A weather station in central Shanghai recorded nearly 313mm of rain in the 24 hours to 7am on Monday, its highest 24-hour rainfall in more than 150 years of records. Another station in the city recorded nearly 400mm.
An inch and a half of rain in a day is not, in fact, a totally unprecedented amount now, is it?
How does one know when a government is in actual emergency mode? From my studies of past mobilizations, real emergency action has certain distinct markers. Governments in genuine emergency mode:
Tell the truth about the severity of the crisis and communicate a sense of urgency about the measures necessary to combat it.
Spend what it takes to win.
Create new economic institutions (state enterprises and public programs) to get the job done.
Shift from voluntary and incentive-based policies to mandatory measures.
Commit to leave no one behind.
Climate fascism here we come, eh?
But renewables are already cheaper, and better for us, than fossil fuels in almost all situations.
He then links to Max Roser. Who is a lovely chap but not actually correct on all things.
We can indeed say that generating electricity can be cheaper by renewables. Which is a different statement from running a nation on renewables is cheaper. It’s that second which is important of course and it’s also that second which is not true as yet.
But it’s not just him, and it’s not just journalism. The radical right moves as a pack, and Heath is just one of many now insisting that climate catastrophe is something we should simply suck up.
How weird. Absolutely everyone says – no, really, everyone – that we’re going to have to do some adaptation. Which is what sucking it up is, adaptation.
George does seem confused on this subject.
Sg_plumber asked: How come pretty much everybody (at least on TV) always forgets to mention that yes, the climate crisis is fuelling these extreme weather events?
Jonathan Watts: I agree. This is not just exasperating, it is frightening. The climate and nature crises are the greatest threats humanity has faced, yet many media organisations downplay or ignore it. Social media is even worse, propagating misinformation and distracting people from the root cause of the problem (petrochemical companies, big agriculture and every rising emissions of greenhouse gases). The Guardian is able to devote much of its resources to covering these topics because it does not have an owner and because our readers make very clear that they want a big share of their contributions to go to this topic.
So the self-selecting staff are in – as happens with groupthink – an ever faster purity spiral.
Cutting fossil fuel pollution is indeed a fundamental solution, and it must be accompanied by a never-ending list of other adaptation measures. I would argue our coverage is pretty good at including both bits. Every article I’ve written on wildfires this summer has included rising temperatures and land abandonment.
But land abandonment is not driven by fossil fuel companies, is it?
Gold-Loan3142 asked: How do we challenge the mainstream ‘“perpetual growth” economics that infuses almost all discussion of the economy?
Jonathan: You have touched on one of the core issues. The obsession with endless GDP growth on a finite planet can only end in tears. The only question is when. There have been numerous academic challenges to this and alternatives, such as Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics and Bill McKibben’s Economics as if the World Mattered. There are also some very interesting studies and books on degrowth by the likes of Jason Hickell and many others.
Signing up to every fucking nutter out there isn;t going to help either.
If I can stray outside my journalist role, I have long believed that what the world needs is not just economic degrowth but ecological regrowth. We need a system of trade, currency, taxation, incentives that rewards countries and companies for restoring the world’s battered ecosystems.
And now you’re arguing to add more value – more economic growth, by definition.
The key is to do this while never letting the petro-companies off the hook. They have tried in the past to convince people that the responsibility for the climate crisis lies with individual consumers. That was why they pushed the idea of carbon calculators. But the real blame lies with them. Most of the big oil companies are expanding production and making record profits.
Those bastard oil companies, eh?
The real concern is that these fools consider themselves the adults in the room. Rather than the kiddies fooled by a charlatan like Hickel.
The extreme heat and drought stoking huge wildfires in Spain and France were made far more likely by the climate crisis, a scientific analysis has found.
Global heating made hot, dry and windy weather at least 20 times more likely in Spain and twice as likely in France, experts from the World Weather Attribution (WWA) consortium calculated. The finding is the latest to pin the blame for the continent’s sweltering and deadly summer firmly on the heating caused by the burning of oil, gas and coal.
As I keep pointing out, we had a wet winter therefore were going to have a fiery summer. It’s always hot and dry here, there are always fires, this is how the local environment works. How many, how big and how much burning the fires do depends upon how much fireload there is from the previous winter.
