London Calling

The ice age is coming, the sun’s zooming in / Engines stop running and the wheat is growing thin /A nuclear error, but I have no fear /’Cause London is drowning, and I live by the river

I've had The Clash on the brain ever since I read this post at RealClimate. The Clash chorus may not stand scrutiny, but the bit about London drowning certainly resonates more now than it did back in 1979 when Joe Strummer and Mick Jones put their punk classic on wax. Recent studies suggest that a sea level rise of as much as 20 feet could result from melting ice caps. Such a rise would turn London into a new Atlantis, alongside Miami, New Orleans, and low-lying cities the world over.

That scenario is still hundreds of years off, but London and climate change have been in the news for other reasons; namely, the dire warnings of the aptly named Stern report. Sir Nicolas's tome is actually called the "Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change" and weighs in at nearly 600 pages. It's available from the website of Her Majesty's Treasury. The nutshell: The world stands to lose 20 percent of its GDP per annum if nothing is done to forestall climate change. At the same time, the investments needed to curtail greenhouse gas emissions are steep but manageable. And the time for action is now.

And there you have it: Another respected authority sounding the alarm. Official reaction in Australia, which was singled out in the Stern Review as the industrialized country with the most to lose in the case of catastrophic warming, was to hit the snooze button. Prime Minister John Howard told his party leaders not to be "mesmerized" by what one US official mocked as "fun with numbers." In a bitter irony, Australia, which is a major coal exporter and the only developed country other than the US not to sign Kyoto, may already be suffering serious consequences of climate change. Here too The Clash seems prophetic, as wheat production in Australia has fallen by 40 percent.

Getting back to London, the Guardian checks in with Mayor Ken Livingston and reports that climate change has not only risen to the top of his agenda, it has become a personal obsession.

He reads about it in his spare time. He talks about it to anyone who will bend an ear and he will travel to the ends of the earth if necessary to cut deals with other politicians, to steal the best ideas from other cities and to communicate with anyone the urgency and scale of the problem.
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Just as US mayors and state governors have led federal government in setting targets and timetables for emission cuts, Livingstone sees one of his roles to pummel and lobby central government, and other authorities, to act.