Blogging Volumes

We associate "warmth" with kindness. A warm person is someone generous, someone you'd like to talk to. This isn't something abstract - we associate physical warmth with emotional kindness : if you're holding a hot cup of coffee, you're more likely to see the person in front of you as an emotionally "warm" person than if you were looking at that person with an iced coffee in your hand. The cognitive linguist George Lakoff attributes this to the fact that most of our warm experiences as children involved being held by our parents. Our group declaring our faith in one another before heading out to the action But perhaps our early experiences with warmth have mislead us about what to expect from people when temperatures start to rise. Here's what heat does, when it's not making us trust those around us more: It increases violent crime . Studies in New York alone have found a positive correlation between ice cream sales and murder rates . Crimes ...

Another week in the Anthropocene. Oh, to say the word, to think the thought! Anthropocene. Feel the power . This week in the Anthropocene , in the geological epoch of the Anthropos , of the upright ape with opposable thumbs, this week, some Sapiens stopped some oil. Some more Sapiens reported on their actions as if they were somehow 'radical'. Hundreds of humans got together and glued their bodies to fossil fuel infrastructure, locked their wrists to the top of tankers, stopping ten key oil refineries from functioning altogether. They acted in unison with groups from around the world, and their actions have already led to immense queues for petrol at empty stations. And while they went home, in their Pampers, from their overnight stays in beautifully rigid, admirably human police cells, the government of their country went ahead and announced they'd be selling off their own ocean for oil and gas drilling. It cannot be overstated just how radically Boris Johnson, and the ent...

To be honest, I’m not sure I would’ve wanted to go. Sat in rows of seats, forced to watch Jacob Rees-Mogg’s ulcerous standup dictionary-waving ‘comedy’ while echoes of “yah, splendid zinger mate” rang out around me, like the tropical birdsong of a Waitrose car park? I’d rather stay at home, thanks. Protect the NHS. But fortunately, I wasn’t even approached by a single member of the Conservative Party for their not-so-conservative, tenuously-labelled ‘party’, so I didn’t have to worry about making some terrible lapse of judgement and going along. It’s difficult though. Despite how shit the party appeared, it seems like loads of people are still a bit jealous, and would’ve gone if they were allowed. FOMO, probably: Fear Of More Obfuscation. And what do you do when you’re partying exclusively but worried other people might sneak their way in? If you’re Priti Patel, it seems, the solution to possible party-crashers is immediate deportation. And for all those people standing outside complai...

Me at the start of the protest in Kelvingrove Park, in my Greenpeace T-shirt my Mam bought me Tipping Point They did it. They finally did it. After all our waiting, and campaigning, and civil disobedience; after all the warnings from climate scientists all round the world, after all the floods, and the fires, and the ceaseless agitation of extremity … Our world leaders finally got together and did it. They sold the world. And I was there . Among the hundred thousand horde chanting and dancing; I was there in the city of the COP adding my voice to a mass of maddened activists demanding a change . I was not there for the actual signing of the deal; but then, none of us were invited to that. None of us were invited to the deal that still has us on track for 2.4 degrees of warming (and that’s if leaders keep to their commitments, which, historically, they have never done). This deal is essentially a death sentence for hundreds of millions of people. That’s what the science says, and in fac...