The Rational Optimist (35 page)

For reasons I explained in chapter 4, famine is largely history. Where it still occurs – Darfur, Zimbabwe – the fault lies with government policy, not population pressure.

Resources

The history of the world is replete with examples of the extinction or near-exhaustion of resources: mammoths, whales, herrings, passenger pigeons, white pine forests, Lebanon cedars, guano. They are all, note, ‘renewable’. By striking contrast, there is not a single non-renewable resource that has run out yet: not coal, oil, gas, copper, iron, uranium, silicon, or stone. As has been said – the remark has been attributed to many people – the Stone Age did not come to an end for lack of stone. ‘It is one of the safest predictions,’ wrote the economist Joseph Schumpeter in 1943, ‘that in the calculable future we shall live in an
embarras de richesse
of both foodstuffs and raw materials, giving all the rein to expansion of total output that we shall know what to do with. This applies to mineral resources as well.’ It is also one of the safest predictions that people will always be warning that natural resources are running out.

Consider the humiliating failure of the predictions made by a computer model called World3 in the early 1970s. World3 attempted to predict the carrying capacity of the planet’s resources and concluded, in a report called
Limits to Growth
, authored by the grandiosely titled ‘Club of Rome’, that exponential use could exhaust known world supplies of zinc, gold, tin, copper, oil and natural gas by 1992 and cause a collapse of civilisation and population in the subsequent century.
Limits to Growth
was enormously influential, with school textbooks soon parroting its predictions minus the caveats. ‘Some scientists estimate that the world’s known supplies of oil, tin, copper, and aluminium will be used up within your lifetime,’ said one. ‘Governments must help save our fossil fuel supply by passing laws limiting their use,’ opined another. It was misleading chiefly because, like Malthus, it underestimated the speed and magnitude of technological change, the generation of new recipes for rearranging the world – as its godfather, the engineer Jay Forester, has acknowledged. In 1990 the economist Julian Simon won $576.07 in settlement of a wager from the environmentalist Paul Ehrlich. Simon had bet him that the prices of five metals (chosen by Ehrlich) would fall during the 1980s and Ehrlich had accepted ‘Simon’s astonishing offer before other greedy people jump in’ (though later, while calling Simon an imbecile, he claimed he was ‘goaded’ into it).

The amount of oil left, the food-growing capacity of the world’s farmland, even the regenerative capacity of the biosphere – these are not fixed numbers; they are dynamic variables produced by a constant negotiation between human ingenuity and natural constraints. Embracing dynamism means opening your mind to the possibility of posterity making a better world rather than preventing a worse one. We now know, as we did not in the 1960s, that more than six billion people can live upon the planet in improving health, food security and life expectancy and that this is compatible with cleaner air, increasing forest cover and some booming populations of elephants. The resources and technologies of 1960 could not have supported six billion – but the technologies changed and so the resources changed. Is six billion the turning point? Seven? Eight? At a time when glass fibre is replacing copper cable, electrons are replacing paper and most employment involves more software than hardware, only the most static of imaginations could think so.

Clean air

In 1970,
Life
magazine promised its readers that scientists had ‘solid experimental and theoretical evidence’ that ‘within 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.’ Urban smog and other forms of air pollution refused to follow the script, as technology and regulation rapidly improved air quality. So by the 1980s the script switched to acid rain. It is worth exploring the history of this episode because it was a dress rehearsal for global warming: atmospheric, international and with fossil fuels as the villains. The conventional story you will read in your children’s textbooks is as follows: sulphuric and nitric acid, made mainly from smoke belched from coal-fired power stations, fell on lakes and forests in Canada, Germany and Sweden and devastated them. In the nick of time laws were passed limiting emissions and ecosystems slowly recovered.

