Our Climate Conversation

In the current UK climate, perhaps a strong new pair of wellies would be the ideal investment. The following year it might need to be some waders and soon afterwards your own rubber dinghy. But things might be different – we could experience prolonged summer droughts like that in 2023 in the rest of Europe causing poor crops and increased risk of wild fires. And of course higher food prices – always higher food prices.

Is this normal? Now it is, and we can do nothing about the existing situation except to change the way we do flood defences. The root cause of these extremes is what we are doing to the Climate. Pollution in the form of fossil fuel emissions is still increasing globally and raising the planet’s temperature – in 2023 by a record amount.

In the UK politicians and many newspapers tell us that we are the first country in the G20 to halve our emissions. Aren’t we doing well and playing a leading role? Perhaps we should ease up and wait for others to catch up? Unfortunately this is big-time creative accounting because it pretends that the emissions from all those items that we import from China, India and other manufacturing centres and the cost of getting them to us, have nothing to do with us – they are not our responsibility! This is plainly wrong. When these emissions are factored in, our reduction is lower than 30%, less than 1% a year on average over the period from 1990 Our World in Data, Hanna Ritchie

In 2015 Paris COP we agreed to try to hold global temperature increases to 1.5 degrees C by 2050. The UK signed up to this and was even the first country to declare a Climate Emergency (in 2019). But at the current rate, this country is due to use up its emissions allocation towards the end of this year! We all have come to accept that Climate Change is a massive problem and it is caused by humans burning fossil fuels. What we have not accepted is the urgency for action – it’s a form of denial. Our politicians say that we can carry on very much as usual and we will drift down to net zero emissions by 2050, and we want to believe that don’t we. But taking this course will generate three times more emissions.

To stabilise the planet we need to take deep transformative action even if we may be missing the 1.5 degree target. Every fraction of a degree more is important and worth fighting for.

What does this mean for each of us? Clearly the Government is not going to save us. There are limited impacts we can achieve as individuals. Our best chance is to work together as a community. Hope survives whenever people come together.