John Roughan: Man's puny concerns of no account to the sea

Whenever I wander along the beach and sit for a while on the rocks I suspect environmentalists are wrong. The way the sea surges and slaps around suggests it doesn't realise it is a delicate ecosystem vulnerable to human industry.

That vast volume of water seems utterly indifferent to my puny pollution. It was heaving to its own rhythm long before my rock was raised from far below the ocean floor by innumerable earthquakes, and I have no doubt the sea will continue its timeless roll when the planet cooks up its next cataclysm.

Even the ocean, we now know, can be moved by that molten brew. Liquid rock continually rising and hardening into the globe's plates and where they meet they set up a friction that can buckle mountains, vent volcanoes and disturb the sea like children do bathwater, to watch how the wave sloshes to the rim.

Something about the sea says it would hardly notice if the next tectonic event was to wipe out the latest life-form that dominates all others, the one that imagines itself so mighty it can even, inadvertently, change the weather.

I wasn't surprised, somehow, to read on Tuesday a report from London that the earthquake and deadly seas that swept the Indian Ocean coasts were being attributed somehow to climate change.

According to this report, it was the culmination of a "year of the hundred billion dollar damage bill".

Losses to natural disasters in 2004, "most of them climate related and headed by hurricanes in America and typhoons in Japan", exceeded US$100 billion ($139 billion) for the first time in the estimate of Swiss Re, a large reinsurance company.

The company was "cautious" about attributing the events to climate change, but the British reporter was not.

"This remarkable sum will intensify the global warming debate," he wrote, "as more extreme weather events, including tropical storms of greater intensity, are among the predicted consequences of climate change. The astonishing storms of the past year are consistent with this, though scientists say it is not yet possible to link them to global warming directly. However, leading environmentalists said they should very much be taken as a warning."

He then quoted one - Tony Juniper, a director of Friends of the Earth, who said: "Here again are yet more events in the real world that are consistent with climate change predictions based on the most up-to-date scientific models. Only last year the members of the United Nations Environmental Programme's finance initiative were estimating that insured losses to natural disasters would soon approach US$150 billion a decade. These figures say we are well on the way to reaching that in just one year ... "

Right now it would be good to believe that the rate of global warming was largely man-made. We might make a bit more of it. Then again, the beauty of the climate change theory, from a believer's point of view, is that it can explain all sorts of weather.

A drought is obviously exhibit A, but a summer such as this one so far is not a disaster for the proposition either. Good or bad, so long as the weather is unsettled it can be blamed on greenhouse emissions.

The Economist, which is quite a green publication in its free-market way, once reviewed the science of climate change and found it wanting. It concluded, though, that global warming was a good excuse to do costly things that were worth doing anyway. That is when I started to worry.

I wouldn't attempt to enter the scientific dispute and I don't have to. Every time I encounter the debate I have no difficulty deciding which side is likely to be right. For every time I hear it, one side is challenging the evidence and the other is invoking the argument of authority.

Sceptics use real data from tree rings and the like to show how the climate has fluctuated over the centuries and to suggest that the changes detected since industrialisation are not necessarily scary. Certainly not scary enough to warrant the penalties environmentalists would like to impose on Western prosperity.

The response of climate change proponents invariably is to challenge the qualifications of the sceptics and deny that there is any longer an argument among reputable practitioners of the science. Their esteemed International Panel on Climate Change has several times reviewed the evidence (mostly the computer models) and its pronouncements on the subject, they insist, cannot be challenged.

Consequently, the poor occupants of Pacific atolls now believe that polar ice is about to drown their homes. I hear the islands are frantically investing in climate change precautions instead of the projects they really need.

Last Sunday nature delivered a reminder of the forces boiling and graunching beneath our feet. The earthquake is said to have caused a detectable wobble in the planet's rotation. Think about the climate change that could bring.

We needed that reminder. We are ants on the rim of the bath.

* John Roughan is a Herald assistant editor.