|
A climate for change? by Richard Scrace Editor, Green World The Official Magazine of the Green Party.
|
||
|
Last summer I stood straddling the mountain border
between France and Spain. To my right a glacier swept down, the sun
bringing forth glints of icy deep blue from its crevasses. Ahead and behind mountains as far as I could see, many of them snow-capped even in
August.
But only a few weeks later I read that even the highest ice-fields will not last 100 years. The massive ice-fields of Tibet and China will melt. As the waters pour forth, there will be floods and then drought, but unlike in natural weather cycles, there will be no eventual return to normal. The ice-fields cannot reform on a man-warmed planet. Once the mountain ice is gone, rivers will start to dry up and ocean levels will rise, threatening coastal cities. Even Everest is 1.3 metres lower than it was in 1953, when it was first scaled by Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay. On a previous trip to the Caucasus, my guide showed me where the main glacier had reached in his grandfather's day, some five miles below the point where we eventually entered the ice.
|
|
Without ice-melt to fuel the rivers, life in the mountains will shrink to
whatever can survive in the desert to come. The upland meadows, rich with
flowers and insects and all the other life they support, will be gone.
In the mountains, I can feel a sense of wonder and delight, but will our civilisations harsh touch reach even there and so rob our children of that wild beauty? Our society can change. The changes our society can make to use less carbon can be surprisingly straightforward. In this issue we read that Jenny Jones in London has been encouraging the Metropolitan police force to use bicycles, while Matthew Selwood in Oxford reports about Zero Emission Developments (ZEDs). And as we went to press, Russia had at last signed the Kyoto Protocol. Will the US be next? * Highest icefields will not last 100 years, Jonathan
|
