The Independent: Earth needs a world climate crisis organisation, says eminent scientist

[OKIsItJustMe]

Earth needs a world climate crisis organisation, says eminent scientist

Such a body, which could be established through the UN, would help facilitate a united global effort against climate change.

Danny Halpin

Countries should band together and form a world climate crisis organisation akin to the World Health Organisation (WHO), to steer humanity through the unfolding disasters associated with the heating planet, one of the UK’s leading climate scientists has said.

Sir David King, former UK chief scientific adviser and chairman of the Climate Crisis Advisory Group, said it is now “almost certain” that the global average temperature will rise to at least 2C above pre-industrial levels, which scientists have warned could lead to further irreversible heating.

At 1.2C the Earth is already experiencing severe heatwaves, wildfires, storms, sea-level rise and species decline, with UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres saying: “The era of global warming has ended, the era of global boiling has arrived.”

This is primarily driven by the burning of fossil fuels since the industrial revolution and has led to a build up of greenhouse gases – mainly carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide and water vapour – in the atmosphere.

…

Maybe the IPCC could be converted into this organization…

[Think. Again.]

1. I think this is agreat idea...

...but I think any and every attempt to organize and create momentum away from the use of fossil fuels is a great idea.

But of course, we must be honest with ourselves, the fossil fuel industry itself is working MUCH harder than we are in their efforts to slow and stall any progress in a real transition away from CO2 emissions.

We must be extremely diligent in guarding against the infiltration of any organizational effort. Just as the COP conferences have been highjacked, and how the UK's Sunak is now building his own anti-transition front organizations, we must not be fooled by the "greenwashing" that the CO2 industry is spending so much time, money, and effort on.

[orthoclad]

2. Corporations and Big Money are well-organized

they will fight until the last human, while greenwashing us to think they're helping.

We might look to countries of the Global South which have been, are, and will be suffering the worst effects. Like Pakistan, which had half its land flooded by a super-monsoon. Or Iran, which just experienced wet bulb temps of 92.7. The First World corps will be too busy watching the bottom line and greenwashing.

Harvard Law Review published a paper saying that oiligarchs could face homicide charges. That would be useful.

[Think. Again.]

3. yes..

...getting serious about pushing back against the CO2 industry in any way possible, like litigation and charges for actual crimes they commit, would help to break them down.

Charging thier co-conspirators like insurance and marketing companies also.

Building and keeping up a consistent wall against what we KNOW they are trying to do is important right now.

[orthoclad]

4. Insurance companies might become allies

They're the ones who have to pay out for disasters. They're abandoning Florida, but they can't retreat from markets forever. Look into re-insurance companies: the big money which insures insurance companies.

Maybe the worst culprit is fiduciary duty law, wherein corporations can be sued by stockholders for not maximizing returns and showing a profit quarterly, the epitome of the short-term thinking which drives the capitalist economy. This is what drives the blindness to external costs.

[OKIsItJustMe]

9. They are also abandoning California

In John Brunner's The Sheep Look Up, the life insurance companies are threatened financially, because their business model was built on the idea that life expectancy was always increasing, but now, it was decreasing.

…

10 April 1993

…

What frightens me in retrospect about The Sheep Look Up, with its vision of a world where pollution is out of control, is that I invented literally nothing for it, bar a chemical weapon that made people psychotic. Everything else I took straight out of the papers, and magazines like New Scientist. But then, I have long been resigned to the fact that no matter how ghastly a plot element I may devise for a story, it will never outdo what I am certain to find in the next day’s news.

…

[orthoclad]

10. Yeah, good book.

I like Brunner. Great quote.

And John Wyndham. He wrote about bio engineering (triffids), nuclear war, mutation, ice caps melting (great scene of London flooding in The Kraken Wakes), satellite weapons, fundamentalism (The Chrysalids), more - back when Rachel Carson was working on Silent Spring. He gave Jefferson Airplane permission to quote The Chrysalids in Crown Of Creation. Wyndham deserves more credit.

Great link.
In The Jagged Orbit, he presaged the NRA-industrial complex (the Gottschalks).

