Shall we begin with a quiz? Who said:

What we are now doing to the world, by degrading the land surfaces, by polluting the waters and by adding greenhouse gases to the air at an unprecedented rate—all this is new in the experience of the earth. It is mankind and his activities which are changing the environment of our planet in damaging and dangerous ways.

…

[T}he environmental challenge which confronts the whole world demands an equivalent response from the whole world. Every country will be affected and no one can opt out.

*Answer at the end

***

A core notion in writing fiction, especially SFF genre fiction, is ‘world building.’ A lot is said about it, but the aim is to create a consistent context for the action, because readers will usually suspend disbelief if everything hangs together, no matter how ‘out there’ the story goes. The same idea crops up in all sorts of contexts, and it swims in the same pond as notions of paradigms and paradigm shifts in the sense articulated by Thomas Khun.

Paradigms and associated fictions have been on display this week in the strange Tory ‘leadership’ debate here in the UK, a debate which is marked by an utter lack of anything resembling leadership from candidates who have ‘succeeded’ so far by craven pusillanimity, patronage and pretence.

That debate is positioned according to a world view that has been with us for several decades, the one that tests everything against a social and economic paradigm. Within that paradigm, economic analyses dominate and climate is discussed, if at all, by reference to the ‘affordability’ of a pledge of ‘Net Zero by 2050.’ This is the language and conceptual structure of Oxford PPEs who seem to be  incapable of grasping that Net Zero is nonsense and 2050 will be far, far too late. They do not get that all of their favoured policy concepts and arguments are contingent in the face of an existential threat that is impacting us now, and they have not the first idea of how to react to what is to come.

One of the more obvious perpetrators of this nonsense in that debate was Kemi Badenoch whose (failed) campaign was masterminded by Michael Gove, whose opinion on listening to experts is a matter of public record. She was not alone in her nonsense, just the most visible. Notably, discussion by Liz Truss of ‘economic growth’ and the forthcoming recession lacks any understanding at all of international factors degrading the already weakened UK economy and how global catastrophe will deliver the coup de grace.

At least during Covid some initial lip service was paid to ‘following the science.’ Not so now.

There is some intelligent discussion on issues ignored by political discourse led by Rory Stewart here from around 2’23” :

I should add that I haven’t heard much on the realities of this from Labour either. Their position is built entirely around responses to the talking points of British politics so far as I can see.

Perhaps here in the UK the debate will at last have reached a turning point with the shock of fires in London and elsewhere after just 1 day of 40° (104°F) heat. I’m not optimistic, but I do get the sense that public opinion is shifting ahead of political action. When lockdown first happened in March 2020, there wasn’t a lot of resistance because we’d all seen what was happening in Italy and expected it. Will the same be true for the much more stringent measures necessary to mitigate imminent disaster? I’d like to think so, but I’m pessimistic.

I’m writing a novel just now which posits that after human depopulation emissions stop completely (it is in the same world as Coyote in the Corner). I had to come up with a plausible scenario for the world as it would be circa 2050. To do this, I used consensus scientific opinion but looked at the edge cases and uncertainties to ramp up the world building. Over the time I’ve been writing it, I have twice had to go back and recalibrate for more severe climate impacts. As the edge cases and worse-case scenarios develop and as the UK and Europe reach those worse cases decades ahead of forecast, I’m going to have to go back again.

*It was said by Margaret Thatcher at the UN General Assembly, 8 November 1989. There are a lot of things to be said about Margaret Thatcher, and the rest of the speech has makes questionable assertions, but she was a chemist and understood the threat of Global Warming in ways that her political descendants do not.