or why wholesale capitalism will not save the world...







At a time when all of the world should be aware of, and trying to mimimise and reduce our global greenhouse gas emissions, it seems in fact, that the industrialised and westernised countries are actually increasing the load they are placing on our environment. The call for biofuels for example, which sounds so laudatory initially, is resulting in large tracts of forest being cut down to make room for the growing of more grain products. In a similar way the demand for soy based products has also resulted in wholesale slashing of indigenous forest in countries like Brazil and has been instrumental in destroying huge areas of Amazon rainforest and is encouraging still further deforestation.

Here in New Zealand the growth "industry" is dairying. Overseas prices for our milk and milk products doubled in the last year and our country's 11,000 dairy farmers are set to reap the riches. Fonterra, our country's biggest company collectively owned by 95% of dairy farmers estimated that each kilogram of milk solids (10 litres of milk produces about 1kg of milk solids) that farmers produced would be worth $6.40NZ for the year ending June 2008. Last year the farmers had got $4.46NZ a kg.  This means that an average Kiwi dairy farmer will get more than $200,000NZ extra this year and the country's economy an additional $2.4 billionNZ.

Needless to say farmers are tripping over themselves to convert to dairy farming. Sheep farming is out. $6.40 per kg for milk solids is a whole lot more attractive than $3.70 per kg for lamb. However the expansion into dairy will come and is coming with major detrimental effects and stresses for the environment and Fonterra is not picking up the tab. As the picture above shows, deforestation of native bush in order to create more pasture is one of the first effects, for example more than 60,000ha of forest is being converted to dairying just north of Lake Taupo - that's an area about the size of the lake itself.

Deforestation in itself causes a rise in greenhouse gas emissions.

Add to that, that 38% of all our greenhouse gas emissions in New Zealand comes from the ever-increasing herds of dairy cows and you should see where I am coming from. Herds of dairy cows are New Zealand's biggest contributor to global warming. This is a a very different scenario to other western countries where industrial emissions are their largest contributors. If New Zealand only kept enough cows to supply meat, dairy products and leather goods to ourselves this would all be sustainable, but dairy has now become our biggest industry. It accounts for 20% of our exports, and injects $8 billionNZ into our economy.

The New Zealand Reserve Bank Governor Alan Bollard had this to say. "In large part, the recent gains in dairy prices can be traced back to a basic imbalance between global demand and supply. Global demand for protein has been on a structural uptrend for some time. Demand for protein is very income sensitive and rising income levels in emerging markets have led to improvements in diet, incorporating more meat, eggs and milk. In recent years, the strongest growth in consumption of dairy products has come from emerging Asian markets, particularly China."

Hayley Moynihan, Senior Analyst, Rabobank Food and Agribusiness Research, says the past ten years have been a "honeymoon" period for the New Zealand dairy industry – with dairy conversions, record production levels, the formation of Fonterra and the emergence of new processors, topped off more recently by stellar international commodity prices. Rising oil prices have also had a positive impact for New Zealand’s dairy exports. The resulting increase in wealth in the Middle East has seen this region grow to account for 18 per cent of total dairy exports. "As oil income drives wealth, people are consuming more dairy products. There appears to be a strong correlation between WMP imports to the Middle East and oil prices. Domestic production in the Middle East is increasing, but this is not expected to keep pace with demand growth. Rabobank expects demand for dairy products from this region and North Africa to grow at around five per cent per annum through to 2010," said Ms Moynihan.

However, none of this benefits the Kiwi consumer. A recent visit to the local supermarket saw me paying $4.99NZ for a pound of butter (it was $2.20ishNZ a couple of months ago). The prices of cheese, milk and any other associated product is rocketing skywards as well. The cheapest 1kg of cheese I can buy currently is $11.99NZ. Fonterra charges us the same prices as it can sell product for overseas - why should they sell for less, they say. Well I can think of a reason or two.

Water is a finite resource...

