98 Months

It seems incongruous to place this entry next to a rather whimsical one about fashion, but then my interests are conflicting.

As of August this year, it was announced the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that after a period of one hundred months, the climate will be irreversibly tipped into a state we will not be able to rectify. This Andrew Simms article is a recommended account of the crisis we purportedly face. I find the comparisons between today and war-time recession especially interesting. Margaret Beckett also alluded to this in her discerning 2007 speech Climate Change: The Gathering Storm (watch). Perhaps it is once again time to Dig for Victory.

On a conspiratorial note, one paragraph of Simms reads "It tells us, for example, that only a government that was sleepwalking or in a chemically induced coma would countenance building a third runway at Heathrow, or a new generation of coal-fired power stations..." puts me in mind of Kurt Vonnegut's novel Timequake. Are we really all on autopilot? Sitting here now, idly blogging and drinking tea, makes me suspect that at least I am.

Finally a quote, from Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni, who regards climate change as “an act of aggression by the rich against the poor”.