Orgy of Green Meetings

In the environmentalism parlance, skeptics attribute the climate crisis to heightened solar activity and the like. Warmists (global Warmists) believe that the human race is primarily responsible for warming. ‘Deniers’ believe that while global warming may be true, warming and cooling have been happening for millions of years and man may not be directly responsible. ‘Coolists’ disbelieve the warming theory. To them climate science is something all about probabilities with no certainties, some would be careful about throwing caveats while making their points, others who are cherry-picking facts to suit their slants are forceful and definitive.

Global warming having taken on an alarmist hue, the Environmental scaremongering has become a common pastime these days. Dissenting views being looked upon with suspicion and disdain, developing and developed countries fight one another on the issues of the rich to accept their historical responsibility for industrial emissions, and the emerging economies to promise emission cuts. The recently convened Copenhagen climate talk ended with a whimper and a bitter global blame game, as also the espousal of meaningless commitments---from no targets on how the rich will cut emissions to no real agreement on the finances needed to pay for transition in the developing world. The Warmists pooh-pooh the failed Indian government for suffering from the ‘Sharam-al-Sheikh’ syndrome--- government version about the meet is not what it is there recorded there in the text. The meet, they claim, was designed by its sponsors to create an international regulatory architecture for climate policy that would emulate world bank and the IMF in being controlled by the US and the EU, besides steady expansion of green technology enterprises and carbon credit markets to secure financial windfall from the implementation of the carbon policies they are (understandably) championing.  

Governments of the world are convinced about the warming effects of greenhouse emissions, but are the people? Is the science of global warming settled? Are there strong vested interests in letting people believe that warming is a myth? Opinion polls call environmental activists as extremists. To Coolists, the tenable arguments of Intergovernmental panel on climate change (IPCC) claims for its climate warming hype are still doubted. Several of the Warmists today were Coolists 20 years ago. For them the climate ideology serves their political purposes.

While last year Obama stood in Berlin and told the world that the sea levels were disastrously raising, the fact is that it increases by 2 mm a year after 2005. Till then it was by 3 mm annually. We now have the slightest increase since the last ice age. Thomas Malthus predicted that population will outrun food supply bringing famine, pestilence and death to large proportion of the human civilization. History proved Malthus wrong because he failed to include ingenuity of the ultimate resource, the human mind. Top scientists and social leaders that met in Rome in the late 1960s formed the Club of Rome. Their sponsored study by Dennis Meadows, ‘Limits to Growth’, predicted that economic growth will eat up our natural resources rapidly and create catastrophic conditions. It never happened and Club of Rome itself has long disowned Meadow’s work.

The world has fallen prey to extremist positions of the Warmists. A large number of scientists however disagree with their view (hype) that a climate catastrophe is looming and that economic development and industrialization are the cause of it. Historically almost as soon as the Kyoto protocol on global warming came into effect several years back, on February 15, our Kashmir valley suffered the highest snowfall in three decades killing over 150. Similarly Mumbai recorded the lowest temperatures in 40 years, disproving therefore that had temperatures been the highest for decades newspapers would have declared this was proof of global warming. But then the problem is that whenever temperatures drop, the media prefers to keep quiet.

In 1940-70s, when there was ‘global cooling’, every cold winter (then) was in fact ‘global cooling’, and would be hailed as proof of coming new Ice Age. But the moment cooling was replaced by warming, a new disaster in the opposite direction was proclaimed. The principle that ‘disaster is news and its absence is not’ has been exploited so skillfully by the ecological scare-mongers in the media that it is now regarded as politically incorrect, even unscientific, to denounce global warming hysteria as unproven speculation.

We know the atmospheric carbon is increasing. We are also in the midst of natural warming trend that started in 1850, at the end of what is called the Little Ice Age. It is scientifically impossible to prove whether the subsequent warming is natural or man made.

‘Greens’ say that global warming is occurring. Yet never in history did scientists predict the internet, microwave ovens, TV, nuclear explosions or antibiotics. It is impossible even stupid to predict the distant future. Because the global warming has become now a multi billion dollar enterprise with thousands of jobs and millions in funding for NGOs and think-tanks, top jobs and prizes for scientists, and huge media coverage for predictions of disaster, the vested interests in the global warming theory are now grown as strong, rich and politically influential as the biggest multinationals.

Metriologists are a standing joke for getting predictions wrong even a few days ahead, but then taken seriously when they use computer models to predict the weather 100 years hence. The models have not been tested for reliability over 20 years let alone 100 years. Different models yield variations in warming of 400%, which means they are statistically meaningless. Assume continued warming, as in the last 3 decades, and you get a warming disaster. Assume more episodes of global cooling, and you get a cooling disaster. Michael Crichton (State of Fear) does a devastating expose of the way ecological groups have tweaked data and facts to create mass hysteria. He points out that we know little about the environment. All sides make exaggerated claims.

Scientific knowledge of the weather being very limited, IPCC projections are considered by many just intelligent guess mates. IPCC scientist may be the best in the world, yet they can not predict the weather more than five days ahead. Can they predict the next drought in India? No. The next El Nino? No.  The number of hurricanes in the Caribbean next year? No. So can they accurately predict the weather 10 years hence? Surely not. When we know very little about a problem we tend to worry endlessly about the worse-case scenario. That does not make the worst case certain or even probable.

Despite alarming situation reported, by any measure, the world is more environmentally friendly than it was 20-30 years back. Our air and water are far cleaner than they have been in a century. Industrial wastes are much less frequently dumped into the natural environmental than they were. Having to breathe secondary tobacco smoke in many countries is a thing of past. Animal species –eagles, mountain lions, whales, alligators, wolves –are rebounding. Economic growth is not on a collusion course with the environment. In the economic jargon environmental goods like clean air and pure water are luxuries, demand of which increase with income. Poor are not interested in the environment but are about food shortage and starvation. The poor may denude forests to provide wood for cooking fires etc. Higher income means environmentally friendly forms of heating and cooking. These guys may talk of environmentalism (but may also cause    industrial emissions).

All species, including human beings, effect environment (mostly for the better) and are part of environment to get benefited. An environment without man is just like with out other plants and animals. Nature’s environments are always changing. They are not static. Deserts and forests move over time—shifting locations, some times expanding, sometimes contracting. What makes humans unique among animal species is that they can think about what creates a better environment and they have the capacity to deliberately create those environments. Humans can create environmental wealth. They learn.

Because humans think of environmental wealth as coming freely from nature, they tend not to value it, not to count it, and to waste it. They only notice that it is important to their total wealth when it is gone and it becomes a subtraction from other forms of wealth. Effectively they see it as free when it is not. Because they see it is free they also tend to think of it as in unlimited supply. It is the tragedy of the commons. Where every one collectively owns something everyone has an incentive to overuse that resource until it no longer exists. Everyone drills wells into the aquifer and pumps as hard as they can so that can get more water than their neighbour before the aquifer runs dry. No one recognizes their mutual self interest in a sustainable water supply.

Environmental wealth is the ability to use constructively the environment given to us by nature, and where possible to improve it. Clean air, clean water and a beautiful environment are not necessary for human survival (much of the world’s population lives without them) but they add immeasurably to our wealth if we have them. The effects of warm weather are uncertain.

Whatever the current horror stories and whatever the future disasters, it is clear that today’s human beings are going to do very little about global warming unless we begin to think about it in very different ways. ‘Let tomorrow look after tomorrow’ will be the rallying cry. Whatever the future costs, they are uncertain, amorphous, and will affect someone else anyway. Only those with the mentality of the builder are going to be willing to think about solutions. 

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