Diary Of The Last Age

I began a novel about what I felt the impact of global warming would be.  In the first section I deliberately compared the social conflict over global warming to the Abolitionist movement in the 18th Century.  Five years ago I posted here about that: The most important deniers are the oil and coal companies and their enablers, members of the U.S. Senate. One of the most important oil company activists are the Koch brothers who have spent hundreds of millions of dollars directly or through groups they support financially. This group are the 21st Century analogues of the 19th Century Southern slave owners whose wealth and ways of life were threatened by the anti-slavery Abolitionists . They are prevailing at this point by their ability to create confusion and doubt about global warming.  I believe that twenty years from people will be looking back on where they were on the issue of climate change in the same way that people in the 18th Century looked back on where th...

The majority of Americans believe there's a climate crisis.   Here are poll results.

I've warned about climate migration before .  The second chapter of my novel, not yet completed, was going to be about the United States stationing machine guns at the border to fight off the immigrants.  I wish I had completed that chapter when I was working on the novel four years ago because it now looks prophetic. The United Nations is warning about food supply . The world’s land and water resources are being exploited at “unprecedented rates,” a new United Nations report warns, which combined with climate change is putting dire pressure on the ability of humanity to feed itself. A particular danger is that food crises could develop on several continents at once, said Cynthia Rosenzweig, a senior research scientist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and one of the lead authors of the report . “The potential risk of multi-breadbasket failure is increasing,” she said. “All of these things are happening at the same time.”  The result, they sugg...

Five years ago I posted about a comparison of global warming activists to 19th Century Abolitionists.  I wrote a chapter of a novel making that point more clear.  Todays "Warmists" will someday be compared to the 19th Century Abolitionists, fighting an opposition to oil and gas companies like Abolitionists fought against slaveholders. I found out about that time that Chris Hayes, of MSNBC, also made the same comparison.  Now that comparison has been made by David Attenborough . The attitude of young people towards tackling the environmental crisis is “a source of great hope”, David Attenborough has told MPs, as he predicted that polluting the planet would soon provoke as much abhorrence as slavery Asked by the Labour MP Vernon Coaker to expand on how public attitudes were shifting, Attenborough replied: “There was a time in the 19th century when it was perfectly acceptable for civilised human beings to think that it was morally acceptable to actually own another...

We are on track for 1000ppm by 2100 if we do nothing.  At 1,000ppm,  human cognitive ability drops by 21% .   Outdoor CO2 already reaches 500ppm regularly in industrial cities; indoors, in poorly ventilated homes or school workplaces, it can regularly exceed 1,000ppm. A  study of bedrooms in Denmark  found that overnight concentrations of CO2 exceeded 2,000ppm, with measurable effects on student’s performance the following day. The global warming deniers argue that CO2 is not a pollutant and therefore it's presence in the biosphere doesn't matter.  However, that just is not true.   Air pollution over London. Rising levels of outdoor pollution will mean levels rising indoors too. Photograph: Nick Ansell/PA  Indoor levels of carbon dioxide could be clouding our thinking and may even pose a wider danger to human health, researchers say. [.....] However, the authors of the latest study – which reviews current evidence on the...

The world is increasingly at risk of “climate apartheid”, where the rich pay to escape heat and hunger caused by the escalating climate crisis while the rest of the world suffers, a report from a UN human rights expert has said.   International climate treaties have been ineffective, the report said. Photograph: Arun Sankar/AFP/Getty Images  Philip Alston, UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, said the impacts of global heating are likely to undermine not only basic rights to life, water, food, and housing for hundreds of millions of people, but also democracy and the rule of law. Alston is critical of the “patently inadequate” steps taken by the UN itself, countries, NGOs and businesses, saying they are “entirely disproportionate to the urgency and magnitude of the threat”. His report to the UN human rights council (HRC) concludes: “Human rights might not survive the coming upheaval.” Another example , rich people with coastal property endangere...

Extinction Rebellion , a movement of young people demanding action on climate change, has been demonstrating in Europe, in particular, London.  I've posted about them recently.  A Banksy has appeared at the Marble Arch in London, a declaration that the time for action is now, From This Moment On Despair Ends And Tactics Begin.    It speaks for itself.  Now is the time for action.