Category: Forecasting

The place is Britain.  The year is 2118.

Emma has just finished planning the family holiday.  Cycling from their home to the Mediterranean coast of France, getting the train back.  One short, one long route each day on the way out, to cater for tastes and energy levels.  Mix of B&Bs and chambres d’hotes on the way down, a week’s airbnb near the coast.

Before the Resource Wars of the 21st century, people used to fly everywhere on holiday, oblivious to the land and sea they were crossing en route.  Man-made global warming, with transport contributions making up the largest sectoral share, led to catastrophic changes in rainfall patterns in the U.S. and the first Water War – a land grab  of western Canada by the Americans, with the Canadians hopelessly outgunned – ensued in 2068.  This was closely followed by the second Water War in the Middle East and the third, a nuclear confrontation between India and Pakistan over the latter’s water security in Kashmir.  In other parts of the world such as sub-saharan Africa, people just died in greater numbers without a named conflict to mark the occasion.  All told, experts put the number of deaths related to water shortages globally at close to a billion during the second half of the century, with Asia and Africa suffering the greatest losses.

Any yet it wasn’t primarily the shocking spectacle of these wars that dissuaded people from flying.  Increased turbulence from more disturbance in the atmosphere (faster surface evaporation associated with climate change led to increased energy levels in the stratosphere, and consequently to stronger and more variable winds) put off those with a poor stomach.  But the real impact was from much higher fuel prices as eventually the supplies of jet kerosene started to wane.  (Batteries had been made to work for short-haul flights but proved physically impossible for long distances.)  It just became too expensive for most of us to afford.

Needs must, not only practically but also psychologically.  As people experienced the disappointment of the intercontinental holidays enjoyed by their parents becoming inaccessible to them, they began to question the merit of those holidays and to talk up the advantages of nearer destinations that one could reach on land and by boat.  Schools started to teach not only about the damage caused by long-distance travel – both in terms of climate change and also the spread of disease (an antibiotic-resistant superbug epidemic killed tens of millions in western Europe in 2071) – but also about its motivation in the following two additions to the national curriculum in education.

Firstly, humanities classes taught that it was no longer necessary to travel far to experience different cultures: excellent communications let us see them on our screens at home.  Our cities had become so cosmopolitan that most of the world’s languages and cultures could be experienced in them without having to visit their places of origin.  And it was taught that becoming broad-minded and tolerant is about noticing, thinking about and caring for people and other life forms around us – and about always being willing to admit that one’s own views might be mistaken – rather than about travelling thousands of miles to similar hotels at dissimilar latitudes.

Secondly, in a growing emphasis on the subject of psychology, pupils were taught about the causes of restlessness.  It was increasingly understood that if people are over-fed, under-exercised (mentally as well as physically), lonely, and/or over-exposed to tempting or disturbing images – not to mention images of people who are better-looking or just better at something – their restlessness grows, with manic travel being one possible outlet.

To assist the psychologists in countering this restlessness, a few enlightened politicians drove through a variety of measures – in the workplace as well as in schools – to increase the population’s participation in local sports, societies, on-going education and charitable ventures.  The belated introduction of standards for internet content was also finally agreed on an international scale.

There was also the more prosaic influence that travel became less interesting.  For instance, study of the Great Barrier Reef was added to the history syllabus in schools: apparently a quarter of the world’s fish species used to congregate in a large coral reef off Australia’s east coast, before the coral was killed by rising temperatures and acidification, and unceremoniously pulverised for building material.  With no wild places left on Earth, travel lost a bit of its romance.

So Emma has not lost too much sleep over the fact that when she was her eldest’s age, her parents took her to the Maldives (now under water).  She does not think the cycling trip to Nice is mean by comparison.  After all, Nice is now just as warm in summer as the Maldives were then; and the mode of transport will be much more comfortable and illuminating (not just cheaper) than a plane.  After a hot swim, the family will still be able to eat from a wide range of global cuisine, or watch a film in any language.

If she has a tinge of regret that Nice is hardly exotic, it is easily tempered by the knowledge that nowhere is anymore.

