Sea levels are rising, the stratospheric ozone layer is falling, the hooded
crow and meadow pipit are declining while non-native species are
encroaching, the smog in summer (in those years that we have summer) is
engulfing and, if that weren’t enough to frighten you, the daffs are
flowering three weeks early.
Scotland’s environment has been put on red alert and if we don’t do something
double quick we’re all doomed.
Within a few years we may well wake up to find ourselves living in a warm
climate, with parakeets in our parks and grapes growing in our polytunnels.
That’s if we don’t get crushed by a man-made landslide or fall off one of
the eroded edges of Scotland’s coast in the meantime.
Extreme storms, unpredictable rainfall and unseasonal snow could become
commonplace features in Scotland in our lifetime.
And don’t say you thought they already were; that’s not the spirit. The global
warming alarmists want you to feel under siege, not under the weather.
As Duncan McLaren, spokesman for Friends of the Earth (FoE), said, “the
scientific evidence is cranking up and up”.
If it were just the FoE banging on about our ecological footprints we could
perhaps take it with a pinch of salt.
But it is not only signed-up Greens who subscribe to this Armageddon version
of the future; our government believes it too. Why else would it sanction a
body such as Sepa (the Scottish Environment Protection Agency) to scare us
all half to death? This week, Sepa published a report on Scotland’s
environmental health. “If global emissions of greenhouse gases continue at
present rates, there is great risk of reaching a point of irreversible
change.”
Sepa is funded to the tune of more than £30m a year from the public purse (not
including income acquired through statutory charges) and wields enormous
control over development — and, consequently, the economy — in Scotland.
It officially represents the fashionable orthodoxy on climate change and
ensures that the environmental lobby carries far more weight than, say, the
rural community or the fishing industry.
If Ross Finnie, minister for the environment and rural development, paid as
much heed to the Scottish Fishermen’s Federation as he does to Sepa,
Scotland would not have had 1,092 boats decommissioned since devolution.
If NFU Scotland or the Scottish Gamekeepers Association or the Countryside
Alliance held as much sway, Scotland’s countryside might not be in crisis.
How did environmentalists manage to push their interests to the top of the
agenda and seduce most of the political establishment, the BBC, much of the
print media, and gullible swathes of the public? Certainly not on the
available science.
While few would deny that the climate is changing, the claims that this is
about to destroy life as we know it are easily countered using pretty much
the same statistics and evidence deployed by the environmentalists.
Sea levels have been rising since the end of the last ice age, about 11,000
years ago, without catastrophic outcomes for mankind. Scotland’s mountains
are rising faster — 2mm a year — as a result of isostatic rebound (land
recovering from having been depressed by the weight of ice on it) and no
amount of recycling or cycling by green Scots is going to stop nature in its
tracks.
Natural disasters in the CO2-belching modern world (the Asian tsunami, for
example) are not more disastrous than those of the ancient world (the
eruption of Vesuvius).
The mass of the world’s two largest ice sheets, Greenland and Antarctica, is
actually increasing because of warmer weather.
Science can be used to illustrate both the advantages and disadvantages of
climatic shifts and there are scientists on both sides of the eco argument,
although you wouldn’t realise that by listening to Sepa’s soothsayers.
Climate change could even be a good thing for Scotland, suggested Bjorn
Lomborg, the world renowned environmental sceptic, when he was in Edinburgh
last week.
There would be fewer deaths from the cold and more species would flourish. In
a world where there are limited resources to solve the planet’s problems,
those problems need to be prioritised. Economists ranked climate change just
14th on a list of priorities.
Famine, war, sanitation, and diseases such as malaria or HIV/Aids are more
pressing concerns to all but the richest nations, and the millions of pounds
being pumped into reducing carbon emissions could be better spent on
improving the general environment and tackling global poverty.
A country like Scotland should learn to live with global warming and accept
that its 0.083% of the total world population can do nothing to reverse it.
Lomborg told his Scottish audience: “If you care about Scotland’s flora and
fauna, you should focus on setting aside national parks and all the things
that typically degrade nature like over-fertilisation, industrial pollution
and those kind of things that have huge impacts.”
This sounds perfectly reasonable and balanced, but reason and balance do not
panic the public like full-blown red alerts and are therefore unhelpful to
an organisation trying to justify its influence.
If a little more scepticism were introduced into the environmental debate,
questions might be asked about the need for a body the size of Sepa.
Farmers harried by incessant Sepa form-filling, and land developers and house
builders plagued by Sepa’s “obstructive” bureaucracy and unreasonably high
charges may demand that the environmental watchdog goes back to cleaning up
beaches and rivers and leaves the politics to politicians.
People who don’t share the warm-earthers’ ethos may be more reluctant to pay
fines for environmental misdemeanours, and companies may object to
compulsory climate change levies.
Think what the government would lose in stealth taxes if we rebelled against
the environmental bullies. Think how many global-warming conferences and
foreign fact-finders would be jeopardised by public (voter) disapproval —
and how much carbon and paper (not to mention time and money) would be
saved.
In fact, we could do more for our environment by worrying less about climate
change. Sepa might go out of business but the rest of us could retreat to
our vineyards and bask in balmy days and frost-free nights. We have nothing
to lose but our power bills.
