Warning Signs

Shocking report

Flights of folly

Biodiversity threatened

Carbon crisis

Stark choices

A plan of action

This is not meant to be an environmental scare story. Rather, unfortunately, it’s reality. In the year 2008AD, we live in what for some is a prosperous world. However, let us roll back the clock nearly 2,000 years so as we may reflect on the past and see what we may learn. For the purposes of this article we will go to the city of Pompeii.

Back then, life was good for the citizens of Pompeii and for many, it was quite luxurious. Located in the majestic bay of Naples, the city and surrounding area was a prosperous centre for agriculture, tourism and had a thriving commercial trade. The city's wealth and favourable position drew visitors from all over the Roman Empire. It was the ancient equivalent of the Celtic tiger, albeit with better weather.

Today, however, Pompeii's ruins tell a stark and tragic tale; that holds many lessons for us in 2008 as we come to terms with the significance of climate change. One day Pompeii was a thriving, lively city; the next it was a steaming mound of smouldering volcanic ash. Warning signs were evident; streams and wells suddenly dried up, the ground had begun to rumble and quiver, the sea in some places had mysteriously begun to boil, wildlife including many animals began abandoning the city. Something strange was happening, as is evident in our environment today with climate change. Back then the people wondered what it could mean; in comparison today our scientific and knowledge-based environment has predicted and studied in detail the consequences of climate change.

We now know to some degree what to expect of climate change and how to limit its impacts. Two thousand years ago in Pompeii the only ones who survived or escaped were those who recognised the growing danger. Today, unfortunately, there is no safe haven. The consequences of climate change are global and even more catastrophic.

Warning Signs
As with the citizens of Pompeii who lingered too long, denying the seriousness of their plight, our inaction will ultimately and rapidly lead to the collapse of our civilisation and ecosystems on a global scale. As with Pompeii, we the citizens of the world have been forewarned about the environmental catastrophe that awaits us as a consequence of manmade climate change, yet we continue to linger and deny the seriousness of our plight.

Life today for many is good, economies continue to grow, people enjoy their shopping trips to London and New York, weekends in Paris and Rome, Christmas trips to Lapland, two cars per household, parents driving their children to school or better yet giving the older ones a car and letting them drive themselves.

We construct more roads, bigger airports, take more foreign holidays, build larger houses and spread concrete like it was margarine on the surface of the diminishing world. So why, I ask myself am I sitting here late at night writing this; well I am troubled and have been for some time. I have nightmares about the future, dream terrible thoughts.

My waking moments are consumed most times about what I know from what I read in scientific papers. I wonder is there anyone else out there who feels the same? I know there are, I have met a few, but it appears we are largely a silent minority. No one seems to bother with what we have to say or take us seriously. For those that are unaware it is now 18 months since the publication of the Stern Review Report on the Economics of Climate Change, followed in February 2007 by the publication of the UN International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, “Climate change 2007”.

Since its publication many leading environmental scientists including Professor James Lovelock believe that even the most pessimistic outcomes predicted by the IPCC fail to recognise the speed with which global warming will progress. In May of 2007 Dr. James Hansen of NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies along with Columbia University Earth Institute, University of California and Columbia University published their truly terrifying report: “Climate Change and Trace Gases” foreseeing catastrophic ice loss and rising sea levels that would mirror biblical floods of the old testament within this century.

Shocking report
This report was followed in June by the Publication in the National Academy of Sciences of another shocking report titled “Global and Regional Drivers of Accelerating CO2 Emissions,” by Michael R. Raupach of the Global Carbon Project. The report identified accelerated increases in CO2 emissions in recent years. The report also noted that while developing economies (China, India, etc), representing 80% of the world’s population, accounted for 41% of global emissions in 2004, they only accounted for 23% of global cumulative emissions since the start of the industrial revolution.

Nevertheless as these economies continue to grow, aided by western nations transferring their environmental and social responsibilities, (i.e. pollution and CO2 emissions related to manufacturing of products destined for the developed nations) emissions in developing countries will continue to grow dramatically.

Notwithstanding this, the report clearly identified that developed countries including Ireland, accounting for 20% of the world’s population continue to be responsible for approximately 60% of global emissions. Ireland alone will witness an increase in CO2 emissions of around 29% by 2010. Yet under the Kyoto Protocol, Ireland is only permitted to have a 13% increase in CO2 emissions by the end of the decade.

