SOME GOOD CONTEXT ON THE HURRICANE FROM HISTORIAN NIALL FERGUSON

Disasters happen. Two hundred and fifty years ago, on November 1, 1755, the Portuguese capital, Lisbon, was flattened by an earthquake that killed thousands of its inhabitants. Like the hurricane that inundated New Orleans last week, the calamity inspired not only awe at the power of nature and sympathy for the helpless victims, but also all kinds of moral commentary. None was more profound than that of the French philosopher Voltaire.

To Voltaire, the destruction of Lisbon was proof that we do not live "in the best of all possible worlds" - a philosophical position associated with Gottfried Leibniz, but most pithily expressed in Alexander Pope's Essay on Man: Whatever is, is right. According to Leibniz, evil and suffering were integral parts of the order God had ordained. Though they might seem inexplicable to us, they were a vital part of the divine plan; the world would, paradoxically, be less perfect without them.....

The old-time hellfire and brimstone reaction would have been to interpret the inundation, John Wesley style, as a judgment on the city that brazenly calls itself "Party Town". But few Christian Churches risk such strong moral medicine these days.

No such inhibitions constrain today's Islamic extremists. The Associated Press reported that they "rejoiced in America's misfortune, giving the storm a military rank and declaring in internet chatter that 'Private' Katrina had joined the global jihad. With God's help, they declared, oil prices would hit $100-a-barrel this year."

It would be hard to get more tasteless. Yet the same underlying impulse - to interpret the disaster as confirmation of one's own ideological position - was at work among many American liberals too. Opponents of the war in Iraq were not slow to point out that National Guardsmen who should have been on hand to rescue hurricane victims were instead failing to prevent lethal stampedes in far-away Baghdad. The usual suspects could not resist pointing out that most of the people trapped in the flooded city were poor African-Americans, who lacked the means to flee the hurricane.

And, inevitably, environmentalists rushed to portray the storm as retribution for the Bush administration's refusal to sign the Kyoto Protocol. After all, they argued, our consumption of fossil fuels causes global warming, and global warming leads to more frequent "extreme weather events", not to mention rising sea levels. Could the prospect of even higher gasoline prices, as a direct result of storm damage, finally bring Americans to their senses about climate change?

Having recently shown one of my classes a map projecting the effects of rising sea levels on the eastern seaboard of the United States (guess which city disappears first?), I must confess that this was also my initial reaction. Only last week, after all, I was fulminating in this column about the way we pollute the world's oceans. It was only with difficulty that I banished the thought of Katrina as Neptune's vengeance.

The reality is, of course, that natural disasters have no moral significance. They just happen, and we can never exactly predict when or where. In 2003 - to take just a single year - 41,000 people died in Iran when an earthquake struck the city of Bam, more than 2,000 died in a smaller earthquake in Algeria, and just under 1,500 died in India in a freak heatwave. Altogether, at least 100 Americans were killed that year as a result of storms or forest fires.

Natural disasters - please, let's not call them "Acts of God" - killed many more people than international terrorism that year (according to the State Department, total global casualties due to terrorism in 2003 were 4,271, of whom precisely none were in North America). On the other hand, disasters kill many fewer people each year than heart disease (around seven million), HIV/Aids (around three million) and road traffic accidents (around one million). No doubt if all the heart attacks or car crashes happened in a single day in a single city, we would pay them more attention than we do.

As Voltaire understood, hurricanes, like earthquakes, should serve to remind us of our common vulnerability as human beings in the face of a pitiless Nature. Too bad that today, just as in 1755, we prefer to interpret them in spurious ways, that divide rather than unite us.

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Synthetic chemicals: killing us softly?

Baseless scare stories are contaminating our enjoyment of food

It's the silly season, which is usually the time for stories about how bad eating is for us. Unless, that is, we're sensible and informed enough to eat organic food. Aficionados will tell you that organic food is natural and therefore better for you. The nub of the argument is that organic produce is untouched by chemicals (a word that sends a shiver down the spine of any self-respecting foodie). In particular, no pesticides are used, so the organic vegetable is therefore full of goodness, and you can eat it with a warm glow of self-satisfaction.

To paraphrase Blackadder, there's one tiny flaw in this argument: it's utter rubbish. Everything we eat is made of chemicals: they just don't happen to be manmade. Many of the minor components of plants are in fact natural pesticides: they repel or harm insects or other creatures that want to make a meal of them. What is more, using the standard ways employed by scientists to test toxicity or carcinogenicity (eg, feed increasing amounts of a substance to rodents until a level is reached where half of them die), many of these compounds can be shown to cause harm. But because they're not manmade, we neither test them nor worry about them. When they are tested, they are found to be equally damaging to the health of rats as manmade pesticides.

Yet we seem to worry incessantly about the use of synthetic crop protection chemicals that have been extremely thoroughly tested. Yes, these are toxic and harmful if misused, but the risk is to farmers rather than consumers. And farmers are intelligent people who have been trained how to use pesticides correctly. Despite agricultural workers' potentially much greater exposure to carcinogens than the general public, they actually have a lower incidence of cancers: in 11 out of 12 studies on farmers, covering some 300,000 subjects in total, cancer rates were found to be substantially lower than for the population as a whole.

There is no evidence that legal levels of pesticide residues cause health problems. During the past 50 years, as agriculture has become more intensive and use of pesticides increased, we have become healthier and longer-lived.

Of course, if you sincerely believe that synthetic chemicals pose a health risk, no amount of evidence will convince you otherwise. The standard response to the fact that there is no evidence of harm is: 'more testing is needed.' To figures that show a steady decline in the levels of pesticide residues detected, we hear: 'what about the build-up over time; what about the "cocktail" effect?'

Cast your mind back to the Sudan 1 contamination that occurred earlier this year. A batch of chilli powder had been brightened up at source by the addition of this red dye. The dye is not allowed for food use, not because there is hard evidence of any hazard, but because it's never been positively approved. The chilli powder was imported and used as an ingredient to make Worcester sauce, and this sauce in turn was used as a minor component of numerous processed food products. Clearly, the use of this dye was illegal: there was a failure of the system. But was there a real risk?

One article pithily summed up the extent of the 'risk': 'To ingest Sudan 1 in the amounts that were shown to cause harm in rats, a human would have to consume Crosse and Blackwell's Worcester sauce at the rate of three tons every day for two years.' But that doesn't assuage fears: if something has been withdrawn 'as a precautionary measure' then it has been condemned.

Consumers can be made to feel frightened of their food if they are given misleading information by campaign groups and their accomplices in the media. Left to their own devices, most people choose food they like to eat and can afford. They don't read labels. They don't think about additives, or the conditions under which the food was packed. If there were fewer negative stories about food in the media, we would be no less safe, but a lot of people might worry a lot less.

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GLACIER "CALVING" IMPLIES GROWTH, NOT SHRINKING

Louis Hissink comments by email about my post on the Greenland glacier scare:

"I took a look at the media article on the Greenland glacier referred to here: "LULISSAT, Greenland - Watching the gargantuan chunks of ice break off the Sermeq Kujalleq glacier and thunder into an Arctic fjord is a spectacular sight".

The issue is simple - this phenomenon is termed calving and is the result of an enormous deposition of snow and ice at the glacier's source, pushing the older ice into the sea simply because of the enormous pressures up slope. This glacier is growing not shrinking.

I would suggest that the media impressions of glacial calving are from gross scientific ignorance rather than anything else."

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists

Comments? Email me here. My Home Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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