Look
behind you!
It's
climate change we need to worry about, not economic growth
and
al-Qaeda
It
almost seems fitting.
The
country that uses the most oil, that has produced the greatest
amount
of CO2 emissions for decades and that has consistently denied
the
evidence of climate change, has received the slap it required.
With
tens of deaths, a crushed infrastructure and billions of
dollars
worth of damage, Hurricane Sandy was the wake up call America
needed. More than that, it was an event to which we should all
pay heed. It
is time to stop wasting money on fake wars and start spending
it to
protect us from a much graver threat.
In
October 2012, I attended the General Assembly of The Club of
Rome, in
Bucharest. There, we were presented with the latest evidence
on the
effects of climate change, and they were scary. Predictions
made
just five years ago have already proved wildly wrong. In 2007,
scientists said that they thought the Arctic would be ice free
by the
end of this century. At the current rate of melting however,
it will
now be ice free in the summer of 2015. It will be ice free all
year
by 2030.
This
is not the main worry, however, as this is floating ice. When
it
melts it does not raise sea-levels. The real worry is the
Greenland
Ice Shelf, which is also melting at an unprecedented rate. If
this
disappears too, the effects will be catastrophic. Sea levels
around
the world will rise between six and seven metres, wiping out
cities
like New York, London and Shanghai. The addition of so much
cold
fresh water into the seas would also change ocean currents and
weather patterns in ways we can barely imagine. At the same
time,
rising temperatures in the northern hemisphere now risk
melting much
of the Siberian permafrost, which will release vast clouds of
trapped
methane, accelerating the speed of climate change even more.
This
risks starting a chain reaction, which we could do nothing to
stop.
The
effects of what we are doing to the planet are all around us.
From
the storms and floods this year, to the record droughts. Since
1980,
the number of natural catastrophes has risen from an average
of 400 a
year to nearly 1,000 now, according to Munich Re. Ironically,
North
America has already been more affected by “extreme weather”
than
anywhere else.
We
need to make urgent changes to the way we live if we want to
avoid a
crisis. The changes now anticipated will not just affect our
children and grandchildren. They will affect us all.
When
predictions were made a few years ago, scientists said it
would all
be more or less okay if we limited the rise in average global
temperatures to 2ºC. Yet we will miss that target now. Because
we
have not actually done anything to halt the damage we are
doing, the
amount of gas being released into the atmosphere has continued
to
grow. Without change, we are now heading for a 4ºC rise, which
will
take the Earth's average temperature back to levels last seen
40
million years ago. This will cause the Antarctic to melt too,
with
sea levels rising 60-70 metres. The droughts and floods we
would
experience along the way would make the planet virtually
uninhabitable.
While
these changes have been happening, while they have been denied
and
ignored, we have been fighting two senseless wars instead. The
first
has been the fight for growth. Governments around the world
have
spent trillions trying to prop up their economies, to keep
them
growing and keep people spending. In the process, they have
kept us
digging up ever more of the world's raw materials and
consuming even
more stuff we don't need, making the changes to the climate
even
worse.
The
second senseless war has been the War on Terror. According to
a
study by Brown University last year, the cost to America in
the first
ten years after 9/11 was a staggering $4trn. Trillions more
have
been spent in Europe and elsewhere. During all this time,
there have
been just 251 terrorism-related deaths in the developed world
and
none in the US. Over the same time, tens of thousands have
been
killed by climate change. According to Munich Re, 30,000
people have
been killed in North America alone, between 1980 and 2011
because of
weather related incidents.
For
more than a decade we have been chasing the wrong demon. The
biggest
threat to our existence is not the lack of economic growth,
nor
al-Qaeda. It is the Earth itself. Unless we learn to treat it
with
respect and start responding to the signals it is sending us,
it will
consume us all.
Graeme
Maxton is a Fellow of the International Centre of the Club of
Rome
