February 2007 Archives

courtesy Indur Goklany

In an article in today's New York Times titled, "In Niger, Trees and Crops Turn Back the Desert," Lydia Pollgren notes how property rights to trees growing on farmers' land have contributed to both economic growth, agricultural productivity and conservation in Niger at virtually no cost. She notes that :

In this dust-choked region, long seen as an increasingly barren wasteland decaying into desert, millions of trees are flourishing, thanks in part to poor farmers whose simple methods cost little or nothing at all...
[D]etailed satellite images and on-the-ground inventories of trees, have found that Niger, a place of persistent hunger and deprivation, has recently added millions of new trees and is now far greener than it was 30 years ago.
These gains, moreover, have come at a time when the population of Niger has exploded, confounding the conventional wisdom that population growth leads to the loss of trees and accelerates land degradation, scientists studying Niger say...
"The general picture of the Sahel is much less bleak than we tend to assume," said Chris P. Reij, a soil conservationist who has been working in the region for more than 30 years ... "Niger was for us an enormous surprise."

What contributed to the success? Apparently greater rainfall and property rights! As the article elaborates:

(courtesy Indur Goklany)

In a recent column Ellen Goodman says, "I would like to say we're at a point where global warming is impossible to deny. Let's just say that global warming deniers are now on a par with Holocaust deniers, though one denies the past and the other denies the present and future." See http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2007/02/09/no_change_in_political_climate/

In so doing, she reveals that she doesn't comprehend the issues. More important, she trivializes the Holocaust.

First, the Holocaust is a part of history and, notwithstanding Ahmadinejad, can be verified as a fact. Similarly whether the present is warmer than the recent past is also verifiable, and no one, including so-called 'deniers' like Fred Singer or Richard Lindzen, denies that today is not warmer than, say, 150 years ago. What they dispute is the amount of warming, the extent to which humanity is responsible for that warming, and the portion of the human-induced warming that can be ascribed to well-mixed greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane and nitrous oxides as opposed to other anthropogenic factors -- all critical questions if one wants to design effective policies to slow climate change, which presumably Ms. Goodman would also want. Regarding the globally-warmed future, its consequences can be modeled but not verified, except after the fact. The best that can be done is to hazard an educated guess about its impacts. We do this using "models", so-called because they are not reality. And where does Ellen Goodman get the notion that global warming will parallel the Holocaust? Will the toll from global warming rival that of the Holocaust? Is that written in the just-published IPCC summary for policy makers, which only addresses the science, but not the socioeconomic impacts of climate change?

Finally, lest we forget, remember that the Holocaust was enabled in part by the passive acquiescence of a population too cowed by authority to dissent from the orthodoxies of time and place. Perhaps more dissenting voices might have saved more lives from the Holocaust.

More power to the dissenters -- 'deniers' to Ellen Goodman -- of today, who refuse to march lock step with -- and dare dissent from -- today's orthodoxies.