Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

When Half the World Population…

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“ENVIRONMENTAL policy isn’t just about the environment, it’s also about people. And it isn’t just about a future nearly impossible to predict, it’s also about what is happening today. When half the world population today does not have access to reliable supply of energy, to talk of problems that may arise 50 or 100 years later and call for reducing consumption is a hard political sell. Green activists almost always forget this. Political leaders do so at their own peril.”

Mr. Mitra is director of the Liberty Institute, an independent think tank in New Delhi, and a columnist for WSJ.com.

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. spangled drongo says

    Ah, but it’s the new guilt industry. Our consciences are still the biggest chink in the human armour and in the collective affluent first world remain the best method to redistribute wealth. In a financial downturn it is possibly still the best honey pot around.

  2. el gordo says

    ‘And it isn’t just about a future nearly impossible to predict, it’s also about what is happening today.’

    Piers Corbyn predicts this winter’s weather (November 30):

    “Winter Dec to Feb inclusive in Britain and Europe will be exceptionally cold and snowy – like hell frozen over at times – with much of England, Germany, Benelux and N France suffering one of the coldest winters for over 100 years. It is expected that two of the three months Dec, Jan & Feb are likely to be in the three coldest for a 100 years (eg using Central England Temperatures).”

    It’s cool, it must be global warming.

  3. Pandanus says

    Back in the late 1960’s the late Jack Westoby, an economist, Director of Forestry for the UNFAO, wrote in a seminal paper that “forestry was not about trees, but about people. It was only about trees in so far as they met the needs of the people”.

    It seems to me that Mitra is channeling Westoby in this instance. One could also say that the Murray-Darling Basin plan is not about water but about people in the same manner. Of course the needs of people can take many forms and these days many people still confuse their needs and wants.

  4. spangled drongo says

    This weekend is SEQ’s big bird count and I have been standing in the rain, getting wet and cold, trying to see, count and ID birds through a steamed-up pair of binocs.

    I think I might get smart and do a climatologist “parameterization” of last year’s data.

  5. spangled drongo says

    Yes, I just tried it for practice.

    How effortless and sensible is that?

    And somehow it feels much more scientific too!

    I mean, let’s face it, no drongo is never gonna be able to list and number all the birds in the bush.

  6. cementafriend says

    Spangled drongo, I think the drongos are protecting themselves from the rain. They might be smarter than the BOM forecasters.

  8. val majkus says

    Is it cooling, is it warming, is it cooling or does that cooling mean that it’s warming? Confused?
    The BOM’s David Jones (he of the BOM that NZ is getting NIWA’s audit done by)
    Reader Tony picks up another line of Jones suggesting that the weather is like a Rorschach blot to him that he always interprets as “warming!”:
    http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/i_suspect_the_bureaus_jones_is_too_eager_to_see_the_warming/

    From the quoted World Today transcript:

    DAVID JONES: You know, the huge fires in Russia for example clearly have a climate change component to them.
    Oh really? The following historical correspondence is a translation from the original Russian-language source (found via a comment at WUWT) which shows there is nothing new, or climate change related, about fires and droughts in Russia (apologies for length):

    1298: There was a wholesale death of animals. In the same year there was a drought, and the woods and peat bogs burnt.

    1364: Halfway through summer there was a complete smoke haze, the heat was dreadful, the forests, bogs and earth were burning, rivers dried up. The same thing happened the following year . . .

    1431: following a blotting out of the sky, and pillars of fire, there was a drought – “the earth and the bogs smouldered, there was no clear sky for 6 weeks, nobody saw the sun, fishes, animals and birds died of the smoke.

    1735: Empress Anna wrote to General Ushakov: “Andrei Ivanovich, here in St Petersburg it is so smoky that one cannot open the windows, and all because, just like last year, the forests are burning. We are surprised that no-one has thought about how to stem the fires, which are burning for the second year in a row”.

    1831: Summer was unbearably hot, and as a consequence of numerous fires in the forests, there was a constant haze of smoke in the air, through which the sun appeared a red hot ball; the smell of burning was so strong, that it was difficult to breathe.

    The years of 1839-1841 were known as the “hungry years”. In the spring of 1840, the spring sowings of corn disappeared in many places. From midway through April until the end of August not a drop of rain fell. From the beginning of summer the fields were covered with a dirty grey film of dust. All the plants wilted, dying from the heat and lack of water. It was extraordinarily hot and close, even though the sun, being covered in haze, shone very weakly through the haze of smoke. Here and there in various regions of Russia the forests and peat bogs were burning (the firest had begun already in 1839). there was a reddish haze, partially covering the sun, and there were dark, menacing clouds on the horizon. There was a choking stench of smoke which penetrated everywhere, even into houses where the windows remained closed.

    1868: the weather was murderous. It rained once during the summer. There was a drought. The sun, like a red hot cinder, glowed through the clouds of smoke from the peat bogs. Near Peterhoff the forests and peat workings burnt, and troops dug trenches and flooded the subterranean fire. It was 40 centigrade in the open, and 28 in the shade.

