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Friday, May 13, 2022

Transgender teaching replaces sustainablity teaching in schools



I authored a submission to the UN in 2018 which was written in conjunction with leading climate change scientists.  The analysis it contained demonstrated the safe global temperature rise had to be less than 0.5degC. This was passed in1980. It is far lower than the politically set 1.5degC target the world has been using and which is soon to be passed. Since 1980, cumulative CO2 emissions have more than doubled. It is impossible to overstate how seriously catastrophic the climate crisis now is.

Young people looking to the future know they will have to inherent the mess the boomer generation created, and know when they get there, they will be contrasting the ruins they have inherited with the utopia the boomers had.  They don’t need to be experts on climate change to know this any more than steering class passengers on the Titanic didn’t need to be Naval Architects to be the first to know the ship was sinking when the water went over their feet. 

In response to the first wave of global climate change protests from 2005-2010, sustainability was introduced into school curriculums.  This was to be evaluated by Ofstead for compliance.  No one knew what it was and or what it meant, and anything to do with sustainability ultimately led to depressing discussions on the curtailment of personal liberties and collective doom. Sustainability has now been quietly removed and I have not seen a single Ofstead report criticise a school for lack of sustainability teaching. I don’t even talk to my students about climate change, unless specifically asked.  That space has been filled with gender ideology. It’s easier to talk about, it’s less divisive than climate change, and everyone can feel good about themselves either by partaking or supporting someone that is.

Teaching transgenderism in schools contrasts positively with teaching about sustainability and climate change doom.  Transgenderism presents a future of multicolours and personal liberty. Sustainability presents a black future and curtailment of liberties.  Transgenederism capitalises on a false equivalence with diversity. The diversity that it presents is an easier diversity for society to accept than that which is needed to accommodate the billions of people who are soon to flood over nation-state borders to escape climate change disasters. Transgenderism allows society to tick difficult boxes without doing the hard work associated with them.

Past civilisations share the common trait of sacrificing children to their chosen gods when faced with collapse. Today, transgenderism is society's way of sacrificing young people to the gods of medical technology and market forces in the face of collapse. It is working, in some schools 1 in 15 girls are presenting as transgender and there is virtually no worthwhile sustainability teaching on any curriculum. 


Wednesday, September 18, 2019

Comments on the IPCC Special Report on 1.5degC

The IPCC report is available here http://www.ipcc.ch/report/sr15/ and the comments in the list below are not meant as an exhaustive and definitive list, but simply follow from a first reading. Others may decide there are other omissions or may disagree with those that we have made, in which case I welcome your comments.

1.       There is no estimate of an equilibrium sea level rise at 1.5 degC. This is a serious omission when paleoclimate records demonstrate that the last time we had 400ppm the sea level was 23 meters higher than today.

2.       There is no evidence that a 10 billion global population can be sustained if the temperature rises to 1.5degC. The observed crisis we have seen this year when the temperatures breached 1.16degC above baseline suggests that long term temperature rises of 1.5degC above baseline is inherently incompatible with sustaining a 10 billion population.

3.       The report assumes that if the temperature overshoots the 1.5degC target, it can be reversed, but this takes no account of irreversibility and hysteresis in the climate system due to such factors as sea ice loss, methane releases and increasing ocean heat content and is counter to the warning of irreversibility in AR5.

4.       The report gives little analysis on persistent upward pressure of CO2 emissions, yet its recommendation to avoid runaway climate change is to get to zero carbon by 2040. To put this in perspective, Schlumberger are currently expecting oil production to rise from 96 million barrels/day to 120 million barrels/day by 2020 and are gearing up accordingly.

5.       The best odds the report offers to avoid 1.5 degC in the event of obtaining zero carbon is only 66%. For something of such seriousness, a probability of 95% should be used.

6.       To have the best chance of limiting temperatures to 1.5degC, the report assumes methane emissions go to zero, but these are increasing exponentially in the critical Arctic regions.

7.       A key assumption in the report is that BECCS will reduce atmospheric CO2, but the report does not consider the thermal efficiency of BECCS power plants and simple calculations show that this can be no more than 7% once the energy for gas compression is included, and it will most likely be negative once the energy for separation is included, so it more likely that BECSS will add CO2 to the environment rather than remove it.

8.       There appears to be no consideration in the report of the rapid global temperature increases that have occurred over the last 12 months. 