The district of Canterbury has the driest climate in New Zealand, uses 58% of our country's water and already has 70% of our irrigated land. Canterbury is not a suitable area for dairy farming (it takes 1000 litres of water to produce one litre of milk), but since 1991 cow numbers in Canterbury have quadrupled to more than 650,000 cows and there are projections that this could double within the next decade. Already many lowland rivers are reduced to thin threads and underground aquifers are being sucked dry as farmers demand more of the groundwater for irrigation and use in sheds. There is now strong criticism levelled at  the regional council, Environment Canterbury (Ecan) which, until recently, have allowed thousands of water permits to be taken out. In some places water is being taken out more quickly than the underground aquifers can recharge themselves.

My regular readers may remember my blog titled "Murky Waters"  about the commercialisation of some Canterbury water and realise more, why I was so annoyed.

In Conclusion

The environment and health costs are not transmitted through markets for the goods produced. Runoff containing effluent and fertiliser contaminates water resources. Methane and nitrous oxide emissions damage the air we breathe, the land we walk on, the water supply that we drink from. The costs of environmental degradation and human health effects are borne by society at large - the consumers and the tax payers and the future generations who get to pay for the cleanup, perhaps not only by money alone, and on the global scale all of us.

The bottom line here is that we human beings no longer have the luxury of the people in the past who for their immediate benefit cleared forests and killed whales. We cannot continue to just exploit all our resources as though there is no tomorrow - or it may well happen that there will indeed be no tomorrow. We need to be running our world with the primary goal of the common good for all to the forefront of our minds and not to be only concerned with the individualistic profits of the corporate sectors which benefit so few of us.

Corporations carry out some of the most horrific human rights abuses of modern times, but it is increasingly difficult to hold them to account. Economic globalization and the rise of transnational corporate power have created a favorable climate for corporate human rights abusers, which are governed principally by the codes of supply and demand and show genuine loyalty only to their stockholders.

Though it isn't easy, we can check the power of corporations—and citizens around the world are stepping up to do it. Global Exchange developed this list of some of the world's worst corporate abusers to illustrate that on issues as diverse as assassination, torture, kidnapping, environmental degradation, abusing public funds, violently repressing political rights, releasing toxins into pristine environments, destroying homes, discrimination, and causing widespread health problems, familiar companies like Dow Chemical, Coca Cola, Caterpillar, Lockheed, Philip Morris, and Wal-Mart play a big role. Now we need you to take action!

Please check this link to Flavour's site and read...

Sir Nicholas Stern is Head of the Government Economic Service and Adviser to the British Government on the economics of climate change and development. This link takes you to an HM Treasury site where you can download his entire review.

Left unchecked, global warming will bring greater weather extremes, plant and animal extinctions and rapidly rising seas warns the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Climate change is already making its mark according to this latest report which cites melting glaciers, rising average temperatures and sea level rise.

The book Hot Topic - Global Warming And The Future of New Zealand by our own New Zealand science writer Gareth Renowden takes a serious look at how global climate change will affect the islands of New Zealand and the people who live here. "The world is warming twenty times faster than the most rapid changes that have happened in recent times, such as the warming that took place coming out of the last Ice Age", he states.

This all may seem irrelevant to people outside New Zealand's shores but New Zealand is a microcosm of the sorts of things that will happen world wide as our planet warms up. It is no good continuing to unproductively argue over whether global climate change exists or not, we need to be planning for the future now.

Currently Gareth Renowden owns a small farm in the Waipara wine district where he grows truffles, olives, and grapes. The main grape grown in Waipara currently is the Pinot Noir, but thirty years from now Waipara may have become to warm for these cool climate vines, instead, Gareth Renowden's book predicts that the Waipara growers may well need to change to warmer climate grapes like merlot. He also suggests that the way in which growers produce their crops is also likely to change and expect to see a trend towards "carbon labelling" on products like wine, as growers focus on reducing their carbon emissions.

