Guest essay by Eric Worrall

The UK Met struggles to get tomorrow’s weather right, and their “warmer than normal” winter seasonal forecasts are an open joke, but they can definitely tell us the form of government our children will experience by the end of the 21st century.

The Met Office warns of armed militias roaming a UK ravaged by climate change in doomsday report (but maybe they should get this week’s weather right first!)

• The Government-funded UK Climate Resilience Progamme issued the report 
• Researchers considered what would happen in the event of climate change 
• The report predicts the collapse of law and order in the event of catastrophe 

By GLENN OWEN FOR THE MAIL ON SUNDAY

PUBLISHED: 09:02 AEDT, 16 January 2022 | UPDATED: 09:16 AEDT, 16 January 2022

It is a bleak forecast even by the Met Office’s standards – the complete collapse of society leaving armed militias and criminal gangs to roam the land unchallenged.

That is one of the doomsday scenarios set out in a report commissioned by the UK’s weather service to model the potential consequences of climate change.

The extraordinary report, called Shared Socio-economic Pathways and developed for the Government-funded UK Climate Resilience Programme, sets out supposedly ‘plausible futures’ as a result of global warming.

One of those scenarios described by the authors is a surge in ‘Right-wing populism’, resulting in the collapse of ‘political and governance systems’. After that ‘a tipping point is reached when the police and justice system (as known in the past) cease to exist’. Due to ‘past investments in military and defence… without an effective central government, different military groups (militias, criminal groups, etc) rise to de facto power’.

Under a different scenario in the report, a ‘rich elite’ imposes conscription. ‘Society is more divided than ever,’ the report suggests, ‘with the majority of the population having low incomes and poor health, contrasting with a rich ruling elite. Social unrest increases and the prison population skyrockets. To keep the general population in line, governments introduce military conscription by the end of the century.’

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Read more: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10406521/Met-Office-predicts-collapse-society-following-climate-disaster.html

My first thought was, both scenarios sound like life in today’s London. But maybe the people who write such reports have never venture outside of their safe spaces.

Guest essay by Eric Worrall

The South China Morning Post article actually says coal is expanding, but you have to read halfway down to get to that bit.

Climate change: Renewable energy to meet over 70 per cent of China’s additional power needs in next three years, says IEA

Even as state subsidies are being phased out, the rapid growth of onshore wind and solar farm installations is expected to continue

Renewable energy expansion is the mainstay of China’s strategy to gradually decarbonise its coal-dominated electricity supply

Renewable energy will meet over 70 per cent of China’s additional electricity demand in the next three years as coal’s role in powering the world’s second largest economy continues to decline, according to the International Energy Agency’s latest projection.

Additional demand refers to any increase from today’s level.

Even as state subsidies are being phased out, the rapid growth of onshore wind and solar farm installations is expected to continue, with their combined generating capacity surging 75 per cent to 930 gigawatts by 2024 from 530GW in 2020, it projected.

Renewable energy expansion is the mainstay of China’s strategy to gradually decarbonise its coal-dominated electricity supply, as it aims for peak coal consumption by 2025 and peak carbon dioxide emissions by 2030 to help fight global warming and climate change.

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“Renewable energy sources are set to meet over 70 per cent of additional demand during 2022-2024, while coal meets 25 per cent of the increment.”

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Read more: https://www.scmp.com/business/article/3163644/climate-change-renewable-energy-meet-over-70-cent-chinas-additional-power

I call BS. I have no doubt Xi Jinping’s administration told the IEA this is the plan, but Xi Jinping almost crashed the Chinese economy late last year by trying to switch off coal, a follow on from Xi’s catastrophic gas conversion directives, which caused millions to suffer through winter in 2018 without home heating. So I can’t help feeling Xi’s contact with reality is a little tenuous, when it comes to energy planning.