Hannah Ritchie (2024) Not the End of the World.

Shit. If you’re like me, and you tell your big sister that she should really move house because it’s going to burn down (she lives in Canada, not LA California) but not to worry too much because her grandkids are toast, because of global warming, then, as Hannah Ritchie shows, you’ll really need to change your apocalyptic-scenario storyline. I’ve got a fall-back position that the moron’s moron Trump will start a war with China. So I’m kinda OK with the end-of-the-world happening before I miss it and die of fucking natural causes associated with being too old or worse, Alzheimer’s, which is common fare. How boring is that?

After doing a degree in Environmental Geoscience at Edinburgh Uni, Hanna Richie got a First (everybody but total dummies gets a First now, all you have to be able to do is turn on the computer and ask ChatGBT to write your essays and do your coursework but that’s another story) here’s the interesting part.

‘I left with no solutions,’ she tells us. ‘I felt the deadweight of endless unsolvable problems…how humanity was ravaging the planet. Global warming, sea-level rise, ocean acidification, dead coral reefs, starving polar bears, deforestation, acid rain, air pollution, overfishing, oils spills and the annihilation of the world’s ecosystems. I don’t remember hearing about a single positive trend.’

You get it. Don’t you? She’s going to start blathering about positive trends and upsetting us doomscollers and make us look like the minority of students at Edinburgh Uni that weren’t English, or worse, who spoke with the kind of working-class accent that had lecturers and fellow English students wincing and mocking them for not speaking with a proper middle-class accent, or at least faking it, before they make it and send their kids to a proper boarding school like Gordonstoun where they can be taught to speak properly like King Charles.

Sigh. ‘Our World in Data.’  Everything you thought and believed about global warming and the poor polar bears is wrang, wrang, wrang. Fuck! How um I gonnae tell my sister I never got a First, I never even got and O’level, and her hoose isnae gonnae burn doon unless she starts smoking and getting properly drunk and starts a chip-pan fire?

Beastie! https://bit.ly/bannkie