Are we going to burn this planet within our lifetimes?
Hottest June on record, extreme weather events, Canadian forest fires, Antarctica shrinking, insane sea temperature stats, the four hottest days ever ... this is really bad, isn't it?
June 2023 was the hottest June on record, 1.89°C above the average global temperature for the month, and 0.13°C above the previous global record in 2020.
It was the hottest June ever recorded in the UK, the Netherlands, and the entire Caribbean region, Antarctic sea ice was at its lowest ever level for the month, and smoke from wildfires in Canada shrouded cities in the US into dystopian orange smog.
June 2023 was the 47th-consecutive June and the 532nd-consecutive month with temperatures above the 20th Century average.
The excess heat isn’t dissipating in July. China’s record highest temperature was recently smashed by a whopping 1.7°C, and southern Europe is baking in another heatwave, following on from last year’s.
The four hottest days since records began were recorded on consecutive days between July 4th and July 7th, with a new all time high average global temperature of an unprecedented 17.2°C.
Some of the excess heat can be explained by the El Niño weather pattern, which causes rising temperatures in the Pacific, but you simply can’t explain away the hottest temperatures ever recorded by pointing at a cyclical recurring weather phenomenon.
Climate change is causing these soaring temperatures, and we should be concerned about it, not just because of the damage already done, but because the pace we’re doing it is still increasing.
The majority of the increasing heat is being absorbed into the oceans (about 90%), and this year’s sea temperature stats make alarming reading.
In June scientists recorded sea temperatures up to 5°C above normal in British coastal waters, which could lead to devastating marine die-offs.
No wonder it was the hottest June ever recorded in the UK if the waters that surround our island are so unusually hot.
It’s not just temperature records that are smashing either. On July 13th Flightradar tracked an astonishing 137,225 commercial flights, smashing a record that’s been beaten again and again this year. So far in 2023 they’ve been tracking around 24,000 more flights per day than in 2022, and over 6,000 more flights per day than the final pre-pandemic year of 2019.
Is it really wise for us to be dramatically increasing the amount of CO2 we’re pumping into the upper atmosphere when we know global average temperatures have already risen by 1.1%?
Then there’s the issue of international freight shipping that accounts for more of the worst climate change emissions than all of the cars on the planet combined.
When that huge ship got stuck in the Suez Canal a few years back, causing a massive traffic jam of container ships, loads of people made (admittedly funny) memes about it, but few people asked why we’re using such polluting ships to transport such vast quantities of materials halfway around the planet.
The answer of course is capitalist profiteering. Greedy capitalists can increase their profit margins by shifting manufacturing to low-pay economies like China and Bangladesh, because what it costs to transport the goods across the globe to Europe and North America is more than outweighed by what they save through reduced labour costs, lower working conditions, and lack of environmental protection laws.
We’re needlessly burning vast amounts of fuel and heating the planet so that a bunch of capitalist profiteers can increase their already huge profit margins.
The only way to stop this level of environmental ruination would be through government intervention, and international co-operation.
However we’re all playing a part in it as individuals too.
Consider how much of the stuff you own was manufactured on the other side of the planet in order to increase capitalist profit margins; household goods and kitchen utensils from China; clothing and bed linen from Bangladesh; electronic devices from South Korea …
All of it comes with a carbon footprint, but we tend not to think about it when we need a new chopping knife, bedsheet, or Christmas tree lights do we?
I barely use my car more than once a week because I prefer to walk or catch public transport if it’s available, but I still burn way more than my own body weight in petrol every year despite my minimal usage. And every litre of petrol that gets burned creates around 2.2 kilos of CO2.
We’re all partly responsible to one extent or another, but it really doesn’t matter much in the scale of things how much we sort our bottles and cans; cut down our car use; buy reusable coffee cups; or try to buy local, if governments are unwilling to make major changes to avert what seems like looming disaster.
The Tory government hasn’t done nearly enough over the last 13 years, even deliberately impeding environmental action on numerous occasions by blocking onshore wind, actively subsidising fracking, and scrapping home insulation schemes.
And Labour is offering little hope either, after watering down their already disappointingly weak climate pledges to posture as “fiscally conservative” austerity hardcases for capitalist media propaganda rags, and Keir Starmer’s furious “I hate tree-huggers” rant.
I can’t tell you if we’re actually going to burn the planet and leave swathes of it uninhabitable within our lifetimes, but I can tell you that the direction of travel is now absolutely obvious.
The planet is heating; extreme temperatures and extreme weather events are becoming more and more common; and we’re still not reducing the amount of pollution.
Catastrophic global heating is inevitable unless we dramatically change our ways, and the only debate is how long it’s going to take to get there if we don’t.
It seems like humanity as a whole is behaving like the apologue of the frog in a boiling pot, that doesn’t notice the gradually rising temperature until it’s too late and ends up getting boiled alive.
I don’t always agree with the tactics of climate protesters, but I do agree with their message. We’re in severe danger of burning the planet purely for personal convenience and capitalist profits, and our comfortably wealthy political classes are clearly disinclined to do anything effective to stop it.
We reached tipping point a while ago. Scientists knew this was coming for years and years but they were ignored or vilified. I’m not a scientist but I have worked around them and they were convinced. I’ve believed it was coming because I’m a gardener and I’ve been aware of how the seasons have changed, how birds I grew up seeing have disappeared. People don’t want to acknowledge it because it means radically changing the way they live even in less affected countries like ours. And as a society we are so docile and apathetic about politics aren’t we? I remain astonished at how many teachers and NHS workers supported the Tories in the 2017 general election, how many people believed the lies about Brexit and, even now, still refuse to admit the appalling damage being done by the Tories to our country. Why should they therefore believe that human activity has altered the climate? We are still building houses in vulnerable coastal areas, still pumping sewage into our water system and still using chemicals which destroy our ecosystem. So yes we are going to destroy this planet on our lifetime. It’s already happening in countries around the world. Our politicians are too stupid and/or too corrupt to do anything about it. I have adult children and young grandchildren and I wish I didn’t because their lives are going to become increasingly difficult. It’s so sad.
The heat we are feeling now was baked in decades ago, the future warming is is now guaranteed and irreversible and is progressing at a pace that climate modelling did not predict. We simply do not know how the effects of abrupt and irreversible climate change are going to play out , other than it is going to be catastrophic for all human and animal life on the planet. 50 C predicted for southern Europe this year after 40C last year and all the attendant wildfires which further heat the atmosphere . The ocean our largest carbon sink gets so hot it becomes a carbon emitter , again triggering devastating feedback loops. What is next year going to look like ? I'm no climate expert but the climate experts are terrified and so should we be. Unfortunately we do not have the political class or cooperative economic system that we need to mount a global coordinated fightback, and we are almost out of time . Capitalism will literally be the end of us.