9.       In the text of Chapter 2 of the report it states that “SSP-based modelling studies of mitigation pathways have identified high challenges to mitigation for worlds with a focus on domestic issues and regional security,” but the need for proactive security management has not made it into the Summary for Policy Makers (SPM) and is not being considered in policy responses.

10.   There does not seem to be any acknowledgment or consideration in the report that the extreme events of this year could be indicative of the climate now entering a condition of rapid and self-reinforcing transition from the habitable Holocene to uninhabitable Hot-house conditions.  If the concerns on the danger of interacting feedbacks mechanisms and a tendency towards super exponential change are valid, then the temperature spike of the last year cannot be dismissed as a short term anomaly and instead it should be considered as potentially strong evidence that rapid change is now underway.

11.   The implications of the logarithmic relationship between radiative forcing and CO2 concentration has not been considered in determining policy needed to stablise temperatures at 1.5degC. The effect of this relationship means that a 50ppm increase from 280 to 330 ppm increases radiative forcing by 0.88, but a 50ppm reduction from 450 to 400ppm reduces radiative forcing by only 0.68, thus once the initial warming has triggered amplification mechanisms then future hypothetical reductions in CO2 will be unable to provide an adequate cooling effect to offset the thermal inertia that will have built up.

12.   Despite Chapter 4 of the report indicating Solar Radiation Management (SRM) can be a useful contribution to climate change, the SPM rejects SRM and instead suggests that policy should be focused on carbon reduction and carbon removal even though all the available evidence strongly suggests that this cannot be done anywhere near fast enough to avoid initiating interacting climate change feedback mechanisms.

Friday, May 11, 2018

Submission to the UN Talanoa Dialogue


Through the UN Talanoa Dialogue, all countries and other stakeholders, including business, investors, cities, regions and civil society, are invited to make submissions into the Talanoa Dialogue around three central questions: Where are we? Where do we want to go? How do we get there?
Countries and non-Party stakeholders will be contributing ideas, recommendations and information that can assist the world in taking climate action to the next level in order to meet the objectives of the Paris Agreement and support the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
 
Submission is here:

The role for an integrated climate restoration strategy; the setting of targets and timescales; the methodologies and funding options (Submitted, 1st April)

In summary:
  • Atmospheric CO2 is already at unsurvivable levels which will lead to sea level rises of up to 30m and catastrophic temperature rises, yet it is still increasing at a rate that is faster than exponential.
  • There is an unspoken paradox with climate change; as climate change intensifies then the increasing competitive rivalries between nations that it causes prevents the co-operation needed to agree to the mutual sacrifices needed for a zero carbon economy.
  • The coal reefs stated dying and the Arctic polar ice cap started melting in 1980 when CO2 was 336ppm, thus the world then was already well on the way to disaster. So, planning for a 1.5 degC temperature rise is a suicide note; this target needs to be replaced with a new target, which is that the maximum temperate rises should not exceed 0.5deg C over the pre-industrial baseline.
  • ANY temperature rise will lead to catastrophic heating due to the interacting nature of the amplifying effects such as methane, sea ice melt and increased water vapour content, so if the temperature increases to 1.5degC (which is where we most likely are today) it will lead to unstoppable temperature increases. It also means that even the more radical 0.5degC target that we propose could be too high.
  • NO measurable levels of CO2 have been sequestered by natural processes since the start of the industrial revolution and natural processes will take approximately 250,000 years to return the planet to an upper CO2 threshold of stability (approx 300ppm), and even at this level of CO2, then sea levels would be at least 10 meters higher than today. So even the emergence of a zero-carbon economy tomorrow would not help due to the persistence of legacy CO2 in the atmosphere and oceans.
  • There is a very high level of hysteresis (irreversibility) in the climate system caused by ocean heat content and ice albedo loss, but in particular due to the logarithmic relationship between CO2 and radiative forcing. The implications of this have been completely ignored by policy makers.
  • Proposed methods for CO2 removal from the atmosphere that the COP temperature projections are based on, such as BECCS and DAC are so fundamentally flawed, they are likely to add more CO2 to the atmosphere than they will take out.
  • The only way of removing CO2 is through bio enhancement, such as increasing carbon content in soils and biomass in the oceans, but natural limits means this will most likely take thousands of years to remove sufficient CO2 for a return to stability.
  • To survive we must immediately start a solar radiation management program, and marine cloud brightening is probably the only option, in as much that it is scalable, controllable and sustainable over long periods. The scale of the cooling needed will increase at least exponentially with delay, and as we will soon be at the point where the climatic changes under way will be irreversible then there is a moral imperative to make an immediate start.
  • The techniques that we develop now for climate restoration (cooling and bio enabled CO2 sequestration) must be capable of continued operation by future societies that have become dysfunctional due to the pressures imposed on them by climate change.
  • There is no evidence that a carbon tax will be agreed by governments to either curtail emissions or raise funds for a climate restoration program that can either be guaranteed in the long term or done in time. We thus propose that this issue is handed to the insurance and reinsurance markets, whereby a climate change premium is imposed on fossil fuel extraction and can be set by normal actuarial processes

