IT'S
A HARD RAIN GONNA FALL...
In
the late 1950s industrial pollution emitted by western European
countries and the Ukraine began poisoning lakes in Switzerland.
By the late 1960 many of the lakes were incapable of supporting
life as toxicity levels rose. Much of the pollution simply fell
out of the sky with the rain. Acid
rain, as it became known, causes immense damage to areas of thin
top soil or to areas of rocky terrain such as mountainous regions.
Dozens
of scientific studies were carried out into the Swiss situation, prompted
by urgent warnings and complaints from the Swiss government.
What
is deeply disturbing to this writer is the existence of the internationally
compiled Global 2000 report, initiated during US President Carter's
term. The report, which brought together dozens of nations and some
of the world's most renown scientists, scientifically documented
projected changes to global climate and other ecosystems as a direct
result of human activity. In short, the authors of Global 2000 and
all countries contributing to it were charged with evaluating the
predicted effects of eco-change by the year 2000 and outlining measures
that could counteract or reduce the damage.
The
report also outlined a no-nonsense programme for tackling the problems
head-on, warning of the irreversible serious consequences of inaction.
The report was buried within two years of its completion. It required
too much change and was too detrimental to profiteering industry.
The
following item was published 1997.
CLIMATE CHANGE AND GLOBAL
WARMING
It may be incongruous
to describe climate change in any current environmental controversy.
It is after all nothing new. The last Ice Age finally retreated from
Britain perhaps only some 12,000 years ago and the North African coastal
Plains, much of which are now desert, were the granaries of the Roman
Empire. What is new is the speed of change and the risk that ecosystems
will be unable to adapt at the same rate. The fears expressed by some
members of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that southern
Africa could face a 100-year drought and that it is the climate refugee
rather than the political refugee who will characterise the 21st century,
convey the scale of that risk. Even if there is overall adaptation,
localised impacts could still be severe. Other members of the Panel
have speculated, for example, that diversion of the Gulf Stream could
give the United Kingdom a climate akin to that of Labrador. Seventy
percent of the world's population could be threatened with severe water
shortages within the next ten years.
The Phenomenon
of Global Warming
Climate change is
a comprehensive term for the changes arising from the phenomenon
of global warming generated by the build up of what are known as greenhouse
gases in the atmosphere.
The best known is carbon dioxide
(CO2), and the first area of controversy, which is essentially
scientific, is the actual rate of change and the extent to which it
is man made. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which
has scaled down some earlier predictions, currently estimates that warming
is occurring at a speed of between 1°C and 3.5°C every century,
rates which may sound modest but which at the higher end of the scale
could raise sea levels by up to one metre in the same period.
Scientific opinion increasingly supports
estimates within this range, but the argument is far from closed. Similarly,
there is growing but not unanimous acceptance that global warming is
being accelerated by greenhouse gas emissions from the burning of fossil
fuels, particularly coal and oil, with natural gas as a lesser but still
important contributor. Although domestic households, industry, commerce
and agriculture produce most greenhouse gas emissions, road transport
is responsible for 21% and that proportion is increasing. The increasing
level of car and lorry use are steadily outweighing improvements in
the domestic and industrial sectors. Even the substantial gains of 50%
or more in fuel efficiency over the last 20 years have been outweighed
by longer journeys and the preference for more powerful models. The
net result has been that CO2 emissions from road vehicles
have increased by 70-80% throughout the European Union alone in the
last 20 years. These trends may seem slightly remote to the ordinary
citizen but in practice they are not. The potential of the ordinary
family car to contribute to global warming, for example, may be assessed
from the statistic that on average each one emits about a ton of carbon
dioxide every year.
Rising Sea Levels.
Rising sea levels
are a daunting threat not only to countries like Bangladesh, where more
than 100 million people live on land barely above sea level, but also
to those extensive areas of north western Europe like East Anglia, the
Netherlands and the German coastal plain where the land drainage of
centuries past has caused the soil to dry out and shrink, putting much
land significantly below the present sea level.
Such anxieties were aired at the
United Nations Conference on Environment and Development
held in Rio in 1992, and led to the drafting of the Convention on Climate
Change.
