Death by appeasement
Last week saw the highest temperature ever recorded in the United Kingdom, where I live. It happened in the east of England, and the mercury reached 40.3 degrees centigrade (104.5 degrees Fahrenheit). The comments this invited were simply beyond belief. “You people in Britain don’t know what temperature really is. Here in (fill in the blank) we’ve seen temperatures reach (fill in the blank).”
First of all this is emphatically not a contest. I’ve experienced higher temperatures than that myself, as long ago as the 1970s and 80s. That isn’t the point. The point is that it just doesn’t get to 104 degrees in the shade in England. It just doesn’t. That it did, and that we can expect it to happen again, very soon, that we know that the record will be broken soon, ought to scare the living crap out of all of you. That it isn’t scaring the living crap out of some of you and instead is being turned into a pitiful you-know-what-wagging contest is proof of just how far down the road to climate appeasement some of us have been led.
The truth of the matter is things are getting bad fast, and they are going to get worse even faster. Because that’s what happens when things deteriorate. The accumulation of bad results, due to the earth’s rising global temperature, creates a feedback loop phenomenon that deteriorates faster and faster with time. And if you think things are bad now consider this: we are just about 10 years away from seeing right now as “the good old days.”
By then a hothouse earth will be common, so common in fact that every summer will be inevitably horrid and predictably worse than the previous one. Crops will start to fail and certain foods we take for granted will become scarce, or even disappear entirely. Hurricanes will reach unprecedented destructive power. Whole countries, particularly in the tropics, will be in a constant state of crisis. The results will be almost Biblical: floods, fires and famine will become the order of the day almost everywhere.
Meanwhile we are being lied to on a daily basis by our leaders and our pundits. Even many climate scientists who publicly proclaim optimism are in fact scared to death. We need to learn the brutal, honest truth now so we can get to work — today, right this minute — and forestall the worst of it.
The days of preventing any further tragedies are over. Our best hope right now is to ameliorate the coming unstoppable damage. The good news is that there is much we can still do to stop the very worst of it. The worst of it is quite simple. If we don’t stop it, we are heading for extinction. Not by 2100 but by 2060, or perhaps even sooner.
The authors and finishers of our predicament aren’t the climate science deniers but the climate science appeasers. Those are the politicians and heads of corporations who make agreeable noises and set goals and make positive climate change intervention plans without any real commitment, with a readiness to abandon those plans or goals the minute they become inconvenient. Some of them know they are mouthing mere words. Some of them have no intention of doing anything. They are the leaders who continuously say, to quote Greta Thunberg, “Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. They are the appeasers. And we are dying by appeasement.
“Just look at what is happening already to a world which has only heated up by just over one degree,” says author and climate scientist Bill McGuire, “It turns out the climate is changing for the worse far quicker than predicted by early climate models. That’s something that was never expected.” And it’s going to continue to get worse in other unexpected ways, too, because such devastating interactions have unpredictable consequences.
Meanwhile, according to a recent United Nations report, the world population will reach 8 billion by November of this year. People are actually celebrating this fact. Ladies and gentlemen, we do not need more babies. We need fewer babies. What we have left to us right now are resources, and the more humans there are to consume those resources the worse things will get for us. So one thing you can do to help save the planet is, if you’re thinking about having kids, don’t. For one thing, you will be introducing them to a planet that is failing fast. This is no time to have children.
The only way out of this is for us — we the people — to take charge and insist that positive action be taken. It is an odious, difficult, infuriatingly thankless task. But if we don’t do it no one will. And the alternative is too horrible to contemplate. And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.