As the Guardian notes in one of its morning newsletters today:
Southern Europe is bracing for a second “heat storm” in a week. Record temperatures across the Mediterranean could be broken on Tuesday, and people in Italy have been told to prepare for most intense heatwave ‘of all time'. Meanwhile in the US more than 100 million people were under extreme heat advisories this weekend.
This is not an accident. It is the predictable and predicted consequence of human behaviour, about which politicians and most people have been in denial.
None of these situations are going to get better without drastic human action. And by ‘drastic' I mean radical human change.
We have to transform out energy systems.
We have to change our patterns of consumption - rather oddly prioritising g as a result the very things that the government is so badly failing to supply right now, such as education, justice, health and social care and so much more.
We have to travel less. Air travel for holidays must become exceptional.
We must change our diets. Eating meat must at the very least become occasional, not the norm.
We need to rethink our houses.
Working at home will become normal.
The nature of work itself is likely to change for many.
Many businesses that cannot adapt to to this will fail. There will, of course, be opportunity for others. It was ever thus.
None of this should surprise anyone. It should, instead, be obvious. And yet it apparently is not. The world of politics is ignoring this. The pretence is that these are just peak, and even freak, events. They can as such be ignored. But they can't, because they presage real change and pose questions that need answers, which it seems no politician is willing to address.
Start with these:
1) What if much of the Mediterranean becomes uninhabitable? Where do its people go?
2) How can we manage food supply in a country utterly dependent on imports when many of the areas that supply us cannot produce any more?
3) How will we find the money for the investment that we need if there is an insistence on balancing the books?
No one is asking these questions, but they are issues that need to be addressed, urgently.
Isn't it time we got real about the harm we have already done to our planet?
And isn't it time we planned for continuing life on earth? The alternative will be democide - which is the killing of members of a country's civilian population as a result of its government's policy, including by direct action, indifference, and neglect.
Is that where we are heading? We will be if we do not do something about what is happening. And so far we are not.
So, democide it is right now, by default. Are you happy with that?
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Excellent questions. I’d add a fourth. Why, when critical planetary boundaries are already being crossed, do politicians continue to see growth in GDP as a solution rather than a problem?
I wish I knew
Nice wishlist. Never gonna happen. It’s too late anyway.
We’re doomed.
Well…no.
Some good news. A recent paper by Aarhus Uni Denmark has esimated the potential for agri-voltaics in the EU + UK.
Agri-voltaics involves placing PV panels above stuff being grown for food (not wheat & cereals). If properly managed this approach can help plant growth, protect plants and catch rainwater. The agri-voltaic potential (EU+UK) is +/- 55TW which could produce around 72,000TWh per year.
Putting this into context, the EU+UK consumes about 18,000TWh/year of ENERGY from ALL sources (oil, gas, nuke etc etc). Thus agri-v could provide several multiples of this.
If you consider that on + off-shore wind have a potential of 26,000TWh/year then, as you can see, the EU + UK does not lack for renewable resource.
What it lacks is political will. The energy transformation is a social exercise & thus needs to be planned, by politicos.
Said planning almost wholly absent. Current action is mostly ad-hoc and by private industry.
So there we are, staring us in the face, a possible partial solution. I guarantee that at least in the UK, given the current crew of polit-sickos nothing will happen.
Thanks
A distinction needs to be drawn between eating meat properly farmed, ie pastured, and the abominable practice of factory farming where thousands of animals are kept wholly unnaturally in sheds. One enhances the environment and the other greatly disturbs it. There’s no comparison between the two. Regarding the unwillingness of politicians to accept the realities of global warming, well, it makes me wonder again if the reality is what it’s routinely portrayed as in the popular press, which we know can’t be trusted – just look at the nonsense it reinforces regarding economics.
