UK Breaks 40C. Brits Warned More to Come.

 

It's toasty in Great Britain. Heathrow hit 40.2 Celsius, a national heat record.

Where there's heat, there's fire. The London fire brigade has a Major Incident in response to a "huge surge in fires across the capital."

It's thought the heatwave could last into August.

Across the UK, flights are suspended and planes unable to land due to runways melting. RAF Brize Norton, Britain's largest air base, has suspended flights in and out.


Meanwhile, president Biden is expected to declare a climate emergency tomorrow. Just wait until the stooges on the US Supreme Court get their teeth into that.

The Liberal government declared a climate state of emergency in Canada some time ago and then wasted no time pushing through their new and improved bitumen pipeline and Newfoundland's Bay Nord seabed oil project. Unless your head is up your backside you might notice a certain morbid disconnect between what Trudeau says and what Trudeau does. It's funny how he does that, eh?

George Monbiot hit that nail on the head with his latest column.


Our failure to prevent catastrophic global heating arises above all from the conspiracy of silence that dominates public life, the same conspiracy of silence that has, at one time or another, surrounded every variety of abuse and exploitation.

...They do so on behalf of the fossil fuel industry, animal farming, finance, construction firms, car manufacturers and airline companies, but also on behalf of something bigger than any of those interests: the power of incumbency. Those who hold power today do so by stamping out challenges, regardless of the form they take. The demand to decarbonise our economies is not just a threat to carbon-intensive industry; it is a threat to the world order that permits powerful men to dominate us.


Comment Reaction -

I thought we would miss this, Lorne.  Sure, the tropics would get hammered. The forecast was for that to develop in the early 2020s. Those in more temperate climes, the latitudinally advantaged, were supposed to be a good two decades behind. 

Conservtives, Liberals, even New Dems, have failed to act, allowing one option after another to be foreclosed. We've been betrayed.

Comments

  1. LorneJuly 19, 2022 at 2:17 PM

    I've kind of reached the end of the hope line, Mound. If the horrific scenes we witness today don't move us to demand real action, nothing in the future will, either.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Up in Smoke. 300 Sq. Mi. of Amazon Rainforest Lost Every Day.

Image
  The Amazon rainforest is disappearing at what should be an alarming rate. 312 sq. mi. or 808 sq. kms. every day. Over the past 30 years humans have destroyed a patch of the Amazon equal in area to the states of Texas and New Mexico . The Amazon – historically a great carbon absorber, since trees take in carbon dioxide and release oxygen – now releases more carbon than it stores, which adds to, rather helps to reduce, our global climate crisis. Deforestation rates decreased slightly from 2004 to 2012. But since then, they’re back on the rise, especially in the past couple of years, since Jair Bolsonaro became president of Brazil. In 2018, as Bolsonaro campaigned as a patriotic man of the people, scientists predicted that once the Amazon lost more than 25% of its tree cover, it would become a drier ecosystem, all because deforestation changes weather patterns (due to how trees respire), which in turn reduces rainfall. Furthermore, as the forest becomes fragmented, areas surrounded...
Read more

The Cognoscenti Syndrome

  There is a group of people I think of as the Cognoscenti, people who are well educated, very informed and of rapidly diminishing relevance. Their ranks include writers such as Chris Hedges and Glen Greenwald. These are people who have honed an almost Puritanical value system, readily finding fault in any direction. They are scathing in their attacks on Republicans and Democrats alike to the point where they become nihilists. They don't endorse. They prescribe. This is where they fail. They're unable to advocate for anything that might resonate with the public whose interests they argue are being trammeled. Donald Trump was bad but Joe Biden is scarcely better. This is where their elitism comes in.  74 million may have voted for Trump but, hey, they didn't know any better. The mob that stormed the Capitol. They were just victims of the system venting their frustrations. All the racism, bigotry, xenophobia, misogyny, white nationalism - inevitable side effects of their oppr...
Read more

Who Asks "Why?"

Every time there's a conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians, all we hear is 'why?'  Why, as in, whose fault is this? It's easier to affix blame if you can truncate the event. Pick a convenient start date, something recent. In this case we'll make it either the Israeli eviction of Arabs from Jerusalem or the scuffle that took place outside the mosque in response. If those don't work, let's go for Hamas launching unguided rockets into Israel. That's even better because it tags Hamas with the blame. The nice thing about this approach is you can just keep using it. It goes on and on, just as it has for the past half-century since the '67 war. You can even date this whole mess to the beginning of the occupation of the Palestinian territories. The Israelis are said to have called these periodic wars, "mowing the lawn." The idea is that, every now and then, you have to take these Arabs to the woodshed. And then you keep your powder dry unt...
Read more