Is climate change such a big deal? Should we leave our fate to Western opinion? Perhaps it is time for Arabs to conduct their own studies, writes Abdel-Moneim Said The seriousness of the situation never really struck home until I saw the film produced by former US vice-president Al Gore, The Inconvenient Truth. Anyone who follows the international news knows that climate change and its effects on the environment has become one of the most crucial global issues and that it concerns people everywhere because the threat looms over everyone. Many may now also be familiar with the succession of images appearing in the media showing the attrition on the polar icecaps and on the glaciers of the Himalayas, which have begun to melt as the result of the rising temperature of the earth. Images such as these vividly demonstrate how radically the natural environment can change due to global warming. More recently, after long imagining that the problem has nothing to do with us, the warning bells have sounded much closer to home. As the polar icecaps melt as a result of global warming, the seas and oceans will rise to a level high enough to inundate those parts of the earth that are currently close to sea level. Images projecting how this will affect Egypt have shown large tracts of the Nile Delta submerged beneath water. Now it is not unusual to find articles in Cairene newspapers attempting to identify the contours of the flooded areas and estimating the numbers of people who will be affected. Estimates vary from eight million to 22 million people, although the most commonly cited figure is 14 million whom the Egyptian government will need to evacuate to prepared locations further inland. I examined several maps to see whether my native town in the Delta would fall within the flood zone but was frustrated to find that the town's fate varied according to different maps. The cause of the problem is that the sun is no longer our planet's sole source of heat. Man and the carbon emissions from his industries now generate the extra heat that is endangering the planet. The only way to forestall the threat is for mankind to reorganise its life and industries in a way that halts the rise in the earth's temperature. Naturally, the theory came under fire from various right-wing circles that suspected it was the product of a liberal "fit" of trying to encumber heavy industry despite its importance to human development. I had thought this criticism was fairly marginal and unreliable, in view of the ideological and economic motives behind it, until I had the opportunity to conduct a television interview with Czech President Vaclav Claus. What occasioned my desire to hold this interview was his book, The Blue Planet in Green Shackles -- What is Endangered: Climate or Freedom? which exposed me to an entirely different philosophical and scientific perspective on the subject. President Claus takes as his starting point a citation from the Russian-British philosopher and historian Isaiah Berlin: "What was the source of terror in the 20th century was not the ordinary baser human impulses, but ideas." It was not greed for natural resources or the ambition for territorial expansion that were the source of some of the worst horrors and atrocities of that century, but the ideology of the Nazis that drove them to attempt to reorder the world according to race, and the communist ideology that claimed for itself the sole ability to create a more just world. Today, according to Claus, the world is in the grips of other mass ideologies that threaten human freedom to the very core, and foremost among these is the ideology related to the environment and climate change. Like the big ideas of the 20th century, this one starts by instilling widespread fear of a brutal and demonic force and then strives to restrict human freedom in order to be able to tackle that evil. The argument represents an attempt to shift the question of the greenhouse effect and climate change from the framework of scientific debate over the accuracy and validity of relevant facts to a philosophical realm involving ideological totalitarianism in the name of a noble cause. Interestingly, Claus grants from the outset that the earth's temperature is indeed rising. However, he quickly adds that the degree of change is not so worrisome or beyond mankind's ability to deal with. We can sum up his argument, here, in four points: First, the rise in temperature is not uniform or all encompassing. It occurs only in the colder climates, not the equatorial zones; in humid regions, not in dry ones; in winter, not in summer; and at night, not in the daytime. Second, it is not such a huge increase in temperature. The average increase in temperature is not at all huge: it rose less than one degree Centigrade over the course of the whole of the last century. Third, such a rise is not unprecedented and the reports that attempted to prove that it was have come under heavy criticism. In fact, many scientific papers now claim that climate change was responsible for the fact that parts of ancient Alexandria now lay under water and for the drought that created the Western Desert from what was once, apparently, a luxuriant verdant plain. Fourth, that not so unreasonable rise of one degree Centigrade in the world's temperature may not have been solely caused by man-made carbon emissions; other non-anthropogenic factors may have come into play. During the interview, I had the Arabic translation of his book on the table in front of him. I pointed to it and asked him whether any of his opinions have since changed. He shook his head and said that he stuck by every word he wrote. I tried to obtain some reassurance regarding my birthplace in the Delta. His answer, accompanied by a smile, was not to state the facts but rather to stress that human beings have proven their ability to come to terms with facts that were much harder to deal with than this one will turn out to be. I suggested that perhaps he was influenced by the snow drifts surrounding the presidential palace in Prague and temperatures that plunge from seven below zero at noon to 17 below at midnight, which might make the thought of global warming quite comforting. He would not budge. Nature had its own laws and ultimately knew how to balance itself. On the possibility that most of the Delta would be submerged under water as the result of the meltdown of the polar icecap, he did not appear particularly worried. In fact, he confessed to know little about Egypt's specific situation, though he did know that for thousands of years Egyptians have demonstrated their ingenuity at dealing with changing climatic conditions. In all events, the crucial issue for him was the extent to which "climate theory" was being used to control people, to tell them what and what not to do, to dictate to them how to live and act, and what to eat and where to travel. That was why he ultimately rejected the Copenhagen Conference and pleaded that people should be left to their own devices so that they could enjoy the flexibility to make the necessary adjustments through technological advancements and open markets. What human beings really needed, he insisted, was freedom. Our conversation then leaped to a subject that had nothing to do with the greenhouse effect and melting polar icecaps. On the question of the Arab-Israeli conflict and the possibility of a solution he also had very interesting opinions, though I still could not get the fate of my native village out of my mind. I was left wondering whether climate-warming fears are indeed exaggerated, or whether Claus's opinions on the state of our planet were the product of a kind of right-wing paranoia that shudders at scientific conjectures and mistrusts the knowledge that scientists bring. In the end, I thought, perhaps what we really need is to perform some independent studies of our own so that we do not have to submit our fates to this or that Western camp of opinion.