We need to turn to a variety of alternative ways to produce protein. Pastorally raised animals still have to be fed vast quantities of soy and etc unless the stocking rates are so low as to make meat unviable as a product of any significance. I like a good sausage as much as the next person but I agree with you about factory farming, and have served my time lugging sacks of feed across muddy fields – I know how much our four footed friends need to eat! Pasture fed meat is a nice idea and just occasionally the right way to farm in a particular location – but it just doesn’t scale, nothing approaching…
Or we should make what protein we have more bioavailable. Should we be looking at digestive enzymes, perhaps? Liberal use of leucine (except with eggs, I’d think)?
Meat – i) hill farming, not much use for arable so sheep make some sense. On the other hand, there’s a balance to be argued re: re-wilding as bald hills are mostly man-made and a consequence of sheep grazing. And ii) grazing with forestry – which is entirely possible but low intensity. So not necessarily no meat, but a reversal of ratios ie: meat as a garnish rather than a sprig of greenery on a plate of meat?
Sheep are deeply destructive of what should be on Welsh and Lake District hills – when is essentially rain forest.
Historically, meat has always been expensive, it’s only c20 factory farming that made it cheap so that it’s commonly seen as the core ingredient of every meal. But the reality is a terrible cost. If meat farming is made sustainable then quantities will plummet and prices rocket, which is how it should be. But that would probably also cause riots.
I used to presume a meal had meat and fish in it
Now meat, in particular, is rare in the Murphy household and it is never from a mammal.
Currently it looks like democide by default and there are all sorts of structural reasons why it’s hard to change this. (As few will know better than you, Richard).
These include climate always losing out to more urgent political matters, bad actors, pollution paradox, dark money etc etc.
A consumerist approach won’t work. If some of us go vegan, wear second hand clothes and cycle it gets drowned out while some are free to choose private jets, gas guzzling cars and a fast fashion lifestyle. And to force everyone into the former lifestyle would feel uncomfortably like eco-fascism.
Regarding the Med becoming uninhabitable I’m most worried about the nuclear powers. Israel, India, Pakistan and swathes of both China and the USA are set to become unihabitable as cold wildernesses in Canada and Siberia begin to look quite temperate. It seems likely that force will be used to take territory.
Food supply could be addressed by changing our diet, particularly to a more plant-based diet but we are not yet at the point of telling people they can’t eat steak every day – heck we are still subsidising meat which is truly daft.
Your point 3) is being addressed by the Labour Party as we write. Faced with the prospect of not balancing the books they are rowing back on the £28 billion green commitment they made.
To solve climate we need an economy that is on a war footing, in the manner of the 1940 UK economy. And I fear that the only way we will get our economy on a war footing is to be in an existential war.
The Guardian also has a small report about a TV weather forecaster in the US mid-West who tried gently to introduce the concept of global warming into his forecasts and had to quit his job after death threats to him and his family.
Seemingly we have now reached the point where for many the truth has been so undermined by organised lying and misinformation paid for by wealthy vested interests that the reality you understand to be true now has the same characteristics as fanatical religion.
Entirely unsurprising that the beneficiaries of this development, in this country the Tories, are today campaigning to stop more ordinary people from going to University. Nothing to do with the fact that the University educated overwhelmingly vote against the Tories of course.
In a masterpiece of Black Comedy the Tories claim that they are doing this to prevent poor children from falling into debt.
The media over the last few days has been making us aware of the unprecedented high temperatures in many countries to the south of us which meteorologists are telling us is due to climate change. It hasn’t really registered with the media that 46% of Britain’s food is imported and climate change is bound to reduce the quantity available. There is no guarantee the UK will be able to compensate by growing more given that climate change effects here according to the scientists will likely be for more monsoon effect rain with the possibility of flooding.
We can perhaps expect the media not to engage in much joined up thinking but politicians we do expect. What in reality we are getting is most parties being dogged by fiscal conservatism so much so for example we have Keir Starmer telling us he is “laser-focused” in his thinking but then announces he is putting spending for tackling climate change effects on ice! I don’t think it unreasonable to suggest his grey matter has in fact been “laser-scrambled” by his ludicrous adoption of fiscal conservatism dogma!
