Welcome to hell
SPECIAL REPORT: 100-YEAR WINTER ON BRITAIN’S DOORSTEP! TEMPERATURES RISING FASTER THAN AT ANY TIME IN HISTORY! ONE MILLION OF THE WORLD’S SPECIES EXTINCT WITHIN 50 YEARS TIME! WELCOME TO HELL…
December 2019, and Britain has been placed under martial law. A curfew is operational and the use of electricity is regulated. Parliament was dissolved when the ice storms came in November and the Cabinet has retreated to nuclear bunkers under Whitehall. Not that they’d have been able to coordinate anything from Westminster; the Houses of Parliament are shrouded in colossal snow drifts and the tower of Big Ben is half buried in tightly packed snow and ice. A convoy of army snowmobiles snakes up the frozen Thames, but the majority of British troops are stationed in ‘Glasgow City Fortress’, where their orders are to repel the swarms of Scandinavian asylum seekers – by deadly force if necessary.
Across the Pond, Los Angeles and many large conurbations have been flooded with water, as the relentless, torrential rain lashes the Western States, and the Sierra Nevada mountain range shrugs off its age-old blanket of snow. Police search and rescue boats scour the former streets for survivors – and supplies that can be put to use feeding and clothing the millions of displaced residents now sheltering in the Hollywood hills. Meanwhile the Hague, the centre of European policymaking, is now a desolate wasteland. The droughts of the previous five summers grew longer and more unforgiving by the year and, when oil prices quadrupled in a quarter and Holland’s famous canals dried out, the domestic commercial infrastructure simply collapsed.
Down in the Southern Hemisphere, UN troops wage war with private armies and mercenaries in the streets of Luxor as they attempt to secure water supplies for industries owned by their billionaire paymasters. The Battle for the Nile has begun…
Secret report
The opening shots for a new Hollywood blockbuster perhaps? Sensationalist propaganda produced by a crusty rabble of monged-out Eco Warriors? Er, no. The above scenarios are based on key findings in a leaked Pentagon-funded report on climate change. The document explains that abrupt climate change could bring the planet to the edge of anarchy as countries develop a nuclear threat to defend and secure dwindling fuel, food and water supplies. Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine, Siberian winters and widespread rioting will erupt across the world - in as little as twenty years’ time.
Policy is being drawn up in Washington to defend the nation against Armageddon, while across the Potomac River, Senators such as James Inhofe are publicly insisting, "that global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people and the world." It seems that Ol’ Ma Nature is about to crack open a 10 million gallon barrel of whupass and Bush’s most trusted advisors are secretly bricking it. Which means you should be too.
The creeping killer
Mark Lynas, author of High Tide: News from a Warming World (published by Flamingo) explains how we got ourselves into this monstrous pile of environmental caca: “We got into this mess through having burned billions of tonnes of oil, coal and gas, as well as chopping down most of the world's forests. We now know that there are more greenhouse gases left in the atmosphere from all this burning than there have been for millions of years. Temperatures are rising faster than at anytime perhaps in human history. And much, much worse seems to be just around the corner.”
As for the Siberian winter that the report warns will hit Britain between 2010 and 2020; curiously, this too is caused by global warming. The UK is kept relatively mild in the winter by a blanket of warm air brought to us from the tropics by a branch of the Gulf Stream. But if global warming continues to melt major ice sheets, that supply of warm air could come to an abrupt end. The Stream relies on a sensitive "conveyer belt" action, which could be switched off – quite suddenly – if it becomes diluted by fresh water from the melting ice-sheets. When this happened last time, it brought about the Ice Age. Worryingly, NASA has measured catastrophic increases in the speed of some of Greenland's largest glaciers, and melt-water on the Greenland ice sheet in 2001 was twice that recorded 10 years ago.
"It will be quick," says Dr Terry Joyce, an oceanographer from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, USA. "Suddenly one decade we're warm, and the next decade we're in the coldest winter we've experienced in the last 100 years, but we're in it for a 100 years." Dr Bill Turrell, from the Marine Laboratory, Aberdeen, who has measured a drop in the Gulf Stream’s salinity (the first warning sign that the current might collapse), agrees: "These changes are fundamental. They are substantial. They are going to impact our climate and the climate our children have to live in."
The facts
You’ve probably heard the ‘official opinion’ of some old duffer from a seemingly worthy meteorological society in the media, scoffing at the very notion of global warming and putting the recent hot summers down to freaks of nature, but consider the evidence: A study released by the World Meteorological Organization last year announced that the world is experiencing record numbers of extreme weather events. 562 tornadoes crushed the United States in May 2003 – far higher than the previous monthly peak of 399 in June 1992. And a pre-monsoon heatwave which hit India caused peak temperatures of between 45 and 49 degrees Celsius. Switzerland sweltered in its hottest June in at least 250 years, while in the south of France average temperatures were between 5 and 7 degrees warmer than the long term average. England and Wales experienced its hottest month since 1976 (and our hottest day ever); Australia was bitch-slapped by the longest drought in recorded history; and many parts of China and East Asia were hit by severe flooding. As Mark Lynas puts it: “How much more evidence do we need?”
