Life
Shock value
by Bill Ralston
You can’t fool me with your scare tactics.
I am not sure who I disbelieve. It’s either scientists or Time magazine. Together they have given me some nasty shocks over the years.
In the mid-80s, the cover of Time announced the end of sex as we know it, thanks to the prospect of herpes becoming endemic. Panicked by the imminent demise of indiscriminate shagging, I promptly got married in an effort to avoid the sexual Armageddon. I was sadly misled, as I gather people still do it a lot, despite the risk.
A few years later, I was startled to find Time warning of another sexual cataclysm. It quoted scientists claiming the scourge of Aids would end bonking and, probably, the human race.
I was still pondering the horrible question of which dirty swine had it off with a green monkey in the first place, when Time announced another doom-laden scientific finding. On the stroke of midnight, December 31, 1999, the evil Y2K bug would spark an international digital cataclysm in everything from my fridge to North American Aerospace Defense Command’s super-computers, probably sparking nuclear war in one case and a massive defrosting in the other.
Of course, neither event occurred. At least as far as I noticed.
So I should not have been worried when that cursed magazine reported, shortly after the turn of the century, that according to scientists the world over, chooks were about to kill me. To stave off the coming global bird flu pandemic I hoarded, at enormous cost, boxes of Tamiflu, all of which have long since reached their expiry date.
Embittered by these Chicken Little false alarms, I have viewed subsequent covers of Time and other magazines sounding the alarm about global warming and climate change with extreme suspicion.
At the risk of being labelled a “climate change denier”, a phrase that deliberately feasts on the resonance of the last word, implying one is the kind of disgraceful person that would also deny the Holocaust, I wonder if we are being fed another massive overreaction to a natural phenomenon.
I must admit, I do enjoy watching the wrath of the Greens every time someone suggests that the sky might not be about to fall.
Recently, Northern Ireland’s Environment Minister, Sammy Wilson, drove conservationists crazy when he labelled their views on climate change a “hysterical pseudo-religion”. He argued that the shift in weather patterns wasn’t man-made, but occurred naturally, and rather than vainly trying to stop it in a King Canute fashion, we would be better off channelling resources into adapting to climate change. The Northern Irish Greens promptly fainted.
When they roused themselves to form a lynch mob, the minister was unrepentant. “The tactic used by the ‘green gang’ is to label anyone who dares disagree with their view of climate change as some kind of nutcase who denies scientific fact.”
Well, just to prove we have our own version at this end of the planet, Act leader Rodney Hide chimed in on the debate.
He told South Island Act party members, “I don’t know what we are scared of. A New Zealand that was one or two degrees warmer would be a better place to live and a better environment for agriculture. The same is true for CO2.
“We pump the stuff into our greenhouses to stimulate plant growth. It’s the No 1 nutrient, with carbon through photosynthesis being the source of all life.”
After a long, cold winter, Hide’s position is alluring. He maintains if New Zealand did, as the scientists predict, become two to four degrees warmer by the end of this century, we’d have a climate similar to that of the Gold Coast and this would be a damn good thing.
I realise there’s an additional benefit for my children or my children’s children. They will inherit my house on the Ponsonby ridge, which by that stage will have become prime waterfront land when Freemans Bay returns to its natural state as seabed.
Well, I am presuming the family would still own the house. There’s every chance the punitive charges involved in the Government’s ill-conceived Emissions Trading Scheme will have left my descendants -impoverished and homeless.
As with Time’s medical scare-mongering and the Y2K panic, someone is making a great deal of money out of the climate-change industry. The carbon footprint left by countless international scientific conferences addressing the issue would be enough to raise the world’s temperature by at least 1ºC.
I need to invent my own worldwide crisis. I am thinking of claiming that continued texting will cause the loss of not only the apostrophe, the semicolon and colon, but eventually all vowels – unless we move urgently to solve the problem.
I wonder if I could convince the Listener to do a “Save the Vowel” cover story.
