We’ve just had the hottest June on record. Dr Karsten Haustein, a climate scientist at the University of Leipzig warns: “Chances are that July will be […] the hottest month ever: ‘ever’ meaning since the Eemian which is some 120,000 years ago”.
We’ve broken global heat records two days in a row this week:
Friends in New York State tell of their alarming wake-up to the reality of climate change when smoke from the Canadian wildfires kept them indoors. They had known intellectually, but they have been shocked into a bodily awareness, physically coughing and short of breath because of fires in a neighbouring country.
And let us not forget that these fires release carbon that had been locked in trees. Carbon we cannot afford to add to the CO2 levels recorded at 424 parts per million in May this year, an increase of 3 parts per million compared to the same time in 2022. https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/monthly.html
The Western Canadian Wheat Growers Association says the dry conditions in southern Alberta are already resulting in crop losses.
Oceanic climate scientists predict that half of the world’s ocean may experience marine heatwave conditions by September: https://research.noaa.gov/2023/06/28/global-ocean-roiled-by-marine-heatwaves-with-more-on-the-way/
NASA records that Antarctica is losing ice mass at an average rate of about 150 billion tons per year, and Greenland is losing about 270 billion tons per year, adding to sea level rise: https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/ice-sheets/
Every metric shows the global temperature, sea-surface temperature, ice loss, and other parameters, all going through the roof.
And yet these are the circumstances in which the UK government decides to renege on its climate finance pledge: https://www.businessgreen.com/news/4119501/row-escalates-reports-government-drop-climate-finance-pledge
Governments and businesses, global power actors, are already not doing enough. This is not a time to go back on existing promises.
The Westminster Government is obsessed with small boats on the English Channel. As the pressures of climate change, biodiversity change, and the global social justice crisis grow, migration will increase. Just as humanity is not separate from the environment, so human migration is not separate from the environment. What we see now on the English Channel is just a beginning as these processes accelerate. Treating it as a discrete issue is pointless. It cannot be separated from the context.
We cannot pretend that “The Environment” is something over there in the “To Do” pile. It is not. We are part of the environment: at the atomic level, we are carbon and water and minerals made from elements forged in ancient stars. At the individual level, we breathe the oxygen, eat the organic matter, live on the soil of the planet, and eventually return to it. At the species level, we roam and herd over the planet’s surface, using its resources, while shaping and being shaped by its processes. We are the environment, and the environment is us.
The “Poly-Crisis” is not something we can procrastinate about any longer.
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