In reading Bob Donaldson’s criticism of my response to Don Campbell’s missive I’m both bemused and confused that he should castigate ‘environmental activists’ for their vocal concern during the Cold War and the very real likelihood that the world might have been fried in a thermo-nuclear war. What’s to criticise about wanting to rid the world of the threat of a nuclear holocaust, Bob? You say it as though it was a conspiracy. Sadly the threat is still with us but has been diminished, if marginally, with the collapse of Communism, if our imagination allows us to think of Russia and some of her former client States as somehow democratic.
But to suggest that the ‘Ban-the Bomb’ disciples suddenly looked around for some other cause after the fall of Communism is a pretty wild conclusion requiring some imagination, considering that the people most concerned about ‘global warming’ today appear to be our young, so give them credit for their intelligence and their concerns. True, they are informed by what they hear and read in the news and when the overwhelming expert conclusion is that the threat posed from treating the earth’s atmosphere as a sewer for airborne waste is ‘real’ I think it warrants thinking about. I agree there is no such thing as ‘settled science’ and that new and more sophisticated research methods can change perceptions but would you, Bob, want us to keep up the rate at which we are pumping carbon into the atmosphere as though it had an inexhaustible ability to absorb it and therefore bequeath to future generations a world where the pursuit of wealth still has primacy over the quality of life on our planet? And to hark back to your ‘no such thing as Settled Science’ utterance, surely the changes in scientific thinking today regarding this vexed question is proof of that and let’s not forget the technology and modelling that scientists have at their disposal today. And let’s not forget there are at least a billion more people on this planet than there were at the beginning of the post-war reconstruction that you alluded to. That’s a billion more people (mainly in third world countries, to use the pejorative term) requiring food and housing so let’s give mother earth a fighting chance to support them, otherwise your ‘chickens coming home to roost’ might instead be coming home to roast, Bob.
Mike Feeney