According to Gareth Renowden, the temperatures that we are seeing today are in fact twenty or thirty years behind where the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is. This is because there is a lag in the warming of the world caused by the oceans which take a longer time to warm up. Therefore no matter what we do now, the planet will continue to warm over the next twenty to thirty years and adaptation to warming is a critical part of the response to this unavoidable climate change.

However carbon emission reductions made today will help to slow the rate of global warming thirty years from now. He therefore supports MainPower's proposed wind farm at Mt Cass.

While fresh water will become an increasingly precious commodity, the rates of future sea level rises come with potentially big impacts not just on New Zealand but on all low-lying Pacific Island nations. Global warming in the Pacific is likely to result in "climate refugees".

The Global Warming Outlook For Canterbury, NZ (from the book)

Over the next few decades warming is likely to continue at 0.2 deg C per decade. The warming will be greater in winter. The likelihood is that the eastern parts of our country will warm slightly more than the west.

As the average temperature increases, the probability of extreme events - either cold or hot - also increases. Heat waves will be more frequent and there will be fewer frosts.

The increase in the westerly flow of wind, (westerlies are hot, dry, and gusty winds), will have an important impact on the regions rainfall. By the end of this century Canterbury (which already has a dry climate) will be drier.

By the 2030's there will be water availability problems on all of the east coast of the South Island. Under a low to medium warming scenario, the risk of what is currently a one in twenty year drought may double in the easternmost parts of Canterbury.

Rising sea levels may accelerate coastal erosion and flood groundwater systems with seawater.

A Prepackaged Plasticised Planet


People who have been reading my blogs for a while will be aware that towards the end of May my household was adopted by the cute wee kitten, (Simba), in the above pic.

It has been a quite few years since we have been owned by a cat and so I have discovered big changes on the pet food shelves at the supermarket. In the old days you just bought tins of Jellimeat or Jellichicken or some meat from the butcher.

But now the shelves groan with stacks of tiny tins of Feasties or Gourmet tins even huge bags or cartons of dried biscuit thingies. You can even buy special packs of food especially designed for kittens or even for your geriatric cat.

I guess thats all cool BUT there is one thing that I do find offensive and that is the plethora of SINGLES packs.

These are ONE meal sized packs of cat food (pretty flash looking food too I must say) but ALL THAT PACKAGING!!!! FOR CAT FOOD EVEN!!!

ALL THAT PLASTIC!!!

This is at a time in our evolution when we really need to be concerned with the future of our planet and whether it will be able to sustain human life past 2050 even, and when right now it is timely to review our huge landfills and carbon emissions.

We really need to be reviewing the wastage of our resources. If a cat got two meals a day from singles packs and if you think about how many people keep cats who may be potentially feeding them from the ridiculous packets, it is mind boggling.

It is just as bad as the wastage of the throwaway plastic bottles from bottled water and the throwaway disposable nappies on the bums of the western babies.

There is a tablespoon of oil in each disposable nappie. (diapers if you live in the USA).

Are people so lazy now they cannot wash a bottle or a nappie or store a tin of cat food????

And what really gets me mad is that a large ingredient in the manufacture of plastic is OIL.

In Iraq, soldiers and civilian people are being killed because of the Western greed for OIL.

Women, Men and Children are being killed so that we can continue to feed our cats from Singles Petfood Packs, drink bottled water from Disposable Plastic Bottles, and use Disposable Plastic Nappies on our babies.

PS: Simba gets fed a combination of tinned meat, (one tin lasts a week and goes into our recycling bin), and from a large sack of dried food, (he hasn't got through the full sack yet, but when he does its recyclable).
                                                      ~

Sometimes Life Is Full Of Sh*t And We Just Have To Deal With It


the proto-type disposable nappy(diaper)composter

"One Use Nappies"

Linda, (aintmisbehavinat48), inspired this shitty blog ... she said "Well I won't tell my take on the diapers cuz even though I hate changing diapers I do not want to save and clean cloth ones with my Granbaby. EEEEEEWWWWWWEEEEE!!!!! Stinky! LOL! with the disposables you can hurry and close it up and throw it away. Sorry! That one I can't help and I know how bad they are for our environment. Hopefully they will come up with a recyclable diaper soon huh?"

