https://www.dhakatribune.com/op-ed/2022/04/01/how-can-we-sleep-while-our-beds-are-burning
A few days ago, the activist British journalist George Monbiot posted with palpable anguish on Twitter that it was “30°C above normal in the Arctic today [and] 40°C above normal in the Antarctic today. It would be unbelievable if it were not true. And it is terrifying beyond words. The war we have waged against the natural world has, in climatic terms, just gone nuclear.” Addressing his own country, Monbiot wrote, “And our government's response? To propose a cut in fuel duty. In other words, to make fossil fuels cheaper to buy. This is how we destroy ourselves - with a thousand blinkered decisions, made for an ephemeral gain in popularity or comfort.” Monbiot was reacting to an astonishing series of findings from the coldest locations on the planet, which are experiencing unprecedented heat waves this year. As *The Washington Post* reported on March 18, “temperatures running at least 50 degrees (32 Celsius) above normal have expanded over vast portions of eastern Antarctica from the Adélie Coast through much of the eastern ice sheet’s interior. Some computer model simulations and observations suggest temperatures may have even climbed up to 90 degrees (50 Celsius) above normal in a few areas.” These are scarcely imaginable numbers. From Italy, the weather-focused journalist Stefano Di Battista tweeted with considerable alarm that “it is impossible, we would have said until two days ago. From today (March 18) the Antarctic climatology has been rewritten.” It should be noted those horrifyingly out-of-place temperatures have receded closer to normal, but the grim reality they represent is entirely unchanged. Just a couple of weeks ago, for example, scientists confirmed that Antarctic sea ice has reached its lowest concentration since satellite observations first began 43 years ago. Then, soon afterwards, it was learned the Conger Ice Shelf (which spreads over 1200 square kilometres) has collapsed into the South Indian Ocean, in the most severe incident of its type ever recorded in those same four decades of satellite observations. American glaciologist Peter Neff told *The Washington Post* these kinds of episodes will keep threatening humanity, and that “this is going to continue happening in a warming world, so the best thing we can do is get rid of our fossil fuels, stop emitting greenhouse gases and limit the amount of warming we experience.” Can this happen, in our unsustainable modern world built on the fundamental principle of cheap oil for all purposes? It’s hard to be optimistic, because we have known about this eventual reckoning for decades and done nothing about it. That plight is perhaps best summed up by the Australian rockers Midnight Oil’s great hit from 35 years ago: “How can we dance / When our earth is turning? / How do we sleep / While our beds are burning?” In an important interview with *The National Herald* last year, the great novelist and writer Amitav Ghosh told Aditya Anand that “I look at it as a geopolitical problem. And I think it's not just me, anybody that you speak to in India, China, Indonesia, will say the same thing. If you ask them, are you willing to make emission cuts to shrink your carbon footprint because of climate change, the first thing they will say to you is, why should I do it? This problem is of the West's making.” Ghosh has been at the forefront of the global intellectual response to climate change via the superb and prescient 2017 non-fiction analysis *The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable*, the wonderful 2021 novel *Gun Island*, and – also from 2021 - the stunning *The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis*, which, in the words of its publishers at The University of Chicago Press, “argues that the dynamics of climate change today are rooted in a centuries-old geopolitical order constructed by Western colonialism.” Speaking to *The National Herald*, Ghosh warned that “We are actually seeing a massive geopolitical shift, a historic geopolitical shift. And we just don't know which way it's going to go. With the rise of China and Russia, it's the first time in, let's say, 500 years that power is dramatically shifting away from the West. There will be winners, and there will be losers. And right now, I don't know where India will be. I think this particular geopolitical shift is not going to favour India.” In the absence of any truly cohesive and co-ordinated global efforts to mitigate and reverse the effects of global warming and climate change, many people believe the planet will auto-correct, like a laptop being rebooted. But that’s unlikely, says Ghosh: “The whole idea of Malthusian correction is that a lot of people will die. That is certainly not something that I agree with. That's the eco-fascist sort of position and people do talk about it. They think that if a lot of people die, then the problem is solved…and they could keep on expanding the carbon footprint and maintain their lifestyle. People who talk about this never mention the fact that actually it takes 33 Bangladeshis to produce as much greenhouse gases as a single American.”