From extreme heat to sinking venues: how are festivals coping with climate change?

The worsening effects of climate change and hotter, longer, drier summers are having an effect on our big summer outdoor festivals. There are the usual concerns: is there enough drinking water, sunscreen? What about shaded areas and ventilation in tents?

‘You don’t want to be on an open boat on a river in the
middle of the day. It’s too hot and the sun is too sharp.’ 

But climate change has changed how large-scale public events run in previously unforeseen ways. Take Adelaide festival, for example, which wrapped up on Sunday. In recent years, the festival has run a venue on the River Torrens – The Palais, a floating pontoon, a nod to Adelaide’s 1920s floating dancehall, Palais de Danse, that sank in 1928. This year, the Palais was hosting events including a morning coffee and papers forum, as well as live music such as Washington and Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever.

Read the story from The Guardian by Brigid Delaney - “From extreme heat to sinking venues: how are festivals coping with climate change?”

The Real Politics of the Planetary Crisis

(This is part three of a work in progress. The series begins with The Last Decade and You, and continues with On Climate, Speed is Everything.

In the last two pieces, I pointed out how getting on the right emissions reduction curve for this era means taking bold action, now. We must peak global emissions by 2020. Then we must cut them in half by 2030 — and then cut them in half again by 2040, and then again, by 2050 — while restoring the natural world and spreading sustainable prosperity. 

Because the planetary crisis is steepening — the longer we wait, the harder it becomes to solve the problems we face — failing to get on the right curve will mean that we end up, very quickly, on an even steeper curve. Wait too long and the curves we face become essentially impossible to meet.

We can fail catastrophically on climate. We’ll know that failure when we have delayed action so long that we find ourselves confronting an insurmountable emissions reduction challenge coupled with rising and untenable losses — a crisis where all humanity’s choices are bad ones. We will have then reached a point where a even drastic program of global carbon austerity — even when combined with our wildest gambles on trying to pull CO2 out of the air and engineer the planet’s temperature — will simply not be enough to avoid tragic, essentially permanent losses for all humanity.

Read the story by Alex Steffen - “The Real Politics of the Planetary Crisis.”