‘Apocalypse my arse’

Martin Durkin, director of The Great Global Warming Swindle, on green intolerance, soft censorship and his ‘dodgy’ Marxist background. See the video version of the film here. The article below is from one of the retired Marxists at "Spiked"

‘I wanted to call it “Apocalypse My Arse”, but in the end we decided on “The Great Global Warming Swindle”. It’s a provocative title, which helps with ratings.’

Martin Durkin has a hangover. And a cold. He spent last night, Thursday 8 March, watching the Channel 4 screening of his film The Great Global Warming Swindle in a pub with friends and colleagues. ‘It’s better than watching it at home. That can be an isolating experience. You become convinced you’re the only person in the country watching it.’ Now, this morning, he has some things to get off his chest – about the green movement’s demonisation of him for daring to question environmentalist orthodoxy; the ‘soft censorship’ of his earlier programmes; and the endless revelations that he had an apparently dodgy Marxist background. ‘Shock, horror’, he says. ‘Exposing that a journalist has a Marxist background is like exposing that he wears trousers.’

Durkin’s latest film has won him the accolade – or perhaps slur – of being the ‘anti-Al Gore’. Where the American president-who-never-was transformed his rather dull PowerPoint presentation on the threat of global warming into a marginally less dull big box office flick – An Inconvenient Truth – Durkin has directed a 90-minute made-for-TV movie that basically says: ‘Everything you know about global warming is wrong!’

Its title a knowing, punk-rebellious nod to the Sex Pistols film The Great Rock’n’Roll Swindle, The Great Global Warming Swindle featured scientists questioning whether global warming is manmade. Some of them argued that the Sun - directly, or through its effect on cosmic rays - causes global warming. Others claimed that CO2 levels are influenced by changes in temperature rather than the other way around. If this were the case, it would turn on its head every fundamental assumption underpinning not just the green movement but also national and international politics, a whole new genre of global warming literature and research, and much of the newly greened education system in Britain: those assumptions being that a rise in CO2 is causing the Earth to warm, that man is responsible for that rise in CO2, and thus we must rein man in. No wonder many seem miffed by Durkin’s film.

Whatever viewers may have thought about the new theories put forward in Swindle to explain global warming (personally, I found the replacement of the widespread, all-encompassing manmade theory with an all-encompassing cosmic ray theory – sort of ‘It’s the Sun wot done it!’ – a little unconvincing), there’s no denying that the film poked some very big holes in the global warming consensus.

Professor Paul Reiter of the Pasteur Institute in Paris, one of the world’s leading experts on malaria, was a revelation. He explained how he had to threaten legal action against the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to have his name removed from the list of ‘2,000 of the world’s leading scientists’ who apparently backed its summary published last month. The problem? Professor Reiter didn’t back it, instead arguing that it was a ‘sham’. The IPCC ‘make it seem that all the top scientists are agreed, but it’s not true’, he said.

And leaving to one side the science of global warming, there was also some stirring stuff on the impact of the environmentalist ethos on political debate and human ambition – especially in relation to the developing world. Many of the talking heads argued that our obsession with restraining development in order to ‘save the planet’ will consign the world’s poorest to a life of grime and squalor. And, ironically, pollution. As one contributor pointed out, the smoke from cowshit and other items that some in the developing world burn in order to warm their homes – because they don’t have electricity and because the only solution put forward for their predicament is that they should use expensive and ineffectual ‘sustainable’ solar and wind power – is recognised by the World Health Organisation as one of the worst pollutants in the world. Tens of thousands of children in the developing world die every year from respiratory problems brought on by such in-house smog. It is peasantry, rather than modernity, that kills them; shit, not cars.

Watching The Great Global Warming Swindle felt a little bit naughty, even subversive. You simply never hear stark criticisms of the politics of global warming in the mainstream media very much. And yet, as Durkin points out, the response to his film has pretty much been a shrill: How can Channel 4 show this stuff?!

