Great contribution. It reflects everything that is wrong with (Maltese) society: ill-placed sarcasm, greed, and the legendary inability to think long term.

[Daphne – Amen to that.]

My comparison and classification for your approaches to climate change (better to say environmental protection from a more top approaach) is nothing related to your personal lifes or altitudes, it is only different idea from a complete different perspective: an anology from a social theory! Your ideas for natural resource management can be different than your approaches to life; which is also valid for most of the scientists including me. However, your perspective to climate change is more close to fatalist approach rather than hierarchist, egalitarian, or individual perspective.

[Daphne – It isn’t: the fatalistic approach is the one that accepts we are all doomed and because of that, we have to change our ways. Non-fatalists like me don’t think we’re all doomed, and we think that what all this is about is a sublimation of some primeval need to appease the angry Gods of Rain, River, Sun and Flood: if we make the required sacrifices, they will not slay us with fire, brimstone and a couple of whirlwinds.]

This is from a 2004 paper written by a noted anthropologist, on the subject of what might be a return to paganism – earth worship – in developed societies:

“Religious production in recent years suggests not only that many religions are becoming more environmentally friendly but also that a kind of civic planetary earth religion may be evolving, manifested in events like ‘Earth Day’.”

Environmentalism fills a void in very secular societies. The clamour to change our behaviour lest the earth turn on us and destroy us all is little more than the 21st-century equivalent of the appeasement practices of ancient religions: child sacrifice for the alleviation of drought; virgin sacrifice to calm the god of thunder, and so on. It’s no coincidence that environmental movements are strongest in the more economically developed and less religious regions of the world. Some people commenting on this blog, and on The Times’ comment-boards, have a serious inability to make connections between cause and effect when it comes to social developments.

As an expert and a researcher, I cannot say both of you are right or wrong, but can show how your opinions (like many scientists) are really based on your cultural way of life. Maybe it is better if you look how the social sciences and more particularly the cultural theory of Thompson can contribute to developing shared understanding of your controversies to climate change approach. Also, I would like to remind you that controversies often betray the presence of differences in basic values, beliefs and assumptions.

For me, it is most interesting to consider how your way of life faces issues such as scarcity, growth, technology, and the management of needs and resources. So I make a classification as done in Cultural theory:

Holland: Egalitarian.

Egalitarians believe that resources are given and finite, so that needs have to be reduced to ensure a reasonable supply of resources. Scarcity is perceived as a depletion of resources, due to overexploitation of nature. The solution is to change people’s life-style and to opt for small-scale technology.

Daphne: Fatalist

Fatalists regard both their needs and their resources as unmanageable. Their management strategy involves coping with an environment over which they have no control. Nature is perceived as a lottery-like cornucopia, where resources might be abundant, but it has to be seen whether and when they will be available. Chance may bring it their way.

I also want to stress that current scientific knowledge does not provide sufficient argument in favor of one of your particular perspective. One reason is that uncertainties about the various interactions between man and the environment are still very large, leaving room for different interpretations of the available data. Another reason is that most of the environmental problems of today are not merely technical but strongly value-laden. Therefore, from a scientific point of view, I think it is advisable to involve different perspectives in any decision. An additional argument for doing so is the fact that basic assumptions and perceptions influence the outcome of the analysis probably more than anything else does.

[Daphne: Thank you for contributing the last paragraph, which is about right. But as for your assessment of me as a fatalist – well, I am the opposite of a fatalist, and this is amply demonstrated by much of what I write. I don’t believe in either fate or destiny, and famously so (or infamously, depending on how you look at it). Though I do know that chance plays a certain role in all our lives – a chance meeting at a party or an airport that leads to a job or a marriage – intelligent behaviour, guts and carefully calculated risk play an even greater role in success. I believe that we are all responsible for what happens to us, barring accidents that are beyond our control, and that we should use every ounce of our being to make the best of our lives and the most of our gifts and abilities. I have gone through life turning setbacks into opportunities with successful results, so that even though I left education at 17 and had three children by the age of 24, which is the classic recipe for disaster, I am now well ahead of my contemporaries and through my own efforts rather than piggy-backing through marriage, parents or inheritance. I put myself through five years of university education while looking after three primary-school children and working for various publications. I consider laziness and apathy to be unforgivable ‘crimes’, and I can’t bear people who whine and do nothing about their lives.

