Climate change and me

 Climate change and me

1. I come to this topic with some advantages. 
2. I was a business banker for thirty years and must have seen thousands of accounts and financial projections. 
3. While some of the accounts were accurate the projections almost never were. 
4. I did not grow weary or cynical. Bad as the projections were, I knew without them we would never know by how much we missed our targets. 
5. Projections failed at times because people were lazy or indeed lying, but mostly through misplaced optimism or the hope that if we wished for something that would make it more achievable. 
6. So I have brought this healthy distrust to many other fields, from politics to rugby predictions. 
7. So when they brought out the Paris Agreement in 2015 with a target of 1.5% my immediate response was to double it to 3.0%. And I wrote poems to that effect. 
8. In the first instance that’s my best guess as to where we will reach in under a century.
9. In the second instance it’s a reachable target when it is important for people not to lose heart. 
10. In the third instance it sounds small but in fact is terrifying. At a guess about 90% of the worlds population will be directly impacted. 
11. A world sweltering at 3 degrees above the historic average will give rise to massive climate changes. That world will not support 7 billion people. 
12. At a guess the surviving population will be closer to 2 billion. 
13. All our current preoccupations of trade and travel, of electric cars and divisive politics, of leisure and land-wars will be overtaken by the new imperative to simply survive. 
14. It is conceivable that AI will be forced to sort it out. 
15. We will be left with a civilization with very different values and no national boundaries. 
16. Mankind will change not when it should but when it has to. 
17. And in the meantime?
18. What is the point of our tiny inputs when facing such challenges and the knowledge that others are doing so little? 
19. The answer is the age old invitation ‘to do our best’. Why?
20. Because it is the right thing to do irrespective of the overall outcome or the expectation or behavior of others. 
21. Virtue is good for its own sake. 
22. Our little bit combines with others doing the same and maybe the increase will be only 2.9 degrees or 2.8. 
23. By the same token we need balance. Logically we should all commit suicide and avoid further damage to our planet. But we can learn to cut down and plant up. 
24. We will learn to overcome the anger we feel when we see decent people make continual missteps and misjudgments. 
25. Never was this prayer more appropriate. 
26. God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, 
    the courage to change the things I can, 
    and the wisdom to know the difference. 
27. July 2023. Greece is burning. Portugal is smoldering. Italy is baking. Spain is sweltering. 
28. Il faut cultiver notre jardin (Candide by Voltaire 1759). 

Three Degrees Warmer

It’s three o clock in the morning

It’s three degrees warmer at sea

What’s going to become of our world 

In under a century?

Two degrees is a figment 

There isn’t a chance in hell 

That Paris or any Agreement

Will save us from climate Hell. 

This makes three hells in one poem

Which doesn’t sound good at all 

But then neither does three degrees

And that’s what we’re heading for. 

There’s lots of numbers these days

It’s hard to remember them all,

Remember the number that matters

In eighty years time we’ll recall - 

Its 3