Wednesday, February 08, 2017

Tearing things down

What happens when you get to the end and come to the realisation that hope exists no more?

Do you play like the band on the deck of the Titanic, or fight for the last life boat knowing that there are not enough seats, or smash what is left of the Titanic and kill its officers in a fit of rage for their stupidity?

For too long the environmental movement and the left played the story that the most critical issue of our time, climate change, could be managed by a capricious transition to renewal power driven by the enlightened desire of all to co-operate to avoid an evident mutual annihilation. They told us that all we had to do was to destroy capitalism, or raise our ambition, or invest more in renewable power and all would be well.

It was a mind numbingly poor position to put forward. Simply hoping for the best, no matter how hard you hope is not going to bring it about.

Destroying capitalism meant having a rationing economy and not one prominent leader of the populist left pressed this politically sensitive debate.  Thus we still have destructive capitalism.

Meanwhile too many people crowded the debate on climate change with absurd projections and mistruths. They told the world it could continue to have economic growth with a renewable economy and all that was stopping the roll out of electric cars was conspiratorial behaviour by the car manufactures. Furthermore, in a bid to attract votes the various Green parties around the world told of a positive image of the future if we could only embrace the policies that they couldn't prove.

Like many often repeated mistruths, people started to believe them and even the people spouting out such nonsense also started to believe them. It is into this vacuum of truth that has been sucked the real liars whose only objective was self-satisfaction through nihilism.  

And that is what we have today, almost everywhere. Thus, our collective solution to our sinking ship is to smash it and kill the officers in a fit of rage that will accelerate our demise. So everywhere that matters is now following the paths to nihilism.....

Just when we thought that no organisation could be as bad as Al Qaeda, along came ISIS with its absolute commitment to destruction and the darkest recesses of the human mind and its allure to the disposed of the industrial societies with the most un-provable promise of virgins in heaven.

The optimistic birth of a democratic Russia from a dysfunctional communist dictatorship was been hijacked by a MAFIA government whose guiding principles and philosophy were lifted straight from Mario Puzio’s Godfather trilogy.

The great European experiment in co-operation that was the EU has been torn apart on a bed of lies and mistruths. Those lies ignored its painful birth in response to the blood shed by millions and the destruction of centuries of heritage in a bid to ensure the evils of nationalism never triumph the disciplines of co-operation.

And now, for all its faults, the nation that once aspired to the highest ideals has in Donald Trump elected a despotic leader so ignorant in world affairs as to believe that the climate change is a fraud perpetrated by the Chinese.  His nihilistic response to the most fundamental crisis of our times will surely exceed all the destruction that ISIS can even muster and it will firmly place Donald Trump in the position of the world’s worst and most dangerous leader ever.

Even Hitler was not able to destroy the world and Stalin backed away from its prospect, but Donald Trump embraces it. His adherence to nihilism is the flip side of the ISIS coin.

Thursday, August 11, 2016

Email to IPCC focal points



We are writing to you along with all other focal points at the coming IPCC meeting (August 15th onwards) to discuss the implications of a 1.50C temperature increase. We wish to offer a necessary course of action that has a genuine chance of success and which can break the deadlock that we are already trapped in.

As we are sure you are already aware, there is no chance that the temperature rise can be held beneath 1.50C, even if we were to implement a zero carbon global economy tomorrow.

The clear, but brutal, evidence from every critical measurement is that runaway climate change has begun. This has been reinforced by the extraordinary temperature rises that have occurred since the Paris COP which have taken the global temperature almost up to the agreed target.

All the statistics reflect this hypothesis. Atmospheric CO2, oceanic and atmospheric temperatures, sea ice extent, methane emissions and precipitation are all changing at rates that exceed the worst case model predictions. In many cases, these continue to change at exponential like rates in spite of current efforts and discussions to implement a zero carbon economy.

