Beyond greed

I’m not an authority on climate change and, though I’m a working experimental biologist, this is too complex an area for me to claim any authoritative position. My professional obsession is with understanding, and hopefully enhancing, immunity to the influenza A viruses. This has assumed much greater significance as we sit and watch the extremely dangerous H5N1 bird ’flu spreading throughout the world.

Of course, if the H5N1 viruses do jump the species barrier and kill off 30 to 50 per cent of the human population it would, at least for a time, diminish the population pressure that most consider a primary driver of global warming. The number of people on the planet has increased at least fourfold over the past 100 years, sixfold from the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.

Clearly, this rate of population growth, and perhaps the current global population size itself, is unsustainable. That reality still seems to escape some religious leaders, who continue to urge their followers to out-breed the competition. Fortunately, many of the faithful either have more sense, or are too financially constrained, to follow their directions. Some economists also seem to be in total denial about the possibility that human numbers cannot continue to grow exponentially.

As we apply the new genomic sciences to the study of human evolution, we are finding hints in our DNA history of genetic “bottlenecks” where the numbers of people were remarkably reduced. The “culling factor” may well have been infectious disease. Mortality rates of 30 to 50 per cent were recorded routinely in the plague that raged repeatedly through European communities in the middle ages. Currently, about three million people (the population of Melbourne) are dying annually of AIDS, but the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) transmits at a relatively low rate and the effect on global population size is, so far, not very big.

People like me are dedicated to seeing that modern communities don’t experience anything like the catastrophe of the medieval plague years. The effectiveness of the global response to the 2002-03 SARS epidemic is proof of this. Political systems, scientific expertise, business and regulatory authorities came together to protect the human community.

One might take the very harsh view that preserving human populations is counter-productive for the health of the planet, but it is only by assuring people in (particularly) the developing world that their children will survive that we can expect them to reduce family sizes. Stability, progress and good health go hand in hand.

The fact that warning bells about the dangers of global warming are being sounded loudly by all the national academies of science should cause us to think that we may be facing a substantial problem. The academy memberships are comprised largely of prominent, established scientists elected on the basis of achievement. As a consequence, they tend to be conservative, and try very hard to be responsible, to work effectively with their respective national governments and to be seen as the reservoir of informed scientific opinion. The most prestigious is probably the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS), which was established by President Abraham Lincoln exactly for those purposes.

The much older (1660) British national academy, the Royal Society (RS) of London, provides the model for the Australian Academy of Science (AAS), the organisation based around the igloo dome on the edge of the Australian National University campus in Canberra.

The NAS, the RS and the AAS have all contributed, with other prestigious academies like the sciences section of the Académie Française, to issue joint reports on global climate change. In addition, each of these organisations has groups working continually on specific aspects of the problem. You can access much of this via Google, and the printed versions of their various reports are available for purchase or in good libraries. Most are readable, and don’t require that you be a scientist to understand what is being said.

Beyond that, what is worth reading on this issue? There are some very committed Australian scientist communicators who focus on environmental issues, particularly Ian Lowe and Tim Flannery. Jared Diamond’s Collapse (Viking, 2005) is, along with his Guns, Germs and Steel (Norton, 1997), a must-read for anyone who cares about the big themes of how human societies are shaped by, and shape, their environments.

Over the past three years, I’ve seen some good, in-depth, well-researched investigative articles on the environment, and other “off the top of the head” opinion pieces that both plumb the depths of intellectual dishonesty and show a profound, and arguably deliberate, ignorance of how science works and the nature of the world around us.

Television does a great job when it comes to conveying the acute reality of natural disasters and environmental catastrophes. But, in fact, some of the more spectacular horrors, like the Boxing Day tsunami, have nothing to do with either global warming or, as some of the more despicable clerics claimed, God’s wrath, though they may be described as “acts of God” by the insurance industry. The fact is, tectonic plates moved, threw up a mountain under the ocean and caused a tidal wave.