(Matt Ridley, WIRED) When the sun rises on
December 22, as it surely will, do not expect apologies or even a rethink. No
matter how often apocalyptic predictions fail to come true, another one soon
arrives. And the prophets of apocalypse always draw a following—from the
100,000 Millerites who took to the hills in 1843, awaiting the end of the
world, to the thousands who believed in Harold Camping, the Christian radio
broadcaster who forecast the final rapture in both 1994 and 2011.
Religious zealots hardly
have a monopoly on apocalyptic thinking. Consider some of the environmental
cataclysms that so many experts promised were inevitable. Best-selling economist
Robert Heilbroner in 1974:
“The outlook for man, I believe, is painful,
difficult, perhaps desperate, and the hope that can be held out for his future
prospects seem to be very slim indeed.”
Or best-selling ecologist Paul Ehrlich
in 1968:
“The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s ["and
1980s" was added in a later edition] the world will undergo
famines—hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of
any crash programs embarked on now … nothing can prevent a substantial increase
in the world death rate.”
Or Jimmy Carter in a televised speech in 1977:
“We
could use up all of the proven reserves of oil in the entire world by the end
of the next decade.”
Predictions of global
famine and the end of oil in the 1970s proved just as wrong as end-of-the-world
forecasts from millennialist priests. Yet there is no sign that experts are
becoming more cautious about apocalyptic promises. If anything, the rhetoric
has ramped up in recent years. Echoing the Mayan calendar folk, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
moved its Doomsday Clock one minute closer to midnight at the start of 2012,
commenting: “The global community may be near a point of no return in efforts
to prevent catastrophe from changes in Earth’s atmosphere.”
Over the five decades since
the success of Rachel Carson’s Silent
Spring in 1962 and the four decades since the success of the Club
of Rome’s The Limits to
Growth in 1972, prophecies of doom on a colossal scale have
become routine. Indeed, we seem to crave ever-more-frightening predictions—we
are now, in writer Gary Alexander’s word, apocaholic. The past half century has
brought us warnings of population explosions, global famines, plagues, water
wars, oil exhaustion, mineral shortages, falling sperm counts, thinning ozone,
acidifying rain, nuclear winters, Y2K bugs, mad cow epidemics, killer bees,
sex-change fish, cell-phone-induced brain-cancer epidemics, and climate
catastrophes.
So far all of these
specters have turned out to be exaggerated. True, we have encountered
obstacles, public-health emergencies, and even mass tragedies. But the promised
Armageddons—the thresholds that cannot be uncrossed, the tipping points that
cannot be untipped, the existential threats to Life as We Know It—have
consistently failed to materialize. To see the full depth of our apocaholism,
and to understand why we keep getting it so wrong, we need to consult the past
50 years of history.
The classic apocalypse has
four horsemen, and our modern version follows that pattern, with the four
riders being chemicals (DDT, CFCs, acid rain), diseases (bird flu, swine flu,
SARS, AIDS, Ebola, mad cow disease), people (population, famine), and resources
(oil, metals). Let’s visit them each in turn.
Silent Spring, published 50 years ago this year, was
instrumental in the emergence of modern environmentalism.
“Without
this book, the environmental movement might have been long delayed or never
have developed at all,”
Al
Gore wrote in his introduction to the 1994 edition. Carson’s main theme was
that the use of synthetic pesticides—DDT in particular—was causing not only a
massacre of wildlife but an epidemic of cancer in human beings. One of her
chief inspirations and sources for the book was Wilhelm Hueper, the first
director of the environmental arm of the National Cancer Institute. So obsessed
was Hueper with his notion that pesticides and other synthetic chemicals were
causing cancers (and that industry was covering this up) that he strenuously
opposed the suggestion that tobacco-smoking take any blame. Hueper wrote in a
1955 paper called “Lung Cancers and Their Causes,” published in CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians,
“Industrial
or industry-related atmospheric pollutants are to a great part responsible for
the causation of lung cancer … cigarette smoking is not a major factor in the
causation of lung cancer.”
