PAUL C. W. DAVIES is a physicist and cosmologist at Macquarie University, in Sydney, Australia. He is the author, most recently, of How to Build a Time Machine.
Some countries, including the United States and Australia, have been in denial about global warming. They cast doubt on the science that sets alarm bells ringing. Other countries, such as the United Kingdom, are in a panic and want to make drastic cuts in greenhouse emissions. Both stances are irrelevant, because the fight is a hopeless one. In spite of the recent hike in the price of oil, the stuff is still cheap enough to burn. Human nature being what it is, people will go on burning it until it starts running out and simple economics puts the brakes on. Meanwhile the carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere will just go on rising. Even if developed countries rein in their profligate use of fossil fuels, the emerging Asian giants of China and India will more than make up the difference. Rich countries, whose wealth derives from decades of cheap energy, can hardly preach restraint to developing nations trying to climb the wealth ladder. And the obvious solution—massive investment in nuclear energy—has been left too late. The main tragedy of Chernobyl is not the fifty people killed in the disaster but the twenty-year nuclear paralysis it engendered in Western nations. So continued warming looks unstoppable.
Campaigners for cutting greenhouse emissions scare us by proclaiming that a warmer world is a worse world. My dangerous idea is that it probably won’t be.
Some bad things will happen. For example, sea level will rise, drowning some heavily populated or fertile coastal areas. But in compensation, Siberia may become the world’s breadbasket. Some deserts may expand; others may shrink. Some places will get drier, others wetter. The evidence that the world will be worse off overall is flimsy. What is certainly the case is that we will have to adjust, and adjustment is always painful. Populations will have to move. In two hundred years, some currently densely populated regions may be deserted. But the population movements over the past two hundred have been dramatic, too. I doubt if anything more drastic will be necessary. Once it dawns on people that yes, the world really is warming up, and no, it doesn’t imply Armageddon, then the international agreements like the Kyoto protocol will fall apart.
The idea of giving up the global warming struggle is dangerous because it shouldn’t have come to this. Humankind has the resources and the technology to cut greenhouse gas emissions. What we lack is the political will. People pay lip service to environmental responsibility, but they are rarely prepared to put their money where their mouth is. Global warming may turn out to be not so bad after all, but many other acts of environmental vandalism are manifestly reckless—the depletion of the ozone layer, the destruction of rain forests, the pollution of the oceans. Giving up on global warming will set an ugly precedent.