I too am a mother, and also a grandmother and from this perspective I reckon two of the best inventions for mothers are the automatic washing machine and "disposable" nappies .

Only thing is, they really should be called "one use" nappies (or diapers if you prefer), because the way they fill up our landfills and add to the carbon emissions on our planet certainly has nothing to do with the word disposable.

So we do need to deal with and that is where creativity comes in (and Natalie)...

"TRULY Disposable Nappies"

Here in New Zealand we have a national science project competition for school kids where the kids have to identify a problem and figure out a solution. In 2003 fourteen year old Linwood High School student Natalie Crimp, concerned about the environmental mess created by so-called disposable nappies filling landfills around the world, identified the problem for her science project and came up with a method to produce good quality garden compost from disposable nappies.

(we bring them up smart over here)

Enter Karen Upston, a Rangiora mother of two, who, inspired by Natalie's work set out to trial a commercial-scale, viable nappy composting unit (you see it in the above pic).

The Process
(this whole section is copied from Karen's website)

The Nappy Store is operating a small home-based plant in Rangiora, with the goal to provide an environmentally friendly solution to the problem of growing landfill waste in New Zealand.

How can Nappies be turned into compost which is safe to use on my garden?

R5 Solutions have developed the commercial composting prototype unit 6.5m long and 1.2m wide to conduct this trial.

The combination of the microbes created by rotting organic waste, the continual mixing and aerating of the compost by the HotRot System and the temperature created by the compost has proven to eliminate the harmful pathogens. As a result the final compost is clean and "safe enough to eat." These contributing factors are monitored and tested daily.

The unit will be (is) set up at The Nappy Store, 63 River Road, Rangiora, and can compost up to 500 kg of waste per day, or approximately 2000 nappies.

As nappies are very high in moisture content, we will also be feeding the unit wood chips and house hold food scraps in order to reduce the moisture level, and ensure “Premium” grade compost is coming out the other end.

Part of the ongoing process is to thoroughly test the quality of the compost in laboratories BEFORE it is available for purchase.

Nappy Composting Update - July 5th 2007
Trial will cease from 12noon Thursday 12th July 2007

Since we last updated you on the composting trial we have made some significant steps forward in regards to a purpose built commercial nappy composting plant, we have had three separate meetings with both the Waimakariri and Hurunui councils. Thank you to the many of you who responded to our questionnaire last month. These results were collated and results have helped us with making some future decisions.

We now have many processes to go through in order to develop the plant and move forward into the future for all of us.

The trial that we have been conducting out here was to not only develop the right 'recipe' for composting of nappies, but to also work through the logistics of how this service could work on a commercial scale.

We have involved over 200 families, six pre-schools, our local maternity hospital, elderly residents and a Christchurch Branch of the IHC.

As you are aware this was a privately funded trial and we have still received no financial support to date. We are now five months down the track and are extremely happy with the trial results and the conclusions that we have made. The trial was proposed to last for 3 - 6 months and as we have achieved all of the objectives that the trial was set to obtain from 12noon on Thursday the 12th July 2007 the trial will cease.

While we would love to continue providing the service as we currently are, we now need to put our available time, money and energy into the development of the new plant so that we can make this service available to the many interested families and businesses we hear from daily.

Over the last five months we have composted approximately 450,000 nappies which equates to 56 tonne. Our new plant will be able to compost up to 20,000 nappies per day or 2.5 tonne. This will be able to increase with demand up to 60,000 nappies or 7.5 tonne per day!

This has been an amazing trial to be involved in and we thank R5 Solutions for their incredible assistance and support. This trial would not have been possible without the loan of their Prototype HotRot unit and there technical knowledge and advice. No matter what the weather was or time of the day or night they were always here to help when we needed them. We have only just begun and amazing journey ahead with there team and look forward to what the future holds for us all as individuals and as a community.

