We are all responsible for the planet and need to face up to climate change

I’M trying to work but suddenly my head is on the keyboard.

This is too awful for words. Leaks from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s scientific report, which will be made public tomorrow, say that unless we take radical action the global temperature may be so high by 2100 that a lot of the bets are off.

We all try to burrow into a hole on this one. I won’t be around, we say. It won’t happen here. It’s not our fault.

And it’s true the IPCC is not 100% sure about anything. They’re 95% sure we’re causing climate change. They’re 5% surer since 2007, when the panel, which synthesises the work of over 2000 of the world’s best scientists worldwide, won the Nobel Peace Prize. Science rarely gets surer than that.

Climate change is happening and we’re doing it. The period from 1983 to 2012 was probably the warmest in 1400 years. The melting of ice sheets and glaciers in the last 10 years has been several times faster than in the 1990s and it is probable that there will be no summer ice in the Arctic by 2050.

The sea levels are rising faster and faster. They rose almost as fast from 1993 to 2010 as it did between 1901 and 2010.

The temperature has risen less fast in the last decade than the IPCC predicted. The theory is that the oceans are absorbing heat in ways not previously understood. The top 700 metres of the oceans have been warming steadily.

This fifth report sketches the possibility that the earth could be less sensitive to a doubling of the carbon in the atmosphere than previously thought, making a 1.5 degree rise by 2100 possible. Exactly as possible as a 4.5 degree rise, which would incinerate us all.

And, in any case, we’re on track to far more than double the carbon in the atmosphere. This uncertainty, this careful modelling and remodelling, has been seized upon by editors in UK Mail on Sunday in an effort to prove that the 2,000 scientists in the IPCC are conspirators against the common man. This pathetic attempt, full of basic reporting errors, was faithfully dished up again by the UK’s Daily Telegraph, The Australian and Sydney’s Daily Telegraph.

You could blame the multi-billion climate change denial lobby, funded by fossil fuel interests. But that’s not the real story.

The real story is that when the media lose their moral compass they tell us what we want to hear, whether it’s true or not. And we all want to cop out on climate change. But these leaks from the IPCC’s fifth assessment make copping out hard because they break down their predictions of the possible effects of climate change, region by region. The first question is, of course – where’s Ireland? And it’s definitely not as bad a scenario as elsewhere in the world, with temperature rises of about 0.8 to 1.25 degrees by 2046-2065.

Though I don’t fancy a 10% to 40% increase in winter rainfall or even a possible 10% to 20% increase in summer rainfall by the end of the century. You’d be doing a fair bit of colouring in on holiday in Ireland during such a summer.

If the cottage were still there, that is. It is estimated that 1.6 million people in northern and central Europe will be affected by coastal flooding by 2080, by which time 20% of coastal wetlands may have disappeared.

There may be increased forest growth in western Europe, which is a trend to remember. And sugar beet is likely to become a more important crop due to its biofuel use in parts of Europe not affected by drought — which sounds like here, except that here we took a wrecking-ball to our sugar beet industry in 2006 because we decided we didn’t have enough sun.

But even if Ireland could adapt to climate change, a temperature rise of more than two degrees would leave the rest of the globe in such a state that climate refugees would surely pour into the country. One of the most terrifying findings in the IPCC leaks are that 90% of Africa’s population could be under-nourished by the end of the century if our temperature goes between a degree and two degrees higher. By the 2020s, 75 to 290 million Africans will be under increased stress, by the 2060s, that figure could top 600 million.

Crop production in Africa will reduce by 15% to 20% with high levels of warming. Egypt’s current trials will be a picnic compared to what it may face as early as 2050 with rice production down by 11% and soya bean production down 28%.

Further east, millions of homes in low lying areas of south, southeastern and east Asia such as Vietnam, Bangladesh, India and China will be under water. In the next 30 years there will be no coral reefs in Asia and this, along with the destruction of other coastal eco-systems, will decimate fishing. Well, those are far away places, aren’t they? It’s just a question of beating the boats off the beaches and holidaying nearer home. Like those lovely southern Mediterranean countries we know and love which may have daily maximum temperatures from five to eight degrees hotter than they are today. Unliveable. Literally. Between 60% and 80% of current species in the southern Mediterranean region would not survive a global temperature rise of 1.8 degrees.

Alright, alright, I’ve accepted this is going to affect me and it’s going to be bad. What the hell do you want me to do about it?

That is the question which paralyses us. What’s certain is that we have to ditch our efforts to burrow into a hole and take occasional pot-shots at the neighbours. Climate change is international in its effects and tackling it requires international co-operation. That requires a new international climate treaty and the UN will attempt to negotiate this in 2015.

But behind our government representatives, we the people must understand and demand that this earth, which technology makes smaller every day, is our common home.

No part of it will escape climate catastrophe, if it happens. We must put down the tools of nationalism and instead embrace the earth. This would leave no more room for Minister Simon Coveney’s argument that the Irish shouldn’t cut their emissions from the national herd because our products will be replaced by more polluting products from Brazil and North America.

There is only one planet. The point is that the emissions from these products must go down across the planet, which means we will have to consume less of them.

We must reject the vision put forward by then-Taoiseach Bertie Ahern in the Dáil in March 2006, who, when asked by Trevor Sargent if he would face his cabinet with the prospect of “ecological genocide” if radical cuts in greenhouse gas emissions were not achieved, responded: “I am not responsible for the planet, as the deputy is aware...”