    1868: a prolonged drought in the northern regions was accompanied by devastating fires in various regions. Apart from the cities and villages affected by this catastrophe, the forests, peat workings and dried-up marshes were burning. In St Petersburg region smoke filled the city and its outlying districts for several weeks.

    1875: While in western europe there is continual rain and they complain about the cold summer, here in Russia there is a terrible drought. In southern Russia all the cereal and fruit crops have died, and around St Petersburg the forest fires are such that in the city itself, especially in the evening, there is a thick haze of smoke and a smell of burning. Yesterday, the burning woods and peat bogs threatened the ammunitiion stores of the artillery range and even Okhtensk gunpowder factory.

    1885: (in a letter from Peter Tchaikovsky, composer): I’m writing to you at three oclock in the afternoon in such darkness, you would think it was nine oclock at night. For several days, the horizon has been enveloped in a smoke haze, arising, they say, from fires in the forest and peat bogs. Visibility is diminishing by the day, and I’m starting to fear that we might even die of suffocation.

    1917 (diary of Aleksandr Blok, poet): There is a smell of burning, as it seems, all around the city peat bogs, undergrowth and trees are burning. And no-one can extinguish it. That will be done only by rain and the winter. Yellowish-brown clouds of smoke envelope the villages, wide swaithes of undergrowth are burning, and God sends no rain, and what wheat there is in the fields is burning.

  9. val majkus says

    Global Warming… no Global Cooling… no Global Warming…NO, IT’S COOLING!
    Global Cooling:
    “The discoveries of changes in the sun’s heat and the southward advance of glaciers in recent years have given rise to conjectures of the possible advent of a new ice age.” Time Magazine, September 10, 1924.

    “MacMillan Reports Signs of New Ice Age” The New York Times, September 18, 1923

    “The possibility of another Ice age already having started… is admitted by men of first rank in the scientific world, men specifically qualified to speak.” The Los Angeles Times, June 28, 1923

    Global Warming:
    “Gaffers who claim that winters were harder when they were boys are quite right… weather men have no doubt that the world at least for the time being is growing warmer.” Time Magazine, Jan. 2, 1939

    “America in Longest Warm Spell Since 1776; Temperature Line Records a 25-Year Rise” The New York Times, March 27, 1933

    “Permafrost in Russia is receding northward up to 100 yards per year.” Time Magazine, 1951

    “Winters are getting milder, summers drier. Glaciers are receding, deserts growing.” U.S. News and World Report, Jan. 8, 1954

    Global Cooling…. Again?
    “Scientists Ponder Why World’s Climate is Changing; A Major Cooling Widely Considered to Be Inevitable” The New York Times, May 21, 1975

    “Climatological Cassandras are becoming increasingly apprehensive, for the weather aberrations they are studying may be the harbinger of another Ice Age.” Time Magazine, June 24, 1974

    “North Atlantic sea temperatures declined, and shipping routes were cluttered with ice. Furthermore, the permafrost in Russia and Canada was advancing southward.” The New York Times, December 29, 1974

    “There is very important climatic change going on right now… It is something that, if it continues, will affect the whole human occupation of the earth—- like a billion people starving. Fortune Magazine, from Reid Bryson, February 1974

    Back to Global Warming…..Confused Yet??
    “About 10 million residents of Bangladesh will lose their homes and means of sustenance because of the rising sea level, due to global warming, in the next few decades.” Al Gore, from ‘Earth in Balance” 1992

    “Billions will die,” says Lovelock, who tells us he is not normally a gloomy type. Human civilization will be reduced to a “broken rabble ruled by brutal warlords”, and the plague-ridden remainder of the species will flee the cracked and broken earth to the Arctic, the last temperate spot, where a few breeding couples will survive. The Daily Telegraph, February 2, 2006

    check it out with links at

    http://www.climatechangedispatch.com/media-manipulation/8223-global-warming-no-global-cooling-no-global-warmingno-its-cooling?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+climatechangefraud%2FnkcO+%28Climate+Change+Dispatch+news%29

  10. el gordo says

    Vicky Pope defends the indefensible AGW, with the suggestion that increased pollution is causing regional cooling. This was a favorite idea of Reid Bryson who believed that particulate matter would overpower AGW right about now.

    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/climatechange/8159991/Global-warming-has-slowed-because-of-pollution.html

    If this is the warmists strategy of keeping the gravy train on track a bit longer, then it’s ultimately doomed to fail.

  12. Dave says

    Nice of Mr Mitra to be polite, but in my experience current ‘Green activists’ don’t forget that environmental policy affects people, they don’t care. I suppose an argument could be made that greenies see an absolute dichotomy between mankind and Nature, and since we are completely abstracted from Nature, protecting the Environment from human influence can only be good. But what I see now is mostly greenies who hate people (or at least other people) and would have no problem with everyone else being immediately teleported to hell. I’m not a student of religion, but the greens do strike me as rather bizarrely like a variant on Calvinism with Nature replacing God and choosing them for salvation and the depraved rest for damnation. With such a belief system it makes no sense to care about how environmental laws affect people or even to have realistic political goals.