Is Global Warming Hogging All the Attention? [And Resources & Money & Solutions?]
Check out “The Question of Global Warming,” an essay by Freeman Dyson in the June 12 issue of The New York Review of Books.
While agreeing that global warming is a serious problem, Dyson has long been a “heretic” or skeptic of claims that climate change is the biggest danger facing the planet. While his most recent essay is a critique of two recent books on global warming, its conclusion is, to me, the most crucial part. In it, Dyson suggests that environmentalism, which he calls (approvingly) “a worldwide secular religion,” has been hijacked by global warming alarmists to the detriment of other, “more immediate dangers,” which he identifies as “nuclear weaponry, environmental degradation, and social injustice.”
Whether or not you’re outraged by Dyson’s take on global warming, it is worth considering the fact that much discussion about the subject has perpetuated a key problem: People tend to see global warming as an isolated issue, in a box by itself. In fact, it is part of a complex web of issues involving everything from habitat conversion (to agriculture, largely) to loss of biodiversity. For someone who argues that these issues are at least as important—and perhaps need the same urgent intervention that climate change calls for—Dyson is weirdly cavalier about biodiversity. He suggests that “if one quarter of the world’s forests were replanted with carbon-eating varieties of the same species, the forests would be preserved as ecological resources and as habitats for wildlife.” No biologist could read that without banging his or her head against a wall. Planting forests with the “same species” is a virtual invitation to disaster, bark beetles, biodiversity loss, and the perils of non-native, introduced invaders. Intensive monoculture cannot supply “habitats for wildlife.” It is a big part of what got us here—to a planet of degrading, devolving ecosystems—in the first place. So I suspect Dyson needs to take his own advice: Let’s not limit ourselves to the narrowest possible construction of the problem.
[CF]
