Poor prognosis for our planet

The world has about a decade left to sort out the climate-change mess. John Collee sees lessons from his medicine days as parallels for the future of our planet.

Every patient with an incurable illness will ask how long they have to live. The answer goes something like this: “No one can say how long you may live, because every individual is different, but focus on the changes you observe and be guided by those. When things start changing for the worse, expect these changes to accelerate. So the changes that have occurred over a year may advance by the same degree in a few months, then in weeks. And that is how you can judge when the end is coming.”

Apply that thinking to climate change. When An Inconvenient Truth opened in 2006 it was generally supposed we had a window of two or three decades to deal with climate change. Last year that shrank to a decade. Last month Australia’s chief scientist, Penny Sackett, told a Canberra gathering that we have six years to radically lower emissions, or face calamitous, unstoppable global warming.

Six years. Given that this problem is usually described as a process unfolding over centuries, how can it be that things have spun out of control in such a short time? The worst case scenarios of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, dismissed a mere three years ago as remote possibilities, are now given very short odds: the death of the Murray Darling, the drying of southern-east Australia to a tinderbox, the increased flooding in low-lying areas, the defrosting of the Siberian tundra, the dramatic loss of rainforest and the break-up of the Antarctic ice shelf. All these things are happening as predicted but – if you believe the evidence – at several times the expected speed.

I do believe the evidence. Which leads me, personally, to the bleak conclusion that the human race is stuffed. The current financial crisis is merely the curtain raiser to a grand opera of social and ecological collapse. Our children – forget our grandchildren, I’m talking about my own kids, aged 14, 11 and 9 – are going to live in a world in which major cities are flooded, fertile plains become deserts, populations run out of food and water, rivers run dry, fishing grounds become dead zones, our rainforests and living coral reefs become curiosities of history.

Sydney Morning Herald