Climate change is already destroying millions of lives in the poor world. But it will not stop there

Desmond Tutu
Saturday May 5, 2007

Guardian

What if dealing with climate change meant more than a flick of a switch? Would our friends in the industrialised world think differently if the effects of climate change were worse than extended summer months and the arrival of exotic species? Cushioned and cosseted, they have had the luxury of closing their minds to the real impact of what is happening in the fragile and precious atmosphere that surrounds the planet we live on. Where climate change has occurred in the industrialised world, the effects have so far been relatively benign. With the exception of events such as Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the inhabitants of North America and Europe have felt just a gentle caress from the winds of change.

I wonder how much more anxious they might be if they depended on the cycle of mother nature to feed their families. How much greater would their concerns be if they lived in slums and townships, in mud houses, or shelters made of plastic bags? In large parts of sub-Saharan Africa, this is a reality. The poor, the vulnerable and the hungry are exposed to the harsh edge of climate change every day of their lives.

The melting of the snows on the peak of Kilimanjaro is a warning of the changes taking place in Africa. Across this beautiful but vulnerable continent, people are already feeling the change in the weather. But rain or drought, the result is the same: more hunger and more misery for millions of people living on the margins of global society. Even in places such as Darfur, climate change has played a role. In the semi-arid zones of the world, there is fierce competition for access to grazing lands and watering holes. Where water is scarce and populations are growing, conflict will never be far behind.

In so many of the countries where the poorest live, governments are ill-equipped to cope. Katrina was a challenge for the US, so why should we be surprised that the annual cyclone season off the east coast of Africa continues to stretch the governments of Mozambique and Madagascar to their limits? Where governments are weak, the reliance on humanitarian agencies is greater.

People who work for bodies such as the UN World Food Programme are finding their work is a humanitarian “growth industry”. Indeed, the numbers of people who know what it’s like to go hungry stands at more than 850 million, and they are still growing by almost 4 million a year. The increasing frequency of natural disasters makes the fight against hunger even more challenging. The World Bank estimates that the number of natural disasters has quadrupled from 100 a year in 1975 to 400 in 2005.

In the past 10 years, 2.6 billion people have suffered from natural disasters. That is more than a third of the global population – most of them in the developing world. The human impact is obvious, but what is not so apparent is the extent to which climatic events can undo the developmental gains put in place over decades. Droughts and floods destroy lives, but they also destroy schools, economies and opportunity.

Every child will remember the story of the three little pigs and the big bad wolf. In the world we live in, the bad wolf of climate change has already ransacked the straw house and the house made of sticks, and the inhabitants of both are knocking on the door of the brick house where the people of the developed world live. Our friends there should think about this the next time they reach for the thermostat switch. They should realize that while the problems of the Mozambican farmer might seem far away, it may not be long before their troubles wash up on their shores.

Desmond Tutu is a former archbishop of Cape Town and a Nobel peace laureate

To the original… ➡

– One of the main premises of the Perfect Storm hypothesis is that humanity is edging nearer and nearer all the time to various disaster thresholds – any one of which could cause major problems with global civilization, the biosphere and the environment.

– One of those potential disasters is food shortages. We live in a world where humanity has grown so large that there’s not much slack left in the world’s ability to grow sufficient food to feed all of us. In fact, many of us go hungry now – but that’s another issue.

– So, if this wheat rust epidemic breaks out world-wide, it is likely to cause a large drop in the world’s wheat supplies. Maybe scientists will come up with a treatment before is spreads too far, maybe its virulence is over-rated. Maybe what looks like a global food threat will evaporate. Or maybe this time we won’t dodge the bullet.

– Remember that most of the wheat grown in the advanced nations consists of mono-culture plantings which are vulnerable, en masse, to problems like this.

