The year’s end may seem an unlikely time to start waxing sentimental about the British weather. Winter in Britain, even when it isn’t chilly, means skies the colour of dishwater and wetness that can’t rouse itself into a decent storm. In one of his more depressing poems, Ted Hughes described November as the month of the drowned dog, which does at least capture something of the enervation brought on by dull, windless weather and darkness that seems to begin a minute or two after noon.
But we may soon have reason to celebrate our dull weather. Everybody else’s weather is going haywire. Last month the latest round of international talks aimed at curbing global warming ended in Buenos Aires in an atmosphere closely resembling Britain’s winter weather – gloomy and inconclusive. The UN’s expert group of scientists, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, says that to halt global warming, the world needs to cut its emissions of the chief greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, by 60-80 per cent from 1990 levels. Last year at Kyoto in Japan, the industrial nations managed to agree cuts of just over 5 per cent by 2010 – the US actually committed itself to 7 per cent. Kyoto was widely seen as a success, although since developing countries were allowed greater latitude, it would actually have produced a global increase in emissions of about 30 per cent. But over the past year, positions have hardened, various loopholes have been discovered, the US has been busy trying to exploit them and the Kyoto compromise has steadily unravelled. Buenos Aires did little to stop the rot.
On one front, however, there is progress. Public awareness of the link between worsening weather and greenhouse gas emissions is apparently growing. For example, some of the victims of this year’s flooding in the English Midlands said they thought governments should do something about climate change. But then seeing your ground floor covered in several feet of stinking water and having lots of time to work out how it happened is no doubt an educational process.
Such learning experiences are piling up fast. This year, 1998, looks certain to become the warmest in history, easily eclipsing the previous warmest, which was last year. Some of this is attributable to El Nino, the periodic warming of the eastern Pacific Ocean, but evidence is also accumulating that El Nino episodes and related turbulences, chiefly flood and drought, are getting longer and bigger. And untoward weather, and its consequences, have been regularly capturing the headlines over the past year. Forest fires plunged South-east Asia into gloom. Two-thirds of Bangladesh was covered in water this summer. The worst floods in China for a generation drove 56 million people from their homes. Large-scale fires have raged in the Brazilian Amazon, Mexico and Florida. According to Washington’s Worldwatch Institute, over 50 countries have been hit by severe floods in 1998, and at least 45 by droughts, many of which led to runaway wildfires. More recently, the impact of Hurricane Mitch on Central America has demonstrated the devastation bad weather can wreak on a nation’s infrastructure and the health and economic well-being of its people.
Scientifically, the link between global warming and any one instance of bad weather cannot be “proved”. But there is a pattern emerging and, while it will alarm anyone who worries about the division of the planet into haves and have nots, it will surprise nobody with a decent knowledge of geography.
Look at a map of the world and it is striking how much of what it is now fashionable to call the South, or the developing world – as opposed to the North, or industrialised world – congregates around the equator. Indeed, the definition of a tropic is what lies between Capricorn and Cancer – an area that takes in nearly all of Africa and India, most of South and Central America, the whole of South-east Asia and bits of the Middle East. Superimpose on this a map of the world’s food-growing areas and you will see that most of the rest of the Middle East and a large slab of China are defined as low-yield zones, by virtue of being desert or mountain. Now look at the population distribution of the planet. The area you have just picked out is where most of its people, and virtually all its poorest people, live.
In climatic terms, this is a region of extremes – sometimes very wet, sometimes very dry, usually very hot. It is also innately turbulent – it’s the home of the monsoon, of El Nino, of hurricanes and cyclones, of high (and increasingly deforested) massifs from which waters pour fiercely down into vast river deltas. Meteorologically speaking, it’s a dangerous place to be.
