Television
Hatchet job
Simon Hoggart
Against Nature (Channel 4, Sunday) was tendentious, selective and unfair. It used a raft of underhand television tricks to sup- port those whom the makers agreed with, while leaving their opponents looking fool- ish and unbalanced.
I loved it. The documentary, the first of three, was a ferocious attack on the Green movement, which it accused of trying to scare us all silly, while casually condemning the poorest people in the world to a life of continuing misery and disease.
But the Greens have pulled exactly the same dishonest stunts many, many times. It will do them tremendous good to get a taste of their own medicine, With anyone else I might have said that they would have a hard time answering the case the pro- gramme made against them, but like all fanatics they will either ignore it altogether, or express outrage and horror that anyone was allowed to make it in the first place.
The first segment of the show was about global warming. To listen to the terrible warnings pouring out from this week's Kyoto summit, you'd imagine that the entire planet will be a spinning ball of dust within 50 years. An impressive group of sci- entists and climatologists (no doubt known to and ignored by Greens as the usual dis- credited suspects) produced many intrigu- ing facts which have been ignored or laughed off by the 'we-are-all-doomed brigade. Did you know that in one eruption Mt Pinaturbo pitched 30 million tons of sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere, or twice as much as the whole United States generates in a year?
Or that 100 million years ago, there was six times as much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as there is today, yet the global temperature was slightly cooler? Or that the average temperature in the southern hemisphere has actually dropped in the past eight years? Of course not. Such infor- mation rarely rises above the hysterical yelling from the true believers, for whom the Kyoto summit is such a triumph. As we heard from Piers Corbyn, a man who last month turned himself into a multi-million- aire through his remarkable ability to pre- dict the weather: No matter how many times you read about global warming, that doesn't mean it's true. It's just someone else repeating what they've read.' The fact is that the greenhouse effect fills a profound psychological need. Now and again a bit of boat is found on Mt Ararat. Someone identifies this as part of Noah's Ark, and it's hailed as proof that the story of the Flood is true. But the point about the Flood was not that it happened — it probably did — but that people at the time assumed it was a punishment for their Own misbehaviour. When we exclaim that the Earth is dying and it's all our fault, we are only imitating primitive tribesmen who see a volcano and conclude that the gods are angry with them for sleeping with their cousins.
The second part of the programme admirably dealt with the vicious way in which the Greens have prevented the World Bank from financing a dam in north-west India. This would have brought electricity and clean water to millions of people, but the environmental movement, with its lock on so many Western govern- ments, has been able to halt the work, to the appalled distress of the people to whom the dam would have brought innu- merable benefits.
The programme loaded its message in many subtle ways. Green spokesmen appeared hunched and furtive, or in one case, standing next to a lavatory — no doubt to suggest that she was perfectly happy to sluice away hundreds of gallons of clean water every day. Anti-Greens, by contrast, appeared relaxed and expansive, in sensible settings. One particularly silly woman declared that she had lived in Africa for four-and-a-half years without electricity, and they were the happiest years of my life'. Cut to picture of hands picking up brown sludge with voice-over: This woman is picking up cow-dung for fuel.' Five million infants in the Third World die every year from inhaling indoor smoke, much of it made by cow-dung. But the Greens, our new colonialists, as anxious to impose their philosophy as the British on lesser breeds in the last century, or the Roman Catholic Church on Latin American Peasants today, insist that they should lead the simple, Edenic (and disease-ridden) existence. A splendid hatchet job, and I look forward mightily to the next two editions. On BBC 1 on Wednesday, the green- house effect got another roasting, almost as fierce, in Scorching the Earth. This included a history of other climate scares and a can- ter round the now-forgotten but once allegedly imminent Ice Age, predicted in 1976. Green scientists are fond of comput- er models, which sound impressive, but simply play with whatever numbers you feed into them. Make the right guesses, and, hey presto, 1 could have giant tidal waves covering the Millennium Dome in January 2000. Oh, and it turns out that Nasa satellites have found no evidence whatever of global temperature change over the last ten years.
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