Roger Hallam’s guide to the quickest route to hell

I was resting from scything practice in the garden, appropriately enough, and saw that a friend was meeting Roger Hallam who founded Extinction Rebellion. He urged me to watch a video of one of Roger’s speeches.

I sat and watched a 1 hour 8 minute video and recommend it to everyone. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WgFc4Zhvjtg even if the beginning is a bit slow. Start at 3 minutes.

But there are lots of videos, just search “roger hallam extinction rebellion” if you haven’t seen him yet.

This is a section of his argument:

–          We have already locked in temperature rises of 2.2 degrees, despite what politicians and UN people and scientists say

–          1.2 degrees has already happened

–          Melting of icecaps is unavoidable and that causes an extra 0.5 degrees of warming

–          The emissions between now and stopping emitting in some years’ time will cause further 0.5 degrees warming

–          This takes us to 2.2 degrees

–          As the world gets warmer, you get more water vapour in the sky. For every degree of warming, extra water vapour adds a further degree because it holds heat. So that gets us to 3.2 degrees

–          If you go over 3 degrees then the Amazon is going to burn down; that will add 1.5 degrees

–          1.2+0.5+0.5+1.0+1.5=4.7 degrees

These are average temperatures, and the centre of continents heats twice as much as the coast, so average 2 degrees warming means 4 degrees in the middle of continents.

Then we won’t have enough food:

–          corn yields fall by 15% for every 1 degree increase in temperature

–          If you have 4 degrees of warming, that’s 60% fall in corn production

–          All civilisations grow and survive because they have storable grains

–          If your food production falls by half, you don’t have storable surplus

–          We are looking at falls in grain yields over the next ten to fifteen years

–          We are looking at societal collapse in that time scale.

(This is all in less time than it takes to build a nuclear power station. This means that nuclear is not a viable answer to tackling climate change. We won’t be able to feed the chaps building the plant.)

It gets more scary:

–          The planet moves between two stable states.

–          One, with polar ice, with an average temperature of 12 degrees.

–          Another, with an average temperature of 23 degrees.

–          In the hotter state, to which we are moving, there is no wind.

–          As a result the oceans become still

–          As a result emissions of noxious nitrate-sulphite gases [the name was not clear – check 29:50] fill the atmosphere

–          Mammals cannot survive this gas in the air. Humans are mammals.

–          End of.

All this within not many years.

This is worth bearing in mind when you hear cheery talk from government officials and big companies about cutting emissions by 2050 and all that. They are spouting irresponsible rubbish. Trying to sugarcoat a nasty, violent, scary and uncontrollable future.

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