Strangely Warmed

A few days ago, when the canal system failed (a 'once in 50 years' occurrence, according to Government spokespeople), the first thing I thought of was the 'global warming' phenomenon. It's instructive to take a careful look at the long view.

Yes, it's been getting warmer and more watery of late. Should you be concerned?

The answer is clearly 'yes'. But can we do anything about it?

The answer is clearly 'yes' — but here, we don't actually know what can be done in practice, and what the ultimate effect will be. It's probably the greatest game-changer of all, as far as human life for the next few decades or centuries is concerned. The problem is that the problem is too complicated for simple explication. We can't teach it in schools with any degree of the required nuance. We can only use extreme positions. It's all very unsatisfactory.

It is a strange new world we live in, that has such people in it. Misquoting the Bard helps, I suppose.

Heatwave

Where I'm sitting right now, the average temperature is about 33°C and the droning of grasscutting equipment fills the distant air. It's a vengeful onslaught presaging a really hot summer. Or so you would think, if you hadn't just had a really cold rainy few days prior to this.

It's hard to think about higher average temperatures when you've been having the occasional bout of record-breaking lowest-ever local temperatures. It's hard to think about global warming when everyone seems to be wondering about nuclear fireballs. It's easy to think of American strategy in the Middle East as an aberration of foreign policy.

But the average temperature is going up, the desire for nuclear playthings likewise, and American strategy in the Middle East is something we've come to expect from certain kinds of administrations. Back in the latter part of the 20th century, America backed India with arms shipments (which India then used to absorb the smaller states of Goa, Hyderabad and so on) then switched to Pakistan as a counterbalance (and supplied them F-15s, believe it or not). Thus, the two big South Asian democracies (yes, India is indeed the largest democracy in the world) were put at each other's throats to the benefit of the US military-industrial complex.

Who do you think is to blame for the fact that both Pakistan and India have some kind of nuclear capability? Maybe China; it's convenient to blame them. But the first arms traders to make a killing in South Asia were the British, followed by the Russians and Americans. And the killing hasn't stopped.

I think the problem that Americans have in seeing all this is that Americans don't have a very detailed mental map of the world. The Onion's Our Dumb World: Atlas of the Planet Earth (73rd Edition) is a masterpiece of lampoonery directed at mainly American stereotypical perceptions. Unfortunately, the fragments which substitute for a mental map are indeed a lot like the funny bits lovingly assembled by The Onion's team.

And so outside my window, the heatwave continues. The haze rises off the ground, and you can see little of clarity beyond it. The drone of the grasscutting machines fills the air with white noise and green flecks. And everything hangs, uncertain.

50 Facts That Should Change The World

That's the title of Jessica Williams's book of powerful and intriguing truths. Others have summarised this list elsewhere. But sometimes it is also important to juxtapose various truths and see how they work with (or against) each other.

Truth #20, for example, says that cars kill two people every minute. Truth #22 says that 150,000 people are killed by global warming every year. Do some calculations. #20 will show you that 120 people are killed by cars per hour; 2,880 per day; 1,051,200 per year. In other words, cars kill almost exactly 7 times as many people per year than global warming does. And since cars also contribute to global warming, we should just eliminate cars!

Really?

Well, there are about 6.8 billion people on this planet today. I checked here. This means that approximately 0.015% of the world's population dies because of cars. And if you examine the ticker on that site, the rate of births far outweighs the rate of deaths from ALL sources of death. And nobody has bothered, as far as I know, to measure how many lives are saved by combustion-engine-driven transport every day.

If you were particularly callous, you might conclude that #20 and #22 do not matter as much as finding ways to provide a better life for those still living. But I'm not quite so callous, I think; as Donne wrote, "Each man's death diminishes me." Yet, I am also quite sure that most of us don't think of such things much. Even when we do, the breadth and range of vision required are too great for comfort, the ability to do significantly much seems too small.

The niggling voice of one Robert Browning, however, still speaks to me. He said, "A man's reach should exceed his grasp; or what's a heaven for?" Ah, that Browning. He bugs me all the time, an incurable optimist about humanity who also once wrote, "The best is yet to be; the last of life, for which the first was made."