Does any major UK political Party *care* that Earth Overshoot Day is just 17 days away?
https://www.overshootday.org/about/
All that there is
Lives on
All that there is
From a purely selfish point of view, we (the UK) needs a Dutch farming revolution – huge areas of crops grown under glass and powered by green energy. Dyson (the hoover guy) has started the ball rolling, but we should be looking at the Netherlands for what can be done.
Similarly with energy. We have huge potential with offshore wind. We’re hoping to build 50GW capacity in less than 10 years. We should be looking not at 50, but at 200GW, along with hydrogen production and other storage solutions. We should also be actively ‘repowering’ our older winfarms and reaping the gains from modernising existing installations. And we should be covering our car parks and our roofs with solar panels.
Note. None of this requires new technology. We already know how to do it!
With a 1 meter rise in sea level the Netherlands and East Anglia (the Fens) all disappear
That solution does not work well….
At 4mm/year a 1m rise in sea level would take 250 years.
Around a quarter of the Netherlands are already below sea level.
Humans have proven adaptable to harsh conditions, provided we’re given the freedom to be so.
Well said DavidN
Oh dear, linear thinking
If you do not recognise the existence of discontinuities in climate change and the impact of tipping points ypu clearly have not the slighest idea what you are talking about.
I entirely agree with you. But obviously both our government (and government in waiting) and those who vote for them have decided instead that killing as many Russians and Chinese as possible before the end is the desirable option and best use of our resources. War: always humankind’s response of choice.
I fear that you are correct. Democide appears to be baked in — the only question being whether it will be of the unplanned environment-wrecking variety currently underway or a more purposeful slaughter of “the other” in order to reduce humanity’s footprint.
You have articulated something dark this morning that has been at the back of my mind for some time.
I suppose when we look at human history, before the invention of money and even after, human beings upped and moved around together during changes to the seasons and adapted like most other animals.
But now things are much more different – we have nation states in what are always within disputed boundaries, some not. These changes are now more globalised – I’ve paid particular attention to what has been happening in Australia this last few years and it is really frightening.
What is happening in southern climbs is really important to get our heads around. The Northern hemisphere thinks its going to get away with it – but we’re not.
There are two barriers for me operating at the moment preventing the penny from dropping.
One is extreme wealth who have decided that the rest of us are expendable – merely collateral in the changes that will take place. Most of us are polar bears now – we’re just ‘unlucky’. The rich need the money to keep coming so that they can save themselves so we can forget about any real change. The capitalism we have tolerated is one where it is OK for most if not all the output accrues to the owners and its funders.
So it follows logically does it not that the ability to weather climate change also accrues to the wealthy at the top?
The other elephant in the room is fascism that enables us to see ourselves as special and more worthy of surviving than other peoples. That tool will be deployed to essentially protect wealth but portrayed as something to protect us all from having to working together with others to adapt and survive.
Looking at what has happened in the southern hemisphere and some of the genocidal nature of events, I’m filled with his dread that we have already shown that the world has a tolerance of watching peoples who are not us die en masse? We are already used to it.
These events were at the hands of national governments, and when the seas rise and land disappears, the drowned and disease ridden will not be dying because of climate change but still be dying by the hands of international governments this time who will refuse to allow mass emigration away from carbon-induced inhospitable areas of the planet.
There is so much to do. For example, I keep reading about the ‘food supply’. But what about fresh drinkable water? The seas are going to rise. Where’s our de-salination plants here and elsewhere? We need to be re-processing that sea water?!! I’m serious!
But no – it all takes money doesn’t it? And we have a culture dominated by accruing money for money’s sake – and not what it can do to solve problems. And the more money you accrue, the more you are worthy and others are not.
And the more money you have, the more the world will look to you to solve its problems because you will be considered to clever and wise. But the truth is, all the rich are good at is getting rich. They have no other intelligence than that. And so the wrong people are in charge. And so we go around and around in circles.
