A Crack In The Dam
A leaked draft summary of a major new special report, ‘Climate Change and Land’, from the IPCC on the decaying state of global terrestrial ecosystems1 has some extraordinary findings which if they were understood more widely might finally cause galvanised global action not just to reduce carbon emissions, but all the other major greenhouse gases too. However, this report is likely to end up as ineffective as all the other reports since the first IPCC report in 1990 (ironically called FAR – First Assessment Report).2
Why should large numbers of people take notice? The essence of the report is that humans now have control of the majority of the ice-free landmass of the planet and the rate at which we have taken over the land from the rest of nature is not only incredibly fast, which is scientifically indisputable, but outrageous and dangerous and physically unsustainable. Since 1961, we have taken, or indeed stolen, from nature and put into agricultural use an area two thirds the size of Australia.3 Given that we generally use about half the land surface we take for agriculture, that suggests we have probably taken about 1.3 Australias in just over half a century. If we wish to carry on at this rate, and we shall have to if we want to go on adding the current 83 million net new humans a year4 (about the size of Germany, Iran or Turkey5), then where are all these new Australias going to come from?
Amazingly, many still dispute the danger and some still dispute the facts, but perhaps with each new eco disaster that number may be reducing, though only if people get to hear about it and actually believe it. Perhaps, increasingly, people won’t need to see it on the TV news, because it will be in the back yards or even in their TV lounges. At this moment, over fifteen hundred people in a small town in England have been evacuated,6 at five minutes notice, lest a dam, which has held for nearly two hundred years,7 bursts and floods the town. The reason is that much of a month’s rain fell in a few hours and overwhelmed part of the damn’s structure. This highlights one of the effects of global warming – more rain concentrated in very heavy bursts. This will mean that exposed infrastructure will need to be strengthened, even as infrastructure spending has been cut in many parts of the world thanks to the austerity, needlessly put in place following the disaster of the financial collapse in 2008 – also the result of foolish government policies driven by greed and ideology.
As to the outrage, this year has seen something new: a real and noticeable rise in citizen anger about the lack of serious and meaningful action on climate change by their governments. The official IPCC Specal Report8 is due out on August 8th and we shall look at some of the more significant findings then.
1. https://www.climatechangenews.com/2019/07/17/leaked-un-science-report-warns-clash-bioenergy-food/
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPCC_First_Assessment_Report
3. “Since 1961, two millions square miles (5.3 million square kilometres) of natural land has been brought into agricultural use. See page 11 of:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/11fJPbJdtRLElzTKO6vjP6pCJWT0MZaZK/view
4. It is hard to be exact about population growth, but 83 million a year increase looks like a reasonable interpolation from various sources, including
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_growth
5. https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/population-by-country/
6. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-derbyshire-49222956
7. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toddbrook_Reservoir
8. https://www.ipcc.ch/2019/