Who cares about climate change?
JVL Introduction
This powerful article on the necessity for action to limit climate breakdown and the rapidly closing window available to “secure a liveable future for all” is by Fiona Godlee, former editor in chief of the British Medical Journal.
She delivered it as a speech from the pulpit of King’s College Chapel, Cambridge, for the annual “Sermon before the University”.
Her opening – “Have you ever sat down in the middle of the road? I did it the other day” – had the worshippers sitting up in astonishment and they remained in stunned, total, silence for a long time after she finished.
She stressed that “the impacts fall heaviest on the world’s poorest, who have contributed least to greenhouse gas emissions”. She challenged Cambridge University to face up to its responsibilities to join the battle to prevent the world reaching its likely tipping point of 1.5 degrees of warming in 2033. She had a focus on health impacts with climate breakdown “already causing injury, disease, and death…through heatwaves, wildfires, storms, floods, droughts, increased infectious disease and mental ill health”. She shared with the doctors sitting with her in the road the conviction that “they can’t protect their patients if we don’t protect the planet.”
This article was originally published by the British Medical Journal on Sun 22 May 2022. Read the original here.
Who cares about climate change?
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COP26 Said it all, when the largest delegation of over 500 came from the fossil fuel lobbyists and the indiginous people who were being affected the most were prohibited by various reasons for attending. Pakistan is in the middle of a climate change induced heatwave and are running short of water. Result a Cholera outbreak.
When the rich west chooses to waste money on armaments to a futile war and the US and UK ‘s economy relies on producing weapons what chance do we have. If all that money was spent on renewables and protecting environments perhaps we MIGHT have a chance.
I started teaching Science in 1969 and specialised in Environmental Science from 2004…by 2005 on retirement.
I despair on how little had changed in that time.
It was important for Fiona Godlee to speak out as she did in the heart of Cambridge University. The University could do so much to try to avert some of the catastrophic effects of ecological breakdown, but it chooses instead to act as a collection of rapacious predatory capitalist institutions, caring little for the futures of its own students, guided by a chief financial officer who left Leman Brothers after the financial crash of 2008. So Fiona Godlee is too gentle with the University, whose organised climate response – Cambridge Zero – is there to greenwash. It helps research centres bid for lucrative research funds that promote fantasy solutions in the time we have left to act, like fossil free flight and carbon capture and storage and obscures the continuing links of the University with the fossil fuel industry. As major land owners the colleges feed the Cambridge “growth bonfire”, coined by the ex-Master of St Edmunds College, dragging jobs, homes and water supplies from the North to the South and East of the country in a bizarre parody of the so-called people-mocking, “levelling-up agenda”. But, of course, It is great that Fiona Godlee seized the opportunity to open the eyes of some of her fellow Cambridge citizens to the impacts we face in the next few years. I hope that others will build on it.