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August 11, 2004
Eco-musings .....
The more we learn, the more we discover we do not know, or at least so it would seem to those who, like myself, approach a lot of things with a reasonably open mind. (OK, OK, I have a particular blind spot called the Civil Service and Politicians!) But, in recent weeks (I wonder why all the more entertaining "Global Disaster stories always surface when the politicians are on holiday?) we seem to have had more than a few stories about the looming demise of our planet than usual. First it was the usual Global Warming, then it was the sun was about to zap us with a burst of radiation, (which, to be fair it did!), then it was New variant Creuzfeld-Jakob disease was about to strike more than half the population and so it goes on.
I have recently discovered a wonderful site called "Junk Science" which has some really fascinating stuff on it. Everything from giant intelligent jellyfish to PCB mimic chemicals in farmed fish. It has a serious message underlying it all, which is, put simply, we really do get ourselves worked up about the wrong things almost all of the time.
As Russell of RussBlog pointed out in a comment to my previous post on the subject of Global Warming, the data on which all this hue and cry is based is hopelessly flawed, and until we can get some really quality data which covers the entire planet as opposed to 25% of it, we may never know. Ice cores from Antartica seem to suggest that this sort of cycle of heating up and then freezing down is a natural one linked to the sun changing whatever it's doing. We now know (or at least think we know) that there is life, oxygen, and water on this planet because it is located in a "temperate zone" just far enough from the sun to be warm enough and not too far to be too cold. It helps, too, that we have a rather large planetoid called the moon stabilising our tilted axial spin, otherwise the extremes of winter and summer could be lethal, anyway.
Life is a risky business, it is extremely fragile, and it is so heavily interwoven with so many things that we do not yet understand fully how it will be changed or destroyed by whatever happens in the next few thousand years. Political visions seldom run longer than five years, and when they do, the vision of five years ago has usually been abandoned in favour of the latest fad or scare by the time the first five years is over. The problem faced by many "Green" groups is that they simply refuse to accept any evidence which runs counter to their particular political thesis. This is what is really holding back advances which may actually benefit the entire eco-system in the longer term - that, and the fact that the media really do not want to promote anything which may not be "popular" with their "friends" in the Green camp.
Kyoto is a classic case of a bunch of politicians being fed information from a bunch of very selective organisations who employ only the "research" done by scientists who are on their bandwagon and then set "targets" which are unrealistic, taking no account of changing circumstances and the needs of any given society. It is more about branding the developed nations as "eco-destroyers" and "capitalist oppressors" than it is about any scientific solution to a problem we cannot even define at the moment. Yes, it would be good to reduce emmissions, for one thing the air would smell a lot better in a lot of these places, but you cannot achieve this by simply setting unrealistic targets.
No, to find the way forward for the entire human race we actually need less campaigning, more serious thought, and a great deal less of the scare stories the Green activists and their supporting scientists like to release in order to frighten governments into funding their research. We also need to keep much more open minds on the whole issue of science and its role in understanding life on this or any other planet!
Posted by The Gray Monk at August 11, 2004 12:37 PM