Morts Musings

I asked a similar question just over a year ago, with regards to Bangladesh’s annual floods. Although Bangladesh has flooded this year, as it does most years, and caused hardship and disruption for many thousands of the nation’s poorest citizens it has gotten off relatively lightly compared to the impact that the monsoons have had on Pakistan this year.

Really, you’d have to be living in a complete news vacuum to have missed the awful disaster which this year’s monsoon floods have caused in Pakistan; The UN has now declared that the scale of the crisis is greater than the combined effects of the Haiti earthquake (Jan ‘10), the Kashmir earthquake (Oct ‘05) & the Asian tsunami (Dec ‘04) and has left over 14,000,000 without food or shelter and at risk of falling victim to the host of diseases which commonly occur in the aftermath of major flooding.
One bright note is that this disaster has seen an unprecedented response from the public, with donations actually increasing as the crisis entered it’s second, then third week; very different from the usual pattern seen in these kinds of cases, where “donor fatigue” tends to kick in after the first week irregardless of how well the effects of the disaster are being dealt with at that stage.
However, for all that the response, both in the UK and internationally, has been amazingly generous so far there is still much work for the aid agencies to do, and many, many flood victims who still need the help of the international community if they’re to have any hope of returning to a normal way of life any time in the foreseeable future!
Unfortunately there are many despicable scammers in this world, and in particular on the internet, who’ll take any chance to profit from the misery of others, so if you’re planning on making a donation it’s best to go through the DEC, or one of their well known, reputable members such as Oxfam who, like most of the major UK charities, now have a page dedicated to the Pakistan Flood appeal.

Anyway, that was all a bit of an aside, an incredibly important aside, but a tangent none the less.
The real question I wanted to ask in this blog post was whether these floods, described as a “once in a century” event, are another sign that Climate Change is indeed a real and pressing problem which should concern the whole global community?

I understand the principle that climate is a long term pattern, and that it can’t judged by single isolated events, no matter how catastrophic, but it seems to me that we’ve been getting more and more of these “once in century” type of weather events over the past decade or so, and I truly wonder how much longer the climate change deniers will be able to keep their heads in the sand and continue to refute that there is a shift occuring in the planet’s weather patterns?
I can accept that there’s still a lot of debate to be had over the extent of anthropogenic climate change, and, in turn, how much humanity can do to mitigate the global climate change, but surely we’re now getting to a stage where denying the existance of a pattern of climate change is a thoroughly asinine position, and one which is only likely to be held by either the woefully gullible or those who are motivated by profound self-interest.

Stories, brimming with righteous outrage and indignation, about foreign immigrants “coming over here and stealing British jobs, and/or just generally scrounging and making the place look untidy” seem to be standard fare for much of the right leaning press.
However this piece from the Telegraph is (to my mind) a slightly more whimsical variation on that theme, or at least it’s not spewing xenophobic bile, which is always a plus.

It concerns a Danish invasion of our green & pleasant land, the likes of which we’ve not seen since 1013, when some bloke called Sweyn Forkbeard turned up with his son Cnut, & a bunch of mates, to ruin King Ethelred the Unready’s day.
Fear not though, this isn’t news of some recent influx of Scandinavians looking to plunder our currently shaky economy; this threat is altogether far more floral in nature!
Yes, this is the news that Danish Scurvy Grass, a small plant with white flowers, that’s usually found in coastal salt marshes, is outcompeting native British flowers & apparently taking over the verges of our nations motorways!
The Danish plant actually arrived in the UK during the middle ages, and as its name suggests was quite welcome at the time, being used by sailors to stave off Scurvy, a condition caused by vitamin C deficiency. However, many native British plants find the conditions next to major roads less than ideal, whereas the hardy marsh flower has evolved to thrive in harsh conditions & is now out-competing native wild flowers; Years like this, where snow fall has lead to wide scale salting of roads, are even better for the invader, since most plants don’t deal with salty conditions at all well.
Even the ever tenacious dandelion appears is losing out to the Scurvy grass! and if I’m honest I’m actually rooting for the Scurvy grass on that one, but then my battle with the dandelions in my garden has been a frustratingly long running conflict; my enemy’s enemy is my friend, and all that.

