The Ukraine war fills the news, and is a crisis of desperate urgency and huge scale, but is it the most so? It is dwarfed by climate breakdown. One might say that Ukraine to climate is as the Large Magellanic Cloud to the Milky Way.
Simplified from the Map of the Starry Sky
The latest, most comprehensive, most authoritative report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, produced by more than 1,000 scientists, based on 34,000 studies, and approved unanimously by 195 governments, had to be published when ready, and that was unfortunately on day seven of the Ukraine war. And so it was second-page news.
Second-page news. Almost inevitably, wildfires, droughts, super-storms will become more frequent, severe, and widespread than they already are. Cities and islands will be lost to the sea. Farmlands are becoming useless. Heat and rain will increase contagious diseases, not only in people but in animals and crops. Half the world’s population is already thirsty. Millions of children will grow up stunted. Forests are disappearing at increasing rate. Amazon forests have switched from storing carbon to emitting it.
The IPCC says that “a liveable future remains within grasp – just. But the window of opportunity for action is brief and rapidly closing.” It says that “Some impacts are now irreversible.” I have to read the Guardian article rather than the hundreds of pages report itself, and it was not clear to me which are the irreversible effects. Also:
“The IPCC sets out in the strongest terms to date that the climate crisis is inseparable from the biodiversity crisis and the poverty and inequality suffered by billions of people… The IPCC report is also crystal clear that adapting to the climate crisis is as much a social problem as a scientific one. The best way to give effective and lasting protection from climate chaos is through action that addresses ‘inequities such as those based on gender, ethnicity, disability, age, location and income.'”
Lovely, if solving inequality simultaneously helps to solve climate! I looked forward to more about how those “best ways” are crystal clear, but there was none. We do know about global inequality: if large poor equatorial countries cannot afford to preserve their forests or reduce their use of dirty fuel, they will worsen world climate and drive climate refugees to the luckier countries. But I would like to know how reducing gender or ethnic or health inequality helps with the climate; perhaps you know.
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This weblog maintains its right to be about astronomy or anything under the sun.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the question you posed in this blog entry – how can fighting social inequalities help with climate change – and I’m fumbling for an answer. In the broadest strokes, I think any inequality harms the push for better policy changes in regard to the climate because people’s attention gets divided. It divides the funds, time, and resources away from the climate disaster we are facing so they can get their fundamental human rights needs addressed. While this is surely a gross oversimplification of a complex issue, it’s the only reason I can come up with.
Maybe it’s because rich young able-bodied white men pollute more and exploit the resources of the equatorial countries Regarding the AC, your peacock edition is another masterpiece. Thank you.
Rick followed this up with an email to me saying his original comment was as follows but “I left out the second sentence because i didn’t want to challenge you publicly.” I see no offence in his second sentence.
“Maybe it’s because rich young able-bodied white men pollute more and exploit the resources of the equatorial countries. It seems like we always have only 5 more years to prevent our extinction. Regarding the AC, your peacock edition is another masterpiece. Thank you.!
I purchased the Astronomical 2022 calendar . Downloaded, bookmark. Not it’s not there, gone.
Kevn, I’m not sure what you mean. If you downloaded Astronomnical Calendar 2022 and saved it to your computer or other device, it will stay there. If you forgot to save it to your device, let me know; we can make it available again to you.