LADY GAIA: the interview

Me: So. What do you think about COP 27?

Lady Gaia: I beg your pardon?

Me: COP 27. Conference of the parties, I think. Now happening in Egypt. Lots of world leaders there, talking in hushed voices about climate change and making friends with all the oil lobbyists and gas lobbyists and coal lobbyists.

Lady Gaia: Are you being funny?

Me: No. Wouldn’t dream of it.

Lady Gaia: Well, it seems they had targets to avoid warming of more than 1.5 degree Celsius of average heating but as nobody has actually achieved a target yet, they’re recalibrating to hit 2 degrees of average heating. Is that right?

Me: Sounds like it.

Lady Gaia: And when they motor past 2 degrees of warming, heading for 2.5 degrees, they’ll be congratulating each other on substantial progress being made.

Me: No doubt.

Lady Gaia: Good god.

Me: Yup.

Lady Gaia: Don’t they realise that 2 degrees of warming will destroy most of their cities as the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets melt? Not to mention most of the fertile agricultural land that’s left?

Me: It’s weird. Lots of people have been telling them but they don’t really believe it applies to them. They think of it as a side issue and much less important than The Economy.

Lady Gaia: [silence]

Lady Gaia: I really don’t want to kill 7.8 billion humans. I mean, apart from anything else, the methane from that number of corpses will totally fuck my atmosphere.

***