‘Some people seem really outraged that 90 minutes of airtime was given to “the other side”’, he says. He describes as ‘surreal’ the accusation that Channel 4, in airing his film, is somehow distorting the debate about global warming. One commentator declared: ‘Channel 4 has done a huge public disservice. Or are they planning to show a follow-up that takes apart last night’s wayward thesis?’ (1) ‘These people talk about balance, but the environmentalist view is everywhere!’, says Durkin. Indeed, even Durkin’s film was not allowed to stand alone: earlier in the week Channel 4 showed a Dispatches documentary made by green Guardian columnist George Monbiot to ‘balance out’ Durkin’s film, and then repeated it again last night after Durkin’s film. So even when you get to criticise the prevailing view, you have to be sandwiched in between two slabs of Monbiot.

TV has been well and truly greened: there are hectoring lifestyle shows like No Waste Like Home and It’s Not Easy Being Green, the greening of various soap characters, the unwritten law that says all wildlife documentaries must pass comment on how man has endangered tigers/whales/polar bears (usually polar bears), and news programmes frequently leading on The Threat of Global Warming to Life As We Know It, complete with Peter Snow-style swingometer graphics showing creeping deserts, disappearing glaciers and, of course, stranded bloody polar bears.

And yet some have branded Channel 4 as irresponsible for showing a 90-minute critical film which Durkin says he struggled for 10 years to have commissioned. ‘It shows that environmentalists and journalists can be utterly intolerant’, he says. ‘They simply will not tolerate any dissenting view. Straight away they try to take it down. You can see that in the kind of language they use – they say “the jury is in” on global warming, or “the science is done and dusted”, or you’re a “denier” if you question the consensus. This is not about having a debate but about shutting down debate.’

Indeed, many of Durkin’s critics have responded to The Great Global Warming Swindle by trying to slur Durkin and the participants in the film. Or they have gone running to the Office of Communications (Ofcom) to demand that it rap Durkin’s knuckles – a bit like overgrown school sissies squealing to teacher about the boy they don’t like in the hope that teacher will give him a jolly good thrashing.

Before the film aired, a contributor to a green-leaning website advised fellow contributors to keep an eye out for who is due to appear in the film ‘and more importantly who they work for’ (my italics). This sums up the approach of trying to demolish the arguer rather than his argument, to expose people’s alleged funding or leanings rather than to take up the substance of what they say. (For what it’s worth, most of the participants in the film said they hadn’t received a penny from oil companies, much as they would have liked to.)

In today’s Guardian, Zoe Williams seems to make a sly dig at one of the participants (Professor Tim Ball) on the basis that he is from Winnipeg. Apparently, being based on Farringdon Road in central London is a far better qualification for commenting on climate change, even if you are a ditzy la-la columnist and the weird Winnipeg man a professor of climatology (2). (Durkin points out the irony of people ‘exposing’ that he doesn’t have a background in science. If everyone who doesn’t have a background in science was forbidden from researching or talking about global warming, he says, then that would mean silencing some of the leading environmentalist thinkers and just about every newspaper columnist, who can always be relied upon to churn out an ‘I’m Scared of Global Warming and So Should You Be!’ column despite not knowing what a test tube is.)

On Wednesday, before the film even aired, a left-leaning website provided readers with a link to Ofcom’s website and the instruction: ‘Please do complain [about The Great Global Warming Swindle], and please do publicise this link and ask others to complain.’ It gave a link to the Channel 4 complaints website, too, saying that if Channel 4 ‘get a number of complaints then they will find it harder to commission future programmes from Durkin’ (3). This represents a new low in the discussion of environmentalism. Instead of having an upfront, open debate about the science, and the social and political courses of action that might be required to alleviate pollution while still meeting people’s needs and desires, some try to have a film written off by the suited and booted powers-that-be at Ofcom and a director excommunicated from the world of TV.

