The Psychology Of Climate Doomsters
by Andrew Marr
The Daily Telegraph, 15 June 2005
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml;jsessionid=0XWFH5HESQT0VQFIQMFCNAGAVCBQYJVC?xml=/opinion/2005/06/15/do1503.xml&sSheet=/portal/2005/06/15/ixportal.html&secureRefresh=true&_requestid=16904

[...] Speaking of which, there has been some rethinking about global warming that has made me squirm. I am not talking about whether climate change is happening - there seems to be just too much solid evidence that it is. No, the question is whether it is a disaster or a good thing, overall.

There are serious scientists who point out that cooling down generally hurts biodiversity more than warming up; that climate change could help boost rainforest growth and spread trees and agriculture to new areas of the world; that the seas around us could seethe with new life; and that with the political will, global warming need not spread hunger or create impossible human disruption.

This is not the place, and I am not expert enough, to assess whether that is true or not. Selfishly, I'm more interested in my own reaction, which is queasy and half-appalled. At some level, the thought of looming environmental catastrophe gets me up in the morning, a pleasant dirge in my heart. Once, I needed looming nuclear disaster to keep interested.

When that went, climate change came along just in time: any sneaking suspicion that everything might be all right after all is profoundly unsettling.

What's going on here? Is it native Scottish pessimism, getting close to my inner Private Frazer? Do some of us need the thought of impending disaster to keep going - as in Cavafy 's poem about a Roman city waiting for barbarian attack, which doesn't come: "Now what's going to happen to us without the barbarians? / They were, those people, a kind of solution."

Or is it that journalists, with our notorious inability to contemplate boredom, simply find mild progress too dull? Ah well, if by any chance global warming does prove to be beneficial, there's always viral mutation.
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Andrew Marr is the BBC's Political Editor
http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/biographies/biogs/news/andrewmarr.shtml