Global Warming
Pollution, global warming and climatic change have been a source of debate for as long as most of us can remember. Recent events suggest that we may not have the luxury of debating about such issues for much longer..
The world in which we live is no longer linked to a traditional, agricultural past, when we humans enjoyed a direct relationship with nature. Indeed, we are becoming increasingly detached from our roots, yet apart from astounding advances in fields like information technology and medical research, we also do not live in the futuristic high-tech world imagined by visionaries of the not so distant past. The world we inhabit is, in fact, the product of the petrol-driven culture that shaped the 20th century. The industrial revolution was driven by coal, the consumer-driven society of the 20th century by oil and the 21st century was to have been propelled by clean and efficient nuclear energy. Somewhere along the line, the world strayed from the script and now we may be losing the plot altogether.
How it should have been
At the end of the Second World War much of the world lay in ruins. It was hardly a time to rejoice, but with the defeat of Nazis and Fascists many thought they had finally conquered evil and brought the world to the brink of a New Age. Liberalism was to be the new creed, prosperity the new religion. Out were notions of imperialism, and the liberal foundations on which institutions such as the United Nations were built sought to spread modern Western concepts such as multi-party democracy and free enterprise-driven consumer society to the far corners of the world. Education, housing, medical care, mass consumption and a voter’s role were the precepts of human happiness and fulfillment. What the world needed to make this dream a reality was strong economies fueled by…lots of fuel. A modern, industrial welfare state is a thirsty thing, soaking up energy as it grows—and grow it must to sustain itself. For the time being, oil was the obvious conduit for this growth. It was cheap and plentiful, but even as places like London, Milwaukee and Swerdlovsk choked in oil and coal-induced smog, plans were afoot to develop the power of the future: nuclear energy. By the year 2000, it was boasted, most of the world would be running on an endless supply of this clean and efficient form of energy. Technology was the answer to the questions of the future. Gone would be the smog-filled cities, and it wasn’t just the science-fiction writers who thought we would be flying around in little saucers by now.
How it is
Well, we don’t fly around in little saucers, don’t have machines to do all the housework and don’t live in friendly, squeaky-clean cities devoid of any suffering or strife. That this was always going to be a bit of a pipe-dream is one thing, but the world we find ourselves in, anno 2005, is very far removed from the utopian dreams of the past. Instead of a world of happy people empowered by technology and prosperity, we live in a world of extremes, where those who enjoy prosperity can’t find fulfillment, while others, desperately in search of the very same trappings of prosperity that are said not to bring happiness, remain enslaved in a cycle of subsistence. The one billion or so who have achieved the goals of multi-party democracy and mass-consumption drive around in ever-bigger cars along ever more crowded roads in pursuit of ever more wealth. In doing so, they—we—have become hooked on oil. Our economies, lifestyles and very infrastructures are now so dependent on a structure that has evolved over the past century that it would require nothing short of a serious change in lifestyle, with accompanying economic transformation, uncertainty and unprecedented infrastructural investments to change things around. No-one, from the most hard-nosed oil executive to the most self-righteous activist, really seems prepared for such a thing, so we go on consuming away, paying lip service to all the right PC topics while pumping soot into the air and bulldozing what is left of nature. Pressing ‘delete’ on their conscience, each one passes on responsibility by blaming others; individuals say it is the fault of the very industries that keep them in the style to which they have become accustomed, business says it’s purely a matter for government, and government, as always, ignores important issues and throws all its weight behind ‘vital’ issues such as anti-smoking, fox hunting and drink driving campaigns. In the meantime the debate about pollution, global warming and climatic change rages on, alongside those of deforestation, habitat loss and extinction, and the misery caused by the poverty trap set by Third World over-population, corruption and war.
