The Dangers
of Crying Wolf
at the Climate Conference
By JONATHAN POWER
LONDON-- "5,500 journalists and 700 in
the American delegation alone" reports a London newspaper on
the Kyoto global warming jamboree. If only one tenth of
those would turn up for a conference on supplying pure water
and giving every girl a basic primary education then we
might be getting somewhere with the most tangible pressing
environmental need of our age. (And one that cannot be
scientifically questioned, to boot.)
Still, give Kyoto its due. This is the
way issues get placed firmly on the political map. "I have
only a modest proposal" said Kierkegaard as I recall "to
make the true state of affairs known." It may be the wrong
issue, it may be an overblown issue but if you believe in
getting attention this is the way to do it.
But it has its dangers. Crying wolf
can be counterproductive. Twenty-five years ago I wrote a
column for the Washington post, provocative enough to
trigger an editorial alongside. Having talked to most of the
world's top climatologists I pronounced that the world was
cooling, dangerously so. It could trigger an ice age.
One of my sources, Stephen Schneider
of the University of Stanford, pooh-poohed the evidence of
the dangers of an increase in carbon dioxide. Where is he
now?--a fervent advocate of the greenhouse effect and global
warming and lambasting the press for equivocating. It is
"journalistically irresponsible to present both sides," he
is reported to have said with a straight face at
Vice-President Al Gore's Global Climate Change Roundtable in
Washington.
Twenty years ago the Club of Rome's
"Limits to Growth" introduced us to the wonders of
exaggerated extrapolation. Its computor models were
summarized for the non-initiated by the analogy of the lily
pond. Where was the lily that doubled its size every day the
day before it covered the pond? Answer: only half way across
the pond.
Yet none of the Club of Rome's
projections have stood the test of time. Neither on raw
materials (never so abundant), oil prices (just been cut
again, this time by OPEC), on food supplies (ever
increasing--see below), on population growth (although still
a curse in many countries it has peaked in the three
countries that most matter--India, China and Brazil). Even
the AIDS doomsayers with some of their wilder projections
overlook the lesson of the medieval Black Death--all plagues
peak of their own accord in due time.
In fact, if we look through the well
publicized environmental causes of the 1970s we can see how
many false notes there were in the doom songs. There was the
alleged destruction of the ozone layer by the newly
introduced Concorde airliner. There was the pollution of
ocean waters. There was DDT poisoning, the issue that made
Rachel Carson and her book "The Silent Spring" famous. But
as time passed it became clear that the breakdown of the
ozone layer by supersonic aircraft had been grossly
overstated. There is little pollution yet of the great
oceans, and no evidence that it affects fish stock or marine
life. Over-fishing is the real worry, but that only in
certain parts. And we realize today that DDT is safer for
the people that use it than the organo-phosphate
insecticides that replaced it.
Let's take food in a little more
detail. At the World Food Conference called by a worried
Henry Kissinger in 1974 the headlines read, "the world is
running out of food." Indeed, the evidence of failed
harvests all over the place pointed that way. One third of
humanity was said by the UN's Food and Agricultural
Organization to have "inadequate access to food." But at
last year's W#orld Food Summit the figure was down to one in
five although, in the meanwhile, the world's population has
increased from a billion to nearer 6 billion.
Perhaps the most telling recent
parable for our times is the story of Germany's Black
Forest. A dozen years ago the famous forest was considered
all but dead, the casualty of ecological calamity,
supposedly attacked by pollutants and climatic changes. "An
Evergreen Cemetary" was the title of one popular book.
To paraphrase Mark Twain, the rumors
of the forest's death were premature. The forest today is
verdant and growing faster than ever, for reasons that are
as unclear to foresters as they should have been when the
forest appeared to be on the wane.
All this is not to say we should
ignore that there are serious limits on our planet's endless
magnanimity. There are. Alas, in the age of super-hype one
has to scream to be heard. But as Planche wrote in 1879,
"Why, you've cried `Wolf!' till, like the shepherd youth,
You're not believed when you do speak the truth." Or, as
Florio said three centuries earlier, "The death of the wolf
is the health of the sheep."
December 10,
1997, LONDON
Copyright © 1997 By JONATHAN POWER
Note: I can be reached by phone +44 385 351172
and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
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