So I am not a tree-hugging hippie. All
I really have is a deep love of the Lake District and an awareness that there
is a link between walking for miles in nature and an increase in mental
well-being. That’s it.
My interest in climate change came
when a friend mentioned with some
despair how apathetic and ill-informed most people seemed to be about the
issue. So I decided to read about it.
I was expecting to find debate. I
knew about the climate controversy. I’d heard arguments against the primary
cause of climate change being humans blasting billions of tonnes of CO2
into the air. I knew some people said it was the sun and others said it
was because of natural cycles and others said climate change wasn’t happening
at all.
But I
didn’t find debate. What I found was the history of a battle between scientists and
non-scientists. Among scientists, there is no debate about climate change. A consensus exists of 97% that climate change is human-caused and
will be catastrophic if we don’t take action now.[i]
The
debate is among politicians, the oil industry and, as
a result, the public. When
climate change first became an issue in the 80s and 90s, huge amounts of money
from the oil industry were poured into George Bush's quest to 'discredit the science'.[ii]
The people who carried out the research were intelligent individuals, but they
were not scientists. They pointed out that the earth’s climate has always changed,
that the activity of the sun affects the climate and put forwards other reasons
for the rapid rise in the earth’s temperature that have all been proven wrong by scientific research.[iii]
Many commentators now compare political denialism
to the tobacco industry's attempts to discredit the proof that smoking was
linked to lung cancer. This denialism has become part of the public psychology
of climate change, but it has no basis in science. Every scientific body and
academy in the USA has produced a statement that that human-caused global warming is happening.[iv]
I
went on reading. I read how politicians blundered their way through two decades
of mounting evidence that climate change was the greatest threat humans now
faced. George Bush refused to believe the science and as result, when
world leaders met in Kyoto in 1997 to try and stabilise the global climate by
cutting CO2 emissions, the USA refused to sign up. His approach to climate
change echoed Ronald Reagan’s before him, who referred to climate scientists as
‘a bunch of tree-hugging hippies’ and asked, ‘How many trees do you need?’[v] In fact, the only
politician in the 1980s who fully engaged with and respected the science was
Margaret Thatcher, whose degree was in chemistry
and who was a practising scientist before entering politics. She predicted,
when she left office in 1991, that ‘the environment would become the dominant
theme of politics in the twenty-first century.’[vi]
Years went rolling by. There were
discussions by world leaders about what to do, but with
nearly 200 countries joining in, all with conflicting interests, agreements
could never be reached and crucial summits ended in deadlock. Scientists,
in the meantime, went on researching. The world went on not listening. More and
more arguments against climate change appeared in the international press and
on the television. The public zoned out. Even those who accepted the science
turned away from it because the problem was too huge. There was nothing they could
do, except wash out a few yoghurt pots, and what good was that when – Oh, my
God, have you seen the size of the
average American car?
But then things started happening.
Freak weather in Britain, droughts in California, typhoons, hurricanes, floods,
English roses budding in December. People began to link these events to the
possibility that climate change had arrived.
But still nothing was done. World
leaders went on meeting, negotiations went on failing. Politicians from those
countries most immediately affected by climate change wept openly when, at the
Copenhagen Summit in 2009, just after Typhoon Haiyan had struck south-east Asia
and killed 6,300 people in the Philippines alone, no agreement to curb carbon
emissions could be made.
Climate scientists despaired. There
had now been three decades of inaction and the world was changing drastically.
Nothing they could say seemed
to change anything. They put the message out that the climate was
changing and would have desperate consequences, but the world was not going to
hear it.
What now existed was a huge gap between what
scientists knew and what the public understood about climate change. Very few people realise just what was at stake in the Paris talks. Anyone could be forgiven for
listening to Barack Obama’s speech and thinking the man
had come over hysterical.
This was the point the world had
reached when I started reading about climate change. I had no idea, when I
picked up the first book, what awful knowledge awaited me.
To
date, the average global temperature has risen one degree since pre-industrial
times. The Climate Change Summit in Paris began as an attempt by world
leaders to restrict the rise to 2 degrees by 2100. Beyond such a rise, the impacts of
climate change will no longer be dangerous, but catastrophic. Even if the average global
warming is limited to 2 degrees, areas that are today home to 280 million people will slip
under the waves.[vii]
However, based on global emissions levels
of the last ten years, together with the three decades of inaction that they
presumed would continue, climate scientists have been saying that we are on course for a
rise of 4 degrees in the average global temperature by the end of this century.
