It hasn't gone away, you know

As I write, the Indian summer continues. In contrast to the awful summer, the last six or seven weeks have been almost perfect with little wind or rain, warm sun, mists and mellow fruitfulness. Elsewhere it has been a bit rougher with typhoons in the Far East and hurricanes in the Caribbean. But on the whole, albeit just for the moment, the kind of catastrophe that makes us sit up and think about climate change is a distant memory. But it hasn’t gone away you know.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is a panel of experts first brought together by the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) and the United Nations Environment Programme. They issued a report earlier this year setting out the situation as they saw it and describing scenarios for the future.
It’s not easy reading. The outlook is bleak and we have little time to change the future.
Coincidentally, you may have read that one of those typhoons threatened the Special Olympics in Shanghai. It all turned out well in the end and the Irish contingent returned with bags of medals. The only beef I have with it is that it gave the truly ubiquitous Fergus Finlay another radio opportunity and it would be nice to have a week or two without that. But I digress...
The Chinese treated the Special Olympics as a small dry run for the real thing next year in Beijing. The typhoon gave them a reminder of how nature can upset even the best laid plans.
Not to worry! Even though August is normally the rainy season for Beijing, Chinese meteorologists have promised perfect weather for the Games! They plan, apparently, to blast any dark clouds with rockets to guarantee blue skies. Fascinating thought, eh? According to various news reports, including www.theweatherfront.com, they’ve already been practicing. Boom!
Olympic organisers also plan to generate rain to clear smog. What they call ‘cloud-seeding’ is a normal feature of life in Beijing. That’s where chemical infused rockets are fired into clouds to induce rain. In fact, a man called Zhang Qiang is in charge of the city’s artificial rainmaking and prevention programme! Get that man for the M50!
Now, all this is very jolly and we sodden Irish just read this stuff and think, ah bless! But actually, what the Chinese are doing may well be modelling the way we address climate change. Sure, the scale will change. But some scientists now say that the various emissions-reduction systems agreed under the Kyoto protocol and recommended in the IPCC report must be complemented by scientific efforts to control (and specifically to cool) the climate.
Why? Well, it may be that the IPCC report is too cautious, and that perhaps we are closer to catastrophe than we think. Without help it may not be possible to stem the slide.
So what’s envisaged?
Some call it ‘geo-engineering’. A starting point might be the explosion of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991. This released huge amounts of gas and dust into the atmosphere. Scientists were able to track the effects on the climate, in particular of sulphur particles, which we now know reflect incoming sunlight.
So, releasing sulphur is an option. Other geo-engineering solutions include storage of carbon dioxide, the distribution of iron in the oceans to encourage oceanic photosynthesis (which stores a lot of carbon) and placing mirrors in space to deflect the sun’s rays. And so on.
Clearly, none of this is imminent. And yet, we are said to be within a decade or so of the tipping point, the moment beyond which it’s too late and everything changes. So, it may be necessary to jump before the ship hits the rocks, so to speak.
Of course, not everyone agrees that this kind of thing is acceptable. Some fundamentalist environmentalists think that humanity needs to be at least badly damaged, if not destroyed altogether, to expiate the effects we’ve had on the world. In their vision, the world was an Eden and humanity has eaten the apple and must therefore be cast out into eternal darkness or damnation.
Well, I don’t believe that shit. Every species adapts the environment as much as they can to serve their own ends. The thing is, we know what we’re doing. We have walked the earth into the present situation and we have to walk it out. Most humans, and also most animals, would be best served by the world remaining more or less as is. If science can help to keep things as they are, and without unforeseen consequences, that’s okay with me.
But over the next few years you can expect this to rise again. Be prepared!