One month to go

Sat in the centrally heated school Christmas concert, I sang, like countless others, In the Bleak Midwinter, not knowing the half of it. Christina Rossetti’s mournful, yearning poem, later set to music by Gustav Holst, was written in 1872, but speaks of a “bleak midwinter, long ago”, relocating the nativity to a chill northern landscape where, “Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone.”

If Rossetti conjures a folk memory, the best candidate for that bleak history is the decade from 1430-1440, according to a new paper published in Climate of the Past, the open access journal of the European Geosciences Union. It was a period of “exceptional cold” driven by “chaotic internal variability within the climate system”. Crops failed, food and fuel prices rose. Malnutrition and famine struck many parts of Europe. Weakened populations fell prey to disease and pestilence, themselves worsened by environmental and living conditions.

It was such a threat to the medieval order that authorities responded by changing trade policy, banning food exports and introducing new approaches to protect people from hunger, such as communal granaries for storage.

In a warming world today, we are more used to rising temperatures leading to weather extremes and crop failures. In both 2007-2008 and 2010-2011, extreme climatic conditions led to food shortages and price rises globally. Drought and wildfires in Russia and Ukraine led to controls on wheat exports.

There is a huge amount we can learn from our own past and ability to engineer rapid change

A long-suspected irony of global warming is that Arctic ice-melt will slow or even switch off the Gulf Stream that warms Europe. An extraordinarily high Arctic temperature anomaly was one of 2016’s most alarming climate stories, with the freak temperature referred to as “insane” by the Washington Post.

It now seems more likely that, rather than being plunged back into a medieval deep-freeze, consequential changes in the Gulf Stream will merely slow the warming of Europe. But others have pointed out that this, linked to the sheer volatility and unpredictability of a warming climate, could still produce more severe winter weather patterns, such as snowfall and blizzards.

One thing Europe’s bleakest decade reminds us, is that even without two centuries of being destabilised by industrial pollution, as is the case today, the climate can flip rapidly and dramatically. For that reason, and to prevent loading nature’s environmental dice even more heavily against us, the obligation has fallen on the world’s wealthiest countries to change themselves as rapidly as the climate is capable of changing.

One of the most tenacious notions is that we are stuck with broadly the lifestyle choices and economy that we have. Yet 2016 has demonstrated how quickly politics can change. And there is a huge amount we can learn from our own past and ability to engineer rapid change, whether the uptake of new energy sources and technologies, the building of transport infrastructures and cities, or new social contracts to guarantee the health, education, freedom and rights of populations.

To grow the conversation on rapid transition, several organisations ranging from the New Weather Institute, to Steps at Sussex University, the Manchester Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, the Centre for Alternative Technology, and energy researchers at Leeds University and have been working together over the last year. In 2017 they hope to push against a counsel of despair that the world will not live up to the climate commitments made in Paris in 2015, and demonstrate how rapid change is not only possible but has happened before.

The next in this particular series of articles will be the last. It began 100 months ago with the objective of charting action in a crucial period to address potentially catastrophic climate change.

Back then, we proposed that with conservative estimates, this was the period of time before it was no longer “likely” that we would stay below a temperature rise of 2C. For the last of the series I will be asking a range of people what our chances are now, and what it will take to stay the right side of that line, and go further to meet the Paris commitment of keeping to a maximum 1.5C rise.

Just as the climate can flip suddenly from cold to warm, there is every chance of a thaw in our frozen incapacity to accept the need for rapid change and act.