Let’s Say I Wanted to Escape Climate Change. Where Should I Go?
So you want to escape climate change. That’s a reasonable impulse — climate change rivals nuclear war for the greatest threat to human life in the history of our species’ existence.
So you want to escape climate change. That’s a reasonable impulse — climate change rivals nuclear war for the greatest threat to human life in the history of our species’ existence.
Generations of Hollywood films have conditioned us to expect snowbound Christmases, even though they are no longer the norm for Missouri (Meet Me in St. Louis), modern London (Love, Actually), or most of the other cities where such movies are set.
If you’re someone who’s curious about the geopolitical implications of carbon fuel and the ecological havoc it wreaks, you’ve probably come across some of Richard Heinberg‘s work. This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak with this senior fellow at the Post Carbon Institute.
We speak with Kevin Anderson, professor in climate change leadership at Uppsala University’s Centre for Environment and Development Studies, and 15-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg about the drastic action needed to fight climate change and the impact of President Trump on climate change activism.
There’s a reason that few people are thinking about world grain supplies. Last year saw record worldwide production of grains and record stocks of grains left over. But this year worldwide production slipped about 2 percent, owing in large part to the plunge in Australia’s production caused by an ongoing severe drought.
Although the effects of climate change seem to be near to apocalyptic over the long term, over the
short term taking signficant action to cut emissions also appears to be a tremendous challenge.
The fact that climate change is mostly caused by the rich and yet the poorest, who have done least to cause it and have the least resources to respond, will be hit most seriously by the damaging impacts – is uncomfortable. But it is important.
What the death of ancient trees are now telling us about climate change, concludes Beresford-Kroeger, is that we must “make a daisy chain of people willing to improve our lot.”
In British Columbia alone, wildfires released between 150 and 200 megatonnes of carbon dioxide in 2017. That’s more than twice the volume created by human activities in the province.
Quite suddenly, in the wake of the recent IPCC report, it’s become commonplace to talk about a global climate emergency. Al Gore told PBS on 12 October: “We have a global emergency. You use a phrase like that and some people immediately say, ‘okay calm down, it can’t be that bad.’ But it it is.”
Rather than sharing the distractions now capturing the attention of other drivers, we must each retrain ourselves to pay attention to the instrument panel and the road ahead of us. Abandoning old habits and making new ones requires effort. But some habits are so unwise that changing them is a life-or-death affair.
The latest report from the IPCC is the first to abandon the measured tone of its previous ones and foretell what it considers a climate catastrophe for human civilization unless the world makes an abrupt U-turn and begins dramatic reductions in greenhouse gas emissions almost immediately.
And yet, even this forecast is probably too conservative in its pronouncements.