Letter from Ying Shan Lau (Miss), Straits Times Forum 27 May 08;
I REFER to Saturday's article, 'Beware of doom merchants' by Mr Robert Skidelsky.
Lord Skidelsky rightly criticises alarmism in today's global warming debate. He cautions against the misreporting of science which can lead to unsubstantiated doomsday scenarios being conjured up. Instead, he encourages that a degree of scepticism be employed when evaluating claims about global warming. I agree with Lord Skidelsky that the search for sustainable solutions requires calm and reason, and it is hardly helped by an environment of fear and panic.
However, I find that Lord Skidelsky's criticisms of climate scientists are a tad too harsh. He says that some scientists 'see themselves as captains in the salvationist army, dedicated to purging the world of evil habits'. This claim is surely too strong.
I am far from being a scientist, but I can confidently say that most scientists practise a healthy degree of scepticism, hence they would refrain from comparing themselves to messiahs. Many a geologist would readily acknowledge that the climate has been changing throughout Earth's history, but they would definitely qualify themselves when making the claim that global warming today is entirely anthropogenic. On the other hand, it should be celebrated that scientists at the forefront of their respective fields are making the effort to communicate their findings to society. They are scientists who retain the human touch, scientists who do not disconnect science from its linkages to society. If we laud nuclear scientists who speak out against the use of nuclear weapons, and if we praise genetic researchers who caution against 'playing God', surely we should also give credit to climate scientists who have decided to speak out based on the data which they have access to.
Moreover, it seems only natural that for global warming to make the news, it should be given a doomsday nature. Regardless of whether it is the media that paints the doomsday picture to attract public interest, or whether it is a method used by science communicators to draw the attention of the media, this is how attention is drawn to a highly complex and pressing issue. In Singapore, there was little public awareness about global warming less than just two years ago. It was an almost alien concept to most Singaporeans then, and it was certainly very difficult to generate any public interest in this issue. If not for the doomsday scenarios, public awareness about global warming will still be quite low. However, like what Lord Skidelsky recommends, we should not unquestioningly jump onto the doomsday bandwagon and adopt apocalyptic language. Advocacy is one thing - religious zeal is another. 'Climate change is a fact,' but Lord Skidelsky also cautions against irrationally putting all our stakes on the climate change issues and neglecting other issues, such as intra-generational equity and justice, as a consequence.
However, unless the public is willing to accept that returning to the primitive way of living is an option, I doubt that an 'apocalyptic virus' leading to 'the meltdown of our economies' is truly imminent. In my opinion, the growing awareness about climate change is also creating a wave of environmental concern which can be healthy for our economies.
This wave is not something which we should reject just because some aspects of it have been associated with irrational apocalyptic forecasts. Instead, it is an invitation to the public to understand the fine inter-dependence between human society and nature, and to search for more sustainable solutions to environmental problems. When adequate, solutions to environmental problems will lead to breakthroughs in social equity.
Back home, Singaporeans should take advantage of this wave, as Singapore is well-equipped to be at the forefront of sustainability in tropical climates. For example, sustainable, cradle-to-cradle designs are as yet poorly developed in tropical regions.
More research can be conducted to take stock of Singapore's geography and its unique tropical biodiversity, and to evaluate the ecological footprint of an average Singaporean. With the application of proper knowledge, we can rationally address fundamental problems in our relationship with nature, and transform our island-state into a truly green city, a bastion of environmental sustainability in the South-east Asian region.
SCIENCE AND RELIGION
Beware of doom merchants
Robert Skidelsky, Straits Times 24 May 08;
IT WAS only to be expected that former US vice-president Al Gore would give this month's cyclone in Myanmar an apocalyptic twist.
'Last year,' he said, 'a catastrophic storm hit Bangladesh. The year before, the strongest cyclone in more than 50 years hit China...
We're seeing the consequences that scientists have long predicted might be associated with continual global warming'.
