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.
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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.
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For a society that is so oriented to growth and progress, we seem remarkably immune to good news. We have a deep philosophical cynicism about such simple things as love and sympathy, even though there is evidence that these are forces with significant impact in our world. We are suspicious of ideas like happiness, even if they are central to our highest ethics, both freedom and progress. How can you be free if you are so unhappy you cannot enjoy your good fortune? How can there be progress where this becomes a general condition? Progress or Prozac?

Take the decline of violence in the world: There are fewer and smaller wars now than ever before. The depressing spectacle of embedded journalism, during the last attempt to make war work, had lying beneath it a very good piece of news. People so dislike seeing others blown to pieces, that wars must now be structured around the public not seeing this happen. The media has extended people’s senses, and with it their consciences, and this has shaped the geopolitical ‘realism’ of the most powerful players in the world.

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Mark Lynas writes passionately and accurately at the current corruption of leadership on climate change.

New Statesman - Our leaders are steering us into the abyss

My response is that this is to do with us aiming our messages at the wrong people. The question that bears most strongly on all of this is who is facing the abyss the most. That is where the strongest political pressure-base can come from:

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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.

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.

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I recently got over an existential angst.

The sense of nothingness that my ex-supervisor’s philosophical take was bringing on, under the surface of it all, had been getting me down. That sense of nothing being equal or real, or anything at all, of all things being nothing more than splintered instances, a kind of material emptiness underpinning the world and leaving us like leaves in the empty ocean.

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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?

Richest 2 Percent Own Half the World’s Wealth - Yahoo! News

If the richest 2% own half the world’s wealth, and half the worlds population share less than 1% of the worlds wealth, how can economists and policy makers avoid dealing with equality as a social good?

Well one answer is to concentrate on absolute rather than relative poverty. If enough wealth can keep on being drawn into the economy, then surely it does not matter how rich the rich are, as long as the poor are getting better off?

But this is not a realistic proposition. You just have to look at the sources of wealth to see that this approach is running out of steam, since there is only so much new wealth you can draw into the world economy.

You can extract wealth from nature, but the current global environmental crisis suggests that we cannot keep expanding how much we do that forever. As that source of wealth dries up we have to start thinking about making better use of what we have, which partly means sharing it out more equally.

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If this heating picture is anywhere near right, then Africa and India are in for a very, very rough ride.

See also:

BBC NEWS | Special Reports | 2004 | In Depth