Generally speaking, where reductions in certain industrial sector emissions have occurred in developed countries they can be directly related to the transfer of polluting industries to China, India and developing economies or to the closure due to economic constraints of strategic industries such as the coal industry in the UK or the IFI plants or steel industry in Ireland.

National reductions can therefore largely be seen as inconsequential and meaningless. What is certain is that as long as our consumer societies continue to demand cheaper goods and more of them, the situation will continue to deteriorate. Transport emissions will continue to rise as everything from electronics to clothing, toys and food continue to be sourced in cheaper economies at greater distances from developed world economies.

Moreover, it was recently reported that an incredible 275,000 people flew out of Ireland on a bank holiday weekend, presumably one must assume largely on foreign holidays and weekend breaks, with huge numbers flying to New York for weekend shopping trips.

In 2006, Dublin Airport saw a 15% increase in passenger traffic that saw passenger numbers rise to an incredible 21.2 million people. Indeed Dublin Airport Authority (DAA) proudly boast in their annual report that Dublin Airport had the highest passenger growth of any of Europe’s largest 35 airports.

What’s more, Fáilte Ireland, the state tourism board, stated that overseas tourism numbers increased by 10% in 2006, outstripping any other European country as the average European tourism growth was reported at 6.6 %. As with industries, success in our economies is based on reaching even higher targets, unsustainable growth rates, in the interest of short term economic growth.

Flights of folly
Consider as an example the environmental impact of the aviation industry; it is frightening to note that domestic aviation industry in the USA alone, according to the Institute of Energy, accounts for 76 billion litres of aviation fuel a year. That’s a lot of fuel and a lot of C02.

Almost in every sector similar trends of market growth and increased consumption are forecast. If one examines the electronics industry, the consumer electronics market forecast is for this sector to be worth 439 billion euros in 2008. This growth is being driven principally by flat screen TVs, laptops and mobile phones. It’s a sobering fact that each unit will require to be plugged in, consuming more energy, releasing yet more C02 into the atmosphere.

Consider also the automobile industry, there are an estimated 500 million vehicles in use today, this number is expected to increase significantly, for example according to the UK Department of Transport, car ownership is forecast to increase by 46% between 1996 and 2031, from 23 million cars in 1996 to around 33.5 million cars in the UK by 2030.

In Ireland, similar if not higher growth rates are expected. That’s a lot of cars, leading to further congestion, more roads, more pollution and more C02 not just in the use of the vehicles but also in their manufacture. Incredibly, 98% of all energy used for road, rail, ocean and aviation transport is provided by oil products, based on resources that are rapidly diminishing in availability.

How will civilisation function without them? Do we need to change the way we plan and design our towns and cities to survive in the 21st century. Meanwhile, the New Scientist magazine reports that the planet’s booming population and rising standards of living are set to put unprecedented demands on supplies of primary materials including heavy metals such as zinc, platinum and aluminium.

Their startling report illustrates how the world’s global consumption of precious metals continues to increase while the known reserves of most basic commodities continues to dwindle at an alarming rate. Like peak oil we are now facing a shortage of the very raw materials upon which our economies and industries depend.

Biodiversity threatened
The most recent scientific report published by the World Conservation Union (IUCN) presents a truly scandalous record of loss of the planet’s biodiversity as a result of climate change, habitat loss and hunting. Yet in the same week the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) published its shocking fourth Global Environment Outlook – Environment for Development (GEO-4), exactly twenty years after the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED) published its initial report, Our Common Future.

This latest report noted among other pressing issues that available freshwater stocks continue to diminish at an alarming rate, that the proportion of overexploited fish stocks has risen from 20 per cent to 40 percent, soil erosion has increased in addition to water scarcity, nutrient depletion and pollution. Moreover energy consumption in developed nations has risen dramatically and concentrations of carbon dioxide are a third higher than they were 20 years ago.

Meanwhile a growing human population is expected – barring disaster – to reach nine billion by mid-century, placing further unsustainable burdens on the land, water and biodiversity. We are in no uncertain terms at war with the planet, the UN’s report states that “if present trends continue 1.8 billion people will be living in counties or regions with absolute water scarcity by 2025 and two thirds of the world’s population could be subject to stress”.

