The warnings about climate change have been loud and clear for decades. Yet the industrial juggernaut has gathered speed year after year. Oil companies have brought politicians with bribes and donations to their political parties to down play the effects of burning fossil fuel on the climate. Due to our inaction we will have more crop failures, more droughts and more political unrest.
In August 1974, the CIA produced a study on “climatological research as it pertains to intelligence problems”. It warned of the emergence of a new era of unpredictable weather, leading to political unrest and mass migration (which, in turn, would cause more unrest). The new era the agency imagined wasn’t necessarily one of hotter temperatures; the CIA had heard from scientists warning of global cooling as well as warming. But the direction in which the thermometer was travelling wasn’t their immediate concern; it was the political impact. They knew that the so-called “little ice age”, a series of cold snaps between, roughly, 1350 and 1850, had brought not only drought and famine, but also war – and so could these new climatic changes.
A few months before the CIA report was issued, the US secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, had addressed the UN under a banner of applying science to “the problems that science has helped to create”, including his worry that the poorest nations were now threatened with “the possibility of climatic changes in the monsoon belt and perhaps throughout the world”.
The report argued, the world ignored this warning, as the global population continued to grow and states made massive investments in energy, technology and medicine. Thus the population grew out of control and with it more emissions and more wars on a compounding interest to the climate load.
Meanwhile, the weird weather rolled on, shifting to a collection of west African countries just below the Sahara. People in Mauritania, Senegal, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger and Chad “became the first victims of the climate change”, the report argued, but their suffering was masked by other struggles – or the richer parts of the world simply weren’t paying attention. As the effects of climate change started to spread to other parts of the world, the early 1970s saw reports of droughts, crop failures and floods from Burma, Pakistan, North Korea, Costa Rica, Honduras, Japan, Manila, Ecuador, USSR, China, India and the US. But few people seemed willing to see a pattern: “The headlines from around the world told a story still not fully understood or one we don’t want to face,” the report said.
We have inherited a climatic mess left to us by our forefathers. We can either choose to change our ways or carry on with our climatic changing activities. Sweep it under the carpet and go on that 12 hour flight to America burning tons of fossil fuel, carry on investing in companies that produce oil and gas.