Now look at Britain – an offshore island anchored between the landmass of Eurasia and the Atlantic Ocean, in the temperate zones north of the tropics. The sea may give us lots of moisture (and cloudy skies) but the rain is evenly spread throughout the year: the proximity of ocean also moderates the temperature, preventing the seasonal swings of a truly continental climate. We’re far enough north to have winters that kill off pests and summers that usually don’t kill off people. Granted, we can’t produce fruit and vegetables the year round, but our agricultural productivity is highly respectable – our wheat yield per hectare is the highest in the world, for example. And we’re neither a particularly high, nor a particularly low country, so we’re less vulnerable to flooding. It’s also worth noting that only a few other bits of the world have a similar climate – north-western Europe, New Zealand and extreme south-eastern Australia, southern Chile, the northern seaboards of the United States. In global terms, we’re something of a rarity.
Given the global weather outlook, and without wanting to sound too much like John of Gaunt in Richard II – who spoke of “the envy [for England] of less happier lands” – where we are is not a bad place to be. True, global warming will not be good news for Britain – only recently we were hearing about the spread to our shores of mosquitoes and mutant insects. And since climate change is what scientists call a non- linear process, it could play tricks – like switching the Gulf Stream away from North-west Europe, ushering in a new mini-Ice Age. Nevertheless, its broad effect will be to intensify existing extremes: the five billion people clustered in and near the tropics will suffer far more than the one billion or so in the industrialised, temperate North.
Geography isn’t the only factor. Wealthy states with more sophisticated technology and better services will weather the storm better. Overall, however, the UN estimates that climate-related damage could amount to as much as 9 per cent of GNP in developing countries, as opposed to 1-2 per cent in the industrialised North. In many cases the damage could be terminal. States such as the Marshall Islands or the Maldives, low-lying islands in the Pacific, could vanish; so could much of Bangladesh. And already there has been ample proof of the differential effect. In 1992, for example, Hurricane Andrew killed 34 people in the US – a similar storm killed over 200,000 in Bangladesh the previous year. Thus, to the old economic injustice of a rich North and a poor South is being added a new climatic injustice.
Yet there’s a further, highly perverse and deeply corrosive twist. The people who do most to cause global warming are the Northerners, particularly the Americans, with their air-conditioned lifestyles and passion for large cars, cheap petrol and lots of driving. The average American “emits” 20 times as much carbon as the average Indian, for example. Yet it’s the Southerners who will chiefly suffer – in effect, paying with their lives for the Americans’ lifestyles. There’s also precious little evidence of the Americans wanting to change their ways, either at the grassroots or on Capitol Hill. More than half of all new car registrations in the US are for four-wheel-drive trail vehicles, which are almost as demanding of petrol (and carbon) as an earlier generation’s Cadillacs and Studebakers. The oil company lobbyists have proved remarkably adept at playing on the supposed threat to the American way of life posed by emissions reductions – to such an extent that 7 per cent is now being widely proclaimed as an over-exacting target and powerful voices in the Senate are saying that the US should not agree to cut its own emissions unless developing countries do the same.
Given the huge disparities in emissions, this would be grotesquely unfair. But it does highlight another facet of climatic injustice, which is the enormity of the separation between cause and effect. One of the lessons of environmental progress is that it happens much faster if people suffer the consequences of the pollution they create. When somebody else suffers, and that person lives on the other side of the world, change is liable to be much more halting – particularly when, as happened most recently with Hurricane Mitch, much of the media reporting of climate-related events concentrates on the dramatic human consequences and presents them as “natural”, not man-made, tragedies.
It’s hardly surprising, then, that international willingness to compromise is being undermined. In the South, there is growing bitterness at the sheer imbalance of the trade-offs involved – at the failure of Americans, for example, to buy smaller cars and drive less so that the Marshall Islands and the Maldives can be saved from extinction. From the North, meanwhile, effective action to halt climate change demands a degree of altruism and long-sightedness which modern mass democracies, notably the American version, don’t seem very good at.
There’s no doubt that a rapidly warming world will lead to more disease, poverty, loss of species, food shortages, civil conflict and mass movements of refugees – but there’s also little doubt that, in Britain at least, thanks in large measure to our much-maligned climate, we will be shielded from the worst of it. One can only hope that the Labour leadership, which has made impressive noises about curbing global warming but done nothing, for example, to reduce our dependence on the car, doesn’t draw the wrong political lessons.
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