Author: Bryan Walker

Forecast

Forecast: The Surprising--and Immediate--Consequences of Climate Change

The future of our planet can be found now, on the frontiers of climate change.” That’s how freelance journalist Stephan Faris frames his new book Forecast: The Surprising – and Immediate – Consequences of Climate Change. He visits and talks with people in regions already experiencing some of the early effects of a changing climate and looks to what might lie ahead for them as the change gathers momentum.

It’s a varied picture.  The fearful upheaval in Darfur has many strands, but until the rains began to fail nomadic herders and settled farmers lived without conflict. Faris acknowledges that the contribution of human causes to the long drought is debatable, but more severe droughts are part of the climate change agenda and at very least Darfur is a foretaste of the climatically driven political chaos that can result. Especially is this so when the conditions of life are already fragile, as in Haiti, his next port of call, where severe deforestation has left the country wide open to the likely impacts of climate change.

Across to the southern Florida coast and a less intense but nonetheless troubling feature of climate change. It’s the very sharp rise in insurance premiums and in refusals to offer insurance coverage. One company says bluntly “We believe what the scientists are telling us…We believe it would be bad business to continue to add to our risk.”  Faris describes the physical conditions in Florida and in New Orleans and how people have had to try and cope with them.  While the world has not yet put a formal price on carbon, the cost of global warming is beginning to be monetized in higher insurance prices.

Disturbing in a different way is Faris’s description of his interviews with political figures in Italy and the UK who are bent on making political capital out of the influx of refugees likely to be increased by climate change.  Fear and empathy are the two polar emotions which coexist in the public mind, and some far right  politicians are working on the fear.  The British National Party spokesperson Faris spent time with was happy to incorporate environmentalism into their platform.  “We consider ourselves the only logical green party in Britain.” The logic? Turning people into Westerners turns their tiny climate footprint into a massive one.

In Brazil Faris explores the spread of malaria increased by the clearing of forest. Not perhaps the first consideration that occurs to most of us when thinking of deforestation, but so serious for the populations concerned that at least one economist is arguing that it is a large enough cost to the economy on its own to provide reason to cease deforestation. Faris’s discusion of vector-borne disease and its relationship to climate change ranges into other countries as well.

On a gentler note is a description of the challenges and opportunities facing wine-growers. Faris’s visits provides a fascinating glimpse into the impact of small climatic differences on the wine product. It also raises the prospect of some wine-growing regions having to stop production altogether.  From sunny California he jumps to the icy port of Churchill on he Hudson Bay coast.  Enjoying three more weeks ice-free than it did ten years ago, the port is getting increased business. It offers shorter voyages for cargo from northern Europe.  Yes, agreed the manager of the port, global warming has the potential to be good for Churchill.  Does this mean the port wants to see global warming? “No. Of course not. Nobody does.”

Finally to South Asia.  On the border of North East India and Bangladesh Faris talks with locals about Bangladeshi immigrants and the likelihood that there will be many more of them as global warming pummels Bangladesh with rising seas in the south and increasingly unpredictable rivers from the north.  A terrible massacre of more than two thousand Bengali Muslims took place in 1983. Faris spoke with a village elder on whose land the massacres happened. He runs a non-profit group dedicated to development and reconciliation between his people and the Bengali-speaking Muslims. But if emigration from Bangladesh accelerates he thinks there could be violence. “The scenario has to remain what it is now.”

Across in Kashmir Faris considers the retreat of the Himalayan glaciers and what that will mean for the rivers suppplying water to Pakistan. Reservoirs along the rivers are an obvious way to improve the outlook, but they would need to be constructed in territory controlled by India, which means co-operation with an enemy.  Or the grim possibility of escalating conflict.

For each of the places Faris has visited he furnishes a lively narrative of conversations and excursions, sometimes ranging briefly to other places and related topics. The accounts embrace a considerable variety of people and observations and are highly readable.  Underlying his report is a clear understanding of what climate change involves and a deep concern at its implications for human society, though for the most part he lets the record speak for itself.  It is in conclusion that he points out that if we wait for drought, conflict, migratory tensions, international crises, and humanitarian disasters to pile up we may find ourselves with little time for the complicated challenge of cutting carbon.  We don’t have the luxury of waiting for devastating disasters to scare us into action. Now’s the time.