– But the point is that as we, humanity, work our way into ever narrower and narrower corners pushing to our consumption patterns to the edge or beyond the edge of sustainability, sooner or later one of these nascent disasters will manifest. And, like a house of cards, the many delicate systematic dependencies we all rely on will begin to crumble like a house of cards.

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Science Daily — A new, highly destructive strain of wheat stem rust is continuing to evolve and has the potential to devastate wheat production worldwide, say plant pathologists with The American Phytopathological Society.

Stem rust of wheat was responsible for massive epidemics on wheat during the early 20th Century in North America. In the mid-1950s, wheat breeders developed wheat that had genetic resistance to the disease, making it all but disappear. Despite this success, a new, virulent strain of wheat stem rust, Ug99, evolved in Uganda and has already spread into Kenya, Ethiopia and Yemen, with the potential to spread into Pakistan, India, and China, and eventually North America.

“This new race could attack wheat varieties in many countries and could virtually overcome most of the wheat resistant varieties around the globe,” said David Marshall, research leader with the USDA-ARS, Raleigh, NC.

According to Marshall, if this new strain were to reach regions at risk, it could create epidemics more severe than farmers have encountered in decades and destroy farmers’ harvests in wheat-producing areas worldwide.

More… ➡

– The UN started these IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) reports in 1988 and they come out approximately every five years. This is the IPCC’s Fourth Assesment Report. Previous reports came out as follows:

IPCC First Assesment Report 1990
IPCC Second Assesment Report 1995
IPCC Third Assesment Report 2001

– Within each report, there are multiple working groups, each with a different focus and they each release their own sub-reports at various times during the reporting year.

– What we’re looking at here in this post is the IPCC Fourth Assesment Report, Working Group III.

– In the Fourth IPCC Assesment Report the working group’s specific focuses were as follows:

Working Group I – Physical Science Basis of Climate Change
Working Group II – Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability
Working Group III – Mitigation

– Working Group III’s Mitigation sub-report is where we are now in the sequence.

– For a complete breakdown/overview on the IPCC Reports, go here: ➡

– This stuff is the subject of huge debates among nations, between scientists, within the Blogosphere and anywhere else where people have formed opinions or have vested interests in the implications. Therefore I’m not going to try to report on it. Rather, I’m just going to collect reports and POVs and enumerate them below as I find them.

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➡ – Wikipedia overview of the IPCC Reports up to and including the fourth one.
➡ – The actual IPCC Fourth Assessment Report, Working Group III document (PDF)
➡ – Report from the Sietch Blog (only 8 years and counting left)
➡ – From Scientific American (what will it cost to fix it?)
➡ – From the Climate Progress Blog (countries are avoiding responsibility)
➡ – From the Climate Progress Blog (US & China resisting global efforts)
➡ – From the Climate Progress Blog (Highlights of the IPCC’s Mitigation Report)

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– One thing I noticed is that there do not seem to be as many articles and commentaries on this sub report as on the last. One wonders if the subject material (mitigation) is just inherently less interesting or if people are just getting bored with the entire business.

– The more I think about these things, the more I keep circling back around to the idea that since humans are the cause of the world’s environmental problems, the need to develop a deep and consilient understanding of human nature is probably one of the most effective and obvious approaches we can make to solving our problems. In this context, Evolutionary Psychology seems to me to hold a particular promise.

China could overtake the US this year as the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases, a leading international energy group has said.

The International Energy Agency had predicted China’s carbon dioxide emissions would pass the US by 2010.

But IEA chief economist Fatih Birol said the rate of China’s economic growth this year defied expectations.

His comments come days after a Chinese government report warned of the impact of climate change on the country.

The report, compiled by several government bodies, said that higher temperatures would lead to worsening droughts, spreading deserts and reduced water supplies.

But it stopped short of recommending cuts in greenhouse gas output and risking the country’s economic growth.

More… ➡

– I’m a former systems analyst. I spent years digging around in software systems and learning all the ways things can go wrong in systems. As I’ve been writing and thinking about the world’s gathering problems these last years, a strong revelation has been growing on me: many of our problems are caused because we put profits before people.

