The World Meteorological Organisation warns that the world is likely to breech the 1.5C warming for at least one year within the next five, with the potential for repeated breeches beyond 2027.

Unless action is taken to considerably lessen CO2 emissions over the next few years and beyond, warming will continue towards 2C and above, with conditions on Earth becoming increasingly less hospitable to current life forms, including, of course, us humans.

Irreversible tipping points will come into play, resulting in the collapse of the Greenland ice sheet, loss of tropical coral reefs, thawing of the Arctic permafrost, demise of the Amazon rainforest, to name but a few, with the resulting positive feedbacks accelerating warming.

The incidence of ever-more powerful destructive storms, extensive drought, deadly heatwaves, flooding, wild fires and so on will increase.

And yet, with all the international commitments to limit emissions and companies and individuals purporting to follow ‘green principles’, carbon emissions continue to rise.

In 2022 36.8 gigatons of man-made carbon was emitted, a massive 60% higher than in 1990.

We cannot simply rely on technological innovation such as wind turbines, solar arrays, electric cars, heat pumps and the like to solve the climate problem and blithely expect our lives in western civilisations to carry on relatively untouched.

Our unsustainable lifestyles and economic system over the last 50 years or so has caused the climate crisis, habitat loss, species extinction and degradation of soils and seas.

We live in La La Land if we imagine that our economies will continue to grow forever with no end to our material comforts and conveniences.

We have already exploited the Earth’s finite resources way more than its carrying capacity, yet are under the illusion that it will somehow continue to provide for us a similar base into the future.

The cracks in this illusion, however, are already showing.

We have little choice but to transition away from crass materialism and over-consumption lifestyles which need not be such a wrench from overall wellbeing.

We may even be happier and healthier for it!

CA Brown

Ballakilferic

Colby

This letter was first published in the Isle of Man Examiner of June 16.

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