The Hindu : Opinion / News Analysis : Towards meltdown

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Monday, May 29, 2006

Opinion

Opinion - News Analysis

Towards meltdown

Robin McKie— © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006

FOR A bunch of alleged bloodsuckers, pitcher-plant mosquitoes turn out to be a bit of a disappointment. They are wimps, really. They never snack on the veins of animals and never cluster in swarms round human victims. Instead, they spend their lives lurking inside a species of American plant, the purple pitcher, and rarely emerge from it.

We should not sneer at Wyeomyia smithii, however. This strange little insect has a message for the world. And it is a fairly alarming one.

Every autumn, pitcher-plant mosquitoes go into diapause, their equivalent of hibernation. The process is fixed by the creature's genes and triggered when daylight hours drop below a certain level. Seems simple. But scientists based at the University of Oregon have recently discovered a change in the habits of the Wyeomyia smithii. Over the past three decades, the insect has delayed its diapause for longer and longer, as the North American climate has heated up. And that is highly significant, author Elizabeth Kolbert writes in Field Notes From a Catastrophe. Daylight hours have not changed in the last 30 years, so the only alteration that can account for this delayed diapause is a genetic one. Natural selection is shaping Wyeomyia smithii so it can take advantage of our warming planet. "Global warming has begun to drive evolution," she states.

So the next time someone tells you evolution is just a theory, tell them about pitcher-plant mosquitoes. More important, tell him, or her, to be afraid, to be very afraid, for if manmade climate change is producing evolutionary change in squitty, little mozzies, we can be sure the effects for humanity will be much worse. Indeed, our chances of surviving the global heating we are inducing look positively grim, according to Ms. Kolbert. As she says: "It may seem impossible to imagine that a technologically advanced society could choose to destroy itself, but that is what we are now in the process of doing."

Ms. Kolbert, a staff writer on The New Yorker, has spent the past two years hunting down the detritus of our overheating world: the twisted roads of Alaska that are being wrecked by melting permafrost; the ruined cities of ancient Babylon; the civil engineers of the Netherlands struggling to cope with the rising waters that threaten to engulf their country; the Mountain Ringlet butterfly, which is now vanishing from its last hillside refuges in Scotland and the Lake District; and the Antarctic. And the Met men say there is more to come.

Then there are the scientists. Most are cautious, but clearly worried. "We've got one planet and we are heading it in a direction that, quite fundamentally, we don't know what the consequences are going to be," says Chris Thomas of York University.

And, finally, there are the politicians. In probably the most chilling passage of her book, Ms. Kolbert relates the outcome of a 15-minute interview she is granted with Paula Dobriansky, U.S. Under-Secretary of State for Global Affairs, the woman given the particularly unenviable task of explaining the Bush administration's position on global warming and outline the reasons for America's refusal to curb its vast output of carbon dioxide.The U.S., when asked to show moral leadership and to set an example to other nations, evades its responsibilities and hides behind a curtain of deceit. As it is, the book is a wonderful read, a superbly crafted, diligently compressed vision of a world spiralling towards destruction. It should be a wake-up call to the world. Sadly, it feels more like an obituary.

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