On 6 August 2021, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) formally approved and released its latest report, the ‘Summary for Policymakers’ of the ‘Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis’ and its underlying assessment.

“It is unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land. Widespread and rapid changes in the atmosphere, ocean, cryosphere and biosphere have occurred,” is one of what are called the report’s headline statements. “Global surface temperature has increased faster since 1970 than in any other 50-year period over at least the last 2,000 years” is another. “Temperatures during the most recent decade (2011-2020) exceed those of the most recent multi-century warm period, around 6,500 years ago” is one more.

What we have seen, for more than a decade, is the insistence by multi-lateral agencies and organisations that we are beset by natural circumstances that with every passing year have become more threatening. This insistency speaks of a ‘climate emergency’, by which is generally meant the human-induced increase in atmospheric greenhouse gases like CO2 and CH4, which can be connected to rising global temperatures, and to the incidence of droughts, floods heatwaves, crop failures, rising sea levels.

What we have also seen is ‘climate emergency’ as declarations by politicians, by people who are known as ‘policy makers’, by various kinds of scientists and researchers in a number of scientific disciplines, and by international agencies and formal grupings that have long since become too many to count. What they have in common is the claim that they are taking the climate emergency seriously and that we can trust them to do something effective about it.

What do they want to do? The new IPCC report repeats all the old emergencies:

• The land surface will continue to warm more than the ocean surface.
• With every additional increment of global warming, changes in extremes continue to become larger.
• There will be an increasing occurrence of extreme events.
• The Arctic is projected to experience about three times the rate of global warming.
• Heavy precipitation events will intensify and become more frequent in most regions.
• Intense tropical cyclones are projected to increase.
• Precipitation and surface water flows are projected to become more variable over most land regions.
• A warmer climate will intensify very wet and very dry weather.
• Monsoon precipitation is projected to increase in the mid- to long-term for regions that have monsoon rains.

For the year 2021, the latter half of the year is being prepared to see a number of large meetings, or negotiations, on a group of themes that are linked: climate, biodiversity, food, conservation of natural regions. We have begun with highlighting a very few messages from the August IPCC report and will do the same in teh weeks and months ahead for what remains to be rolled out from the well-stocked stables of the multi-lateral derby.

We have seen it become more obvious that the widely spread group of organisations and agencies active in these subjects are following a particular line. This line uses as its currency the addressing of the global climate and environmental crisis. The objectiv is to “save nature” but by turning it into a huge money spinner. That spinning of money is meant to inject new fuel into the world’s economic growth model. This sees nature’s cycles and processes being called instead “natural capital” which is to be priced and tradable on financial markets.

Of course, we strongly oppose such a deviant view of nature and oppose just as much the mendacious financial jugglery that these agencies and organisations are advancing, as fast as they can. Nature is not capital, is not to be and cannot be valued in the ways that they insist upon, and it is abhorrent that nature is being described as ‘tradeable’ in any way. We will continue to explain why between now and the end of 2021. (RG)