In
fact, of course, the link between smoking and lung cancer was found to be
ironclad. But the link between modern chemicals and cancer is sketchy at best.
Even DDT, which clearly does pose health risks to those unsafely exposed, has
never been definitively linked to cancer. In general, cancer incidence and
death rates, when corrected for the average age of the population, have been
falling now for 20 years.
By
the 1970s the focus of chemical concern had shifted to air pollution. Life magazine set the
scene in January 1970:
“Scientists have solid experimental and
theoretical evidence to support … the following predictions: In a decade, urban
dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution … by 1985 air
pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half.”
Instead,
driven partly by regulation and partly by innovation, both of which
dramatically cut the pollution coming from car exhaust and smokestacks, ambient
air quality improved dramatically in many cities in the developed world over
the following few decades. Levels of carbon monoxide, sulphur dioxide, nitrogen
oxides, lead, ozone, and volatile organic compounds fell and continue to fall.
In
the 1980s it was acid rain’s turn to be the source of apocalyptic forecasts. In
this case it was nature in the form of forests and lakes that would bear the
brunt of human pollution. The issue caught fire in Germany, where a cover story
in the news magazine Der
Spiegel in November 1981 screamed:
“the forest dies.”
Not
to be outdone, Stern
magazine declared that a third of Germany’s forests were already dead or dying.
Bernhard Ulrich, a soil scientist at the University of Göttingen, said it was
already too late for the country’s forests:
“They
cannot be saved.”
Forest
death, or waldsterben,
became a huge story across Europe.
“The
forests and lakes are dying. Already the damage may be irreversible,”
journalist
Fred Pearce wrote in New
Scientist in 1982. It was much the same in North America: Half of
all US lakes were said to be becoming dangerously acidified, and forests from
Virginia to central Canada were thought to be suffering mass die-offs of trees.
Conventional
wisdom has it that this fate was averted by prompt legislative action to reduce
sulphur dioxide emissions from power plants. That account is largely false.
There was no net loss of forest in the 1980s to reverse. In the US, a 10-year
government-sponsored study involving some 700 scientists and costing about $500
million reported in 1990 that
“there is no evidence of a general or unusual
decline of forests in the United States and Canada due to acid rain” and “there
is no case of forest decline in which acidic deposition is known to be a
predominant cause.”
In
Germany, Heinrich Spiecker, director of the Institute for Forest Growth, was
commissioned by a Finnish forestry organization to assess the health of
European forests. He concluded that they were growing faster and healthier than
ever and had been improving throughout the 1980s.
“Since
we began measuring the forest more than 100 years ago, there’s never been a
higher volume of wood … than there is now,”
Spiecker
said. (Ironically, one of the chief ingredients of acid rain—nitrogen
oxide—breaks down naturally to become nitrate, a fertilizer for trees.) As for
lakes, it turned out that their rising acidity was likely caused more by
reforestation than by acid rain; one study suggested that the correlation
between acidity in rainwater and the pH in the lakes was very low. The story of
acid rain is not of catastrophe averted but of a minor environmental nuisance
somewhat abated.
The
threat to the ozone layer came next. In the 1970s scientists discovered a
decline in the concentration of ozone over Antarctica during several springs,
and the Armageddon megaphone was dusted off yet again. The blame was pinned on
chlorofluorocarbons, used in refrigerators and aerosol cans, reacting with
sunlight. The disappearance of frogs and an alleged rise of melanoma in people
were both attributed to ozone depletion. So too was a supposed rash of
blindness in animals: Al Gore wrote in 1992 about blind salmon and rabbits,
while The New York Times
reported
“an
increase in Twilight Zone-type
reports of sheep and rabbits with cataracts” in Patagonia.
But
all these accounts proved incorrect. The frogs were dying of a fungal disease
spread by people; the sheep had viral pinkeye; the mortality rate from melanoma
actually leveled off during the growth of the ozone hole; and as for the blind
salmon and rabbits, they were never heard of again.
