BBC footage of the flooded Thames valley shows hundreds of houses underwater, marooned by another bout of extreme weather. At the same time America’s eastern seaboard is gripped by a winter storm that has covered highways in ice and caused long delays at major airports. According to the Associated Press, this winter US airlines have cancelled more flights than at any other point during the last 25 years. Australia has just recorded its hottest year and a New York Times editorial about air pollution in India cites a World Bank estimate that environmental degradation in that country costs $80 billion annually and is linked to more than a fifth of the nation’s child mortality cases. The costs of global climate change are evident almost everywhere but the political will to address its many facets remains elusive.
There are good reasons to expect more floods, storms, heatwaves and costly environmental damage. In the last 15 years the UK has experienced seven of its warmest years (1998 was the warmest worldwide; 2002 and 2003 were tied for second place) and five of its wettest (warm atmospheres retain more water). The millennium seems to offer an unusually clear-cut turning point in the metrics of global change. Last year the Secretary-General of the World Meteorological Association, Michael Jarraud confirmed that the first decade of this century was the warmest decade on record and he noted that “”The coldest years now are warmer than the hottest years before 1998.”
Writing in the Guardian, Nicholas Stern, a respected authority on the science and economics of global climate change, observes that if worldwide carbon emissions are not cut soon the planet’s average temperature could rise by as much as 4 degrees celsius before the end of the century, causing “mass migrations of hundreds of millions of people away from the worst-affected areas.” Stern adds that “The lack of vision and political will from the leaders of many developed countries is not just harming their long-term competitiveness, but is also endangering efforts to create international cooperation…”
One of the dangers in a global crisis is that in the absence of coordinated leadership, its underlying causes may be ignored, or even exacerbated, by inconsistent local remedies. Stern urges the British government to “resist calls from some politicians and parts of the media to fund adaptation to climate change by cutting overseas aid.” He argues that countries like Britain “should be increasing aid to poor countries to help them develop economically in a climate that is becoming more hostile largely because of past emissions by rich countries.”
Although the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has concluded, with 95 per cent certainty, that human activity is the cause in the sharp rise of global average temperature in the last 50 years, efforts to agree even on modest environmental regulations, such as those in the Kyoto protocol, have been met with a range of self-interested objections from developed countries, and with answering cynicism and disingenuousness from rising industrial behemoths like China. This tit-for-tat approach to the politics of climate change is disastrously shortsighted.
In Field Notes from a Catastrophe, a sobering account of the science and politics of climate change, Elizabeth Kolbert recounts an interview with David Hawkins, head of the US-based Natural Resources Defence Council’s climate change programme. When asked about the US fear that China’s rapidly growing industries – mostly powered by fossil fuels – will make conservation efforts in the US irrelevant, Hawkins replies that this analysis gets the relationship between developed and developing countries back to front. He argues that in fact China will follow America’s lead in environmental conservation and cites the US adoption of modern pollution controls in the ’70s as an example of how this could work. Hawkins says that if the US ensures that it builds cleaner coal plants and creates incentives for the Chinese to follow suit “then it doesn’t matter if there’s an international treaty or not. . . If we get the facts on the ground right, we’ve bought time.”
The facts on the ground are not encouraging and time is increasingly precious in the ongoing struggle against the effects of global climate change. Already there are well-grounded fears that current efforts to address the crisis are too narrow, and possibly too late. If, for instance, greenhouse gas emissions were somehow restricted to current levels, the effects of global change would remain in place for several decades as complex interactions between the already warmed surfaces of the earth, melted glaciers, and sea ice played themselves out.
This week’s extreme weather around the world ought to remind us that climate change can’t be solved only through local and regional initiatives like the UN programme on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries. Its complex, transnational challenges require an imaginative, timely and politically well-coordinated response from both developed and developing countries. Unless our collective response to the crisis can move beyond its current phase of mistrustful, self-interested politicking, it will continue to have little hope of success.