In times of difficulty it always seems that things can never get any worse, until things do and then you wish you were back to the point where you thought things were bad previously.
At Christmas, Tom (Tom Reason who works with me) bought me a book that he asked me to read and pass back on to him.
The book is The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells.
After reading this blog post I hope you’ll either listen to the book or buy it electronically.
The Uninhabitable Earth is a very short book, but it’s almost impossible to read.
It’s so terrifying and difficult to read because it is so well put together and so hard to see that there is any other alternative to what is written in the pages.
If you can’t be bothered to read but have a few minutes, you might want to read the review of it in the Guardian from 2017 here.
As Wallace-Wells suggests as he describes the effects that climate change will have in the very near future on our entire life it is, “worse, much worse than you think” I discussed this briefly in a blog recently about the concept of a hyperobject and climate change is the original and greatest hyperobject.
This is not a blog post to frighten you and fire you into a panic attack, many of us have had enough of those recently but I promise in a short while we will wish we were back here.
I suspect we will look back at the COVID-19 epidemic and see that it was a chance to put the breaks on.
To pull back from the fossil fuel economy.
To stop travelling as much on aeroplanes and to stop buying as many parcels from Amazon and things produced from china that we really don’t need or could have made ourselves.
The truth is that anybody reading this will likely dismiss it and not think about it because in their mind a rise of 2 degrees centigrade will be a nice, comfortable increase in temperature that we can all embrace.
Read the book, see exactly what a 2 degree rise actually means and then be terrified by the fact that in the middle of this crisis the news that Europe has increased by 2 degrees over the past five years and four out of five of those years have been the hottest years on record, it might start to open your eyes about what is coming.
The fact that we are now burning 80% more coal than we were in the year 2000 is devastating, when in the year 2000 we knew exactly what was likely to happen.
One of the most staggering things to put a handle on is that each return flight from London to New York costs the Arctic 3 square metres of ice.
Have you ever flown there? I have and we can’t put it back.
There is no point in planting a tree every time you fly in an aeroplane, that’s the equivalent of bullying someone and then chucking £100 in a Anti-Bullying charity.
The point is that we will get through the other side of the COVID-19 epidemic and the people that live in the UK will mostly be intact (even if their businesses or their jobs currently are not).
Then the work will begin because by the time your children are middle aged, they will wish you started yesterday.
Blog Post Number - 2355
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