This trial has attracted world wide interest which show the demand for this kind of service. If we don't use this opportunity to leap forward and take the next step we can only imagine what the future will hold for our children and grandchildren.

                                                   ~
October 2007 Updates

After I wrote the above blogs I did see on TV that the company R5 Solutions were making larger nappy composters for places overseas to run as a commercial operation. I thought that at least one was going to Canada. So I went to Google to see if I could find updated information for you.

This came from the R5 Solutions website.

First HotRot to North America

The first HotRot composting unit has been installed in North America.

A HotRot 1811-based system has been installed at the New Era Technologies composting facility in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Product from the HotRot unit will be compared with material processed through the current aerated container-based system with the expectation that the HotRot unit will produce a more stable product faster.

This installation in Canada will also provide an opportunity to test HotRot in severe winter conditions.

The unit has been installed outside but has been provided with a “winterisation package”, incorporating additional insulation and an air-to-air heat exchanger for recovering energy from the discharge air and using this to pre-heat injected air.


Where will you find us next?

Itinerary for Future Expos and Trade Fairs

26 - 30 Oct 2007 Eco Asia: Hong Kong http://ecoexpoasia.tdctrade.com/
Dr Peter Robinson, Marketing Manager of HotRot Exports Ltd and Jeff James, Director of LAM, will be attending. They will have a booth.

13 – 17 November 2007 National League of Cities Convention: New Orleans, Louisiana
http://www.nlc.org/CONFERENCES___EVENTS/citiesexpositions.aspx
Dr Peter Robinson, Marketing Manager of HotRot Exports Ltd and Gerald Tibbo, Director of Hatch, will be attending. They will have a stand, and would enjoy meeting with you.

28 – 29 November 2007 Canadian Waste and Recycling Symposium: Vancouver, Canada http://www.eventseye.com/fairs/trade_fair_event_6582.html
Dr Peter Robinson, Marketing Manager of HotRot Exports Ltd and Gerald Tibbo, Director of Hatch, will be attending. They will have a stand, and would enjoy meeting with you.

09 – 12 February 2008 United States Composting Conference: Oakland, California http://www.compostingcouncil.org/index.cfm
Dr Peter Robinson, Marketing Manager, or George Pottinger, General Manager/Director of HotRot Exports Ltd will be attending. We will update you closer to the time.

The impact on our environment

It takes one full cup of crude oil to make the plastic for each "disposable" nappy.

1.3 million trees a year are felled for NZ babies in disposable nappies.

Disposable nappies use 3.5 times more energy, 8 times more non-renewable raw materials, 90 times more renewable materials than reusable nappies.

It takes as much energy to produce one disposable nappy as it does to wash a cloth nappy 200 times.

One baby in disposables will produce 2 tonnes of solid waste!

Disposable nappies take up to 500 years to decompose in landfill sites and can harbour up to 100 different types of virus, including live polio virus from vaccines.

                                                              

(because sometimes things can have simple solutions)

The Institute of Rural Sciences at the University of Wales in Aberystwyth has begun a three-year study into the effectiveness of various plant compounds in reducing methane gas emissions from livestock.

Initial results from this study shows cows fed on the pungent cloves produce only half as much greenhouse gas as they normally do.

If these claims prove to be true, garlic could have a massive effect on New Zealand's efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Livestock on New Zealand farms, especially dairy, accounts for a massive 55 per cent of the total greenhouse gas emissions from New Zealand, which incidentally, is a totally different scenario from most other western countries where more usually, industrial emissions are the biggest contributors to global warming there.

For example in Wales, where this research is being done, agricultural methane emissions account for just 5 per cent of the total in Wales, but any reduction in New Zealand would go a long way towards meeting Kyoto Protocol targets.

So you can see why this is really flash news for Kiwis!

The manager of New Zealand's Pastoral Greenhouse Gas Research Consortium,Mark Aspin, said the news had grabbed everyone's attention.

"If it," (feeding cows with garlic), "reduces methane by 50 per cent, then that is quite an astounding result," he said.

