Thinking About: Global Warming

We’ve just had the warmest start to May since the 1770’s when accurate recording of the climate began. In the same week came the report that Carbon Dioxide levels in the atmosphere have reached 385ppm which is the highest level for 650,000 years. I for one do not believe that this is a coincidence.

It has been pretty clear now to most people that the world’s climate is changing. Too much is happening in too many places around the Earth for it to be dismissed as just an aberration that can be ignored. Despite that feeling and the steadily accumulating facts we persist in doing little or nothing about it. I know many people who recycle, who use a plethora of energy saving devices, who car pool or cycle to work or (like me) use public transport but I think that we all know that this is not enough. With the best will in the world the public alone cannot do enough to stop the seemingly inexorable growth of CO2 in the atmosphere. For that we need concerted action from Governments around the world and from Big Business too. Despite some evidence that this appears to be happening more and more it’s clear that such efforts will not be enough to stop the worst effects of Global Warming. We all need to do a lot more. NASA’s chief climatologist, James Hansen, is clear as can be on this subject. He said recently that “if humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted, paleoclimate evidence and ongoing climate change suggest that CO2 will need to be reduced from its current 385 ppm to at most 350 ppm.”

That’s about as stark as it can get. If we are to preserve our civilisation we need to do something – actually quite a lot – now. Not in 10 or 20 years but now. Personally I think that Hansen’s warning will fall inevitably on deaf ears because we (humanity) don’t want to hear such things. Many people, normally but not exclusively in the developed West, believe that we can have it all, that there is in effect no limit to growth. Unfortunately anyone who has studied biology or has watched fungus grow in a Petri dish will know that when resources give out eco-systems collapse. Unlike some of the Deep Greens I think that we can have sustainable growth and that we do not have to go back to a simpler time in order to eek out our lives in some kind of fantasy medieval world. But our present civilisation is untenable. Business as usual can only lead to disaster on a truly staggering scale. Only a radical shift in the way we go about things will be enough but, as I’ve undoubtedly said here and elsewhere, I think that we as a species are just too stupid and selfish to do that. I predict that it will take at least two and probably three major climate related disasters to wake governments up to the danger of uncontrolled Global Warming. I can only hope that these disasters don’t come too late for us to start the recovery process without truly appalling draconian measures being required. The later we leave things the worse it will be, maybe not directly for us but I fear that our children and grandchildren will hate us for the world we will leave them to struggle in.

Depressing aren’t I?