Advantages for the UK
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Most of the advantages relate to farming, agriculture and harvesting and these result from a generally warmer climate.
Historically, the climate of the UK has been relatively static. Until 1984 the average UK-wide annual temperature over the last 200 years had been confined to a range between 9.2°C and 9.6°C. After a slight lull in temperatures around the middle of the C20th, temperatures began rising. In 1984 the average temperature was 9.6°C and in 2009 it was just over 10.4°C. This rise of 0.8°C in 25 years is approximately double that by which temperatures have been rising on a global scale. [1]
The greatest temperature increases have occurred in the southwest and southeast of England and the smallest increases in the Orcadian, Shetlandic and Hebridean island groups off the north and west coasts of Mainland Scotland. [1]
As a rough rule of thumb, plants and crops grow best beyond the 6°C isotherm and with a warming climate the UK is seeing extended growing seasons. This doesn’t mean that crop yields will increase proportionately and this is because the UK is restricted to one harvest per year. Where it does benefit farmers is that it provides a greater buffer zone so that if, for example, there has been a cool summer, there is more chance of the crop reaching maximum yield in the ensuing months that would have been the case a few decades ago. It also means that the harvest can be planted sooner and this too provides a greater buffer against periods of cold weather.
One area in which yields have significantly improved in recent years is that of timber harvesting. Substantial amounts of low-grade upland areas are given over to commercial forestry plantations. The warmer climate means that the timber line has moved from the 500 metre contour to the 550 metre contour. The growing period for the UK’s most prolific commercial species of pine and spruce has reduced from 40 to 50 years to 30 to 40 years. Back in the 1960’s the Forestry Commission purchased huge tracts of upland areas and planted them in the belief that harvesting would start in approx 2010. In reality, harvesting sub-contractors have been working flat-out in recent years to clear-fell areas that reached maturity several years ahead of schedule.
The advantages to the UK as a whole have been less reliance on imported foodstuffs than might otherwise have been the case and the injection of billions of pounds into UK PLC. Whilst you won’t have noticed this in terms of the number of pound notes in your pocket you will have benefited from slightly less tax rises than would have been necessary otherwise. However, the financial gains are more than offset by the financial losses, the huge increase in the number of adverse weather events in recent decades has more than offset any financial benefits.
On a more personal level, the advantages of climate change in the UK include less cold weather, less cold related health conditions, reduced heating bills, greater productivity in the garden and from smallholdings etc and a climate which, in general, is more amenable to the human physiology.
Disadvantages on a Global Scale
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Expanding the issue of climate change to a worldwide scale, one of the things that is immediately apparent is how little the effect on the UK will be in comparison to other regions including Asia and Africa.
It is these continents that are already bearing the brunt of climate change and the situation can only get worse in the future if nothing is done to address the issue the causes and effects of climate change.
On a global scale there are approx 1.5 billion people who do not have access to a continued safe and reliable source of food and / or water. The majority of these people live in Asia and Africa and are already living a marginal or subsistence lifestyle due to hydrological and agricultural constraints.
They do not have the ability or resources to mitigate against even small scale or short-term changes. The failure of a crop harvest in the UK would be a minor inconvenience, some foods would cost a little more as we’d need to import replacements but that’s about it. If a crop fails in Africa for example, then the community often faces starvation or drought [2].
Climate change causes a shifting of the global weather patterns, some places receive more rain whilst others receive less. As a rough rule, it is the wet places that get wetter and the dry places that get drier. More and more often now, crops are failing in the LEDC’s and today, levels of starvation are higher than they’ve ever been [2].
Substantial areas of Asia and Africa have been reduced to desert due to decreasing rainfall. In Africa half a million people a year lose their land and homes to desertification and in China more than a million people have been forced to flee as their land has turned to desert. A similar situation is occurring in Darfur where desertification has led to fierce fighting to gain control over the remaining agricultural land.
One of the consequences of decreased rainfall is the impact upon water supplies. This is further exacerbated by the melting of many of the glaciers that once fed some of the world’s mightiest rivers. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation and the World Food Programme estimate that some two billion people have been adversely affected by changes in the global hydrological cycles and water supplies. In a lot of cases the effects haven’t been critical but undoubtedly, there are many millions of people who now face water shortages as a direct consequence of climate change.
There are many other consequences of a changing climate and already we are seeing some of the effects. Rising sea-levels have led to half a million people being evacuated from the island of Bhola, the Carteret Islands have been completely evacuated and other island nations such as Tuvalu and Kiribati are close to inundation.
The incidence of many tropical diseases has been increasing in line with climate change. The expansion of affected areas closely matches the shifting isotherms. Schistosomiasis, malaria, dengue fever, onchocerciasis, typhoid, leishmaniasis and yellow fever are a few such examples. The disease vectors are temperature dependent and thus as temperatures increase so too does the proliferation of these diseases.
Further Notes
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[1] Data for the UK from the Met Office Archives. No smoothing, elimination of outliers of homogeneity adjustments. Plotted monthly as anomalous values to a 1961 to 1990 base period, trend defined by application of a 5th order polynomial. Global temperatures data based on a combined average of the HadCRUT3 and GISSTemp anomalous value datasets with a base-period for GISSTemp adjusted to 1961-90.
[2] The nature of politics in many parts of Asia and Africa exacerbate the problem of drought and famine and thus all problems can’t be blamed on climate change. The famine in Ethiopia in the mid 80’s was caused as much by politics as it was by the failure of the rains.