The Earth’s climate could be about to do something it hasn’t done for billions of years
- British policy report underscores the increasingly obvious – the world’s ecology is in a costly death spiral and time is running out
- Typhoon Mangkhut was a warning we ignore at our peril
Clambering along Clear Water Bay’s mountain trails yesterday, sweltering in an unseasonably hot 26 degrees Celsius, I was reminded afresh of the harm inflicted by Typhoon Mangkhut five months ago. Not just the shattered trees, but the silence, and the paucity of butterflies.
I cheered myself by recalling the astonishing capacity of nature to recover from the constant onslaught it faces here in Hong Kong. Outside my house, predatory creepers are well on the way to engulfing the wall of flotsam that was swept 40 meters onshore by Mangkhut’s storm tides.
But am I right to be cheered? A newly released report from Britain’s Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) brought me fast down to Earth. The report begins “This is a Crisis”. It ends “Time has nearly run out”.
Earth could warm to a climate not seen in billions of years “over the next 120 years, reversing a multimillion-year cooling trend in less than two centuries”, it said. It says we are in the “Age of Environmental Breakdown”.
For those of us scurrying around on Earth for 100 years if we are lucky, time frames like this are hard to get your brain around. But it sounds scary, and rightfully so.