Opinion
20 Mar 01

The Unnatural World

Let's start with a crescendo and build to a climax. Being Irish, we talked a lot about the weather. Right from the start. Tornadoes in America and cyclones in east Africa. Doomsday. Biblical torrents raged down the Limpopo and Save rivers. The lucky ones clung to the tops of trees - there was even a baby born in one. But thousands perished. Villages too. A million or more were homeless. Family and tribal networks were destroyed. Roads and rails were in ruins. Thousands of landmines were washed away from their known zones to who knows where.

And really, it just got worse from there - floods and cyclones in Australia, a heatwave across northern in Portugal and a very big freeze in Mongolia. In April there was drought in India and neighbouring areas, in the American mid-west and in Ethiopia. (Maddeningly but typically, as the spectre of famine loomed, the country went to war against neighbouring Eritrea).
Came the autumn, came our turn. In October there were sinkings off the Irish coast. There were major floods in Italy, with torrential rain and mudslides. Dozens dead or missing. 25,000 people were evacuated. A 40-metre wall of mud destroyed the Swiss village of Gondo, killing up to 20 people. You know the rest - the UK was swamped, as were we.
So what's going on? Well, in April the Swedish Royal Academy of Science announced that the earth is now hotter than at any time in history. Their research shows that the warming over the last two decades is not just a natural fluctuation in the earth's climate. Their evidence came from 15 different records, including tree rings in Colorado, ice cores from Tibet, old English shipping records, ancient Chinese writings and mud from the bottom of the Sargasso Sea.
These show that worldwide there were only three short warm periods, 1010-1040, 1070-1105 and 1155-1190. Of greater significance, while conditions varied from place to place, the average temperature was no hotter than in the 1950s. So, the present rise is unique.
This view was supported by research carried out by the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change, a UN-sponsored group. They agreed that human pollution has contributed substantially to global warming in the past 50 years and the Earth is likely to get far hotter than previously predicted, with immense consequences for people and wildlife everywhere. For the record, the US is responsible for 23% of all carbon emissions, with Britain the same as the whole of Africa, at 3 per cent. Staggering, really.
And in The Hague they argued over buttons, over cow farts, over bits and pieces. Listen - we're in trouble, deep trouble. Ain't no two ways about it.