Durkin has been here before. His 1997 series, Against Nature, also an impassioned critique of environmentalism, was similarly the subject of a concerted complaints effort. This led to the Independent Television Commission (subsequently superseded by Ofcom) chastising Durkin and Channel 4 for using ‘underhand editing techniques’.

‘It is soft censorship’, Durkin insists. ‘If there is a huge response to a programme, then the ITC and now Ofcom feel the need to do something. So they end up censuring seriously controversial work. I mean, Channel 4 shows a lot of rubbish, like “wank week”. But because hardly anyone complains about that, Ofcom doesn’t say anything. And then people complain about my work, which is serious, and these bodies take action. It might not be formal censorship, but it is a kind of invisible censorship. The end result is phoney controversialism on TV but not much real controversialism. Ofcom is supposed to uphold standards but it does the opposite.’

He believes that such official chastisement – which was widely celebrated by some greens in relation to Against Nature and which is being demanded again for The Great Global Warming Swindle – has a ‘chilling effect’ on TV output. The big broadcasters, desperate to avoid being ticked off by Ofcom, will avoid showing anything liable to invite large numbers of complaints. So they stick with the wankers of ‘wank week’ instead. A far safer bet.

Durkin’s experiences with Against Nature also showed that the cheap and conspiratorial shot of denouncing someone by associating them with others can be used to stifle genuine debate. Who was he sinisterly associated with over the Against Nature controversy? Why, LM, the predecessor magazine to spiked which was edited by Mick Hume.

Scour the web for commentary on Against Nature (only if you have absolutely nothing else to do – seriously) and you will find shrill, green-ink enviro-babble about how we sinister Marxists at LM pulled the puppet-strings of Against Nature in order to do big business’s bidding against the poor, beleaguered environmentalist movement. Or something. In fact, a few people who contributed articles to LM appeared as talking heads on Against Nature. That’s all. Not as exciting as the crazed and wide-eyed web conspiracy theories make it sound, I know. Sorry.

Yet that hasn’t stopped the anti-LM conspiracy-mongering from making a comeback to coincide with the airing of The Great Global Warming Swindle - 10 years after Against Nature was first shown and seven years since LM was forced to close following a libel action brought by ITN. The new Channel 4 film has been described as ‘The Great LM Swindle’. Anti-globalisation author Paul Kingsnorth has written a satirical skit about what might have happened at the Channel 4 offices when they decided to commission Durkin’s latest film. It ends with one of the C4 bosses saying: ‘Brilliant work everyone. Lunch at the Groucho to celebrate? spiked is paying.’ (4) As well as being spectacularly unfunny (miserabilists can’t do satire), the skit is, of course, pure fantasy: spiked had no involvement in The Great Global Warming Swindle and we never buy anyone lunch. Our petty cash is so petty it doesn’t stretch to that.

Durkin laughs about the fact that many environmentalists fancy themselves as leftists, yet ‘they are always exposing me…as a leftist!’ It is indeed surreal – pure madness, in fact – for environmentalist writers, activists, politicians, TV-makers and the rest to complain about the showing of Durkin’s film, when their arguments are so widespread and so rarely challenged. Talking to Durkin, it is clear he is nobody’s stooge – not Big Oil’s, not Big Science’s, and certainly not mine or spiked’s. Whether he’s exposing the origins of environmentalism, the scare about GM food or the global warming consensus, he makes film about things that he believes in; it’s just that his beliefs don’t chime with what we’re ‘supposed’ to believe today. In these uncritical, unquestioning times, we could do with more anti-conformist films from ‘mavericks’ like Durkin.

The various attempts to have him shut up, denounced, sacked or whatever speak to a worryingly censorious climate in the climate change debate. And whatever the sceptics in the Swindle film might think, such a climate has not come about as a result of a handful of greens conspiratorially plotting to take down Durkin and anyone else who stands in their way. Rather, it is a product of a broader, society-wide attitude of ‘You can’t say that!’ in relation to discussions of global warming, development, man’s intervention in nature and the future of humanity itself. If we want a proper debate about these issues, we need an open and rigorous public life, rather than sneaky accusations of secret conspiracies and demands for censure.

