TalkClimateChange

We’ve had a long cold winter in many parts of the Northern Hemisphere, which has got me thinking: what if the world cools off and returns to the temperatures of our great grandfathers, or even worse, we start sliding even lower?

This is purely a hypothetical exercise - I am not saying there is any basis for this other than my own curiosity as to the effects. But I can’t help thinking what would happen if the temperature starts trending lower and we move into a prolonged cooling period. We are still going to have a different climate, just not the differences we expected.

So I am wondering how that would impact us and what does it would mean to our society?

If the entire underlying motive for all the actions taken to date in the arena of global warming mitigation vanishes over the next five years, we will be confronted with a whole new set of legacy problems to deal with. What will the main effects be, given the current state of the situation in regards to mitigation to stop global warming? I tried to come up with some broad generalities as to not get to technical and boring.

Mitigation Backlash

Trillions of dollars have already been spent on tackling climate change as a result of a warming world. Much more is on the books to be spent in the near future - someone will be held accountable. You cannot waste that much money and not have some sort of responsibility for it.

Standing governments will fall due to backlash from their mitigation taxes and policies; we could also see a divide in bodies such as the European Union and resistance to its regulations moving forward. Political turmoil and finger-pointing politics will paralyse countries as politicians attempt to salvage their reputations and support rather than reacting to the new reality.

We have driven food commodity prices up 40% with our energy policies. We have artificially inflated fossil fuel prices and tightened supply as big producers look to cash in before we move to alternatives. These prices will not ease as fast as they rose - the effects on the impoverished and the developing nations will be severe. We have created a divided global political atmosphere with countries taking sides on the issue. Nearly everything bad that has happened in the last decade has been blamed on the temperature increase; from storms to armed conflict. Without the spectre of global warming looming as the central imperative of these issues they will all need to be addressed.

The Future World

Our future generations may be fighting to feed a rising population on a shrinking food agriculture land base, and so doing be forced into bidding for food on the open market as agriculture for fuel land use will remain high. The oil and gas supply will have been diverted to emerging economies by contract and so there will be far less on the market. There is approximately equal demand for supply today, but that is changing, and with each litre of bio-fuel the supply gets diverted. We will be committed to the bio-fuel from agriculture path, and there will be no turning back. Future generations could be dealing with deep divides between nations on the uneven energy playing field, with countries struggling to pay for the expansion and maintenance of renewable infrastructure, or having to subsidize energy from renewable sources to be competitive in the global market. They could also be dealing with the crisis of individual energy and food costs rising higher than ever before, and this will create an increasing divide between economic classes. They would feel the divisive ravages that tend to follow when someone or some group in a population has caused economic distress on everyone by convincing them that they were right - these people will be held to account using society’s tools of stereotyping and discrimination.

However, perhaps the ultimate casualty will be the general mistrust in the scientific community that may lead to less science, rather than more. The United Nations ability to function will also be called into serious question having promoted the policies that left the planet in such a state.

Yet on top of all that, the mantle of Global Climate Change would not vanish, because the climate would be changing, just not in the way we had predicted. I can already hear the call for a complete change in our society to combat the ultimate threat of a cooling world. We love our causes.

Can we reconcile these debits in our ledger of history against the whole new set of challenges we face in a cooling climate? I do not know. Good thing this is just hypothetical, just like all the effects discussed that will happen as a result of a warming world.