Looming catastrophe of climate change

Fossil-fuel companies have become the “godfathers of climate chaos” and should be banned from advertising in every country, the secretary general of the United Nations stated while delivering dire new scientific warnings of global heating.

Speaking in New York this week, António Guterres called on all media to stop enabling “planetary destruction” by taking fossil-fuel advertising money as he warned the world faces “climate crunch time” in its faltering attempts to stem the crisis.

“Many governments restrict or prohibit advertising for products that harm human health,” he said. “I urge every country to ban advertising from fossil-fuel companies. And I urge news media and tech companies to stop taking fossil-fuel advertising.”

In his speech, Guterres announced new data from the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) showing there is an 80 percent chance Earth will breach 1.5C in warming above pre-industrial times in the next five calendar years. 

The WMO says there is a already a 50-50 chance that the global average in the period between 2024 to 2028 will be above 1.5C in warming.

“We are playing Russian roulette with our planet,” he said. “We need an exit ramp off the highway to climate hell.”

According to the European Union’s Copernicus monitoring system, the past 12 months (from June 2023 to May of this year) have already breached this target following a string of months with record-breaking heat, with the average global temperature being 1.63C higher than the pre-industrial average.

Guterres likened the looming catastrophe to the meteor that wiped out the dinosaurs. “We’re having an outsized impact and, in the case of climate, we are not the dinosaurs - we are the meteor. We are not only in danger - we are the danger.”

He admitted that the 1.5C target was “still just about possible” but said there needed to be far greater effort from countries to slash carbon emissions, to boost climate finance to poorer countries, and for the fossil-fuel industry to be made pariahs by governments, the media and other businesses.

“The godfathers of climate chaos - the fossil-fuel industry - rake in record profits and feast off trillions in taxpayer-funded subsidies,” he said. “It is a disgrace that the most vulnerable are being left stranded, struggling desperately to deal with a climate crisis they did nothing to create.

“We cannot accept a future where the rich are protected in air-conditioned bubbles, while the rest of humanity is lashed by lethal weather in unlivable lands.”

Guterres attacked fossil-fuel firms for their meagre investments in cleaner forms of energy and for “distorting the truth, deceiving the public and sowing doubt” about climate science.

He called for global bans on fossil-fuel advertising and for public relations and media companies to cut ties with oil, gas and coal interests.

“These companies should stop acting as enablers to planetary destruction. Stop taking on new fossil-fuel clients and set out plans to drop your existing ones. Fossil fuels are not only poisoning our planet - they’re toxic for your brand.”

The speech was timed to act as a rallying call by the UN which is increasingly concerned that the climate crisis has slipped down the list of priorities for a world racked by war in Ukraine and Gaza, and other economic worries.

A meeting of the powerful G7 group of countries will take place in Italy next week, followed by November’s Cop29 climate summit, to be held in Azerbaijan, along with a G20 gathering in Brazil.

Amid this wrangling the impacts of the climate crisis continue to hit home, with countries including India and the US recently gripped by severe heatwaves. 

A study released this week found that extensive flooding that has devastated parts of southern Brazil, leading to 169 deaths, was made at least twice as likely due to human-caused climate change.

But Guterres urged people not to lose courage or hope. “No country can solve the climate crisis in isolation and we do still have a choice,” he said.

“This is an all-in moment. We can create tipping points for climate progress, or we can career to tipping points for climate disaster.”

He warned that it was now the people of Earth versus the polluters and the profiteers – and it is time for leaders to decide whose side they’re on.

“Tomorrow it will be too late,” Guterres concluded. “Now is the time to mobilise, now is the time to act, now is the time to deliver. This is our moment of truth.”

Professor emeritus of geophysical and climate hazards at University College London, Bill McGuire, agrees and says that as a scientist he is faced with “indifference and a failure to understand the reality of the climate crisis every day.

“We must wake people up. Extreme weather, especially heatwaves and floods, is set to be all-pervasive and will have a colossal impact on our lives and livelihoods,” he warns.

“A recent report by the European Environment Agency warned that climate breakdown will bring ‘catastrophic’ consequences for an unprepared Europe, most notably through heat stress, river flooding and flash floods.

“And this applies equally to the UK. Disruption to transport and utilities, interference with industrial and business operations, serious pressures on food production and supply, and increased burdens on the health service and hospitals, will conspire to make day-to-day living harder and far more unpredictable.”

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A Moment of Truth – UN speech by António Guterres (5 June 2024)
Hothouse Earth – by Bill McGuire (2022)

Politicians dither as climate crisis builds

 

GLOBAL heating appears to have entered a new and fast-moving trajectory. Amid record-breaking temperatures, melting ice and a sharp increase in North Atlantic sea surface temperatures during the month of July, veteran climate scientists are now becoming increasingly alarmed about the pace of change.

