Fiona Harvey at the Guardian on new evidence that global warming is going to wallop poorer countries harder than the not-poor ones:

It has long been expected that poor people would bear the brunt of climate change, largely because so many more of the world’s poorest live in tropical latitudes whereas, wealthier people tend to live in more temperate regions.

This is inverse to the generally accepted responsibility for climate change, which falls mainly on rich countries that benefited early on from industry, and thus have historically high emissions, compared with poorer countries that have only begun catching up in the past few decades.

Heads we win tails they lose, innit. We got the accumulated wealth, and we won’t get drowned or starved as soon.

Those living in the poorest countries also have the most to lose, as so many depend on agriculture, which is likely to be badly affected by temperature rises and an increase in droughts, heatwaves and potential changes to rainfall that may lead to recurrent patterns of floods, droughts and higher intensity storms.

It’s going to be terrible…and we’re doing almost nothing to stop it or slow it. Our friend Bjarte Foshaug put it this way in a Facebook comment:

It’s as if we’re in a car heading towards the edge of a cliff that’s about 300 ft ahead. There’s some uncertainty about the road grip, the precise distance to the cliff etc. If we’re as lucky as one can possibly get, we might be able to stop as much as 30 ft before plunging into the abyss, provided that we start grinding to a halt at this very moment. If we’re unlucky, it may already be too late. But really none of that matters, because the idea of stopping after 300 ft is not even part of our public conversation. The only conversation that’s currently inside the Overton Window is whether we should aim to stand still after 1000 ft or 1500 ft.

Anybody got some mattresses?