Taking George Monbiot's advice to heart

George tells us that:

The lesson, to my mind, is obvious: if we fail to hold organisations to account for their mistakes and obfuscations, they’ll keep repeating them. Climate crimes have perpetrators. They also have facilitators.

This seems entirely reasonable to us. From the same edition of The Guardian we get this:

More than 8 billion people could be at risk of malaria and dengue fever by 2080 if greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise unabated, a new study says.

Malaria and dengue fever will spread to reach billions of people, according to new projections.

Researchers predict that up to 4.7 billion more people could be threatened by the world’s two most prominent mosquito-borne diseases, compared with 1970-99 figures.

The figures are based on projections of a population growth of about 4.5 billion over the same period, and a temperature rise of about 3.7C by 2100.

This comes from a paper in a part of The Lancet network:

…across four RCPs (arranged from the most conservative to business-as-usual: RCP2·6, RCP4·5, RCP6·0, and RCP8·5)

Now that’s a mistake, or obfuscation, that needs to be held to account. As one of us has pointed out in significant detail that RCP 8.5 is not business as usual. It never was anything other than an unlikely edge case just to show extremes. The actions that have already been taken concerning climate change make it - without extreme and significant retrogression - unachievable as even a possible case now.

What might happen if we all party with coal like it’s 1899 is a possibly interesting rumination. But to call that a likely, even possible - let alone business as usual - future is somewhere between that mistake or obfuscation that we must hold people to account for.

Well George, what say you?