Goodbye, kind world

[Guest guest]

>

<http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,5673,1279603,00.html>

>

> Goodbye, kind world

>

> People choose to believe the climate change deniers

> because the truth is

> harder to accept

>

> George Monbiot

> Tuesday August 10, 2004

> 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.

>

> www.monbiot.com

>