Still, with most of the countryside given over to agriculture, the nation’s verges are one of the more common refuges left for the Britain’s wildflowers, and there are concerns that we may see some species disappear altogether if the Danish rampage continues.

If it was just the dandelion I doubt anyone would mind, but it would be a shame if, in the future, the only way to see some of the nation’s flowers was to order them from a florist.

So, the Copenhagen summit is drawing to it’s exciting close when we’re to be treated to the spectacle of Obama saving the world with a last minute agreement which will be met with unanimous, rapturous approval by all 190 odd countries involved, and do enough to tackle the effects of anthropogenic climate change, so that future generations won’t be totally screwed.
Obviously, Obama’s chief sidekick boy-wonder Brown has been in Copenhagen for the last few days attempting to build a consensus, & generally trying to look like someone who’s worthy of re-election, or rather, I suppose that should be election, since he wasn’t voted in by anyone.

In anycase it looks like the Copenhagen Climate Change Summit is set to be a massive failure; We’ll probably get some kind of ineffectual, face-saving agreement pulled out of the fire at the very last moment, but the chances that it amounts to anything substantive, let alone does enough to combat the dangers which climate change pose to all of us, not to mention future generations, are in my opinion very depressingly slim indeed.

A big sticking point seems to be the Kyoto protocal; it seems like everyone who didn’t sign up for it wants to keep it, while those who did would rather sort out a new agreement which includes those who didn’t. To be honest I have more sympathy with the Kyoto signatories, it seems stupid to try and insist that a group of developed nations, which don’t include the US, should abide by an agreement when the world’s two largest pollutors, the US and China, aren’t to be bound in the same way; frankly we need them on board if we’re to achieve the kinds of CO₂ reductions which the science suggests are necessary.

Ultimately I wonder if this is where humanity demonstrates that it is an evolutionary dead end; short-sighted greed seems to be stymying attempts at taking longer term action to solve a problem which stands to effect us all, or rather the next generation. The impacts of climate change are already being seen in some of the world’s poorest regions, and yet relatively petty arguments between nations look set to make a farse of the Copenhagen Summit.
Faced with such monumentally selfish stupidity I guess we just have to hope that, against the vast weight of evidence to the contrary, it turns out that the climate sceptics are right, and it’s not going to be too great a problem.
Not a comforting thought at all!

It was all over the news yesterday; President Obama has said he will attend the Copenhagen Climate Change summit next month, and the announcement has, not surprisingly, been hailed as a positive move by the media in general.

As always though the devil is well and truly in the details. We certainly need the US, along with China, to sign up to any deal that is reached for it to actually have any meaning; without the participation of the world’s two most polluting nations any climate change agreement that is reached is just so much hot air, as we saw with Kyoto.
As of yet China’s president, Hu Jintao, hasn’t made any committment one way or the other as to whether he’ll attend Copenhagen, so even with Obama’s attendance at this stage there are no guarentees that anything substantive or meaningful will come out of Copenhagen. Still, at least one of the big two polluters appears to be prepared to start taking action, undoubtedly a step forward in the battle to mitigate the impact of climate change before it’s too late.

Unfortunately, although Obama seems genuinely committed to taking action on the issue, how much he’ll be able to achieve is another question entirely. Generally Americans are far less concerned about the threat of climate change than he is. Currently the US has a Climate Bill in front of Congress, which aims for a 20% reduction in US CO₂ emissions by 2020. However it’s taking 2005 as it’s base level, whereas Europe and many other countrys are setting their reduction targets based on 1990 emisson levels. Even then it’s looking like Obama’s going to have to reduce his preposed target from 20% in order to get the necessary support to pass the bill through Congress; hence why he’ll only be pledging a 17% cut, by 2020, when he attends Copenhagen.
It also has to be noted that currently he’s only planning to attend the summit for one day, before heading off to Oslo to accept his Nobel Prize, and won’t be returning to Copenhagen for the crucial final days of the summit, when any agreement will be hammered out.

