In today’s FT (February 23)…
There is a curious sentence in the excellent article “The power of Europe’s rebel farmers” by Alice Hancock and Andy Bounds (FT Weekend, February 10). They write that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has warned of “‘substantive agricultural production losses’… if temperatures continue to rise.”
If? To quote the famed American diplomat George Kennan, writing in 1948 in another context “we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and daydreaming.”
Every year we pour more carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere – almost 70% per annum more since policymakers first started mouthing the pieties 35 years ago. This year atmospheric concentrations will be 425 parts per million, 100pm more than when I was born in 1970. As charted by the United Nations Environment Program’s annual “Emissions Gap” report, the chasm (or abyss) between our alleged ambition and the physical requirements to keep temperature increases even below an unsafe 2 degrees above pre-Industrial levels. grows remorselessly, every year.
There is no “if” – or but – about it. Temperatures will increase, with all the consequences we can imagine, and more than a few we cannot. Might the FT lead the way in replacing “if” with “as” in its coverage?