Writing on the Wall

The IPCC has come out with some fairly mixed messages about food security. The headline finding is that up to 3 degrees of warming, global food production will increase. Policy makers have so much else to worry about even as we approach 1.5 or 2 degrees, meaning that food security slips down the agenda.

But as I read the fourth assessment several things made me stop and think. For instance, the IPPC admits that its predictions do not take into account extreme weather events. This is very worrying: ask any farmer and they will tell you that it is not the 364 days of normal weather that scares them, but the one day of flash flooding.

Take the 2003 summer heat-wave in Europe, it reduced agricultural yields in affected countries by between 10 to 40% of the harvests for that year. This is exactly the kind of thing which is set to become much more frequent.
Read the rest of this entry »

The leaders of big oil companies should get behind the scheme of contraction and convergence, as it might be their only chance of avoiding nationalisation.
It should have been a wake up cry for big oil when UN secretary general Ban Ki Moon announced (1) that the tragedy of Darfur was caused by global warming. You would think that the horror of a country collapsing into civil war under environmental pressures would be enough. But I suspect that the really frightening thing for oil bosses is the techtonic shift in opinion that means a Secretary General will say this despite American disapproval. The world is changing,and so are the political dynamics that go with it. Indeed, on closer examination, the situation in Darfur reveals how profound these changes are.
Read the rest of this entry »

Food is something we can no longer take for granted. The recent forth IPPC report on climate change, as well as pressure on land use from Bio-fuels, increased meat consumption and a growing freshwater crisis all point towards ongoing problems with food supply to the poor. Add to this the rising cost of oil, and the pressure on the price of oil-based inputs to agriculture, like most pesticides and fertilizers, and you can see that we need to think carefully about how to stabilize food supply, as well as protect farmers from price shocks.

One of the key issues impacting on the poor is that their right to food is being compromised by market mechanisms. The enormous purchasing power of the rich, for meat, bio-fuels as well as luxuries like sugar is being pitted against the pitiful purchasing power of the poor, who are being priced out of food markets, and thus out of existence. Thus there is a need to try and provide the poor with affordable food. One way to do this is for countries to subsidize food on a national level. But this does nothing for global justice…
Read the rest of this entry »

Keith Kahn-Harris points out that denial, the slasher flick baddie of Global warming debates, is related to the mind protecting itself from things it can’t cope with. So why not take the taboos, the worse case scenarios, and explore the positives in them? Surely that is a way to open up things a bit.

So yes, maybe it is a good thing if, over the next few hundred years, the vast majority of life on earth goes extinct. Just think, if humanity survives this crisis, and goes on to colonize other planets, what a problem that would be for those other planets,and those that live on them.

We don’t have a great track record, what with colonialism and environmental destruction, so maybe we will have saved the universe at large from a terrible fate. Besides, if you take a giant step back you can see it is all futile anyway: Lives will come and go, planets will live and die, and eventually stars, including our own, will burn out. The rest is just not worth getting too upset about, or is it?

Read the rest of this entry »

The Reith Lectures this year are given by Sachs. He’s an economist, and an American, but he actually seems sensible: He is having a good go at putting a picture together.

BBC Radio 4 - Reith Lectures 2007 Summary

Also, the BBC seems to be wising up about open source and is offering the lectures as an MP3 podcast. You can even subscribe via iTunes!

Looks like parts of the mainstream are actually starting to wake up to what is going on.

Here is a reponse to a comment piece in the Guardian, from UN official, about the upcoming IPCC report on the impacts of climate change, particularly in the tropics:
Guardian Unlimited | Comment is free | Tide of suffering

What needs to be borne in mind in this is the high proportion of earnings that the cost of food represents for the poor.

When we talk about climate change, we seem to forget that all these effects, rising sea levels, changes in weather patterns, an overall drying trend globally, will all tend to impact on food production, and thus the price of food.

This is already happening: The world has been in net food deficit for the last couple of years: Not just because of climate change, but because of various forms of environmental degradation, that climate change is likely to make worse.

Read the rest of this entry »

The biofuels issue is part of a wider issue of Global food supply, which in turn has some frightening implications in terms of the politics that may accompany insecurity.

Even the most hardened climate sceptics acknowledge the climate is changing. All forecasts seem to agree on one thing at least: That these changes are likely to damage food production in the tropics, and also, on balance, reduce food production globally.

Guardian Unlimited | Comment is free | George Monbiot: If we want to save the planet, we need a five-year freeze on biofuels
Even without biofuels it is hard to see the price of food remaining stable.
There have been prodictions of global drying from the Met Office, as well as a range of predictions about impacts on tropical agriculture:

see: http://sedac.ciesin.org/giss_crop_study/CCMresources.html

What is clear is that the price of food is likely to rise, as food production falls. This is likely to lead to both civil unrest and environmental refugees, as well as disruption of the cheap labour sources that currently underpin the global interdepenencies of production. India, China and Pakistan are likely to be hit hard, all of whom are nuclear powers.

Read the rest of this entry »

New Statesman - Trident: Why Brown went to war with Labour

There is another theory as to why trident is being renewed, being advanced by a long term Canadian defence analyst, Gwynne Dyer, with a pretty long academic track record in the area.

Planners do thought experiments to work out future scenarious, especially military planners. So lets go on a little journey. What happens if we miss our Global warming targets, and have a more than 2 degrees c rise?

Well Gwynn Dyer claims that military planners in the UK have noticed that our land area will allow us to support 60 mllion people under such conditions, wheras continental Europe’s agriculture will most likely largely collapse. This raises the prospect of lifeboat Britian collapsed by hungry environmental refugees from the mainland.

But how to keep them out? Well, a nucear deterrent might help.

Read the rest of this entry »

Guardian Unlimited | Comment is free | The point of no return

The sense of resignation is more than troubling, it speaks of a collective cynicism. It seems that government is publically saying it will try and stop climate change, but privately admitting to itself that it cannot summon the political will to challenge vested interests.

Read the rest of this entry »

It seems that Cheap Flights are Proliferating around the world:

Branson has plans to open up routes to Asia

Whilst low fare airlines enjoy huge growth in across Asia

In the UK Sian Berry Bemoans the way ministers are incoherant over flying

Blair effectively says keep on flying to everyone

Whilst Plane Stupid point out that all this is, well, ridiculous, and not really helping things very much.

It seems that everyone is pointing at each other. Blair says that the Chinese will make up for any British cuts in emmissions in a couple of years, whilst India and China point out that their per-capita emmissions are much lower than for OECD countries, and that their people surely want a taste of the pie.

There is a big debate about environmental justice underlying this (how much of the world’s resources does each person get to use?)
So when are we going to see a global convention that limits aviation? Aviation is not a part of Kyoto. The EU emmissions trading scheme does not seem to limit flying very strongly (the Plane Stupid people make that pretty clear.)

So the question is, where is the binding global agreement to limit aviation going to come from?