Consider the drip-drip effects of climate change
Graeme Maxton says if someone consumes a lot of sugar, the damaging impact takes time to show up, but it will – and the same is true of global warming
Media reports about climate change typically focus on big events – a wildfire in Greece that forces people into the sea, a flood in Germany that washes away a town, a drought in California that destroys a season’s harvest, unprecedented rainfall in Hong Kong, or a long heatwave in Vietnam.
But this is to greatly misunderstand how climate change is happening. Big events make headlines but, for the next few years, lots of small events should be the main concern. These will bring difficult long-term problems which are mostly uninsurable.
Think of it a bit like looking after your teeth. If someone consumes lots of sugar, the damaging impact on their teeth takes time to show up. At a certain point though, their teeth begin to fall apart and this affects their health in lots of ways.
The pain of toothache and bad breath aside, their cardiovascular and respiratory systems might suffer. They could have gum disease and oral infections which are linked to higher rates of diabetes. Bad teeth might lead to digestive problems, as well as headaches. They can even affect a person’s mental health. Put simply, lots of small events (eating too much sugar every day) gradually escalate into a series of interlinked long-term health problems which are often hard to relate back to their original source with certainty.
And so it is with climate change. In Britain, there is now a farming crisis following the wettest 18 months in recorded history. Crop yields are down not by a few per cent but by about 30 per cent in some cases, and newborn animals are dying in the fields. This means food prices will rise, as will the volume of imports. This will have an impact on the value of the pound, and grain supplies elsewhere.
It may even change how the United Kingdom responds to the war in Ukraine, because grain stocks in Russia and the price of grain will receive greater attention. The diets of many people in many places will change, as will their long-term health.
However, the effects of all the rain are not just on farming, consumer prices, geopolitics and human health. With so much water draining from fields, many of the UK’s country roads have started to fall apart. More potholes mean more damage to cars, and more risk for drivers. More of the nitrates in fertilisers are being washed into rivers, increasing pollution, and the foundations of many buildings are being slowly weakened. The facades of houses that have stood for 200 years are beginning to crumble because they were never built to deal with the volumes of water they are now experiencing.
And it’s not just rain. Humidity levels are more variable, as is the temperature, and this is also having an effect. Fungi are growing and storms are more frequent. These bring windier weather and higher waves. The value of houses in some coastal towns has dropped, as has the number of seabirds. In other parts of the world, the problems are different but their cascading impacts are similar.
In Asia, the main problem is rising heat and more variable rainfall. This increases the need for air conditioning, which could mean more coal-fired power stations and higher air pollution. With the rising heat, schools could be closed for weeks in some places to protect children. This affects parents, who may have to stay at home to look after them, which has an effect on the workforce and productivity. Elderly people die sooner. People get angrier more easily.
Around the world, there are countless other examples of similar knock-on effects, and of the drip-drip consequences of global warming. The point is that societies are thinking about climate change wrongly. Too often, there is a sense that what’s happening is temporary, that the long period of wet weather in the UK or the heatwaves in Asia are statistical blips or short-term aberrations. They may be the case, or it may not. What’s certain is that the weird weather will have strange and unexpected consequences.
It’s not the big events that societies should focus on, but the multiple small ones, which are probably interlinked in some obvious and not-so-obvious ways, and which will lead to a cascade of difficult and hardto-manage outcomes. These small events don’t even need to be extreme or especially unusual, just persistent and widespread in their impact. That’s the new normal.