The health and security implications of climate change were the subject of an interesting-looking conference hosted by the British Medical Journal in London on Monday. Both medical and military speakers took part in the programme. The meeting produced a strong and succinct statement which underlined how widespread are the ramifications of climate change, in particular as they relate to human health and the security of populations. I’m always cheered to see groups weighing in on climate change from the perspective of its impacts on human welfare, and thought it worth reproducing their statement here.
Author: Bryan Walker
Not a pretty picture: recent science summarised
A valuable review, Climate Science 2009-2010, has just been published by the World Resources Institute. It’s a summary of major peer-reviewed research in climate change science and technology during those two years. Aimed at policymakers, the NGO community, and the media, it offers succinct summaries of the findings of a wide array of scientific papers, a short discussion of the implications of each paper, and brief overviews along the way of where the research is pointing.
It’s 48 pages in length, not a quick read but tailored for easy comprehension for anyone with a general lay understanding of climate science. A sample list of some of the findings is provided at the start, but the full survey is well worth reading through. The range of papers is a reminder of how much scientific work is being done and how the full picture is built from many studies and a great variety of detailed investigations. The review is restrained in its drawing of implications from the studies, often pointing to the need for further investigation and certainly not hyping any of the results. Nevertheless it’s apparent that the recent research continues to reveal grim prospects for humanity as emissions continue to rise.
Continue reading “Not a pretty picture: recent science summarised”
The long history of hot air and inaction
In a comment on Tom Bennion’s recent post on the water crisis in Tuvalu and Tokelau Gareth drew attention to an article in the Economist which sounded similar themes. Small island states are well aware of the danger in which they stand and of how grudging any help is likely to prove:
Australia has turned down Tuvalu’s request for an emergency migration programme that would resettle the islanders. Even a €90m ($119m) aid package to tackle regional climate change pledged earlier this year by the European Union has done little to tamp down its fears.
The leaders of countries as far afield as Barbados and Grenada joined Tuvalu in raising the alarm over the issue in a series of impassioned speeches to the United Nations General Assembly last month. Ralph Gonsalves, the prime minister of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, laid the blame for the current debacle squarely at the feet of developed economies.
He was “baffled” he said, “by the intransigence of major emitters and developed nations that refuse to shoulder the burden for arresting climate changes that are linked to the excesses of their own wasteful policies.” As it happens, the first states to experience the effects of climate change as an existential threat are among the world’s smallest, most isolated and least powerful.
What particularly caught my attention in the Economist article was a link back to a past story published in the magazine in 1997. It was revealing both of how long the island states have been anxious and of how summarily those concerns have been treated by the more powerful.
A fighting chance?
Bill McKibben has a striking article this week in Yale e360 in which he explains why the protest against the pipeline to carry tar sands oil from Alberta to the US may be the start of “something big and desperate”. The desperate part is easy to understand. Three converging factors contribute to it, political, meteorological and geological.
Politically the US administration has failed to secure carbon legislation, or even to show much resolve to do so, with the result that there isn’t going to be a price on carbon in America, and hence not in most of the world, any time soon. The hope that surrounded Obama’s election in that respect has evaporated.
That hope was perhaps always excessive — but then, the man himself had done all that he could to encourage it. On the night he clinched the nomination he said that during his presidency “the rise of the oceans will begin to slow and the planet begin to heal.” Waiting for a messiah, we managed to convince ourselves we might have found one.
Meanwhile the climate is changing. Continue reading “A fighting chance?”
The blind leading…
Evidence this week that the New Zealand Energy Strategy, trumpeted by the government as a key to the country’s prosperity, is making good on its promise to advance oil and gas exploration. The NZ Herald carried a report of a meeting on Monday of high-powered global oil and gas exploration companies hosted by New Zealand Petroleum and Minerals, a division of the Ministry of Economic Development. It’s described as push to encourage new interest in the country’s under-explored frontier basins.
It was no doubt a decorous occasion, attended by representatives of prestigious exploration companies, some of them state-owned. Duncan Clarke, of Global Pacific & Partners, is the strategic consultant engaged to facilitate the discussion of a new competitive bid round process for allocating exploration rights. He says the government is “very open”. It’s asking the companies “what do we have to do to get you here”?