by David Steven | Feb 27, 2009 | Climate and resource scarcity
The first signs of disaster are noticed by only a few doomsayers.
Newspapers profess themselves ‘distressed by the calamities that have befallen certain islands,’ but counsel awaiting more evidence before taking hasty action.
Industry reacts with fury when government indulges in what it sees as a ‘panic inspired’ reaction.
The loss of the ice caps brings breathless media coverage. “I have seen icebergs formed before, but never on anything like the scale that is taking place there,” reports one observer.
In the great ice cliffs hundreds of feet high, cracks appear suddenly. An enormous section tilts out, falling and turning slowly. When it smashes into the water the spray rises up and up in great fountains, spreading far out all around…
Very often a berg had no time to float away before a new one had crashed down on top of it. The scale was so big that it was hard to realize.
Only by the apparent slowness of the falls and the way the splashes seemed to hang in the air – the majestic pace of it all – were we able to tell the vastness of what we were seeing.
But still there is little appetite for action. The scale of the threat may be accepted by a growing number of ’eminent but very worried men’, but the public remains sanguine. Sea level rises of two and half inches appear an anticlimax, ‘ just a very slightly higher mark on a post.’ And, after all, by the time things get really bad, won’t the ‘boffins’ have come up with a technological quick fix.
Then London’s flood defences are breached for the first time and thoughts turn to protecting those parts of Britain that can most easily be saved. The result? “Great bitterness between those who were chosen and those who looked like being thrown to the wolves.”
The second flood is worse and prompts a state of emergency (“the government had removed the velvet glove”). For a while, despite crumbling infrastructure, some kind of normality is maintained, “seemingly through habit or momentum.” Gradually, however, lawless ‘seeps’ in.
“Failure of the emergency electricity supply one afternoon, followed by a night of darkness, gave a kind of coup de grace to order. The looting of shops, and particularly foodshops, began, and spread on a scale that defeated both the police and the military.”
From there, it is a short step to the era of mass migrations, as people make a “panicky rush to stake a claim on the high ground while there is still room there.” A fiercesome “guerrilla war between starving bands” begins.
Standard climate change-inspired, apocalyptic fiction? Sure, except for the fact that John Wyndham’s The Kraken Wakes was first published over half a century ago, in 1953. (more…)
by Jules Evans | Feb 27, 2009 | Climate and resource scarcity
Spent the afternoon at a water-park in Dubai, mainly reading Cormac McCarthy’s 2006 novel, The Road .
If there’s ever a book I don’t recommend reading in a water-park in Dubai, its Cormac McCarthy’s novel, The Road.
The book is set in a post-apocalyptic world, in which some unspecified ecological disaster led to the sun being covered behind dust or ashes, leaving the earth in perpetual winter. American society has broken down, most people are dead, most plants and animals are dead, and most of the survivors are marauding bands of cannibals.
In this horrendous environment, a man and his son travel a road, trying to stay alive and get south, where they hope some form of human society may have survived.
Reading it makes me wonder if the so-called ‘politics of well-being’ may be hugely presumptuous.
Geoff Mulgan said this century would be defined by the politics of well-being. Lots of others are involved in this emerging politics – Lord Layard, Richard Reeves of Demos, Martin Seligman, Oliver James, NEF, and in a small way I am too, that’s why I named my blog www.politicsofwellbeing.com
But the main idea of the politics of well-being is western societies are safe and affluent, therefore can afford to turn their attention to higher transcendent goods like inner peace and so on.
Then you read a book like The Road , or like James Lovelock’s Revenge of Gaia , and you wonder…
What if this century isn’t about well-being at all? What if it’s mainly about ecological disaster, food shortages, water shortages, extreme weather, burnt out fields, societies breaking down?
James Lovelock predicted that the global population will go from 10 billion to 1 billion in the next 90 years, because of food shortages and rising oceans.
If people don’t have enough food, they will eat each other. That is the grim message of McCarthy’s book. Civilisation will break down.
In this sort of situation, the question becomes ‘how can states prevent themselves from breaking down’?
They need two things – food and security. They need to be able to protect their borders from the huge amounts of people who will migrate in search of food, and from other states hunting in search of food. And they need enough arable land to make their own food.
The UK as a society, in such an apocalyptic future, would have a chance of surviving, because its institutions are strong, and its people are (one hopes) good at coping in crises and not eating each other.
But if we are facing huge food shortages in the future, then is there an argument for controlling or even stopping immigration? Partly because we can only take a population that we can support with our own land, and partly because I am not sure how a multi-cultural society copes under extreme stress…
Do you think liberalism survives climate change? Or that the open society survives climate change? I don’t think they do.
Like I said, not a great beach book…but a great book nonetheless.
by Charlie Edwards | Feb 27, 2009 | Conflict and security
I have a short piece in this month’s Prospect Magazine on the role of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in 21st century warfare. The intro:
A British Reaper drone taxis across a runway in southern Afghanistan. The unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is about the size of a light aircraft. Circling thousands of feet above the ground for hours at a time, armed with deadly hellfire missiles, it feeds live pictures to the soldiers below. But while those on the ground might have just started the evening shift in Kandahar, the drone’s two-man pilot team will be watching dawn rise 7,000 miles to the west, in an air-conditioned room on Creech Air Force base in the middle of the Nevada desert.
You can read the rest here .
by Charlie Edwards | Feb 26, 2009 | Conflict and security, Economics and development
At the end of last year I offered ten foreign policy predictions for 2009. The first prediction was about Mexico:
The world’s leading narco state will, unnoticed, dissolve into total chaos destabilising the surrounding region.
In a early January 2009 John Robb suggested that Mexico would be an essential security threat to the United States:
The narco-insurgency in the northern provinces morphs into a national open source insurgency with thousands of small groups all willing to fight/corrupt/intimidate the government. Many, if not most, of these groups will be able to power themselves forward financially due to massive flows of money from black globalization. The result will be a diaspora north to the US to avoid the violence.
Since the beginning of 2009 more than 1,000 people have been killed in drug violence. In 2008 6,290 people were killed, double the 2007 death toll.
Since 1993 the City has been known for the violent deaths of hundreds of women – ‘las muertas de Juárez’ (The dead women of Juárez). According to Amnesty International , since February 2005 more than 370 bodies have been found, and over 400 women were still missing. Most of the cases remain unsolved.
In the next three weeks the Mexican Government is sending up to 5,000 new troops and federal police to the country’s most violent city, Ciudad Juárez , where law and order is on the brink of collapse.