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POLAR BEARS THRIVING. WHY? BECAUSE THEY HAVE LOTS MORE YUMMY HARP SEAL PUPS TO EAT THESE DAYS



A survey of the animals' numbers in Canada's eastern Arctic has revealed that they are thriving, not declining, because of mankind's interference in the environment. In the Davis Strait area, a 140,000-square kilometre region, the polar bear population has grown from 850 in the mid-1980s to 2,100 today. "There aren't just a few more bears. There are a hell of a lot more bears," said Mitch Taylor, a polar bear biologist who has spent 20 years studying the animals. His findings back the claims of Inuit hunters who have long claimed that they were seeing more bears. "Scientific knowledge has demonstrated that Inuit knowledge was right," said Mr Taylor.

While fellow scientists have accepted Mr Taylor's findings, critics point out that his study was commissioned by the Inuit-dominated government of Nunavit. Critics claim the government has an agenda to encourage polar bear hunting and keep the animals off the endangered species list. In small Inuit communities, hunters kill bears that wander too close to human settlements and, in this particular region, they are licensed to kill six polar bears a year.

Polar bear experts said that numbers had increased not because of climate change but due to the efforts of conservationists. The battle to ban the hunting of Harp seal pups has meant the seal population has soared - boosting the bears' food supply. At the same time, fewer seal hunters are around to hunt bears.

"I don't think there is any question polar bears are in danger from global warming," said Andrew Derocher of the World Conservation Union, and a professor of biological sciences at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. "People who deny that have a clear interest in hunting bears." Bear numbers on the west coast of Hudson's Bay had shrunk by 22 per cent over the past decade, he said. "They are declining due to global warming and changes in when the ice freezes and melts in Hudson's Bay," he added. He and other scientists in his group are concerned that the retreating ice in the Arctic may pose a danger to future generations of polar bears because of 'habitat loss'. "The critical problem is the sea ice is changing. "We're looking ahead three generations, 30 to 50 years. "To say that bear populations are growing in one area now is irrelevant."

However, Prof Derocher conceded that some polar bear-related evidence of the damaging effect of global warming was misplaced. Contrary to concern over a celebrated photograph of a bear and its cub floating on a tiny iceberg, the animals often travel in that way, he said. "Bears will often hang out on glacier ice or large pieces of multi-year ice," he said.

The state of Alaska yesterday questioned the scientific justification for proposals to add polar bears to the US endangered species list. Tina Cunnings, a biologist attached to the Alaskan government, questioned whether they needed sea ice to survive, saying they could adapt to hunt on land and find alternative food sources to seals. Prof Derocher said the theory was "absolutely fanciful".

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Europe agrees to embrace nuclear option in battle to "save the planet"

That old planet sure seems to need a lot of saving

The role of nuclear power in Europe received an unexpected boost yesterday as EU leaders hailed a landmark climate change deal to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and switch to renewable fuels.

Environmentalists complained that an ambitious headline goal to cut Europe's CO emissions by a fifth by 2020 had been weakened by concessions to the main nuclear nations and the biggest polluters in Eastern Europe. Nonetheless, Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, will use the agreement struck at the spring EU summit in Brussels to put pressure on world leaders to follow suit when she hosts the G8 meeting in June. China, India and Brazil will join that summit and, like the US, be challenged to accept the principle of binding CO cuts for the first time.

As well as agreeing in principle to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, EU leaders pledged to ensure that 20 per cent of Europe's energy will come from renewable sources by 2020. The commitment of all 27 member nations is legally enforceable by the European Court of Justice.

