Posts Tagged climate change
Climate change: Come back and tell me when you’re sure?
Posted by ebintliff in Global Summit on June 3rd, 2009
“Climate change is not something that is waiting to happen. It is having a real impact, on communities and individuals around the world. Some of them are losing their islands. Others have lost their farmland”
So says Kofi Annan in the short film “The Anatomy of a Silent Crisis“, released to coincide with a new report on the human impact of climate change by the Global Humanitarian Forum last Friday.
The report’s headline figure – 300,000 people are already dying each year because of climate change, and that number will rise to 500,000 deaths a year by 2030 – sounds scary enough to provoke some kind of action. But then again, that’s what the Stern Review was meant to do in 2006. Unfortunately, precious little has been achieved in the intervening three years, despite the added impetus of the four IPCC reports in 2007. Which begs the question: why are all these reports falling on deaf ears?
Richard Cable, writing in the BBC’s Blog of Bloom, is scathing about the GHF effort, complaining that the report:
“contains so many extrapolations derived from guesswork based on estimates inferred from unsuitable data sets that you have to ask some serious questions about the methodology.”
Pretty strong criticism. The calculations in the report are based on data provided by the World Bank, the World Health organisation, the UN, the Potsdam Insitute For Climate Impact Research, major insurance companies and Oxfam. The GHF report admits in its very first pages: “These figures represent averages based on projected trends over many years and carry a significant margin of error. The real numbers could be lower or higher… Detailed information describing how these figures have been calculated is also included in the respective sections and in the end matter of the report.”
Of course it’s essential to interrogate the information we are fed and for that reason Cable is doing us a favour by questioning this report’s accuracy. Not all predictions are created equal. And I don’t know enough about prediction methodology to evaluate the value of GHF’s numbers, but I do know that in 2000, climate change killed 150,000 people, according to the UN and the World Health Organisation. Which is enough to make it a pretty big killer.
Aside from that, I find Mr Cable’s criticism interesting and enlightening in itself, because his problem with the report exactly pinpoints why we typically find it so difficult to engage in the climate change issue. So much of climate change science is about projecting into the future, and thus – inevitably – relies on “guesswork” and “extrapolations”.
I first got a sense of this problem in 2007, when researching an article on climate refugees. The leading expert on the subject is Professor Norman Myers. In a long interview with him, he told me that he’d struggled to get anyone to listen to his concerns on the phenomenon since he first wrote about it in 1995. He explained:
I feel (environmental refugees) is one of those sleeper issues that is bubbling away in the background and gathering pace. It’s very unfortunate. It’s against all humanitarian instincts and yet it’s as if the global community has turned its back on this…
This is a prime example of what I call scientific uncertainty and public policy. In many ways we know there’s a big problem out there but we don’t have any exact objective figures as yet. But we do know it’s in the many millions. At the same time we almost certainly know it’s not a hundred million.
If you go to a policymaker and say we’ve got a big problem, they say tell me about it, tell me an exact number… and if you say well we’re not quite sure yet, they’ll be so pleased, they’ll say “Come back and tell me when you are sure“. Because that’s a good way for them to sidestep the issue.”
“Come back and tell me when you are sure” is shorthand for what the world has been telling climate scientists for decades. No-one likes being wrong, and no-one likes spending time, money or energy on a threat they don’t believe in. So far, so human. But how much evidence do we need? Now that actual climate refugees are knocking on the doors of developed nations and asking for aid, Professor Myers’ expertise is back in demand, and funnily enough his figure of 200 million refugees by 2050 – which he first suggested in 1995 – is now being promoted as news. Myers himself has admitted this figure is based on “heroic extrapolations”. For now, it’s the best we have. There’s a lesson here.
Faced with possibilities, probabilities and very few certainties, we can only make informed judgements, based on a set of questions such as:
* why would this person or organisation lie to me? Money is often a key determinant in this. When it comes to share price predictions, there are many reasons your informant may be lying. On the other hand, one of the reasons governments took Nicholas Stern’s report so seriously was because he was not an environmental activist but an economist, and he looked at climate change in order to predict its likely economic cost.
