The Penguin History of the World

This became much clearer as a new spectre came to haunt the last decades of the twentieth century – the possibility of man-made, irreversible climatic change. The year 1990 had hardly ended before it was being pointed out that it had been the hottest year since climatic records began to be kept. Was this, some asked, a sign of ‘global warming’, of the ‘greenhouse effect’ produced by the release into the atmosphere of the immense quantities of carbon dioxide produced by a huge population burning fossil fuels as never before? One estimate is that there is now some 25 per cent more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than in pre-industrial times. It may be so (and as the world’s output of the stuff is now said to be 30,000 million tons a year, it is not for laymen to dispute the magnitudes). Not that this was the only contributor to the phenomenon of accumulating gases in the atmosphere whose presence prevents the planet from dissipating heat; methane, nitrous oxide and chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) all add to the problem.

And if global warming is not enough to worry about, then acid rain, ozone depletion leading to ‘holes’ in the ozone layer, and deforestation at unprecedented rates, all provided major grounds for new environmental concern. The consequences, if no effective counter-measures are forthcoming, could be enormous, expressing themselves in fears of climatic change (average surface temperature on the earth might rise by between one and four degrees Celsius over the next century), agricultural transformation, rising sea-levels (2½ inches a year has been suggested as possible and plausible) and major migrations.

The Kyoto Protocol to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, which came into force in 2005, is an attempt to deal with these problems through limiting the amount of greenhouse gases that are released into the atmosphere. Thirty-eight industrial nations have pledged to reduce their emissions to below 1990 levels by 2012. But the world’s largest polluter, China, is exempt from most of the regulations because of its status as a developing country, while the world’s second largest polluter, the United States, has refused to sign. Even if the signatories live up to their commitments (and there are no signs at present that they are doing so fully), most experts believe that much more is needed to avoid the long-term effects of global warming. By the turn of the twenty-first century it was abundantly clear that if the major states could eventually come to co-operate rather than compete, there would be plenty of common concerns for mankind to co-operate about – if they could agree on what had to be done.

Historians should not pontificate about what goes on in the minds of the majority, for they know no more than anyone else; it is the untypical, who have left disproportionately prominent evidence, whom they know most about. They should be careful, too, about speculating on the effect of what they think are widely held ideas. Obviously, as recent political responses to environmental concerns show, changes in ideas can soon affect our collective life. But this is true even when only a minority know what the ozone layer is. Ideas held more widely, and of a vaguer, less-defined sort, also have historical impact; a Victorian Englishman invented the expression ‘cake of custom’ to speak of the attitudes, formed by deep-seated and usually unquestioned assumptions, which exercise decisive conservative weight in most societies. To be dogmatic about how such ideas operate is even more hazardous than to say how ideas tie up with specific matters (such as environmental change), yet the effort has to be made.

We can now see, for example, that more than any other single influence a growing abundance of commodities has recently shattered what was for millions – still not long ago – a world of stable expectations. This is still happening, most strikingly in some of the poorest countries. Cheap consumer goods and the images of them increasingly available in advertisements, especially on television, bring major social changes in their train. Such goods confer status; they generate envy and ambition, provide incentives to work for wages with which to buy them, and often encourage movement towards towns and centres where those wages are to be had. This severs ties with former ways and with the disciplines of ordered, stable life, and forms one of many currents feeding the hastening onrush of what is new.