My weekly Comment Column in the daily Plymouth Herald (10.11.26), offering what is now an annual ridicule of the COP31 UN Climate Conference and call to action on the Climate Emergency. The threat has never been more real and apparent, the concern more diluted than in the past 5 years. The problem? Inertia. Solutions to this real-time emergency appear too distant and out of our hands. A sense of inevitability has been drummed into people by a ruling class set on keeping things as they are, for their own short term profit. But we do all really care about the future, don’t we – if not for ourselves but our children? They deserve all our efforts, now. Join the protests on Saturday – Plymouth 11am, Armada Way Amphitheatre (below Sainsbury’s car park).
There’s an anomaly in the Arctic, according to the UK’s Met Office. They should know. They’re our scientists.
Powerful winds above the North Pole trap some of the coldest air on Earth each Winter. This circulation, known as the polar vortex, has weakened and shifted position in recent days.
While such disruptions can occur during winter, scientists say an event this early in November is unprecedented in modern observations.
We may even see snow and an early White Christmas, with excessive deaths from hyperthermia rather than seasonal joy and happiness. Seasons are collapsing one-on-another, trees and plants are confused, leaving birds and insects dying for loss of their food and habitats.
The Arctic is not yet as cold as it will be by January. We are facing a long winter. And the current Super El-Nino in the Pacific is taking us into previously unknown disruption to worldwide weather patterns.
What we do know can be seen with our own eyes. Severe weather bringing devastating floods from sudden heavy rains across the world, from North Carolina and Spain’s Valencia to Borneo where the gorillas’ fragile living spaces are under water.
In Gaza, the millions of Palestinians now homeless and without resources to produce and store food or drinking water, flash flooding is devastating their vast tented encampments.
In the middle of this, government representatives from across the world are meeting once again for 10 days of argument and pontification about what is to be done. The United Nations Climate Conference COP31 in Turkey has achieved too little across the 30+ years of its’ assemblies. The conference has been told that the world is still warming too far, too fast, with devastating consequences for our economies and the quality of life billions of human beings, and life itself. Limits for seven of the nine fundamental processes that maintain the safe operating space for humanity have been crossed.
Next Saturday, 14th November, will see an outcry across the world, a campaigning, protesting demand for action to mitigate the worst projections of the climate catastrophe. Governments can and should be ending all global heating gas emissions now – the end of all reliance of fossil fuels.
In Plymouth we will hold a protest March and organising Summit with workshops about what is happening and what we can do.
In brief, governments should be funding adaptations to protect ordinary people everywhere, the working classes of the world who have not the personal and private resources on our own to protect ourselves from climate change.
Governments should be working in unison, collaborating to ensure climate security by funding clean energy production, housing, water and agricultural protections to ensure food and shelter to those in the worst hit regions. But they’re not.
The sole reason that governments are doing too little, too late, is that the entire infrastructure of the global capitalist system they administer relies upon fossil fuels. The System cannot be changed without defeating the oil magnets. The profits of the energy companies dwarf much else, and the power to influence policy-makers follows the money.
The billionaire-sponsored free newspapers falling through our letter-boxes are keen to deny the climate emergency, promising the “scrapping of green levies” and opening-up of more gas and oil fields. They are defying all science, physical, biological and economic. Those who benefit most from the System are simply upholding the current failed Status Quo of fast-buck capitalist competition and private property ownership. To hell with the rest of us.
That’s why we protest. The collective power of working class communities and the trade unions internationally has be brought to power. For a socialist redistribution of resources, the only possibility of saving the world! Stop Emissions! Plymouth Climate Summit – Saturday 14th November, Swarthmore Centre, Mutley Plain from 1pm.
