The progress of science has brought immeasurable benefits; but as King pointed out this success has brought problems in its wake. As more people live to maturity, more children are born (for at least two generations, before rising educational standards cause birth rates to level off). Inexorably, by the middle of this century, the Earth will have to support nine billion human beings and no amount of contraception programmes and education will make much difference. Moreover, the rising expectations of life among those coming generations will make their impact even more environmentally burdensome.
For each of the many problems that we face as a result of climate change, we may develop technical fixes; but any we adopt should not make matters worse. For example, the response of the Australian State of Victoria to its continuing (10-year) drought has been to build desalination plants. One third of the State’s water now comes from these – whose demand for energy contributes to global warming and further exacerbates the drought. Clearly this is not sustainable. Water will be central to the future sustainability of world population. Fifty percent more crops will need to be grown worldwide to feed the multitudes, so getting “more crop per drop” will be essential. Maintaining “ecosystem support” in this new world will mean much more than saving coelacanths or preserving polar bears. We will have to think not of individual species but whole functioning ecosystems to help keep the planet working for us rather than against us.
In King’s view, climate change takes politicians into unfamiliar – though not wholly untrodden - political territory. They have acted concertedly before, though on smaller scales, and environmental gains have been made. Controlling car exhausts with catalytic converters is making photochemical smog a thing of the past in cities. The Montreal accord led to the banning of CFCs in response to the observed loss of ozone at the poles. When the Han Dynasty desertified China’s Loess Plateau through over-cultivation, they moved the population to the Beijing region and changed to more sustainable farming practices. Now, the modern Chinese government is replanting these badlands so quickly that the whole area (whose catastrophic erosion gave the Yellow River its tincture) should be rehabilitated by 2020.
Clearly then, we can react in two contrasting ways to the challenges ahead. We could allow individual states to use their strength to secure the resources they need by appropriating it from others. Such “resource wars” – of which those in Iraq may one day be seen as the first – can only be temporary solutions because they are ultimately unsustainable. But responding more imaginatively to oil shortage, for example by developing sustainable biofuels (as in Brazil) could render such conflicts obsolete and make transport energy sources carbon neutral within decades.
In a complex system even our “positive” responses can create negative repercussions when undertaken without coordination. The US’s decision to add bio-ethanol to motor fuel (motivated less by environmental concern than the need to subsidise US farmers while lowering dependence on foreign-sourced energy) raised world cereal prices by two or three times. This adversely affected many of the poorest people worldwide, who could no longer afford their staple.
Misplaced concern over new scientific methods among developed nations also impacted upon the most vulnerable, King said. The EU ban on genetically modified (GM) crops had been a “lifestyle choice” that had, by its bad example, caused starvation in countries where the luxury of such choices did not exist. The resulting worldwide political resistance to using GM technology had delayed the introduction of flood-resistant rice strains by 13 years. And so, when floods in rice-growing areas coincided with the price hike caused by US biofuel policies, rice harvests were needlessly decimated, forcing prices higher still.
Tackling climate change in all its manifestations will require the globalisation of government. But while industries globalise naturally, governments only do so reluctantly. Visionary leadership – particularly from the US and China – is now essential if we are ever to reach a solution. It will take a repeat of the sort of trans-national idealism that inspired the best minds after two world wars and brought us the United Nations, King concluded. That, surely, would be nothing if not a positive outcome from the challenge of an otherwise implacable common enemy.