Months of haggling will follow as diplomats argue over targets for individual countries. Each will contribute a different amount, and diplomats made clear that less would be expected of the heaviest-polluting former Communist countries. The Czechs and Slovaks had both complained that they had only just left decades of five-year plans behind them. In a sop to France and the Czech Republic, a country's nuclear power capability will be taken into account when calculating national commitments to renewable energy. France produces 80 per cent of its electricity from nuclear power stations and insisted that this "noncarbon" source of fuel should be taken into consideration. French diplomats believe this will lessen the EU demand for more renewable sources such as wave, wind and solar power.

Jacques Chirac, the outgoing French President, welcomed the deal as one of the top three achievements of the EU during his 12 years in the Elysee Palace. Tony Blair was also pleased with the concession towards the nuclear powers. The outcome will give a boost to his plans to rebuild Britain's ageing nuclear power stations which suffered a setback last month when the High Court ruled that the consultation process was seriously flawed. Mr Blair said: "There is then the 20 per cent target on renewable energy. In setting that, there will be permission to look at the energy mix that countries have . . . including nuclear technology, which obviously helps the UK as well."

Environmentalists were less enthusiastic. Friends of the Earth said the targets were timid. A spokesman said: "Heads of States gave a modest boost to the uptake of renewable energies, but agreed that the EU should aim low on cutting greenhouse gases, and failed again to agree any concrete commitment towards reducing Europe's appalling waste of energy."

Mr Blair and Mr Chirac were full of praise for the handling of the summit by Mrs Merkel, who faced strong opposition to her climate change ambitions from several nations, not least in eastern European countries such as Poland, which still rely heavily on fossil fuels. But she was determined to give herself the best possible leverage on members of the G8 to persuade them to follow suit and prepare a post-Kyoto global framework for cutting harmful emissions. President Chirac described the outcome as "one of the great moments of European history". He said: "It was not easy, but Mrs Merkel achieved it with lots of intelligence and brio."

Key to any new global deal will be the United States, where Congress refused to ratify the Kyoto protocol, but also China, India and Brazil, which were all excused Kyoto targets because they were classed as developing nations in the 1990s. The EU deal allows Mrs Merkel to challenge other global players to match the EU's commitment - with the extra pledge that Europe will go further and cut emissions by up to 30 per cent if others are prepared to follow suit.

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Forcing Africans to ‘adapt’ to poverty

By blaming climate change for Africa's problems, green groups have become apologists for inequality and underdevelopment.

The latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), published on Friday, seems likely to conclude that Africa is particularly vulnerable to global warming. Responses to climate change increasingly fall into two categories: the first urges cutbacks in greenhouse gas emissions from the developed states; the second, dealing with the symptoms, urges greater support for Africa, the continent held to be most in need of external assistance.  Assistance programmes for Africa under the internationally agreed ‘adaptation agenda’ are seen as essential to prevent the impact of climate change from undermining African development.

This essay questions the views of African development implicit in the ‘adaptation agenda’ and suggests that its implementation will institutionalise African poverty and dependency. Those who suggest that this agenda is empowering are not only patronising African people but also seeking to exploit African poverty to reinforce climate change advocacy in the West itself.

The adaptation agenda

According to the UK Government’s latest White Paper on development, Making Governance Work for the Poor, ‘climate change poses the most serious long term threat to development and the Millennium Development Goals’.  The poverty agenda and the climate change agenda have come together in their shared focus on Africa. In the wake of international support for poverty reduction and debt relief, many international NGOs, international institutions and Western states have called for climate change to be seen as the central challenge facing African development. African poverty and poor governance are held to combine to increase Africa’s vulnerability, while the solution is held to lie with international programmes of assistance, funded and led by Western states, held to be chiefly responsible for global warming.

This agenda appears to be more pro-African than the interventionist agendas of the 1990s in which good governance and democracy promotion seemed to put Western states in the position of lecturing and hectoring African states. Building on the poverty reduction and debt-relief approaches of the early part of this decade, assistance to cope with climate change is billed as a way of empowering Africans and learning from them in an attempt to develop ‘shared approaches to shared problems’.

