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Global Warming and Other Bollocks. Stanley Feldman
Читать онлайн.Название Global Warming and Other Bollocks
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781857828467
Автор произведения Stanley Feldman
Жанр Юмористические стихи
Издательство Ingram
AUSTIN WILLIAMS is an architect and project manager. He is the Director of the Future Cities Project; past editor of the Architect’s Journal. He is the author of Towards a New Humanism in Architecture and more recently of Enemies of Progress, a book on the effects of sustainability. He is the producer and chair of the Bookshop Barnies and a contributor to the Battle of Ideas.
PAUL WITHRINGTON is the director of Transport Watch. He has an honours degree in civil engineering from Bristol University and a masters degree in transport planning, having graduated in 1967. He is a member of the Institution of Civil Engineers (a chartered engineer). As a transport planner he first worked for the Greater London Council (1967 to 1970). At that time four ring roads of motorway proportions were planned for the capital. It was in that organisation that he had contact with the Railway Conversion League. Subsequently, he lectured at Portsmouth Polytechnic, had experience with a small PTRC, a firm that specialised in providing a range of courses for local and central government and in 1975 he joined Northamptonshire County Council, where he worked for 20 years as the project manager of Transport Planning Department. He retired in 1994 to work as the director of Transport Watch.
THE DOOMSDAY VIEW OF THE WORLD
THE IDEA THAT MAN is born into sin is as old as the story of Adam and Eve. It spawns the doomsday cults and the belief that only through repentance and self-denial can man aspire to redemption and save the world. It is manifest in the abstinence of Lent, the fasting of Yom Kippur and Ramadan and the various New Age groups that deny themselves material pleasures and seek solace and forgiveness by adopting a primitive lifestyle that they claim is compatible with nature. This has given rise to the ‘back-to-nature cults’ that predict that man’s tampering with nature will lead to the end of the world as we know it. In the early days it spawned the Luddite movement and opposition to mechanisation of transport and the telephone. Today it sees industrialisation, modern farming methods, genetically modified crops, scientific medicine, nuclear power and the internal-combustion engine as heralding the end of civilisation.
Fortunately, all the end-of-the-world cults have been proved wrong, but, undeterred by this abysmal record, they continue to echo a deep-seated, inherent fear that, unless man repents and changes his way of life, he will be instrumental in destroying his world.
The aesthete, the hermit and the back-to-nature movement all reflect this mindset. Today, politicians and persuasive pressure groups play on this same basic fear. They scare us with tales of an inevitable catastrophic effect of global warming, which they blame on the carbon dioxide (CO2) we produce; they play on a fear that an epidemic of obesity, caused by overeating, will kill our children before they reach a mature age; they claim that our indulgent lifestyle is consuming Earth’s precious resources, that pesticides will kill off life in our oceans, that chemicals in food will poison us all and that invisible rays from nuclear power stations, overhead electric cables or mobile phones will kill us with cancer. They are today’s prophets of doom using modern media methods to disseminate fear so as to propagate their belief that the end of the world is nigh. This book examines the evidence for and against some of their apocalyptical predictions.
The philosophies of one age have become the absurdities of the next, and the foolishness of yesterday becomes the wisdom of tomorrow.
—Sir William Osler, Aequanimitas and other addresses
SEVERAL YEARS AGO we were told that all the computer systems would fail at the turn of the millennium. Millions of pounds were spent on the so-called ‘millennium bug’. It proved to be nonsense.
The panic caused by public concern over the toxicity of DDT and the prediction it would lead to a sterile sea and famine on Earth caused its use to be suspended. As a result, millions have died of malaria and insect-borne diseases.
The health authorities told us that we should avoid cholesterol, or else our arteries would clog up and we would die young from heart disease. Eat only one egg a week, drink only skimmed milk and consume no cream or butter. Millions of pounds were spent on low-cholesterol diets. We now know it is a waste of time: it is not the cholesterol one eats that causes heart disease.
We are told our children are getting so fat that they will die younger than their parents. It is nonsense. We are being scared stiff.
Following two relatively dry years in 2004–05, we were told by government officials that, because of global warming, we should get used to droughts and obtaining our water from standpipes in the streets, that we should rip out our flowering shrubs and replant with drought-loving plants. So successful was this propaganda that the Chelsea Flower Show in 2007 featured grasses and succulents. It was followed by a series of the wettest summers on record, with sodden gardens and floods.
Today our children’s school meals are subject to the ‘food police’, who inspect their sandwiches, control their lunches and lecture them on their parents’ bad eating habits and the dangers of junk food. They ban fizzy drinks and stop the children using salt. They are taken on ‘school trips’ to the depots to be indoctrinated on the virtues of recycling, shown propaganda films to scare them stiff about the dangers of global warming and told they must walk to school and stop their parents using the car and destroying the Earth. They are not allowed to expose themselves when the sun shines in case they get melanoma, they must avoid foods that contain chemicals and weigh themselves regularly to make sure they are not part of the obesity epidemic that will kill them before they reach maturity.
With such a busy schedule, lessons on reading and arithmetic take second place in the curriculum. This might possibly be justified if the message they are being given was likely to improve their wellbeing and prevent future disease. The trouble is that there is increasing evidence that it is, like the ‘millennium bug’, a belief that is in part or entirely untrue. Often it is based on numbers picked out of the air.
We are frequently presented with new scare stories, based on so-called ‘new research’, often involving epidemiological surveys, poor science or inadequate samples. They soon become belief systems. They are propagated by the prophets of doom in a manner that engenders irrational fear. They foretell of imminent disaster unless remedial action is taken. The scare develops into a belief, like a religious dogma, whose tenets invariably end up involving a restriction of personal choice and freedom of action. This, they claim, is the price to pay to assuage the wrath of nature and the inevitable disaster presaged by these New Age prophets of doom.
The problem is that not all scare stories are baseless or involve poor science. Smoking is undoubtedly bad for your health. The beneficial effect of stopping smoking is real and important. The smoking scare was based on good evidence that met the criteria of ‘reasonable proof’. Similarly, we have reason to be circumspect about the effect of a burgeoning population on finite or limited resources and to be prepared to meet the challenge of any possible natural disaster or epidemic. It needs good evidence from reproducible scientific observation to determine the degree of risk associated with a particular indulgence. Only when this evidence is watertight and compelling is it justifiable to restrict personal freedom and individual choice.
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