I think that we make our own luck and our own disasters depending on the kind of decisions we take, whether they are intelligent decisions or not. I do not think anything in life is a lottery except the circumstances of our birth and possible accidents or tragedies involving deaths or maiming, or serious illness. All other matters of chance can be used to our advantage or dealt with in some other way. I do not regard either my needs or my resources as unmanageable, but rather the opposite, as you can see from this brief description. I think they are ultra-manageable, and I manage them down to the last detail. If I didn’t do that, it would not be possible for me to publish 17 magazines a year when other magazines are produced by a fully-staffed office with an army of people, who generate fewer editions with far less reading-matter inside them. And I do this while still attending to other business, running my household, and planning new projects – hardly the life of a fatalist who sees things as being beyond her control. I’m a capitalist, a pragmatist and a meritocrat who admires achievers and respects entrepreneurship. I would actually like to put a rocket under fatalists and other ‘mentally floppy’ people.]

Not sure your statement is correct, anyway. The US produces 25% of CO2; if Americans change their lifestyles (they are already starting to do this because of the oil prices) it will indeed result in some change. Simple maths, or should I say math.

[Daphne – Your comparison isn’t quite right. Instead of spending more than you need to survive, when you are in debt, you should use the money to reduce the debt. And one day it will be cleared, failing which you will have to declare bankruptcy. There is a way out. With climate change, there isn’t. To use your analogy, even if we all use solar heaters, it will be like contributing cents towards a debt of several million. Might as well use the cents: in personal economic terms, it’s called opportunity cost. What do we have to give up in the here and now for ourselves so as to have a hypothetical benefit that we won’t even notice, for the world in general?]

What I find objectionable is this new attitude that since the world is warming up anyway, we might as well continue how we are – like it is a lost battle.

You are right, of course, in the fact that there have always been climate changes. What there hasnt been are changes which appear to be linked to a huge increase in the amount of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse glasses in the air. This is a new phenomenon, uncharted territory, one that has not yet really been tested or experienced before – and to be blunt, why take the risk at all and continue like nothing is happening?!

We appear to be playing with fire if we dont do something about this and continue with our livestyles; it does look like a lost battle, I admit, because of the magnitude of the problem. What I find unacceptable (and illogical) is the attitude that since the problem is so big and because we are yet unsure of the technicalities, we might as well do nothing and not even change little things in our lives that help.

[Daphne – Changing the little things in our lives doesn’t help at all, no matter if armies of us do it. We do it for our own conscience, nothing more. It doesn’t actually achieve anything except the feel-good factor. The point is this: we are expected to make huge sacrifices without the guarantee that it will be worthwhile in the end. A bit like religious belief, don’t you think?]

[Daphne – I said ‘smell’ not ‘taste’. I don’t drink it. I take showers in it, and the ‘chemical’ smell of the water is at times overwhelming.]

You will always find a small percentage of people who think differently than all the rest and posting a couple of links to their articles does not necessary make them right or special – after all, there is still a sect in the US that believes the Earth is flat and pictures from outer space are just a conspiracy; so there is always a divergence about everything in the world.

The majority of scientists believe that global warming will have very serious ramifications for all of us, especially the poorer and lower-lying countries. The difference of opinion is about the ‘when’ not the ‘if’.

[Daphne – Nobody is questioning the fact that the world is warming up, not even me. The point at issue is whether this would have happened anyway, without millions of people running cars and breathing. Historical records and archaeological evidence demonstrate quite clearly that climate change is a fact of life whether you have industry, cars and billions of people or not. The climate change fanatics are trying to present the flux as a recent phenomenon, and NEVER refer to the fact that there were massive climate changes throughout history and prehistory. Did you read the link I posted to The Sunday Times article about the discovery of the weather logs kept by Captain Cook and Lord Nelson? Did they fake those records to sabotage Al Gore 300 years down the line, do you think? I’m an archaeologist by training, so my perspective is a little longer. The most I found in my reading through myriad articles is the admission that human beings have accelerated climate change in the 20th/21st century – a very brief reference that made a pleasant change from the endless nagging about how human beings cause it in the first place. Climate change is going to happen no matter what we do or don’t do. The great flood of ancient Middle Eastern legend – which gave rise to the biblical account of Noah and his ark – is likely to have been based on a real climatic catastrophe that wiped out an entire civilisation, living on in a narrative passed down the generations by the survivors. This is just narrative evidence. There’s actual, real hard archaeological evidence of cities abandoned because the surrounding terrain turned into a dustbowl, or left desolate when crop failure caused by drought killed off the entire population. Do you know that North Africa and Libya were, 2000 years ago, lush places with trees, forests, grass and water, capable of supporting thriving cities? Look at the ruins of those cities now: they’re standing in the desert, or in bleak arid terrain. It didn’t happen because of cars or heavy industry.]