Tell me again, I need to know
The forests had trees, the meadows were green
The oceans were blue, and birds really flew
Can you swear that was true? (Tom Paxton)
In a casual WhatsApp comment the other day, I wrote that I felt another blog post on the subject of global heating was bubbling, but it’s too big a subject. Of course, a blog post is meaningless scribbling in the face of what’s coming, but it at least records my thoughts in a diary-like format in case anyone should ever read this in time to come (assuming that there isn’t a great digital crash that will wipe it all out).
That said, it obviously is too big a subject for a single blog post, so it will probably become a running theme. Also, the impacts of global heating are part of the general background to my current writing-in-progress, which is set around 2050, so I’m trying to do the research to make that at least plausible – and that research will likely feed through to here too.
At the outset I have to say that I take it as axiomatic that nothing of significance will happen to mitigate global heating (short of a massive volcanic eruption, but that will be a temporary blip). We are currently on course for an average rise of 1.5° by 2030 or so, and the only question is how bad it’s going to get after that. ‘How bad’ is, of course, the key question, but it’s worth saying that, after eighteen months of pandemic, we ought to have a more visceral understanding of feedback loops, tipping points and the impact of exponential change. Also, not much picked up on, is that the IPCC discarded (for now) the really scary models because they thought the degree of climate sensitivity those models suggested was currently unsupported by historical evidence.
***
I am not given generally to catastrophism. History is full of people predicting the end of the world and finding themselves still here, embarrassed, the day after. And I’m not going there.
But.
Not only are we in an interstitial state regarding the way our daily lives are led (and still between phases of the current pandemic which is by no means over), we are also coming out of the two and a half centuries of industrialisation behaving in a way that means we will not reverse, or even mitigate, the damage we’ve done to the climate.
Predictive Failure
In any event, even without catastrophising, it’s bad enough. As I write, we have monstrous fires in Siberia, record temperatures in the Mediterranean with fires in Turkey and Greece, and we’ll soon be getting round to this year’s catastrophic fires in the southern hemisphere. We’ve had major floods in Germany, Belgium and Luxembourg. Looking to the US, I would say the west coast and Pacific North-West are already on course to be uninhabitable at current population levels within twenty years, partly because of the direct effect of the heat and fires, and partly because of the water shortages that are already happening and certain to increase (the balance of probabilities globally is, broadly, that areas that are already dry will get drier while areas that are already wet will get wetter).
And that’s all before the impacts of sea-level rise, which is on course to become obvious after 2030. Anyway, I jotted down some headline areas to think about/worry about on a scrap of paper and came up with:
- Water rights
- Refugees
- International travel
- Transport
- Infrastructure,
- Food
- Energy
- Supply Chain/Logistics
- Nationalism/Border skirmishes
- Wealth inequalities
- Housing
A sobering list, and some of them are already causing problems. In the big picture, there isn’t a lot we can do about them as individuals because the required changes to mitigate the problem are global and systemic – it’s an exceptionally complex, large-scale systems issue, in fact. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do anything, but it seems to me that what we can do as a country is to seek to mitigate what’s coming, and this requires some big decisions and preparations – the UK has, for example, outsourced the bulk of its food production, and a lot of what remains is vulnerable to intense weather events.
I have no expectation of anything of significance happening in the USA, which will have its own internal problems to deal with soon enough as the west coast becomes near-uninhabitable and the east coast floods (and the midwest had extreme flooding in 2019, and severe floods in 2020 and 2021). The UK will bluster until it’s too late, then try to find a foreigner to blame. The EU will issue lots of fine words but do the square root of fuck all. In the big picture, we are reliant on China to drive at least some positive change.
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