Greenhouse gas concentrations hit a record last year and the world is “way off track” in capping rising temperatures, the United Nations said. 

A report by the U.N. World Meteorological Organization (WMO) showed carbon dioxide levels surged to 413.2 parts per million in 2020, rising more than the average rate over the last decade despite a temporary dip in emissions during COVID-19 lockdowns.

WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas said the current rate of increase in heat-trapping gases would result in temperature rises “far in excess” of the 2015 Paris Agreement target of 1.5 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial average this century.

“We are way off track,” he said. “We need to revisit our industrial, energy and transport systems and whole way of life,” he added, calling for a “dramatic increase” in commitments.

Under countries’ current pledges, global emissions would be 16% higher in 2030 than they were in 2010, according to a separate analysis by the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

That is far off the 45% reduction by 2030 that scientists say is needed to cap warming at 1.5 degrees and avoid its most devastating impacts. A “business-as-usual” trajectory leading to temperature rises of 1.6C, 2.4C and 4.4C by 2030, 2050 and 2100 respectively would result in 2.4% lost output by 2030, 10% by 2050 and 18% by 2100, according to the median replies to the survey.

World ‘way off track’ in halting warming, UN warns ahead of COP26 (trust.org)

 Rich countries agreed in 2009 that at least $100bn a year would be provided annually from public and private sector sources to the developing world by 2020, in order to help poor countries cut greenhouse gas emissions and cope with the impacts of the climate crisis. That target has so far gone unmet. 

Experts said it was “shameful” that developed countries were not doing more to help the poorest in the world, who were struggling with a climate crisis not of their making.

The climate finance delivery plan published found that a shortfall remained between the finance likely to be provided this year and next year and the $100bn (£73bn) target, but that it would be closed by 2023 when new contributions that had already been pledged came into effect. By 2025, according to the plan, the amount flowing to developing countries should reach $117bn.

No new money is likely to be forthcoming immediately under the delivery plan.

Climate finance for poor countries to hit $100bn target by 2023, says report | Cop26 | The Guardian

Australia has now belatedly pledged to achieve net zero carbon emissions by 2050.

Greta Thunberg has announced she will be taking part in climate protests in Glasgow next week, also inviting Glasgow workers who plan on striking to join her in the march.

She confirmed she would be in Glasgow during Cop26 to take part in the protests on Friday, 5 November. The protest, arranged by Fridays for Future Scotland a group inspired by Thunberg’s activism, will march at 11am from Kelvingrove Park in the west end of Glasgow to George Square in the city centre.

Thunberg invited thousands of striking street cleaners, railway and refuse staff to join the climate protests. The Swedish activist appeared to support the workers’ strike in her invitation. Around 1,500 Glasgow City Council staff in refuse, cleaning and catering roles are set to strike in the opening week of Cop26 over a pay dispute.

She wrote: “Climate justice also means social justice and that we leave no one behind. So we invite everyone, especially the workers striking in Glasgow, to join us. See you there! #UprootTheSystem.”

Greta Thunberg to march at Glasgow climate strike during Cop26 | The Independent

Volume three of Alwyn Edgar’s work on the Scottish Highland Clearances is out now as an ebook. This volume is about the clearances in Sutherland.

Before the Rebellion of Prince Charles in 1745, each Highland clan owned its own land. No one else, including the Government in Edinburgh, had the power to deprive them of it. (Travellers saw that in the mountains every crag was a new fortress for men defending their own country.) But the Highland Jacobite rebels having been defeated at Culloden and scattered, and the Lowland Government in Edinburgh now being much stronger since the Union with England in 1707, the British authorities decided to incorporate the Highlands into Great Britain in fact, as well as in theory. The anglophone legal system was successfully imposed, and the clan chiefs were made into landlords, owning all the land which had once belonged to their clans. Scots law now gave each chief-landlord the right (for any reason or no reason) to turn his entire clan out of their homes and farms, and keep the whole clan land as his private back garden, if he wanted. So when the new landlords realized that big grazing farms, for cattle or sheep, would make a lot of money, the clearances started. Well-to-do Highlanders, Lowlanders, even a few Englishmen, rented the clan lands; the chiefs evicted their folk; and the chief/landlord found his income shooting up over the years to five times or fifteen times what it had been (and there was no income tax!). Many of the evicted Highlanders were given an acre or two of worthless, barren land, and told to make it fertile: and when by donkey-work the crofters were able to grow a few potatoes, they had to pay rent for the value they themselves had created. Others – either immediately or after years of rack-rented drudgery on the croft – went to the Lowland factories, or abandoned Scotland entirely for arduous pioneering lives in North America (those who survived the journey).

