Book Review – Forecast: the consequences of climate change from the Amazon to the Arctic

Like all stories, the climate change narrative can be told in different ways.

George Monbiot’s 2006 classic Heat3 addressed the task of reducing carbon emissions. Professor Monbiot applied the available science to assess the reduction in world emissions by 2030 necessary to keep the risk of runaway climate change to minimum levels. He then applied the concept (developed by concert viola player, Aubrey Meyer) of a personal carbon ration by dividing allowed 2030 emissions by the expected world population in 2030. The result of the calculation (0.8 tonnes of carbon) for the United Kingdom was that the UK would need to reduce its carbon emissions by 90% by 2030. (Australia would, on the same criteria, require a 95% reduction. Ethiopians, on the other hand, would be permitted to treble their use of carbon.)

Professor Monbiot then set himself the task of showing that the reduction could be achieved using existing technologies without reducing Britons to a subsistence lifestyle. While the need for focussed government policies was dramatic, Professor Monbiot’s conclusion was that the reduction could be achieved with one major exception. The ubiquitous use of air transport was simply not able to be maintained.

Stephan Faris is a freelance reporter who publishes, frequently, in magazines such as Time, The Atlantic and Salon. The primary focus of his reporting has been the developing world. He brings this expertise to Forecast. The chapters focus on particular pressures affecting particular regions of the world. The book is spiced with interviews with people whose lives are being affected by climate change right now. These experiences are then placed in the context of the regional and geo-political factors in which climate change will play out. The overall effect is that climate change is taken out of the realm of a theoretical debate. Through people’s lives, the reader is able to view the actual phenomenon.

The conflict in the Darfur region of Sudan is already the saddest example of climate change impacting in the context of local competition for resources. Since the world has had no difficulty in ignoring the tragedy of Darfur, there should be no difficulty in ignoring the climate change aspects of the tragedy. Mr. Faris, however, electrifies the reader in revealing underlying causes by presenting an interview from 1985 and relating it to present events. A 1985 interview by PhD student, Alex de Waal, with an elderly Arab sheikh, Hilal Abdulla, exposes the old man’s concerns with the way in which the old man relates his concern about the breakdown of old arrangements. These arrangements allowed the nomadic Arabs to move through the settled areas, in which the predominantly African farmers grew crops, grazing their stock without impinging on the plots in which the farmers grew their crops. The then unprecedented drought was leading to exclusion of the nomads from those areas in breach of the old agreements. Hilal Abdulla was sick with worry about what the future would bring.

Mr. Faris fast forwards to 2004 and the genocidal attacks of the Janjaweed militia in the same region of Darfur. The author reveals the name of the militia leader, a fact that might otherwise be of no interest. His name is Musa Hilal, the son of Hilal Abdulla. The fears of the old man had come true through the actions of his son and his followers.

Lest the reader suddenly become too empathetic with genocidal warriors whose actions have been shown to have underlying causes, the author recounts his interviews conducted in Chad with refugees from the conflict. Almost with one’s own eyes, the reader witnesses murder, rape and kidnapping; experiences children being torn from mothers’ arms, to be checked for gender and thrown to the ground if female and killed if male.

The Darfur example gives rise to a broader proposition. Climate change impacts on societies which have poor institutional coping mechanisms. It also impacts on societies which are already experiencing conflict over scarce resources. In this way, climate change is not simply a problem of changing weather patterns and rising sea levels. It constitutes a potential cause of repeated variations on the Darfur theme.

Mr. Faris visits post-Katrina New Orleans. He also talks to residents of Key West, part of Florida that intrudes well into the Caribbean. He examines the interaction between climate and the institutions which underpin economic life in the developed world. The threat of hurricanes has led to the costs of insurance against wind damage in exposed coastal areas rising beyond the ability of salary earners to meet those costs. Wind insurance is a pre-requisite to obtaining finance from banks and other financial institutions. The combination threatens to drive ordinary people out of Key West and to prevent their return or continued existence in New Orleans. Climate change is not an event of the future about which scientists warn. It is an economic player determining where people in the United States can afford to live. It is changing the social make-up and economic functioning of whole regions.

Growing grapes for wine is a finicky business. The details of micro-climate determine what grapes can be grown and the flavour of the wine which is produced. This explains why Mr. Faris uses Californian grape growers as his example of the impact climate change is having on agricultural patterns across the world. The various growers interviewed in Forecast share their observations of the way in which climate has changed in their area during recent decades. Grapes that could only be grown on south facing (sunny) ridges can now be grown on the northern side of the ridge. Grapes that could only be grown below a certain elevation can now be grown right up to the highest point of the same holding. And grapes that could only be grown in California are becoming possible to grow on the cooler hillsides of Oregon. As the wine growers point out, even the changes that might at first be thought to be favourable will, as they continue, force wholesale changes and many growers may be forced to abandon their current holdings (and wine making infrastructure) completely.

The most worrying sections of Forecast are those which discuss water allocation issues between India and Pakistan. (Gwynne Dyer’s 2008 book, Climate Wars, also published in Australia by Scribe, uses, as one of its defence planning scenarios, the aftermath of nuclear war over water between India and Pakistan.) The Kashmiri conflict is introduced through the recollections of Safia Azar, a thirty four year old, Kashmiri woman whose timber trader husband, Humayun, had been “disappeared” by Indian soldiers, some fifteen years earlier. The regional tensions which have given rise to that conflict and its myriad personal tragedies are likely, however, to get much worse as the glaciers which are the water source for the rivers that make agriculture production possible in both countries continue to diminish with increases in prevailing temperature.

This review has touched upon only a few of the backdrops to climate change explored in the book. Even attempts to reduce carbon emissions in the atmosphere operate against a back drop of existing resource shortages. The author makes this point by describing his visit to a re-afforestation project in eastern Uganda. Local farmers, whose land had been used for a tree planting exercise that was part of a carbon offset project for western airline travellers, had resisted the project. They took action in the courts and were successful in stopping the tree planting. They also took direct action removing the trees with machetes and replanting their crops.

Politicians tell us that climate change can be avoided by a little bit of fine tuning. The same politicians who tell us that the market and greed have placed us in a big sewer are prescribing a little bit of market and greed to prevent climate change from happening: our prime minister calls it a “Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme”.4 The economists, Stern and Garnaut, measure future Darfurs, with all their rape, murder and genocide, in small percentages of future GDP.  

Stephan Faris tells, in beautiful prose, a different story. He relates his own travel of 60,000 air miles to research Forecast. The carbon usage of that travel is another irony, another complexity, of the difficult battle to prevent and cope with climate change. The metaphor used by Mr. Faris to describe his own actions and those of others campaigning for action is apt to describe the operations of the Australian political process in the same area: “The world may have opened its eyes to climate change, but we’re far from taking effective action. We are like a doctor puffing a cigarette, flipping through a medical journal on lung cancer and hoping it won’t happen to us.”

Henry Rosenbloom at Scribe should be congratulated for bringing to Australian readers, within a month of its publication, elsewhere, another important book. Forecast deals insightfully with what is the most fundamental issue that we, as a polity, face.

Stephen Keim SC

Footnotes

1. Stephan Faris’ personal web site is at http://www.stephanfaris.com/. There is a Wikipedia entry at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephan_Faris.
2. Scribe’s web site is at http://www.scribepublications.com.au/. Forecast is published in the United States by Henry Holt and Company.
3. Published by Allen Lane, an imprint of Penguin. See http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2006/11/07/heat/