Published on Sunday, April 1, 2001 in the Observer of London
Global Warming
The World in 2050
by Robin McKie and Priscilla Morris
It is the year 2050, and April blizzards have gripped southern England for the third successive year while violent storms batter the North Sea coast. The Gulf Stream, whose warming waters once heated our shores, has long since disappeared, destroyed by a deluge pouring south from the melting Arctic ice cap.
In the United States, much of Alaska has turned into a quagmire as permafrost and glaciers disintegrate. In Colorado, chair lift pylons stand rusting in the warm drizzle, reminders that the nation once supported a billion-dollar ski industry, while the remnants of Florida are declared America's second island state.
Africa is faring badly. Its coastline from Cairo to Lagos is completely flooded and many of the major cities have been abandoned. Tens of millions of people have been forced to flee and are struggling to survive in a parched, waterless interior.
In Asia there is a similar, terrifying picture. Bangladesh is almost totally inundated and the East Indies have been reduced to a few scrappy islands. Tens of millions stand on the brink of death.
It is a startling scenario worthy of a science fiction disaster film. And it would be easy to dismiss, were it not for the uncomfortable fact that these visions are the result of rigorous scientific analysis by some of the world's most distinguished climatologists.
As the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) points out in its recent Climate Change 2001 report, global warming is likely to trigger a cascade of unpleasant effects: elderly people will suffer and die in smoggy, polluted cities; crops will fail; and wildlife and livestock will perish on a scorched and miserable planet. That report was the combined work of several thousand of the world's leading meteorological experts, scientists whose views George Bush has now dismissed as 'questionable' and whose work in creating the Kyoto protocol has been utterly undone.
The US decision to pull out of the international accord on climate change has caused predictable international alarm, though it is important to note it will have no direct effect on levels of carbon dioxide now circulating in the atmosphere. Kyoto merely pledged developed countries to restrict their industrial output. 'It was an excellent first step towards reversing climate change,' according to Southampton University's Professor Nigel Arnell. Kyoto was, in effect, a statement of intent. The industrial nations which had, after all, initiated the problem of global warming, would show their commitment by making the first crucial, self-sacrificing moves. Then the Third World could be drawn in, and the first decreases in carbon-dioxide emissions agreed over the next few years. 'Bush has now made the attainment of these next crucial steps much more difficult,' says Arnell. In fact, most experts believe he has made them impossible. If the West won't act, why should the rest of the world? If no action is taken, the consequences are likely to be calamitous. Before the industrial revolution, the atmosphere was made up of 250 parts per million of carbon dioxide. Now that figure has reached 366 and is already producing meteorological effects: a steady increase in devastating storms across Britain, rising sea levels, and dwindling glaciers and ice-caps. And that is just the start. Carbon dioxide levels will inevitably reach 450, even if governments closed every factory tomorrow. 'Plants absorb carbon dioxide and when they die they release that gas,' says Dr David Griggs of the IPCC's science working group. 'Similarly, the oceans absorb and release carbon dioxide.' These carbon dioxide stores mean that we could not stop atmospheric levels rising for future decades, no matter what we did. 'The climate is changing and will continue to change, regardless of what George Bush says,' comments Dr Mike Hulme of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change in Norwich.
In any case, closing down factories is not on the cards. With the nation responsible for a quarter of all global carbon dioxide emissions refusing to limit its output by the merest fraction, levels will inevitably reach 550 parts per million - double their pre-industrial revolution figure - by about 2050. By then the world's temperature will have increased by 1.4 degrees Centigrade, triggering the mayhem outlined in the IPCC report. 'It is very difficult to make hard predictions,' adds Griggs. 'All we can say is that the future is going to be very uncertain, highly variable.' Britain provides an excellent example of the problem. We may swelter - or, if icy Arctic waters divert the Gulf Stream, we may shiver. Either way, the consequences will mean millions of homes will be refused insurance, native wildlife will perish and great chunks of coastline will be inundated.
And, say meteorologists, it now looks as if there is nothing we can do about it.
The solution to the storage problem is technology that doesn't exist. Wind power and solar power are both technologies that do exist. While they can use some work in developing better efficiencies, they still exist and are worthwhile to develop.
