Roll on Global warming

A few millennia ago a substantial (or small and very fertile) proportion of the human race in the Northern hemisphere made a serious mistake and moved north. Some went the whole hog and lived in igloos, hunted seals, followed reindeer around and wore fur clothes; others just went part of the way and just shivered most of the time, consuming a huge amount of resources to keep warm, farming and storing food and forgetting.
These latter have, in recent centuries, developed quite complex explanations and justifications for their bizarre decision to leave sunny climes and move north or to the centre of cold continents, especially after, with the rise of nation-states, they got trapped within the boundaries of one country or another.
These explainers fall into two types.
In the first group are those who say: It wasn’t our fault, we were driven to it; the ice ages caught us unawares, we didn’t realise that winter would come every year.
Others, in a curious inversion of logic are proud of the hardship and, in the good tradition of cold showers and running out the sauna into the frozen lake, say: It was good for us. We needed the hardship to become great, to learn how to plan, to rule the world, to create tropical empires.
Many of these people, truth to tell, are now edging their way south again. The population centre of Britain drifts further and further south; Britons are overflowing into Northern France. The population centres of Norway, Finland, Canada and Sweden are just about as far south as they can go already, and could be argued to be actually somewhere near the Mediterranean for a good part of the year..
There is timeshare on the seasons. Northern denizens from St Petersburg to Glasgow jet off south for longer and longer periods of the year. Some do it in summer, many in winter. An invading force attacking Scandinavia or the Netherlands in August would probably find no one in. That may soon be true in winter too.
In the tradition of the stubbornness of human nature there is, of course, a contrary movement. The Sicilians, West Africans, Sri Lankans and the Jamaicans do move north, to freezing countries which offer larger salaries, suffering hardship on the way and rejection on arrival, while their unwilling hosts are actually packing to fly off to, you guessed it, The Gambia, Sri Lanka and the Caribbean.
But even the illegal immigrants would stop in Italy if they could. On the whole people prefer being warm to being cold, and it’s certainly a lot cheaper to be warm.
It is very curious therefore that so many people get exercised about global warming. After all, it will make Scotland, Canada and much of Russia warmer and whole areas of Canada and Siberia will be more cultivable than they are now.
Having been brought up in a freezing apartment in Edinburgh, I rejoice in the idea of more warm days and a shorter winter. I am looking forward to the effects of global warming.
I am not a global warming denier, though it seems to have become almost as wicked as to practice Holocaust denial. I am a global-warming accepter. I think that there are many benefits to be had from global warming. I am a believer in the ingenuity of the human race in the face of change. I do not believe in focussing only on the negative effects of global warming.
My heroes are the Dutch who make their country bigger by holding back – and pushing back – the sea; the American Pilgrims who after a rather slow start embraced the newness of their environment and learned how to live with it and develop it; the ‘Bushmen’ who find water in deserts; the Jesuits in Peru who developed quinine, the health pioneers of Victorian England who found out where cholera was coming from, and decided to do something about it.
They are the people who look at Mars and say: We can terraform that. They will look at the global warming changes and do something about them, rather than just rolling over, moaning and dying complaining about the mosquitoes.
We are told that an insect here or a plant there may die out. Well, tough, that’s life if it really happens, and anyway we are told already that species are dying like flies. But, surprise, surprise, like suggested in a recent article on coral, it often isn’t happening.
Lo and behold, the coral has not heard the pundits and is adapting in many places (though quite why this is a surprise is unclear since we were taught at school that coral, by definition, is a creature ‘on the edge’).
We are told that Bangladesh or the Maldives may disappear. The recent tsunami illustrates this, we are told, but we have to hold our horses a little. Firstly, the tsunami was not a climate event and secondly, most places did actually survive, including the Maldives. That people died was due to the suddenness of the event. There is no reason to believe that an event taking decades would have such a pernicious effect. After all, along the coast of Sri Lanka and Thailand the momentary rise in sea-level didn’t go more than a couple of hundred metres inland. This would be the case over most of the world’s coast-line.
When Mount Nyiragongo erupted in the early morning in Goma there was enough warning of the lava flow so there were almost no deaths when it reached the town in the afternoon. With their previous experience of natural and human disasters, the population walked quietly out with their most valuable possessions and returned the next day to find out what was left and start rebuilding. At the time the lady in charge of American aid declared that no help would be given by the Americans until Goma, a city of half a million, was moved out of danger! Though, to where, given that the volcano was to the north, the lake to the south, Rwanda to the east, and previously fractured land to the west, was not very clear.
Needless to say, Goma is still there under the still-smoking volcano, and Los Angeles is still on the San Andreas fault, Fuji overlooks Tokyo , and Bangladesh floods every year already but still functions as a country. In all these places people are aware of what might happen, but are unwilling, or unable to leave, for a mixture of straightforward and complex motives.
The one thing that is sure about global warming is that the effects will be complex. There may be more cloud cover which may mitigate the effects … or intensify them … depending on what you read. There will be more ‘weather’ in terms of higher wind-speeds, more storms, … or there won’t, since much weather is actually quite local.
There will be more mosquitoes further north (or south); but there may be more flowers, and more honey. Some crops will not do so well in some areas, others will do better; the Mediterranean diet will become easier to obtain locally in Britain. Lesser-known crops, long forgotten, may thrive.
Just look at some of the benefits of a warmer world by looking at fuel supply. Far less fuel will be used for heating; the transport of fuel around the world will be reduced and some oil-rich, politically unstable areas will come to have less political clout. There will be less need to travel to hot climates for recreation. Hot places will be nearer.
From the perspective of where I live most of the time, 1300m above sea-level beside Lake Victoria, exactly on the Equator, the predictions about what might happen in the tropics have been so woolly as to be meaningless. Our daily variation of temperature is from 15° to 35° so a couple of degrees more isn’t going to matter. Most of our rain is local; maybe it will cycle a bit faster. In fact, for ten months of the year it clouds up in the afternoon already since there is warming every day. In January, the lake appeared to be falling a little after a couple of months of drought, but now in April, there are floods all over the region.
For people who live in the tropics the wider pattern is always one of change, not far off the seven lean and seven fat years of Biblical repute. In the seventies the desert was going to march so far south that everyone would be living in the Sahara, surrounded by goats eating up the last plants.
In the late nineties, we had so much rain that I could hardly recognise some places that had been bone-dry. Interestingly no one talked about the retreat of the desert; that might be too optimistic, not doom-laden enough.
So, let’s have a bit of this global warming, accept it and enjoy it. The British holidaymaker may be able before long to get his timeshare cottage in Lerwick so he can spend some of the summer on the balmy beaches of Shetland, eating local mangoes and swatting the mosquitoes.

Barry Sesnan, Entebbe 2006

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