* What qualifications does the predictor have, and what is their track record? The Met Office, for example, publishes statistics on how accurate their weather forecasts are – pretty darn accurate, actually.
* And, is there a consensus view that we can compare this prediction against? For instance in the climate change debate, the IPCC’s exhaustive Nobel Prize winning reports are a pretty good scientific consensus to work from.
Based on the criteria above, I have personally come to the decision that climate change is real, is spectacularly urgent, and is a threat to the survival of the world in the next century if we don’t act now. It’s of course possible that if we do, we will avoid the worst case scenarios that scientists are starting to predict. Which would be great. What a bonus – we get a healthier, more sustainable planet AND we don’t face armageddon. Hmm. Somehow I’m more concerned that the human tendency to wait til the last minute, even deciding to ’sit out’ projected disasters in the hope that they’ll never happen, or that we’ll somehow escape harm, could get the upper hand.
Teach us climate change
Posted by kmccatty in Global Summit on June 3rd, 2009
I remember speaking with a fisherman on the beach. There weren’t many people on the beach that day and, understandably, not many people had gone out to sea, he’d said. More important to me that what he said, was him. His dreadlocks and his skin were the kind that had seen lots of sun and the sea, about which he spoke in a very familiar, if not familial manner.
So when I hear that people’s whole livelihoods will be wiped out by climate change, I only need to think of that Rocky day to see not only how devastating, but just how possible that could be. There are many such fishing villages in Jamaica and across the Caribbean, upon which many people depend for their lives.
Now, I know my views on climate change are decidedly skewed because of where I’m from: one of those small countries that they say are only minimally responsible for climate change, but will feel it the most. But I’m not about to argue that large countries should bear the burden. Everybody knows and agrees that they should. That was the point of the Kyoto Protocol.
So, as my first year university professor used to say after he had outlined some conundrum or the other: What [are] we going [to] do?
It’s not an original solution. In order to ‘protect’ vulnerable populations, we, those populations, first need to understand what exactly it is that we need protection from. I read somewhere that Barbuda, a small island in the Caribbean Sea, is likely to sink in 50 years due to rising sea levels. How many people in the Caribbean or even Antigua and Barbuda are aware of the gravity of this?
My grandfather doesn’t know what climate change is. Why should he? It just hasn’t been important enough in the context of a country where crime is the number one problem. That being said, why should he know and understand, for example, that he should try to use less electricity, when for most of his life he has lived without it? So, the crux is to achieve this sensitization, without turning it into a ‘force-it-down-their-throats’ kind of public education campaign, which makes the organizations that put it on look good, but really doesn’t do much educating.
We need to find a way to reach everybody. From those who inch along in bumper to bumper traffic every morning, one-by-one, in what is easily the biggest status indicator in Jamaica, their air-conditioned cars, to those from the lower parts of town who aspire for and often eventually acquire one of those air-conditioned units themselves and join that unmoving line of traffic.
I don’t know how it is to be done.
But say we successfully do this and people understand the problem. How do they help to fix it? Last week, a co-worker at the Japanese high school where I work, in giving a synopsis of a demonstration social studies class, said the main point for him was the idea: think globally, act locally in relation to caring for the environment. That idea is quite a few years old, but that has to be it.
We, these vulnerable populations must begin to take our environment seriously. In my country, the environment just isn’t a priority. Not on the national level, not on an individual level. So the first step has to be toward making people care about the environment. Then we should focus on creating an understanding of the consequences of not caring.
Let us help people understand that the Rockys scattered across the Caribbean could cease to exist. That the terrible hurricanes we get every season could increase. That our ocean, which attract so many tourists each year and therefore feed many families, could become warmer, that the marine life will be depleted. Get an understanding of these facts into our people’s heads and then we can get moving.
And perhaps there is already some movement. Last week, the Jamaica Institute for Environment Professionals hosted its fourth biennial conference on climate change, with the aim of outlining ways for the Caribbean to respond. Anyone was invited. I don’t know yet what came out of this conference. But whatever it was, if that information can reach as much of the populace as possible, in an effective manner, and on a sustained basis, the process can begin.