The fossil fuel corporations and their enablers treat us with complete contempt. This is not very polite to say, I know, but they spit in our faces and laugh.
The great majority of people around the world want more serious efforts to stop global warming. The International Energy Agency advised some time ago that there should be no more fossil fuel extraction projects, and those that exist should be phased out as quickly as possible. They said public subsidies of fossil fuels (over $10 billion per annum in Australia, perhaps $2 trillion per annum world wide) should be rapidly removed.
None of that has been done. Emissions of greenhouse gases are still rising. Politicians announce moderately ambitious goals for a decade hence, or by 2050, but what little is said about how we might do that commonly involves dodgy offset schemes and technology that does not yet exist. Means exist to do the job, and do it well, but they are not as profitable for the giant corporations, and they involve some changes in how our societies are organised.
The politicians speak as though there is ample time to act. There is no time left. Over the past year or so major components of the global climate system have gone well outside their previous range of fluctuations. The graph shows mean ocean temperature variations over the past few decades. From May 2023 the temperature rose well outside the range of previous fluctuations. It is clearly a highly anomalous development.
Antarctic sea ice, global air temperature, North Atlantic sea temperature all showed similar anomalies.
Closer to home, the 2022 flood of Lismore in northern NSW was more than two metres above the previous record. The river flow would have been higher, wider and faster than previous floods, suggesting there might have been something like ten times more water. Records are usually broken by a few centimetres, so this also was a highly anomalous event – a freak event. Similar freak events are happening around the world, most recently in Valencia, Spain.
These developments are ominous, the more so with a bit of technical background. The climate system is a complex system, in a technical sense. Such systems commonly fluctuate around a fairly steady mean. However with sufficient disturbance they can shift into a different mode. The shift is called a tipping point. Beyond a tipping point the climate patterns might be very different, though being hotter overall.
As a complex system approaches a tipping point it can become more erratic, with larger fluctuations. Tipping points are difficult or impossible to predict in detail, but a sudden increase in fluctuations can portend a tipping.
We don’t know whether the recent erratic behaviour is a warning that a tipping point is near, of if it is a sign of a tipping under way. We don’t know.
Presumably the politicians are given a sanitised version of the science, because they show no sign of appreciating the danger, and its imminence. Of course they should make it their business to fully inform themselves on such a critical matter. Not to do so would be a major abrogation of their duty. But that’s just politics as usual these days. Most of the politicians are either enthusiastic spruikers of the climate culprits or captured by them.
So they all gather in Baku, in an authoritarian petro-state, for the COP29 gabfest, with fossil fuel executives outnumbering climate scientists and advocates of serious action. The host and many attendees talk openly not only of continuing fossil fuel extraction indefinitely into the future but of plans to increase extraction.
That is a death sentence for the recent and present state of the climate, and very likely a death sentence for the brittle global industrial system these people feed, and profit from. Whether they perceive the suicidal path they are on or they convince themselves no harm will result is irrelevant. They need to be stopped.
But who will stop them? The politicians are captive. The major media (old and new) are onside, a big part of the problem. Prominent people beg politely. Protesters gather outside but they are ignored, or attacked.
So the fossil fuel magnates know this and treat us with contempt. They spit in our faces and laugh.
There are crimes against humanity, but the term doesn’t usually refer to all of humanity. Nor to a four-billion-year heritage of miraculous forms of life. We might call them crimes against the planet. Read Tim Winton’s Juice for one vision of where this could lead.
I think my grandchildren will forgive me for being a little impolite. I hope they will appreciate that I do what little I can to inject some sanity. I wish I could do more.
I dearly wish people around the world would remove the obstructors who feign to lead us and protect us, so we can get on with doing the things that will actually make a difference and hope to retrieve some sort of reasonable future for our descendants.
Dr. Geoff Davies is an author, commentator and scientist. He is the author of A New Australia: Discarding Delusions and Organising for the Wellbeing of All (2023, https://betternaturebooks.net/my-books/regenoz/). He blogs at Thrival Economics https://thrivaleconomics.blog/.
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