by Ross Clark
The (London) Daily Telegraph
January 2005

The most telling remark about last week’s tsunamis was made by a man who was in Scandinavia when the wave struck. In response to the reported deaths of 1,500 of his countrymen, Swedish Prime Minister Goran Persson declared: “It is probably the worst [disaster] of our time and will impact on everyday Swedish life for a long time to come.”

In other words, in a country of fearsome winter storms, and where roads and railway lines are affected by ice and snow for many months of the year, the worst disaster to strike its people in living memory has occurred in a string of holiday destinations 8,000 miles away in the tropics. The point is that it isn’t natural disasters which kill people, so much as poverty – which prevents them protecting themselves.

Had the tsunamis struck Scandinavia or the west coast of America, people would have died but in nothing like the numbers who died on the shores of the Indian Ocean. A flood warning system such as that employed in Britain after the catastrophic floods of 1953 would have evacuated most people to safety well in time. Communications would have been affected, but whole stretches of coastline would not have been cut off for days as they were last week in Indonesia. The beaches would not still be lined with bodies nearly a week after the disaster. The affected areas would not be facing starvation and infectious disease for weeks to come.

Contrary to the many fatalistic leading articles and columns written last week, which marveled at the awesome power of Nature and encouraged us to believe that we are entirely at her mercy, there is something countries can do to improve their chances of surviving natural disasters: namely to do everything they can to achieve prosperity and the true security that comes with it.

A fully industrialized Indonesia would have had a transport system capable of getting help to the required areas. It would also have been able to react to the earthquake alerts which were issued by US seismologists hours before the disaster. At the very least it would have had a network of refrigerated mortuaries to cope with the bodies of victims without leaving them to putrefy on the beaches.

It would be fatuous to make these points were it not for the fact that the world’s strategy for averting natural disasters increasingly revolves around a policy of stunting the processes of industrialization. For the past 15 years the governments of most developed nations and most international development agencies have been preoccupied with one threat: that of steadily rising sea levels caused by global warming.

Last week’s tsunamis aside, almost all recent natural disasters have in some way been blamed upon global warming: the hurricanes which struck the Caribbean last summer, the heatwave that killed hundreds of Parisians in the summer of 2003, and the various famines to have struck sub-Saharan Africa over the past decade. The blame for all meteorological events, according to the doom-mongers of global warming, can be traced back to mankind’s excessive burning of fossil fuels.

Moreover, according to these people, there is only one way we can hope to reduce the death toll from future disasters, and that is to reduce our consumption of fossil fuels drastically. They do not deny that the policy of reducing carbon emissions will severely hamper world economic growth, only the possibility that there could be any alternative strategy for coping with the problems posed by global warming. It has been left to Bjorn Lomborg, the Danish environmentalist who has become a pariah in the scientific world, to point out that the Kyoto treaty, which commits signatory nations to sharp reductions in fossil fuel use, is extremely poor value for money.

The effect of the treaty will be to reduce global economic growth by some $150 billion year – all in the cause of postponing alleged global warming by a few years. Yet for half that sum, Lomborg calculates, the world could provide clean water, education and healthcare for all. To Lomborg, it is obvious that money would be better spent protecting vulnerable settlements from sea level rise, or rebuilding them in more elevated positions, than in sacrificing economic development.

Yet to make this argument is to invite scorn. Global warming has become a dogma from which no dissent is to be tolerated. And so the world persists in a policy that will do little to abate global warming – such as it is – but will certainly prevent third world countries attaining the living standards of the West. The overall result will be to leave their populations more vulnerable to natural disasters.

The skewed sense of priorities shown by most Western governments was demonstrated in their response to last week’s disaster. Britain, which kept raising its donation towards the relief funds in line with the scale of the disaster, was one of the more generous. Yet the sums are trifling compared to the money spent annually on research into global warming. Ever keen to latch on to what is important, the EU proposed a conference on disaster aid. You can bet that the sums spent feeding the delegates will dwarf the £2.2 million that the EU released last week for actual disaster relief in the wake of the tsunamis.

No one is more irritated by the West’s warped sense of priorities than the developing nations themselves. The Johannesburg Earth Summit in 2002 was supposed to mark the commencement of a new era of cooperation between the rich and the poor, yet it merely served to show how far they are apart.

As far as the developing nations were concerned, the most important issue for discussion was that of trade. In particular, they wanted an end to the agricultural subsidies and tariff barriers that prevent them from bettering themselves by competing in our food markets. Most Western leaders, however, opted to skip these discussions, only flying in for a photo-call when the agenda had moved on to climate change.

If any good might come out of last week’s tsunamis it will be to remind the world that natural disasters are just that: acts of nature that have no human cause but whose effects may be reduced by industrial development. The obsession with reducing carbon emissions will do nothing to prevent a repeat of last week’s tsunamis and virtually nothing to arrest the steady rise in sea levels predicted over the next 100 years. But it will hamper the development of modern roads, airports and communication systems that could have saved tens of thousands of lives.

The world’s poor are being sacrificed in a misguided effort to save them.

Copyright 2004 The Daily Telegraph

The (London) Daily Telegraph, January 2, 2005

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