The Earls of Sutherland were chiefs of the Sutherland clan, Murrays, MacKays, Sutherlands and others. Adam Gordon married a daughter of the Earl of Sutherland about 1500, and managed to cheat the rest of the family out of their land-charters. After that the Earls of Sutherland were Gordons. The 18th earl died in 1766 leaving a year-old daughter, Elizabeth Gordon, to succeed him. She inherited nearly two-thirds of the county of Sutherland, over 1250 square miles, an estate about the size of Gloucestershire. The long wars with France between 1793 and 1815 meant there was a desperate need of soldiers, such as the Sutherland small tenants could provide: but (despite being married to one of the richest men in England, the Marquis of Stafford) she wanted the much higher rents which big sheep farms would supply. (You can never have too much money.) She was indifferent to the fate of the small tenants – “a good many of them”, would “inevitably be tossed out”, she wrote; they would be “driven from their present dwellings by the sheep farms”. She cleared her estate between 1807 and 1821, greatly increasing her rents. She and her husband became the Duke and Duchess of Sutherland.

The second greatest Sutherland landowner was Lord Reay, the chief of the Reay MacKay clan. Reay cleared his estate even before Elizabeth Gordon, beginning about 1800. (Thirteen smaller landlords owned the rest of the county, and rivalled the countess and Lord Reay with their own clearances.) Reay belonged to a London firm which provided finance to slave-traders, and spent most of his time in gambling dens and brothels. Having wasted vast amounts of money, he sold his estate to the Sutherlands in 1830, and bought a slave plantation in the West Indies. When the slaves were freed in 1833, like the other slave-owners he was compensated. (The slaves weren’t.)

The Sutherland Clearances. The Highland Clearances Volume Three – Theory and Practice

 Poorer households have been found to pay as much as 50 per cent more on their energy bills than those with more money.

It was revealed that those living in poverty pay a significantly higher proportion of their household budget on energy bills, with the poorest households spending around seven times as much of their funds on energy as the richest households, and three-and-a-half times the national average.

Figures also show Britain’s poorest 10 per cent of households pay on average £756 a year per person for electricity, gas and other fuels. This is compared with an average of £504 per person in the richest households, as well as a national average of £530.

As of 1 October, the cap on what energy companies could charge households for their monthly consumption rose by £139 for people on default tariffs and £153 for people on pre-payment meters. As a result, millions face higher monthly bills.

People living in poverty ‘hit harder by gas and electricity bills’ | The Independent

Analysis of data on the 540,000 wealthiest individuals in the UK – the top 1% – shows how decades of low taxes on capital gains, a type of income mainly available to the wealthiest in society, is creating a new breed of “super-gainers”. 

Under the current system, income – which covers earnings such as salaries – is taxed at a maximum rate of 45%. Capital gains – the profit made when an asset such as shares or property is sold for more than it cost to acquire – is taxed at much lower rates. Gains from shares attract a maximum rate of 20%, while the maximum for property is 28%. 

The analysis has found that since the late 1990s, the proportion of earnings that are declared as capital gains by the top 1% has ballooned: just 3% of their income came through gains in 1997, doubling to 5.4% in 2010. By the 2017/18 tax year it had reached 13.3%.

Among the extremely rich – the 50,000 people who make up the 0.1% – the amount declared in capital gains grew by 213% between 2007 and 2017. 

They found this type of income was very concentrated at the top, with the 5,000 highest earners receiving 54% of all capital gains.

Because gains are so lightly taxed, the wealthiest pay a far lower share of their earnings to the tax authorities than most workers. The top 0.001% – 400 people with earnings of between £9m and £11m – were paying an effective tax rate of just 21%, Advani found. This was slightly less than someone on median earnings of £30,000, whose effective rate was 21.4%.

Adam Corlett, the principal economist at the Resolution Foundation, said there were “glaring holes” around capital gains which needed to be addressed. “Thanks to the glaring holes in the capital gains tax system, it’s quite possible for the wealthiest to pay a tax rate of only 10%, or even zero, while low income workers pay much higher rates. That should change,” he said.