The book is a valuable addition to the record of what is happening to our world, and deserves many readers.  Journalists who go to places, talk to people, and then pull us into the detail of what they have seen and heard perform a much-needed function amid the heedlessness which still marks much of our public discourse.

If you don’t have time to read the book but can spare half an hour or so to listen to an interview, there’s one here on Writers Voice in which the author draws out some of the book’s main points in a sharply informative way.

 

Addendum:

Last night, after finishing Faris’s book I watched a BBC news programme on the alarming spread of dengue fever in Jakarta as a result of climate change. Increased precipitation is extending the opportunities for the mosquito which spreads the disease.  Vigorous measures are being taken to counter the greatly increased occurrence of the fever, but the programme made clear how serious the climate change-related spread of vector-borne diseases is likely to prove.  The medical people involved in the programme were absolute that this is climate change-related.  The BBC journalists did the same as Faris aims to do – took us to the spot and showed us what is happening.

Bolivia: the necessity of adaptation

Oxfam’s messages on the battering effects of climate change on poorer countries continue with the publication this week of their report Bolivia: Climate Change, Poverty and Adaptation. Poverty and injustice in many countries of the world is what Oxfam works on, and this focus has inevitably led to concern about what climate change is adding to the problems faced by the poor.  This report, like their others, includes a number of interviews with local people whose livelihoods depend on the food they grow. It can be argued that this is anecdotal evidence of climate change and not to be trusted. I don’t see it that way. What the local people are experiencing fits with what we would expect from the predictions of climate science. I see no reason for Oxfam to withold their stories on the grounds that we can’t be absolutely certain that all of what the locals report is down to global warming. If we wait for absolute certainty on such matters we will have waited until it is too late.  Climate change is always going to be mixed with natural variability but the underlying warming trend is as apparent in the human stories as it is in the global temperature graphs. And the stories are certainly guides to the kind of adaptation measures that need to be urgently addressed.  Continue reading “Bolivia: the necessity of adaptation”

Africa says do what science requires

The desperation that poorer countries are feeling over climate change was dramatically displayed at Barcelona this week when the African bloc walked out of the official negotiations towards a Copenhagen agreement.  Their complaint, reports the Guardian, was that the rich nations’ carbon cuts were far too small to avoid catastrophic climate change. The demand is that the rich countries adopt the science-backed target of a 40% overall cut on emissions on 1990 levels. So far, rich countries have pledged an aggregate of less than 10%. The US, the world’s second biggest polluter, has pledged to cut around 4% on 1990 levels, or 17% on 2005 levels.

Continue reading “Africa says do what science requires”

Muddled economics ignore reality

“The analysis of the NZIER in their latest report is muddled and superficial” Exactly. I was relieved to see this response from the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment, Dr. Jan Wright, to the report the NZ Institute for Economic Research has just published on sustainable development priorities.

The report’s findings on climate change are a challenge to the imagination.  It provides some criteria for measuring priorities which lead to the conclusion that “the main focus of climate change policy in recent years, emissions reduction, is not the most crucial priority for environmental policy.”

Continue reading “Muddled economics ignore reality”

Now Or Never

“It is all too possible that we will fail to achieve sustainability, and that the blind watchmaker will once again…reset the balance of a severely diminished living Earth.” That’s the possibility that Tim Flannery hopes we can yet avoid. He makes the statement early in his essay Now Or Never: Why We Must Act Now to End Climate Change and Create a Sustainable Future, in the course of setting out his view of Earth as a living whole, where he follows James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis. The evolutionary process has arrived at a system in which humanity can contribute intelligence and self-awareness to the functioning of Earth – or set the process at naught and turn back the evolutionary clock.

Flannery’s earlier book The Weather Makers, reviewed here, was his major contribution to advancing public awareness of climate change.  Now or Never echoes and updates the urgency of the earlier book.  His regard for Lovelock’s thinking remains high, in terms both of the Gaia metaphor and of the extremity to which we have come, but he resists Lovelock’s conclusion that the damage already done is too great for amendment.

