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Mass Migrations And War: Dire Climate Scenario
AP Report ^ | February 21, 2009
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Posted on Sat 21 Feb 2009 04:43:03 PM PST by Steelfish
Mass migrations and war: Dire climate scenario
CHARLES J. HANLEY, AP Special Correspondent – Feb 21, 3:00 pm ET
CAPE TOWN, South Africa – If we don't deal with climate change decisively, "what we're talking about then is extended world war," the eminent economist said.
His audience Saturday, small and elite, had been stranded here by bad weather and were talking climate. They couldn't do much about the one, but the other was squarely in their hands.
And so, Lord Nicholas Stern was telling them, was the potential for mass migrations setting off mass conflict.
"Somehow we have to explain to people just how worrying that is," the British economic thinker said.
Stern, author of a major British government report detailing the cost of climate change, was one of a select group of two dozen — environment ministers, climate negotiators and experts from 16 nations — scheduled to fly to Antarctica to learn firsthand how global warming might melt its ice into the sea, raising ocean levels worldwide.
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"This was an act of anger, desperation and indignation" is the way Gar Smith, editor of Earth Island Journal, described the terrorist attack on America two days after it happened. He offered an "environmental analysis" of the event, tracing "every terrorist attack against the United States . . . back to one common factor: Oil." Mr. Smith's solution to terrorism was "to transform our economy into one that operates on clean, renewable energy."
Meanwhile, the Green Party USA suggested that we respond to the attacks by letting "U.S. corporations, so busy using up Earth's resources and beggaring Earth's life forms, protect themselves." It proposed an end to the American "manufacture and sale of most pesticides and industrial toxic chemicals."
That's one way of looking at Sept. 11 -- as if Osama bin Laden will leave us alone if we stop making plastic and start using ethanol. What is so odd about this, coming from environmentalists, is that prosperity is the reason why so many environmental trends are positive today, and prosperity owes a great deal to energy production, technology and markets.
You don't believe that environmental trends are positive? You are not alone: The media treat the environment as a subject of ceaseless decline, hastened by the indifference of ruthless capitalists and their toady politicians. But The Skeptical Environmentalist (Cambridge, 515 pages, $27.95 paper), a superbly documented and readable book by a former member of Greenpeace, has a different story to tell.
The author, Bjorn Lomborg, is a professor of statistics at the University of Aarhus in Denmark and a self-described "man of the Left." A few years ago he read an article about the economist Julian Simon in which Simon claimed that the state of humanity and the natural environment were both improving. Mr. Lomborg didn't believe it. He directed his students to find the "real" data that would debunk this "right-wing" American. What they found stunned him and inspired this book.
Mr. Lomborg begins with what he calls The Litany. "We all know it," he dryly notes: "Our resources are running out. The population is ever growing, leaving less and less to eat. The air and water are becoming ever more polluted. . . . The world's ecosystem is breaking down." There is "just one problem," he continues. The Litany "does not seem to be backed up by the available evidence."