Points of View
Climate Change
Human-induced climate change, natural changes linked to sunspot activity or even Milankovitch cycles, or a figment of our short-term, unreliable perception of weather patterns? With agriculture so dependent on weather, and so vulnerable to severe weather phenomena, it's no wonder that strong views are held. Here are a selection - in text and audio.
Globally, climate change is likely to increase the disparities in food
production between developed countries, located largely in temperate regions,
and developing countries, which are mainly in the tropics. Not only will
the effects of climate change be more severe in developing countries,
but these countries are less equipped, in terms of capital and infrastructure,
to adapt agriculture to changes in climate. For example, new crop varieties
that are more resistant to high temperatures might not be available or
affordable in developing countries... The effects of climate change will
not only reduce food yields on average, but will cause farmers incomes
to decline.
'Food Security Implications of Climate Change for South and Southeast
Asia' by Ata Qureshi and Greg Richards
www.mssrf.org
Above all, Senegal's farmers want reliable rains. They are paying a heavy
price for global climate change. Drought and subsequent land degradation
are threatening all the dry lands of the world - a third of all farmland
- and the livelihoods of 900 million people who depend on them. In Senegal,
it is estimated that 15% of the farming population has left the land for
good.
Learning to live with long-term drought by Susie Emmett, Farmers Weekly,
UK, March 1999
The predictions on climate change are very serious for agriculture.
And, of course, most serious for agriculture in vulnerable areas or agriculture
which is dependent on rain, rain-fed agriculture. And since the majority
of small farmers, the majority of poor farmers are dependent on rain-fed
agriculture, really it's especially them that will be most affected by
climate change. Whether it is when they are living in very low delta areas,
like Bangladesh, or whether it is in hilly areas, dryland areas.
Paul Travil, Ministry of Foreign Affairs Development Co-operation,
The Netherlands
Food security is unlikely to be threatened at the global level, but some
regions are likely to experience food shortages and hunger and the poor
and disadvantaged will be the most vulnerable to the negative consequences
of climate change.
UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, Press document, October
1999
I think the issue of global climate change is real one.
I think the potential impacts are very severe. Many people either aren't
convinced it's a problem yet or think it's a problem not for many decades.
But the risk is that unless we start to take actions now, we're going
to much more vulnerable to the impacts of climate change in the future.
There are things that we can do now to make ourselves less vulnerable
but if we don't take actions today, I think we are going to be unpleasantly
surprised in the future.
Dr Peter Gleik, Director, Pacific Institute for Studies in Development,
Environment and Security, California, USA.
In Bangladesh, there is a widespread acceptance that seasonal floods
are worsening and people have built raised fields with freshwater ponds
stocked with fish to help them sit floods out. But such preparedness begs
a question: with Bangladesh's fertile coastal plains at risk of sinking
under the sea by the end of the next century, who and what will feed the
dispossessed people? The number of environmental refugees worldwide has
been estimated at 25 million, more than the total of all other refugees.
Fleeing into adjoining lands, they are largely invisible to the rich West.
Africa, the continent that has the greatest food problems already, is
predicted to suffer the most from drought and creeping deserts. We have
to pull our heads out of the sand now, before the changes start spiralling
out of control.
'Gathering storm', New Internationalist, Dec 1999
The global temperature increases this century are unlikely to be the
cause of the spate of El Niño events during the 1990s, says Dr
Rob Allan, from the CSIRO Division of Atmospheric Research. "We know that
El Niño tends to occur every 2-7 years. I have found two additional,
longer climatic fluctuations linked with El Niño: one every 11-13
years; the other, every 15-20 years. These climatic fluctuations have
probably occurred for thousands of years which makes me think that the
gradual warming we've seen around the globe this century is unlikely to
be the cause of the recent series of El Niño events.
CSIRO Media Release March 1998 www.csiro.au
While some experts believe that higher temperatures would help farmers
by destroying some weeds and disease pathogens, others think that a mere
1.5 degrees Fahrenheit (~0.65° C) increase in temperature could reduce
India's wheat crop by 10%. The spread of desert, a shorter growing period
for foodgrains in the north, changes in the cropping pattern, reduced
water supplies from the major river systems following the drying up of
glaciers: all of these will all have a multiplier impact on the country's
food security. The odds against Indian farmers, despite all their ingenuity,
could ultimately prove to be too high.
Devinder Sharma, 'The fight for food' New Internationalist December
1999
Predicting the effects of human-induced climate change at regional scales
is a difficult business. Whereas global measures such as the average surface
temperature or the mean sea level tend to smooth out the wrinkles of local
variations, the signature of climate change at small scales is much harder
to read. Yet the ability to do so is vital for regional policy decisions.
