Water
World 1
“We were just
standing around in our shorts, stunned and amazed, trying to make
sense of it”. Thus spoke one Inuit villager, on describing winter
temperatures of 9ºC that should have been -30ºC
(Independent on Sunday, 27
August). As the Arctic warms up twice as
fast as the rest of the world, and sea ice has shrunk in area by a
quarter and in thickness by a half, its inhabitants are discovering
that their igloos are heat traps, their water supply needs wells and
their workplaces need air-conditioning. Meanwhile Greenland farmers –
for they do exist – are
starting to grow broccoli, cauliflower and Chinese cabbage, while
having to make up, among their thousand words for reindeer, some new
words for the salmon which are appearing in their rivers, and the
barn owls, hornets and robins which are now adventuring to the far
north. What the Inuit think of global warming can be surmised by the
number of their houses and snowmobiles that have started falling
through the ice, and one can easily see why they think “the world
is slowly disintegrating.” Meanwhile in Siberia, roads and
buildings built on the permafrost are starting to collapse, and the
Permafrost Institute in Yakutsk has recently suffered a major flood
(BBC Online, 12 September).
Greenland is the second biggest
ice mass after Antarctica, with glaciers as large as Manhattan
and as
high as the Empire State Building, and it is now melting at a rate
that has alarmed even the alarmists. Evidence from NASA satellites
and ground-based researchers concluded in February 2006 that
Greenland's glaciers are melting twice as fast as they were five
years ago. If the ice cap were to completely disappear, which it is
quite likely to do by the end of 2100 at this rate, global sea levels
would rise by 6.5m (21 feet) (BBC
Online, 11 August). If this
happens, New York, New Orleans and half of Florida including Miami,
Tampa and Fort Lauderdale will be underwater.
Not surprisingly
perhaps, Washington is facing rebellion from state governors all over
the country to stop stalling over Kyoto and do something, not least
because their own oil and gas companies are already one jump ahead
with ‘greener’ technology and need the relevant legislation to be
enacted so they can capitalize on it. Leading the way is Da
Governator, Arnold Schwarzenegger, who when not terminating crooks by
state execution is so keen to display his green credentials he sided
with the Democrats against his own party in order to pass the Global
Warming Solutions Act, which aims to cap emissions in California, the
world’s 12th largest CO2 emitter, by 25 percent by 2020 (BBC
Online, 1 September). But even Arnie is unlikely to hold back
the
Arctic flood, because capitalism just doesn’t sit down and listen
to reason, as his Republican ex-buddies know perfectly well. The
reason they opposed his cosy Californian carbon-capping caper was
because they knew perfectly well that unless such a plan was federal,
so that nobody could get out of it, all the investment would leak out
of the state into neighbouring ones which were not required under
their state law to worry so energetically about the problem.
Water
World 2
While the Inuit
are fast running out of ice, a third of the world’s population are
faced with a shortage of any water at all. The situation has arisen
twenty years earlier than projections forecasted, according to a
report by the International Water Management Institute in Colombo,
Sri Lanka (New Scientist, 26
August). The report states that while in
some places physical shortage of water is to blame, in others it is a
question of lack of financial investment. So are they talking
billion-dollar pipelines from the water sources to the dry interiors
in Africa, Asia and parts of China? Not a bit. The state-of-the-art
technology is, wait for it, plastic buckets and bags, lots of big
ones, to catch the stuff as it falls out of the sky. Storing roof and
road run-off, they argue, could double or triple food production in
sub-Saharan Africa and south-east Asia. Not only that, but saving
water for ‘unrainy days’ in this way could slow the expansion of
rain-fed agriculture into virgin habitats from 60 per cent by 2050
down to 10 per cent.
The predictable response of most people
reading this would be a Homer Simpson-like ‘Duh’. You don’t
need to be an engineering genius to figure out that water butts are a
good way of saving water, so why in hell aren’t they doing it
already, you cannot resist asking? Presumably because in the
capitalist scheme of things, poor Africans, Indians and Chinese
peasants don ’t have the price and don’t rate the price even of a
plastic bucket.
Water World 3
Socialists
always welcome any sincere attempt to solve the world’s problems,
even if some of these attempts are inevitably misguided. One doesn’t
in all honesty expect a great contribution to be made by new-age
mystics so it is no surprise that when Madonna and husband Guy
Ritchie approached the UK government with a scheme to clean up
nuclear waste, using a deeply mystical Kabbalah water which they
claimed had received extensive testing in a Ukrainian lake, the
government didn’t show much interest in the Ritchies’ esoteric
knowledge of Jewish mystical liquids and in fact showed them the door
(New Scientist, 26 August).
One might expect however that the
government official who recounted this story would show the
appropriate respect for such eminent celebrities, or at least a cool
and precise scientific detachment. Instead, the official described
the encounter as follows: “It was like a crank call…. The
scientific mechanisms and principles were just bollocks.” Lovely to
see scientists descend to plain English occasionally.
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