Climate change is not as new as we think {writer: Piet Coetzer}

For modern man, dramatic and even cataclysmic climate change is a new experience; but in the planet’s history stretching over million of years, it is nothing new. In fact, climate change more than likely played a vital role in the evolution of man, which is the best equipped species in history to respond successfully to drastic changes in climate patterns. But because of a highly polarised approach, mankind may be squandering the talents that evolution has given it to deal with the climate change awaiting us.

For more than one hundred years after Charles Darwin in 1859 published his then revolutionary work on evolution, On the Origin of Species, the accepted wisdom – or theory, if you will – among palaeontologists was that evolution came from within species and is driven by competition for resources. According to this view of the world, the planet is first and foremost a survival-of-the-fittest environment.

In his fascinating book, Born in Africa: The Quest For The Origins Of Human Life, Martin Meredith recounts how, during the 1970s, Elisabeth Vrba – a South African palaeontologist working for the then Transvaal Museum – discovered evidence of dramatic evolutionary change in history that had occurred about 2.5 million years ago. In sudden profusion, new species had emerged and old ones had disappeared which, she believed, was due to a marked change in vegetation cover.

“The conclusion that Vrba reached was that environmental change was more likely to promote the formation of new species in groups of dietary specialists than in those groups that were generalists,” writes Meredith. “What caused such marked change 2.5 million years ago, she maintained, was an abrupt shift in global climate.”

He describes how she went on to develop a radical theory about the impact of climate change on evolution, that abrupt changes in global climate had led to evolutionary spurts of speciation of African mammals including hominids.

“Indeed, she argued, their response to climate change represented the principle engine of evolutionary change”, in what she called “the turnover pulse hypothesis,” adds Meredith.

In 1998, an American palaeontologist and evolutionary biologist at the University of Hawaii at Manoa published Children of the Ice Age: How a Global Catastrophe Allowed Humans to Evolve. In this book, he argues that a biological revolution had taken place as a result of climate upheaval 2.5 million years ago, which he calls the “catastrophic birth of humankind”.

As Meredith writes: “Few scientists were willing to support the idea that the driving force of climate change was enough to explain the emergence of humankind. In a statistical analysis examining the relationship between evolutionary and climate patterns published in 1993, Robert Foley, a Cambridge biologist, concluded that climate was an important element, but not the only one. Another such element is competition, both within and
between species.”

The details of the debate among the experts in this controversy-prone field of science are not all that important, but again, in the words of Meredith: “What appears certain is that Homo arrived at a time when the world was experiencing another dramatic change in climate, leading in Africa to a cooler, drier environment in which forests there shrank further and savannah grasslands expanded.”

Dealing with the inevitable

Evil prospers when political leaders who are lacking conviction make appeasing noises, as occurred in 1938 when a lack of assertiveness and strong political leadership toward Nazi Germany might have contributed to the outbreak of World War 2. Herein lies a lesson for the politics surrounding climate change.

Speaking at London’s Chatham House, Huhne made the extraordinary claim as he urged leaders to act now to avoid a global catastrophe that could bring a further rise in global temperatures, frequent natural disasters and unprecedented levels of famine and drought. (Source: www.climateactionprogramme.org, July 2011)

His strong statement came in the wake of the destruction in Somalia, which is linked to climate change.

It is unlikely that Mother Nature would change her rhythm maintained over millions of years, and that humankind would be able to stop the climate change which, as it has done many times in the past millions and thousands of years, is apparently presently in an accelerated phase.

Another established fact is that human activity is adding to the momentum of climate change and, in the process, cutting down on the time available to prepare appropriate responses to the changes to ensure the survival of the species.

The present highly polarised debate and politicking between those who believe humankind can turn around climate change and those who deny the reality thereof, is probably wasting the time humankind has available to work on efficient responses to the planet’s inevitable climate future.

It can be argued – and is already by some experts – that we are squandering resources on efforts to try and reverse climate change instead of cutting down on our accelerating practices, and further concentrating on developing effective, appropriate and holistic responses.

Not all the responses that are likely to be called for – in this greatest challenge in modern man’s relatively very short history – will be scientific, physical or even economic.

Few aspects of human life on the planet are likely to go untouched by it.

In an article for openDemocracy.net, under the title “An extreme climate: dangers and needs”, Paul Roger, professor in the Department of Peace Studies at the University of Bradford, writes about that which could await us: “The near Arctic region signals advance warning to the planet of what is to come, like the canaries that coal miners used to keep as a warning of potential explosions.

“At the same time, the core problem that climate change heralds (is)… that it could increase hugely the social and economic stress on the tropics and subtropics, including most of the world’s most impoverished and marginalised societies.”

He further argues that the reason we have not yet made a breakthrough in terms of radical action is the following:

• The first and all-embracing one is that the current political and economic systems are badly equipped to facilitate the effective mitigation of climate change – “which requires economic transformation in the short term, with all its immediate impact to avoid much greater problems in the long term”.

• The second is political, with the lost decade “at the start of the 21st century, when the world’s most powerful state was in the hands of climate-change deniers – all the toxic legacies of the George W. Bush administration, that may well turn out to be the worst.”

• The third factor is systemic, namely “the fact that responding to climate change requires an integrated approach that embraces environmental, economic and security aspects in a single analysis.”

Kevin Cleaver, associate vice president of the International Fund for Agricultural Development, suggests that more can be done by governments and business to help developing countries in the interim period between extreme events.

He said: “Although governments and their development partners cannot make the rains come, they can mitigate the impact of these recurring droughts in East Africa by helping farmers and herders build resilience to these inevitable meteorological occurrences.

“Much greater investment in agricultural research, an area long neglected by both governments and donors, is essential to develop and diffuse drought- and disease-resistant food and fodder crops, which are better able to withstand moisture stress.”

But, back to Huhne and his Adolf Hitler statement.

Since the economic crisis of 2008/2009, the issue of tackling climate change has been pushed back within political agendas, with Huhne believing that leaders need to reprioritise the issue and double their efforts.

“From 2013, there will be new political leadership in the world’s major economies. We hope to have put the global recession behind us. The stars may be more closely aligned in favour of a binding legal deal,” he said.

“Climate change is getting less political attention now than it did two years ago. There is a vacuum, and the forces of low ambition are looking to fill it.

“Giving in to the forces of low ambition would be an act of climate appeasement,” added Huhne.

For his vision to be realised, countries need to agree on whether the best solution for tackling climate change is either an extension to the United Nations Kyoto Protocol, which ends next year, or a new broader initiative.