Fairly sobering cover story in New Scientist this week, by the aptly-named Gaia Vince, a freelance journalist who apparently is ‘wandering the world’, like a cross between Monkey and Samuel L Jackson in Pulp Fiction.
The environment, according to Gaia, is about to strike down upon us with great vengeance and furious anger.
She asks the question – what will the world be like if it is 4°C warmer, as scientists predict it probably will be within 30-60 years?
Not good.
The world will be divided by two latitudinal dry belts where human habitation will be impossible, say Syukuro Manabe of Tokyo University, Japan, and his colleagues. One will stretch across Central America, southern Europe and north Africa, south Asia and Japan; while the other will cover Madagascar, southern Africa, the Pacific Islands, and most of Australia and Chile (Climatic Change, vol 64, p 59).
That means the global population will have to crowd into the few places where habitation is possible, which the New Scientist estimates will be: Canada, the UK, Greenland and Scandinavia, New Zealand, and the parts of the Antarctic that are thawed. Some parts of West Africa may also be able to sustain life.
The global population will either be reduced dramatically, or will be crammed into high rise cities, eating mainly vegetarian food, unable to travel, probably subject to birth control, and energy control, and all kinds of other control. Most animal and plant life, and almost all aquatic life, will either have died of natural causes, or been eaten. “If it moves, we will have eaten it”, says James Lovelock. “We will be desperate.”
Those areas of the world that can still sustain plant life will be faced with a grim choice – do they protect their borders, create a ‘life boat’ as Lovelock put it, and close their ears and eyes to the screams of the dying, or do they open the doors to mass migration, and if so, how much, and to who? If they do, how do they order their societies? Do they give all new arrivals a vote and equal rights, or will such societies have to be run in an authoritarian, Mega City Four-type way?
Can we avoid this grim scenario? Yes, but the chances are very slim.
Paul Crutzen, the Nobel-prize winning atmospheric chemist, says: “”I would like to be optimistic that we’ll survive, but I’ve got no good reason to be. In order to be safe, we would have to reduce our carbon emissions by 70% by 2015. We are currently putting in 3% more each year.”
In other words, we have to get ready for a much hotter world, we have to start thinking the politics, economics, and ethics, of it through.
At the same time, for the next 30 years, and particularly in the next five years, we need to devote all the effort we have to lobbying governments to reduce emissions as much as possible. There’s no higher priority. Discussing anything else is like discussing the latest cricket results on the deck of the Titanic.
We will be judged on this by the rest of humanity, and our generation will probably be considered the most stupid, lazy and destructive ever. Our children and grandchildren, if they are unfortunate enough to have been brought into the world, will stare at us and say ‘why didn’t you do something when you had the chance?’ And we will smile weakly, and look away.
The climate clock is ticking, but civil society is still missing in action. With only nine months to go before the Copenhagen climate summit, the world’s NGOs are far from having a compelling set of demands to campaign on.
Perhaps it is already too late. Many governments are already ramping back their expectations of what can be delivered. The deal-makers among them now desperately need civil society to change the terms of debate and boost all countries’ level of ambition.
I’d give campaigners until April’s London Summit to get their act together. After that, they have zero chance of retaking the high ground and starting to shape the pre-Copenhagen agenda.
So what should their demands be? What makes a good headline ‘ask’?
First, it has to fit with the science – that means stabilizing greenhouse gas concentrations at 450ppm CO2e (nothing lower is now possible).
Then, it needs to make sense to insiders – people who are making the major policy or investment decisions a clear sense of what they need to do now.
Third, it must communicate to a wider public – which means a goal that the average 12 year-old (or journalist) can understand and remember.
And finally, it needs to build climate into a wider post-meltdown narrative, offering an integrated vision for global recovery.
I think one clear, crisp demand fulfils all these criteria, providing a starting point from which all key elements of a global deal logically flow. Global greenhouse gas emissions exploded during the boom years, pumped up by debt-fuelled overconsumption. Now oil demand is declining – and we can expect global emissions see a modest fall too.
This provides civil society with a real opportunity. They should declare 2009 the year of peak emissions and challenge the world’s governments to develop a concrete plan to ensure they are never allowed to rise again.(more…)
Just thinking through how our society copes with climate change. One way might be to bring back national service.
Why?
1) We need to train a generation of young people how to deal with crises, whether that’s food riots, race riots, or extreme weather. They will have to be physically and mentally tough, resilient and disciplined.
2) In general, we need to instill a war-time discipline into the country if it is going to cope with a drastic reduction in our quality of life.
3) We need a bigger domestic emergency force.
4) We may need a bigger external defence force as well.
What are the arguments against it?
1) It’s the first step to a fascist military state.
2) We need experts, not amateurs.
3) We need a bigger global peacecorps, not brownshirts at home.
4) We need de-centralised innovation and spontaneous systems evolution, not goose-stepping drones.
I think the arguments for are better than the arguments against. If you want the UK to be at a forefront of a global solution to food shortages, helping other states that are failing, then you will need an even bigger armed forces.
Our country will need to become much more disciplined very quickly, and I think national service is one step towards that.
I wonder if this could become part of the Resilience programme which Martin Seligman developed, and which the government is now piloting in some schools in the UK.
That programme is based on the assumption of an affluent society. But it could easily be adapted to a much more Stoical sense of resilience – how to survive and stay positive, engaged and ethical in a crisis-prone society.
While we’re on the subject of climate change misery (see the two posts below), an interesting finding in Raymond Fisman and Eduardo Miguel’s ‘Economic Gangsters‘ is that in Africa, the world’s most conflict-prone region, “the risk of armed civil conflict is much more likely the year after a large drop in rainfall than in normal years.”
In the Sahel region – the area between the Sahara and the equatorial zone which takes in such beacons of stability as Sudan, Chad, northern Nigeria and Niger – climate change is expected to reduce average rainfall by 24 per cent. Much of the rain that does fall will evaporate because of higher temperatures. Fisman and Miguel reckon all this will increase the risk of conflict in the region by 15 per cent by 2080, meaning some countries will face a 1 in 3 chance of civil war EACH YEAR!
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…)
