Tuesday, February 01, 2011

What Does Global Warming Have to Do with Hosni Mubarak?

Any farmer will agree that rain is a double-edged sword.   Receiving rain is vital to growing crops but only when it arrives at the right times and in the right amounts.  Too much rain at the outset can leave the farmer unable to plant a new crop.   Once the crop is in, too much rain can cause it to rot in the ground.   Even after the crop is grown, too much rain can prevent the farmer from getting onto the field to harvest the crop.   Too little rain during the crop cycle can prevent germination, stunt growth or simply burn out the crop.   Too little rain is the lesser of the problems thanks to the irrigation options made possible by rivers, lakes and aquifers - until they're exhausted.

When it comes to agriculture, global warming is a real bugger.  It's not just that some places get quite a bit warmer.   It's that global warming can sharply alter precipitation patterns, triggering floods and droughts of increasing frequency and severity.   A warmer atmosphere carries more water vapour, itself a greenhouse gas.   That water vapour is liquid water that used to be on the surface, some of it available for irrigation.   Yet what goes up must come down, somewhere.   And when it does come down it's more likely to be in flood-triggering torrents than were experienced before current levels of global warming arrived.   When that's coupled with particular weather events, like the central Pacific La Nina we're currently experiencing, you get massive storms and mega-flooding in places like Australia, Sri Lanka and swathes of South America.

These rains and floods have all but erased from the public consciousness the droughts of last summer.  We tend to forget these things as soon as the next shiny object appears before our eyes.  Yet those droughts did occur and led to widespread crop failures.   And now, thanks to the droughts and floods, we're about to see food shortages and possibly all-time record food prices that, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization warns, could just be here to stay.

So, global warming is already contributing to lasting food shortages and high food prices.   You know what compounds that?   Income inequality compounds that which is why the tyrannical regimes we prop up in the Middle East are right now rushing about to implement food relief programmes fearing they might just be the next Tunisia.  It's a game they've played before.   They learned it from the Pharaohs.   Yet the game has changed in one critical way.   Food shortages and high food prices once were cyclical problems.    They were periodic.   Now the UNFAO predicts they may be turning into the norm in some parts of the world.

The old regimes in these regions aren't equipped to survive such destabilizing stresses.   As I've explained at end before, disparity, inequality is much less of a problem in times of growth and surplus.  It becomes a huge, even dangerous threat to governments and societies in times of protracted, even permanent shortages.

When planning is based not on growth but on allocation or rationing it shifts the focus from opportunity to inequality. People look for a lot more equality in sacrifice than in prosperity. We can become very egalitarian when we perceive that to be vital to our self-interest.

As reported yesterday in Britain's The Telegraph, these same despotic rulers will soon have to deal not only with chronic food shortages and price problems but also with severe freshwater shortages.   This is a region that the West considers strategic to its interests that is falling to the impacts of climate change that we aren't even interested in trying to arrest.   Yet we know that we could stop all CO2 emissions today and it would not prevent climate change impacts from substantially worsening for the rest of this century.

So there you have it.   The industrialized West has beset the Middle East with the destabilizing impacts of anthropogenic global warming undermining the stability of that region and jeopardizing our strategic interests in it.  It's not just the Middle East that's going to pay the price.    A lot of others, including us, will deal with the blowback from this.

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