Sober reality of planet’s climate crisis – Yorkshire Post Letters

THE headline of Bernard Ingham’s article “Sober realism of UK can calm the climate clamour” (The Yorkshire Post July 21) aptly summarised its regrettable theme: regrettable because climate clamour is sober realism, while Sir Bernard is hawking an irresponsible fantasy. He mentions recent heatwaves and floods, but only for the “unrealistic atmospherics” they may inspire at the international COP 26 climate change conference in Glasgow this autumn.

Why Extinction Rebellion must be resisted in climate clamour – Bernard Ingham

COP 26 aims to keep global warming to 1.5C degrees above pre-industrial levels: it is now near 1.1C degrees, and rising. At 1.5 degrees extreme events – heatwaves, floods, droughts, wildfires, hurricanes – become normal, but life will be sustainable. Sadly, current commitments only limit the rise to an intolerable two-plus degrees. So COP 26 is essential.

Sir Bernard complains that developing countries expect us to pay the costs of climate change. The night before his tirade I saw an ITV report on Madagascar, where four years of man-made drought has created desert, and a desperate mother fed hungry children on insects and cactus roots. Madagascar’s carbon emissions are one hundredth of ours, its GDP one three-hundredth. Surely we can afford to save those children from stunted growth, or death?

Sir Bernard concludes with a serious point, perhaps to justify his earlier abuse of climate campaigners. He says politicians’ first responsibility is to ensure world economic recovery from Covid, to pay for a zero-carbon world. So our zero-carbon planet must wait to emerge as a by-product of business as usual.

But Mark Carney – former Bank of England governor, now UN envoy for climate and finance – reverses Sir Bernard’s priorities. In a BBC interview, he urged governments to spend less on recovery from Covid and more on reducing emissions because, otherwise, deaths from climate change “will be the equivalent of a coronavirus crisis every year” by the year 2050.

Sir Bernard and I were born five weeks apart, and have two grandchildren apiece. I see COP 26 as vital to bequeath them a sustainable world, where no child has to chew a cactus root. He sees it as hot air. Or was he writing tongue-in-cheek? I see that helpless mother’s face, and find nothing funny in global warming.

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