Hurrican Ivan proved truly terrible as it cut a swathe through the Caribbean leaving a trail of devastation in its wake. Yesterday the people of Mobile were counting the cost of its passing. Even the richest and most technically advanced country on earth could do nothing in the face of the awesome elemental power of nature.
This has revived once again the debate about the causes of climate change, the inexorable transformation being produced by global warming. Is it entirely the product of man-made pollution? If it is, the conclusion must be that if we have caused the changes, we have the power to undo them. Hence the huge effort being mounted to cut pollution and stabilize the condition of the earth’s atmosphere.
This campaign, most vigorously supported in Europe and Japan, is seeking to cut the emission of “green house gases”. The key plan is set out in the Kyoto Accord. Yet the United States, the world’s most energy-hungry society, has refused to ratify the accord, clearly motivated by the concerns of its big business supporters. The argument was that if the US were forced to cut down on its pollution emissions, it would be placed at a serious commercial disadvantage, especially against the emerging economies of China and India which were being given more time to control the green-house gases from their burgeoning new industries.
The developing world also is not very keen on the Kyoto proposals which ultimately boils down to the theory that underdeveloped nations should not play economic catch-up but should content themselves with “environmentally friendly” strategies to improve its quality of life, while protecting what wealthy Western campaigners fondly imagine is its largely unspoiled environment.
The core of the environmentalist argument is that if the world stops doing certain things it will be able to fix the problem. However, the definition of that problem has changed over the years. Fifty years ago climate change was blamed on nuclear testing. The testing stopped. The climate continued to change. Twenty years ago climate change was blamed on CFC gases. CFCs were abandoned. The climate continued to change. Campaigners, of course, argue that had nuclear testing and CFCs not been stopped, the changes would have been much more rapid and profound.
No one argues that human activity does not have some effect on our climate. However, that it is the key driver of change, they say, may well be plain wrong. Recent research from Russia has suggested that the earth has gone through 90,000-year climatic cycles within which there are also mini -peaks and troughs, influenced, for instance, by major volcanic eruptions such as those which, one theory has it, may have wiped out dinosaurs. Man’s contribution in the last ten thousand years has almost certainly been minimal compared to the forces of nature itself. Thus the chances of halting or even reversing climate change are equally small. The titanic power of the unstoppable Hurricane Ivan ought to make that clear.