The government could raise an extra £16bn a year if the low tax rates on profits from shares and property were increased and brought back into line with taxes on salaries.

Treasury could raise £16bn a year if shares and property were taxed like salaries | Tax and spending | The Guardian

 Asia suffered its hottest year on record in 2020. The mean temperature pushed 1.39C above the 1981-2010 average, according to a report by the UN’s World Meteorological Organization.

“Extreme weather and climate change impacts across Asia in 2020 caused the loss of life of thousands of people, displaced millions of others and cost hundreds of billions of dollars, while wreaking a heavy toll on infrastructure and ecosystems,” the WMO said in its State of the Climate in Asia report. “Sustainable development is threatened, with food and water insecurity, health risks and environmental degradation on the rise.”

“Weather and climate hazards, especially floods, storms, and droughts, had significant impacts in many countries of the region,” said WMO chief Petteri Taalas. “Combined, these impacts take a significant toll on long-term sustainable development.” 

In 2020 floods and storms affected approximately 50 million people in Asia, resulting in more than 5,000 fatalities.

The report revealed the total annual average losses due to climate-related hazards. China suffered an estimated $238bn, followed by India at $87bn, Japan with $83bn and South Korea on $24bn. But when the size of the economy is considered, the average annual losses are expected to be as high as 7.9% of gross domestic product for Tajikistan, 5.9% for Cambodia and 5.8% for Laos. 

Increased heat and humidity are forecast to lead to an effective loss of outdoor working hours across the continent, with a potential cost of many billions of dollars.

In 2020, average sea surface temperatures reached record high values in the Indian, Pacific and Arctic Oceans. Sea surface temperatures and ocean warming in and around Asia are increasing more than the global average. They have been warming at more than triple the average in the Arabian Sea, and parts of the Arctic Ocean.

There are approximately 100,000 square kilometres of glaciers on the Tibetan Plateau and in the Himalayas – the largest volumes of ice outside the polar regions and the source of 10 major Asian rivers.

“Glacier retreat is accelerating and it is projected that glacier mass will decrease by 20 percent to 40 percent by 2050, affecting the lives and livelihoods of about 750 million people in the region,” the report said. “This has major ramifications for global sea level, regional water cycles and local hazards such as landslides and avalanches.”

Asia had hottest year on record in 2020 – UN | Climate crisis | The Guardian

 Asia suffered its hottest year on record in 2020. The mean temperature pushed 1.39C above the 1981-2010 average, according to a report by the UN’s World Meteorological Organization.

“Extreme weather and climate change impacts across Asia in 2020 caused the loss of life of thousands of people, displaced millions of others and cost hundreds of billions of dollars, while wreaking a heavy toll on infrastructure and ecosystems,” the WMO said in its State of the Climate in Asia report. “Sustainable development is threatened, with food and water insecurity, health risks and environmental degradation on the rise.”

“Weather and climate hazards, especially floods, storms, and droughts, had significant impacts in many countries of the region,” said WMO chief Petteri Taalas. “Combined, these impacts take a significant toll on long-term sustainable development.” 

In 2020 floods and storms affected approximately 50 million people in Asia, resulting in more than 5,000 fatalities.

The report revealed the total annual average losses due to climate-related hazards. China suffered an estimated $238bn, followed by India at $87bn, Japan with $83bn and South Korea on $24bn. But when the size of the economy is considered, the average annual losses are expected to be as high as 7.9% of gross domestic product for Tajikistan, 5.9% for Cambodia and 5.8% for Laos. 

Increased heat and humidity are forecast to lead to an effective loss of outdoor working hours across the continent, with a potential cost of many billions of dollars.

In 2020, average sea surface temperatures reached record high values in the Indian, Pacific and Arctic Oceans. Sea surface temperatures and ocean warming in and around Asia are increasing more than the global average. They have been warming at more than triple the average in the Arabian Sea, and parts of the Arctic Ocean.

There are approximately 100,000 square kilometres of glaciers on the Tibetan Plateau and in the Himalayas – the largest volumes of ice outside the polar regions and the source of 10 major Asian rivers.

“Glacier retreat is accelerating and it is projected that glacier mass will decrease by 20 percent to 40 percent by 2050, affecting the lives and livelihoods of about 750 million people in the region,” the report said. “This has major ramifications for global sea level, regional water cycles and local hazards such as landslides and avalanches.”

Asia had hottest year on record in 2020 – UN | Climate crisis | The Guardian