thelogicalview.co.uk

Tag: COP30

  • Q: COP30…what has changed?

    A: The Earth has got hotter

    In the next few days the aeroplanes will be lining up to carry (not ferry, that was the only long distance transport before aeroplanes) the c.50,000 humans attending this COP back to their home nations, all around the spinning mass of rock which is Earth. No doubt there is great anticipation for the next COP when surely the solution to the crisis on Earth will be found, and of course another great gathering of talking around ‘the table’, hearing latest research, eating and drinking, and of course buying things from local traders to show support for the global market we all now inhabit. Probably no delegates will be walking home, except for the local Belem civic leaders, and that does not dent the c.50,000 who will be setting off, jetting off, in aeroplanes, disrupting the atmosphere and adding a great burden to the the crisis of the natural world, who does not use aeroplanes, or air con, or imported food and drink, or digital tech, or electrical appliances.

    If a quick sketch on the back of an envelope was made, and of which this writer is such a great believer and user of, of the balance of global causation of this crisis, how would this look? The indigenous peoples who do not consume out of their local area, and do not need fridges, cars, and who observe the dictatorship of Helios the whole year round, and of natural water supply and simple biology, they would be on the bottom line – in the doodle. Above that, in the middle band, how about dividing two categories of broadly speaking, the consumers and the producers?

    Because China and India did not appear at this party gathering, they are put as baddies, and of course the USA is nothing but a baddie for all the leftie leaning political and social media and young people in the west. So those two huge blocks of jurisdiction were not there, and no doubt have many black marks allocated to them for that. But if the picture was switched around and producers who are blamed for this increasing CO2 and all the rest of the measurable collapse were on the righthand side and it was the consumers who were on the left, so Consumers = Production, then where does the balance of crisis causation lie?

    Because within the atmosphere is really all one unit, so a rising temperature will eventually affect everything, because the natural world is not confined or contained within one jurisdiction’s opinion, or behaviour, where is this crisis generating? People will say ‘the Industrial Revolution’ and yes sure, it did set off some pretty unnatural processes, although the initial coal and steam industry was still very localised because of the manual work involved, by men, like shovelling coal into the engine of a steam train, or pulling coal up from deep underground, and using water at useful places where it was running downhill from gravity meant the power was already there to enable the industrial processes.

    Using electricity in industry was a different scale altogether, and a different scale of damage to the natural environment, which the human has only as its survival, just like all other species. But now, in the last few decades, the mating of industry and digital, well, if that is put alongside the measurable crisis to life conditions, surely the correlation is too clear to ignore.

    If the ‘bad’ producers were behind the = sign instead of in front as the causation, and not the west opinionating about who is doing the damage, if consumer power was the measure, where does that come from? Since New Labour opened universities to all, and with the result every local college, tech college, tiny institution and even uni’s which had never existed in any form sprang into existence in the ‘UK’ like mushrooms after a spring rainfall, how many air flights are taken each year ferrying, in the modern sense of that word, international students to and from the ‘UK’? How many giant container tankers full of goods are being transported from China each week to ….. not France or Portugal or Spain, but to the ‘UK’? How much food is produced in regions which need their water and manpower to survive themselves, into the ‘UK’ requiring masses of power for cold storage and preservation to ensure perfection in supermarkets? How many Brits are now taking several air flights a year to hot countries, or even to see the Arctic ice before the last snowflake melts? Beyond the Consumer = Producer equation there is even another quick sketched line above – the absolutely absurd. With the USA now facing really difficult questions about borders and consumption and some sense of responsibility coming back into view, is it the ‘UK’ which sits at the peak of the digital era pyramid, alone and absurd?

    If a global scientific conference cannot or will not start at the absolute baseline, what is the point? The baseline has not gone away and there is further to fall the higher we go. Modern belief in science and ‘human rights’ to have consumer goods of 2025 which many young people have only known in their lifetime, it does not change facts in any way, only increases the divergence. Even the Emperor must be saying now, ‘Guys, can’t you see, I have no clothes!!’ But that point has passed, until the big digital collapse, and then no one will be looking to another COP to save the world.

  • COP……how many?

    ………30?

    It’s 2025 by the western calendar, and Belem in Brazil, at c.1.5’South in latitude ‘is hosting’ a vast global conference of c.55,000 (and a few more) scientists, politicians, journalists of course, experts, environmental speakers of all ages, intergovernmental orgs, non-governmental orgs, leaders from within Brazil honoured, or at least appearing to be, chosen as the venue for this global event, and somewhere in the mix …. c.3,000 indigenous peoples from all over the spinning mass of rock with the tiny little atmosphere zone around it which we call Earth will be at this global event, and feted with the title ‘Guardians of Biodiversity.’ They must be delighted.

    This blog is not counter culture. It is not written by a hippy. Far from it.

    Belem, a city of human society, and the capital city of the state of Para (apologies, this writer is not clever with tech so cannot put the right accent above the a there) is pretty much on the Equator. The Equator is the place at which Helios shines constantly, because the Earth being a spinning mass of rock in space but held by gravity into an orbit has its poles further away from Helios and at an angle therefore the Light of the Sun falls obliquely not directly. This creates vastly different climatic conditions over the surface of this mass of rock spinning in space. In 55-56’N this morning it is fairly cold (not nearly cold enough for the time of the seasonal year) and very wet. In Belem it is probably pretty hot, because being on or near enough the Equator is either hot and dry or hot and wet.