How it went wrong
Just as enthusiastically as the post-war nuclear energy programmes got underway, so they gradually ran out of puff. Why? Because technology failed us, for one. Clean nuclear energy, generated through a process called nuclear fusion, remains as yet impossible to achieve. Instead, we’re stuck with dozens of nuclear reactors and power stations that produce electricity by nuclear fission, which although efficient in terms of energy-production, is highly dangerous and produces radioactive by-products for which we have no more sophisticated disposal systems than simple dumping and burying—usually in poor countries. Then again, this applies to most of our mass-produced products, as the littered roads and mountains of garbage, fridges, cars and even aeroplanes attest to. At the heart of it all is money. Money is like water. It follows the path of least resistance, corrodes even the strongest ideologies, allegiances and religious beliefs. Although it is possible to make biodegradable plastics, collect and recycle mass-produced items, reduce emissions with filtering processes, apply strict planning laws, fine for littering and protect areas of natural importance, it is much cheaper to leave junk lying around, construct in green zones, allow animals to become extinct and scuttle ships instead of breaking them up in dry docks. Given such a world, and the hesitancy of anyone, including our governments, to try to tackle the enormous task of redirecting our economies, infrastructures and to some extent, lifestyles, towards a more sustainable future, it is not surprising that we are choking our planet with litter, poisons and gasses. Until now, the earth has coped admirably, still producing food that we can eat and clear skies that we can sit under, albeit with copious amounts of ozone-hole countering sun block, but while debates rage on about whether or not the world is heading towards something ugly it is slowly but surely becoming clear that things have begun to change.
What is wrong?
Even those who laugh at the idea that industry, pollution and climatic change are somehow related, who claim that there is no such thing as greenhouse gasses or a hole in the ozone layer, are starting to realise that something is afoot. Climate change is no longer a theorem proposed by overzealous ‘green’ scientists, as the industry lobby used to suggest. Increasing temperatures and sweltering summers have been recorded year on year since the 1980s, providing the sort of statistical evidence that is hard to ignore. An increase in mean annual global temperatures of 2ºC is considered to be enough to trigger a series of potentially catastrophic climatic changes. We are currently well under way to reaching that figure, and projections suggest that at this rate of growth average temperatures will increase by as much as 3.5ºC. If things continue like this, heatwave summers, like the one that killed 15,000 people in Europe in 2003, will be considered ‘cool’ by 2050.
The cause of it all? As always, not just one simple thing, but rather the culmination of our actions and choices over the last half century. Factories, power plants and cars are the usual suspects. They are usually associated with industrial and industrialising countries, but deforestation, the burning of coal and wood fires on a massive scale, soil erosion, man-made desertification from bad farming practices and methane from farm animals ensure the Third World contributes to the earth’s destruction too. Just as commerce, money and an easy lifestyle are the main culprits in the advanced countries, so over-population, corruption and the disparity between modern realities and traditional practices are the evils of the poor world. All live in a state of denial and a manner that is totally unsustainable. Industry and car engines may have become cleaner over the years, but the amount of pollution has continued to grow with the staggering growth in numbers. If China and India, with two and a half times the population of the rich countries between them, start embarking on mass-consumption, the potentially hundreds of millions of Hyundais, Suzukis and Tatas driving around there could double the world’s car park in a period of ten to 15 years.
Global warming is the result of the so-called Greenhouse Effect, the increasingly thick layer of smog and gasses that have attached themselves around the world’s natural atmosphere, rising up ceaselessly from our factories, cars, farms, shanty towns and forest fires. At first, the earth had the capacity to filter them out, but decades of cumulative effect have allowed an increasingly powerful build-up. This now blocks out some of the incoming sun rays, increases cloud coverage and humidity, raises temperatures by restricting the re-radiation of heat off the earth’s surface into space, which used to be a very important part of the earth’s heat exchange cycle, and also allows for the increasingly powerful build-up of heat and energy in the atmosphere. Just as global warming is gradually shifting climatic regions and vegetation zones, melting polar ice caps at an alarming rate, raising sea level by this release of fresh water and by thermal expansion, so the build-up of thermal energy in the skies above us is producing ever-more powerful and frequent storms, cyclones, winds and typhoons. Regions such as the Caribbean are lashed unrelentingly by hurricane after hurricane, while across the Atlantic, Britain, Ireland and France are starting to experience cyclones for the first time in recorded history. The sheer cost of the storms, floods and droughts that we are already starting to experience as a result of man-induced climate change, is likely to bring economies, let alone the world’s insurance industry, to their knees. Maybe this, along with the loss of rich fishing grounds, fertile soil and other economic problems, will finally motivate those who can be motivated by money alone.
