Having been press ganged into opening a session on ecology at an upcoming SR event it seemed like a good idea to start doing a bit of background reading on the current science, in particular those bits of it which are likely to have an impact on British politics. I’ve previously tried the option of rolling up on the day and hoping inspiration strikes but the results were mixed.

Back to the science. It’s bloody scary! The only good thing is that I’ll probably be dead before things get really really bad.

The major recent document is Adapting to climate change: UK Climate Projections. It was issued by The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) the government department responsible for environmental protection.

It got a reasonable amount of press coverage because it has used rapidly evolving climate models which allow it to make predictions for rainfall at a much more detailed geographical level than before. This of course was the hook of the story for the lazy journalism. It also drew on observations, records and well understood laws of physics.

Tony Benn’s disappointing son Hilary writes in the ministerial foreword: “If we follow a ‘high emissions’ path we could be heading for a global rise of over 5.5°C by 2100 compared with the pre-industrial period – that is, a larger change in temperature than between the last ice age and now.” The thing to remember about the last ice age is that it was the one which buried Europe as far south as England under a mile of ice. 5.5°C can make a big difference. A UK Meteorological Office study has found that there would be a 75% loss of tree cover in the Amazon if the world warmed by three degrees for a century and we will look at what that might mean globally.

Towards the end of the document the rhetorical question is asked “What is the Government doing to adapt to a changing climate?” The answer is given in New Labour speak.

“ensure a fair deal for communities and in particular the vulnerable, by helping people now, as well as in the future; for example, older people and children are more vulnerable to heatwaves, so heatwave plans include easy to follow advice that people can use to keep cool at home and set out what support is available to them.”

That translates as “we will send out leaflets advising people to stay indoors, drink lots of water and have a cool bath if you get really hot and there’s not a drought.”

Is there a class dimension to this? Damned right! Rich old people are much less likely to freeze to death than poor old people during the winter. Heat kills too. The best estimate is that there were 35,000 premature deaths across Northern Europe in the heatwave in 2003. That summer temperatures were just 2°C above the 1961-1990 average in the UK . Defra tells us that the Met Office has concluded that “such heatwaves are expected to become more frequent in coming decades, as summers as warm as this will be ‘normal’ by the 2040s.”

Who is likely to be dying off? It will be the people with miniscule pensions and no savings living in poor quality housing. On top of this we can predict that over the next decade both Labour and Tory governments will be paring social services to the bone to pay for the bank bailouts and that the aging population will be left to shift for itself in a way unimaginable even now.

The rainfall predictions indicate that there will be more sudden severe floods. It will become routine for thousands of people to have virtually all their belongings destroyed and only the relatively affluent are likely to be properly insured. This too will get worse. In its 2004 report, ‘A Changing Climate for Insurance’, the Association of British Insurers notes that claims from storm and flood damages in the UK doubled to over £6 billion over the period 1998-2003 with the prospect of a further tripling by 2050. If the payouts increase so do families’ monthly payments, probably to an extent that will become prohibitive for people stuck in the low wage economy.

On a less parochial level the changes in northern Europe will be benign when contrasted to the Mediterranean region which is at real risk of desertification. North Africa and point south will be almost uninhabitable.

The United Nations’ standing committee on nutrition (www.unscn.org) has produced a report setting out how the crash, not climate change, just a major economic crisis is affecting the world’s poor. The Economist summarises it but the emphasis is mine:

In 1990-2007, the number of hungry people rose by about 80m. In 2008 alone, the number rose a further 40m, to 963m—half as much in one year as during the previous 17.

In other words, lots more children and pregnant women are not getting the food they need. The report reckons that the number of underweight children will rise from 121m to 125m by 2010, assuming no change in the size of the world economy (in fact, it is expected to shrink 2% this year). The World Bank has already estimated that until 2015 the crisis will lead to between 200,000 and 400,000 more children dying every year.

Even if you’ve not polished your crystal ball recent you can begin extrapolate that this heralds a period of wars of the rich against the poor, unprecedented famine and population movements and intense imperialist intervention across the globe. And yet somehow you can’t help but feel that this is at best only on the periphery of the radical left’s vision at the moment.