The Filtnib’s Progress

So I went through a phase of existential terror when I was about 12 years old, as I became temporarily convinced we were doomed to die in a nuclear holocaust. All due to an alarming novel called Children of the Dust which I borrowed one day from the school library. Don’t ever let your children read it. They won’t sleep for weeks.

Nowadays I don’t often think about nuclear war, and when I do (say after some scaremongering speech from the White House about Iran) I think, well, if it’s going to happen, nothing I can do will stop it. Right after that I stop worrying.

But apocalypse is creeping back into my brain. And this time there’s no angsty teen novel to blame. Only the world’s best scientists, economists, and NASA.

I used to be a sceptic about climate change, just like you (according to Ipsos Mori’s poll, “The majority of the British public is still not convinced that climate change is caused by humans – and many others believe scientists are exaggerating the problem“).

But then, about 18 months ago I had to read a document called The Stern Review, for work. How dull, I thought, weighing the massive tome (670 pages) in my hands. Also, wasn’t it about climate change, and isn’t that to do with science, and therefore something I won’t understand? (And doesn’t the cover look boring as hell?)

Then I started reading, then I got scared, and then I started wondering if maybe when I’m older I shouldn’t have kids after all, because, who knows what kind of world they will be born into?

It was like Children of the Dust all over again.

Catastrophic thinking? If only. I don’t expect you to read the report; like I said, it’s long, but then again, if you like horror movies where the whole world’s under threat, maybe you’ll get a kick out of it. Anyway this is how the BBC’s business editor, Robert Peston, described it:

• “The Stern Review says that climate change represents the greatest and widest-ranging market failure ever seen. And on the basis of this intellectually rigorous and thorough report, it is hard to disagree. Sir Nicholas Stern, a distinguished development economist and former chief economist at the World Bank, is not a man given to hyperbole…

• …he warns that we are too late to prevent any deleterious consequences from climate change. The prospects are worst for Africa and developing countries, so the richer nations must provide them with financial and technological help to prepare and adapt”.

A very stern warning indeed. Published in 2006 the report demanded action on a personal, national and global level. Since then we’ve done, well, bugger all, to put it bluntly.

We’ve just buried our heads in the warming sand. And why is that a problem?

• as the Nobel prize-winning scientist and economist Rajendra Pachauri explains: “If there’s no action before 2012, that’s too late. What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future. This is the defining moment.”

• according to the UN, climate change already kills 150,000 a year

• poor children will be among the principal victims of climate change

• climate change will cause global conflict, according to leading defence thinktank, RUSI (read their Whitehall report here)

• if you’re my age, it’s our children who will have to fight to survive in this climate-changed world. All the politicians who are currently trying to work out when and how we should stop producing carbon will be dead by 2050, the date they’re working towards.

• In Mother Jones, an article welcomes us “to the Anthropocene: the new geologic era we’re officially entering, a period in which humanity may simply, and catastrophically, outrun history itself”.

• Last week a NASA climate scientist called James Hansen told Congress it was nearly too late to defuse “the global warming time bomb”: “if we don’t begin to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the next several years, and really on a very different course, then we are in trouble”.

Trouble’s putting it mildly. For a sense of what Hansen’s talking about, I’d really recommend reading what I think is still probably the best article I’ve read on the issue, though it was written over a year ago now.

The great thing about the Sunday Times piece – based on Mark Lynas’ acclaimed book, which National Geographic have recently adapted for film – is the idea of breaking down what climate change will mean, one degree at a time. The world’s leading scientists have agreed temperatures will rise between 1.4 and 5.8 degrees C by the end of this century, but what does that mean?

Just saying temperatures will rise by 2 degrees actually sounds quite tame until you read about what impact that will have. It’s stuff like, the total disappearance of Arctic sea ice; desertification and extreme water shortages in the sub-tropics; floods and heat waves becoming the norm; melting glaciers in the Andes and Himalayas; more than a third of all living species facing extinction.

Ok.

I’ve put in this cup of coffee here because if you’ve got this far you’re a superstar but you probably need a caffeine kick.

I know this is probably the longest blog post I’ve ever written.

But I honestly think it’s also the most important thing I should be writing about.

A few weeks ago I was chatting to some super-intelligent friends, probably the cleverest people I know, and none of them really thought climate change was a big deal. They were inclined to think it was just another of those media-scares, like the millenium bug that never was.

That was when I started thinking apocalyptic thoughts again. Because I started to wonder how we could avoid temperature rises of below 2 degrees if even the brightest thinkers I knew hadn’t really got the fear. Why is public consciousness lightyears behind where it needs to be?

• Because politicians didn’t want us to know the truth. Last month NASA admitted:

“during the fall of 2004 through early 2006, the NASA Headquarters Office of Public Affairs managed the topic of climate change in a manner that reduced, marginalized or mischaracterized climate change science made available to the general public.”

Or, as the New York Times concluded:

This [Bush] administration long ago secured a special place in history for bending science to its political ends. One costly result is that this nation has lost seven years in a struggle in which time is not on anyone’s side.”

[Unfortunately, America's disregard for truth has cost the world; in 2001 President Bush rejected the Kyoto Protocol (which would have limited emissions from 35 developed countries); without U.S. support it became "as ineffectual as the post-World War I League of Nations"]

• because industry doesn’t want us to know the truth. Obviously there’s a lot of money to be made in fossil fuels, and as we’re seeing with oil, the scarcer they get, the better they pay. When it comes to greed, there’s no time like the present – forget 2050; who’s getting the biggest bonus this year? That’s got to be the logic behind E.ON’s outrageous plans to build more coal-fired power stations in the UK, which this government has shamefully backed.

• because we don’t want to know the truth. The necessary conclusion is that our current lifestyles are just not sustainable. It’s as simple as that. And lots of us would rather not give up our luxuries – cheap flights, cars, tumble-dryers, endless plastic bags and packaging, out-of-season food flown all over the world, keeping every gadget constantly plugged in, putting the central heating on full so you can wear t-shirts round the house in winter…

It’s about the pleasure/pain principle. The problem is, the pain won’t hit us in the developed world until it’s too late. The people climate change already hurts – say, the half million pastoral farmers in the Mandera district of North-East Kenya forced to abandon their way of life by a catastrophic four-fold increase of drought – have no real voice; no way of contacting people like you and me to warn us that we’re destroying our own – and their – habitat.

So, time to get evangelical.

The experts say you shouldn’t write about climate change in depressing terms (e.g. the longer we go on doing nothing about climate change, the more mass suffering, havoc and extinction we’re going to face. If we took the scientists seriously, we’d all have trouble sleeping, just like 12-year-old Me waiting for the nuclear holocaust, except this time it’ll be floods and drought and whole areas of Bangladesh submerged).

Yet it seems ridiculous that we should need to rephrase and market the truth just to get people to care about their own future. Then again, people are remarkably stupid about our own mortality, as hundreds of natural disasters have shown. And as they say over at Celsias.com, climate change is not a spectator sport.

There are things to be done.

The biggest one is going to be putting pressure on our government, through marches, petitions, letters to the environment minister Hilary Benn, our own MPs, and of course, wielding our votes like the weapons they are.

Without our input, ministers can say they lack a mandate. Don’t let them. We have to make it easy for them to protect our planet.

If you fancy something more active, follow the example of my friend Beth, who protested against coal power-stations (read her story at the end of the page here).

And, take small steps in your own life: go to celsias.com for ideas. You could also join my facebook group, and try to keep to its mantra: Trains Not Planes for Short-Haul Flights. Or come up with a group yourself. This is our cause, and now is our only chance to make a difference. Don’t wait.