And this environmental carnage is accelerating. According to the National Climatic Data Center, America has sustained 58 weather-related disasters (in which costs reached or exceeded $1 billion) between 1980-2003 – 49 of them occurred since 1988. The total cost of this meteorological mayhem is conservatively estimated to be $220 billion (not adjusted for inflation). In the UK, the Energy Savings Trust submitted a white paper to the government in which they calculated that 180,000 businesses, 1.8 million homes and 3.5 million acres of land are at risk of flooding as sea temperatures rise. Half the properties are in the London region of the Thames – which house 750,000 – are in jeopardy, and the cost is put at £222bn.
Death and devastation
But of course, it’s not the financial cost that’s the most sickening price to pay for climate change. Literally tens of thousands died in the examples above, but much worse is to come. In a report published last year called: Extinction Risk From Climate Change, boffins from the UN Environment Programme calculated that a million of the world's species could be driven to extinction as soon as 2050 - a quarter of animals and plants living on the land could be forced into oblivion. And as Dr Klaus Toepfer, the head of the programme, explained: "If one million species become extinct... it is not just the plant and animal kingdoms and the beauty of the planet that will suffer. Billions of people, especially in the developing world, will suffer too as they rely on Nature for such essential goods and services as food, shelter and medicines".
This is where the war, rioting and mass migrations come in. If a country gets flooded or suffers a drought, the crops won’t grow, the farmers will go bankrupt, their staff won’t have jobs, their suppliers won’t have anyone to sell to, shops won’t have any cheap food and pretty soon the whole economy will be right royally shafted. History tells us that the nation will then begin fighting with itself or lashing out at neighbouring countries to claw back an income.
In a March 2004 report by Barry Smit and Robert McLeman from the University of Guelph, Canada, they stated that "Climate-related disruptions of human populations and consequent migrations can be expected over coming decades [which will] have implications for the security community." The study pointed to countries such as Pakistan and Bangladesh (whose projections of rainfall suggest there will be increased land degradation and flooding) as prime candidates for mass exodus and anarchy in the streets.
Fortress Britain
That said, it won’t just be migrants from South Asia that’ll soon be pounding at our door. According to the Pentagon report, whole populations will be sent scattering all over the globe: “violent storms” will smash coastal barriers rendering large parts of the Netherlands uninhabitable by 2007; “Riots and internal conflict” will tear apart India South Africa and Indonesia; immigrants from Scandinavia will “seek warmer climes to the South”; 400 million people in subtropical regions are at “grave risk” of flooding and crop failure; and access to water will become a major battleground, with the Nile, the Amazon and the Danube all mentioned as “high risk”. Soon, rich areas such as the US and Europe will become “virtual fortresses.”
What can be done?
“Stopping global warming is incredibly simple,” says Mark Lynas, who’s travelled the globe documenting evidence of global warming. “All we have to do is eliminate fossil fuels like oil, coal and gas from the energy equation. The problem is that society is addicted to these fuels – everything we do from agriculture to transport is based on them. Renewable energies can take up some of the slack but probably not all of it – we need a change of lifestyles to less growth-oriented and consumerist patterns.”
A nifty idea for shit-sure, but one that’s unlikely to appeal to most in the Western World – unless ol’ JC graces us with his presence once again. There’s always a case for cashing in, though. In the short term, fears of conflict, economic crash and unemployment usually send shares tumbling; in 2002 such a triple-whammy sent the US into a spiralling decline. However, 20th century history indicates that disaster almost always represents a stock-buying opportunity. As Jeff Fisher of Fool.com explains: “Unfortunately, there are plenty of wars in history that teach this lesson. If you had bought stock at the outset of any major war in the past 90 years, you could have achieved above-average returns, and often in short order.” The sort of companies worth investing in? Arms manufacturers, water purification companies, security agencies, flood prevention consultants and manufacturers, producers of non-perishable foodstuffs, survival and camping retailers, umbrella makers…
The bottom line
So, is abrupt climate change and the scenarios discussed really possible? Or are the ten foot lizard men pushing our buttons by breeding fear and getting us to panic buy and wage costly wars? Final word goes to author Mark Lynas: “Everything we know about the long-term behaviour of the climate through ice ages and so on is that rapid catastrophic change is not just possible, but likely. It's important to understand that this Pentagon report is not science per se - it is about visioning different plausible scenarios, such as the shutting down of the Gulf Stream. This could certainly happen – it has done before, many thousands of years ago through natural processes. But this time it will be humanity's fault, and the problem is we've got no clear way of predicting it, and won't be sure until it has already begun to happen and the changes are irreversible.”
“Once judgement day comes, it's going to be too late – just
as the Pentagon scenarios foresee, it will bring mass conflict, starvation
and ecological collapse. Better not to go there.”
END
View as PDF (1.3Mb)
