Regular readers will know that throughout my Covid Diary I would occasionally say that the pandemic was bad but the real problem is global heating. Last November (Last Orders Please) I wrote:
I may be wrong – I hope I am – and the technical material that will flow from the conference may have actual operational value, but I can’t see the COP26 making the slightest difference once the speeches have been made and the caravans have moved on to the next venue and the next photo-op and next worthy words; all the sound and fury signifying nothing.
There is an old science-fiction short-story – I think Brian Aldiss’s Last Orders – that has it’s protagonist calling in for a final pint before the starships evacuating the Earth leave for a new home. The protagonist gets chatting and having ‘just one more’ before he has to go, and is still drinking and chatting and ordering another drink as the last starship leaves. That’s where we are right now: drink up, ladies and gentlemen – time to go home.
I haven’t written much about it here since then because there’s a risk of sounding like a stuck record, and I’m not sure what else to say, but even the densest of our politicians and corporate cheerleaders must recognise that shit has got real now, and has done well before the supposed 1.5° warming limit – a target that will not now be met due to concerted and deliberate political and industry inaction over decades. You do wonder if people who have invested so much in denying physics will have the wit to do anything now that the UK has had it’s hottest day on record and fires were burning from London to Yorkshire (and yes, that’s a Brit-centric perspective – I’ll broaden it out in a future post).
I was at a family funeral in Yorkshire on Monday, and got caught up in some of the chaos on the way home as overhead cables on the East Coast mainline failed. LNER got me home, and worked hard in difficult circumstances to do that, but it was an acute reminder that an infrastructure designed for a temperate Atlantic climate will fail when that climate changes. And it isn’t just trains, wildfires and melting roads and airport runways: there were significant failures of the digital infrastructure too when datacentres in the London area failed in the heat, bringing down cloud services. And that’s before issues of food and water security and population movements.
But the fires and infrastructure failures are symptoms only: the issues are systemic, structural and global. I’ll have more to write, but for now I’ll just leave here something I put on Twitter yesterday:
Interesting from The @guardian but also, I think wrong in the long run – Net Zero has become a political construct; the policy and strategies should focus on achieving *Actual* Zero, or we’ll keep going round in political and definitional spirals.https://t.co/rYKK9jipFH
— Ian Burdon (@Cosmic_Serf) July 19, 2022
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