There
was an international agreement to cease using CFCs by 1996. But the predicted
recovery of the ozone layer never happened: The hole stopped growing before the
ban took effect, then failed to shrink afterward. The ozone hole still grows
every Antarctic spring, to roughly the same extent each year. Nobody quite
knows why. Some scientists think it is simply taking longer than expected for
the chemicals to disintegrate; a few believe that the cause of the hole was
misdiagnosed in the first place. Either way, the ozone hole cannot yet be
claimed as a looming catastrophe, let alone one averted by political action.
Repeatedly
throughout the past five decades, the imminent advent
of a new pandemic has been foretold. The 1976 swine flu panic was an early
case. Following the death of a single recruit at Fort Dix, the Ford
administration vaccinated more than 40 million Americans, but more people
probably died from adverse reactions to the vaccine than died of swine flu.
A
few years later, a fatal virus did begin to spread at an alarming rate,
initially through the homosexual community. AIDS was soon, rightly, the focus
of serious alarm. But not all the dire predictions proved correct.
“Research
studies now project that one in five—listen to me, hard to believe—one in five
heterosexuals could be dead from AIDS at the end of the next three years.
That’s by 1990. One in five,”
Oprah Winfrey warned in 1987.
Bad
as AIDS was, the broad-based epidemic in the Americas, Europe, and Asia never
materialized as feared, though it did in Africa. In 2000 the US National
Intelligence Council predicted that HIV/AIDS would worsen in the developing
world for at least 10 years and was
“likely to aggravate and, in some cases,
may even provoke economic decay, social fragmentation and political
destabilization in the hardest hit countries in the developing and former
communist worlds.”
Yet
the peak of the epidemic had already passed in the late 1990s, and today AIDS
is in slow retreat throughout the world. New infections were 20 percent lower
in 2010 than in 1997, and the lives of more than 2.5 million people have been
saved since 1995 by antiretroviral treatment.
“Just
a few years ago, talking about ending the AIDS epidemic in the near term seemed
impossible, but science, political support, and community responses are
starting to deliver clear and tangible results,”
UNAIDS
executive director Michel Sidibé wrote last year.
The
emergence of AIDS led to a theory that other viruses would spring from tropical
rain forests to wreak revenge on humankind for its ecological sins. That, at
least, was the implication of Laurie Garrett’s 1994 book, The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging
Diseases in a World Out of Balance. The most prominent candidate
was Ebola, the hemorrhagic fever that starred in Richard Preston’s The Hot Zone, published
the same year. Writer Stephen King called the book
“one
of the most horrifying things I’ve ever read.”
Right
on cue, Ebola appeared again in the Congo in 1995, but it soon disappeared. Far
from being a harbinger, HIV was the only new tropical virus to go pandemic in
50 years.
In
the 1980s British cattle began dying from mad cow disease, caused by an
infectious agent in feed that was derived from the remains of other cows. When
people, too, began to catch this disease, predictions of the scale of the
epidemic quickly turned terrifying: Up to 136,000 would die, according to one
study. A pathologist warned that the British
“have
to prepare for perhaps thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, of
cases of vCJD [new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, the human manifestation
of mad cow] coming down the line.”
Yet
the total number of deaths so far in the UK has been 176, with just five occurring
in 2011 and none so far in 2012.
In
2003 it was SARS, a virus from civet cats, that ineffectively but
inconveniently led to quarantines in Beijing and Toronto amid predictions of
global Armageddon. SARS subsided within a year, after killing just 774 people.
In 2005 it was bird flu, described at the time by a United Nations official as
being
“like
a combination of global warming and HIV/AIDS 10 times faster than it’s running
at the moment.”
The
World Health Organization’s official forecast was 2 million to 7.4 million
dead. In fact, by late 2007, when the disease petered out, the death toll was
roughly 200. In 2009 it was Mexican swine flu. WHO director general Margaret
Chan said:
“It
really is all of humanity that is under threat during a pandemic.”
