A Son of the Rock

(Thank you, Private Frazer.)

The Climate Change summit in Copenhagen has failed to come up with a binding agreement. No surprise there. President Obama, in particular, was always going to find any sort of deal hard to sell at home, and harder again to implement. China and India are understandably reluctant to hamper themselves in their efforts to attain higher living standards.

Still, Private Frazer’s catch phrase is only too appropriate. Over-exploiting our resources to the point of catastrophe is something humans seem to do.

The Easter Islanders and the Maya are more than likely to have contributed to the demise of their environments. Water extraction in the south-western United States is outstripping replacement – so much so that the Rio Grande is now little more than a trickle in some stretches. And the fall of the Sumerian and Roman Empires may well have been due to their over exploitation of wood resources.

While global warming – whether or not it’s occurring (natural fluctuations mean the trend is anything but smooth yet average yearly world temperatures over the past few decades tend to be higher than at any time on record; with the highest being more recent) and whether or not it’s human-made – may or may not lead to deleterious climatic and environmental consequences, it seems axiomatic to me that we as a species couldn’t keep throwing all sorts of stuff into the atmosphere (and the oceans) without causing damage of some sort; damage which may be irreparable in the short term.

In this respect it is possible that ocean acidification due to uptake of CO₂ may even be more of a disaster for non-human species than warming of the atmosphere and seas.

It may seem strange to be going on about this when the country is experiencing what used to be appropriate seasonal weather but if the North Atlantic Conveyor – sometimes known as the Gulf Stream – switches off, we’re in for a lot of this. Think Labrador; with bells on. It has switched off in the past and an influx of fresh water from melting Greenland ice sheets will mean Arctic waters won’t be dense enough to sink they way they do now.

Still; no overall agreement may be better than a flawed agreement. But only if lessons are learned.

The junketing involved at Copenhagen has been an unedifying spectacle. And such gatherings attract all sorts of ancillary activities which only contribute to the problem they are affecting to solve.

There must be a better way to deal with the world’s problems than this.