Author name: Steven Edwards

At the end of the 60s sci-fi classic, The Day the Earth Caught Fire, the camera pans across the Daily Express case room to a front page proof hanging on a wall. “Earth Saved”, screams the headline. The camera pans. “Earth Doomed”, announces the proof beside it.
The head printer looks baffled. Which page will he be told to select? We never find out, for the film concludes without revealing the fate of our planet whose rotation has been sent spiralling out of control by simultaneous Soviet and US atom bomb tests. All we know is that Earth’s fate hangs in the balance thanks to human stupidity.
Such a vision may be the stuff of popular entertainment but it comes uncomfortably close to our own uncertain future, as highlighted last week by an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, which effectively announced “a code red” warning for our species. Unequivocal evidence showed greenhouse gas emissions were propelling us towards a calamitous fiery future triggered by extreme climate change, it announced. Only urgent reductions of fossil fuel emissions can hope to save us.

If pressed, even these I can romanticise: everyone is carefree and dirty (even more so than usual) and doesn’t work (even more so than usual). I always end up crossing Alexanderplatz on a bike thinking, this is like a desert, but more than once I’ve run into someone I know in the bike lane, which renders the scene even more hallucinogenic. Still, I dread the heatwaves as if they are worse than they are. “They’re going to have to get air-conditioning,” I mutter with the rest of the Americans. The only real respite is, unfortunately, to go to the beach.

The strongest evacuation warning, Level 5, was issued on Saturday to more than a million people across the prefectures of Saga, Nagasaki, Fukuoka, and Hiroshima, according to public broadcaster NHK.
The next-strongest warning, Level 4, was issued to 17 other prefectures, affecting more than 4 million residents.
The country’s meteorological authority, which issued the warnings, said in a statement that the rain front could stay over the country for about a week, according to Reuters.

Motorists of the world beware, the all-powerful bicycle lobby (were it to exist, except as a parody on Twitter) is coming for your cars. Bicycle sales are going gangbusters; space for motorists is being reclaimed overnight by global cities installing pop-up cycleways; and 1950s levels of motor traffic mean more people are cycling, even on roads that would otherwise be bumper-to-bumper with tin boxes.
Has bicycling ever been this popular? Yes. In the early 1970s. This was when much of the world, but especially America, experienced a “bike boom”—sales were so strong that bike shops regularly ran out of stock and would-be customers had to put their names on long waiting lists.

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Many of these councils promoting road building have also declared a climate emergency and are committed to reducing carbon emissions from all sources in policy documents and public statements.
The 310 councils that have declared a climate emergency are listed by UK Climate Emergency Network here.

July global temperature (+1.16°C relative to 1880-1920 mean) was within a hair (0.02°C) of being the warmest July in the era of instrumental measurements (Fig. 1, left).  That’s remarkable because we are still under the influence of a fairly strong La Nina (Fig. 1, right).  Global cooling associated with La Ninas peaks five months after the La Nina peak,[1] on average.

Something is going on in addition to greenhouse warming.  The 12-month running mean global temperature (blue curve in Fig. 2) has already reached its local minimum.  Barring a large volcano that fills the stratosphere with aerosols, the blue curve should rise over the next 12 months because Earth is now far out of energy balance – more energy coming in than going out.

Experts say chancellor refusing to commit spending needed to shift economy to low-carbon footing

Fiona Harvey – 13/8/21
The Treasury is blocking green policies essential to put the UK on track to net zero emissions, imperilling the UK’s own targets and the success of vital UN climate talks, experts have told the Guardian.
A string of policies, from home insulation to new infrastructure spending, have been scrapped, watered down or delayed. Rows about short term costs have dominated over longer term warnings that putting off green spending now will lead to much higher costs in future.

Decades of building bypasses may be drawing to a close in Wales, according to Lee Waters, the Welsh Government’s deputy climate change minister. The government made headlines in June when it announced a freeze on existing road schemes pending the outcome of a review, to be conducted by a Roads Review Panel. 
However, Waters told LTT: “The real importance of the roads review is not for schemes currently on the blocks, it’s for all future road schemes.