The
outbreak proved to be a normal flu episode.
The
truth is, a new global pandemic is growing less likely, not more. Mass
migration to cities means the opportunity for viruses to jump from wildlife to
the human species has not risen and has possibly even declined, despite media
hype to the contrary. Water- and insect-borne infections—generally the most
lethal—are declining as living standards slowly improve. It’s true that
casual-contact infections such as colds are thriving—but only by being mild
enough that their victims can soldier on with work and social engagements,
thereby allowing the virus to spread. Even if a lethal virus does go global,
the ability of medical science to sequence its genome and devise a vaccine or
cure is getting better all the time.
Of all the
cataclysmic threats to human civilization envisaged in the
past 50 years, none has drawn such hyperbolic language as people themselves.
“Human
beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet,”
says
Agent Smith in the film The
Matrix. Such rhetoric echoes real-life activists like Paul Watson
of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society:
“We
need to radically and intelligently reduce human populations to fewer than one
billion … Curing a body of cancer requires radical and invasive therapy, and therefore,
curing the biosphere of the human virus will also require a radical and
invasive approach.”
On
a “stinking hot” evening in a taxi in Delhi in 1966, as Paul Ehrlich wrote in
his best seller, The
Population Bomb,
“the
streets seemed alive with people. People eating, people washing, people
sleeping. People visiting, arguing, and screaming. People thrusting their hands
through the taxi window, begging. People defecating and urinating. People
clinging to buses. People herding animals. People, people, people, people.”
Ehrlich’s
conclusion was bleak:
“The
train of events leading to the dissolution of India as a viable nation”
was
already in progress. And other experts agreed.
“It
is already too late to avoid mass starvation,”
said
Denis Hayes, organizer of the first Earth Day in 1970. Sending food to India
was a mistake and only postponed the inevitable, William and Paul Paddock wrote
in their best seller, Famine—1975!
What
actually happened was quite different. The death rate fell. Famine became
rarer. The population growth rate was cut in half, thanks chiefly to the fact
that as babies stop dying, people stop having so many of them. Over the past 50
years, worldwide food production per capita has risen, even as the global
population has doubled. Indeed, so successful have farmers been at increasing
production that food prices fell to record lows in the early 2000s and large
parts of western Europe and North America have been reclaimed by forest. (A
policy of turning some of the world’s grain into motor fuel has reversed some
of that decline and driven prices back up.)
Meanwhile,
family size continues to shrink on every continent. The world population will
probably never double again, whereas it quadrupled in the 20th century. With
improvements in seeds, fertilizers, pesticides, transport, and irrigation still
spreading across Africa, the world may well feed 9 billion inhabitants in
2050—and from fewer acres than it now uses to feed 7 billion.
In 1977
President Jimmy Carter went on television
and declared:
“World oil production can probably keep going up for another six
or eight years. But sometime in the 1980s, it can’t go up anymore. Demand will
overtake production.”
He was not alone in this view. The end of oil and gas had
been predicted repeatedly throughout the 20th century. In 1922 President Warren
Harding created the US Coal Commission, which undertook an 11-month survey that
warned,
“Already the output of [natural] gas has begun to wane. Production of oil
cannot long maintain its present rate.”
In 1956, M. King Hubbert, a Shell
geophysicist, forecast that gas production in the US would peak at about 14
trillion cubic feet per year sometime around 1970.
All
these predictions failed to come true. Oil and gas production have continued to
rise during the past 50 years. Gas reserves took an enormous leap upward after
2007, as engineers learned how to exploit abundant shale gas. In 2011 the
International Energy Agency estimated that global gas resources would last 250
years.
Although it seems likely that cheap sources of oil may indeed start to
peter out in coming decades, gigantic quantities of shale oil and oil sands
will remain available, at least at a price. Once again, obstacles have
materialized, but the apocalypse has not. Ever since Thomas Robert Malthus,
doomsayers have tended to underestimate the power of innovation. In reality,
driven by price increases, people simply developed new technologies, such as
the horizontal drilling technique that has helped us extract more oil from
shale.
