IN YOUR FACE: CLIMATE CHANGE

When should we panic?
The global warming alarms are part `cry-wolf’ and part fashionista. Or are they? They’ve been hollering on about climate change with more than the usual heat lately. I say ‘they’ because some of us first felt an urge to press the panic button more than thirty years ago. When the Friends of the Earth first used a giant computer to concoct elaborate graphs illustrating the combined scientific findings of doomsday prophets - the collectively concerned Club of Rome - they published a serious warning signal in their book,`Limits to Growth’. That was in 1972, I think. Okay, so `concocted’ has only a nice alliterative ring to it and you will be wondering where this piece is going. Ballistic it is not, but the closer we come to the year 2008 – the crunch point according to the Club - the nearer, in my view, looms the end of the old, wasteful world as we knew it. I remember 1972 as the same year in which there was an international fuel crisis caused by an OPEC gear change. Also, man called Schumacher was, at that time, preaching `small is beautiful’ and this chimed well with the conclusions of the Club of Rome. And there's more: international opinion-makers of the top rank were meeting at Cambridge University in 1972 to discuss employment opportunities within a global perspective. Their main conclusion: de-throne GDP as the sine qua non of economic happiness and aim (as the Club of Rome had advised) for equilibrium, for sustainability; cut down on growing dependence on a limited supply of hydrocarbons, check the unlimited growth of populations, industrial pollution and nature-destructive monoculture. I think the Kyoto Protocol was only a small genie to emerge from the greenhouse gas bottle after all that.

This week’s Time magazine with its cover showing an ice-beached polar bear, insists that we should be worried, in big, red letters, we should be VERY worried. In a special report on global warming the message screams “EARTH AT THE TIPPING POINT”. I have a feeling in my water (as my mother used to say) that we profligate humans really are beginning to drown in our own wastes. We are still cutting down huge forests, building and buying 4 x 4s, playing with nuclear fission, putting up two fingers to prophets of doom or generally playing God with our wonderful technology. In the meanwhile, the media, bless them, are steering a nervous path between reports which may cause us to worry ourselves silly or cautiously administering soothing doses of analgesics because an overdose of purgatives might set us off on a dangerous panic stampede.

Copyright © 2004 Diana Mitchell