THE GUARDIAN |
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COMMENT |
Goodbye,
kind world People choose to
believe the climate change
deniers because the truth is
harder to accept George
Monbiot The
Guardian "We live,"
the cover story of the current
Spectator tells us, "in
the happiest, healthiest and
most peaceful era in human
history." And who in the
rich world would dare to deny
it? The aristocrats, the
cardinals, Prince Charles, the
National Front, perhaps:
those, in other words, whose
former social dominance has
been usurped by the times. But
the rest of us? Step forward
the man or woman who would
exchange modern medicine for
the leech, sewerage for the
gutter, the washing machine
for the mangle, European Union
for European wars, relative
democracy for absolute
monarchy. Not many takers,
then. But the party is
over. In 2,000 words, the
Spectator provides plenty of
evidence to support its first
contention: "Now is
good." It provides none
to support its second:
"The future will be
better." Ours are the
most fortunate generations
that have ever lived. They are
also the most fortunate
generations that ever will. Let me lay before you
three lines of evidence. The
first is that we are living
off the political capital
accumulated by previous
generations, and that this
capital is almost spent. The
massive redistribution which
raised the living standards of
the working class after the
New Deal and the second world
war is over. Inequality is
rising almost everywhere, and
the result is a global
resource grab by the rich. The
entire land mass of Britain,
Europe and the United States
is being re-engineered to
accommodate the upper middle
classes. They are buying
second and third homes where
others have none. Playing
fields are being replaced with
health clubs, public transport
budgets with subsidies for
roads and airports. Inequality
of outcome, in other words,
leads inexorably to inequality
of opportunity. The second line of
evidence is that our economic
gains are being offset by
social losses. A recent study
by the New Economics
Foundation suggests that the
costs of crime have risen by
13 times in the past 50 years,
and the costs of family
breakdown fourfold. The money
we spend on such disasters is
included in the official
measure of human happiness:
gross domestic product.
Extract these costs and you
discover, the study says, that
our quality of life peaked in
1976. But neither of these
problems compares to the third
one: the threat of climate
change. In common with all
those generations which have
contemplated catastrophe, we
appear to be incapable of
understanding what confronts
us. Three wholly
unexpected sets of findings
now suggest that the problem
could be much graver than
anyone had imagined. Work by
the Nobel laureate Paul
Crutzen suggests that the
screening effect produced by
particles of soot and smoke in
the atmosphere is stronger
than climatologists thought;
one variety of man-made filth,
in other words, has been
protecting us from the effects
of another. As ancient
smokestacks are closed down or
replaced with cleaner
technology, climate change,
paradoxically, will intensify.
At the same time,
rising levels of carbon
dioxide appear to be breaking
down the world's peat bogs.
Research by Chris Freeman at
the University of Bangor shows
that the gas stimulates
bacteria which dissolve the
peat. Peat bogs are more or
less solid carbon. When they
go into solution the carbon
turns into carbon dioxide,
which in turn dissolves more
peat. The bogs of Europe,
Siberia and North America, New
Scientist reports, contain the
equivalent of 70 years of
global industrial carbon
emissions. Worse still are the
possible effects of changes in
cloud cover. Until recently,
climatologists assumed that,
because higher temperatures
would raise the rate of
evaporation, more clouds would
form. By blocking some of the
heat from the sun, they would
reduce the rate of global
warming. But now it seems that
higher temperatures may
instead burn off the clouds.
Research by Bruce Wielicki of
Nasa suggests that some parts
of the tropics are already
less cloudy than they were in
the 1980s. The result of all
this is that the maximum
temperature rise proposed by
the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change in 2001 may be
a grave underestimate. Rather
than a possible 5.8 degrees of
warming this century, we could
be looking at a maximum of 10
or 12. Goodbye, kind world. Like every impending
disaster (think of the rise of
Hitler or the fall of Rome),
this one has generated a
voluble industry of denial.
Few people are now foolish
enough to claim that man-made
climate change isn't happening
at all, but the few are still
granted plenty of scope to
make idiots of themselves in
public. Last month they were
joined by the former
environmentalist David
Bellamy. Writing in the Daily
Mail, Bellamy asserted that
"the link between the
burning of fossil fuels and
global warming is a
myth". Like almost all
the climate change deniers, he
based his claim on a petition
produced in 1998 by the Oregon
Institute of Science and
Medicine and "signed by
over 18,000 scientists".
Had Bellamy studied the
signatories, he would have
discovered that the
"scientists"
included Ginger Spice and the
cast of MASH. The Oregon
Institute is run by a
fundamentalist Christian
called Arthur Robinson. Its
petition was attached to what
purported to be a scientific
paper, printed in the font and
format of the Proceedings of
the National Academy of
Sciences. In fact, the paper
had not been peer-reviewed or
published in any scientific
journal. Anyone could sign the
petition, and anyone did: only
a handful of the signatories
are experts in climatology,
and quite a few of them appear
to have believed that they
were signing a genuine paper.
And yet, six years later, this
petition is still being
wheeled out to suggest that
climatologists say global
warming isn't happening. But most of those who
urge inaction have given up
denying the science, and now
seek instead to suggest that
climate change is taking
place, but it's no big deal.
Their champion is the Danish
statistician Bjorn Lomborg.
Writing in the Times in May,
Lomborg claimed to have
calculated that global warming
will cause $5 trillion of
damage, and would cost $4
trillion to ameliorate. The
money, he insisted, would be
better spent elsewhere. The idea that we can
attach a single, meaningful
figure to the costs incurred
by global warming is
laughable. Climate change is a
non-linear process, whose
likely impacts cannot be
totted up like the expenses
for a works outing to the
seaside. Even those outcomes
we can predict are impossible
to cost. We now know, for
example, that the Himalayan
glaciers which feed the
Ganges, the Brahmaputra, the
Mekong, the Yangtze and the
other great Asian rivers are
likely to disappear within 40
years. If these rivers dry up
during the irrigation season,
then the rice production which
currently feeds over one third
of humanity collapses, and the
world goes into net food
deficit. If Lomborg believes
he can put a price on that, he
has plainly spent too much of
his life with his calculator
and not enough with human
beings. But people listen to
this nonsense because the
alternative is to accept what
no one wants to believe. We live in the
happiest, healthiest and most
peaceful era in human history.
And it will not last long.
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