Climate crisis: 2024 will be worse than 2023 – 12/30/2023 – Marcelo Leite

The choice is ours. We can listen to the British meteorological agency (Met Office), as Reuters did, or we can listen to a retired professor from the Federal University of Alagoas (UFAL), Luiz Carlos Baldicero Molion, as the CPI of NGOs did and reproduced on TV Senado.

Starting with the black goat in the room: Molion managed, in the 3min45s of the report, to deny everything that the IPCC, a scientific panel of the UN and the World Meteorological Organization, has been saying for 35 years. There was a ruralist senator who applauded.

The speaker, who travels through the Center-West in the pay of ogribusiness to say what Bolsonaristas want to hear, stated that the Amazon does not influence the climate and that the atmosphere is regulated by the oceans, not by CO2. A parliamentarian celebrated the proof that environmentalists and the European Union were wrong.

Aldo Rebelo would also applaud. Yes, that politician who was once a communist, socialist, solidarist, who is now a pedetista and who PT scoundrels want to see again as Minister of Defense, perhaps to reinforce the national-developmentalist band that is raving about exploring oil at the mouth of the Amazon.

Right there, close to Belém do Pará, headquarters in 2025 of COP30, a climate summit that has managed to resolve nothing in three decades of anti-climate talk. This will continue, if it depends on the fossils that rule the Planalto and Congress.

Better to listen to the Met Office, even at the risk of decolonial cancellation. Its experts predict that next year could be even hotter than 2023 – the hottest in 125 thousand years, that is. We will cross the threshold of 1.5ºC of warming set as a prudential limit in the Paris Agreement (2015).

In other words: 2024 promises.

It promises more droughts, like the one currently ravaging the semi-arid northeastern hinterland and transforming the Solimões River into a branch of the Sahara, as seen in Lalo de Almeida’s astonishing photo. More rain in the South, as this evil El Niño continues.

More heat waves, less soy, more deforestation in the cerrado, less in the Amazon (hopefully), more landslides on hills and shacks, less food security…

To follow the tradition of measures that solve nothing, if not make things worse, here are some New Year’s resolutions. First: talk more with your grandchildren about the global warming that our generation has let out of control – they, after all, will pay the price.

Eat less meat, by the way. When changing cars, choose a plug-in hybrid model and, if it is unavoidable to fill up, prefer ethanol as always. Travel less by plane? Complicated.

These are all significant mitigation measures. Mitigation more of consciousness than of global warming, let’s be clear. Being more honest in 2024 is another decision, no less difficult to fulfill.

Adaptation measures remain. Buy a second row of curtains to try to better insulate the apartment with a glassed-in gourmet balcony. Install air conditioning in the mountain house.

Buy fans and repellent just in case. Budget for two more photovoltaic solar energy panels. As a bonus, a bank of batteries to have energy, day in and day out, when Elektro interrupts supply due to any windstorm in Santo Antônio do Pinhal (SP).

Don’t abuse irony, a blind double-edged sword, useless in making mincemeat of heartbreak. Don’t let bitterness, resignation and boredom eliminate the climate crisis once and for all from the list of topics worthy of columns that no one reads, or, if they read, they forget as quickly as New Year’s resolutions.

Good 2024 to you too. The year promises.

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