DISEASE AND DISASTERS IGNORED BY GREENS

A reader writes:

Ron Bailey makes the point that we may be facing a "tragedy of the commons" with disease. In the long run, this is probably a bigger threat to globalization than terrorism. There have certainly been examples in history where expanding international trade and cooperation, and the population growth it sustains, was brought to a halt by plague.

It is fascinating that disease, a threat that has been shown time and time again to endanger the lives of millions draws less concern than the more nebulous and much less certain threats of climate change, something that is not inherently lethal. Many climate activists do of course argue that changing climate may induce the spread of tropical diseases. Their solution is to throw money at schemes like the Kyoto Accords which even to it's advocates can merely delay the feared warming for a few years. This is a pretty roundabout way of dealing with a problem. Why not just invest in fighting the disease?

Similarly the threat of asteroid impact. This is 'new' but planetary scientists have proven that impacts are common in the solar system and have happened many times on Earth. We even witnessed the Shoemaker-Levy 9 impact on Jupiter. The risk is small but the consequences dwarf climatic change, something the Earth and even man has seen and survived many times.

See this article by Richerson (PDF file) for a detailed background on paleolithic man's experience with 'natural' climate change.

It is fascinating that many greens are quite hostile to the idea of taking the impact threat seriously. Maybe this reveals their anti-technology bias. This site has some discussion attempting to assess the actuarial risk of impacts and tries to guess what premium we should pay to prevent impacts.

That item from Richerson is quite interesting. He argues that climatic change was so common and extreme the Paleolithic (approx 1.5m to 10,000 before present) that agriculture was nearly impossible. Then in the Holocene (10,000bp to now) we had a period of benign climatic stability.

What is the 'norm'? Sometimes I think the Holocene stable patch may be "gamblers luck in a climatic casino": Just as "the gamblers fallacy" is to assume that past results (good or bad) will determine future results. Maybe we assume that past climates (as determined over a small baseline of a few thousand years) are normal and natural and any variation must be abnormal, unnatural and artificial (ie human induced). But the big picture says change is the norm, with or without human or industrial influences.

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