“A few decades ago some people might have thought climate change was a relatively slow-moving phenomenon but we are now witnessing things happening at a terrifying rate,” said Prof Peter Stott, leader of the UK Met Office’s climate monitoring and attribution team.

The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has also warned of record temperatures and extreme heat in the near future after confirming the latest climate-heating El Niño event had “arrived”.

The last major El Niño was in 2016 – which to date remains the hottest year on record. But for 2023, it comes on top of increasing global heat driven by human-caused carbon emissions, an effect described by the WMO as a “double whammy”. Its officials say urgent preparations for extreme weather events are now vital to save lives and livelihoods.

“As El Niño builds through the rest of this year, adding an extra oomph to the damaging effects of human-induced global heating, many millions of people across the planet and many diverse ecosystems are going to face extraordinary challenges – and unfortunately suffer great damage,” added Stott.

The WMO estimates there is now a 90 percent probability of the latest El Niño continuing to the end of 2023 at a moderate strength or higher, with the added risk of it supercharging extreme weather.

New records for high temperature have been broken almost daily on every continent in recent months whilst in the UK, the average temperature for June was beaten by nearly a full degree with an unprecedented heatwave also affecting the country’s coastal waters.

Peter Kalmus, a climate scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, admits that he doesn’t fully understand what’s going on with this summer’s crazy climate data.

“It feels to me like the climate may have shifted into some sort of new regime of global heating that scientists don’t yet understand. And yet the media and everyone keep acting like things are basically fine and leaders keep expanding fossil fuels,” he says.

Cambridge University’s Prof Emily Shuckburgh, a leading climate scientist and director of Cambridge Zero, says that after the UK’s record-breaking month of high temperatures, it looks likely the rest of the summer will be warmer than normal too as global temperatures continue to rise.

“We’ve been warning of these changes for 30 years and warning that the planet is overheating,” she told listeners on BBC’s Radio 4 Today programme (3 July 2023).

“We’ve got record melting in Greenland occurring right at this moment, we’ve got record low levels of sea ice in Antarctica. From pole to pole we are seeing dramatic changes and it is nature as well as humans that is witnessing the impact.

“Those extreme temperatures of 40 degrees that we saw in the UK last summer had a dramatic impact on our wildlife and a dramatic impact on us. Across Europe thousands of people died prematurely in that heatwave.

“Sadly the UK used to be a global leader in terms of climate change and it was only two years ago that we hosted the big international climate conference COP-26. We’ve now relinquished that leadership.”

Prof Shuckburgh says the recent progress report from the UK Government’s Climate Change Committee (CCC) on how the UK is doing against its own decarbonisation plans was “covered with red” because goals and targets were not being met.

“We should be responding to the cost of living and energy crisis by investing in insulation, in solar, in wind, offshore and onshore,” she suggested.

Prof Shuckburgh urged people to accept the global scale of what is at risk. “We know that if we don’t respond to climate change as a country and as a world then the risks are enormous,” she said.

“They are potentially catastrophic in terms of our food supplies, the global spread of disease, the risk from migration by communities that have been impacted by climate change, the risk of conflicts and, most importantly of all, the risk of passing catastrophic tipping points.

“This is what’s at stake. The really frustrating thing from my perspective is that we know what the solutions are. We have them at our fingertips and what we need are stable policies in support of them.”

Such stark warnings are echoed by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Turk, who also described addressing climate change as a “human rights” issue.

Evoking a “dystopian future” if urgent action isn’t taken, he said: “Our environment is burning. It’s melting. It’s flooding. It’s depleting. It’s drying. It’s dying. We, the generation with the most powerful technological tools in history, have the capacity to change it.”

He accused world leaders of performing “the choreography of promising to act” before getting stuck in a rut dominated by short-term political expediency. Turk called for an immediate end to “senseless subsidies” of the fossil fuel industry and said the Dubai COP28 (2023 UN Climate Change Conference) climate summit in November and December needs to be a “decisive game-changer”.

At the end of June, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak was accused by a resigning government minister and environment campaigner, Zac Goldsmith, of being “simply uninterested” in the environment and climate emergency.

Lame political leadership – mirrored by many of those in power and supported by the fossil fuel industry and elements of the right-wing media – along with a cost-of-living crisis and war in Ukraine, have all contributed to a prevailing laissez faire attitude.

At the start of 2023, when Sunak introduced his five key policy pledges, the climate and environment were noticeable by their absence, a clear indication that the country’s third prime minister in as many years does not view them as a priority.

Nothing has changed and, despite mounting climate relasted emergencies around the world this summer, Sunak, who favours flying about the country on short-haul private jets and helicopters, also shunned a recent Paris summit on the climate, debt and poverty hosted by the French President Emmanuel Macron.

