Topping Out: The Conference of the Parties of the United Nations Convention on Climate Change is unlikely to produce any sort of useful agreement in Paris. Only the world’s scientists understand the width of the gulf between the extinction level event seriousness of anthropogenic global warming, and those whose will and resources are required to, at best, soften its impact.
PARIS IS ALREADY A FAILURE. The world has already exceeded
the target it’s leaders have gathered to enforce. Scientists estimate that the
amount of man-made heat already absorbed by the world’s oceans has locked-in a
global temperature rise of 3.5°C. That’s already 1.5°C higher than the Paris
target of 2.0°C.
Bad enough news, you might think, but it gets worse. All
around the Arctic Circle, but especially in the uppermost reaches of the
Russian Federation, rising temperatures are giving rise to massive burps of
methane. The recorded incidence of these emissions has soared over the last
five years. This is seriously alarming information, because methane is a much
more dangerous “greenhouse gas” than carbon-dioxide.
But, newswise, it gets worse still. The rising emissions of
methane from the rapidly warming Arctic Ocean are but the feeble harbingers of
the vast amounts of methane currently trapped in the planet’s permafrost.
Gigatons of the gas will be released into the atmosphere as Earth’s hitherto
frozen soil gives up its riches. (Strictly speaking, I should be using the
present tense here because, even as you read these words, the permafrost is steaming.)
The world faces “runaway” global warming of 5°C and upwards by the end of this
century.
Fire In The Hole! Gigatons of methane will be released into the atmosphere as the world's permafrost begins to thaw.
A temperature rise of that rapidity and magnitude is not
survivable – not by a human population numbering in excess of 7 billion. Runaway
global warming will cause the Greenland and Antarctica ice-sheets to melt. When
that happens the seas and oceans will rise by metres, not centimetres,
profoundly reshaping the world’s landmasses. Civilisation, as we know it, will
end.
Yes, whole cities will be drowned, but that’s not the half
of it. The real worry are the inevitable and profound changes in the world’s climate
that runaway global warming is bound to trigger. Regions which now produce a
large percentage of the planet’s food surpluses will become arid and infertile.
The glacial sources of many of the world’s great rivers will disappear. Very
quickly water will become more valuable than oil, and men will kill each other
with ever increasing ferocity to control it. Famine, Pestilence and War will
raise their reeking banners above a sweltering earth. Billions will perish.
Could we have prevented this? Was the current unfolding
climate catastrophe ever avoidable?
Probably not. The human animal is not very good at dealing
with slow-moving threats. The slightest tremor in the leaves, the faintest rustle
of crushed leaf-litter, and your average homo-sapiens is instantly alert,
chipped flint spearhead, or rifle, in hand. Humankind’s evolutionary
programming has equipped it superbly to handle immediate and short-term threats
to its survival. Long-term threats, however, are much harder to resist, not
least because the measures required to meet these less-than-imminent dangers
will, themselves, be perceived as immediate and/or short-term threats!
As a species, we have evolved the intelligence to perceive
long-term threats, but not the wisdom to come together and do what is necessary
to eliminate them.
Faced with the imminent danger of being overwhelmed by Nazi
Germany and Imperial Japan, the United States of America was prepared to direct
(or take over) private enterprises, impose strict controls on the operation of
the market, raise billions through higher taxes and the sale of war bonds, and
require its citizens to restrict dramatically their consumption of fossil
fuels. To free up resources for the war effort, neighbourhood “war gardens”
were promoted and radical recycling measures made mandatory.
If, from the moment the world’s scientists agreed that it
was real, the US Government had treated the threat of man-made global warming as
the “moral equivalent of war”, the planet might have been spared.
Better still, if the nations of the world had truly united
in the aftermath of World War II; if, instead of waging a Cold War against one
another, the USA and the USSR had jointly waged a war against want, ignorance
and disease; then maybe the peoples of the planet would have developed the wisdom
necessary to avoid the catastrophe being cooked-up by their industrial
civilisation’s relentless pursuit of economic growth and material consumption.
If, in exploring the solar system, the world’s peoples had grown accustomed to
thinking of their planet as a unique and fragile ark, carrying through the void
of space everything they hold dear, then perhaps, just perhaps, humanity could
have rung the changes necessary for its own survival.
Alas, it was not to be. The Conference of the Parties of the
United Nations Convention on Climate Change is unlikely to produce any sort of useful
agreement in Paris. Only the world’s scientists understand the width of the
gulf between the extinction level event seriousness of anthropogenic global
warming, and those whose will and resources are required to, at best, soften
its impact.
That tremor in the leaves; rustling in the leaf-litter: it
is ourselves.
This essay was
originally published in The Press of Tuesday,
8 December 2015.
