After the scare of the cold war, the fear-mongers of the world found something else- “Global Warming”. It was a perfect cause for the resurgent hippie community and also kept the intellectual community occupied. Pressure groups went all out on this, convinced us that we were really, really bad people and created terms such as carbon footprint to add more guilt to our already depressing lives.
Lets us bear in mind that pressure groups like Greenpeace and Environment Defence Fund are now part of a multi-billion dollar industry. The top officials draw handsome salaries and run these well-oiled organisations to amass huge fortunes as donations. They made it fashionable to donate; they got celebrity darlings to pose for them, they even made it heroic by an ad-campaign that exalted people who went to jail for these causes.
The biggest criticism I have against them was the anti-DDT campaign. The National Academy of Sciences once reported, "To only a few chemicals does man owe as great a debt as to DDT. In little more than two decades, DDT has prevented 500 million human deaths, due to malaria." During the 60’s an uproar shunning DDT, as it was ending up in our bodies led to litigations against it and eventually was banned in the US, even though it was ruled that DDT was not a hazard to man. The cause was taken up by the pressure groups and it led to the complete ban of DDT.
Since the ban in 1972, over 50 million people have died from this once nearly vanquished disease and India is particularly notorious in Malaria-related deaths. Instead of the DDT that didn’t harm human beings we now use Prallethrin, which is like the Anton LaVey of being nice.
There are lots of other examples of them effing things up, so given their track record; Is Global Warming a hoax? If it’s true, are the measures done by them productive or counter-productive?
My qualms arise out of the unsubstantiated and skewed reports circulated by activists, they show drastic pictures of ice-caps melting while we know for a fact that some ice-caps are actually growing, surface temperatures have indeed gone up in some places but its not true for all over the world, in fact many cities in the US have grown colder after adjusting the increases due to concrete density (number of buildings) and so on.
Climate is something that we have not even begun to understand properly because of the very fact that there are far too many variables involved, even the best models of climatic prediction should be taken with a pinch of salt.
I cannot say it’s all been bad, companies have made conscious efforts to reduce their impact on the environment. Research for clean fuels and to increase efficiency of existing systems has been funded because of this. It’s just that when we make opinions we should see all sides of an issue rather than blatantly accepting public sentiment.
Fun Fact: A recent report by the UN revealed that the total livestock produces more greenhouse gases than all the cars in the world. So I am offsetting the greenhouse gases produced by my 3-litre car by eating as much as beef as possible. Wink!
