Daily Archives: March 2, 2019

Humanity and a Million Years of Sea Level Change – Dr Nicholas Flemming

“Sea-Level Rise: Inconvenient, or Unmanageable?” Richard B. Alley

Two cities, two very different responses to rising sea levels

The Dutch & Rebuilding New Orleans

Lessons from Holland on fighting rising sea levels

David Attenborough on climate change: ‘The world will be transformed’

Trump invokes ‘socialist nightmare’ ahead of 2020

Gulf Stream slowing down, researchers say

Gulf Stream Slowdown may lead to hot European summer

My generation trashed the planet. So I salute the children striking back | George Monbiot | Opinion | The Guardian

Across the country today, children left their classes to protest against climate change. This is my message to them

@GeorgeMonbiot

Fri 15 Feb 2019 10.28 EST Last modified on Fri 15 Feb 2019 13.57 EST

The Youth Strike 4 Climate gives me more hope than I have felt in 30 years of campaigning. Before this week, I believed it was all over. I thought, given the indifference and hostility of those who govern us, and the passivity of most of my generation, that climate breakdown and ecological collapse were inevitable. Now, for the first time in years, I think we can turn them around.

My generation and the generations that went before have failed you. We failed to grasp the basic premise of intergenerational justice: that you cannot apply discount rates to human life. In other words, the life of someone who has not been born will be of no less value than the life of someone who already exists. We have lived as if your lives had no importance, as if any resource we encountered was ours and ours alone to use as we wished, regardless of the impact on future generations. In doing so, we created a cannibal economy: we ate your future to satisfy our greed.

It is true that the people of my generation are not equally to blame. Broadly speaking, ours is a society of altruists governed by psychopaths. We have allowed a tiny number of phenomenally rich people, and the destructive politicians they fund, to trash our life-support systems. While some carry more blame than others, our failure to challenge the oligarchs who are sacking the Earth and to overthrow their illegitimate power, is a collective failure. Together, we have bequeathed you a world that – without drastic and decisive action – may soon become uninhabitable.

Every day at home, we tell you that if you make a mess you should clear it up. We tell you that you should take responsibility for your own lives. But we have failed to apply these principles to ourselves. We walk away from the mess we have made, in the hope that you might clear it up.