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Rapid Responses: Rapid Responses published:
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Don't get hot about the future
- Luc Bonneux (20 December 2002)
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Tony McMichael's competing interest
- Max A Beran (24 December 2002)
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half full half empty?
- stephen r. kettle, qld. 4551 australia (26 December 2002)
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Lomborg, McMichael, and egalitarianism
- Colin D Butler (31 December 2002)
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Luc Bonneux, Associate Professor, Julius Center, Utrecht Medical Center 3508 GA Utrecht, the Netherlands
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There are facts, interpretation of these facts and value systems underscoring these interpretations. There is no dialogue between Lomborg and McMichael: they don't argue about their beliefs, underpinning their interpretations. Lomborg can point to the many historical facts indicating an improving world - the improving life expectancy is one of the most spectacular and undeniable markers of progress. McMichael summarises shortly the many believes about the future, but resorts to few meagre facts. He might be advised to read the report of the Club of Rome. I believed that report to be true, as a gullible student. It became a potent vaccin against all types of forecasts predicting gloom and doom, without notable exception based on hidden authoritarian agenda's. In linear extrapolations, Lomborg can't be beaten: the twentieth century showed enormous progress. In complex system modelling, the believes of the authors, hidden in the overload of assumptions, determine the results. Cristal balls are a lot more transparant than the models of 'systemic optimists' predicting change next century (while not being able to predict the change next week). If we judge the reliability of predictions by past performance we don't have to worry: most if not all sound hilarious to our present day ears. I want this debate between believers and non-believers in climate change to be held as a moral weighting of human problems of the future and of the present, and how to tackle these. I observe that the problems of the future are most popular amongst the blasé public of wealthy nations. In the same countries, the poor of the South fighting for a future, any future at all, are a lot less sexy (exception made for the imported sexual slaves). We don't want these fortune seekers, we close the gates. Thousands of drowned refugees didn't need raising sea levels to accomplish that feat. If the sea level will rise (I am ready to accept the accumulating evidence that it will do), the Netherlands will manage. Half of Holland will be under sea level, but we are rich and well organised. In Bangla Desh, tens of millions will be threatened. But with or without climate change, they are threatened any day: the problems of the poor of tomorrow are the problems of the poor of today. The central hidden question in this debate is the amount of resources needed to tackle the problems of an uncertain future and how much to tackle the problems of today. Then, vaccinated by the Club of Rome, I don't get hot about future Climate Change. I do get cold over the present fate of the millions of poor, facing no change. No change at all. Competing interests: None declared |
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Max A Beran, Retired OX11 9LS (Home)
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In their article in this issue "Data dredging, bias, or confounding" authors George Davey Smith and Shah Ebrahim admitted to a competing interest, to whit that the journal they edited lost out to the BMJ because the latter had cornered the market on epidemiological papers with shaky inferences from statistical analysis. While this may have been done slightly tongue in cheek I would have hoped for something along these lines from Tony McMichael. He has been in receipt of numerous research grants since the early days of the climate change issue and travels the world attending international meetings which promote the reality of climate change as a done deal with consequences of enormous dimension. All this would come to an end if Bjorn Lomborg's scepticism about the issue and the scale of its impacts were to become received wisdom, or even a respected alternative. Another correspondant has remarked on the disparity between the quantitative Lomborg and qualitative McMichael whose tactic is one of demolition rather than engagement. Competing interests: None declared |
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stephen r. kettle, solo gp 727 nicklin way, currimundi,, qld. 4551 australia
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at last somebody is challenging the orthodoxy of the green "religion" where at times some pretty extreme & as yet unproven assertions are made & often widely publicised thereafter as 'gospel truth'. each & every one of us all need our own personal "devil's advocate" in all walk's of life or as it is put there's yin & yang in every situation. ozdoc. Competing interests: solo gp |
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Colin D Butler, Post doctoral fellow National Centre for Epidemiology & Population Health, Australian National University Australia 0200
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The BMJ editorialises about the role of politics in health, correctly pointing out that to overtly ignore politics is itself deeply political, because it allows other views to go unchallenged (1). Have no illusions – a deeply ideological and political debate is raging in the world, with enormous consequences to human health and well- being. On one side are forces that are (more or less) happy to keep the poor in the South in (more or less) perpetual poverty and disease, because this is seen as the best way of ensuring prosperity in the (increasingly) fortified North. In support of the validity, if not morality, of this approach, wealthy populations (largely but not exclusively living in the North) have long benefited from the South’s poverty and disorganisation, by means such as access to cheap coffee, cheap oil, debt repayments that greatly exceed the value of aid, and plenty of good customers for arms (2). On the other side is a comparatively disorganised bunch of egalitarians. These people lament the extent of global inequality, worry about the future, and look to the BMJ and the Guardian for solace. Their influence shapes the language of the debate (forcing non-egalitarians to disguise their intent) but rarely dominates policy – except perhaps in the early years after World War II (3). According to this analysis, both Lomborg and McMichael should be on the same side – Lomborg repeatedly professes concern for people in the South, and much of McMichael’s writing concerns the current and future welfare of the poor. Yet, because of his view that climate change is a comparatively minor problem, Lomborg must be a godsend to the fossil fuel industry, which, as a general rule, clearly belongs in the non-egalitarian world-view camp. (Otherwise how can we explain Shell and Ogoniland, Occidental Petroleum in Ecuador, and countless Third World coups designed to protect big oil interests?) Close analysis of Lomborg’s writing reveals, in fact, that he seeks to fix global poverty not by addressing the complexities repeatedly discussed elsewhere in the BMJ (4) but by diverting funds (and attention) from our feeble attempts to tackle global warming, the impact of which is universally predicted to be worst for poor populations. Thus Lomborg positions himself not only as a maverick regarding the global environment, but as a person with unique insight into solving global poverty. There is an opportunity to narrow this ideological divide. The genie of technology and information is out of the bottle. Globalisation has drawn us so close together that the welfare of the North is no longer best assured by maintaining misery in the South. The recent claim that two West African leaders may have assisted al-Qaida both before and after September 11 (5) is unsurprising in a world where cold cash matters more than morality. Convergence of these two ideologies may yet save us from a future riven by hatred and revenge, a fate which would seem highly improbable, were Lomborg’s analysis really correct. 1. Delamothe, T. How political should a general medical journal be? BMJ 2002 325: 1431-2. 2. Southall, DP and O'Hare, BAM. Empty arms: the effect of the arms trade on mothers and children BMJ 2003 325: 1457-61 3. Butler, CD. Inequality, global change and the sustainability of civilisation Global Change and Human Health 2000 1: 156-72. http://www.kluweronline.com/issn/1389-5702 4. Logie DE and Benatar SR, Africa in the 21st century: can despair be turned to hope? 1997 BMJ 315,1444-6. 5. Carroll, R. West African leaders implicated in al-Qaida plot. 2003 The Guardian Weekly January 2, p2. Competing interests: I am the co-founder of an aid organisation (Benevolent Organisation for Development, Health & Insight [BODHI]), I work for Tony McMichael, I have received funds for travel for meetings of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. I am also an egalitarian. |
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