There have been predictions of rising sea levels for some time. Like rising temperatures they were long considered to be the fanciful notions of fear-mongering scientists, but now the rate of melting glaciers in Greenland, the Arctic and Antarctica is not only recorded, it is speeding up quickly. Billions of liters of ice are melting into the sea continuously. If the Greenland ice cap alone disappears into the sea, it will raise global sea level by seven metres, but this is still rather theoretical in comparison to the less spectacular but ongoing sea level rise caused by the thermal expansion of sea water due to rising temperatures alone. The threat to the low-lying islands and coastal areas of the world is no longer fanciful. The Indian Ocean tsunami gave us a very clear idea of what could happen, although it must be said the process of sea level rise would be much more gradual, but also continuous. Already, low-lying island states such as Tuvalu, in the Pacific, are starting to lose islands and atolls to the sea, while millions in Venice, the Netherlands and parts of Belgium and England have the proverbial sword of Damocles hovering over their heads. The current tide of immigration could become insignificant compared to the mass-migration of over 200 million Bengalis if low-lying Bangla Desh is flooded permanently.
Future scenarios are indeed so scary that they produce a good deal of cynicism, yet even if only a small percentage of the possible outcomes occur, our lives will be changed forever. Shifting climatic belts may cause the Mediterranean to become dry scrub, deserts to expand and areas such as Great Britain to develop a more Mediterranean vegetation pattern that would make wine-growing on a large scale possible. While humanity will be able to adjust to such changes, it is the spectre of rising sea levels, increasingly powerful storms and possibly even the disruption of complex weather patterns that could bring death and destruction. Already, the UN predicts the wars of the future will not be about oil but about water. Wars of survival could become increasingly vicious, taking on a genicidal tone as the reduced carrying capacity of the world exacerbates over-population. Rwanda-Burundi was a foretaste of this, Sudan (Dafur) is another. The movie, The Day after Tomorrow, may have been criticised for simplifying the effects that the release of huge volumes of melting ice could have on the disruption of the Gulf Stream, which brings warm temperatures, nutrients and life to much of the mid-and north Atlantic regions, but a disruption in any of the world’s sea currents or air cells could cause droughts, floods and even the onset of ice age conditions that would make El Niño look like a storm in a teacup.
What can be done?
Oil made us what we are today, in the good and in the bad sense. We remain dependent upon it, but if we are to avoid heading into an unknown and potentially cataclysmic future, which could start to manifest itself sooner than we think, we should try to gradually kick the habit and reduce our dependency on oil. The USA, in its crusade against Communism, gave oil the kind of geopolitical preeminence that has created a whole new wave of problems in its wake. Breaking with oil will have to be a gradual process, which will require not only an economic, technological and, especially, very costly infrastructural transformation, but also a change in priorities. Rather than focusing so much of its resources on maintaining the oil-built status quo, strategic supplies of oil and the free flow of oil to the world’s economies, countries such as the US should start focusing again on the development of new technologies that will gradually take over oil’s burdone of supplying the world with energy. These energies will have to be clean, cost-effective and, ideally, sustainable. Nuclear technology has so far failed us, but it seems likely that clean nuclear energy generated from the fission of atoms would be within our reach if enough money was available for research. The same applies to the development of a host of other technologies that have so far been pursued in a half-hearted manner.
If this much damage can be done in little over half a century, imagine what future generations of hamburger-munching, shopping mall-addicted ignoramos can do. The world has tripled to six billion people since World War Two and is adding over 120 million new people every year (nett growth including deaths). If we do not change our ways any solution may be so costly and drastic that there is no telling how it will affect the future development or even survival of the human race, let alone less hardy creatures. In short, the time for debating, theorising and arguing has passed. Opportunities in the past have been missed and the world is already starting to pay for this lack of courage and foresight. If we continue to stick our heads in the sand, it may well become our permanent dwelling.
By Michel Cruz
