What do Agar Grove and 1.5 degrees have in common?

Pity the residents of 53 Agar Grove, Camden, in London. For they live in a block which appears to be falling down around them. And it’s taking their life savings, even hope itself, in the process.

This is not the place to ascribe blame. This story by Harry Low and Morgan Hammond of the BBC goes into the whys and wherefores of the whole sorry mess.[1] We still hope the legal and insurance processes will one day resolve matters to the just satisfaction of all parties. But have deep and abiding sympathies with the residents. Because we believe that their story will one day be our story.

For they are us. The same aspiring sorts of hard working people who only wanted a little property because it represented long-term security. OK, maybe a little richer than most of us. But being rich does not necessarily make you a bad person (LSS is a Whig blog, not a Socialist one) And until recently, aspiring to a high consumer lifestyle was a perfectly ordinary-even understandable-thing to do.

Yet that lifestyle has its costs. Which brings us to our second story, this time from Nature Briefings. For once, we reproduce their summary below our text [2] But the message is simple. We’re starting to break the 1.5⁰ C temperature limit with ominous regularity. Parts of the world are now doing it every year. And if we smash through 2⁰ C then you you may rest assured that the consequences will make the travails at 53 Agar Grove look small by comparison. For all of us.

[1]https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-65668790

[2] What 1.5⁰C of global warming really means

Last week, meteorologists predicted that the global average temperature for a single year is likely to hit 1.5 ℃ above pre-industrial levels within the next five years. The landmark evokes the Paris climate agreement’s aspirational goal: to keep global warming below 1.5 ℃. But the two milestones are not the same. The Paris goal is defined as the midpoint of the first 20-year period when the average global surface air temperature is 1.5 ºC warmer than the 1850–1900 average.A global stocktake in preparation for the next United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change meeting (COP28), in November, found that, for a 50% chance of achieving the goal, global greenhouse-gas emissions need to peak before 2025; this hasn’t happened yet.Because global warming is uneven, more than one-fifth of the world’s population currently live in regions that have already exceeded 1.5 ºC of warming in at least one season.More important than when Earth will hit 1.5 ºC is what amount of warming the planet will peak at, and when that will happen. “With every tenth of a degree above 2 ºC, you’re looking at more-sustained, more-systemic impacts,” says geographer William Solecki. Those numbers won’t be apparent for decades.Nature | 5 min read

#global warming #climate change #agar grove #lifestyle #consumer