Posted this on RN Facebook. I don’t know why I keep doing that. Must be for the audience. But it’d be tiny, tiny and not worth worrying about. Bigger than here, though, which is really a private place.
Anyway some guy talking about Climate Change and the recent figures that indicate targets haven’t been met.
So I said:
They talk climate change again this morning. Two interesting sentences I reckon:
1.
‘not doing enough to slow down climate change’
and
2.
‘that’s a good point except any country could say the same except major countries it’s all little countries 1% here, 1% there’
1. Makes it very clear that the aim is only to ‘slow down’. There’s no suggestion of stopping or reversing. None. That’s sensible for that’s clearly the truth. But not normally seen to be the truth when agitators carry on about reducing emissions in order to ‘prevent’ or ‘stop’ or ‘take action’ re climate change.
So if we’re only hoping to slow it down just how much unslowed are we expecting to happen?
Obviously some. Obviously some is going to happen.
So right: get busy and prepare.
Get busy and prepare! That’s what should be being said everywhere. Massive preparation is required, possibly. Massive physical works maybe and massive administrative works.
Currently what’s being done? Nothing. That I know of. What do you know of?
Question 2.
He presents this sentence as a motive for getting busy doing what we can to cripple our nation in the interests of reducing emissions.
But in fact it is clearly a half truth on the one hand (at best) and a motive for giving up and relying on adjusting to the forecast future on the other hand.
A half truth because it clearly is NOT a 100% made up of 100 ‘little’ nations, little emitters. When in 2016 the top five emitters emitted 18 million Kilotons out of a total of nearly 36 million kilotons for the whole world.
That’s 50%. So there’s only half of the globe comprised of ‘little’ 1% emitters and of course even that’s an uneven list amongst them.
One way of looking at this is that more than half of the total emissions are completely untouchable – because made by the ‘big’ countries who aren’t going to do anything about it. So that makes it even more hopeless even trying.
And then again the list of ‘little’ emitters makes up the rest of the struggling world and the smaller the emissions the more that country needs to make those emissions we could say as a generality.
They can’t afford to do anything else. So there’s buckley’s chance of expecting to find them doing anything else.
Just as India can’t afford to do anything else. India represents something like a quarter of the world’s population and they’re poor. Most of the world is poor.
They can’t afford to do anything but what they’re doing.
The major part of the emissions are from the rich: the USA and increasingly China, let us say half of China on the one hand and from the poor on the other: India and the other half of China.
That’s virtually immutable.
So his sentence when looked at directs us to find something else to do: Get ready. Expect change and quantify and qualify what it will be and prepare for it.