Overall it has to be seen as a positive step, that a US President is finally engaging in the fight to tackle the effects of Climate Change, but it also has to be remembered that he ultimately serves his electorate, and so, even if Obama is on-board with the struggle to reduce the effects of climate change it’s quite clear that his hands will, to an extent, be tied until he’s able to convince more of the US population that climate change is everybody’s problem!

While doing my rounds of various news sites during a quiet spot earlier, I came across an article called Study Predicts Effect of Global Warming on Spring Flowers, on NASA’s Earth Observatory site.

The study in question was carried out by British and Australian academics & investigated the likely effects of global warming on flowers, and other plant species. My first reaction was actually pedantic rage brought on by NASA’s use of the phrase “Global Warming“. All too often this term is used incorrectly as a synonym for climate change, and it’s one of my pet hates, since the label “global warming” implies that climate change will lead to warmer weather globally; whereas the reality of climate change is that some places will get hotter while others get colder, or that specific locations will become hotter in the summers but get colder winters than they’ve previously experienced.

In short, climate change comes down to much more than the idea that everythings going to get warmer, & I believe imprecise use of the term “global warming”, when one is talking about climate change as a whole, only adds confusion to a debate which is already bogged down in misunderstanding, statistical chicanery, &, at times, downright dishonesty.
For a start it implies that everywhere is going to get warmer, which makes some people wonder “What’s the problem, hotter summers would be nice!”, but it also gives especially ignorant anthropogenic climate change sceptics an excuse to crow on about how “global warming” is a myth, whenever it snows badly, or there’s a cold snap. Of course, what the poor fools are missing is that climate change could very well lead to much hotter, wetter summers for us in the UK, but leave us (in worse case scenarios) with winters they’d be more familar with in Moscow; London’s only a few degrees of latitude south of Moscow, and if the Gulf Stream &/or Jet stream were to pack up it’s likely that the UK would become a good deal colder!

In anycase misuse of “global warming” to mean “climate change” it’s one of my pet hates, and it especially grates when a source which should know better does it, hence my initial reaction to the piece. However, on reading through it I discovered that I had perhaps been too hasty, as the piece in question appears to be looking at a “global warming” scenario, rather than climate change as a whole; Of course how much validity there is in a study which is predicting an overall warming pattern, rather than considering the possibility that weather will become more extreme, and erractic, all round is another question entirely, and one which I’ll maybe rant about another day.

OK, “sloppy use of precise terms” rant aside, what did the study actually conclude. Essentially the results shouldn’t be a surprise to anybody, in the sense that generally speaking, it found that warmer winters would lead to plants flowering earlier; However, the predicted scale of these changes is quite surprising. Roughly speaking, for every 1^oC that average air temperature rises, plants will start flowering 11 days earlier, although this figure could vary between 7 and 16 days per ^oC, depending on whether the local climate is oceanic or continental, and how exactly it’s effected by climate change in the longer run.
Near the start of the article it’s stated that flowers could be appearing “as much as 50 days” earlier, than they currently do, by 2080, but, cynic that I am, I assume this figure is based on more extreme climate change predictions, in order to produce an eye-catching headline.

“So what’s the problem?” you may be asking; how do flowers appearing earlier in the year have a negative impact on anyone, except for possibly shops which sell flowers losing sales around Valentine’s day. The answer is that, most likely, there wouldn’t be any direct negative effects for humans, but when one thinks about the numbers of other species, particularly insects, whose life cycles rely in some way on flowers, and other species who, in turn, rely on those species, it’s clear that ecologically this could be a pretty big deal.
A great deal of effort is spent on highlighting how climate change might end up directly effecting humans, and while that is definitely a worthy goal, I think that too often it’s wider ecological effects are only vaguely touched upon. The stark truth is that, despite all of our scientific advances, humanity’s welfare is still, very much, tied to the ecosphere which we inhabit, and if other species which play important roles in the ecosystem start to fail then the overall impact of climate change could be far greater than many realise.