After his initia Gaia musings Flannery has an illuminating chapter on how we are shuffling matter among Earth’s three great organs – crust, air and water – and thereby creating an imbalance. He writes of Earth’s contrast with the planets without life, such as Mars and Venus, where the great bulk of the atmosphere is made up of CO2. On our living planet the difference is that over aeons enormous quantities of carbon have been drawn into Earth’s crust in the form of coal, oil, natural gas and limestone. Our bringing to the surface and burning these stored sources, combined with the destruction of forests and the degradation of soils, has created an imbalance whereby the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere has reached a level not seen for 55 million years.

The impacts are already alarming. Flannery confesses to find it increasingly difficult over the past two years to read the scientific findings on climate change without despairing. Most dispiriting are the changes occurring in the Arctic, which render hopelessly inadequate much of the human response to the crisis so far.  Flannery has an excursion into the possibility of oceanic death, concluding with the fearful vision of Peter Ward in Under a Green Sky.  He turns then to the work of James Hansen and colleagues in their 2008 paper and concludes that humanity is now between a tipping point (where greenhouse gas concentration reaches a level sufficient to cause catastrophic climate change) and the point of no return (when that concentration has been in place sufficiently long to give rise to an irreversible process). We still have a few years before we reach the point of no return, but there is not a second to waste.  Energy use must change drastically and we must also draw CO2 out of the air. Otherwise we enter Lovelock’s new dark age.

Turning to solutions Flannery spends time on clean coal technology, not because he is enamoured of it but because the world, and China in particular, has gone so far down the road of using coal as an energy source that he sees little choice but to pursue a solution that involves coal.  Not instead of renewables, but along with them.  Resignation rather than enthusiasm marks his treatment of the subject.

On renewables he notes the US government clean energy initiatives and the development of trading schemes to put a price on carbon, adding that regulation will also have to be part of the strategy. Not having the space to review all the means of generating electricity without carbon emissions, he selects one hopeful example from plans in Denmark to ally electric cars to wind energy which is currently under-utilised at night. He sees it as a sign that wind energy can compete directly with big oil.

CO2 must be drawn down from the atmosphere. High-tech methods remain on the drawing boards for now, but  tropical forests are “prodigious engines of atmospheric sanitation”, and Flannery surveys ways of supporting tropical reforestation, preferably under local management. Funding reforestation is in all our interests, and is also a way of repaying a debt we owe to the poor who are disproprtionately affected by the global warming we have caused. Flannery is an advocate of charcoal made by pyrolysis being ploughed back into the soil as a form of carbon sequestration and soil improvement.  Vigorously pursued on a global scale it could pull 5 percent of global CO2 per year.

He takes a look at ways in which farming management processes may enhance soil carbon significantly, mentioning a number of new practices worth pursuing, including holistic management and nitrification inhibitors.  Farm-based ecological efficiency is described in Polyface Farm in Virginia, a mixed-farming undertaking which has integrated a wide variety of plants and animals into productive and sustainable enterprise.

Before concluding Flannery acknowledges that desperate measures may be called for to avert disastrous melting of the Greenland ice cap in coming years, and believes that a measured dose of sulfur to the stratosphere to cause global dimming may yet be something we have to consider “if all else fails”.

“If we are successful in finding a sustainable way of living in the twenty-first century…”  It’s a much bigger “if” in the author’s mind than he or any of us would wish, but there’s no escaping the reality.  Gaia has brought us to a unique position and role on planet Earth.  That’s the philosophical understanding from which Flannery operates, and he warns that if we don’t that exercise that role responsibly and maturely we will bring disaster on ourselves.  The carbon we have freed, “like a malign genie, threatens the entire world.”

The book includes a number of interesting invited responses to the essay.  Among them Bill McKibben endorses the seriousness of the situation and urges 350.org activism as a way of acting. Richard Branson imagines a world where the best scientists collaborate with the best entrepeneurs and finds ground for optimism. Peter Singer welcomes Flannery’s impact on public and political awareness and agrees that there is no time to waste, but takes issue over the implications of eating beef.  Gwynne Dyer notes that whether we talk of human beings becoming the consciousness of Gaia, or just see us as the same old self-serving species we always were, we are taking control of the planet’s climate, and we may need stop-gap geoengineering measures to win extra time to get emissions down before we hit runaway warming.

Tim Flannery’s informed intelligence, ranging thoughtfulness and humanity is as apparent as ever in this essay. Short and accessible, its urgent message could not be plainer.  One hopes its readers include any policy makers who still need a wake-up call as to the reality of what we are doing to the planet.