We cannot afford to wait for critical temperature increases to occur before we take action, instead we must start action today based on the exceptional rate of change observed in the variables listed above.

We must also be realistic.

There is a significant time constant between a CO2 increase and a temperature response. We don’t know what this is, but it is likely to be significantly longer than 30 years and it is prudent for us to work on this assumption. As we are already about to breach the 1.50C temperature increase (see our warning here), then the emissions added in the last 10 years along with the time constant make it impossible to maintain a temperature rise below 20C. Thus, our current approach of controlling temperatures by relying on developing technologies for a low carbon economy and hoping these can out compete fossil fuels is quite simply inadequate on its own.

We are already seeing our global political system coming under strain before the temperature has even got to 1.50C. Mass migration, heat waves, floods, war, terrorism and land grabs have become the norm for news headlines. The result is that competition for resources is usurping co-operation for the common good.

As the warming that is already in the pipeline comes through, competition will increase and the chance of the mutual co-operation and discipline needed for a successful transition to a zero carbon global economy with all nations remaining in this state indefinitely reduces to zero for all practical purposes.

It does not appear to us that this inevitable increase in global competition has been factored into the COP agreements. This leads to an inherent and unspoken critical danger within its process. That danger is the illusion of success must be preserved at all times, even when this is impossible. If the COP process fails to do this, then the negotiations will break down and a deadly free-for-all will break out. The irony of this is that the currently failing strategy is adhered to in a tightening embrace as the situation worsens with the ultimate paradox that a free-for-all becomes inevitable. (You may want to read our experiments on the emergence of free-for-alls here).

The developing nations will be the first to suffer in the ensuing free-for-all. Their weaker economic and military strengths mean they are already suffering disproportionately from the climate change impacts caused by the emissions of the more powerful nations that have gained competitive advantage by continually subverting climate change agreements in the past. Thus, the developing nations have nothing left to gain by taking the risk of the mutual sacrifice needed to get to a zero carbon economy, especially if they perceive that control of climate change is about to be lost.  Ironically, the regular mantra from politicians and the media is how severely affected the poorest nations will be by climate change, thus backing up this assertion.  The result is that most developing nations are developing plans for new fossil fuel driven economic growth as a hedge against coming climate change loss, irrespective of the science of climate change and COP agreements. The reciprocal response from the developed nations is to continue with business as usual.

The result for the planet will be continued inaction in spite of the inevitable catastrophic consequence.

It is thus essential that we collectively embark on a different course of action that has a genuine prospect of success. The heart of this is a systematic climate restoration programme which is based on a three pronged strategy which consists of cooling the planet using marine cloud brightening, sequestrating CO2 using slow release of nutrients into the ocean and restoration of the Arctic ecosystem using ice thickening techniques. With the three interventions being deployed in the order given, we believe the climate system can be stabilised and runaway climate change avoided.

We summarise each of these below, and include a further extension of their application to address atmospheric methane accumulation, with  further details being available on our website, http://www.climate-restoration-foundation.com.


  • We will cool the planet by Marine Cloud Brightening using a novel technique with a fluidic oscillator which allows seeding of marine clouds using salt water sprays.  This is the most energy efficient, controllable and safe way of increasing the planet’s albedo.  This replicates the natural formation of marine clouds, so it is inherently safe. By using it to block the heat flux into the planet at the subtropics, it will prevent excessive heat flowing to the Arctic and help the reflective ice cap to be re-established. It can also be used to protect coral reefs from bleaching and to mitigate extreme weather events.
  • We will sequestrate CO2 from the atmosphere by fertilising the ocean surfaces with buoyant nutrient flakes. This is the most rapid method of converting the excess CO2 in the ecosystem into biomass and exceeds by far the speed that can be achieved with any land based method. Converting CO2 into biomass also reverses ocean acidification. Without tackling this, most marine ecologies will not survive in anything other than a grievously impoverished state. The consequences of this would be starvation and a further diminution in the ocean’s ability to sequester CO2.

  • We will thicken the Arctic Ice Cap using renewable power systems which can be deployed over multiple years to pump water from below the ice sheet to its surface in the winter months. The restored ice cap will lead to an increase in the planet’s albedo, stabilise the jet stream, restore the Arctic habitat and trap methane emissions.  The act of pumping water onto the ice surfaces acts as a planetary radiator. This needs to be rolled out in conjunction with the MCB to be most effective.