If there can be a final thought and persepctive (for now) on this challenging issue then perhaps, somewhat surprisingly, it might go to the actor William Shatner.

As Captain James T Kirk of Star Trek’s Enterprise spaceship he explored the universe, espousing a vision of the future where humanity had not only survived but overcome many of the Earthly problems we face today.

Last year, 90-year-old Shatner had what he described as a “life-changing experience” when he physically travelled into space for the first time, expecting to experience “a deep connection with the immensity around us” and “a deep call” for endless exploration.

“The strongest feeling I had, that dominated everything else by far, was the deepest grief I have ever experienced. I understood, in the clearest possible way, that we were living on a tiny oasis of life, surrounded by an immensity of death,” he said.

“I didn’t see infinite possibilities of worlds to explore, of adventures to have, or living creatures to connect with. I saw the deepest darkness I could have ever imagined, contrasting starkly with the welcoming warmth of our nurturing home planet.

“This was an immensely powerful awakening for me. It filled me with sadness. I realised that we had spent decades, if not centuries, being obsessed with looking away, with looking outside.

“I did my share in popularising the idea that space was the final frontier. But I had to get to space to understand that Earth is and will stay our only home. It is the final and only frontier, and we have been ravaging it relentlessly, destroying it at an unprecedented rate and making it uninhabitable.” 

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This article by Clive Simpson was first published by Central Bylines under the title, 'Politicians drag their heels as the climate crisis intensifies'.

A life worth living

Occasionally in the rich tapestry of life we share together on planet Earth someone or something comes along to make a difference. One such person is the Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg, who spoke eloquently and with conviction to the UK Parliament this week. Her urgent words on climate breakdown were fresh, sharp and precise - a prophetic call to action that we continue to ignore at our future peril. Regular readers of So Said the Lighthouse Keeper will know her concerns have a deep resonance with the writer and so they are reproduced here in full. Please read on - it is time to reflect, consider and act.

"My name is Greta Thunberg. I am 16 years old. I come from Sweden. And I speak on behalf of future generations.

I know many of you don’t want to listen to us – you say we are just children. But we’re only repeating the message of the united climate science.

Many of you appear concerned that we are wasting valuable lesson time, but I assure you we will go back to school the moment you start listening to science and give us a future. Is that really too much to ask?

In the year 2030 I will be 26 years old. My little sister Beata will be 23. Just like many of your own children or grandchildren. That is a great age, we have been told. When you have all of your life ahead of you. But I am not so sure it will be that great for us.

I was fortunate to be born in a time and place where everyone told us to dream big; I could become whatever I wanted to. I could live wherever I wanted to. People like me had everything we needed and more. Things our grandparents could not even dream of. We had everything we could ever wish for and yet now we may have nothing.

Now we probably don’t even have a future any more.

Because that future was sold so that a small number of people could make unimaginable amounts of money. It was stolen from us every time you said that the sky was the limit, and that you only live once.

You lied to us. You gave us false hope. You told us that the future was something to look forward to. And the saddest thing is that most children are not even aware of the fate that awaits us. We will not understand it until it’s too late. And yet we are the lucky ones. Those who will be affected the hardest are already suffering the consequences. But their voices are not heard.

Is my microphone on? Can you hear me?

Around the year 2030, 10 years 252 days and 10 hours away from now, we will be in a position where we set off an irreversible chain reaction beyond human control, that will most likely lead to the end of our civilisation as we know it. That is unless in that time, permanent and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society have taken place, including a reduction of CO2 emissions by at least 50 percent.

And please note that these calculations are depending on inventions that have not yet been invented at scale, inventions that are supposed to clear the atmosphere of astronomical amounts of carbon dioxide.

Furthermore, these calculations do not include unforeseen tipping points and feedback loops like the extremely powerful methane gas escaping from rapidly thawing arctic permafrost.

Nor do these scientific calculations include already locked-in warming hidden by toxic air pollution. Nor the aspect of equity – or climate justice – clearly stated throughout the Paris agreement, which is absolutely necessary to make it work on a global scale.

We must also bear in mind that these are just calculations. Estimations. That means that these “points of no return” may occur a bit sooner or later than 2030. No one can know for sure. We can, however, be certain that they will occur approximately in these timeframes, because these calculations are not opinions or wild guesses.

These projections are backed up by scientific facts, concluded by all nations through the IPCC. Nearly every single major national scientific body around the world unreservedly supports the work and findings of the IPCC.

Did you hear what I just said? Is my English OK? Is the microphone on? Because I’m beginning to wonder.

During the last six months I have travelled around Europe for hundreds of hours in trains, electric cars and buses, repeating these life-changing words over and over again. But no one seems to be talking about it, and nothing has changed. In fact, the emissions are still rising.

