Politics
The drowning of the Earth
Published 06 March 2000
Horrendous floods in Mozambique are just the latest symptom of global warming. David Nicholson-Lord asks if it is already too late to reverse it
More than a week after large areas of Mozambique disappeared under water, it is still possible to read, and see, reports that say a lot about Nature but nothing about human agency. One primetime television news bulletin told us that a "natural" catastrophe made something of a change for Africa, where most of the extremes of human suffering are man-made in origin - civil war, genocide and so forth. No mention then, and precious little since, of that little local difficulty the planet is currently experiencing, by the name of global warming.
If this had happened at virtually any other period of human history, it would be understandable. From classical Greece to the broodings of Thomas Hardy's Wessex heroes, events such as storms, plagues, inundations and crop failures usually involved inexplicably angry Gods or capricious entities known variously as Fortune, Providence, the Fates. In the post-Darwinian 20th century, Nature replaced God as the chief agent of unforeseen or arbitrary calamity, but in the past couple of decades or so Nature's rule has been challenged. It simply won't do any more to scratch one's head and wonder what hit us.
In a world dominated by human beings, tragedy is increasingly man-made. Mozambique has all the elements of a plot with which we have become horribly familiar in the past few years - violent weather impacting on a fragile third world infrastructure, a degraded and impoverished environment and a population living on the economic margins. We saw it in Bangladesh in 1998, when two-thirds of the country was flooded, and in Honduras a few months later, when Hurricane Mitch battered Central America for more than a week. In Mozambique, the images of people stranded on rooftops or trees, the stories of helicopters returning to rescue them only to find that they have vanished, have sketched in an awful new reality, but the text is similar. Between the lines, however, there's one important difference.
How many swallows make a summer? To put it another way, at what point does the future turn into the present? Ever since it got on to the political agenda in the 1980s, global warming has been presented as a future threat - a punishment awaiting us if we misbehaved. And misbehave we have, with a vengeance. North American culture, which the rest of the world wants to ape, is hooked on cheap petrol, copious long-haul leisure, air-conditioning, all- terrain assault vehicles masquerading as family cars - each of them immensely productive of carbon dioxide, the gas mainly responsible for climate change. Through films, television and tourism, the US transmits these addictions not only to Europeans, but to the likes of China and India. Politicians concerned to win elections think that they have to indulge such mass addiction. Insensibly, the political landscape changes: the limits of what is electorally feasible contract.
It is some such process that explains the vacillation, inertia and sheer gutlessness that has characterised new Labour's transport policy over the past three years. But it is instructive to look back at 1988, when a newly constituted expert body of scientists, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change met in Toronto and announced that the world needed to cut its emissions of carbon dioxide by 60 per cent if it was to halt global warming - instructive, because it was a target treated, then, with some respect. Nearly a decade later, in Kyoto in 1997, the industrialised states were scarcely able to agree on any cuts at all, finally managing 5 per cent (but from a different, more accommodating baseline), and in the case of the US, refusing all commitments point blank. The realities of global geopolitics or a failure of courage, belief and leadership? Or even, possibly, a systemic failure - in the way we allow ourselves to be governed? Choose for yourself.
Either way, a 60 per cent cut in global carbon emissions is now the stuff of fantasy. And the 1990s, originally designated by the United Nations as the International Decade for Natural Disaster Prevention, became the international decade for disasters, clocking up records all along the way - the warmest decade on record, the hottest year on record (1998), the worst year for storm damage (1998 again), the deadliest Atlantic storm for centuries (Hurricane Mitch). And somewhere on the way, between all those pictures of submerged and devastated third world landscapes, the future metamorphosed into the present.
We live, therefore, in a warmed and warming world, in which the greenhouse effect, which turned the planet Venus into a cloudy inferno, increasingly governs the way Earth behaves. Technically, this has been the case since the start of the industrial revolution; the difference now is that you can see and hear it. Frogs are certainly aware of it, as anyone with a garden pond will testify. Last year a government report told us what we had already observed - that spring, in the shape of oaks coming into leaf, chaffinches laying their eggs, is arriving several days early. And however many swallows it does take to make a summer, they're arriving earlier too. The talk in conservation circles these days is no longer of prevention, but of mitigation: how to prevent planetary heating causing a wave of die-offs or extinctions. Global warning is here and only wild-eyed rightwingers, or those in the pay of the oil and coal industries, now pretend to believe anything else.
In that sense, it is already too late - we saw global warming coming and we failed to stop it. But talk of early springs - or warmer summers and better British wines, as UK vineyard owners were doing the other week - imparts a spurious charm to the idea. Consider instead the forecasts from the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction, which predict forests turning to desert, the spread of malaria, millions more people short of food or water by 2050. Consider a report from the Red Cross, which said that, in 1998, "natural" disasters created 58 per cent of the world's refugees - and that for the first time in history such "environmental refugees" outnumbered those displaced by war. Think of the 32,000 who died in 1998, and the 300 million displaced from their homes, as a result of meteorological extremes. Cast your eyes over the year-end summary of 1998 from the insurance giant Munich Re, which said the frequency of "natural" disasters had tripled since the 1960s.
And there is worse to come. We tend to think that global warming progresses in a measured, linear, mathematically intelligible way - so many centimetres or fractions of a degree a decade, for example. If that was so, it might be reversible, but it is not how nature behaves. Over in Washington, the Worldwatch Institute, the world's leading environmental think-tank, has been speculating recently about what it has christened the Nemesis effect - in which climate change, overpopulation, infectious diseases, habitat loss and a host of other stresses interact, producing a planet subject to sudden lurches into new, unpredictable and much nastier states.
Nemesis effects are strictly non-linear. They involve critical thresholds, feedback effects, "discontinuities" - the sudden melting of an ice sheet, vast forest fires that release huge "pulses" of carbon, shifts in ocean currents, die-offs of species. One increasingly likely discontinuity is a global loss of coral, caused by oceans suddenly reaching a temperature that causes it to bleach and die. A matter of only an extra degree Celsius or two - but enough to destroy reefs worldwide, and with them the fish that breed in the reefs, the millions of tonnes of free protein the fish provide and the free flood prevention the reefs themselves provide to thousands of coastal towns and villages.
It is unthinkable in such an unstable world that affluent countries such as Britain, for all the robustness of their infrastructure, will remain unscathed. Think of the potential for conflict arising from such stresses. Or of how easily an environmental refugee could turn into an asylum-seeker or an illegal immigrant, and of the implications for social cohesion or human rights. And if the Gulf Stream, which warms our western shores, decides to change course - one of many such global discontinuities that could affect us - English wine growers might as well pack up and go home.
What is genuinely alarming is the silence on such issues. When was the last time you heard Tony Blair make a speech about climate change? How does John Prescott reconcile his advocacy of carbon restraint with his enthusiasm for very short journeys in Jaguars? Is it surprising, given such models, that the streets of London are thronged with petrol- guzzling four-wheel drives or that most kids nowadays talk of long-distance foreign travel - Asia, South America, Africa - without any sense of the environmental costs? Is is any wonder that television news bulletins do not bother to mention climate change when it is staring them in the face?
If the consequences were not so awful, one could dismiss it as merely bizarre - a wilful misprision, a strange collective act, in the psychotherapeutic sense, of denial. Undoubtedly, events such as Mozambique's floods may yet serve as a form of shock therapy. But it is a peculiarly horrible learning process, particularly for those on the receiving end.
David Nicholson-Lord is the former environment editor of the "Independent on Sunday"
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