The European Union for its part had earlier agreed
after much argument to stabilise CO2 emissions
at 1990 levels by the year 2000.
The results of these initiatives,
in themselves fairly undemanding, remain modest. It is widely predicted
that the EU target will be missed by perhaps 8% despite the substantial
contribution made in some countries, notably the UK, by the substitution
of natural gas for coal to generate electricity, athough that change
is controversial for other reasons. Some observers also fear that emissions
will rise steeply in the next century as public opinion refuses to countenance
the building of another generation of nuclear power stations and much
reliance again has to be placed on coal, due to the under-development
of alternative power sources.
The first conference of the parties
to the UN Convention on Climate Change, held in Berlin in April
1995, likewise had only modest results. The reason is not far to seek—Greenhouse
gas emissions are unlikely to be stabilised, let alone reduced, unless
fuel use becomes more expensive, which in practice means taxation of
energy generated from fossil fuel sources. Although such taxation
has the potential to be popular as one facet of a movement away from
taxing
incomes and employment towards taxing resource consumption, which
would help to reduce unemployment, it will be seen as a regressive additional
burden unless it forms part of a comprehensive redistributive package.
Moreover, it is feared by many in industry, particularly in fields such
as chemicals where energy use is high, by governments such as those
of Japan, the US and the United Kingdom which are apprehensive
of the impact on their competitiveness, by developing countries who fear
their
development might be stifled, and by the oil producing countries
who do not wish to see a reduction in the sales of what may be their
sole
significant export.
Taxation in some form is, however,
almost certain to come because the challenge of climate change
will not go away. Recent years have been the warmest for well over a
century
and both droughts and flooding have grown in frequency. Some, like
the 1995, 1999, 2000 and 2001 and 2002 floods in Germany and the Netherlands,
were extremely severe and could easily have become major disasters,
if in fact they were not— the floods of 2002 have been categorised
by some as a major scale disaster. February 1995 saw the breaking away
of an Antarctic iceberg the size of Oxfordshire. The years between 1990
and 2002 have produced global flooding on a greater scale than through
known history excluding the prehistoric catastrophes of the Bosphorous
and Black seas.
Temperatures in
1997
The year 1997 was
the world's hottest since global records began in the 1860s with
air temperatures rising to 0.43°C above the long-term annual average. Britain
enjoyed its second warmest summer on record with temperatures 3°C above
the monthly average.
Although the average Briton might
well instinctively react that such an increase for the traditional holiday
month was a positive asset, the global reality is very different from
the perspective of the Pacific and the Caribbean. Some twenty states
including the Maldives, the Cook Islands, Nauru, Kiribati, the Seychelles,
Antigua, Barbuda and the Federated States of Micronesia are at risk
of becoming uninhabitable through the saline pollution of all water
supplies or through simply being submerged. One of the leading members
of the islands' lobbying body, the Association of Small Island States
(Aosis), is the Marshall Islands with an average height above sea level
of 6ft and a maximum height of 20ft but with a population of 56,000.
It is projected that 80 per cent of the main island and its capital
will be under water within a century, which has led to the preparation
of a strategy of total evacuation and abandonment.
Precedent is not encouraging for
the ready welcome of such refugees, and even if they do receive a welcome
their national culture will almost certainly be lost. The possible host
nations may also have problems of their own. Vulnerable coastal cities
range from New Orleans in the United States to Hamburg and Venice in
Europe, and Bangkok, Hong Kong, Shanghai and Tokyo in Asia.
El Niño
El Niño,
however, has provided the most dramatic recent expression of the destructive
potential of global warming, although precise relationship with the
wider global phenomenon is the subject of scientific argument. El Niño
is a complex of storms and hurricanes routinely generated at five to
six year intervals by the warming of the Pacific. An area of warm
water comparative in size to the continent of Europe is displaced from
off
Indonesia towards the South American coast 3,000 miles away, and
instead of provoking the familiar southeast Asian monsoon it brings torrential
rain and floods the length of the western littoral of the Americas.
