WELL, last week I listened to Mike Hulme a Professor from the famous Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research speak at the Hilton Park Hotel. It’s happening, he has no doubt. Even if we cut greenhouse gas emissions to zero today, which is, of course, impossible, the world temperature is going to continue to rise for at least another 100 years and the oceans warm for the next 500. Sea level is going up. Full stop.
I am glad that the Olympic committee have no regrets about giving London the games, despite the atrocities of 7/7. There is only one way to combat terrorism and that is not to allow it to change our values and our lifestyle.
However, terrorism is not the only threat to the games. Climate change could ruin the whole show. By 2012, there is serious possibility of flooding in the whole of the East End of London if the Thames Barrier does not contain a water surge; or at the other extreme, as London continues to have hotter summers, athletes could find themselves with no water, drought and 40 degree temperatures.
Prof. Hulme is involved with the British government in discussing these scenarios and helping to put into place plans to deal with them. One thing is for sure: they will cost us.
This then was his message that climate change is being accelerated. It has social, economic and political implications and the solutions cannot just be environmental; we are going to have to find technological solutions too. The greenhouse effect will trigger extremes of temperature and no one can predict where or how these will happen.
At one level, I listened to this and felt totally impotent. All of it seems to be happening on such a vast scale that anything we do would just be a drop in that rising ocean. On the other hand, if we were all prepared to change out lifestyles just a little, huge differences could be made.
Technology may be able to provide the long-term solutions. They hope to provide electricity for the games from renewable sources independent of London’s grid system.
The problem is that one environmental solution poses another problem. To use tidal energy from rivers such as the Severn means constructing huge barriers with the inevitable change in river habitat. To stick wind turbines on our roofs requires planning permission. To build more nuclear reactors causes widespread panic and understandably no one wants one in their neighbourhood. Solar panels are expensive. What are the most practical solutions?
The way forward to a greener planet is not easy: but without a united international effort we all face an uncertain future far more deadly than the atrocities of terrorism.