Mr Gore's not-so-subliminal message: These natural catastrophes foreshadow the end of the world.
Apocalyptic beliefs have always been part of the Christian tradition. They express the yearning for heaven on earth, when evil is destroyed and the good are saved.
In their religious form, such beliefs rely on signs and omens, such as earthquakes and sunspots, which can be interpreted, by reference to Biblical passages, as portending a great cataclysm and cleansing. Apocalyptic moments are products of a sense of crisis: They can be triggered by wars and natural disasters.
Apocalyptic thinking is alive and well, especially in America, where it feeds on Protestant fundamentalism and is mass-marketed with all the resources of modern media. Circles close to the Bush administration, it is rumoured, take current distempers like terrorism as confirmation of Biblical prophecies.
In secularised, pseudo-scientific form, apocalyptic thinking has been at the core of revolutionary politics. In his book Black Mass, philosopher John Gray writes of how political doctrines like Marxism colonised the apocalyptic vision in prophesying capitalism's destruction as the prelude to a socialist utopia.
But political messianism was an offshoot of 19th-century optimism. With the collapse of optimism, contemporary apocalyptic belief lays more stress on catastrophe and less on utopia.
For example, in his book Flat Earth News, investigative journalist Nick Davies reminds us of the millennium bug panic. Newspapers carried stories predicting that computer systems would crash on Jan 1, 2000, causing much of the world to shut down. The subtext was familiar: Those who live by technology will die by it.
Misreporting of science is now so routine we hardly notice it. Much more serious is when science itself becomes infected by the apocalyptic spirit. Faith-based science seems a contradiction in terms, because the scientific worldview emerged as a challenge to religious superstition. But important scientific beliefs can now be said to be held religiously, rather than scientifically.
This brings us back to Mr Gore and climate change. There is no doubt Earth became warmer over the 20th century - by 0.7 deg C. Most climate scientists attribute this largely to human carbon dioxide emissions. If nothing is done to restrict such emissions, global temperature will rise by 1.8 to 4 deg C over the next century. At some 'tipping point', the world will be subject to floods and pestilence in classic apocalyptic fashion.
This is the second doomsday scenario in recent decades, the first being the Club of Rome's prediction in 1972 that the world would soon run out of natural resources. Both are 'scientific', but their structure is the same as that of the Biblical story of the Flood: Human wickedness - in today's case, unbridled materialism - triggers the disastrous sequence, which may already be too late to avert.
Like Biblical prophecy, scientific doomsday stories seem impervious to refutation, and are constantly being repackaged to feed the hunger for catastrophe.
Scientists argue that the media and politicians are responsible for exaggerating their findings as promises of salvation or warnings of retribution. But scientists themselves are partly responsible, because they have hardened uncertainties into probabilities, treated disputable propositions as matters of fact and attacked dissent as heresy.
Scientists are notoriously loath to jettison conclusions reached by approved scientific methods, however faulty. But their intolerance of dissent is hugely magnified when they see themselves as captains in the salvationist army, dedicated to purging the world of evil habits.
Today it is the West that foists an apocalyptic imagination on the rest of the world. Perhaps we should be looking to China and India for answers about how to address environmental damage, instead of using climate change as a pretext to deprive them of what we already have.
How do the Chinese feel about their newfound materialism? Do they have an intellectual structure with which to make sense of it?
The best antidote to the doom merchants is scepticism. We must be willing to take uncertainty seriously. Climate change is a fact. But apocalyptic thinking distorts the scientific debate and makes it harder to explain the causes and consequences of this fact, which in turn makes it harder to know how to deal with it.
The danger is that we become so infected with the apocalyptic virus we end up creating a real catastrophe - the meltdown of our economies - to avoid an imaginary one.
In short, while a religious attitude of mind deserves the highest respect, we should resist the re-conquest by religion of matters that should be the concern of science.
The writer, a member of the British House of Lords, is professor emeritus of political economy at Warwick University.
Copyright: Project Syndicate
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