Certainly, in the mid-1980s, a combination of scientists scenting grants and environmentalists scenting donations, led to some apocalyptic predictions. In 1984 the German magazine
Stern
reported that a third of Germany’s forests were already dead or dying, that experts believed all its conifers would be gone by 1990 and that the Federal Ministry of the Interior predicted all forests would be gone by 2002. All! Professor Bernd Ulrich said it was already too late for Germany’s forests: ‘They cannot be saved.’ Across the Atlantic, similar predictions of doom were made. Trees were said to be dying at an unnatural rate in 100 per cent of the forests on the eastern seaboard. ‘The tops of the Blue Ridge Mountains are becoming tree graveyards,’ said a plant pathology professor. Half of all lakes were becoming dangerously acidified. The
New York Times
declared ‘a scientific consensus’: it was time for action, not further research.

What actually happened? History shows that the biomass of European forests actually increased during the 1980s, during the time when unconstrained acid rain was supposed to be killing them and before any laws were passed to limit emissions. It continued to increase in the 1990s. Sweden’s government eventually admitted that nitric acid – a fertiliser – had increased the overall growth rate of its trees. European forests not only did not die; they thrived. As for North America, the official, ten-year, half-a-billion-dollar, 700-scientist, government-sponsored study did a great rash of experiments and found that: ‘there is no evidence of a general or unusual decline of forests in the United States or Canada due to acid rain’ and ‘there is no case of forest decline in which acidic deposition is known to be a predominant cause.’ When asked if he had been pressured to be optimistic, one of the authors said the reverse was true. ‘Yes, there were political pressures ... Acid rain had to be an environmental catastrophe, no matter what the facts revealed. Since we could not support this claim ... the [Environmental Protection Agency] worked to keep us from providing Congress with our findings.’ The truth is that there were small pockets of damage to forests in the 1980s some of which were caused by pests, others by natural senescence or competition and a few by local pollution. There was no great forest die-off due to acid rain. At all.

It would be wrong to conclude that the anti-acid rain legislation did no good at all. The acidification of mountain lakes by distant power-station emissions was a real (though relatively rare) phenomenon, and this was indeed reversed by the legislation. But even this harm was vastly exaggerated during the debate: far from 50 per cent of lakes being affected, it was 4 per cent, said the official study. Some of these continue to be acid even after the clean-up, because of the chemistry of the surrounding rocks. The fact is, if you read the history of the episode carefully, acid rain was a minor and local nuisance that could be relatively cheaply dealt with, not a huge threat to large stretches of the planet. The ultra-pessimists were simply wrong.

Genes

Every advance in human genetics and reproductive medicine is greeted with predictions of Frankenstein doom. The first attempts at genetic engineering of bacteria in the 1970s led to moratoria and bans. The activist Jeremy Rifkin said that biotechnology threatened ‘a form of annihilation every bit as deadly as nuclear holocaust’. Yet the result was life-saving therapies for diabetics and haemophiliacs. Shortly after, the pioneers of in-vitro fertilisation, Robert Edwards and Patrick Steptoe, were vilified on all sides, even by their fellow doctors, for their supposedly dangerous experiments. When Louise Brown was born in 1978, the Vatican called it ‘an event that can have very grave consequences for humanity’. Yet their invention has brought no eugenic abuse and heartfuls of individual happiness to millions of childless couples.

When the human genome was sequenced in 2000, pessimism soon dominated the commentary. People will fiddle with their children’s genes, moaned some: yes, to avoid passing on terrible inherited diseases like Tay-Sachs or Huntingdon’s. Predicting illness will make health insurance impossible, groaned others – yet health insurers’ rates are so high precisely because they cannot predict who will get ill, so predicting and preventing will bring some costs down. Diagnosis will run far ahead of therapy, wailed others, so people will know their fate but not know how to cure themselves. In practice, there are very few diseases for which some kind of preventive intervention cannot be tried once a predisposition is known, and knowing is still and always should be voluntary. Then, to cap it all, within a few years the pessimists were complaining that genetic insights were coming disappointingly slowly.

