Some “5,500 journalists and 700 in the American delegation alone,” reported a London newspaper, describing the 1997 Kyoto global warming jamboree. And given the world’s newly awakened interest in climate change, there will doubtless be many, many more at the follow-up conference in Copenhagen at the end of this year.
If only one-tenth of those would turn up for a conference on supplying pure water and giving every girl a basic primary education, then we might be getting somewhere with the most tangible pressing environmental need of our age. (And one that cannot be scientifically questioned, to boot.)
Still, give Kyoto its due. This is the way issues get placed firmly on the political map. “I have only a modest proposal,” said Kierkegaard, “to make the true state of affairs known.” It may be the wrong issue, it may be an overblown issue; but if you believe in getting attention, this was the way to do it.
This approach has its dangers. Crying wolf can be counterproductive. More than 33 years ago I wrote a column for the The Washington Post that was provocative enough to trigger an editorial alongside. Having spoken with most of the world’s top climatologists I pronounced that the world was cooling, and dangerously so. It could trigger an ice age.
One of my sources, Stephen Schneider of the University of Stanford, pooh-poohed the evidence of the dangers of an increase in carbon dioxide. Where is he now, a third of a century later? A fervent advocate of the greenhouse effect and global warming and lambasting the press for equivocating. It is “journalistically irresponsible to present both sides [of the global warming theory],” he is reported to have said with a straight face at the Global Climate Change Roundtable in Washington, hosted by former Vice President Al Gore.
Twenty years ago, the Club of Rome’s “Limits to Growth” introduced us to the wonders of exaggerated extrapolation. Its computer models were summarized for the non-initiated by the analogy of the lily pond. Where was the lily that doubled its size every day the day before it covered the pond? Answer: Only half way across the pond.
Yet none of the Club of Rome’s projections have stood the test of time. Neither vanishing raw materials (never so abundant), skyrocketing oil prices (back to 2006 levels), food supplies (ever increasing), nor population growth (although still a curse in many countries, it has peaked in the three countries that matter most—India, China and Brazil). None of these benchmarks has threatened humanity the way the Club anticipated. Even the AIDS doomsayers with some of their wilder projections overlook the lesson of the medieval Black Death—all plagues peak of their own accord in due time.
In fact, if we look through the well-publicized environmental causes of the 1970s, we can see how many false notes there were in the doom songs. There was the alleged destruction of the ozone layer by the newly introduced Concorde airliner. There was the pollution of ocean waters. There was DDT poisoning, the issue that made Rachel Carson and her book Silent Spring famous. But as time passed it became clear that the breakdown of the ozone layer by supersonic aircraft had been grossly overstated. There is little pollution yet of the great oceans, and no evidence that it affects fish stock or marine life. Over-fishing is the real worry, but that only in certain regions. And we realize today that DDT is safer for the people that use it than the organo-phosphate insecticides that replaced it.
Let’s examine food in a little more detail. At the World Food Conference called by a worried Henry Kissinger in 1974, headlines read that “the world is running out of food.” Indeed, the evidence of failed harvests all over the place pointed that way. One third of humanity was said by the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization to have “inadequate access to food.” But now the figure is down to one in five, although the world’s population has increased from by a billion to over 6 billion.
Perhaps the most telling recent parable for our times is the story of Germany’s Black Forest. Twenty years ago, the famous forest was considered all but dead. The casualty of ecological calamity, it was supposedly attacked by pollutants and climatic changes. To paraphrase Mark Twain, the rumors of the forest’s death were premature. The forest today is verdant and growing faster than ever, for reasons that are as unclear to foresters as they should have been when the forest appeared to be on the wane.
All this is not to say we should ignore the serious limits on our planet’s seemingly endless magnanimity. Alas, in the age of super-hype one has to scream to be heard. But as Planche wrote in 1879, “Why, you’ve cried ‘Wolf!’ till, like the shepherd youth, You’re not believed when you do speak the truth.”
Jonathan Power is a syndicated columnist and a contributing editor of Prospect magazine in London. His most recent book is Conundrums of Humanity (Martinus Nijhoff, 2007).