If, for example the EU were to instigate measures to offset predicted
adverse effects of climate change on crop production, how would we know
they were working if such effects could just as readily be caused by a
decade-blip in the natural climate pattern?
What have we done to the weather? Nature Science Update March 1999
http://helix.nature.com/
I think that the fundamental issues that we are faced with
is just not the question of water itself and what is going to happen to
our water services and the management of water services but also what's
going to affect water services in the future and global warming is definitely
going to have a major impact. There is going to be such a climate change
shift that some sections of the world, which have previously had a great
deal of precipitation and moisture, will become more dry and arid. And
there will be other parts of the world where water shortages are going
to increase and become more intensified as a result of global warming.
So it is extremely important that the governments, or the people, start
to look ahead at the water future, that they have to look at the issues
of global warming because that is going to have a major effect on what
happens.
Tony Clarke, Director, Polaris Institute, Canada
Africa's lethal droughts of the past 30 years have been puny compared
with arid spells in previous centuries, according to a pioneering reconstruction
of the climate using lake sediments in East Africa. Those centuries saw
huge swings in African rainfall, says Dirk Verschuren of the University
of Ghent in Belgium. "The fluctuations seem to be tied to variations in
the radioactive output of the sun. Higher solar radiation is linked to
droughts in equatorial East Africa." Regionally, Verschuren says that
these recurring droughts may be more of a problem than global warming.
"In arid places like East Africa, central Asia and Australia, I think
they should be much more worried about natural variability in rainfall.
They need to be less dependent on hydroelectric dams and irrigated agriculture."
New Scientist 29 January 2000
Authors of the third assessment report by the International Panel on
Climate Change (IPCC) accept that some of the warming in the first half
of the century, as well as a cooling in the 19th century could
have been caused by solar influences. But, based on these factors alone,
they estimate that temperatures would actually have fallen during the
past two decades. Unlike the last IPCC assessment five years ago, which
concluded merely that the 'balance of evidence' suggested that global
warming was caused by humans, the latest report unequivocally points to
humans as the culprits.
New Scientist 20 November 1999
But, of course, we have to go to the root of climate change
and then we come back to the Western countries who are consuming more
than 80% of the world's energy and are contributing most to the causes
of climate change. So actually, what the main issue should be about is
how the Western world is addressing its own consumption patterns and it's
changing its lifestyle, its way of thinking about progress, about development
so to say.
Paul Travil, Ministry of Foreign Affairs Development Co-operation,
The Netherlands
"All the methods (studies of tree rings, ice cores, lake sediments and
coral growth) generally show a very unusual 20th century. And
our (method) does too," says Professor Pollack, a geologist at the University
of Michigan. "The 20th century is the warmest century of the
last five, and the one which is most rapidly changing. What we show that
is somewhat different is that the total temperature change over the past
five centuries has been greater than some of the other methods are showing."
(Professor Pollack's research was based on measurements
from boreholes at more than 600 sites around the world)
Daily Telegraph February 17, 2000
Even in this high-tech information age, human societies cannot continue
to prosper while the natural world is progressively degraded. Our food
crops and medicines are derived from wild plants, and even genetic engineering
is based on rearranging the genes that nature has created. Moreover, our
crops, industries, and cities require healthy ecosystems to store our
water and to maintain a nurturing climate. Like the early residents of
Easter Island, we are vulnerable. But unlike, them, we can see the problem
coming.
Lester Brown & Christopher Flavin, Worldwatch
Institute, State of the World 1999
The richer countries have built reservoirs, built aqueducts
so that if there's a drought we have water stored in the dry seasons that
we can use. We build big systems to control floods. In the developing
countries, those systems have not been as well built and there's serious
concerns that the developing countries will be the most severely affected
by climate change. Unfortunately I think there's
not much we can do to prevent some climate change from occurring. It's
causes are so fundamentally tied to our energy systems and what that means
is, how do we then adapt to climate change, how do we mitigate the impacts
of climate change. That involves understanding what the impacts will be
and it also means spending money to develop systems that make us more
resilient, developing crop systems that are less dependent on rainfall.
It means developing ways of managing our water resources so that we are
less vulnerable to extreme events. It means using our water more efficiently
so that we are not wasting the limited water resources that we have. Not
building on floodplains and letting people live in floodplains but reserving
floodplains so that floods can occur without devastating impacts on humans.
And, in some cases, it may mean building new systems, building reservoirs,
building water systems that can control the quality of our water. All
of those things will be components for protecting against the impacts
of climate change.
Dr Peter Gleik, Director, Pacific Institute for Studies in Development,
Environment and Security, California, USA
See also a 'Non-scientific perspective on climate change'