[OKIsItJustMe]

12. Ever since reading it in the early 80's

I find myself looking at the news, and thinking of the The Sheep Look Up, (frequently) including the President of the US.

He does not (as I recall) include “The Greenhouse Effect”/“Global Warming” among the many ecological changes… I’ll cut him some slack, the book came out in 1972.

[orthoclad]

15. He had a general sense of foreboding

that we were devastating the environment. Cli-fi wasn't yet a thing.

When I smelled wildfire smoke this summer, I thought of the ending in Ireland: "What's that smell?" "That's America burning". (I hope I have the right book; it's been a while)

For a similar eco-catastrophe sf novel, look at Philip Wylie's The End Of The Dream. He makes a solid point that we're releasing many chemicals into the environment which might be mild or harmless in themselves, but we don't know how they combine, react, and interact. Although the graph showing temperature rise from 1850 was making the rounds then, that seemed like a slow disaster compared to drastic events like Love Canal and the Cuyahoga burning. Rachel Carson put the focus on toxic chemicals with Silent Spring.

We had to act immediately on toxics (but we didn't act thoroughly). Then we acted quickly on the ozone destruction. But fossil use/climate damage is like tobacco: it's easy to think that one more puff won't hurt, then that adds up to millions of puffs. There's a lot of profit in those puffs.

[OKIsItJustMe]

17. What's that smell?

Yes, you got the right book!

[hatrack]

16. Brunner was flat-out prescient . . . pollution, cybernetics, the Internet, corporatization . . .

And he was writing about it 50+ years ago.

[OKIsItJustMe]

18. Let's not forget a customized 24 hour news network

(with “autoshout” so you know when a story is of interest to you)

Yeah… he definitely understood which way the winds were blowing.

I will occasionally start people off on Stand on Zanzibar, and warn them, “OK, the first 200 pages or so, you may feel lost. Let me give you a few hints. Antimatter and PoppaMomma are am and pm. The JbutO state is Puerto Rico.”

Just keep at it, nothing is wasted…

[orthoclad]

19. Hipcrime vocab

[OKIsItJustMe]

20. "You just committed one"

Muckers - Every time some nut with an “assault rifle” opens fire on a crowd of people, with no apparent reason, I think of the “muckers.”

BBC: The 1968 sci-fi that spookily predicted today

[orthoclad]

21. and eptifying

super-trained military/spook killers.

recreational hallucinogens. Gay characters. The fact that the 21st century didn't start until 2001 (published same year as 2001, A Space Odyssey released). Supercomputers. Race. Fundamentalism.

(deleted spoiler of the brilliant 180-degree single-sentence ending)

One of my all-time favorite books. One of the highest points of the sf New Wave.

[orthoclad]

5. And don't forget

some of those Global South contries have nukes. They're getting steadily more pissed off at the North.

[Think. Again.]

7. Yep...

This is becoming a national security issue that would justify an emergency declaration (as if it doesn't already).

[orthoclad]

8. Think of the borders

with a billion people trying to escape disasters.

[NNadir]

6. People rarely take scientists seriously. They're too busy reading news stories written by...

...scientifically illiterate journalists and then promoting the stories written by them.

My favorite joke is that one cannot get a degree in journalism if one has passed a college level science course with a grade of C or better.

Reading journalists and taking them seriously is a big part of the reason we spent trillions of dollars on solar and wind energy - thus entrenching fossil fuels - for no result.

[orthoclad]

11. Once again, Kim Stanley Robinson

anticipates developments, with his The Ministry For The Future.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ministry_for_the_Future
"Set in the near future, the novel follows a subsidiary body, established under the Paris Agreement, whose mission is to act as an advocate for the world's future generations of citizens as if their rights are as valid as the present generation's. While they pursue various ambitious projects, the effects of climate change are determined to be the most consequential."

The book opens with a mass-casualty heat and humidity event in India.

[OKIsItJustMe]

13. Predicting tomorrow is easier than predicting the future decades in advance

However, yes, Kim Stanley Robinson seems to get things pretty well.

[orthoclad]

14. And predicting is MUCH easier than

doing the work to make it come about.