The research team at Aberystwyth are also testing whether garlic tainted the milk or the meat from dairy cows and cattle.

The amount of methane being emitted was measured by keeping animals in plastic tents.

Aspin said if garlic proved to be an effective way of reducing methane emissions, the next question would be how to administer it to cows efficiently.

Ben Abernethy, the farm manager for Lyn-Lea Farm near Rangiora, said he would give garlic a go if there was an easy way of feeding it to the cows.

"That is what people are bagging dairy farmers for, so if there was some way of fixing it, then I would give it a go," said Ben.

Each New Zealand dairy cow produces a whopping 82 kg of methane gas each year, and beef cattle 55.7 kg.

I live right next door to cows, (thats some of my cow neighbours in the above pic) and trust me, you can smell the methane.

I may start feeding them garlic surreptitiously over the fence.

(this blog was first posted on the 17th November 2006)  - pictured is the dairy farm behind my house.

Emissions in Aotearoa

In Aotearoa/New Zealand cows apparently account for about 40% of greenhouse gas emissions. Which would explain why a couple of years ago our New Zealand government as a part of implementing the Kyoto Protocol wanted to impose a per head of cow tax on farmers to pay for research on how to reduce these bovine emissions. It seems typical of human endeavour when confronted with a problem to try to change nature to suit rather than altering our own behaviour.

We could instead look at the causes which underlie the behaviour.

We keep these large herds of cows because they provide us with milk, cream, butter, cheese, and other dairy-based products and they also provide us with meat, and with leather for shoes, lounge suites etc. However, New Zealand’s quite small population of currently approx. four million people doesn’t require us to own so many cows. We could sustain our own population on far less cows which would reduce those greenhouse gas emissions immediately.

Historically however, (and into current times, despite some diversifying), New Zealand’s economy and its wealth have been built upon our exports of frozen beef and lamb and then dairy products ever since the advent of reliable refrigeration, allowing the first refrigerated ship with a frozen meat cargo to depart from our shores on the 15th February 1882, arriving in London after a voyage of ninety days.

But long before Aotearoa/New Zealand existed in the globalised world of commerce, the stage was already set. Trading ships of sail and steam, aided and abetted by the militaristic might of European and Western Imperialism, traversed the globe. Whole community groups were enslaved and exploited, even made extinct, lands were confiscated, colonised, and deforested, their minerals extracted, their cultures reduced to commodities in the name of capitalism and even democracy.

Globalisation

Globalisation today is most often just a proxy colonialism where the forces of Imperialism, otherwise known to us in their guises of trans-national corporations including all oil companies, and companies like Monsanto which now own or control at least 40% of the world‘s food supply, the World Bank, the World Trading Organisation (WTO), the International Monetary Fund (IMF) etc, undermine the sovereignties of our individual countries and cultures.

Global Warming

Moreover, differential use of resources by nations, regions, and social classes leads to uneven and unequal contributions to problems such as ozone depletion, global warming, and attendant environmental destruction. The industrialised nations have less than 25% of the global population, but account for about 75% of the world’s energy use, two-thirds of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane and over 90% of chlorofluorocarbons which damage the ozone layer protecting the earth. The effects are global in impact however as is demonstrable in the hole in the ozone layer above Antarctica created by the aforementioned chlorofluorocarbons mostly from the Northern Hemisphere, (which has the largest westernised population base). The hole in the ozone layer is now 3 times the size of the USA.

And we do nothing. Or virtually nothing. Some of our governments have ratified the Kyoto Protocol, (still only a first step in dealing with the problem), and are working to implement the necessary changes while other governments still refuse to read or understand the science behind global warming and the absolute necessity to make changes to save our own human lives from extinction.

