The extreme weather link
CLIMATE 2.0 is here, it’s official. Recent studies
have detailed how the high number of extreme weather events over the
last decade is linked to climate change. Now the Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change (IPCC) has published a 594-page special report,
Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate
Change Adaptation (March 2012), which puts a weighty official stamp on
the facts.
The IPCC states: "Observed changes in climate
extremes reflect the influence of anthropogenic climate change in
addition to natural climate variability". Socialists would replace the
word ‘anthropogenic’ with ‘capitalist’, since a socialist society would
have dropped carbon fuels at least 30 years ago, when the threat to our
then relatively stable climate – on which our agriculture relies – was
known beyond any reasonable doubt. It is not inherently people who
perpetuate the pollution of our planet, but our capitalist economic
system and with it the capitalists’ bought politicians, locked in to
carbon-based fuels by the profit motive.
Like a game with loaded dice, the Postdam Institute
explains that environmental disasters are becoming more frequent. (A
Decade of Weather Extremes, Nature Climate Change, 25 March) Trapping
more heat energy in the atmosphere loads the dice and means that the
inherently random throw of the weather dice will bring up more double
sixes, or environmental whammies. The IPCC correctly emphasises that
exposure and vulnerability to these disasters "depend on economic,
social, geographic, demographic, cultural, institutional, governance,
and environmental factors".
The IPCC draws this conclusion with "high
confidence": "Individuals and communities are differentially exposed and
vulnerable based on inequalities expressed through levels of wealth and
education, disability and health status, as well as gender, age, class,
and other social and cultural characteristics". Of these, socialists
would say – ‘with high confidence’ – class is the most important factor.
In short, in Britain, this means a two-year drought
exacerbated by climate change, alongside its opposite, the increased
risk of flooding. Bad as that can be, in Pakistan, two years of
unprecedented floods affected 18 million people, and one in five
flood-affected children are now suffering malnutrition. The rural poor
suffer the most. The IPCC has placed some emphasis on the
disproportionate affects of climate change on the neo-colonial world,
which is to be welcomed.
Over the last decade or so the rural poor in Africa
have faced dislocation and malnutrition in their millions as a result of
crop failures, in part due to climate change, as well as other political
and economic factors (neo-colonial destruction of local food production,
war for mineral resources). While any one environmental disaster might
have a precedent in the historical record, it is the sheer number of
extreme weather events relentlessly pounding the world which shows the
hand of climate change. A recent report showed that four out of five US
citizens live in counties that have been issued with a weather-related
federal disaster declaration since 2006.
In March this year, 15,272 warm temperature records
were broken in the USA, including 7,755 daytime temperature records,
after what Dr Jeff Masters, co-founder of the Weather Underground,
called "a ten-day stretch of unprecedented record-smashing intensity".
Overwhelming the propaganda of the capitalist media, these events are
driving home the truth of global warming to the population at large. In
the USA, birthplace of climate change denial and the heartland of
capitalism, a rising working-class consciousness of the world-wide
dangers of capitalist inaction on global warming is significant.
Yet some climate scientists are far from satisfied
with the IPCC report which, with long delays in its publication,
continues to understate the seriousness of the situation. Joe Romm,
acting assistant secretary of the US Department of Energy in the 1990s
and now a biting critic of the Obama administration – and the web's
"most influential climate-change blogger", according to Time magazine –
denounced the IPCC’s report summary (published in November 2011) as
"another blown chance to explain the catastrophes coming if we keep
doing nothing". (Climate Progress, 17 November 2011)
Like many climate experts, Romm believes the
"dustbowl-ification" – his term, now taken up by Nature magazine – of
the planet’s food production can be avoided by a "world war two-style
approach". Essentially, this means the adaptation of a planned economy
approach. Marxists would also advocate this, although with the addition
of democratic control exerted by the 99% – that is, by the working class
– rather than the 1%, in place of capitalist market anarchy, in order to
permanently solve a wealth of other issues.
In response to the publication of the full IPCC
report in March this year, Romm wrote: "But as Kevin Trenberth, one of
the world’s leading experts on the link between climate change and
extreme weather, put it to me in an email: ‘I have seen the chapter on
the physical climate and I found it quite disappointing… I don’t think
it adds to AR4 [IPCC Fourth Assessment report, 2007] much’."
Romm says that the report fails to clearly describe
what the literature now suggests is coming "if we stay anywhere near our
current emissions path". For instance, the US National Center for
Atmospheric Research argued in 2010 that we risk multiple, devastating
global droughts even on a moderate emissions path. This will, of course,
affect food production and drinking supplies. A "very large population
will be severely affected in the coming decades over the whole United
States, southern Europe, Southeast Asia, Brazil, Chile, Australia, and
most of Africa".
