CityCyclingEdinburgh Forum » Debate!
Climate Crisis
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Posted 5 years ago #
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"The future you fear is already here." On side of purple boat in Trongate.
Posted 5 years ago # -
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The figures highlight the disproportionate carbon footprint of those who can afford to fly, with even a short-haul return flight from London to Edinburgh contributing more CO2 than the mean annual emissions of a person in Uganda or Somalia.
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Posted 5 years ago # -
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Earlier this month Opec declared Thunberg, and with her the other young climate activists, the “greatest threat” to the fossil fuel industry. Thunberg tweeted them her thanks. “Our biggest compliment yet.” Hers is a voice totally unlike the world’s usual power-cacophony: clean, simple, inclusive, the voice of someone refusing to beguile. She talks ethics to politics without flinching. She cuts through the media white noise and political rabble-rousing to get to the essentials. This is a communal voice and Thunberg is its lightning conductor, and no wonder: when you hear her speak or you read her speeches you know you’re in the presence of the opposite of cynicism – of a spirit, in fact, that rebuffs cynicism and knows that the way we act, every single one of us, has transformatory impact and consequence. “The real power belongs to the people.”
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Posted 5 years ago # -
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The launch of the Scottish Government’s public consultation on how to combat the global climate emergency has been condemned as “fiddling while the world burns”...
Another participant, Heather Urquhart, was disappointed that corporate responsibility, infrastructural change and reducing inequalities were not on the agenda. Only technology and behavioural change were put up for discussion, she said.
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https://theferret.scot/big-climate-conversation-scottish-government/
Posted 5 years ago # -
I've been saying this a lot to the OH, recently (and she is fully on board) but...
"We're doomed!"
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-48964736
Climate change: 12 years to save the planet? Make that 18 months
Posted 5 years ago # -
WhatsApp message from friend in Bonn earlier. It was 27 degrees / feels like 33 degrees. At 09:30.
Depressing chat with an intelligent & usually well-informed friend while swimming before work. She hadn't made the connection between the heatwaves and climate change - and the news she consumes wasn't making it for her. No contextualisation.
Posted 5 years ago # -
“and the news she consumes wasn't making it for her”
Disappointing but completely understandable in today’s ‘pick ways of confirming your biases’ media landscape.
Those making policies and laws, locally, nationally and internationally, can’t be so unaware of ‘connections’.
But most are doing little apart from arranging for (and assuming the possibilities of) business as usual/more of the same.
Posted 5 years ago # -
Disappointing but completely understandable in today’s ‘pick ways of confirming your biases’ media landscape.
Thing is she doesn't go out to avoid environment stuff, and she's on "our side" - but she's an old-school TV news viewer & sometime print news reader...
Posted 5 years ago # -
I may have been late departing home to do some work because I was trying to explain that the Late Mediaeval Warm Period & Little Ice Age were regional phenomena...
Update: Bonn friend says where she works is at 40C now. And rising.
Posted 5 years ago # -
I had a similar realisation recently when a relative asked me something along the lines of "Is global warming actually real?"
Person is intelligent, well educated, reads a broadsheet newspaper, watches the news daily. Not meaning to imply that any/all these things are necessary to know about climate change, but they should be sufficient.
Utterly despairing.
Posted 5 years ago # -
My friend said "but couldn't it just still be warming after the last Ice Age?" This is what climate confusers wanted - misinformation / suggestions that the science isn't settled / casting of just ENOUGH doubt plays into the hands of vested fossil fuel / status quo interests at least as well (and much more subtly and harder to call out) than fostering frothing hardcore deniers / conspiracists.
It's a problem. (And not one we can solve by calling people idiots - I am eyeing some of the supposedly "helpful" climate twitter people.)
Posted 5 years ago # -
“And not one we can solve by calling people idiots - I am eyeing some of the supposedly "helpful" climate twitter people.”
Missed that, fortunately.
As I’ve said before, even if you can ignore CC/E - and even more if you want to believe it’s not true (or believe ‘there’ll be a technofix coming soon’) - resource shortages: soil, water, food, minerals etc (and related equity issues) are things that need addressing and generally not being dealt with either.
Instead there remains (and arguably increasingly so) the ‘need more economic growth to pay for all the ‘nice’/‘soft’ things’ - like clean air, decent homes, biodiversity, good health etc.
Posted 5 years ago # -
Oh to have such certainty about the future -
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Johnson outlined to a noisy Commons his vision of a post-Brexit UK in 2050 as “the greatest and most prosperous economy in Europe at the centre of a new network of trade deals”.
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Posted 5 years ago # -
Part of the problem -
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jul/25/amazonian-rainforest-near-unrecoverable-tipping-point
Posted 5 years ago # -
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The speed and extent of current global warming exceeds any similar event in the past 2,000 years, researchers say.
They show that famous historic events like the "Little Ice Age" don't compare with the scale of warming seen over the last century.
The research suggests that the current warming rate is higher than any observed previously.
The scientists say it shows many of the arguments used by climate sceptics are no longer valid.
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https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-49086783
If only Govs believed ‘experts’ anymore.
Posted 5 years ago # -
Missed that, fortunately.
Oh, was a general observation rather than a specific instance I had in mind.
Posted 5 years ago # -
Johnson's new Environment secretary, Theresa Villiers, is not only pro-Brexit (obvs) but also pro-fracking and voted against the setting of targets to reduce CO2 emissions. Johnson says he'll stick with the UK's commitments to become carbon neutral made by May during her last days in office, but who on earth thinks we can trust him to deliver on that?
Posted 5 years ago # -
Posted 5 years ago #
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I know I've posted it before, but I still think that the best link for anyone asking "hasn't all this happened before"-type questions is the xkcd graph:
It's all in that final hockey-stick curve...
Posted 5 years ago # -
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Sea levels are rising around the world, but in this region another local factor is helping speed up coastal degradation: swathes of mangrove forests have been destroyed to make way for industrial shrimp farms which have proliferated even inside protected reserves.
Many Honduran shrimps are exported to the US and the UK, where they are sold in major supermarket chains including Waitrose, Sainsbury’s and Marks & Spencer.
“The industry destroys huge mangrove sites promising development, but actually creates very few jobs – and actually increases poverty by restricting fishing access for locals,”
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Posted 5 years ago # -
Driving licence in UK??
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2019/jul/31/india-guns-trees-punjab-firearms-licence
Posted 5 years ago # -
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BlackRock, the world’s biggest investor, has lost an estimated $90bn over the last decade by ignoring the serious financial risk of investing in fossil fuel companies, according to economists.“
Posted 5 years ago #
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