More Funny Weather

Today, with supremely smug irony, the British Parliament has been discussing slashing the feed-in tariff (originally designed to encourage the adoption of solar power by domestic consumers) as part of the Government's so-called "green deal". It is being cut by over a half on the spurious argument that it increases the cost of electricity to consumers and consequently pushes people into fuel poverty - I say spurious because the highest estimated increase caused by FITs is £6 per annum onto the average household bill, with some estimates as low as just 30p. This is zilch by most standards and even more so when set against the rise of several hundred pounds per annum that the Government has contentedly allowed profiteering energy companies to add to fuel costs in the last year or two.

This comes in the same week as a World Meteorological Organisation report has revealed that in 2010, in spite of all the talk and more talk by the IPCC and Governments, the rate of increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere reached its highest yet - an additional 2.3 parts per million, putting us firmly on course to exceed even the worst scenarios previously anticipated by climatologists. These figures endorse an earlier report by the International Energy Agency in May, which produced similarly stark findings. Even if magically all further increase was to stop, temperatures would rise by around 3C by 2050 - it may not sound much, but its impact would be on a level that would spell disaster for human societies in many parts of the world through the collapse of their agriculture and social systems. Less directly affected countries would find the cost of basic needs such as food and water rocketing well beyond the point of social crisis, and mass migrations would almost certainly trigger conflict on an unprecedented scale.

Don't believe it? It would be nice if it wasn't true and tempting to want to think that; and this week, the BBC announced that the global warming episode of its "Frozen Planet" series won't be shown in the USA so as not to disturb the willful ignorance of the US public, who are among the worst polluters on the planet. 

However, aside from the evidence of increasingly extreme weather events, like the fact that British temperatures this past week have been around double the seasonal average - a whopping 18C on Sunday compared to the 9.5C norm for mid-November - the plain science is this:

- the more carbon dioxide there is in the atmosphere, the more heat from the Sun is trapped in our atmosphere. Too little and we would freeze; too much, and we'd fry. The margins either way are surprisingly (and terrifyingly) small - humanity's hold on the planet is tenuous to say the least.

- through our massively increasing use of fossil fuels, such as gas, coal and wood due to the processes of the industrial age from the 1750s onwards, humans have pumped unprecedented amounts of carbon dioxide and other gasses with even greater "greenhouse" effects, like methane and nitrous oxide (currently the fastest increasing gas), into the atmosphere. Indeed, in the last fifty years, we have used more carbon fuel than in the rest of history combined.

- Consequently, since 1750, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased from 280 parts per million to 389 parts per million. At the same time, temperatures have climbed, sometimes exaggerated or cooled by natural variations like El Nino and El Nina, and even occasionally by sunspots, but overall, the ongoing, underlying trend is up, and has nothing to do with any natural phenomena. Rather, it is created and fanned by human activity for precisely the scientific reasons set out above: burning fossil fuels creates greenhouse gas emissions which trap more and more heat in our atmosphere.

The current rate of emissions is in spite of the downturn in economic activity through the global recession - and Britain is as much to blame as anywhere, with a 2.8% increase in emissions in 2010. And as the planet warms, we are already past the "feedback" thresholds for a number of phenomena which will start to cause an exponential increase in greenhouse gas levels. These include the diminishing of the albedo effect as Arctic ice melts and the "whiteout" of the northern hemisphere declines, reflecting less light and heat back into outer space. Similarly in the north, the melting of the Siberian tundra after millennia of permafrosting is releasing dangerous quantities of methane, which is around twenty times more powerful at trapping heat than carbon dioxide. Eventually, what has been triggered by human activity and could still be at least mitigated by human action, will take on a life and dynamic entirely of its own.

So, just as every long march begins with a single step, every piece of action taken now to reduce greenhouse gas is utterly vital, not to saving the planet - it will endure - but to saving our civilisation and even our species. To this end, the delay and trimming by the Con Dem Government is more than lamentable - it is a betrayal of our futures and a crass denial of reality.

Funny weather indeed. But no laughing matter.

"The World" is Sinking! Time to Ski on the Sand...

The World is sinking.

No, not another report by the IPCC or Greenpeace. And not the world that might come to mind.

This World is the collection of man-made islands off the coast of Dubai, constructed out of the sea at huge financial and environmental cost. Each one supposedly represents a country and, separated only by narrow channels of water, together they look like a patchwork map of the planet. They have been marketed to a range of wealthy individuals, including footballers, film stars and businessmen, one a former boss of mine.

It is more than faintly ironic that this hubristic enterprise is now reportedly sinking beneath the weight of its own pomposity. The "Daily Mail", not exactly the greenest newspaper in the UK, has run a series of articles on how the Gulf is gradually washing the artifice away and reclaiming the sand for the seabed. Other more reputable news media have reported similarly, so much that the consortium that runs the islands has published a denial this week. 

World of Water - the sinking planet?

I am no civil engineer, but the photographic evidence doesn't look that good to me; though perhaps I may be wrong.

Either way, this project represents the very worst of our species' excess: that we run our world via an economic system that leaves literally hundreds of millions of people homeless, while a tiny group of rich people are able to accumulate hundreds of millions to spend on creating a fictional planet on the sea, causing massive damage to the environment as they go.

The Gulf states of course are the playgrounds of the western rich - one reason why our leaders are so silent on the violent repression of dissent in the likes of Bahrain. These princedoms were created by the British, sustained by the USA and are now in effect owned by the international financial elite. Boasting superstructures like the Emirate Towers, the highest hotel in the world (the highest six are all in Dubai), an indoor ski resort in the middle of the Arabian desert and a host of imported, penniless labourers and servants from southern Asia to make it all possible, the strip of land along the southern shores of the Gulf truly is the Babylon of today.

Ski Dubai - snow in the desert, courtesy of man and carbon

It is little wonder that the United Arab Emirates, which Dubai is part of, boast the third highest carbon emissions per person on the planet - at over 31 tonnes, a massive 16 times the safe limit for the planet. Only the Antilles and nearby Qatar, both similar playgrounds of the wealthy, are higher. And this fest of excess shows no signs at all of slowing let alone stopping. For many people of even relatively modest means, a holiday to Dubai is now an aspiration, a sign of having made it. With many of the grasping corporations and greedy individuals who enjoy this life of extreme consumption merely encouraged to ever greater heights of auspicious display by both governments and our runaway economic system, there is little hope indeed that this will come to an end anytime soon. The recent Arab Spring briefly raised the possibility, but of course, where it might have made a real difference - in the Gulf states- the Emirs and their western allies rapidly crushed any chances of real change.

What we do know for sure is that, whatever the prospects for the artificial islands, the World is sinking. Literally, the excess of the wealthy in Dubai and around the planet is threatening the existence of entire countries with sinking under the water - Lochahara island in the Bay of Bengal, once home to 10,000 distinctly un-wealthy people, disappeared forever in December 2006; and now whole nations such as the Maldives, Kiribati and Vanuatu face similar fates within just a few years.  

Our system is out of balance. Socially this is not news, but for the first time we are reaching a point of significant resource depletion and growing environmental exhaustion, neither of which can be resolved by clinging to a capitalist system that is founded on the concepts of inequality of outcomes and limitless resources. In such circumstances, the potential for violent conflict and disorder is legion, and a warning from the past resonates loudly around the tall towers of Dubai. Two and a half thousand years ago, Plato wrote: "Any city, however small, is in fact divided into two; one the city of the poor, the other of the rich. And these are at war with one another."