    The city of Belem as everyone knows is at the mouth of the river Amazon, that vast, really vast, wilderness of earth meeting water, the fertility and scale and complexity and sheer wonder that has arisen out of this mass of rock spinning in space with an atmosphere around it. Belem is not ‘on the Brazilian coast’ because humans in the past knew their geography and knew that the sheltered places were just up the river at a suitable point where boats could tie up and humans meet on the river bank, with walkable routes leading to and from that river point. So, just a few miles up the River Amazon is Belem.

    Belem, like many places on Earth, was a major centre for the colonial period when the natural resources were endless. The not mouth but delta system of the Amazon, because these geographies are vast and complex and only make sense from the overall scale, contains the salt water, the fresh water, the precipitation which comes down in humid regions, the unmeasurable biodiversity of the rainforest – forest with a lot of rain – the habitation of so many millions and billions of living creatures from the too tiny to see to the visible animals and birds and spiders and of course trees, those giant trees which produced the sap which was required for the growing production of western rubber requirements ….. and of course, living creatures of humans, who are now called in the Amazon, indigenous. Belem is called the ‘city of mango trees’ so it’s in the name, there are many many mango trees around the delta of the Amazon river.

    A mango is now a favoured western but there are two ‘mango’s.’ One is the native plant of the delta system of the Amazon, and is part of the infrastructure (to use a modern word) with its roots holding together the underlying complexity in that liminal zone of salt and freshwater, land and sea. The other mango is a cultivated plant giving those wonderful fruits, now combined with words such as ‘smoothie’ in the west. The trading port on the site of Belem, over thousands of years a network of small trading between those who could make boats (from scratch, of tree trunks and animal skins), did as history knows, come then under the Portugese government – or Crown as things were then – and the scale erupted into trans-Atlantic trade, either willing or enforced, but still only along certain trade routes and involving a very difficult sea journey over the Atlantic Ocean – by the Portugese it must be reminded, for they were the first to cross that vast stretch of water to establish trade goods, and yes, to use humans from the west coast of Africa to work the new plantations. Portugal is far south of c.55-56’N. But still, all travel was by land and sea, and did very, very, very little damage to the overall life conditions within the atmosphere of this spinning mass of rock in space. It did not damage, because it could not, the life zone around Earth was vast, self-regulating, and assisted greatly by regions such as the Amazon with its unmeasurable array of water and flora, land and sea. The so-called indigenous people in the region, living in the nature-dictated societal groupings of tribe, were not even divisible from their ‘environment.’

    Fast forward to 2025, and a very recent in history event under the umbrella of the United Nations, an organisation which has many arms going into government, health, migration, education, human rights, and every nebulous zone of society possible, now at COP30 has these c.55,000+ humans in a vast conference for 10 days, speaking about …. about what? Well, it’s obvious what they’re there for, it is to save ‘biodiversity’, because biodiversity is the modern research subject, and everybody knows there is a problem. To complete the loop, the 3,000 ish of indigenous peoples who are being flown in as exhibits, they will be given the feted reception (and again, there would possibly be an accent on that French word but is beyond this writer’s capability) of ‘Guardians of Biodiversity.’ Not ‘Champions of….’, no, that would be just too obviously mad. Mad, illogical, nonsensical, and utterly hypocritical, and probably would be refused by any unoffficial spokesman for those indigenous people who would not recognise what a ‘Champion’ was. ‘Guardians …’ yes, a clever term to offer them.

    As long as there are those ‘Guardians of Biodiversity’ sitting at this massive global event all is well. The loop is complete and the work has credibility. Everyone is there to try and ‘save the planet.’

    If COP30 is read through the reverse logic, and the vast and minute data of science and the natural world is reversed into basic facts of heat, water, food, should not a conference like COP30 publish the facts of its own event and publish how many flights were taken, how many different linking flights from origin to Belem, how many litres of water have been used by delegates attending COP30, how much power has been required for air conditioning to ensure the delegates don’t pass out in the humidity, how much food has been flown in (weight on planes adds fuel requirements), how much each hotel has been required to provide in facilities and local workforce who will be ‘let go’ after the delegates have (flown) home, and how much money will have gone into the preparation, event itself, and in dismantling all the conference apparatus, and including that from the protestors who have also flown there, and the indigenous who probably feel they could not refuse this new western domination, and ….. how much hot air has been produced?

    Leaving aside the irony of a global company called Amazon (which it must be stated this writer has never used as it saw the outset of how it decimated the book trade and then went on to decimate everything else which includes The Amazon delta), and in the interests of data, why is COP30 not required to include itself in this data machine of research and concern over the collapse of the survival-support of everything including humans? Should it not quanitfy the amount of water used which requires power to get it to come out of a tap, the amount of flights, the amount of CO2 added, the amount of money paid to get it all going fine, and above all, the degree of temperature rise that it has added?

    If the ‘Guardians of Biodiversity’ collectively made their end of conference statement as ‘Stop COP31’ would anybody believe they meant it? Would it be absorbed into another protest slogan and another ‘we listened to everybody’ in the roundup of the successful COP30, as delegates look forward to the next extravaganza. Short of a global power cut in the next big Solar Flare, is there anything now which can return humans to a reason and common sense?