Furthermore it is a startling fact that feeding the estimated 9 billion people will require a doubling of current world food production. How will this be achieved? Considering that pressures on the environment continue to increase, the amount of water that will be available to irrigate crops is drastically reducing and the impact of climate change will be bring increased droughts and severe weather events. Available land stocks are also reducing while more and more land is being given over to grow biocrops for fuel instead of food, contributing to raising footstock prices beyond what the poor can afford.

Despite this we appear to sit back and wait for someone else to act, for some genie in a bottle to arrive and wave their magic wand and all will be better, allowing us to continue on our current path, to consume without regard for the planet, our children, humanity and the biosphere on which we depend.

The last report I which to mention is perhaps the most alarming of all. Further research just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), carried out by the Global Carbon Project, the University of East Anglia, UK, and the British Antarctic Survey found that, since 2000, the rate at which CO2 has been pumped into the atmosphere is 35% greater than most climate change models have allowed for.

Carbon crises
Their research also noticed worryingly a weakening of the Earth’s ability to absorb carbon. According to one of the authors of the report, Dr Corinne Le Quere of the British Antarctic Survey."The decline in global sink efficiency suggests that stabilisation of atmospheric CO2 is even more difficult to achieve than previously thought" .

The research findings have serious implications not just for every citizen of the world, but the planetary systems on which we depend. The results clearly illustrate that efforts to minimise climate change will be harder and more expensive to control than previously feared and we need to act immediately.

The results also mean that international efforts to bring CO2 emissions under control will need to be more far-reaching. When speaking about this with a few friends recently, I mentioned that I was blessed to have known my grandparents and how when recently looking at old photographs I reflected, that in the short timeframe between their births and deaths, their children’s generation and their grandchildren’s generation the world had changed utterly.

In the same timeframe, so will ours; we have some small opportunity to shape this future but it requires a seriousness of mind and willingness by society to save and shape their future. Our forefathers fought for this, many with their lives. We cannot continue to ignore the dire warnings of how our terminally unsustainable economies are killing peoples in other lands, for that is exactly what is happening, people are dying from our inaction.

There is a storm coming and its like none humanity has every seen. It’s time we battered down the hatches and prepared for the worst. Our generation will either linger into obscurity and extinction like the people of Pompeii or be remembered like the Spartans of old who stood at the gates of Thermopylae and fought for the future of their civilisation.

Stark choices
So what can we do? We have two choices and only two, to act accordingly or not at all. Global warming threatens human civilisation so fundamentally, its impacts are so enormous that it can only be understood as a problem of evolution, not pollution. Our whole world is currently changing at an alarming rate, this century, perhaps in the next decade, we will witness global fuel shortages, declining food production, conflicts for drinking and irrigation water, extreme weather events and ecosystem collapse.

Billions of people will be affected, many nations will lack the resources to support their populations resulting in mass migration of environmental refugees at a scale never before witnessed, leading to certain economic collapse and inevitably the threat of increased conflict amongst nations.

Science has shown us that in the near future your whole world is about to be turned upside down, changed beyond belief. Every person must make a stand and struggle against ignorance and greed and change the way they live their life. We must demand that politicians act for the greater good. You will decide, it is a stark choice, to live or die.

Ponder for a moment and consider: we are the product of millions of years of evolution on this planet, you carry with you the genetic code of your forefathers, who survived against the odds through plagues, droughts, starvation, war and pestilence. Can we really continue to deny the seriousness of the situation in which we now find ourselves?

A plan of action
Can we seriously continue on this path knowing that within one generation the world will be changed utterly for the worst with no going back? Today not tomorrow is the time to radically change the way we live our lives. Start by using less fossil fuels, fly less, drive less, consider how you as a consumer can influence environmental responsibility through what you purchase, from food to clothing to holidays, learn about food miles, shop local, support your farmers or ICA food market, lobby your politicians and local councillors for change.

Don’t wait for others to take action, they are waiting for you. As for Pompeii, have we learned from their lessons? I fear not, inertia appears to be winning the war, it appears we are too conformable in our lives, do we really want to change? I do.

Remember that just as global warming is the sum of individual actions, so the global solution will be depend on small changes by billions of individuals like you and me.