Sunscreen song

“Nature doesn’t always do as it is told,” said Australian winemaker Geoff Merrill and by all accounts Mother Nature is becoming increasingly tempestuous.  While human cause may still be up for some debate, there is little question that climate change is upon us.

Adaptation strategies for the Cape include new varieties and new sites, where diverse and higher altitude soils with diverse aspects may play a role, along with improved water resource management, including removal of alien flora species in attempts to manage potential water deficits.

Some growers are already planting varieties currently suited to a warmer climate, including Grenache, Marsanne, Roussanne and Cinsaut, and considering Nebbiolo and Tempranillo, while others consider what is potentially the next big agricultural product – mineral, chemically inert sunscreen. Other possibilities include genetic breeding of new varieties and rootstocks better adapted to semi-arid conditions.

Some models for the Cape are cause for concern, with shifting air pressure systems pushing rain-bearing cold fronts off the Western Cape coast only to make landfall in the now relatively arid Eastern Cape. Other models suggest that the Cape could even become colder, surely a boon for quality if rainfall is not greatly affected.  However, the decade to 2012 was the warmest (globally) since records began in the mid-19th century.

This week Stockholm sees the fifth IPCC assessment on climate change. Climate sceptics have effectively exploited the opportunities provided by the recession and the disappointing fourth Copenhagen Summit (governments failed to agree on legally binding targets to reduce their CO2 emissions) to push their case, arguing that the last thing people need is expensive and unnecessary renewable energy pushing up their utility bills.

However, Stockholm will be the most authoritative document ever produced on climate change, including a synthesis of thousands of peer-reviewed papers put together by hundreds of leading scientists with the USA and China – the biggest CO2 emitters by far – agreeing to tackle the matter together.

The report will say: there is a 95 per cent chance that humans are responsible for the majority of climate change through their greenhouse gas emissions;  it is virtually certain that the upper ocean has warmed since 1971 and that ocean warming dominates the change in the global energy content;  the cryosphere (where water held as  ice) is shrinking dramatically, including permafrost thawing in the Northern Hemisphere; and it’s likely to say that the world has already burned more than half the maximum amount of fossil fuel that can be consumed if catastrophic levels of global warming are to be avoided.

Sceptics are also pointing at the recent hiatus in warming but the report is expected to claim 15-year-long hiatus periods are common in both historical records and computer models, and that barring a major volcanic eruption, most 15-year global mean surface temperature trends in the near-term future will be larger than during 1998-2012.

But the IPCC is not the biggest scientific collaboration on the planet – that would be Iter, the 34-nation £13bn International Nuclear Fusion project at a hilltop setting in the Cadarache forest of Provence in the south of France. Only the International Space Station is bigger.  Iter, meaning ‘the way’ in Latin,  is designed to demonstrate a new kind of nuclear reactor capable of producing unlimited supplies of cheap, clean, safe and sustainable electricity from atomic fusion.

Earlier this year the project gained final approval for the design of the most technically challenging component – the fusion reactor’s magnetic field ‘blanket’ that will contain the super-heated nuclear fuel, which reaches temperatures as high as 3oo million Celsius. The design, development and construction of a machine that will attempt to emulate the nuclear fusion reactions of the sun is proving to be a triumph not only of science and engineering but diplomacy as well.

These are the sort of miracles the planet will need to face climate change and the expected threefold increase in global energy demand, particularly if no consensus on CO2 emissions is reached at the next significant UN Climate Change Conference in Paris in 2015, at least 15 years before such reactors will be commercially available.

– Jonathan Snashall