The ‘adaptation agenda’ highlights the increasingly interventionist demand for ‘grand strategies’ and new, more comprehensive, Western agendas to manage Africa. In the midst of the Make Poverty History campaign, which won the support of millions of people for debt-relief and poverty reduction strategies linked to the Development Millennium Goals, a group of major international NGOs already questioned the lack of strategic linking of the UK government’s chief themes - Africa and climate change.  The NGO Working Group on Climate Change and Development called for a new test for every international policy and aid project, ‘in which the key question will be, “Are you increasing or decreasing people’s vulnerability to the climate?”’ The threat of climate change in Africa was held to necessitate ‘a new flexibility and not a one-size-fits-all, neoliberal-driven approach to development’.

The ‘adaptation agenda’ brings together the concerns of poverty reduction and responses to climate change by understanding poverty, not in terms of income or in relation to social or economic development, but in terms of ‘vulnerability to climate change’. This position has been widely articulated by the international NGOs most actively concerned with the climate change agenda. Tony Jupiter, executive director of Friends of the Earth, argues that ‘Policies to end poverty in Africa are conceived as if the threat of climatic disruption did not exist’.  Nicola Saltman, from the World Wide Fund for Nature, similarly feels that ‘All the aid we pour into Africa will be inconsequential if we don’t tackle climate change’.  This position is shared by the UK Department for International Development, whose chief scientific adviser, Professor Sir Gordon Conway, states that African poverty reduction strategies have not factored in the burdens of climate change on African capacities. He argues that there are three principles for adaptation:

1. Adopt a gradual process of adaptation;


2. Build on disaster preparedness;


3. Develop resilience.

The focus of the adaptation agenda puts the emphasis on the lives and survival strategies of Africa’s poor. Professor Conway argues that, with this emphasis:

‘Africa is well prepared to deal with many of the impacts of climate change. Many poor Africans experience severe disasters on an annual or even more frequent basis. This has been true for decades. The challenge is whether we can build on this experience.’

The focus on the survival strategies of Africa’s poor is central to notions of strengthening African ‘resilience’ to climate change. This approach has been counterposed to development approaches that focus on questions of socio-economic development dependent on the application of higher levels of science and technology and the modernisation of agriculture. As the Working Group report states: ‘Recently the role of developing new technology has been strongly emphasised…There is a consensus among development groups, however, that a greater and more urgent challenge is strengthening communities from the bottom-up, and building on their own coping strategies to live with global warming.’ Despite the claims that ‘good adaptation also makes good development’, it would appear that the adaptation to climate change agenda is more like sustained disaster-relief management than a strategy for African development. 

Redefining poverty as ‘vulnerability to climate change’

The focus on ‘bottom-up’ strategies that can increase communities’ resilience to climate change fundamentally challenges traditional approaches to development.  Andrew Simms, policy director of the New Economics Foundation and lead author of the report Africa – Up in Smoke?, challenges the ‘top-down’ focus on poverty reduction of the G8 aid and debt-relief provisions arguing that resilience should be seen as the key problem:

‘Many places in Africa are overwhelmingly dependent on rain-fed agriculture and so they are vulnerable to even the early phases of climate change: any slight exaggeration of peaks and troughs of climate extremes hits them instantly.’

The adaptation agenda focuses on individuals’ vulnerability to climate change rather than looking at the possible responses from ‘top-down’. This may appear to be empowering and ‘community-focused’ but it misses the bigger picture. The ‘bottom-up’ approach, focusing on community resilience, suggests that large-scale development projects that seek to industrialise agricultural production are unnecessary. According to Simms:

‘[T]here has been a lot of emphasis on the commercialisation of agriculture. But people have not thought about whether the development of luxury horticulture from the west coast is going to enhance the resilience of people in the face of massive shifts in climate, when what you may really need is a massive amount of support to small-scale agriculture.’