When I have been travelling around to speak in different countries, I am always offered help to write about the specific climate policies in specific countries. But that is not really necessary. Because the basic problem is the same everywhere. And the basic problem is that basically nothing is being done to halt – or even slow – climate and ecological breakdown, despite all the beautiful words and promises.

The UK is, however, very special. Not only for its mind-blowing historical carbon debt, but also for its current, very creative, carbon accounting.

Since 1990 the UK has achieved a 37 percent reduction of its territorial CO2 emissions, according to the Global Carbon Project. And that does sound very impressive. But these numbers do not include emissions from aviation, shipping and those associated with imports and exports. If these numbers are included the reduction is around 10% since 1990 – or an an average of 0.4 percent a year, according to Tyndall Manchester.

And the main reason for this reduction is not a consequence of climate policies, but rather a 2001 EU directive on air quality that essentially forced the UK to close down its very old and extremely dirty coal power plants and replace them with less dirty gas power stations. And switching from one disastrous energy source to a slightly less disastrous one will of course result in a lowering of emissions.

But perhaps the most dangerous misconception about the climate crisis is that we have to “lower” our emissions. Because that is far from enough. Our emissions have to stop if we are to stay below 1.5-2C of warming. The “lowering of emissions” is of course necessary but it is only the beginning of a fast process that must lead to a stop within a couple of decades, or less. And by “stop” I mean net zero – and then quickly on to negative figures. That rules out most of today’s politics.

The fact that we are speaking of “lowering” instead of “stopping” emissions is perhaps the greatest force behind the continuing business as usual. The UK’s active current support of new exploitation of fossil fuels – for example, the UK shale gas fracking industry, the expansion of its North Sea oil and gas fields, the expansion of airports as well as the planning permission for a brand new coal mine – is beyond absurd.

This ongoing irresponsible behaviour will no doubt be remembered in history as one of the greatest failures of humankind.

People always tell me and the other millions of school strikers that we should be proud of ourselves for what we have accomplished. But the only thing that we need to look at is the emission curve. And I’m sorry, but it’s still rising. That curve is the only thing we should look at.

Every time we make a decision we should ask ourselves; how will this decision affect that curve? We should no longer measure our wealth and success in the graph that shows economic growth, but in the curve that shows the emissions of greenhouse gases. We should no longer only ask: “Have we got enough money to go through with this?” but also: “Have we got enough of the carbon budget to spare to go through with this?” That should and must become the centre of our new currency.

Many people say that we don’t have any solutions to the climate crisis. And they are right. Because how could we? How do you “solve” the greatest crisis that humanity has ever faced? How do you “solve” a war? How do you “solve” going to the moon for the first time? How do you “solve” inventing new inventions?

The climate crisis is both the easiest and the hardest issue we have ever faced. The easiest because we know what we must do. We must stop the emissions of greenhouse gases. The hardest because our current economics are still totally dependent on burning fossil fuels, and thereby destroying ecosystems in order to create everlasting economic growth.

“So, exactly how do we solve that?” you ask us – the schoolchildren striking for the climate.

And we say: “No one knows for sure. But we have to stop burning fossil fuels and restore nature and many other things that we may not have quite figured out yet.”

Then you say: “That’s not an answer!”

So we say: “We have to start treating the crisis like a crisis – and act even if we don’t have all the solutions.”

“That’s still not an answer,” you say.

Then we start talking about circular economy and rewilding nature and the need for a just transition. Then you don’t understand what we are talking about.

We say that all those solutions needed are not known to anyone and therefore we must unite behind the science and find them together along the way. But you do not listen to that. Because those answers are for solving a crisis that most of you don’t even fully understand. Or don’t want to understand.

You don’t listen to the science because you are only interested in solutions that will enable you to carry on like before. Like now. And those answers don’t exist any more. Because you did not act in time.

Avoiding climate breakdown will require cathedral thinking. We must lay the foundation while we may not know exactly how to build the ceiling.

Sometimes we just simply have to find a way. The moment we decide to fulfil something, we can do anything. And I’m sure that the moment we start behaving as if we were in an emergency, we can avoid climate and ecological catastrophe. Humans are very adaptable: we can still fix this. But the opportunity to do so will not last for long. We must start today. We have no more excuses.

We children are not sacrificing our education and our childhood for you to tell us what you consider is politically possible in the society that you have created. We have not taken to the streets for you to take selfies with us, and tell us that you really admire what we do.

We children are doing this to wake the adults up. We children are doing this for you to put your differences aside and start acting as you would in a crisis. We children are doing this because we want our hopes and dreams back.

I hope my microphone was on. I hope you could all hear me."