George Monbiot in The Guardian puts it all down to our fear of death. Another view is that the stronger the scientific evidence gets, the more certain it is that we are going to have to change our treasured lifestyles – lifestyles that have caused the problem in the first place. And it is this threat to our lifestyles that brings out the Inner Denier in everyone.

Now the Environmental Justice Foundation has brought out a report that quantifies the human damage that global warming is going to cause. The report, “No Place Like Home”, highlights the humanitarian plight of an estimated 150 million people whose homes, it says, will be lost as a result of climate change by 2050. These ‘climate refugees’ are not recognised under the 1951 Geneva Convention on Refugees and the report calls for a new international legal agreement to help them survive.

With the Copenhagen conference looming ever larger, and expectations of any legally binding agreement on emissions reduction fading as inconclusive meeting follows inconclusive meeting, the EJF report details the growing economic and humanitarian costs of climate change which it says is the cause of the deaths of over 300,000 people and economic losses of US$125 billion annually. Furthermore, an estimated 500 – 600 million people, around 10% of the planet’s human population are, it says, at extreme risk from the adverse effects of climate change.

The World Development Report 2010, the Press edition of which has just been published, comments, “Warming of 2°C could result in a 4 to 5 percent permanent reduction in annual per capita consumption in Africa and South Asia, as opposed to minimal losses in high-income countries…It is estimated that developing countries will bear most of the costs of the damages—some 75–80 percent.”

And it is always worth reminding ourselves that the developing countries created – and continue to create – very little of the carbon emissions that are the source of global warming.  In 2005 people in High Income countries emitted an average 15 tonnes of carbon each, whilst in the Low Income countries the average was nearer to 2 tonnes.

And the WDR goes on, “Warming can have a big impact on both the level and growth of gross domestic product (GDP), at least in poor countries. An examination of year- to- year variations in temperature (relative to a country’s average) shows that anomalously warm years reduce both the current level and subsequent growth rate of GDP in developing countries. Consecutive warm years might be expected to lead to adaptation, lessening the economic impacts of warming, yet the developing countries with more pronounced warming trends have had lower growth rates. Evidence from Sub-Saharan Africa indicates that rainfall variability, projected to increase substantially, also reduces GDP and increases poverty.”

So we really should, along with everything else, be doing everything we can to boost GDP in the developing countries most at risk from the effects of climate change, many of which are in Sub-Saharan Africa.