In re-describing poverty as ‘vulnerability to climate change’, the result appears to be a rejection of aspirations to modernise agriculture. Instead, there is the opposite emphasis: the design of plans that reinforce the social and economic marginalisation of many African people. Rather than development being safeguarded by the modernisation and transformation of African society, underdevelopment is subsidised through the provision of social support for subsistence farming and nomadic pastoralism.

Once poverty is redefined as ‘vulnerability’ then the emphasis is on the survival strategies of the poorest and most marginalised, rather than the broader social and economic relations which force them into a marginalised existence. According to the NGO Working Group:

‘[T]he majority of the continent’s poorest and most undernourished people live in rural areas – especially smallholders, nomadic pastoralists, and women. The joint effort to eradicate poverty promised by African governments and donor governments must therefore deliver rural policies that involve and prioritise these vulnerable groups.’

The Working Group’s follow-up report, Africa – Up in Smoke 2, argues that the problem is not one of underdevelopment in Africa, instead, ‘it is primarily politics’ which explains, for example, the poverty of nomadic pastoralists. To this end, Oxfam and others have put pressure on the Kenyan government to do more to support nomadic groups, arguing that with the right government policies ‘pastoralism could still, despite climate change, be not only a viable way of life, but a profitable one too’. 

Aid agencies, like Oxfam and Practical Action are encouraging the provision of a safety net of external subsidy to pastoral groups, by buying animals (usually goats which would die in drought conditions) at a fair price, slaughtering them and returning the meat and hide to the sellers, which they can then sell on to buy provisions.  Other social safety nets include the provision of cash for work, direct cash relief, free veterinary services, seed distribution etc. 

Policies that make sense in a temporary emergency situation, where famine can be prevented through the provision of government relief, are now promoted as the way forward to increase the ‘resilience’ of the poor to climate change.  Pastoralism is seen as unproblematic in itself. The fact that pastoralists live a life of dependency on the weather and are consigned to poverty is seen as a problem of ‘climate vulnerability’ to be ameliorated by government sponsorship.

The reality is that Africa’s poverty has absolutely nothing to do with global warming. Sub-Saharan Africa suffers from underdevelopment that puts people’s lives and livelihoods at constant risk regardless of what happens to the level of atmospheric carbon dioxide in the next hundred years. People’s lives are at the mercy of the weather and the forces of nature more generally, because low levels of development prevent the application of existing levels of science and technology. Reliance on support for traditional coping strategies such as nomadic pastoralism or subsistence farming can only ensure that Africa’s poor remain poor and at the mercies of the climate (whether it changes or not).

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STERN ACCUSED OF OVERCOOKING THE ECONOMICS OF CLIMATE CHANGE

The British mandarin behind a gloomy report on climate change has had to run a gauntlet of American economists

PUNCH "Sir Nicholas Stern" into Factiva, the news clippings database, and you'll find only 38 references to him in the American press over the past 12 months. In Britain the quality papers alone have mentioned him more than 501 times (make that 502).

Commissioned by the government to look at the impact of climate change, Stern published his review last October and it makes sober reading. Unless drastic action is taken - and soon - 200m people are likely to be displaced by floods by 2050, Stern concluded. According to his 600-page report the global economy could shrink by between 5% and 20% over the next two centuries because of the likely disruption to people's way of life caused by global warming. Taking action now to reduce carbon emissions would involve a "significant but manageable" one-off cost of 1% of global economic output by 2050. Not taking action would be disastrous: "Our actions over the coming few decades could create risks of major disruption to economic and social activity, later this century and in the next, on a scale similar to those associated with the great wars and economic depression of the first half of the 20th century," wrote the former World Bank chief economist.

Until recently America's ruling party was in a state of denial about global warming. President George W. Bush appeared to believe it was a hoax. His critics accused the former Texan oilman of letting the world burn to protect business interests.

Mid-term elections have given the Democrats the upper hand in Washington and global warming has become a hot topic, fuelled by former Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore and his Oscar-nominated documentary, An Inconvenient Truth.

