Advertisement
The View
CommentWorld
Richard Harris
Richard Harris

The View | Focus on what we discard and how we deal with our waste, not global warming

  • The world is getting warmer and there is not much we can do about it except accept, adjust and adapt
  • Investment in cleaning the effluent from burning fuel, reusing waste heat and regulating domestic waste disposal will lead to sustainable environmental advances

Reading Time:3 minutes
Why you can trust SCMP
6
A woman looks at an installation set up with plastic bottles during an environmental campaign in Gresik, East Java, Indonesia, on September 9. It was made from plastic collected from rivers in Gresik and Surabaya. Photo: Xinhua
Richard Harris

In the long, hot European summer of 1976, I took part as a geologist on a research project on the Norwegian ice cap. The Little Ice Age, from the early 14th century to the mid-19th century, caused the ice cap to surge, sending out glaciers which destroyed homes and farms. The glacial retreat could be precisely dated using lichen growth and other botanical indicators.

Advertisement

It took about 20 minutes of climbing to reach the glacier’s snout – when I returned, eight years later, it took an hour. Now, that moving block of ice barely exists.

Global warming is a fact, but investors should be focusing on what we discard as waste, not on the heat created by the greenwashing rhetoric coming out of the COP26 UN Climate Change Conference this week.

We live on a dynamic planet, with an iron core and molten subsurface, which exists in a steady state; observe the one-thriving city of Pompeii. The Earth just needs to wobble a little on its axis for weather and climate to change. Over a single lifetime, the seasons seem stable enough, and our two or three centuries of scientific records capture very short-term changes.

There is much hyperbole surrounding COP26, like the BBC headline, “Extreme weather events are the ‘new norm’.” If we lived for 300 years – not even a blink of an eye in geological terms – we would see that what we think is extreme weather is, in fact, the norm.

03:38

COP26 Glasgow, the UN Climate Change Conference: last chance to save the planet?

COP26 Glasgow, the UN Climate Change Conference: last chance to save the planet?

Ice coring, carbon dating, dendrochronology, palaeontology and geochemistry all provide evidence for temperature changes over time. A recent US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration study shows we are technically still in an “ice age”.

Advertisement