An apocalyptic view of the world is always to be avoided if we wish to remain sane. However, it is becoming increasingly difficult to push away that nagging feeling in the pit of one's stomach that we are on the edge of a precipice when the mass media is dominated with images of a world either buried under water or going up in smoke. When news about the deadly covid19 virus is pushed down the running order, delta variant notwithstanding, by tales of climatic doom, we should pay attention.
I remember when climate change was a curiosity, the concern of mainly tree-huggers and men who wore socks with their sandals.
Yet, slowly, as prominent people adopted the cause, the message of the need to save the planet spread. It took decades to gather pace, but it was a very strategic campaign, directed at making us focus on what we can each do: to recycle, for example: buy electric cars; conserve energy by using household appliances less, and invest in solar panels (not yet in TT, though).
But those measures seem paltry in the face of a threat described by UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres as 'Code red for humanity.' He was responding to the frightening UN Report on Climate Change published last week by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which pulled together 14,000 international scientific papers.
We now know unequivocally that the planet is heating up so fast that we may well run out of time to contain the now everyday disasters of guaranteed hurricanes coming off all earth's oceans and extreme heat waves and drought that are causing uncontrollable forest fires on all her continents.
Tens of millions of acres of forests were destroyed this year alone, and the fires have taken scores of lives too. Even in the coldest parts of Siberia the fires have been so furious that for the first time in recorded history the smoke reached the North Pole, and most of Russia itself was covered in smoke. Simultaneously, people are dying in floods in places previously unaffected by copious rain, like in the heart of Europe.
IPCC scientists warn that it will all intensify and some of the changes cannot be undone, very much in the way that we will have to learn to live with the coronavirus.
Even without the report, the magnitude of the challenge of keeping the earth from overheating is obvious, but the importance of the report is that it is the very first time that the human contribution to the phenomenon of global warming is not in dispute.
For decades, different scientists argued among themselves about whether climatic changes are cyclical or the work of mankind. The landmark report finally puts that to rest.
Global temperatures have risen by 1.1 degrees C since the Industrial Revolution, which is entirely our fault, and until we change our ways we will arrive headlong at an increase of 1.5 C, beyond which there will be no salvation for us, our societies or economies.
The most doomsday fact in the IPCC report relating to us here in the Caribbean is the spectre of rising sea levels, which
