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Saturday 26 January 2019

Climate change: and building walls

Last week's Start the Week on Radio 4 started with a chat with the author of a new novel looking to a future Britain: 

The prize-winning writer John Lanchester considers the political endgame of a fractious world in his new novel, The Wall. He tells Amol Rajan why he has written a dystopian fable in which the young distrust the old, and the world appears broken.

BBC Radio 4 - Start the Week, Violence and Conflict

There's been a lot of interest in this book:
BBC Radio 4 - Saturday Review, Mary Poppins, The Convert, John Lanchester, Dead Poets Live, The Long Song
Will Gompertz reviews John Lanchester's dystopian novel The Wall - BBC News

His book will be the Radio Times' first for its new book club:
JOIN OUR NEW BOOK CLUB TODAY! – Radio Times Shop

And the author has taken part in one or two interesting programmes, including: 

Walls

Novelist John Lanchester, journalist Tim Marshall and historians David Frye and Kylie Murray join Anne McElvoy to discuss why we build walls rather than bridges and what it says about civilisations past, present and future from Persia to Berlin, the USA to a dystopian vision.


BBC Radio 3 - Arts & Ideas, Walls

We can certainly expect more displaced people heading to the UK as the climate warms:
Futures Forum: Climate refugees on the increase

It's an international issue - and walls are not the solution: 

Climate change is threatening to force millions of people to become refugees and spark major wars that could “completely destabilise” the world, a leading general has warned. And countries which attempted to deal with the coming crisis by resorting to “narrow nationalistic instincts” – for example, by building walls to keep out refugees – will only make the problem worse, according to Major General Munir Muniruzzaman, chairman of the Global Military Advisory Council On Climate Change (GMACCC). He added that, while countries had talked a lot about the problems posed by global warming and how to address them, there did not seem to be “much action” on the ground.

Climate change wars are coming and building walls won’t help, top general warns | The Independent

But you still might want to build a wall or two: 

PRESIDENT Donald Trump will finally get the wall he's after. However, it won't be along the U.S.-Mexico border. An Irish council on Thursday granted approval for a wall to be built around part of Trump's golf course in Doonbeg, Ireland to protect it from water erosion, The New York Times reportedTrump International Golf Links & Hotel Ireland previously applied to the Clare County Council for a continuous 1.7-mile long wall, but withdrew the application last year. Now, the resort will build a line of two low, concealed seawalls on the landward side of a public beach to prevent storm waters from eroding three holes of the course.

Trump Resort in Ireland Will Build Seawalls to Protect Against Climate Change | World | US News

Meanwhile, scientists are actually looking at walls to stem climate change:
Fight Climate Change, Build the Wall - ASME
Building Massive Walls on Seafloor Could Save Earth From Impacts of Climate Change - Interesting Engineering
Building walls on the seafloor could be next move in climate change, scientists say - inews.co.uk
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