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The British Prime Minister has joined 65,000 people who have chosen to fly around the world to Baku to address Climate Change. Baku, for those who did not spend hours in class staring at maps, is the capital of Azerbaijan, an ex-Soviet dictatorship & petrostate with a dirty human rights record, particularly against its ethnic Armenian minority. This might be deemed acceptable if something of importance were to be solved, but the opening Communique appears to have forgotten to discuss phasing out fossil fuels.
It is a truism that the climate and environment is a global problem. We have all been told that to limit global warming to 1.5C, the world must achieve Net Zero by 2050. According to the UN, the world is on track for a 3C increase, twice what is deemed workable. But while successive governments talk about leading the way on climate targets, they ignore one key statistic: The UK was responsible for 0.81% of global CO2 emissions in 2023.
This fact cannot be avoided and undermines the entire concept. To fly 470 British delegates halfway around the world to discuss what a statistically insignificant power can do borders on imperialistic hubris. Should the entire population of the UK sacrifice their lives for the climate salvation of the world, it would achieve nothing.
It may be unfortunate, and it may be painful to admit, but Britain is not the economic or manufacturing power it used to be. The Workshop of the World we are not. Beyond symbolic gestures, the government is powerless and should admit to it, rather than spending tens of billions of pounds on what amounts to PR stunts.
Maybe I should say effectively powerless*. There is only one way His Majesty’s Government can potentially solve climate change and global warming. The Royal Navy possesses between 225 and 240 nuclear warheads for the Trident Nuclear Deterrence. Based on the analysis of the Kuwaiti Oil Fields and the firestorms that followed WWII strategic bombing raids, American climatologist Alan Roebuck modelled a limited nuclear exchange of a hundred 15kt bombs. This would create 100 firestorms to fill the skies with enough pyrocumulonimous clouds to carry soot into the upper atmosphere. There, the burnt organic remains of a thousand-degree fire remain for up to a few years as tiny obstacles to block out the sun. According to Roebuck, a hundred firestorms would cool global temperatures by approximately 1.25C for two to three years. Even ten years later, with such a “limited” nuclear exchange the planet would still be 0.5C cooler
Therefore, presuming these calculations to be correct, should the Holbrook warheads on the British nuclear deterrent be set to “pre-strategic yields” of around 10kt, the Prime Minister can theoretically cool the planet by up to 3C (1.25Cx240 warheads). The same 3C the world is on course to heat up by.
We would collapse global agriculture, destroy 240 forests or grasslands**, kill thousands if not millions, of people and likely cause mass radiation sickness to additional millions, but the Prime Minister could do it.
This may seem extreme (It certainly does to the author), but the MoD’s policy on Trident is to “deter the most extreme threats to our national security and way of life”. Antonio Guterres, the UN General Secretary, famously stated in 2018 that the climate was an existential danger. It could be argued existing is part of our way of life; in 2020 19% of British children polled had “Climate Change Nightmares”. If nothing else, the government could threaten nuclear blackmail in order to save the world.
Hopefully, the government will never countenance such a seemingly insane policy. I say seemingly for should what we have been told be correct, there is a cold, hard, realpolitik rationale for it being the lesser of two evils for the people of Britain. But if we’re not sure the science is correct, why is there a war on domestic agriculture and industry, forcing us to source our requirements overseas, and driving up emissions?
Having decided there is nothing the government can reasonably do to prevent Climate Change, the only question is what it should do. There is a lot more scope for potential, which I’ll share later, in more positive part two of this article. There, I intend to outline how we can ‘lead the way’ on sustainability without destroying our economy but rather restoring it to life.
NB: I feel it necessary to discuss this as some feel hopeless inevitability, and I wish to show that the government must be aware of this “solution.” Given their dilatory attitude in confronting the main sources of emissions, they cannot (yet) consider climate change to be “existential” or the other hyperbolic adjectives shouted by JustStopOil, Greta Thunberg, and the like.
**Fortunately due to post WWII building standards, modern cities are unlikely to allow firestorms, eliminating them from a potential target list.
