You must admit it is difficult not to be in a constant state of worried misery given the number of 'doomsters' there are around, you know, grumpy old men in their pajamas tapping away at their keyboards warning against this or that disaster just around the corner . . . hang on . . . that reminds me of someone . . . never mind, it'll come back to me later . . . where was I? Are yes, the multitude of "the end of the world is nigh" merchants forever mimicking Cassandra:
Cry, Trojans, cry! Lend me ten thousand eyes,
And I will fill them with prophetic tears.(*)
Mind you, she was dead right about the poor old Trojans, tricked into destruction by clever Greeks bearing gifts - which reminds me of something else - but never mind, let me try, for once, to stick to the point. All my adult life I have been surrounded by highly 'educated' people telling me that this, that or the other would inevitably lead to death and damnation. The cure for these supposed ills usually involved giving those very same highly 'educated' people immense powers over my life to the point where, on the whole, by and large, taking it all into consideration, death and damnation seemed preferable!
Anyway, today I can bring you not so much the Good News Bible, as the Good News Analysis as written by the estimable Matt Ridley and delivered in Wells Cathedral last week - dammit, if only I had known because its only just up the road. Ridley applies his curiosity to the claims of the various 'doomsters' and comes to these rather heartening conclusions:
Global warming, I hear you say. Yes indeed. The official forecasts say world temperature will rise by 2-4C in this century. It is going to have to start accelerating soon, because the rate of increase since 1980 is about 1C per century – and that’s if you ignore the satellites and rely mainly on the land-surface records, which many now think are hopelessly contaminated with the effects of urbanisation. Even then, it has been slowing down.
I thought it was getting a bit chilly, but he moves on:
What about the ice-caps then? They will be gone, along with Bangladesh and Florida, surely. No. There’s a satellite called GRACE, which is so clever it can weigh Greenland every time it goes over it. The scientists who tell it what to do have calculated that Greenland is losing 200 cubic kilometres of ice a year, and they say that scares them. [...] How much of Greenland’s ice is 200 cubic kilometres? About one half of one hundredth of one percent – which means that Greenland is losing ice at the rate of half a percent per century. It will be half gone in 10,000 years.
To quote a popular catchphrase, "Am I bovvered?" and the answer is 'no'. Ah, but wait a minute, cry the alarmists, what about the population explosion?
Well, did you know that population is growing at the rate of a little over 1% a year, whereas in the 1960s, it was growing at 2% per year. The number of net new people born each year has been falling for 20 years. World population quadrupled in the twentieth century. It won’t even double in the twenty-first. The median UN projection has it levelling off in 2075 at roughly 1.5 times today’s level.
Even I knew that the wealthier people become the less children they have for very obvious reasons. Still, we have to feed these extra people:
Despite that quadrupling, we ended the twentieth century having largely extinguished famine (except in countries run by criminals, like North Korea and Sudan). We actually increased food production per capita by about 30% in 50 years –and we did so without ploughing new land. The world cereal harvest trebled from the same acreage. Repeat that trick – plausible with new seeds and technologies coming along all the time -- and we will feed 9 billion people in 2100 very comfortably from a smaller acreage than we plough today. We can rebuild large chunks of rainforest and other wilderness. We might even bring back some extinct species by genetic engineering.
He goes on but by this time I was on my second bottle of 'Dom Pom'. Cheers! Dammit, life is good!
(*) Troilus & Cressida, II.ii
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