Bringing disaster on Earth
THREE years ago an eminent scientist warned that if we allowed climate change to continue as we were doing “we are loading the dice in favour of escalating geological havoc”.
Driven by human activity like the burning of fossil fuels and clearing of land, and the consequent emission of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, warming temperatures are melting ice sheets and glaciers, snow caps and tundra, and swelling our seas. This is changing the pressures on the sensitive outer “rind” of the earth, causing it to “bounce and bend”, and triggering an increase in the number and severity of volcano eruptions and earthquakes.
Bill McGuire, professor of geophysical and climate hazards at University College London and one of the world’s leading experts in his field, delivered this warning in 2012 with the release of his book, Waking the Giant. I read his article then and have been thinking about it since the terrible ‘quake hit Nepal 10 days ago.
Touching down in Nepal as a young backpacker in 1991, I had never heard the phrase “climate change” and could not have imagined the suffering of the Nepalese these many years later.
At 8 091m, Annapurna is the 10th highest mountain in the world, situated in the north- west of the country, on the border of Tibet (about 150km further west than Barpak, the epicentre of the April 25 ‘quake). Annapurna (Sanskrit for goddess of the harvests) was a name I knew from a book on the shelves at home when I was little.
So Annapurna Base Camp it was going to be, I decided.
It was August, still monsoon season so there were few other trekkers around to join and I didn’t have enough money to hire a guide. But I gathered advice and a map, and caught the next bus to Pokhara (riding on the roof to avoid being squashed) and then once there, from languid Phewa Lake, a taxi to the foot of the highest mountains on Earth, the point where I would start trekking.
The cab driver dropped me on an empty road from where I would branch off on a path. The nearby village was Phedi. So familiar yet so strange. Like in a scene from a Bertolt Brecht play, a little boy appeared and offered to sell me tobacco. To repel the leaches, he explained – a pinch on your palm, spit, mix and smear on especially the ankles and wrists.
I bought some and it served me well. The poor old water buffalo had none, however. As I climbed through the rice paddies I saw fat leaches hanging beneath their eyes.
Up through the forest in intermittent rain I trekked, the water sluicing down beneath my veldskoen.
Occasionally Sherpas from the high mountain villages shod in slip-slops carrying huge bags of firewood on their backs, straps looped across their foreheads, necks straining, eased past me.
Up and up and up. High above, the peaks were shrouded in cloud. On the third day I trekked through a grove of wild hydrangeas and then came to a ravine: the Modi Khola River.
The bridge across was just a few logs roped together. The water, swollen with snow melt, raged past far below.
Somehow I had taken a wrong turn. My stomach was trembling but there was no turning back.
I strapped my rucksack tight to stabilise it and inched across on all fours. Some while later night was falling and altitude sickness was restricting me to 20 steps at a time.
The slopes were bare and it was icy cold.
I was in a serious fix. Then a 90-degree shape appeared out the mist, unmistakably manmade in the crooked tumble of rocks: a hut – Annapurna Base Camp (4 130m) at last.
Great astonishment from the camp Sherpa and the English couple stranded for days with diarrhoea. Great joy from me. I remember a fire in a trough beneath the table warming our feet and falling asleep over my dal baht until the kindly Sherpa showed me to my hut.
At dawn the next morning the peak of Annapurna was there above us, framed against blue sky.
McGuire describes our frozen world of 20 000 years ago and how, as it thawed, this triggered cataclysmic geological responses. Now, he warns, with our inability to check greenhouse gas emissions, global average temperatures could rise at least as rapidly in the course of the next century as during the Ice Age, “causing the world to toss and turn once more.
“The signs are that this is already happening. The reduction in weight on the earth’s crust is allowing faults to slide more easily, promoting in- creased earthquake activity.
“A dramatic elevation in landslide activity would be inevitable in the Andes, Himalayas, European Alps and elsewhere.
“The bottom line is that through our climate-changing activities we are loading the dice in favour of escalating geological havoc.”
For my part, grand adventure was coupled to downright foolishness no doubt. But I’m so grateful for what I experienced in Nepal.
I hope that little boy from Phedi, who must be now a man, is okay. And I hope we do something about climate change.
We owe it to our kids.