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The shape of things to come?
Neil Adgar, Guardian
A leading climate change scientist gives his prediction of what living with the effects of climate change could be like within 50 years
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Adapting to the impacts of climate change will be a painful process for people around the world. Adapting our homes and habits to the floods, droughts, storms, rising sea levels and hotter summers it heralds will mean giving up things we care about and the places we love. This year’s UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports show that rising global temperatures will alter the geography of where we live, whether it is in cities, flood plains or the coast. How and where the next generation will move is a major issue for international governments, even if they don’t know it yet.
…A British child born today will be 50 on bonfire night, 2057. What will life be like for our 50-year-old citizen? Here is a plausible scenario:
Summer top temperatures will be around 38C (100F), winters will be shorter and floods more frequent. To combat the latter, the government will have already controlled where people live through the planning process. Houses, businesses and land already in risky areas will also have lost value because insurance companies will have withdrawn protection. People will simply choose not to live in risky areas. But climate change will still, as now, retain the ability to spring unforeseen weather surprises.
Climate change will have brought about significant population shifts, primarily relocating the world’s poor. Mediterranean Europe, north Africa, California and the south-west US in 2057has become severely water-stressed. In the northern hemisphere there are frequent severe storms with concurrent summer droughts. The UN climate reports predictions in 2007 were right: up to 500 million people in south Asia and Africa live with incomes that put them at risk from hunger. This has exacerbated political instability in the worst affected regions including in the Horn of Africa and west and southern Africa.
(5 November 2007)
Bill Clinton’s Seattle Climate Speech
Alex Steffen, World Changing
Climate change is an opportunity. That was the message Bill Clinton brought to an amazing speech at last week’s U.S. Conference of Mayors meeting here in Seattle.
Now, I don’t often recommend speeches by politicians, of any party. It is in the nature of a political speech to be milquetoast. They lack substance. They lack a willingness to confront the massive challenges we face today. They lack a sense of the possible.
But Clinton’s speech is different. It is, quite simply, the best speech on climate given by an American politician (other than Al Gore) I’ve ever heard — it’s the sort of speech I wish a sitting president would stand up and deliver before Congress and the nation. I’ve been thinking about writing the speech I wish a politician would deliver about climate change — as I did before on the tsunami — but this time about the climate crisis. Now, I don’t need to. This is it.
Key points: …
(5 November 2007)
Insurers Can Have A Constructive Role in Fighting Global Warming
Mindy Lubber, WorldChanging
The recent devastating fires in California reminded us how vulnerable society is to the whims of nature, even in this modern age. They also illustrated why the insurance industry, the world’s largest (bigger than even Big Oil), is increasingly concerned about climate change. While it’s impossible to associate these fires — or any specific event — with climate change, scientists tell us that it could increase the risk of large wildfires by over 50 percent by the end of the century. Add that to growing worries about climate change’s impact on hurricane intensity, as well as a veritable biblical plague of other impacts (mud slides, wildfires, hail storms, blizzards, drought, floods, crop failures, heat waves), and you can see why the industry is beginning to worry.
As a recent report by Dr. Evan Mills documents, insurers can be a major part of the solution to climate change in varied ways, including everything from helping clients become more resistant to disasters (for an extreme example of this, insurance giant AIG sent a private fire-fighting force into the teeth of the California fires to spray fire retardant on the homes of its high-end clients) to developing products and services that simultaneously reduce risk and reduce global warming pollution. Examples of the latter include products like “pay-as-you-drive” auto insurance, where instead of paying for unlimited mileage, consumers pay for each mile driven. It’s like a reward for walking to the store instead of driving.
(5 November 2007)
