Tory MPs call the green transition ‘unaffordable’. Europe is proving that’s a lie
While all eyes were on another horror, our war against the living world went nuclear. Over the weekend, temperatures at some weather stations in the Arctic rose to 30C above normal. Simultaneously, at certain weather stations in the Antarctic they hit 40C above normal. Two events, albeit off the scale, do not make a trend. But as part of a gathering record of extreme and chaotic weather, these unprecedented, simultaneous anomalies are terrifying.
On their heels came news of another horrific event: mass coral bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef during a La Niña year. La Niña is the cool phase of the Pacific cycle. Until now, widespread bleaching had happened only during the warmer El Niño years. The likely impacts of the next El Niño are too awful to contemplate.
We knew that climate breakdown would happen abruptly. Earth systems that seemed stable, lives that seemed safe, would slip from under us. All that we took for granted would suddenly be in play. It could be happening now.
A characteristic of complex systems is that it’s hard to tell how close to their critical thresholds they may be until they have been crossed. Are we now passing the tipping points? The only rational response is to act as if it’s not too late, and as if we have the briefest of opportunities to stabilise the system before it slides.
Instead, as if to announce its intention to push us past the point of no return, the UK government floated plans to cut fuel duty this week. Since the Cop26 climate summit last November, it has approved one new oil and gas field in the North Sea and proposes to approve six more. A paper published yesterday by Dr Dan Calverley and Prof Kevin Anderson at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research shows that to permit
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