Fred Pearce, a smart if worried eco-journalist, points out that the the UN Climate Panel has essentially cancelled climate exceptionalism -- global warming is not special, but one of many problems. Here is the start of his article: The thousands of villages on the shifting sand spits of the Ganges Delta in Bangladesh know all about climate risk. The farmers and fishers who eke out a living there readily blame rich polluting nations for the cyclones and rising sea levels that swamp their homes and land. Fair enough. But when I questioned their analysis, some agreed that the delta’s river channels, some as wide as the English Channel, have always been on the move, constantly gobbling and creating land. Nature too makes their lives precarious. But nature did not put these poor and vulnerable people here. So I asked once more who was to blame for their hardships. This time their answer was that they were stuck in harm’s way because their country’s unfair land laws gave them no right to safer territory. Ultimately, as he points out, many environmentalists and development professionals have long been angered by the exceptionalism of climate scientists who are convinced that most of the world’s problems are, or will be, about climate change. And who believe that fixing it should trump everything – including, if necessary, justice and land rights. And he even thinks that there might be something to my arguments on prioritization: Whisper it quietly, but maybe there is some truth in the claims of sceptics about climate policymaking, such as the Danish economist Bjorn Lomborg, who argue that money spent fighting climate change might sometimes be better spent fighting poverty. eco-business/opinion/climate-change-we-are-not-all-together/
Posted on: Wed, 30 Apr 2014 12:52:42 +0000