The end of the world is nigh

An apocalyptic view of the world is always to be avoided if we wish to remain sane. However, it is becoming increasingly difficult to push away that nagging feeling in the pit of one’s stomach that we are on the edge of a precipice when the mass media is dominated with images of a world either buried under water or going up in smoke. When news about the deadly covid19 virus is pushed down the running order, delta variant notwithstanding, by tales of climatic doom, we should pay attention.

I remember when climate change was a curiosity, the concern of mainly tree-huggers and men who wore socks with their sandals.

Yet, slowly, as prominent people adopted the cause, the message of the need to save the planet spread. It took decades to gather pace, but it was a very strategic campaign, directed at making us focus on what we can each do: to recycle, for example: buy electric cars; conserve energy by using household appliances less, and invest in solar panels (not yet in TT, though).

But those measures seem paltry in the face of a threat described by UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres as “Code red for humanity.” He was responding to the frightening UN Report on Climate Change published last week by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which pulled together 14,000 international scientific papers.

We now know unequivocally that the planet is heating up so fast that we may well run out of time to contain the now everyday disasters of guaranteed hurricanes coming off all earth’s oceans and extreme heat waves and drought that are causing uncontrollable forest fires on all her continents.

Tens of millions of acres of forests were destroyed this year alone, and the fires have taken scores of lives too. Even in the coldest parts of Siberia the fires have been so furious that for the first time in recorded history the smoke reached the North Pole, and most of Russia itself was covered in smoke. Simultaneously, people are dying in floods in places previously unaffected by copious rain, like in the heart of Europe.

IPCC scientists warn that it will all intensify and some of the changes cannot be undone, very much in the way that we will have to learn to live with the coronavirus.

Even without the report, the magnitude of the challenge of keeping the earth from overheating is obvious, but the importance of the report is that it is the very first time that the human contribution to the phenomenon of global warming is not in dispute.

For decades, different scientists argued among themselves about whether climatic changes are cyclical or the work of mankind. The landmark report finally puts that to rest.

Global temperatures have risen by 1.1 degrees C since the Industrial Revolution, which is entirely our fault, and until we change our ways we will arrive headlong at an increase of 1.5 C, beyond which there will be no salvation for us, our societies or economies.

The most doomsday fact in the IPCC report relating to us here in the Caribbean is the spectre of rising sea levels, which is totally irreversible and will continue for centuries.

In the mid-1990s, I visited the beautiful, and then, still untouched, coral islands archipelago of the Maldives Islands in the Indian Ocean. Recently, I saw recent pictures of the same island I stayed on and it had become even smaller in size owing to coastal erosion.

It is difficult to imagine the effect of natural disasters. Only when we witness it ourselves do we understand what is at stake. It may be why we are negligent in demanding that our governments do more to stop us reaching that 1.5 degree C increase point of no return by 2040.

If the report is correct, the ship has sailed, but we could try slowing it down over the next decade by pushing our feckless world leaders into urgent action, coming out of the next climate meeting in Scotland later this year. So far, countries’ pledges to reduce emissions from fossil fuels are insufficient to make any significant difference to the quantity of gases accumulated in the atmosphere, state the report’s authors.

We in TT face a particular dilemma, being totally dependent on oil and gas for our national revenues. We also face the problem of rising sea levels and shrinking land mass. The current spate of localised flooding due to intense heating and heavy precipitation is only a taste of what's to come.

As citizens, we should press for urgent, improved management of our watercourses, serious implementation of environmental planning policy and a whole new drains project to cope with the no-longer-unexpected voluminous rainwater.

Then we need to actively manage our forests to avoid seasonal bush fires. Politicians will have to make difficult choices, but the time for planning has gone. We, too, as individuals, will have to make sacrifices such as reducing air travel and turning off the air conditioning more often.

It won't be enough. but it might delay the agony.