A new report predicts the end of the world will be worse than the last report predicting the end of the world said
[Photo: Magnolia Pictures]
THE OZONE layer was supposed to be gone by 1977, you know. The population of New York City, currently around 9m, was supposed to be up to 20m (or else the city was scheduled to be a maximum security prison by 1997). I was sure pollution was going to render the fields barren and mass starvation ubiquitous by the late 1970s.
Not to make light of ozone depletion, overpopulation, pollution and other environmental/sociological problems - I was certain my morning commute was going to be via canoe by this time - but the hysteria and panic of 20 or more years ago seems just a tad silly now.
It's something to remember when reading the latest tome of sci-fi-like disaster projections: In May, former UN secretary general Kofi Annan's Global Humanitarian Forum (GHF) released a report, and we are doomed, I tell you. Doooomed!
According to the GHF's Human Impact Report: Climate Change - The Anatomy of a Silent Crisis, global warming/climate change is the yearly cause of 315,000 deaths and $125bn (€90bn) in damages.
But the report's methodology makes no direct links. No one is described as dying from climate change, but from something (like tribal warfare) that was caused, says the report, by something else inspired by something else that is finally linked to climate change. The bigger the net, the more fish you catch, I suppose.
Roger Pielke, professor in the Environmental Studies Program at the US's University of Colorado, Boulder, calls the report "a methodological embarrassment and poster child for how to lie with statistics.
"The report will harm the cause for action on both climate change and disasters because it is so deeply flawed."
The GHF report states that it does have a "significant margin for error," but even then, it often seems to stretch things. Pielke notes that the report "engages in a very strange comparison of earthquake and weather disasters in 1980 and 2005.
"The first question is, why? They are comparing phenomena with many 'moving parts' over a short time frame, and attributing 100% of the resulting difference to human-caused climate change.... [These] events do not have the same variability, and earthquake disasters affect only a small part of the total inhabited area of the earth, whereas weather disasters occur much more widely. The assumption that weather disasters should track earthquake disasters is flawed from the outset for both geophysical and socio-economic reasons."
THE OZONE layer was supposed to be gone by 1977, you know. The population of New York City, currently around 9m, was supposed to be up to 20m (or else the city was scheduled to be a maximum security prison by 1997). I was sure pollution was going to render the fields barren and mass starvation ubiquitous by the late 1970s.
Not to make light of ozone depletion, overpopulation, pollution and other environmental/sociological problems - I was certain my morning commute was going to be via canoe by this time - but the hysteria and panic of 20 or more years ago seems just a tad silly now.
It's something to remember when reading the latest tome of sci-fi-like disaster projections: In May, former UN secretary general Kofi Annan's Global Humanitarian Forum (GHF) released a report, and we are doomed, I tell you. Doooomed!
According to the GHF's Human Impact Report: Climate Change - The Anatomy of a Silent Crisis, global warming/climate change is the yearly cause of 315,000 deaths and $125bn (€90bn) in damages.
But the report's methodology makes no direct links. No one is described as dying from climate change, but from something (like tribal warfare) that was caused, says the report, by something else inspired by something else that is finally linked to climate change. The bigger the net, the more fish you catch, I suppose.
Roger Pielke, professor in the Environmental Studies Program at the US's University of Colorado, Boulder, calls the report "a methodological embarrassment and poster child for how to lie with statistics.
"The report will harm the cause for action on both climate change and disasters because it is so deeply flawed."
The GHF report states that it does have a "significant margin for error," but even then, it often seems to stretch things. Pielke notes that the report "engages in a very strange comparison of earthquake and weather disasters in 1980 and 2005.
"The first question is, why? They are comparing phenomena with many 'moving parts' over a short time frame, and attributing 100% of the resulting difference to human-caused climate change.... [These] events do not have the same variability, and earthquake disasters affect only a small part of the total inhabited area of the earth, whereas weather disasters occur much more widely. The assumption that weather disasters should track earthquake disasters is flawed from the outset for both geophysical and socio-economic reasons."
