The Penguin History of the World

This awareness is evident in the attention given in recent years to the problem of ‘global warming’, the rise in average temperatures on the world’s surface, believed to be produced by changes in the atmosphere and stratosphere that affect the rate at which heat is dispersed and lost from it. The facts themselves were until recently in dispute, but in 1990 a United Nations conference at Geneva conceded that global warming was in fact a growing danger, and that it was largely a matter of the accumulation of man-made gases in the atmosphere. This, it was agreed, had in a century already produced a measurable increase in average temperature; climate was in fact changing faster than at any time since the last Ice Age. At present, the authoritative consensus is that human agency has been a major contributor to this.

Argument continues about the likely rate of further increase and its possible consequences (in, for instance, rising sea levels) while work began on the preparation of a framework convention on man-made climatic change, which was ready by 1992. Its main aim was the stabilization of levels of emission so that in 2000 they should still be at 1990 levels. At Kyoto in 1997 this was turned into a regulatory agreement covering the emission of all major ‘greenhouse’ gases (as they were called); it imposed levels of reduction for emissions and timetables that placed the main burdens on developed countries. So far 191 countries have ratified the protocol, which gives some reason for hope. But the United States has yet to agree to it, and the present aim of the signatory countries is a very modest one: to keep future global warming to less of an increase than two degrees centigrade in global mean temperature. Meanwhile, signs of the bad effects of human-induced climate-change multiply and the first attempts are already being made to seek legal remedies for damage caused by it in terms of flooding.

Two decades or so is hardly long enough to expect or find politically acceptable solutions to a problem of such magnitude. There seems to be no reason to assume that things will not get worse before they can get better, but, more important, also none that agreed solutions cannot be found. Humanity’s confidence in science has, after all, been based on real success, not on illusion. Even if that confidence is now to be qualified, it is because science has made it possible to do so by giving us more knowledge to take into account. It is reasonable to say that while humanity may have been producing much irreversible change since it successfully displaced the larger mammals from their prehistoric habitats, and if, consequently, some grave issues are now posed, the human toolkit has not been shown to be exhausted. Humanity faced the challenge of the Ice Ages with far poorer resources, both intellectual and technological, than it faces climatic change, with today. If interference with nature has led to the appearance of new, drug-resistant bacteria by mutation through natural selection in the changed environments we have created, research to master them will continue. What is more, should further evidence and consideration oblige humanity to abandon the hypothesis that global warming is mainly a man-made phenomenon – if, say, it were to become plausible to say that natural forces beyond human control or manipulation, such as those producing the great Ice Ages of prehistory, were the determining forces at work – then science would apply itself to dealing with the consequences of that.

Even irreversible change does not in itself warrant any immediate abandonment of confidence in the power of the human race to pull itself out of difficulties in the long run. Although we may already have lost some choices for ever, the arena within which human choice can be exercised – history itself – is not going to disappear unless the human race is extinguished. That humanity’s extinction should occur by natural disaster, independently of human action, is possible, but speculation about that is hardly useful (even actuarially) except over a limited range of cases (that the world should be hit by a monster asteroid, for example). The human being remains a reflective and tool-making animal and we are still a long way from exhausting the possibilities of that fact. As one scholar strikingly put it, from the point of view of other organisms, humankind from the start resembles an epidemic disease in its successful competitive power. Whatever it has done to other species, though, the evidence of numbers and lifespan still seems to show that human manipulative power has so far brought more good than harm to most human beings who have ever lived. This remains the case, even if science and technology have created some new problems faster than they have yet produced solutions.