Stern was in Washington this month to address Congress about his report - an audience, it would be fair to assume, more receptive to his words than at any other point in the Bush administration. Stern pressed Congress to consider adopting new regulations, funding new technologies and establishing a system of trading carbon-dioxide-emission credits to try to limit gases that spur global warming. "Leadership in the world's largest markets sets the pace elsewhere," he told the Senate's energy and natural resources committee. "Now is the time to act urgently, strongly and internationally."

But while the politicians were at least paying lip service, America's academics were taking their gloves off. On a trip to Yale, Stern was compared to the Wizard of Oz, his frightening picture a projection of badly flawed economics. Unlike Bush, it is not that Yale's economists doubt that the earth is getting hotter, or that human activity is the cause of global warming. The clear implication is that Stern overstated his case for political reasons.

Stern's biggest critic is William Nordhaus, an expert on the economics of global warming at Yale. In a public debate Nordhaus said the report "commits cruel and unusual punishment on the English language", adding that the British government's opinion on climate change was no more infallible than its prewar view about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Fellow Yale economist Robert Mendelsohn was blunter still. He was "awestruck" by the report, comparing Stern to "The Wizard of Oz". "My job is to be Toto [Dorothy's terrier, which unmasks the wizard]," he added.

Commenting on the dispute, Paul Joskow, director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Centre for Energy and Environmental Policy Research, said: "I don't think that there is a disagreement in terms of policy. The US needs to get on board and control greenhouse gases." Even Nordhaus has called Stern "fundamentally correct in sign if not in size". "The problems have been with the way in which the analysis in the report has been packaged," said Joskow. Academics felt the damage attributed to climate change was "chosen from the high side of the probability distribution" and likely costs "from the low side", Joskow said.

More criticism will soon be forthcoming. Harvard economics professor Martin Weitzman, in a soon-to-be published report in the Journal of Economic Literature, has made another attack on Stern's methodology. He argues that the UK government official overcooked his figures. The Stern report is biased toward gloom, argues Weitzman. According to "a generous interpretation of its not-so-great economic analysis," the report "has its heart in the right place" but its numbers do not back up its "alarmist tone", he writes.

The main economic objection to Stern centres on "the discount rate". Stern's headline numbers assumed that a dollar of economic damage prevented a century from now (adjusted for inflation) is roughly as valuable as a dollar spent reducing emissions today. The figure makes the cost of disaster to our grandchildren equal to the cost of the same disaster to ourselves.

Morally, the approach is unimpeachable; economically, its critics argue it is a nonsense. The world's economy is set to grow at 4.1% this year, according to the International Monetary Fund. Already today's dollar is looking like it is worth less than it will be worth tomorrow. If growth rates continue at present levels, then in 100 years' time there will be no comparison between the two figures. A richer and more technologically advanced society will be better able to deal with tomorrow's problems than we are today, argue Stern's critics.

The Stern Review team has begun to address these criticisms and published a defence of its methodology. The easiest part of the argument to follow is that "business-as-usual emissions of GHGs (greenhouse gases) could radically reduce the standard of living of future generations".

But his critics say it is still Stern's convictions, not his numbers, that buttress his argument. "I think very highly of Nick," said Joskow. "There's always a question if you are an economist: should you be stepping over the line and become a politician and a promoter? Nick has come to believe that this is a very serious problem, and drastic measures need to be taken. The very large numbers in the Stern review are at best speculative."

The report has certainly ignited a heated academic debate. But so far Stern's words do not appear to have reached a mass audience in America in the same way they have in Europe.

"These kinds of problem get you all tied up with the dilemmas of the infinite. We don't know a lot of things and 100 years away is a very long time," said Joskow. "Getting away from the precise numbers, the fact that it has helped to invigorate a debate about climate change and how we deal with it is very good. Maybe that was the intent: to shock people and get them to think."

Source

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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 generally 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

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