We are in a climate emergency - Denis the Dustcart Blog
Published: 9 August 2021
In his regular feature, Denis the Dustcart talks about a landmark UN study which has confirmed we are in a climate emergency and if many of us in the UK have noticed.
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We are in a climate emergency, but the power to help bring about change is within each of us.
A landmark UN study has confirmed the facts, and that we can avert catastrophe through direct action to massively reduce emissions.
Climate breakdown is happening.
But how many of us in the UK have noticed?
Entire towns were burning down in Canada while here we declared it ‘too hot for duvets’ at night.
There was ‘much needed’ rain in parts of the UK after our small heatwave, while floods devastated communities on continental Europe.
Then there were major floods in London.
Climate change has reached Britain – just not all of it. Yet.
The British have always been preoccupied with the weather, but this is genuine cause to be concerned. The blows of climate breakdown aren’t only landing in far-off places.
These catastrophes are not down to some freak weather patterns. This is systemic climate breakdown in action.
Severe storms, which used to be ‘once every hundred years’ events in the UK, are now happening at least twice in every five years, flooding towns and homes built on natural flood plains and where natural irrigation has been compromised by human activity, making whole communities homeless.
The earth is no longer able to store carbon like it should, and we are producing too much carbon and other greenhouse gasses for even a healthy earth to cope with.
So it’s shutting down, choking on the huge amounts of greenhouse gasses it can’t swallow.
Massive deforestation and the destruction of wild areas – to allow livestock grazing and the growing of their feed – isn’t new and hasn’t only ever happened in the Amazon.
Think of all the land used for centuries in the UK for animal agriculture that used once to be forested.
Couple that with the massive emissions associated with grazing animals and it’s clear to see we don’t have enough forest to soak up what we pump out into the world.
And many of the forests we do have in the UK are monocultures of non-indigenous species, unsuitable for nesting birds, etc..
But this is about more than forests and animal agriculture.
We rely on crops in far-flung places to sustain our consumer habits. But these crops will fail where there is soil-erosion and soil-degradation through over-irrigation or through a lack of rainfall.
For many of us, the challenges of climate breakdown will become apparent initially in an impact on our ability to feed and clothe ourselves as we do now.
It’s our demand for cheap clothes, for example, that’s causing soil degradation in Middle Eastern countries, where inland water habitats are being emptied to irrigate cotton plantations.
The disastrous consequences of this are on us – the Industrialised North.
Yet we’ll be among the last to reap the consequences of our actions. (That being said, what’s happened in London suggests we won’t be spared the harshest penalties for too long.)
Even in the UK, in many areas our soil’s nutrients will be washed away by floodwater, rendering them infertile.
Fields of short grass do not allow water to soak away like wild land does, so we will get heavier run-off and more swollen rivers.
Extreme weather at home and abroad will inevitably have a deep impact upon how we live.
Everyone on earth is responsible for the earth. We can all make choices about what we buy, what we eat and what activities we do.
We need to reduce emissions. We need to restore the land.
We need to prevent solar energy from becoming trapped in our atmosphere, heating up the planet, melting the ice caps and raising sea-levels.
Every tonne of CO2 emitted around the world causes 3 square metres of Arctic sea ice to melt, according to a report in Science (link below).
We in the UK are among the most significant contributors to global heating.
In 2014, the UK’s CO2 emissions were an average of 6.5 tonnes per person for the year. That’s 19.5 square meters of Arctic ice gone for each of us.
There were 124,300 people living in Exeter in 2014, which equates to 807,950 tonnes of carbon for the year based on that UK average of 6.5 tonnes per person (which doesn’t allow for regional variation).
This means the yearly carbon output of Exeter’s residents, all together, will have melted 2,424 square kilometres of Arctic ice.
But we don’t need to do complicated sums when weighing up our choices.
We don’t need to know the carbon footprint of every last thing we buy.
We just need to be willing to develop a greater awareness of how we cause harm, so that we can understand better how to cause less harm.
It’s about choosing to care – to care enough to make better choices and to be open to learning as we go on making those choices.
We know cheap cotton causes harm and that buying cheap clothes to replace quickly worn-out cheap clothes represents a false economy.
We know cutting down on meat reduces our impact on the environment.
We know taking public transport or walking or cycling is cleaner than driving a car to work alone.
We know combining our journey by car to our local farm shop with our trip out to our weekend walk in the country will have less impact than making individual journeys for each activity.
We know keeping our car tyres properly inflated reduces fuel consumption.
We know a five-minute shower uses less water and energy than a twenty-minute shower.
We know buying a big bottle of squash concentrate is better than buying lots of individual bottles of diluted squash.
We know drinking plain tap water is better than drinking squash.
We know drinking five cups of coffee a day is bad for us and we should know it’s bad for the planet. (Every cup of coffee contains 140 litres of water, factoring in growing, processing and transportation.)
And so on and on.
Some of these may seem like minor points in the scheme of things – and they are. But the point is that every decision we make has an impact, and all those small impacts together add up to a big impact either way.
There are lots of quick wins before we even get to thinking more deeply about things.
We must all do our best with the information we have and continue to be open to learning as more information becomes available.
The power to help bring about change is within each of us.
Science article: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/354/6313/747
BBC article on UN climate report: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-58130705
