Robert Fisk: Fear climate change, not our enemies

[cal04]

From this wreckage was bound to come the insurgencies and the hatred

It was a warning. Scratched, of course after more than 50 years, but a home movie, shot by my mother in colour. But most of the colour is white. Bill Fisk, the 57-year-old borough treasurer of Maidstone, is standing in the garden of our home in his long black office coat, wearing - as always - his First World War regimental tie, throwing snow balls at his son. I am 10 years old, in short trousers but up to my waist in snow. There must have been two feet of it in the garden. You can even see the condensation from my mouth. My mother doesn't appear on the film of course. She is standing in the snow behind my father, 36 years old, the daughter of café proprietors who every Boxing Day would host my own and my aunt's family with a huge lunch and a roaring log fire. It really was cold then.

I think was it Andrew Marr, when editor of The Independent, who first made me think about what was happening. It was a stiflingly hot summer and I had just arrived in London from Beirut and commented that there wasn't much difference in temperature. And Andrew turned round and pointed across the city. "Something's gone wrong with the bloody weather!" he roared. And of course, he was right.

Now I acknowledge it silently: the great storms that sweep across Europe, the weird turbulence that my passenger jet pilots experience high over the Atlantic. Because I have never travelled so far or so frequently, I notice that at year's end it's 15 degrees in Toronto and Montreal - a "springtime Christmas", the Canadian papers announce in a land famous for its tundra. In Denver, the airport is blocked by snowfalls. I return to Lebanon to find so little snow has fallen that much of Mount Sannine above my home is the colour of grey rock, just a dressing of white on the top. The snow is deep in Jerusalem. There is a water shortage in Beirut.

How casually these warnings come to us. How casually we treat them. I suspect that most people feel so detached from political power - so hopeless when faced with a world tragedy - they can do nothing but watch in growing anger and distress. Water levels in the world's oceans may rise 20 feet higher, we are told. And I calculate that in Beirut, the Mediterranean - in rough weather -- will be splashing over my second-floor balcony wall.

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/article2169192.ece

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

1. Climate change is here, I think

and not just a temporary "fluke" that will right itself in the next year or so. We need to watch out for droughts and rough weather and strange weather all over the globe.

[Marrak]

2. Sun Tzu's "The Art of War"

Know your enemy....

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