Money is the most under- utilised utility we have at the moment when you consider what it is actually being used for – yachts, SUVs, football clubs, real estate, plastic surgery, designer clothes, acquisitions.
When one day someone or something writes human history (as we have done with the Dodo) – I wonder what they will make of it all?
Tut, tut, tut.
Am I hpappy with that? Nope. Been having sleepless nights (and I am serious) about this for the last half decade at least and it’s not been getting better – it was part of the reason I yhrew my all at working to try to get a Corbyn lead government (for al it’s faults), and now this https://www.theguardian.com/news/2023/jul/12/red-alert-inside-the-14-july-guardian-weekly the El Nino
…and …wel. You probabpy all know it’s bad, and what’s also really clear is that it’s only people like you and your commentators (excepting trolls) that have any idea of the urgency and predicatment we are in… and of course unpopular groups like Just Stop Oil.
And yet The US, China and India continues with little, if any consequence.
So you beieve in mutally asured destruction?
https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/united-kingdom
And do you think that any of the three countries will slow down soon enough?
Who knows?
But if we don’t try the result is the end of life on earth and I do not want my children to suffer that fate
You seem to
Why? Please explain
I don’t have children for the very reasons yo describe in this blog post.
But, as I’m sure you are aware, it is not a small family going abroad for a holiday no and again, it is not small family run farms, it is not a person of mature years pottering about in a small car for minimum miles.
It is agriculture on a grand scale (see The US etc….) Frequent business fliers who could use conference calls, road haulage industries that get favourable treatment over rail, and, above all, capitalism, neoliberalism and worst of all, human nature.
Don’t misunderstand me, I agree with your analysis, I just don’t see sufficient change from those who matter.
I accept that
So the pressure has to continue
Just Stop Oil are right. I cannot believe that any fossil fuel that is extracted will not be burned. Carbon capture should be focused on reducing the CO2 in the atmosphere. We are already too hot!
Questions:
1. Given that the fossil fuel companies have known this is happening for decades, are they just selfish and what plans do they have for their own future? They must understand what is going to happen.
2. How do you deal philosophically with the fact that our world is coming to a horrible end?
3. Is there any other species that has destroyed its habitat? Maybe viruses where the analogy might be Elon musk who probably plans to leave earth and infect somewhere else. Good luck with that!
Apologies for delay in getting to this.
Re 1), yes they are just selfish. That is the core idea in neoloberalism
Re 2) I don’t accept that idea
Re 3) I am not sure. But I am intent on trying to stop us doing so.
When Jut Stop Oil brings our attention to the oncoming ecocide 0ur ‘democracy’ a plaything in control of a supine media thinks protest should be treated like terrorism. What hope is there? Greens have been drawing attention for decades on this subject and have been ridiculed as sandle wearing, wooly hatted muesli eating dreamers but now the climate and ecological ignorance is really coming home to roost. We ain’t seen nothing yet!
So good once again, Richard.
Even after September 1939, the British foreign secretary Lord Halifax wanted to negotiate a peace treaty with Hitler. Chamberlain’s war efforts were constrained – they were failing – in May 1940, when Churchill became Prime Minister.
Rather than accommodate half-heartedness, he formed a coalition government and convinced the country that ‘We will never surrender’.
More than ever, Britain now needs a coalition government and an absolute commitment to cutting carbon dioxide pollution to the maximum possible extent and as rapidly as possible.
Economics, employment, travel and everything else must follow that rather than constrain it.
Professor Kevin Anderson has been insisting for two or three decades that we need to aim for *zero* (not net zero) in all areas apart from farming.
The Italian Grand Prix was cancelled recently because of floods. Now Italy is beset by heat waves.
It is time to cancel all forms of racing that use fossil fuels – cars, motorbikes, boats and aircraft.
Having started to challenge the need for entertainment, let’s continue. The Olympics and all the professional sports – tennis, golf, rugby, football and the rest, all depend for their viability on vast emissions of polluting carbon dioxide by vehicles, aircraft and ships.