It
was not just energy but metals too that were supposed to run out. In 1970
Harrison Brown, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, forecast in Scientific American
that lead, zinc, tin, gold, and silver would all be gone by 1990. The
best-selling book The
Limits to Growth was published 40 years ago by the Club of Rome,
a committee of prominent environmentalists with a penchant for meeting in
Italy. The book forecast that if use continued to accelerate exponentially, world
reserves of several metals could run out by 1992 and help precipitate a
collapse of civilization and population in the subsequent century, when people
no longer had the raw materials to make machinery. These claims were soon being
repeated in schoolbooks.
“Some scientists estimate that the world’s known
supplies of oil, tin, copper, and aluminum will be used up within your
lifetime,”
one read. In fact, as the results of a famous wager between Paul
Ehrlich and economist Julian Simon later documented, the metals did not run
out. Indeed, they grew cheaper. Ehrlich, who claimed he had been “goaded” into
the bet, growled,
“The one thing we’ll never run out of is imbeciles.”
Over the past half century, none of our
threatened eco-pocalypses have played out as predicted. Some came partly true;
some were averted by action; some were wholly chimerical. This raises a
question that many find discomforting: With a track record like this, why
should people accept the cataclysmic claims now being made about climate change?
After all, 2012 marks the apocalyptic deadline of not just the Mayans but also
a prominent figure in our own time: Rajendra Pachauri, head of the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, who said in 2007 that
“if there’s no
action before 2012, that’s too late … This is the defining moment.”
So,
should we worry or not about the warming climate? It is far too binary a
question. The lesson of failed past predictions of ecological apocalypse is not
that nothing was happening but that the middle-ground possibilities were too
frequently excluded from consideration. In the climate debate, we hear a lot
from those who think disaster is inexorable if not inevitable, and a lot from
those who think it is all a hoax.
We hardly ever allow the moderate “lukewarmers”
a voice: those who suspect that the net positive feedbacks from water vapor in
the atmosphere are low, so that we face only 1 to 2 degrees Celsius of warming
this century; that the Greenland ice sheet may melt but no faster than its
current rate of less than 1 percent per century; that net increases in rainfall
(and carbon dioxide concentration) may improve agricultural productivity; that
ecosystems have survived sudden temperature lurches before; and that adaptation
to gradual change may be both cheaper and less ecologically damaging than a
rapid and brutal decision to give up fossil fuels cold turkey.
We’ve
already seen some evidence that humans can forestall warming-related
catastrophes. A good example is malaria, which was once widely predicted to get
worse as a result of climate change. Yet in the 20th century, malaria retreated
from large parts of the world, including North America and Russia, even as the
world warmed. Malaria-specific mortality plummeted in the first decade of the
current century by an astonishing 25 percent.
The weather may well have grown
more hospitable to mosquitoes during that time. But any effects of warming were
more than counteracted by pesticides, new antimalarial drugs, better drainage,
and economic development. Experts such as Peter Gething at Oxford argue that
these trends will continue, whatever the weather.
Just
as policy can make the climate crisis worse—mandating biofuels has not only
encouraged rain forest destruction, releasing carbon, but driven millions into
poverty and hunger—technology can make it better. If plant breeders boost rice
yields, then people may get richer and afford better protection against extreme
weather. If nuclear engineers make fusion (or thorium fission) cost-effective,
then carbon emissions may suddenly fall. If gas replaces coal because of
horizontal drilling, then carbon emissions may rise more slowly. Humanity is a
fast-moving target. We will combat our ecological threats in the future by
innovating to meet them as they arise, not through the mass fear stoked by
worst-case scenarios.
Matt Ridley (rationaloptimist.com) is a columnist for The
Wall Street Journal and the
author, most recently, of The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity
Evolves.
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