Moreover its scale is such that it disrupts weather patterns as
far away as Africa.
Although the phenomenon is ancient,
it appears to be growing in frequency and intensity, fuelling speculation
that global warming is aggravating it. The rise of 5'C in the surface
water temperature of the Pacific in 1997 was expected to provoke rainfall
200 per cent of normal before Christmas and 300 per cent afterwards
along the Pacific seaboard of the United States. In an apparently perverse
contradiction, it can provoke compensating snowstorms and blizzards
further inland.
The Impact
of El Niño
The impact
can be devastating. The 1983 visitation saw damage of £9 billion worldwide
and the death of at least 1,200 people, with the Californian coast
being amongst the areas worst affected. The Peruvian GDP was reduced
by some
five per cent. The consequences in 1997 promise to have been even
more severe when the full impact can be assessed, as the extent of ocean
warming was already the century's second largest by September.
The Indonesian coffee crop could register a fall by 40 per cent
through
drought and
the same lack of rain was leading in the autumn to localised starvation
and the suspension of the copper industry in Papua New Guinea,
where the rivers were too low for commercial use. The Australian wheat
crop suffered severely and the Philippines were preparing for the
emergency
distribution of rice. Wheat producers on the other side of the
world, in South Africa and Zimbabwe, similarly feared the impact of drought.
In literal realisation of the old
adage that "it is an ill wind that blows nobody some good", agricultural
areas in the American mid-West and on the eastern seaboard, and in East
Africa, may benefit, but such considerations miss the gravity of the
situation. Wealth transfers are comparatively straightforward within
a single prosperous country such as the United States but are much less
so between and within developing countries. A possible rise of 15 per
cent in global food commodity prices could spell starvation and social
unrest in less fortunate regions. Even more seriously in the longer
term, there is the risk that the rate of change will exceed the rate
at which flora and fauna can adapt, irreversibly accelerating the already
crucially high rate of species loss.
The Kyoto Conference
It is not surprising
against this overall background that the second conference of the 150
parties to the Convention on Climate Change, held in Kyoto, Japan, in
December 1997, was politically charged. The European Union, strongly
supported by the Association of Small Island States, urged a target
of a 15 per cent reduction in emissions of three key greenhouse gases
by the year 2010 with Britain being ready to reduce its emissions by
20 per cent in any event.
America and Canada were initially
unwilling to envisage any reduction at all, although America expected
China and India to commit themselves to future reductions. China and
the G7 group of developing nations, on the other hand, called for reductions
of 35 per cent by the wealthier countries by the year 2020.
It is perhaps remarkable in these
circumstances that any agreement was reached at all, even if it
was dubbed second-rate. A protocol was neverheless adopted stipulating
a
binding target of a 5.2 per cent average reduction by the major
industrialised countries on 1990 levels of emissions of a "basket" of six greenhouse
gases by the years 2008-12. The different regions will, however, receive
differential treatment, The EU will make a reduction of eight per cent
as will most of the countries of central and eastern Europe, the United
States one of 7 per cent, and Japan and Canada six per cent. New Zealand,
Russia and the Ukraine will stabilise emissions at 1990 levels but Australia
will be allowed an increase of eight per cent. No emission reductions
are required of the developing countries, which some observers feared
could delay American ratification. America did, however, gain acceptance
of the controversial concept of "carbon trading" between developed and
developing countries, which is on the one hand a politically realistic
approach but on the other a disincentive to real domestic change - a
case of do as I say, rather than do as I do.
Conclusion
The Kyoto Conference
decisions represent a considerable advance on the non-binding undertakings
entered into at Rio in 1992, but their adequacy is controversial. For
those who still doubt the extent to which man is responsible for global
warming. they are a gratuitous economic hurdle. For the much larger
number who accept that humanity is accelerating a natural phenomenon,
they are a very weak response. A reduction in emissions of greenhouse
gases of 5.2 per cent on 1990 levels by the developed countries by 2008-12
has to be set against the estimate of the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change in 1990 that a global reduction of 60 per cent in carbon
dioxide emissions was required then, if the atmosphere was to enjoy
a stable equilibrium.
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