Foreword to British editon
This seminal book was first published in 1977, having been written the previous year while the author was on sabbatical from the Foreign Office as a Fellow at the Centre for International Affairs at Harvard University. It was published by the Centre and the University Press of America. The second edition, which represented a substantial revision and update, was published in 1986.
Not long after the Lord had gathered the waters in one place, and had caused dry land to appear - that is to say not long after, if measured by the pages of Genesis - Noah was forced to take to his ark because new floods covered all the earth. Then came a time when Moses, searching for a land where milk and honey still flowed, had to lead his flock across what we now know were man-made deserts. There was also a Tower of Babel, where men spoke in many tongues, without understanding, and heeding no message.
All this could only have happened in what was an infinitesimal fraction of the time that life has existed on this globe of ours, and in the course of which the surface of the earth has altered time and again out of all recognition. The shapes of continents and oceans have been continually changing; mountain ranges have thrust to the skies and then disappeared; and ice has covered the land.
Relatively speaking it was not long before man as we know him emerged - at most a million out of more than four billion years since there was living matter - that the Bering Straits formed, to separate the eastern tip of the Eurasiatic continent from America, and the Mediterranean to separate Europe from Africa. Only 5,000 years ago, the Straits of Dover, which now separate us from France, was dry land.
We may have a sense of the physical forces that have been at work, but we certainly do not wind the clock which triggers major changes in geography and in climate. All we know is that these forces are still there; that our earth is still changing; that the axis on which the globe spins every 24 hours is not immutably stable; that the orbit in which we move annually round the sun is not constant; that the sun from which the earth derives its energy is itself subject to change; that the climate we know - the winds, the rains, the seasons - is also changing from year to year.
In his brilliant short book, and with the clarity that marks the informed professional diplomat, Crispin Tickell sets our species, Homo sapiens, in the dimension of geological time. Those who have not been too bemused by science fiction should read and ponder. The first half of our century probably enjoyed a warmer climate than did any corresponding period in the past thousand years.
In the 17th century, a drop in average temperature of only 10ºC brought about a 'little ice-age'. A shift of a few degrees upwards could one day lead to the melting of the polar ice caps and the inundation of vast areas; one downwards to another age in which the land on which we live would be buried under hundreds of feet of ice.
If all this is something which is hard to comprehend, we should at least remind ourselves that in recent years many regions of the globe have suffered acute droughts, tornadoes and floods, and that many countries have suffered ruinous crop failures. We should also recognise that in his multiplying millions, man, and not 'nature' on its own, is now affecting his physical environment in unpredictable ways.
The world's climate seems to be moving into a phase of rapid change. And we need to realise that the units of time in which we make our social, economic and political decisions are incredibly small in comparison with those which affect climate. Nature's time-clock goes on ticking away, triggering unexpected changes, and as our physical environment changes, new political and economic strains and stresses develop in the world.
A vast amount still needs to be learnt about the factors which affect the earth's climate. But, as Crispin Tickell urges, it is now that we should begin to organise, on a worldwide scale, to monitor what is happening. It would be too late to do anything if, to take an extreme example, part of the ice which covers Greenland and which helps to anchor the northern ice cap were to break away. And undoubtedly we would be slow, and even reluctant, to recognise the first signs that anything like that was happening.
The problems of climate are clearly international. Man's present political problems are minuscule in relation to what could result from major changes in climate, and someone from outer space, viewing our globe in the units of geological time, could well suppose that nations of today behave like people who quarrel violently and murderously over immediate trivialities on the 50th floor of some huge Modern Tower of Babel, oblivious of the fact that it is blazing away merrily below them.
It is not going to be easy to pool our understanding or to co-ordinate research into long-term climatic change; and it will be even more difficult to concert the actions which have to be taken to deal with sudden catastrophes - but in these matters the world cannot afford any Tower of Babel.
One can only pray that the day will soon dawn when the current disputes and turmoil of national and international politics sink into the proper perspective of time; when speculations about man's future cease to be idle extrapolations about 'limits to growth'; and when we realise that in the context of real time, nature itself has been responsible for far more significant changes in the physical world within which living beings have evolved than any for which we, the human species, have been or are likely to be responsible.
Lord Zuckerman of Burnham Thorpe, O.M., K.C.B., F.R.S.
July 1977.
