Global climate change

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I see that Britain has a new headache, to add to all the other woes that weigh her down. The growing season for crops is now two weeks shorter than it was in 1950 and it's going to stay that way. This is not the doing of conservatives or socialists or a splinter party or even of any radical group. It's the work of nature alone or, quite possibly, by nature helped along by the pollution we've been working on nature's atmosphere.

To put it bluntly, the climate of the world is changing fast enough to puzzle meteorologists and set them at each other's throats with various and even opposing theories. Now this is not something I've picked up from cab drivers who, in my experience, are the most dogmatic theorists about the weather now extant. In the late 1940s any freak of the weather, an icy day in May, a bearable day in August, was put down by these head-shaking experts to the atom bomb. And this profound theory was not be sneezed at even by scientists. 

I remember a joyous occasion in Madison Square Gardens some time, ooh, around 1950, I should guess, when Julian Huxley told a jubilant audience that, pretty soon, whenever a drought was threatened, we could let off a nuclear explosion over the Antarctic ice cap and melt enough of it to bring warm temperatures and happy irrigation to great stretches of the earth. In fact, he promised that the whole global mystery of climate might soon be in our hands. Anyway, there was one thing not in doubt. The earth was warming up. 

Well, now the weathermen say, 'Not so'. They're agreed on one thing, on the main trend, the climate of the world is cooling so much so that some of them expect a new Ice Age. No need to get panicky just yet and rush out for electric heaters. Not this weekend, anyway. It may not come before 6000 AD which should let most of us off the hook, even the cottage cheese and yoghurt, health food nuts. But what they do all agree on is that the big change towards a colder earth became clear around 1950. Now this runs absolutely counter to the experience, or maybe I should say to the sentimental memories, of all our parents and grandparents, taxi drivers or not. 

I got into this knotty problem only a few evenings ago when an old, but robust, friend of mine announced as a fact that the winters weren't what they used to be. He had vivid memories of Gloucestershire, 60 years ago, buried under a Dickensian cover of snow as smooth as an iced cake. And this, I found out a few days later, is not borne out by the British weather records. No matter, people who get little snow tend to remember it with great vividness and build up the inches with each telling. 

A London friend of mine, of conspicuous sophistication, goggled his eyeballs when I was over on a recent flying trip and told me that London had had five inches of snow. Now that's quite a fall and I made a rude disclaimer. 'Outside on the pavement,' he screamed, 'it was five inches deep!' Which is not quite the same thing. I guess that a quarter of an inch fall could tumble up to a five-inch drift. 

Anyway, I was mooching around in the weather records afterwards – I'd just talked to my daughter who lives in Vermont, this was about a month ago. 'Thank God!' she said, 'It's stopped!' They'd had in four days 42 inches of snow which, I discovered, is about the total snowfall in London over the past 30-odd years. Did I say that the first half of this century has been the warmest period over the earth since a famous hot spell that happened between five and seven thousand years ago? Well, if I didn't, I meant to. And some shrewd listeners, already with pen in hand, will have spotted a contradiction here. Am I saying that the probability of a new Ice Age, of colder temperatures in general, is proved by the fact that we've had, till 1950 or so, a famous hot spell this century? 

Well, ridiculous as it may sound, that’s exactly what I'm saying. It seems that these historic hot spells are freaks, deceivers. They interrupt but signal the contrary trend. And since 1950, the earth has reverted to its general trend of getting colder and colder and that's why Britain is having to wait two weeks longer to start the growing season. 

There are many, many theories, all at loggerheads with each other, but it seems to be conceded that the first man to spot the coming trend towards a cooler earth and to offer an explanation for it was a Yugoslav, Milankovitch, way back in the 1920s. He recorded the extent of the snow cover in the northern seas and lands. The more extensive and the longer the snow lasts, the longer the snow reflects sunlight back into space and reduces the heat of the atmosphere. Well, the way things went in Vermont last month, I shouldn't wonder if Vermont got the jump on everybody and had its next Ice Age next winter. I have a three-year-old grandson who's convinced of it. He already skis better than he walks. In his short life, he has seen, I figure, about 350 inches of snow fall. If you blindfolded him and flew him over to London, he'd think he'd landed in the Sahara. 

