Don’t despair: the climate fight is only over if you think it is

In response to Monday’s release of the IPCC report on the climate crisis – which warned that “unprecedented” changes were needed if global warming increases 1.5C beyond the pre-industrial period – a standup comic I know posted this plaintive request on her Facebook: “Damn this latest report about climate change is just terrifying. People that know a lot about this stuff, is there anything to be potentially optimistic about? I think this week I feel even worse than Nov 2016 and I’m really trying to find some hope here.”

‘Climate change is an inescapable present and future
reality, but the point of the IPCC report is that there is
still a chance to seize the best-case scenario rather than
 surrender to the worst.’

A bunch of her friends posted variations on “we’re doomed” and “it’s hopeless”, which perhaps made them feel that they were in charge of one thing in this overwhelming situation, the facts. They weren’t, of course. They were letting understandable grief at the news morph into an assumption that they know just how the future is going to turn out. They don’t.

Read the story from The Guardian by Rebecca Solnit - “Don’t despair: the climate fight is only over if you think it is.”

If you can't stand the heat, get out of the climate change debate

There is no shortage of things to talk – and worry – about this week.

More than 260 heat and low rainfall records
 were broken during the winter months, the
Climate Council says.

A glance at trending social media topics suggests "Las Vegas", "Tom Petty", potential moves for AFL players Tom Rockliff and Jake Lever and "National Boyfriend Day" are on the brain. But oddly missing from the list of talking points is the terrifying research released on Wednesday.

According to a study led by the Australian National University, Sydney and Melbourne should prepare for 50-degree summer days in the coming decades. Researcher Sophie Lewis said these 50-degree scorchers could occur even under the Paris Agreement's global warming limit of 2 degrees.

The study, published in Geophysical Research Letters, adds "such unprecedented temperatures would present onerous challenges to human and natural systems"

Read Judith Ireland’s comment in today’s Melbourne Age - “If you can't stand the heat, get out of the climate change debate.”

Hurricanes, Climate and the Capitalist Offset

Texans will find few consolations in the wake of a hurricane as terrifying as Harvey. But here, at least, is one: A biblical storm has hit them, and the death toll —38 as of this writing — is mercifully low, given its intensity.

Nature has no respect for our status symbols.

This is not how it plays out in much of the world. In 1998, Hurricane Mitch ripped through Central America and killed anywhere between 11,000 and 19,000 people, mostly in Honduras and Nicaragua. Nearly a decade later Cyclone Nargis slammed into Myanmar and a staggering 138,000 people perished.

Nature’s furies — hurricanes, earthquakes, landslides, droughts, infectious diseases, you name it — may strike unpredictably. But their effects are not distributed at random.

Rich countries tend to experience, and measure, the costs of such disasters primarily in terms of money. Poor countries experience them primarily in terms of lives. Between 1940 and 2016, a total of 3,348 people died in the United States on account of hurricanes, according to government data, for an average of 43 victims a year. That’s a tragedy, but compare it to the nearly 140,000 lives lost when a cyclone hit Bangladesh in 1991.

Why do richer countries fare so much better than poorer ones when it comes to natural disasters? It isn’t just better regulation. I grew up in Mexico City, which adopted stringent building codes following a devastating earthquake in 1957. That didn’t save the city in the 1985 earthquake, when we learned that those codes had been flouted for years by lax or corrupt building inspectors, and thousands of people were buried under the rubble of shoddy construction. Regulation is only as good, or bad, as its enforcement.

Read opinion piece in The New York Times by Bret Stephens - “Hurricanes, Climate and the Capitalist Offset.”

Are these the innovations that will save us from climate change?

Radical ideas and ground-breaking
innovations are needed if we are to 
stop global warming in its tracks.

It’s been a significant – some would say terrifying – year for climate data. Soaring temperatures have pushed planet Earth to its hottest period in recorded history; August 2016 was the warmest August on record and was tied with July 2016 as the hottest month since record-keeping began 136 years ago.

We are now living in a new “climate change reality”, with levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere having breached a symbolic threshold of 400 parts per million on average throughout the whole of 2015. Scientists warn that concentrations of CO2 are unlikely to dip below this mark for generations.

Elsewhere, the Arctic experienced its warmest winter on record and the region’s ice sheets are disappearing faster than expected, with repercussions that go beyond environmental risks like rising sea levels. As two Arctic experts opined in this recent piece: “We live in a connected world, and what happens in the Arctic does not stay in the Arctic.” Societies and economies are also at risk, they argue.

Read the World Economic Forum story - “Are these the innovations that will save us from climate change?”