Lying bastard twats.
Families to be moved out of billionaire-owned tower after suffering without air con
Several councils to stop housing tenants in glass-fronted Britannia Point in London, where tenants were earlier told they could not use air con
Air conditioning is immoral, isn’t it? It’s escaping Gaia’s wrath and therefore no one should have it?
The Green leader, Marine Tondelier, who cut short a tour of France on medical advice that at seven months pregnant she should avoid breathing smoke-filled air in the south-west near a huge wildfire in Gironde, said the political class still had its head in the sand.
She said the government had ignored her plea for cross-party crisis talks to declare a national state of emergency on the climate this summer. She called for a new “climate welfare state” in France to help those whose lives were being affected as about 260,000 people were evacuated because of wildfires across the country.
But French politicians focused instead this week on arguments over budgets, crisis planning and criticisms over the levels of state funding for emergency services and equipment to fight fires, including water-bombing planes. The more complex longer-term issues of cutting emissions and structural societal changes to address climate heating were largely left aside.
You mean that no one was willing to agree with “structural societal changes” ? You know, abolish capitalism in order to appease Gaia? Shock, eh?
Of course, the scale of big oil’s climate liability will only grow in the coming years – this is, after all, not just the hottest summer of our lives, but the coolest summer for the rest of our lives. Someday, we can hope that the corporate actors responsible for such breathtaking havoc will face a made-to-fit tribunal that can fully address the ways they have condemned my five-year-old and countless children like him to a dangerous future. But we don’t need to wait.
Climate victims deserve justice now, and the officials responsible for pursuing that justice have all the laws they need to begin prosecuting big oil today. So next time you hear a climate disaster described as a crime, remember that this isn’t just rhetoric. These really are crimes. It’s time we treated them that way.
So let’s charge them all with involuntary manslaughter or some such and ……well, and then what? The lawyers get lots of money and then what?
Well, then we will have to move on to the idea that it’s actually us that uses oil, us that likes using oil. So do we all get prosecuted too?
Britain’s foreign secretary, Ed Miliband, is to indicate he will put the climate crisis and overseas development at the heart of UK international relations by taking up the country’s seat on the board at the World Bank.
The position, which is usually delegated to a junior minister, means Miliband will play an active role in shaping the changes to the World Bank that developing countries have called for, and ensuring the climate remains a core focus for overseas aid.
That’s why he moved. So he can ensure that the rest of the world goes bust by going Green too.
Pedro Sánchez says Spain is suffering effects of climate crisis as firefighters battle wildfires in France
But as I’ve said a number of times. It’s not hot summers that cause this. It’s wet winters. Last winter was very wet therefore there’s a lot of fire load out there. I did actually predict, last winter, that this summer would be bad for that very reason.
So there.
It’s not heat, it’s wet.
Impossibly high summer temperatures and a spate of wildfires after a winter of incessant rain has made the public recognise the reality of the climate crisis.
The cause of summer wildfires is a wet winter which builds up the fire load. Well, that an rewilding, which removes the grazing animals which reduce it.
I’ve even seen The Guardian referring to it as “a shortage of goats” which is a phrase I invented. Well, at least it was original to me, even if someone else had it originally before me if you grasp that point.
Good, so we advance. Wildfires are caused by winter rains, rural depopulation and rewiliding. Not hot summers at all. We advance in our understandings of the world.
Heat pump households face winter warmth rationing as the drive to net zero raises increasing fears of blackouts.
By the end of next year, electricity suppliers will be able to remotely turn down heat pump central heating to help Britain’s energy system cope with high demand.
Suppliers are expected to do so on the instructions of the quango responsible for coordinating the grid, which is overseen by Ed Miliband’s Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ).
How long before someone starts to use it to punish BadThink?
In Spain, firefighters used to dealing with a couple of blazes at a time say they struggle with an increase in number and strength. The situation has been worsened by recent wet winters and springs that allow vegetation to flourish – leaving more surplus fuel when it inevitably dries in summer – as well as the abandonment of farmland that once broke up flammable countryside. On Thursday, authorities said they expected a large fire in rural Aragón, one of dozens still burning across the country, to take days to control.