  • We will bring atmospheric methane levels down using two methods. Firstly we will stop methane getting into the atmosphere by tailoring the nutrient recipes on the buoyant nutrient flakes to favour methanotrophs. Secondly, we will use the fluidic oscillator to disperse iron chloride salts which in the presence of sunlight which will convert methane to CO2 a thousand times faster than would occur in naturally.

It is critical that this programme is started immediately.  We are already heading for an ice free Arctic Ocean in September and once we pass this critical threshold, the effectiveness of our proposed strategy will rapidly diminish, with the risk that at some point in the near future it will be overwhelmed by events.  This is not an attempt to hold a gun to the heads of policy makers, but a sober and clinical assessment of the facts.

At the same time much work needs to be done - engineering and scientific validations are needed; approvals need to be sought; funding needs to secured; equipment must be manufactured and deployed and finally there is the time constant of response. All this must be completed before the heat in the pipe line strikes us and undermines our ability to co-ordinate a response. Thus, the consequences of delay are critical and have been outlined in a risk assessment we prepared in May. In the relatively short time since preparing this presentation, events have unfolded to support our worst fears associated with inaction.

It is thus absolutely vital that this intervention strategy becomes the subject of serious discussions at the coming meeting and we ask your support in enabling this. As a minimum we need clear and unambiguous political commitment towards this to enable us to secure seed funding for early development. If this is not forthcoming, the consequences are too dire to contemplate. Further to this, we need all the help that we can to secure that initial funding.

Thus we write to you not as pessimists who have given up all hope for the survival of higher forms of life on the planet, but as realistic optimists who believe that once the reality is clear and a feasible solution is evident, then better instincts will prevail allowing time to be safely bought and competition avoided to allow the types of ideals implicit in the COP 21 agreement to be realised.

We will be delighted to offer any support and information delegates wish and we will remain humbly at your service.

With kindest regards,


Kevin Lister and Sev Clarke.

Tuesday, December 29, 2015

We cannot leave geo-engineering any longer

Email to Geoffrey Clifton-Brown MP

Dear Geoffrey,

Climate change has now reached an unprecedented level of danger. Today, the temperature at the North Pole is 42 deg C higher than normal. This extreme heating is driving the deep Atlantic lows that are rendering many of our ancient cities uninhabitable.

More ominously, the heating of the Arctic is already triggering methane releases. It is estimated that 50 Gigatonnes of methane trapped in the Arctic region is at risk. Only a small percentage of this needs to be released to tip the planet into unrecoverable runaway climate change. The dynamics are such that small percentages will not be released, instead it will be all or nothing. It is on this premise that we must work.

Policy makers and computer models have assumed that the transition of our climate from its previous equilibrium that supported life and allowed our economic development to a new hostile equilibrium would be smooth and predictable. Instead it will be chaotic  and unpredictable with increasingly large variance around the mean as we progress through the transition. This is what we are experiencing today.

Each swing around the mean  during the transition will act like a jack hammer inflicting more damage and accelerating the speed of the transition. For example, the warming of the Pacific Ocean in the  1998 El Nino led to a significant increase in atmospheric CO2 which further intensified global heating. The El Nino of this year is far stronger. These non-linear pulses are accelerating us towards the point of economic and ecological no return.

Today's extreme heat at the North Pole is a thunderous crack of the climatic jack hammer as it nears its break through to the new equilibrium.

We have nothing to counter this. Despite the hype, the #COP21 talks were a failure. No legally binding agreements were made and the CO2 targets that were agreed will lead to a temperature increase far in excess of 2 deg C. So great is the cumulative damage already incurred, that even an emergency attempt to go immediately to a zero carbon economy would be futile on its own.

In light of our inability to tackle the climate change problem at its source by cutting CO2 emissions, we are forced to manage its consequences by mitigation measures. However, events around the world are already showing this to be a failure. Those of tomorrow will expose the extent of this failure even more brutally.

In the short period of time that we have left, we must embark on a geo-engineering program that will simultaneously sequestrate CO2 from the atmosphere and cool the Arctic. The extreme events in the Arctic today mean that this must start this coming summer. After this, climate change will most likely have built up such momentum as to be unstoppable and the economic chaos in its wake may well preclude organisation of actions.



I would commend my colleague Professor Paul Beckwith (email: pbeck062@uottawa.ca)  to you and strongly urge you to watch his interview at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHi6rVPL-iU .  He has long been advocating the seeding of oceans with iron oxide to encourage plankton growth and  whitening of clouds and SO2 injection into the atmosphere during the summer months to cool the Arctic.  

