Time to face global warming

How are Dunedin and Otago's civic leaders preparing the city and province for the encroaching challenges of climate change?

Not very well, argues Jocelyn Harris.

"Council forecasts show debt rising to $354 million in 2010-11, largely due to planned borrowing to pay for big-ticket infrastructure items and the planned $198 million Otago Stadium," reports the Otago Daily Times.

Council staff, it says, "have already highlighted the effects of the spending plans, leaving little room for additional expenditure of the 10-year period" (13.3.09).

That means that there will be no money to stave off climate change over the next 10 years, or to deal with its effects.

Likewise, an editorial in the ODT says the Otago Regional Council is displaying "extravagant and worrying attitudes" about its "vanity project", the planned $30.4 million harbourside building.

"Spending on the building will mean less money available for other purposes", it says (19.3.09).

Those purposes must include sewerage and water, to be sure, but the most imperative of all is how to respond to climate change.

I'm no scientist, but it's easy enough to find out what's going on.

Stories about climate change appear almost every day in the ODT, the Listener, Time, the Guardian Weekly, the New Scientist and other reputable journals.

Some models predict that the planet will be cooked as early as 2050.

We cannot simply avert our eyes from the bad news.

Five-year-olds will only be 45 when the world as we know it comes to an end.

How can we protect the next generation from the worst effects of climate change?

Where is the sense of urgency among our civic leaders, who have the power and the money to take effective action?

Here are some recent headlines plucked pretty much at random.

On March 10, the ODT published an article about respected scientist James Lovelock.

Climate change, he says, will wipe out most life on Earth by the end of this century, and mankind is too late to avert catastrophe.

Higher temperatures will turn parts of the world into desert and raise sea levels, flooding other regions.

Crop failures, drought, and death on an unprecedented scale could cause the population of the world to shrink from about seven billion to one billion by 2100 as people compete for ever-scarcer resources.

Efforts should therefore be focused, he says, on creating safe havens in areas which will escape the worst effects of climate change.

The good news is that leading scientific journal New Scientist says that those areas include New Zealand.

But the bad news is that some models predict that the planet will be 4degC warmer as soon as 2050, well within the lifetimes of our children and their children (28.2.08).

"Climate guru calls for `drastic action'," writes Robin Mackie in The Observer (21.1.09).

Jim Hansen, a distinguished climatologist, has pinned photographs of his three grandchildren to his office wall.

They remind him of his duty to future generations, children he believes are threatened by a global greenhouse catastrophe that is soaring out of control because of soaring carbon dioxide emissions from industry and transport.

Barack Obama's administration, says Hansen, offers the world the last chance to make things right.

If it fails, global disaster - melted ice caps, flooded cities, species extinction and spreading deserts - awaits mankind.

Coal-burning power-plants he especially singles out as factories of death.

So how can we eliminate all coal-burning heating plants in Dunedin?"

Melting glaciers imperil world's water," says the Sunday Star-Times (18.2.09).

Nearly 2 billion people in Asia will suffer water shortages as global warming shrinks glaciers on the Tibetan Plateau.

Temperatures in high-altitude Tibet rose by 0.32degC every 10 years between 1961 and 2007, well above the world and national average, says a report in the ODT (9.3.09).

Meanwhile, down in the Antarctic, more rain is speeding glacier melt and nudging up world sea levels, which could exceed 150cm this century, says the Guardian Weekly (2.01.09).

That would swamp many major cities of the world, as well as low-lying parts of Dunedin.

What would make Dunedin's leaders care enough to act? "Earth teeters at its physical limit," says John Vidal in the Guardian Weekly (19.12.08).

Last year, he writes, it may have dawned on governments that hell-for-leather, Western fossil-fuel-based, car-centred growth only ends in social and ecological disaster.

The drop in oil prices may give us a chance to "climate-proof" our economies, says Vidal. But is it too late?