World lacks the will to tackle our changing climate

Date Published: {J}

I have the usual problem with current events here. By the time you read this the world might have been hit by a vast meteor storm, for example, obliterating all human civilisation. If it has, I want to thank you for your perseverance. It must be hard to concentrate on an opinion column when there are packs of feral dogs out for your tasty flesh.

And perhaps this is not so far-fetched; between now and Friday one global catastrophe may well have struck – the climate conference could have collapsed. This may not bring about as sudden an end to civilisation as rocks from space, but it will be almost as sure.

That the climate is getting warmer, there is no doubt. We may not be feeling it around here a lot, what with the sub-zero temperatures we had at the weekend, but weather is complicated. A warmer sea for example will evaporate faster, making more clouds to blow inland.

That makes the weather colder and wetter for people like us who live on the coasts. There is no doubt that the planet is warming overall though, and doing so more rapidly than at any time in history. Some still deny it, but these are mainly fruitcakes of the right who have trouble differentiating what the world is from what they want it to be.

Such people would sooner claim that all scientists are in a global conspiracy against them than accept that there could be anything wrong with their way of life.

Even when they acknowledge that climate change is a reality, they will deny that it’s the result of human activity – and as you can’t take two copies of Earth and add extra carbon to one, the fanatics will always be able to say the case is unproven. But the rise in temperature so closely coincides with the rate at which we’ve burned fossil fuels that to deny a connection takes grim determination. Nowadays just about everyone accepts it– even oil companies. Exxon still funds some climate change sceptics, but has admitted there seems to be a relationship. The president of Shell warned the Bush administration that action needed to be taken as long ago as 2004.

So everyone’s agreed there’s a problem, and we can decide how to fix it. Right? Unfortunately, no. The action we need to take will mean some pain, for everyone, right now. We in the developed world will have to take a hit to the quality of our lives. We need to price out the fossil fuels, and that is inevitably going to make things more expensive. In effect, we will have to become poorer. Those in the developing countries meanwhile will have to accept that they cannot aspire to the lifestyle we in the West enjoy now. Are we really all going to sit down and agree to that?

There’s not a hope in Hell, frankly. Even though climate change could cost millions of lives and incalculable sums from crop failure, flooding and ecosystem collapse, even though just about every government on Earth accepts that we need to act swiftly to avert disaster, we aren’t going to agree. Because disaster in the future will never outweigh discomfort in the present.

Richard.Chapman@Gmail.com