Wet winters means more fireload. Abandoned land the same.
Sure, they’re still going “Oooooh, climate change” but at least they’re mentioning the right reasons now.
The heatwave that affected England and Wales in June killed about 440 people a day during its three-day peak, scientists have estimated. Across the whole of the June heatwave, plus the one in May, about 2,700 people lost their lives prematurely.
The data starkly illustrates the danger of extreme heat, which is being supercharged by the climate crisis. More than 40% of the people affected would not have died without the 1.4C of human-caused global heating to date, according to the analysis.
Now compare and contrast with those killed by cold snaps. As Our Man Bjorn has been known to note.
In a critical passage of its advisory opinion the ICJ held that a state’s failure to take appropriate action to protect the climate system from GHG emissions – including through fossil fuel production, fossil fuel consumption, the granting of fossil fuel exploration licences or the provision of fossil fuel subsidies – may constitute a violation of international law which is attributable to that state. From that perspective, any new fossil fuel exploration/exploitation (including in the North Sea) would be unlawful.
That’s a specifically green politics that has been smiuggled into international law. So, leave that court.
Legally speaking, the UK has a massive responsibility here. Governments are obliged to use every tool in their shed to stop major environmental harm. To actually do that, the UK needs to completely overhaul how it regulates big business. We are talking about new laws and rules that put a hard cap on the emissions private companies can pump into the atmosphere.
Really, just leave.
Not the answer she comes up with
Monica Feria-Tinta is a specialist public international law barrister at Twenty Essex; her book A Barrister for the Earth: Ten Cases of Hope for Our Future, is published by Faber.
Surprise, eh?
“If every extreme weather event ends up being attributed to climate change in one way or another, is it really attribution science … or just confirmation bias dressed up as science? A hypothesis that can explain everything risks explaining nothing,” he posted on social media on Thursday, responding to a scientific assessment showing Europe’s recent heatwave would have been impossible if not for the climate crisis.
And:
said: “Our country cannot afford a compromised USGCRP or NCA that peddles politically motivated disinformation echoing fossil fuel industry talking points.”
“Reconstituting the USGCRP only to place the National Climate Assessment under the auspices of an utterly unqualified climate science denier would jeopardize the integrity of one of the nation’s most important climate science resources,” said Martinez.
Who is the extremist here? Who the rationalist?
Mike Reader, the Labour MP for Northampton South, said: “Opening up the North Sea would be tin-eared while we’re dealing with record-breaking heat, and the second energy spike in four years caused by our over-reliance on oil and gas. Anyone who thinks this is a good time to take our focus off clean, secure power is frankly deluded.”
More oil means lower oil prices. Which would be good for price spikes, no?
However, the world’s leading energy economist, the executive director of the International Energy Agency, Fatih Birol, told the Guardian that Rosebank and other new fields under consideration would not reduce the price of oil or gas and would have little economic impact.
Ain’t that one of the cunts who’ve marched through the institutions?
One in every six babies in England are living in overheated homes, causing sleep disruption and serious health risks, according to new analysis.
The National Housing Federation (NHF) and the Chartered Institute of Housing (CIH) found that more than 70,000 babies are living in overly hot homes as climate change drives record temperatures across the country.
Glad I moved if that’s what climate change is going to do to the old home town….
Dust events, when thousands of tonnes of fine sand whipped up from the Sahara are dumped over Europe, are becoming more intense. These sometimes produce “blood rain” that leaves visible red streaks, and while generally harmless, the dust is not sterile but brings a freight of microorganisms.
We get them here in the Alentejo, they’re common that another 100 miles south in the Algarve. And of course they bring bugs with them. Obviously.
When the wind blows the other way, out into the Atlantic, they also fertilise the ocean. Iron being the missing element for the bottom of that ocean foodchain, often enough. So you get an algal bloom, then more fishies eating it and so on.
It’s why iron fertilisation of the ocean would work to beat climate change, d’ye see?
That’s also why international law says you’re not allowed to even experiment with this because that might be a solution that doesn’t involve socialism and medieval peasantry…..