Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change vs the Ministry for the Future
Heatwaves at both of Earth’s poles alarm climate scientists
The Guardian, Mar 2022
Antarctic areas reach 40C (104F) above normal at same time as north pole regions hit 30C (86F) above usual levels.At this time of year, the Antarctic should be rapidly cooling after its summer, and the Arctic only slowly emerging from its winter, as days lengthen. For both poles to show such heating at once is unprecedented.Scientists warned that the events unfolding were “historic”, “unprecedented” and “dramatic”.
They also said that extreme events like these are exceeding model projections, which is another way of saying that according to our current models, the planet is behaving like it's about 2030 already.
When the scientists who study this stuff for a living start getting worried because their models aren't even strong enough to capture how fast things are happening, that's when you take note.
COP26: Document Leak Reveals Nations Lobbying to Change Key Climate Report
BBC, Oct 2021
Last year, we got a meta-glimpse of how science really works at the highest levels of global coordination, when a leak of an IPCC draft showed us which parts of the scientific consensus were removed for the final report.
- Saudi Arabia, Argentina, Australia, India, Japan, Norway, and OPEC demanded insistence on rapid reduction in fossil fuel be removed from the report.
- Australia lobbied against the elimination of coal-fired plants, and also lobbied against the mention of lobbying in the report. (Go figure.)
- Just about everyone said carbon capture isn't real, and scientists should "do their research" (just kidding about the quote, but that's basically what they said).
- Saudi Arabia said “accelerated mitigation” is a bad idea, and a bad word, and it shouldn't be in the report.
- Brazil and Argentina want meat-based diets, and they don't want the report to ask people to not eat meat, even if it might help save the planet.
- Switzerland doesn't want the rich people to have to finance the poor people to "meet their emissions", which is another way of saying stop using fossil fuel.
- India, Poland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic want scientists to say nuclear power is good.
In the end, the report we got from the IPCC was very much modified from the original scientific consensus. And it didn't contain the words “accelerated mitigation” at all.
Here's another part that was removed -- 1% of the world’s population caused half of aviation’s carbon emissions in 2018 [the guardian]
And with that, I remind folks, for those who have read Kim Stanley Robinson's Ministry for the Future (2020), of Crash Day, the day the war for the Earth began, by mysteriously crashing roughly 10% of all flights in the air, at the same time; people stopped flying in regular airplanes from that day on. For those who haven't read it, read it.
Oh, and what happens next? The majority of the world's meat is intentionally infected with Mad Cow, which stops people from eating meat. Problem solved?
Image credit: Not the Ministry for the Future (MftF) but the Mirror Fusion Test Facility (MFTF), a nuclear fusion machine from the 1980's that never actually ran. [link]
