Spoiler alert: there's a nasty guy with a knife hiding behind the shower curtain waiting to stab the pretty, clueless young girl to a horrible, bloody end. All of us except for the girl know he's there.
Okay, Jon Lovitz isn't a horror villain but you get the idea anyway, I trust.
And wrong movie!
This is a movie we're all in together, and the nasty guy with the knife that we know is there is climate change, and his collection of knives is on display in depressing detail in the infographic below.
A series of serieseses
By the time I'd finished my seventh post (see the full list at the end of this post) on the negotiations underway at the 24th "Conference of the Parties" (COP24), I was well and truly convinced that the only global leaders who'd shown up were either under the age of 18 (Greta Thunberg and Majka Mulak, who you can read more about in the second and fourth posts, respectively, in that series of seven) or over the age of 90 (David Attenborough - see the first post in that series for his clarion call to action).
The conference finished with cries of success - of course it did. What else were they going to say? I'm still not ready to do a closeout post on COP24 because I'm deeply unconvinced that real progress towards a 1.5°C temperature rise above pre-industrial levels remains attainable, because so much of the world plans to continue with Business as Usual.
Let's not get ahead of ourselves - what did the Year in Review have to say?
Ah, yes, while procrastinating on finishing the series on COP24 I started another series of extracts (after writing a post on procrastination!), presenting selected extracts of the World Bank's recently released Year in Review: 2018 in 14 Charts.
Its headline take on climate change this year shows an interesting and rather frightening link to yesterday's post. Remember the number of people forcibly displaced globally by the end of 2017? 68.5 million. You think that's a lot of people? Did you read the infographic at the beginning of this post? They're projecting that as many as 143 million people may become internally displaced just in Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and Latin America by 2050 if the world doesn't switch to the 1.5°C trajectory rather than the 2°C+ trajectory we're on at the moment.
The Year in Review report added this sobering thought:
The World Bank Group’s Shock Waves study estimated an additional 100 million people could be pushed into extreme poverty by climate change. Internal climate migrants are rapidly becoming the human face of climate change.
What chart did they use to illustrate this? Interestingly, they went with the anticipated cause, rather than the effect.
Adopting the 1.5°C trajectory won't solve the whole refugee/migrant crisis, but it will keep a lot of people, their children and their children's children at home over the next five decades. Is that worth considering? Wouldn't it just be better to avoid the horror movie altogether instead of trying to cope with it?
References
World Bank - Year in Review: 2018 in 14 Charts
"Global Warming of 1.5°C"
Groundswell: Preparing for Internal Climate Migration
Other posts in what now seems to be a series
https://steemit.com/economy/@kiligirl/do-you-want-the-good-news-or-the-bad-news-first
https://steemit.com/womensrights/@kiligirl/women-s-lot-in-the-world-is-improving-slowly
https://steemit.com/waste/@kiligirl/waste-post-hasty
https://steemit.com/global/@kiligirl/2018-in-review-migrants-and-refugees
Past posts on the COP24 climate negotiations in Katowice, Poland in late 2018
https://steemit.com/cop24/@kiligirl/cop24-why-should-we-care-that-it-s-happening
https://steemit.com/cop24/@kiligirl/cop24-the-proceedings-begin-bad-news-and-good
https://steemit.com/cop24/@kiligirl/cop24-third-in-a-series-reflecting-on-its-relevance-and-achievements
https://steemit.com/cop24/@kiligirl/cop24-fourth-in-a-series-of-reflections-on-the-most-important-global-conversation-happening-right-now
https://steemit.com/cop24/@kiligirl/cop24-fifth-in-a-series-of-reflections-food-for-thought
https://steemit.com/cop24/@kiligirl/cop24-sixth-in-a-series-the-big-bad-wolf-starts-to-blow
https://steemit.com/cop24/@kiligirl/cop24-seventh-in-a-series-ambition-versus-the-rulebook
Team South Africa banner designed by @bearone
Frightening scenarios indeed. World leaders need to wake up! But then this brings us back to the orange clown...
Sigh...that's one of the main reasons I'm cynical about COP24....