A self-proclaimed
‘megalomaniac’ writer from
It’s just
one of many bad ideas and terrible policy decisions arising from climate change
hysteria included in a study published recently by the San Francisco-based
Pacific Research Institute.
Hysteria’s History: Environmental Alarmism in Context by Dr Amy Kaleita and Gregory R Forbes (available as
an e-Connect at www.nzbr.org.nz) examines the apparent
natural tendency of some portion of the public to catastrophise about the
future of the planet.
Thomas
Malthus, in his 1798 Essay on the
Principle of Population, predicted the certain depletion of the earth’s
resources by man, leading to famine and ultimately starvation. Despite plenty
of criticism, the theory was profoundly influential at the time, as proponents
of political interests used it to advance their political and social agendas.
Self-proclaimed
propagandist Paul Erhlich picked up the baton 170 years later with his alarmist
manifesto The Population Bomb, in
which he argued that the world had reached its carrying capacity. “The battle to feed all humanity is over”, he announced,
adding that any action to prevent certain, self-inflicted, global environmental
and societal disaster would merely provide a “stay of execution”.
Although Erhlich’s
ideas and the Malthusian theory have been thoroughly disproven, they still have
supporters, like the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, which calls on people
to stop having children altogether. Members sign a pledge not to procreate and
adherents are helped to live up to the group’s motto, ‘Save the planet, kill
yourself’, with information on how to commit suicide.
Hysteria’s History goes
on to explore the phenomenon created by Rachel Carson’s 1962 Silent Spring, the book credited with
launching modern environmentalism.
The report
acknowledges there were elements of truth to
The
ensuing public pressure to ban DDT brought to a halt life-saving efforts to
combat malaria in many parts of the world.
With the use of DDT in
The tide
of opinion on DDT has since turned with, among others, the World Health
Organisation and the Endangered Wildlife Trust now promoting indoor spraying of
DDT in developing countries, and, surprise, surprise, the birds are still with
us. Robins (which were never in
jeopardy) continue to flourish, and the bald eagle was this year taken off the
But the
wild claims and alarmist projections continued. In 1975, in an article titled
‘The Cooling World’, Newsweek described
ominous signs of an impending ice age and warned of catastrophic famines,
“drought and desolation”, “floods, extended dry spells, long freezes [and]
delayed monsoons”. Sound familiar?
Today, of
course, global warming is the major cause du jour, having well outstripped acid
rain, peak oil, Y2K and bird flu. It’s being blamed for just about everything,
even increased teenage drinking, stray cats, poison ivy and sharks, as well as
some very serious events such as widespread malnutrition, outbreaks of disease
and the crisis in Darfur. As Hysteria’s
History points out, it’s troubling indeed that it appears acceptable to
present extreme consequences based on extreme projections without providing
either an analysis of their likelihood or the wider context.
An
outstanding current example is Al Gore’s Inconvenient
Truth, slated recently by a British High Court judge as prone to “alarmism
and exaggeration” and containing nine major factual errors.
Among the
long litany of predicted apocalyptic disasters, many have a basis in a
legitimate issue. But alarmism often obscures that. It plays on people’s
natural inclination to expect the worst to happen and polarises the debaters into
groups of ‘believers’ and ‘sceptics’.
The
challenge for policy makers, in developing appropriate evidence-based responses
to such issues, is to avoid knee-jerk reactions intended to appease their alarmist
constituents and the media. Where a real
problem exists, responses should be based on cool-headed analysis and rigorous
scientific investigation.