As the climate continues to change, some good news at last: England will enjoy mild Mediterranean winters and delightful champagne vintages; Scottish farmers will be able to cultivate new crops, not to mention suntans. From Siberia to Alaska, denizens of the frozen north will be reflecting that every cloud has a silver lining. All this we suspected anyway, and the more sober details are likely to be confirmed this week - as much as climate forecasts are ever confirmed - by the scientists comprising the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Yet it would be unwise to uncork that English champagne just yet. The British like to complain about the weather, but barring an occasional dusting of snow, we know that we can cope with the current climate. What appears to be an improvement, therefore, may not be. There are enough feedback loops in the climate to make all prognostications unreliable. We may be promised bright sunshine and suffer blizzards after all.
Furthermore, since we are well adapted to our current climate, most changes are likely to be for the worse. Our houses, roads and railways are built neither for hotter weather nor for colder. Changes in rainfall will require new agricultural techniques. In short, an Italian climate is nice for Rome but will take some getting used to in the vineyards surrounding Birmingham.
Things look much grimmer for those in climates that are already quite warm enough. East Asia and the southern US are promised more hurricanes and cyclones, Africa and south Asia droughts and disease. Hurricane Katrina was a reminder that the US is not immune to extreme weather, but rich countries are better equipped to adapt to any change than poor ones. Rich economies are far less dependent on agriculture - and not at all on subsistence farming - and are also better able to deal with malaria. The rich are most likely to feel the impact indirectly through migration from poor and unstable areas.
This, then, is the situation: climate change poses risks to all of us, but by far the largest risks to poor countries. It is very probably the result of carbon dioxide emissions, and they have come largely (not wholly) from rich countries. That is unfair, but more to the point, it means that political agreement will not be easy to reach. Poor countries have more to gain from development than from restricting their own limited emissions. A feeling of universal brotherhood has not been enough to persuade rich countries to limit theirs. In retrospect it is not hard to see why the Kyoto agreement failed to have much impact. Future negotiators will have to do better.
There are precedents for reaching an international agreement on sharing costs and benefits - notably, the Marshall Plan. This negotiation will be a tougher nut to crack. For now the champagne should stay in the bottle.