Plague

By the late 1990s, the modish cause for doom was the resurgence of infectious disease. The combination of an incurable and brand-new sexually transmitted disease, AIDS, with a growing resistance to antibiotics among hospital bacteria gave genuine cause for fear. But it also sparked a search for the next and still more lethal plague. Book after book trumpeted the alarm:
The Hot Zone, Outbreak, Virus X, The Coming Plague
. Hundreds of millions of people were going to die. Infectious disease was on its way back into human affairs as part of the planet’s revenge for human despoliation of the environment. The human race was due a culling. Some of the more misanthropic authors, sounding like Puritan preachers, even expressed something approaching satisfaction at the thought. Yet once again, the auction of competitively pessimistic forecasts that surrounded Ebola virus, Lassa fever, hanta virus and SARS proved ridiculously overblown. Ebola outbreaks – which wreaked horrible disintegration upon their victims and wiped out whole villages in the Congo a handful of times in the 1990s before fading away each time – proved to be very local, easily controlled and partly man-made. That is to say, it soon emerged that what was turning this occasional bat-borne infection into a raging local epidemic was such things as quinine injections given by well-meaning nuns with re-usable syringes. Even AIDS, while terrible especially in Africa, has failed to live up to the dire predictions commonly made in the late 1980s for its global effects. The number of new cases of HIV/AIDS worldwide has been falling for nearly a decade, and the number of deaths from the disease has been falling since 2005. The proportion of the population infected with HIV is falling, even in southern Africa. The epidemic is far from over, and much more could be done, but the news is getting slowly better, not worse.

Remember mad-cow disease? Between 1980 and 1996 about 750,000 cattle infected with the brain-destroying prion called vCJD entered the human food chain in Britain. When it became clear in 1996 that some people were dying of the same agent, acquired from eating infected beef, there was perhaps understandably a competitive auction in doom-laden predictions. The winner, whose views were broadcast repeatedly as a result, was a bacteriology professor named Hugh Pennington who said things like ‘we have to prepare for perhaps thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, of cases of vCJD coming down the line.’ Even the ‘official’ models warned that the true figure could be as high as 136,000 victims. In fact, as of this writing, the number of deaths has reached 166, of which just one was in 2008 and two in 2009. Only four people are now living with definite or probable vCJD. Each one is a tragedy, but a threat to humanity it is not.

(The numbers are surprisingly similar to those from Chernobyl. At least 500,000 people would die from cancers caused by the nuclear accident there in 1986, said the sobering early reports, and there will be many birth defects. The latest estimate is that less than 4,000 will die of Chernobyl cancer, compared with 100,000 natural cancer deaths among the exposed population, and that there were no extra birth defects at all. In addition, fifty-six died during the accident itself. The evacuation of the area has caused wildlife to flourish there to an extraordinary degree, without any unusual genetic changes at all in the rodents that have been studied.)

In the 2000s influenza, too, proved to be a paper tiger. H5N1 strains of the virus (‘bird flu’) jumped into human beings via free-range ducks on Chinese farms and, in 2005, the United Nations predicted five million – 150 million deaths from bird flu. Yet, contrary to what you have read, when H5N1 did infect human beings it proved neither especially virulent nor especially contagious. It has so far killed fewer than 300 people worldwide. As one commentator concluded: ‘Hysteria over an avian flu pandemic has been very good for the Chicken Little media, authors, ambitious health officials, drug companies ... But even as many of the panic-mongers have begun to lie low, the vestiges of hysteria remain – as do the misallocations of billions of dollars from more serious health problems. Too bad no one ever holds the doomsayers accountable for the damage they’ve done.’

I suspect this is too strong, and that flu may yet mount a serious epidemic in some form. But the H1N1 swine flu epidemic of 2009 that began in Mexico also followed the usual path of new flu strains, towards low virulence – about one death for every 1,000–10,000 infected people. This is no surprise. As the evolutionary biologist Paul Ewald has long argued, viruses undergo natural selection as well as mutation once established in a new species of host and casually transmitted viruses like flu replicate more successfully if they cause mild disease, so that the host keeps moving about and meeting new people. A victim lying in a darkened room alone is not as much use to the virus as somebody who feels just well enough to struggle into work coughing. The modern way of life, with lots of travel but also rather more personal space, tends to encourage mild, casual-contact viruses that need their victims to be healthy enough to meet fresh targets fleetingly. It is no accident that modern people suffer from more than 200 kinds of cold, the supreme viral exploiters of the modern world.