After all the mentions I’ve made here of global heating in the last couple of years, I haven’t mentioned COP26, currently taking place in Glasgow. This is because I’ve found it hard to find much to write about. A bunch of politicians are making worthy and noble speeches for the international stage, articulating sentiments that are absent from their domestic policies, trying to find weasel words to allow them to do the opposite of what the world needs. At least the much-maligned Australians (‘screw you, mate, we’re happy with our droughts, wildfires and plagues of mice and what’s it got to do with you anyway?’) have the virtue of blunt honesty.
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.
Here’s a drookit Professor Jason Box, ice climatologist at Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, getting depressed by the Glasgow weather, and telling it how he sees it.
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