Dialogue: Why progress is good for all of us

My mother thinks we've had it. She is convinced that the world is getting hotter and the weather's going bonkers. And she can be forgiven for thinking so because she lives in England where it has recently rained a lot.

She has not been flooded, but many of her friends and neighbours have been and have had dead cows knocking at their bedroom windows.

According to my mother and her neighbours, our children will reap the bitter harvest of what the self-indulgent 20th century has sown.

With our fridges, aerosols and Honda Civics we have steered a suicidal path towards the wall on which our fate is written.

If we had gone without cars and underarm deodorant, it would have been okay. If we had walked and stunk as our ancestors did, there would be plenty of ozone and nice clean air and mad cow disease would be restricted to cows and every little thing would be all right.

But it's not all right because we are sinners. Nature is bashing us up for being naughty.

Well, I was brought up not to argue with my mother. And besides, her opinion is shared by many modern thinkers, including superbrain Al Gore.

Al and his pals are particularly angry at the moment because the men in suits who gathered in Kyoto or Geneva or wherever it was have failed to agree on steps to save the world. So we've had it.

Well, my mother and Al may be right. But they may also be wrong. It's not a popular view and one would be advised to whisper it because the doomsters are fierce people, but as far as I can tell the evidence of science is that they are probably wrong.

Science has never been much good at predicting the end of the world, or indeed simple matters of temperature.

Only 30 years ago there was many an earnest boffin predicting global cooling. The world has always cooled and heated. Ice ages have come and gone throughout history and no one knows why.

Although the word science means knowledge, the only sure knowledge we have is of the past. And the evidence of the past is that my mother and Al are definitely wrong.

History is not a popular guide because every generation thinks itself wiser than its ancestors, but history suggests that the human race doesn't change a lot and every generation is as gullible as the ones that went before.

And one idea that crops up time and time again in human history is that we will be punished for our sins. The only thing that changes is the name of the punisher.

It used to be God under one or other of his many titles. Now it's nature.

I'm no clearer about what people mean by nature than I am about what they mean by God, but I am very clear about what has happened to all the prophecies of doom. They have been wrong.

Today's version of the myth is that nature has it in for us because we have meddled with it. Well, if nature exists, man is part of it. And it is man's nature to meddle. It's how we've got where we've got. If my house is unnatural, so is a kakapo's nest.

Nevertheless, the idea persists that there is a right way to live according to moral laws laid down by nature and we offend those laws at our peril. Where that idea springs from I can't tell you. What I can tell you is that it's bunkum.

Life lived according to what we like to think of as nature was, as Thomas Hobbes pointed out a long time ago, nasty, brutish and short.

The romantic notion of living under the stars in the green bosom of natural benevolence like the illegitimate progeny of Robin Hood and a chimp is so much baloney.

If you don't believe me, go tramping in the nude.

What has supposedly messed up the world is our frantic pursuit of riches. That's the precise opposite of the truth. Man is capable of turning localised bits of the world into uninhabitable wastes, but the places which man has made uninhabitable are places of poverty.

Rich countries clean themselves up. The moral is not that we should get back to nature, but rather that we should get richer.

Rich people save whales, treat sewage in ponds and conserve wilderness. Poor people eat whales, dump sewage in rivers and cut down trees.

Progress is good for everyone including the entirely imaginary god called nature.

The assumption that we are responsible for heating the world, or that we can do anything much to affect it, is an arrogance which has far more to do with superstitious guilt that it has to do with science.

Sorry, Mum.