– Now, don’t get me wrong – I’m not against Capitalism. It is the prime engine of creativity and wealth generation in today’s world. What I am against, however, is letting Capitalism sit at the top of the decision maker’s priority pile.

– In my opinion, we can and should decide for ourselves what kind of a world we want to live in. I’d prefer to live in one in which the good of people and the environment they live in is the paramount concern and Capitalism has to take a back seat to that. That still leaves a huge playing field for Capitalism and it wouldn’t disadvantage Capitalists either, so long as the entire world played by the same rules thus generating a level playing field for the competitors.

– So, back to this story. Food imports – many of them coming out of China – are now making up a significant portion of what we Americans are eating. And there’s lack supervision and inspection of what’s coming into the country bound for our tables. China was recently found to be putting chemicals into the wheat glutens they sell to us to improve the ‘apparent’ protein content to the material and thus improve its price. I read the other day that this is an ‘open secret’ in China – everyone’s doing it.

– The Chinese, like profit obsessed Capitalists everwhere, are willing to play fast and loose with things that affect human welfare and health to boost their bottom line. And why shouldn’t they? After all, they subscribe to the theory that profit comes first – and all else (including the welfare of other people) takes second place.

– Here in the US, we have the FDA which attempts to inspect our incoming food. But it is woefully under funded and understaffed. Why? Its activities are seen by Capitalist oriented minds here as being a money sink rather than a source so they fund it as little as they can to give the appearance that we have a strong and vibrant FDA providing good and necessary services for the good of the people – when it fact, we have a hobbled and lame FDA which is much more a cardboard store-front than it is an agency fully staffed and funded in a manner commensurate with its assigned duties and responsibilities.

– You watch. There will be a crises at some point where some crap from China or some other place with lax standards, slips into our food supplies and people die. And then there will be a most amazing display of shock and outrage on Capital Hill as everyone, who previously was content to ignore the FDA’s plight, suddenly wants to know, “How the hell this could happen?”. Watch – it’ll be great and instructive theater on why we should begin to rearrange the priorities of our societies away from Capitalistic dominant models to something else that acknowledges that people are what this planet’s resources and our governments should be primarily about.

– Here an axiomatic thought to ponder: You cannot simultaneously have two or more number one priorities.

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Early in the 20th century, the safeguarding of food at American ports often amounted to inspectors from the Food and Drug Administration prying open containers of molasses or sugar and examining them for mold or insect parts.

The F.D.A. has come a way since then. But not much more.

Last year, inspectors sampled just 20,662 shipments out of more than 8.9 million that arrived at American ports. China, which in one decade has become the third-largest exporter of food, by value, to the United States, sent 199,000 shipments, of which less than 2 percent were sampled, former officials with the agency said.

Now, as F.D.A. inspectors travel to China to investigate the source of contaminated pet food that has killed at least 16 dogs and cats and sickened thousands of others, critics in Washington are warning that the agency is woefully understaffed and underfinanced to keep America’s food supply safe.

“The public thinks the food supply is much more protected than it is,” said William Hubbard, a former associate commissioner who left in 2005 after 27 years at the agency. “If people really knew how weak the F.D.A. program is, they would be shocked.”

Globalization and new manufacturing capabilities have changed the makeup of the food that Americans put on their table. Food processors in the United States are buying a greater number of ingredients from other countries, becoming more of an assembler in the nation’s food supply chain.

“With globalization, American food processors are turning to less-developed countries to get food ingredients because they can get them so much more cheaply,” Mr. Hubbard said.

More… ➡

– This article is from the NY Times and they insist that folks have an ID and a PW in order to read their stuff. You can get these for free just by signing up. However, recently, a friend of mine suggested the website bugmenot.com as an alternative to having to do these annoying sign ups. Check it out. Thx Bruce S. for the tip.