In fact, whole groups of concerned people, such as the Greens Party in New Zealand for example, have more often been maligned, written off as tree -huggers, and even abused, especially when long-seeing environmental concerns clash with short-term economic prospects as most often they seem to do. Companies have the language all their own way, the language of money and commercial gain, they can cite job creation, economic growth, increased GDP’s etc. Its much harder to argue the value of trees left standing in the ground when they could be cut down to manufacture pencils thereby contributing to the capitalist pedestals of Growth and Economic Benefit even.

The Stern Review on The Economics of Climate Change

On the 30th October this year the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change was released. This document has importance because for the first time it is written by an economist with credibility in the mainstreamed world of capitalist democracies and trans-national corporations. Sir Nicholas Stern is Head of the UK Government Economic Service and Head of the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change. He was knighted for 'services to economics' in June 2004. Previously, he was Chief Economist and Senior Vice President at the World Bank, Washington D.C. 2000-03 as well as Chief Economist at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development 1994-99. The Review, which reports to the Prime Minister and Chancellor of the UK, was commissioned by the Chancellor in July last year.
 
Sir Nicholas said: “There is still time to avoid the worst impacts of climate change, if we act now and act internationally. Governments, businesses and individuals all need to work together to respond to the challenge. Strong, deliberate policy choices by governments are essential to motivate change. But the task is urgent. Delaying action, even by a decade or two, will take us into dangerous territory. We must not let this window of opportunity close.”

The first half of the Review focuses on the impacts and risks arising from uncontrolled climate change, and on the costs and opportunities associated with action to tackle it. The Review emphasises that economic models over timescales of centuries do not offer precise forecasts – but they are an important way to illustrate the scale of effects we might see.

And the effects thus illustrated are (as quoted from the report):

“Most climate models show that a doubling of pre-industrial levels of greenhouse gases is very likely to commit the Earth to a rise of between 2 – 5°C in global mean temperatures.

This level of greenhouse gases will probably be reached between 2030 and 2060. A warming of 5°C on a global scale would be far outside the experience of human civilisation and comparable to the difference between temperatures during the last ice age and today. Several new studies suggest up to a 20% chance that warming could be greater than 5°C.
If annual greenhouse gas emissions remained at the current level, concentrations would be more than treble pre-industrial levels by 2100, committing the world to 3 – 10°C warming, based on the latest climate projections.

Some impacts of climate change itself may amplify warming further by triggering the release of additional greenhouse gases. This creates a real risk of even higher temperature changes.

Higher temperatures cause plants and soils to soak up less carbon from the atmosphere and cause permafrost to thaw, potentially releasing large quantities of methane. Analysis of warming events in the distant past indicates that such feedbacks could amplify warming by an additional 1 – 2°C by the end of the century.

Warming is very likely to intensify the water cycle, reinforcing existing patterns of water scarcity and abundance and increasing the risk of droughts and floods.

Rainfall is likely to increase at high latitudes, while regions with Mediterranean-like climates in both hemispheres will experience significant reductions in rainfall. Preliminary estimates suggest that the fraction of land area in extreme drought at any one time will increase from 1% to 30% by the end of this century. In other regions, warmer air and warmer oceans are likely to drive more intense storms, particularly hurricanes and typhoons.

(what we would experience in real terms is increased events such as Hurricane Katrina because of more moisture evaporating into the rain clouds, and in drier areas we would experience more extreme drought such as that being taking place in south-east Australia right now- my insert)

As the world warms, the risk of abrupt and large-scale changes in the climate system will rise.

Changes in the distribution of heat around the world are likely to disrupt ocean and atmospheric circulations, leading to large and possibly abrupt shifts in regional weather patterns.

If the Greenland or West Antarctic Ice Sheets began to melt irreversibly, the rate of sea level rise could more than double, committing the world to an eventual sea level rise of 5 – 12 m over several centuries.

(this would mean we would have to move all our coastal cities and populations and some of the smaller islands would simply be engulfed by ocean, creating urgent refugee crisies’ - my insert again)

The body of evidence and the growing quantitative assessment of risks are now sufficient to give clear and strong guidance to economists and policy-makers in shaping a response.”

Well I surely hope they do respond.

The Stern Review on Climate Change