Coping with a cold climate

Press, 6 March 1978, Page 16

Coping with a cold climate

By

ANTHONY TUCKER

in the “Guardian”

With Scotland staggering under the costs and losses of the most devastating winter snowfall for half a century, and the west of England too crippled to do more than gasp for aid, it is something of a surprise that the climatologists of the world have not pointed out, acidly, that the warning was given but ignored. Mind you, the warning was difficult to interpret and, in its simplest form, implied that the weather patterns—which for the best part of a century had seemed stable—would become increasingly variable.

Climatic change does not mean the subservience of all weather patterns everywhere to a simple cooling of warming trend: it means violent swings to extremes laid unpredictably on to the grand pattern that is seen historically as the Ice Ages. It is relevant (but nobody knows how relevant) that astronomers in the no less snow-smitten United States have this (northern) winter observed, for the first time since the development of modem spectrographic instruments. a fall of 6 degrees centigrade in the temperature of the photosphere of the sun. That may or may not mean that less energy is being radiated, and in any case it may be only a transient effect. But the fact is that the climatic systems and local weather patterns on Planet Earth are inseparably coupled to the energy output of the sun and that—whatever relatively minor effects may also be involved—the great Ice Age cycles tel! us that over long periods of time the sun’s output has varied. The American solar observation is ominous. < It is an extraordinary thing that, although the international debate on climatic change on man's possible contribution to global changes through various emissions from industrial and fossil-fuel burning activities, and on the enormous practical and economic importance of such changes, has been going on for almost two decades, it has somehow failed to become woven into political and social thinking. Maybe the jokers will still be quipping cheerfully when the ice closes over them or the drought renders barren their sources of food, but it is high time for political and planning machines to take on board the unpalatable fact that failure to harden al! policies against climatic extremes will represent a gross failure of responsibility. Those involved—and that means all of us—can make a start on understanding the complexity of the climatic problem by browsing through one or both of two books published recently.

Both are the brainchildren of Dr John Gribbin, a physi-cist-journalist now at Sussex University but with connections at the Unit for Climatic Studies at the University of East Anglia, and perhaps the most active propagandist in Europe for research into climatic change and its implications. One is a primer (“The Climatic Threat” Fontana paperback) which every politician and civil servant should read forthwith, for without this they will be regarded as ignorant; the other is a more detailed survey, based on a collection of expert statements, of present scientific knowledge about climatic change and the kind of research we should be supporting “Climatic Change,” (Cambridge University Press).

If the highly complicated and still ill-understood fluctuations in atmospheric circulation and energy, which result in such disasters as drought in the Sahel or India, the loss of the crucial grain crops in the steppes of Russia, or—on Britain’s tiny scale—the tragic isolation and loss of people or livestock through “freak” conditions, are too technical to invite articulate public involvement, the effects themselves drive home the long-term implications. World agricultural productivity will become less stable: centralised systems will become more vulnerable, and, increasingly, there will be a need to insulate communities — both rural and urban — against the effects of extremes. For it hardly matters at

this stage whether the industrial activities of mankind add to the cooling trend which the long-term solar fluctuations will undoubtedly impose, or help to ameliorate it. It is the short-term violent variation which affects the human condition. And insulation is not just a matter af providing adequate emergency services or of putting 25 centimetres of expanded polystyrene between you and the weather.

It is a far more complicated matter of reappraising all the nation’s vital systems from agriculture to energy distribution. At the moment the great industrialised temperate belt of the Northern Hemisphere is an obsolescent evolution of wanner, more stable and balmy climatic times. If we stay that way we will die.