The World in 2030

110 The World in 2030
under four. Most of the increase in the burning of
fossil fuels has occurred over the last few decades and
nine out of the ten warmest years ever recorded have
occurred since 1990. 216
In other words, it’s the Baby Boomer (or ‘war baby’) generation
that’s really to blame because half of the energy generated
since the Industrial Revolution has been consumed in the
last twenty years.
Only it’s not any single generation’s fault – it’s all of our
faults in the developed world and, in the future, the culprit
responsible for any further man-made climate change will be
the looming and inescapable global population explosion.
The 20 th century opened to a world population of a little
more than one billion people and closed on a world of six
billion. Every one of those six billion is using on average
four times as much energy 217 as people did 100 years ago.
As I said in my introduction to this section, we are now
confronted with the physical proof of climate change and
Europe is a good place to go looking for extreme weather.
Such extremes are caused by the atmosphere heating up. For
every single degree the atmosphere is warmed, world rainfall
increases by 1 per cent. 218 This does not sound like much,
but the increase is very unevenly distributed.
The 1990s were the warmest decade in Britain since
records began in the 1660s, with 2006 the hottest year ever,
2005 the second warmest year ever, 1998 the third warmest
ever and 2001 the fourth warmest