Mrs Benn

I wish all my readers a very happy Christmas.

It has sometimes seemed during 2023 that the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are at the door. Russia carries out a campaign of medieval rape and slaughter in Ukraine; Hamas terrorists visit sexual violence and murder on Jewish women and girls, and Israel responds by razing Gaza to the ground; and most serious of all, a cartel from the United Arab Emierates was allowed to turn COP28 into a rescue plan for big oil. Whatever calamity we are seeing in Ukraine and Palestine is as nothing to the horrors that await if the world does not decarbonise very, very fast.

All we can do is to hope, and Christmas is a time to hope. Maybe in 2024 I’ll join Just Stop Oil, get myself arrested for civil disobedience and join the world-wide movement of ordinary folks demanding change. It is time. Am I writing politically? No, I’m writing as a scientist, as somebody who has followed the primary scientific literature on climate change – not opinion pieces in newspapers, or the pronouncements of politicians, or still less the apologists for global conflagration who chaired COP28, but the primary, peer-reviewed scientific lterature – for three decades. Moreover, scientific thinking about the coming climate cataclysm goes back two decades further even than that. If humanity becomes extinct because of a failure to work together to avert the coming climate catastrophe, it will be in the sure and certain knowledge that we saw it coming and it was entirely preventable.

Recently I started reading “Our Fragile Moment” by Michael Mann, an American scientist who has been at the forefront of understanding how anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions are reshaping the global climate. Appropriately, as we approach a new year, Mann’s advice is that all is not yet lost. In the past, climate change denialism was our enemy; but now that the evidential foundations of denialism have turned to dust, our enemy is “climate doomism” – the view that it is too late to avert catastrophe so we should try not to worry about it and place what hope we have in “mitigating the consequences” of climate change. This is, according to Mann, equally great a recipe for disaster. Because we can still avert the worst that climate change threatens, but only if we act fast and act boldly.

The UN proclaims that COP28 signals the beginning of the end of the fossil fuel era. I pray that this is true, but I fear that it is not. Let’s resolve to stand up to big oil in 2024 and demand that our elected leaders do the right thing and not the expedient thing. Let’s not hand victory to greed and intergenerational genocide.