Sir, - Patrick Finnegan (January 31st) postulates a connection between recent flooding in the west and global climate change. He goes on to warn that "all the world's climate models are showing that extreme weather events will, unfortunately, become no longer extreme, but normal. This way disaster lies, and we will run into it as extreme weather."
That apocalyptic and completely unsubstantiated arguments like these are so widely accepted is indicative of the intellectual vacuum that has emerged in the scientific debate on this issue. Rarely are environmentalist prejudices challenged.
Up to recently, the doom-mongers were focusing specifically on the dire consequences of global warming. However, as Dennis Avery pointed out in a very informed article in the Guardian last year (May 15th, 1999), a certain level of global warming would actually be beneficial. Avery argued convincingly that the global climate was more beneficial for mankind when temperatures were 1-2 degrees Celsius higher than today, during what is known as the Little Climate Optimum (900 to 1300 AD).
More recently, environmentalists have shifted their focus from global warming to the broader notion of climate change. Mr Finnegan posits a future of volatile and chaotic climate change, where even small but sudden changes will be sufficient to trigger events such as hurricanes, flooding and so on. Some even prophesy the coming of another Ice Age. However, as Peter Sammonds of University College London has argued, "the fact is that we do not know how to predict future climate. What we do know is that climate change is the norm and that past temperatures, measured by proxy measures in ice cores and marine sediments, have far exceeded recent measured temperatures" (LM, vol 122, 1999).
Nevertheless, Mr Finnegan is able to inform us that all the information we need about the effects we will all face from climate change "is available". Case closed. In a way he is right, because what seems to matter least in political and public discourse on this issue is rigorous scientific evidence. The Government will press ahead with its greenhouse gas abatement strategy on the basis of unquestioned assumptions about climate change and on the basis that the precautionary principle must be adhered to.
Mr Finnegan concludes by expressing the wish that "we learn to adjust our economic thinking faster than our climate forces us to." Unfortunately, these sentiments are now widely shared even in the political and corporate spheres, and it is having a stultifying effect on economic growth and on scientific and technological innovation and progress. Deterred by the stigmatising of growth and a culture of risk-avoidance and restraint, corporate managers are curtailing investment, to the detriment of all of us, but particularly the developing world. This is demonstrated most clearly in the case of the bio-tech industry, where companies such as Monsanto are increasingly running scared of NGOs and government regulation and are cutting back on research and investment in areas that offer potentially enormous rewards for humanity. - Yours, etc.,
Damian W. Byrne, Belvedere Place, Dublin 1.