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Insurers Munich Re believe that, by 2060, the cost of our changing weather will outstrip the total value of commodities and services produced by the global economy. Documents by United Nations officials completed in mid-October reveal that the number of people in the world struck by natural disasters has doubled over the past decade. Economic losses have more than trebled.
At almost the precise point the Earth Centre conceded nobody was interested, nature unleashed a sequence of global calamities. Four violent hurricanes took turns to batter Florida and the Caribbean; Bangladesh reeled from the most ferocious flooding in recent years; even the great glaciers of the Tibetan Plateau, spanning a quarter of China's giant landmass, were found melting at a rate that would make survival this century a miracle. The most extreme temperature increase the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts is 5.8C this century. It may sound modest - we've all wallowed in 30C and, like Schellnhuber, got the tan to prove it. Yet an increase of half that would be enough for the ice sheets that encase Greenland to begin melting faster than they can be replaced, threatening a rise in sea level that could inundate much of south and eastern England; the recognisable lifestyles of millions depend on such distant waters remaining exactly where they are. Such scenarios convince Sir David King, the government's chief scientist, that global warming not only poses a threat greater than global terrorism, it is the biggest obstacle facing civilisation for 5,000 years.
Bjorn Lomborg offers a rather different assessment. The Danish statistician, whose book The Skeptical Environmentalist provoked outrage by daring to doubt climate change or in fact that the planet was in a poor state, has grown increasingly influential. Tackling HIV, the planet's chronic water shortages and unfair trade issues should take priority over a threat that is inherently long-term, he argues. His questioning of the risk of global warming is now on school curricula and governments call him for advice. Russia is not known to have sought Lomborg's views before ratifying the Kyoto protocol, the international treaty to reduce climate change gases. The move made Vladimir Putin an unlikely ecological saviour and saved the treaty from imminent collapse. Yet the planet's biggest polluter, the US, remains a seeming advocate of Lomborg's with its refusal to come on board. A previously unpublished map drawn up by Schellnhuber, to persuade the US to take climate change seriously, revealed that a sizeable chunk of Yorkshire could vanish in just over 50 years.
Millions along the coast from Hull to Norwich to Colchester to Southend-on-Sea, as well as the capital itself, could find themselves underwater. 'Britain's power came from the coastline and provided the ability to trade and defend itself against enemies. But now the sea could turn into a curse, its wonderful coastline is posing major problems,' says Schellnhuber.
So, too, the nation's once enviable infrastructure: London cannot cope with new-style monsoon showers and, for that reason, the Thames could upstage the Don as one of our most polluted rivers. Outrage greeted the 600,000 tonnes of excrement that slipped into the famous waterway in west London after the capital's sewers were overrun during one violent downpour, yet new figures reveal that since April an amount of untreated sewage enough to fill the Royal Albert Hall 120 times over has flowed into the Thames. And now 95.5 per cent of our rivers are in danger of failing new targets on pesticide poisoning and the destruction of endangered wetland habitats.
Across the capital, concern is being focused on the glinting metal barrier that safeguards the city from destruction. When the Thames Barrier opened just over 20 years ago it was closed three times that year. In 2003 this rose to a record 19 shutdowns. Soon it will offer no protection. On either side of the barrier are rolling fields which, for centuries, have remained unsettled for fear of being swept away. Yet amid warnings that flooding can only worsen, these vast flats that lie beneath high-tide level are the government's chosen site for tens of thousands of homes.
For some, the failure of the Earth Centre lent credence to the claims of woolly thinking that has blunted the ideology of Britain's environmental movement. It is an accusation repeated as the Greens face their greatest conundrum at a time when the earth contemplates its gravest threat.
If climate change is man-made, then reducing carbon-dioxide emissions becomes imperative. However, powering Britain in a manner that preserves our largely cosseted lifestyles without imperilling the planet is not that simple. The one proven source of electricity that does not exacerbate climate change is the enduring nemesis of the green ideal: nuclear power. Yet the reality is that Blair's green revolution is stuttering: less than three per cent of our electricity comes from the wind, sun and sea. In addition, Britain's main supply of electricity will soon expire, the North Sea's once-plentiful reserves of gas effectively drained in little more than a decade.
For their part, the dirty power stations that drove the Industrial Revolution are no longer tenable; their predilection for coal is what brought Britain to the brink of climate change in the first place. And so a fading nuclear vision, punctured by persistent safety and financial concerns, suddenly burns bright again. For many environmentalists such a move is anathema. Some of the Greens' greatest heroes have risked accusations of betrayal. James Lovelock, who coined the Gaia hypothesis, the notion that earth is sustained by the actions of living things, is among those delight
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