We value our children too highly to allow ourselves to be distracted by activities that are likely to ensure their premature demise. Local, amateur competitions can be devised.
And that is just the start.
Sometime you will be proved right
It may be too late, but you will be proved right
Having worked as a mining engineer, in Africa, for nearly 20 years the critical thing is not just the temperature but also the humidity. If the humidity is too high your sweat will not evaporate and you will quickly get heat stroke, go unconscious and die. This can happen within 5 to 10 minuets.
It nearly happened to me when I was inspecting a poorly ventilated tunnel but I recognised the situation, found a hole in the ventilation duct, opened my overalls and laid down under a hole in the vent duct, the breeze increase the evaporation from my skin and I recovered.
I am concerned that some areas in the world such as equitorial Africa could be come uninhabital quite soon.
This seems quite likely
In Saudi, the worst time of the year is August/September as is said,the humidity is so high that physical work is virtually not possible around the mid-day hours.
As a wearer of glasses you were rendered blind on leaving the air conditioned areas and venturing out , the condensation on glass lenses was instantaneous.
Early work starts and long lunch breaks, evening work.
Some time ago now but that was when temperatures of 40c were not common every day in the summer months, August was always in the mid to high 30’s with 90% humidity reported.
Common Salt tablets were withdrawn and electrolyte mineral drinks used.
The mantra “Going for Growth” is as treacherous as “Make Friends with Change”. Essentially they both mean the same – bundle up the things that we desperately need to happen and the things that will hasten disaster, talk as if they are all the same – and then, most of the time, junk the kinds of growth and the changes we need, and push ahead with the kinds that are going to kill us.
The other disastrous mantra is “there’s no such thing as a Magic Money Tree”, which has a hypnotic power over almost the whole spectrum of politicians, and people in general. Of course there’s a Magic Money Tree, but it needs to be handled intelligently.
Lord of the Flies.
That’s human nature.
Ungovernable,
in a crisis.
On the subject of eating meat, can I recommend George Montbiot’s “Regenesis”? He makes a very good case for replacing meat with lab grown bacteria. No, really, much better than it sounds; minimum land use, maximum output and allowing for rewilding (yes, I know – only in those areas not razed to the ground by fire). Of course this only addresses one of the problems facing us …
On another subject – I am one of those praying for a coalition after the next GE. They work perfectly well in other countries, cross party committees work very well indeed in our country. Once we’ve got that we MUST get PR, then our Green votes will count. Think Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs – start with the bottom layer, save the planet first, then address the other issues in order of priority.
I found the book hard going but I agree the sentiment
So on agriculture, Russia and Canada will benefit from this. The Middle East and Africa will be devastated, and the human wave is on Europe’s doorstep. You have seen nothing yet in terms of migration.
The rise in sea levels will devastate coastal cities around the world, case in point the Netherlands which is already studying floating buildings as they prepare to become the worlds largest houseboat along with Florida
Forecast major harvest losses in Canada where massive fires continue to rage. The loss of Arctic sea ice and a predictable jet stream, accelerated heating in high northern latitudes, mean earlier ideas of safe regions are no longer valid. Prof Murphy’s two articles today don’t quite inhabit the same world. Maybe they can’t be reconciled as industrial civilisation doesn’t have the capability to transition instead of collapse.
I am not sure what contradiction you are claiming
Richard, just to amplify your point (1) re: “What if much of the Mediterranean becomes uninhabitable? Where do its people go?” – I read an authorative UN report about 8 years ago which enshrined the idea that by 2035 some 65 million Africans would be “on the move” i.e. displaced because of desertification (the southward advancement of the Sahara ) of much of the Northern part of central Africa.
We know why so don’t need to labour the point.
We can already see the start of this with Italy (mainly Sicily due to its close proximity to the North African coast) bearing the brunt of it.
I can all too easily imagine the Tory Party extending its “stop the boats” nonsense by getting Murdoch to publish “…and they’re all coming to a street neaer you…”