I know that I have been ridiculed for my predictions of an ecological disaster regarding climate change, and I have stuck my neck out and said that it will be happening in the next four to five years. Even amongst friends and acquaintances, people have said in veiled terms, that I must be mentally ill, paranoid and delusional. But while I hate to say it, I told you so!
The latest projections from scientists are that by the summer of 2013 we will loose the sea Ice in the Artic. This will devastate the species that rely upon this habitat like ring seals and polar bears and we are likely to see them become extinct in the wild in the next ten years.
Even the IPCC in their latest report say that it its too late and climate feedback systems are now operating expanding the effect of global warming. In the case of the Artic that means the darker seawater is absorbing more of the suns energy, warming the liquid water and speeding the melting of the Ice.
That is not the only feedback system that is operating in the Artic, as the loss of the sea ice is also warming the air temperatures and this is melting the glaciers on the Greenland Ice shelf.
While scientists may not want to be alarmist and don’t want to make predictions of a massive sea rise, I will. As when these glaciers do slip into the sea, I do say when and not if, there will be a rise is sea levels of about seven meters.
While at grass roots level there are people who care and understand the dangers, our political leaders are still hoping that a technical quick fix can be found. The difficulty is that our whole economic system is flawed. Therefore while this sudden upward swelling of sea levels will be a disaster for many millions of people, it will also be the wake up call that the world needs. This rise is inevitable as even if we stop burning all fossil fuels today, the melting of the sea ice and the glaciers will still happen.
It will only be via a disaster like this can we get all the worlds governments to stop worrying about all the trivial matters in the world and start to really develop an economic and energy system that is fair to all the peoples on the planet.
For example if half the money that were spent on military expenditure were put in to developing, manufacturing and installing Solar Photo Voltaic around the planet many of the problems that cause the instability and insecurity would be solved. This would also help developing countries provide their peoples with energy and essential services. Clean water is often not available to many peoples because there is no electricity to pump the water. The health of peoples in developing countries can often be vastly improved by providing electricity to health clinics and hospitals. None of this is rocket science either.
We could go further and in parts of the deserts like the Sahara, we could install banks of Photo Voltaic panels, enough to provide enough energy for all the counties in north Africa and provide them with an industry that will earn their economies the revenue they need to develop as well as providing Europe with some of its electricity with a minimal carbon impact. While this would cost large sums of money, if the money wasted on the building of the International Space station had been used for this project, we could have done this three times over.
While there will be some that will think that this will damage the desert ecology, not so, as climate change will render extinct ninety-nine percent of the species in the Sahara. Additional, with careful engineering, the solar panels can have a duel purpose as they can help capture the small amounts of water vapour in the air, condensing it on the panels, thus providing some of the water needs for people in these arid regions.
Equally, we could use geo-thermal energy. Iceland has developed the technology and all around the Pacific Rim we could help those countries to build plants and power stations using this low carbon energy. Again it would help developing countries without causing them to go down the route of heavily polluting coal or oil. Further, this would help these peoples to stop relying on cutting down their forests as the only real way of earning export income.
With this type of energy generation, it is not just the developing world that would benefit, as countries like Japan could provide fifty percent of its energy needs via Geo-thermal electricity production. All around the world we could generate from ten percent to twenty-five percent of the global energy needs from geo-thermal. Incidentally, if industries like aluminium smelting were relocated to these geo-thermal power plants, then as aluminium smelting is responsible for three percent of all the Carbon dioxide released globally, we would save over two billion tonnes of CO2 pollution.
These are all solutions that could be enacted today if there were the will. The trouble is while businesses are taking climate change seriously, most of the effort is going into developing ways of making money from the situation. What we need is to share skills and technology as by helping the developing world we also help save our own environments.
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