Climate Change

I have not written an essay on these pages for many months but I have been shaken out of my indolence by being reminded from several quarters about the importance of designing and implementing strategies to cope with Climate Change.

In the United States the Fourth National Climate Assessment was published. It seeks to show in a measured and non hysterical way what the impact of climate change will be both in terms of danger to humanity and also in terms of impoverishing humanity in material terms. The President of the United States of America , Mr Trump, has, if I may say so a very simplistic view of climate change. Having simplistic view is can sometimes be helpful, but he approaches climate change as a matter of belief, and not as a matter of science. that is profoundly dangerous.  Mr Trump appears to confuse climate with weather, a common mistake.

Recently in the United Kingdom the Met Office published its report assessing how climate change may affect the United Kingdom over the next fifty years or so. The Prime Minister, Mrs May, did not comment on the report; she is far too busy trying to justify her Brexit policy so we must infer that for the United Kingdom government Climate Change has no priority.

As usual the short term triumphs over the long term. Present politicians will not benefit from the votes of the unborn.

The predictions made in each report are of course educated guesswork  and in many cases highly educated guesswork. The authors of the reports could be wrong and most leaders of most countries are prepared to gamble that the warnings are not as serious as they are expressed, so no real new initiatives about climate change have been or will be put into being.

I should point out that the recent monthly average for carbon dioxide recorded at Mauna Loa was 406 parts per million. It was “just” 385 when i first starting writing these posts in 2008. 240 years ago it was around 280 parts per million. Slowly and surely humanity is adding to the density of the blanket that envelops our planet making it warm and the extra layers will make it warmer.

I suspect that in the short term humanity will experience “more of the same”- more forest fires, more storms, stringer storms and hurricanes, less ice at the poles and a slowing of the great oscillations that keep western Europe warm.

Predicting the future is always a hazardous enterprise but if the climate change predictions in these reports are half right then our not too distant descendants will live more difficult and dangerous lives than any people have lived for millennia.