Fairly sobering cover story in New Scientist this week, by the aptly-named Gaia Vince, a freelance journalist who apparently is ‘wandering the world’, like a cross between Monkey and Samuel L Jackson in Pulp Fiction.
The environment, according to Gaia, is about to strike down upon us with great vengeance and furious anger.
She asks the question – what will the world be like if it is 4°C warmer, as scientists predict it probably will be within 30-60 years?
Not good.
The world will be divided by two latitudinal dry belts where human habitation will be impossible, say Syukuro Manabe of Tokyo University, Japan, and his colleagues. One will stretch across Central America, southern Europe and north Africa, south Asia and Japan; while the other will cover Madagascar, southern Africa, the Pacific Islands, and most of Australia and Chile (Climatic Change, vol 64, p 59).
That means the global population will have to crowd into the few places where habitation is possible, which the New Scientist estimates will be: Canada, the UK, Greenland and Scandinavia, New Zealand, and the parts of the Antarctic that are thawed. Some parts of West Africa may also be able to sustain life.
The global population will either be reduced dramatically, or will be crammed into high rise cities, eating mainly vegetarian food, unable to travel, probably subject to birth control, and energy control, and all kinds of other control. Most animal and plant life, and almost all aquatic life, will either have died of natural causes, or been eaten. “If it moves, we will have eaten it”, says James Lovelock. “We will be desperate.”
Those areas of the world that can still sustain plant life will be faced with a grim choice – do they protect their borders, create a ‘life boat’ as Lovelock put it, and close their ears and eyes to the screams of the dying, or do they open the doors to mass migration, and if so, how much, and to who? If they do, how do they order their societies? Do they give all new arrivals a vote and equal rights, or will such societies have to be run in an authoritarian, Mega City Four-type way?
Can we avoid this grim scenario? Yes, but the chances are very slim.
Paul Crutzen, the Nobel-prize winning atmospheric chemist, says: “”I would like to be optimistic that we’ll survive, but I’ve got no good reason to be. In order to be safe, we would have to reduce our carbon emissions by 70% by 2015. We are currently putting in 3% more each year.”
In other words, we have to get ready for a much hotter world, we have to start thinking the politics, economics, and ethics, of it through.
At the same time, for the next 30 years, and particularly in the next five years, we need to devote all the effort we have to lobbying governments to reduce emissions as much as possible. There’s no higher priority. Discussing anything else is like discussing the latest cricket results on the deck of the Titanic.
We will be judged on this by the rest of humanity, and our generation will probably be considered the most stupid, lazy and destructive ever. Our children and grandchildren, if they are unfortunate enough to have been brought into the world, will stare at us and say ‘why didn’t you do something when you had the chance?’ And we will smile weakly, and look away.