“During this past 10 years, if anything … average world temperature has slightly declined.” Nigel Lawson, the Today programme, 11th August 2017

“We are in the end tempted to divide mankind into a minority (a minimality) of those who know how to make much of little, and a majority of those who know how to make little of much.” Friedrich Nietzche

Where I work, people want to give to charity.  Especially charities about people.  Kids and those who suffer from mental illness have top priority and receive the largest donations from the company.  Enviromental charities are regarded as worthy but less important than people charities, and consequently receive less money.

The problem is this.  We are gradually but surely ruining our planet from the perspective of many of its life forms, including us.  A consequence of degrading the planet is that people suffer: through malnutrition, water shortages, land loss and so forth.  Rising temperatures will raise sea levels, not because of melting icebergs (which Archimedes realised have no effect) but because of the melting of large continental icesheets such as the one in Greenland, with the consequent loss of low lying lands.  Acidification of the seas from carbon dioxide reduces fish stocks.  The increasing incidence of droughts will lead to more famine in poor regions of the world.  And the pressure on resources (less land, lower fish stocks, a reducing acreage that is amenable to growing crops and cattle farming) will lead to conflict, the increased harbouring of dwindling resources by the wealthy at the expense of the poor, and probably greater economic inequality as a consequence.

So it is not possible to separate charitable concern for the global environment from ‘people issues’ such as child poverty and inequality: they are linked inextricably in a world the natural balance of which is being transformed by its human population.

What is to be done?  Setting aside the ostriches who still deny climate change, most of the rest of us think science and technology will come to the rescue. The trouble is that the science is saying we need to reduce our carbon footprint to a global average of around 2-3 tCO2e per annum.  That is less than half the current global average.  It is much less than half of the average for a citizen of Britain in 2017 (which can be calculated to be anywhere in the range 10-15 tCO2e per annum depending how honest one wants to be about the attribution of emissions relating to international aviation and imported goods).  And technology, however ingenious, can only work within the confines of science and its physical and natural laws.

Ultimately, and in spite of the beguiling delusion that climate change can be solved by decarbonising electricity production, our way of life is not sustainable.  We are then faced with the challenge that it is neither morally acceptable or realistic to plan a future world in which we in western nations continue to live as we do whilst people elsewhere reduce their per capita greenhouse gas emissions even further. The people of Asia and Africa will aspire to live as we do, as long as we do, and we can neither blame them nor stop them.

So the only hope – unless the problem goes away because the human population is devastated by warfare or disease – is that we learn how to live gentler lives, with less stuff, smaller homes, less meat and less travel.  The change that is required will either occur of our own volition, and herald a concomitant revolution in our ideas about happiness and economics, or it will be brutally imposed upon us over the course of the coming decades by an unsympathetic ecosystem.  The timing is uncertain; the outcome – unless climate science is completely mistaken – is not.

Attitudes to travel

Of all the changes that we need to make for our future to be sustainable, the most intractable for the British is probably to rein in our travel habit.  Somehow we need to find alternative outlets for our restlessness; and to explode the myth which is still promoted in our education system that travel broadens our attitudes and deepens our cultural awareness.  To the extent that was ever true, it applied to generations that lived before the internet.  In today’s world, there is no evidence at all that Brits who holiday in Spain or the Caribbean are less prejudiced and more liberal than the French who holiday on the French coast or Canadians who spend the summer at a holiday cottage on a Canadian lake.

Open-mindedness and refinement of perspective depend above all on an ability to notice – to notice the richness and variety in objects, people and landscapes that we encounter everyday.  Perhaps we do not need to go the extremes of the Frenchman Xavier de Maistre, who spent an entire ‘holiday’ in his bedroom, reacquainting himself with its unappreciated furniture, to the subsequent admiration of Nietzche.  But we do need to re-think our adventures and discover anew the value in the seemingly mundane.  Global destination-bagging would be harmless if it were not demonstrably harmful to the environment.

Why do we desire so strongly to see that which in the process of seeing we knowingly destroy?  I am reminded of a friend who despaired of his mother’s travel plans to visit Antarctica.  “Mum,” he remonstrated, “Antarctica will be destroyed by people visiting it.” “That, Simon,” she replied, “is why I need to go and see it.”