Thankful that there’s no real emergency yet, but I suspect governments will drag their feet long enough that there will eventually be one, and then emergency relief will be deployed anyway, but it will cost way way more than 5bn.
Sure, these events could mysteriously stop. Or stay very much the same, acting like a new normal that isn’t so destructive as to be an emergency. But the trend line is there. Fires increasing, biodiversity decreasing, floods occurring more dramatically and frequently, 100 year events predicted to be 10 year events not in decades but right now.
If that’s not an emergency, what is? If you’re thinking something like “when the province is stricken with drought for 10 years and everyone’s starving”, I hate to tell you but that’s well past the emergency date. At that point, you’re already done and the initial emergency happened.
https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/climate-change-hasnt-set-th...
That's a real piece of misdirect by Murdoch press though and typical of their editorial stance.
To quote Multi-decadal trends and variability in burned area from the 5th version of the Global Fire Emissions Database (GFED5) [1] (one of many similar studies)
* Burned area declined by 1.21±0.66% yr-1 20 , a cumulative decrease of 24.2±13.2% over 20 years.
* The global reduction is primarily driven by decreases in fire within savannas, grasslands, and croplands.
* Forest, peat, and deforestation fires did not exhibit long-term trends.
So, managed areas are increasingly having fewer fires for a variety of reasons and they're a big part of the non ice areas across the globe.
Forest fires aren't decreasing, more worrying areas that typically don't see frequent fires are now seeing fires more often.
The Fox message is that beacuse total global fire area is reducing there's no need to worry about massive forest fires in places that typically don't see such things.
If ten thousand acres of seasonal grass fires doesn't happen does that really offset a thousand acres of old growth forest being torched to the ground?
[1] https://essd.copernicus.org/preprints/essd-2023-182/essd-202...
> From 1 January to 31 July, accumulated carbon emissions from wildfires across Canada total 290 megatonnes. This is already more than double the previous record for the year as a whole and represents over 25% of the global total for 2023 to date.
Really? Of course they would say that.
You know it's an emergency when the status quo is completely unacceptable and the government takes drastic measures (no more cars of any kind on the road, every physically able man/woman forced to work on whatever solution is chosen to help, that kind of thing - nothing close to what we're seeing today) with widespread support of the population.
You can't call it an emergency when no one would truly support emergency measures of the scale that would be enough to affect the climate (no, driving an electric car is not even close to helping if this was a true emergency - and I drive one myself).
So if we never acknowledge it it is never an emergency?
> every physically able man/woman forced to work on whatever solution is chosen to help
Doing what? How will the physical power of the masses help us here?
When climate change starts causing QALY losses comparable to the effects of, say, banning cars.
> yet the voices to do so are curiously absent
It's easy to think this if you're not paying attention: the issue is very controversial and many people oppose it But a number of scientists signed onto a letter calling for additional research into this [1], and Congress and the White House OSTP are also pushing to speed up and increase research funding [2]. Of course, this kind of research could go away in a single election.
[1] https://insideclimatenews.org/news/27022023/solar-radiation-...
[2] https://www.whitehouse.gov/ostp/news-updates/2023/06/30/cong...
Imo governments know this , just not yet sure what to do yet.
Once it's working, I expect they won't be allowed to shut it down.
