The Folly of Pointless Optimism

2008 hasn’t really been a year for good news. Economies have taken a battering, foreign crises have multiplied and have been met with equally woeful responses. Perhaps the greatest tragedy however, has been that all these crisis’ have distracted attention from the greatest crisis of all, the failure of world leaders to effectively combat climate change.  It’s almost surreal listening to expert after expert articulating the terrible situation we have got ourselves into, and exclaim that it is of course still possible that we can avoid climate change, as if these scientists are afraid of appearing pessimistic. Any close observer of the current national and international climate change debates can see that the sluggish political processes to slowly tackle environmental problems are woefully inadequate and even if such low emissions targets were met they would fail to stop runaway climate change.

Put in simpler terms, general scientific consensus is that capping emissions at 450ppm of Co2 in the atmosphere is necessary in order to avoid dangerous climate change. What is conspicuously under-reported however, is that this figure only provides us with a 50% chance of avoiding dangerous climate change. The target that most governments realistically aspire to now is 550ppm. This concentration would guarantee mass migration, far less food production and the extreme likelihood of a range of natural disasters across the globe. Yet many experts such as Anderson of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at Manchester University have pointed out that most that carbon emissions since 2000 have risen much faster than anyone thought possible, driven mainly by the coal-fuelled economic boom in the developing world. So much extra pollution is being pumped out that most of the climate targets debated by politicians and campaigners are fanciful at best, and “dangerously misguided” at worst.The 4c degree rise that inevitably would come with a 650ppm concentration seems more and more likely with every passing day.

Yet Shyam Saran has delivered the unsurprising if not devastating news in an interview with the Guardian newspaper that India would “not volunteer to take on responsibilities that would see it accept legally binding limits”. As India and Pakistan’s water supply is largely derived from the seasonal thawing of alpine reigons, India’s decision effectively sabotages the reigon’s water supply and confines the next generation to chaos and famine.

The causes of this disaster are complex and widespread. Partly a result of the inertia of our unsustainable consumption based societies, partly a failure or inability of the media to effectively communicate the severity of the problem. No single blog entry could even begin to explain the many problems that have doomed the next generation to enduring the consequences and failures of the current generation of leaders. All this entry aspires to do, is to encourage people to face reality and to stop debating climate change with a fake optimism that suggests that we are still in a position to prevent it happening at all. It is not a question of climate change or no climate change, but rather between dangerous climate change and even worse climate change.  Perhaps debating the issue in these more realistic terms may wake our politicians up from their unacceptable slumber. I wouldn’t bet on this happening any time soon however, no matter how much scientific evidence is presented, it will for the moment lose out to the corporate lobbyist who screams job losses and so wins the ear of all politicians who are terrified of being blamed for further economic woe.

In thirty years time, our children and grandchildren will be studying history books and and the heading for the section that describes our current crop of political leaders will undoubtably read “The ones who saved the banks and let the planet die.”