I would therefore urge you to act on this with the greatest of urgency by the following: 
  • Explore  how you can lobby for geo-engineering 
  • Press for government support of necessary research programmes 
  • Circulate  this message around other MPs. 
  • Press for a parliamentary debate on geo-engineering 
  • Contact the respective ministers who can advocate these actions on the international stage 
Yours,
Kevin Lister

Further Reference: 

Warm Arctic Storm To Hurl Hurricane Force Winds at UK and Iceland, Push Temps to 72+ Degrees (F) Above Normal at North Pole: http://robertscribbler.com/2015/12/27/warm-arctic-storm-to-hurl-hurricane-force-winds-at-uk-and-iceland-push-temps-to-72-degrees-f-above-normal-at-north-pole/



Sunday, December 13, 2015

After the Euphoria of the COP 21




The world has been told again that a successful outcome from the climate change agreements has saved it, even though it agreed targets to guarantee a 3 deg C temperature increase and won't admit to knowing what is needed to limit this to 1.5 deg C. This is a green light for the world to develop fruitless computer models over the coming years to enable prevarication to take the place of action. 
This annual charade has developed its own unique process. It agrees nothing when at the same time every thinking being, from humans to earthworms, knows the crisis is worsening. It glorifies failure as shining success and does little other than provide a platform for the leaders of the industrialised nations to hide their motivation to continue with destructive business as usual.  
 So now let's get real and do some crystal ball gazing of possible future scenarios:
1. Climate change destroys us by 2050. The Trident crews and other equivalents from China and Russia are the only remaining people on the planet. (This is the logical conclusion of the policies that the world's most powerful  governments are pursuing, which is to avoid action on climate change and update nuclear weapon systems that will outlast the societies they purport to protect, and why this is at the top of the list).
2. A right wing dictatorship takes over the UK and gains control of our nuclear deterrence. It then links with other similar dictatorships around the world and wipes out anyone considered to be undesirable. When George Osborne refuses to support a ban on Donald Trump, is prepared to dismantle our legal system and gets into bed with the Chinese over a massive nuclear deal, we are closer to this than many think.
3.  Our economy collapses, Greek style, under the weight of accumulated debt and climate change recovery costs. We are forced to sell our Trident system to the highest bidder or our largest creditor (most likely Russia, China or India). This is made more likely because the huge cost of building, operating and defending Trident is funded by debt.
4. Our economy collapses, Greek style, for the same reasons as above, but Britain cannot sell Trident. Trident then suffers a major nuclear failure because we cannot afford to maintain it or train its operators properly. If this happens near the coast, it leads to  mass evacuations at a time when this is least possible to manage due to the issues of mass migration and economic collapse from climate change. In the worse case, it means millions of people are instantly incinerated as its warheads simultaneously explode. 
5. At a time of rising international tensions, a  captain on a Trident thinks that he is being followed by a new modern Russian Akula class submarine. Being the only submarine on patrol and knowing that spending cuts have resulted in no anti-submarine warfare capability he fears instant destruction. Being so worried, he makes a premature launch decision. After destroying Moscow and with London and New York suffering a retaliatory nuclear strike, he discovers that the acoustic trace was a false reading. 
6. Alternatively, a captain on a Russian Akula class submarine following a Trident thinks that with climate change intensifying international tensions a premature launch is to be made and he destroys it, leading to a retaliatory strike from the US. 
7. Because Russia is frightened by our Tridents, they build even more equivalent submarines. Events 5 and 6 above happen, but with the flags swapped around. The effect is still largely the same. 
8. As a result of the international disorder brought about through climate change, nihilistic terrorists have managed to obtain several nuclear warheads and detonate their first with a suicide bomber in the middle of London. Just as with 9/11 when America attacked anyone they could think of, the UK fires its missiles at anyone it can think of.
9. As climate change intensifies and nations around the world realise they will be destroyed by runaway climate change, everyone goes mad. This affects all links in the nuclear command and control chain, from the presidents and prime ministers at the top to the battle field commanders with their fingers on the button at the bottom. Somewhere within this chain, a sane man is driven mad by the news and decides to end the pain by firing the warheads under his control.
10. We avoid all of the above, but as soon as the new Trident is completed, we have to start building another 4 replacement submarines to keep the submarine building companies in business. This time we do succeed in bankrupting the country and any one of the above happens.