Culture
05 Mar 10

The Climate is Changing...

The pace of climate change accelerated to a frightening extent as the decade wore on. We’d been aware of it since the late Eighties, when the phrase ‘global warming’ first entered the lexicon. At the time, it was understood to mean that humanity as a collective was releasing significant quantities of gases into the atmosphere, enough to cause a rise in the Earth’s average surface temperature. Unnerving, but probably not worth losing sleep over. But this was one story that wouldn’t go away.

As the process escalated, leading scientists soon began to speak openly of grave and terrible consequences for the planet, and humans weren’t granted an exemption from the carnage foreseen by the experts.
The projections, independently arrived at by legions of eminent specialists, are stark and terrifying: they speak of vast swathes of the planet becoming uninhabitable, raging fires turning huge areas of the sub-tropics into desert, mass migration on a scale never before witnessed as refugees flood towards the relative ‘safe havens’ of Scandinavia and Northern Europe – and, if the worst comes to the worst, humanity eventually being reduced to a few survivors eking out a brutal existence in the polar regions. The scientific consensus can be summed up in two words: we’re fucked.
The natural response is denial, or at least a desperation to believe that the picture couldn’t possibly be as grim as it’s painted. Nobody wants to embrace the fact that the end of the world may be nigh. The ostrich response is understandable, but it’s about time we faced the music. Even if all carbon emissions stopped this instant, global warming will continue until at least the year 2100 as a result of the long life-span of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. It’s now a question of damage limitation – what can we do to minimise the cataclysmic effect of carbon emissions on the ecosystem, and how best can we respond to the problems already manifesting themselves: melting polar ice caps, rising sea levels, forest fires in Mediterranean Europe?
The Scarlett O’Hara response (‘I won’t think about it now, I’ll think about it tomorrow’) is no longer a viable option, because this ghastly process is already well under way. The World Health Organisation estimates that approximately 150,000 people are already dying annually “as a direct result of climate change”. Right now, this is concentrated chiefly in the Asia/Pacific region. Malaria is spreading through Papua New Guinea as a result of increased temperatures. Infectious diseases such as dengue fever, West Nile fever and malaria are increasing in frequency and severity throughout the tropical zones. For those of you tempted to respond ‘who gives a fuck about Papua New Guinea’, the bad news is that the bad news doesn’t end there. The WHO has cautioned that global warming may lead to a major increase in insect-borne diseases in Britain and Europe – and presumably Ireland – as ticks (which carry encephalitis and lyme disease) and sandflies (which carry visceral leishmaniasis, aka ‘black fever’, an invariably fatal disease in which a parasite invades the liver, spleen and bone marrow) are likely to move in.
There was a drought in 2003 in Southern Europe which led to tens of thousands of deaths. There has been a sequence of Category-Five hurricanes in the USA, including the infamous Hurricane Katrina which ravaged the great city of New Orleans. There was a tsunami in the Indian Ocean which killed (at the very least) 230,000 people in eleven countries: other estimates of the amount of people killed as a direct result of the tsunami rise as high as 1 million. Every one of these extreme weather events is understood to be directly related to global warming. We can expect them to become more, rather than less, frequent.
So, co-ordinated global action at government level is a must. The fight against global warming was set back eight years by the Bush administration’s bone-headed refusal to observe the Kyoto treaty, on the basis that it might potentially be harmful to US economic interests (read: big oil). Had Al Gore’s victory in the 2000 Presidential election actually landed him in the White House, it’s at least plausible that he would have addressed the matter with the seriousness it requires, given his track record of interest in environmental issues. Bush’s successor, Barack Obama, has pledged to make up for lost time. As I write, the United Nations is holding a climate summit in Copenhagen in order to thrash out a strategy to combat the menace that threatens to leave our grandchildren inhabiting a near-apocalyptic landscape. How humanity responds to this unprecedented challenge will define the 21st century, as surely as the fight against Nazism defined the 20th. We live in hope. We have to.