes on domestic airline flights, cuts taxes on alcoholic drinks, cuts taxes on banks, repeating emphatically that his priority is to lower taxes so as to improve his party’s chances at the next election.
Vladimir Putin will not bother to attend COP26. Xi Jinping will not bother to attend. The queen, aged 95, was to have given an opening speech, but is not well enough to attend.
Glasgow’s bin workers, who keep the streets clear of rubbish, intend to go on strike throughout COP26, and transport and other services may do likewise.
Actions by humanity sometimes remind me of the proverbial man sitting on a branch of a tree and sawing it off.
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This weblog maintains its right to be about astronomy or anything under the sun.
So, I guess we dodged a bullet in the 1970s by avoiding joining the club of ice worlds and moons when Jimmy Carter was caterwauling about global cooling. Or maybe we did too good a job reversing cooling? Nah, both are just politics (at least when blaming humans for it).
This is the nasty tone of the evidence-ignorers.
One way to reduce energy consumption would be to outlaw storing digital content in live memory. I have not researched this, but consider the petabytes of utterly useless crap that is stored in active memory for anyone to retrieve via the internet in fractions of a second. Tweets, youtube vidoes, tiktoks, snapchats, instagrams, facebook pages, not to mention vast databases maintained by every online retailer and internet service provider. The data and server farms run by Google and Amazon and all of the intelligence agencies also consume vast amounts of electricity, as does all the bitcoin “mining”. I like to be able to access Guy’s content on my computer whenever I want as much as the next person, but it would probably be “greener” to go back to printed material. Of course, I’m just as guilty as everyone else . . . LOL
All irrelevant,like plastic drinking straws,when you have,in one fairly small European country alone,32 million people making their body mass 20x bigger by driving around in metal shells!
Here they’re even turning the railways and buses into parking 🅿️ lots.The only new rail stations are parkways and the buses park and ride and it’s very hard to get funding for a station that actually serve people rather than cars yet cars have put the railways and buses out of business but now due to congestion they’re bailing out the car!So much light pollution as well for the car centric development floodlit cars parks,car dealerships,lit up uninhibited roads(defeating the object of cars being fitted with lights).In France the government are going to give €2000 to the poorer motorists to drive!What kind of a message does that send out and if they are poor how come they can afford a car anyhow? Middle class motorists who go electric become smug with their machines but they take up just as much space as a petroleum car,are just as deadly, require endless roads and car parks and soon will be strip mining the sea beds for lithium for the batteries.And 89 percent of them will have one person in them most of the time they’re by, assuming a small family car size,a single person has increased their body mass to that of about 18 average sized people stood in a box.All in all the Glasgow summit is a waste of time.
I appreciate your comments The human experiment has exceeded its proportionality We are better observers than interactive participants to our planets dilemma Further we are not capable of acting in concert as a species Gaia will probably return us to a reduced state in a tumultuous climate Each of us can do the clever things we know to survive but as a collective humans have a lot to prove
Well hopefully one day soon Boris Johnson won’t be the PM of Scotland,if they’d had any sense they’d have jumped the British/UK ship a few years ago.The meeting in Glasgow won’t sadly make any difference.They’ll keep churning out cars,cars and cars.I didn’t realize that there are 32 million cars in England alone….how’s it happened?I’m afraid I don’t have much faith that there’s going to be any change at all.
It’s sad, perplexing and terrifying. I don’t think there’s any way around the possibility that world governments will decide to “engineer” climate to subdue the rising heat. And that’s even scarier! There will be much suffering, mostly to those who are already poor. Still … I’m weirdly hopeful that my grandchildren and their contemporaries will find a way to help as many as they can to adapt to the changing world.
Very concise and inspiring post. I hope it gets a wide readership.
A major contributor to climate change is how we use the land. Cutting down forests to build parking lots, or, as in the case of the western mountain ranges in the USA, the checkerboard clear cutting is causing the forest to dry out, increases the temperature, and makes fires advance faster. We have also removed over 90% of the forests in the eastern US. Levees on rivers cause the land to subside and increases floods. We have FEMA that allows homebuilders to build in low areas, reducing habitat. FEMA should not be in the insurance business. Already 30% of most species (except Humans) have been reduced due to development. There should be more regulation, such as you can’t remove more than 30% of the trees when building a home or business, and for every 10′ of tree that is cut down, 10 more should be planted. The rainforest is being destroyed. This pattern is happening all around this planet. We need to do more.