If this were to happen, it is unlikely that any life at all could exist on Earth.
We have reached a point of crisis in the human inability
to live with the natural world. Since 1970, the planet has lost half of its
wildlife population. This is an unprecedented rate of extinction, due not just
to climate change, but to deforestation, which in turn increases the rate at which the planet warms.
The Amazon Rainforest is home to half of the wildlife
species on Earth and is being cut down at a rate that means extinctions are happening
rapidly – so rapidly that scientists are now calling the period we live in The Sixth Great
Extinction. In none of the other five great extinctions in the Earth’s history
have extinction rates been this quick.
The impact of deforestation on the earth can be seen from
space.
There can
be no question that the earth is suffering at the hands of its dominant
species. Humans are intelligent, but ultimately, not yet intelligent
enough to be able to live with other life forms. Unless we can work
together to stop it, we will soon begin the very real process of
grieving for a planet.
James
Lovelock, the brilliant, independent scientist who developed the Gaia Theory of Earth, has
put forwards his view about how humans will change. He wrote his book A Rough Ride to the Future at a time
when a 4 degree rise appeared to be inevitable. His vision
is that the coming catastrophe will result in the global population being reduced
to around one billion. He predicts that human survivors will live in air-conditioned cities and
around them, the natural world will flourish. Tropical forests will rejuvenate,
wildlife will thrive, and out of environmental catastrophe, humans will develop
planetary wisdom. They will be able to sense, think about and act upon any
behaviour that could be detrimental to the well-being of the planet. He sees
climate catastrophe as a major step in the evolution of humans towards true
intelligence and the ability to share the world with other species.
Since
Lovelock’s book was published, the leaders of 200 countries from across the
world have met in Paris to discuss once again their ambitions to keep the earth from
warming beyond 2 degrees. This level of warming would still result in food
shortages, still result in freak weather and floods, and still result in a loss
of land mass that will displace millions of people. It will result in an even
greater loss of wildlife than that which has already been seen. But it is
better than 4 degrees.
However,
last week world leaders somehow managed to come together and agree that they
would not let this happen, if they can help it. They changed their ambition from a 2 degree
rise to a rise of 1.5 degrees. There is a long way to go, but the world has started to pull together to try and prevent catastrophic climate change and
ensure the survival of the human race. The deniers of the 80s and 90s have gone
from politics. Everyone is on board now.
Last
night, I watched the final episode of David Attenborough’s documentary The Hunt. He addressed some of the
issues we are now facing. He talked about the Indian tiger population – once 300,000;
now 2,000. But tigers have become an Indian triumph. Not long ago, they were almost
extinct. One of the reasons for this has been that as the human population of
India has grown, people have expanded into the tiger’s habitat. Forests have
been cut down and the space tigers need to hunt is limited. To combat this, the
Indian government has paid humans to move out of the
countryside and into the city, so that tigers can own the forest again.
Similar
things are happening in Africa. Humans, instead of killing lions, are beginning
to move away from the wilderness and into the city and lions are making a
comeback.
Among
the horror, good things are happening. Fringe
groups of environmentalists have always worked hard to protect the natural
world, but as the natural world recedes, these groups are growing, with the aim
of bringing it back to us. All
over Africa, huge groups of young conservationists are forming, determined that
the continent’s wildlife will survive the human impact upon it.
As I watched this documentary – the movement of people to
cities so the natural world can thrive again, and the steady determination of
people to prevent greater crisis – I was reminded of Lovelock’s prediction. The
future for humans will be in the cities, and we will be able to live with, not
against, the natural world. This vision already exists in Japan.
The decision of world leaders to finally come together
and pledge to bring us back from the precipice we are now at might be looked back on as a turning point
in human evolution. The rest of this century
will see the drama of climate change played out, but if the world co-operates
as leaders have just pledged, time will also see us working together, so that as
one disaster strikes, another might be averted. And always, we will be taking certain
steps to a better world, a better state of being human.
[ii] Kyoto Protocol Climate Conference, http://www.globalissues.org/article/183/cop3-kyoto-protocol-climate-conference
[iii] http://www.skepticalscience.com/tcp.php?t=home
[iv]
NASA, Global Climate Change, http://climate.nasa.gov/scientific-consensus/
[v]
Quoted in Don’t Even Think About it: Why
our brains are wired to ignore climate change by George Marshall
[vi]
Quoted in A Rough Ride to the Future by
James Lovelock
Great piece, Sarah
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