Well, while you're wrapping up against the main trend, I ought to say that we, at least half the American landscape, is going through a freakish bit of weather that proves its opposite. From the Canadian border, down through New England and out into the Prairie and the Great Plains, we have had grey, suffocating days, dense with humidity, with temperatures up around 90, with a result that greatly cheers big corporations and the makers of refrigerators, detergents and pizza pies, who can still afford large advertising budgets. 

Since this hot spell hit us, the figures on television viewing have soared, though I haven't seen that the television tycoons have made the connection with the weather. They probably think that people have decided the problems of the world are too difficult to wrestle with – just stay home and watch them explode. 

The truth is that whenever you go out and lose a pound or two of sweat and scratch at your eyes to rub away the smog, you get home right after work and stay there. So, noticing this marked enthusiasm for the box, I asked several people this week not what was the most memorable item of world news, but what was the TV image, the picture, they remembered best? And they all said, 'the sight of those 20,000 angry students in Bangkok, plodding through the night with flares towards a demonstration outside the American Embassy.' 

It certainly was as impressive as any crowd scene done by D. W. Griffith or Cecil B. DeMille. Is this a frivolous memory to go on? I think not. The news, as most people around the globe pick it up, is not what television says, but what television shows. And the sight of 20,000 neat, but angry, young marchers in a land that is supposed to be inhabited by orderly and impassive people was full of omens of things to come. 

The Thais were, as everybody knows, mad at the United States for having used their country as a base for the rescue operation of the American merchant ship, the Mayaguez and doing it without getting permission from the Thais. Probably President Ford didn't think he needed permission since for the past, oh, 15 years or so, Thailand has had American bases on its soil and welcomed them. Now it wants them closed for keeps. Well, as you may know, the threat appeared to vanish overnight. The American government sent a note regretting the incident and the Thais decided to look on it as an apology. The Thai foreign minister called a news conference and said the case was closed and he wished that bygones may be bygones. 

But this is not going to dispel the gloom in Washington over the future of Thailand or the Thais own anxiety about their independence in the wake of the fall of Cambodia and Vietnam. One look at a map will tell you why. 

They are hemmed in – except on the Burmese – side by countries that suddenly have communist regimes or regimes ready to kowtow to the communists. Imagine! Imagine what happens if you look across your long, straggling border on the east and you see two countries, independent for centuries, Cambodia and Laos, which in one week fall into the communist camp. Burma, on the west, is no bulwark either for Burma, too, I think you're going to hear, is scared of the encroaching red tide. There is, by the way, extraordinary silence here from those of us who spent eight or ten years pooh-poohing the domino theory which says that if Vietnam fell, the Asian countries to the west would topple in turn. 

Well, why should Thailand worry? I can tell you best by reading something I wrote in a despatch from Bangkok ten years ago when few of us knew what the American ambassador at the time was privately willing to confide, that there are three million Chinese inside Thailand, that the disciplined communists among them are regularly invited to Peking, trained in subversion and guerrilla tactics and then returned to northern Thailand where, even ten years ago, they were breaking the police authority of the villages, murdering mayors, and such, and terrifying the countryside. 

What was not common, or even uncommon, knowledge in 1965 was that when, in 1962, the Pathet Lao moved out of Laos towards the Mekong River, President Kennedy sent in 5,000 American troops on his own. The South-East Asia treaty required unanimity among its members. The Pathet Lao pulled back and the Kennedy troops were withdrawn. But I found out three years later that by the end of 1965, the State Department would very grudgingly allow that 14,000 American troops had, as they said, sifted back and taken up tactical positions. By that time, the United States was expanding the war against the Vietcong and the White House made a decision which it quietly communicated to its inactive Asian allies. 

This is what I wrote – it was that, whether or not Vietnam was held, Thailand would be fought for. The United States was acting on the assumption that if the worst happened, Thailand might be the Poland of the next war. Well, for most of ten years, successive Thai governments have nursed the comfortable belief that Uncle Sam was their protector. Now having seen that he couldn't deliver protection in Vietnam, they beg him to get out. Inevitably, it seems to me, they will decide to make up to their menacing neighbours and live with them. 

And Burma and India will then begin to wonder, far more realistically than South Vietnam ever did, if a firm American promise to draw a line and fight on it can ever be trusted.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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