Jury out on terrorism vs global warming

By Karen Carstens

Date: 11/03/04

ENVIROMENTALISTS have long lambasted the Bush administration for failing to take climate change seriously, but now some are wondering whether Downing Street is doing the same.

The global warming debate has heated up again recently on several fronts.

Sensationalist headlines have been sparked on both sides of the Atlantic by a controversial Pentagon report claiming a sudden climate change disaster could, albeit only in a worst-case scenario, eclipse terrorism as the world's number one geopolitical threat.

The US study coincides with alarming comments coming from Sir David King, the UK government's chief scientist, who said that more people have been killed by climate change than by terrorism.

In his appearance yesterday (10 March), before a House of Lords committee that is conducting inquiries for a report on EU climate-change policies, King praised the Union's emmission's trading scheme as the right way to avoid a global meltdown (see Page 2).

King wrote a scathing article, published in the American journal Science in January, attacking Washington for ignoring global warming: "In my view, climate change is the most severe problem we are facing today, more serious even than the threat of terrorism," wrote King, a Cambridge University chemist who offers independent advice to UK Prime Minister Tony Blair. In February, he was sent a memo from Ivan Rogers, Blair's principal private secretary, telling him to limit his contact with the media lest he fuel such a "sterile argument".

Support soon came from Hans Blix, the former United Nations chief weapons inspector, who warned that the danger of terror is overestimated: "There are other things that are of equal, if not greater, magnitude, like the environmental global risks," he said.

Norman Baker, the Liberal Democrats' environment spokesman, told London's Independent on 8 March that as David King is "the nation's chief scientist, I'd expect him to say what he thinks".

Yet King said on 9 March that the memo did not amount to an instruction that he had to obey.

"I have certainly seen the memo but I am not being muzzled," he said.

King undertook numerous interviews with the media when he spoke at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Seattle last month.

During a plenary lecture, he claimed that global warming has already caused 160,000 premature deaths around the world. King has said that his equation is "based on the number of fatalities that have already occurred" - implying that global warming had already killed more people than terrorism.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon report has been stirring controversy since its release in January. The report gives pause for thought, especially as it was penned not by radical "tree-huggers" but by Peter Schwartz, former head of planning at Shell Oil and sometime CIA consultant, and Doug Randall of the Global Business Network, a California think-tank.

Commissioned by Department of Defense planner Andrew Marshall, the report paints a scenario under which global warming could pose a threat to the world "greater than terrorism" - complete with mega-droughts, widespread famine and rampant rioting.

But while it has sounded alarm bells on Capitol Hill, it has yet to provoke any reaction from the White House.

"This adds a powerful new voice to the global-warming debate in Congress," said Tim Profeta, senior policy advisor to Senator Joe Lieberman, a Conneticut-based Democrat.

Profeta said he hopes that the report will spur renewed interest and support for the McCain-Lieberman Climate Stewardship Act, which was narrowly defeated in the Senate last autumn, but could soon be up for another vote.

Sir David King, the UK Government's Chief Scientist, says that more people have been killed by climate change than by terrorism and he praised the European Union's emissions trading scheme as the right way to avoid global meltdown.

• Primary Source