Positive Thinking

Well, here's a thing: it appears that climate change may have been "the main driver behind the birth of civilisation". Caused by "natural fluctuations in the Earth's orbit round the sun", as George W Bush might say if he believed the earth went round the sun, a sudden increase in global aridity forced people to abandon their carefree hunter-gatherer existence and congregate around the remaining water-holes, which some enterprising souls had no doubt privatised so as to ensure a happier society for all. Without "the driving force of climate change" (dear me, such automotive metaphors), "human society might have evolved much more slowly", according to Dr Nick Brooks of the University of East Anglia.

Without impugning Dr Brooks' theory, whose plausibility I am not qualified to judge, I am reminded of something I once read about Dr Edward Teller, the Hungarian-American nuclear physicist and proud parent of the hydrogen bomb. Teller was a rabid enthusiast of nuclear weapons - bigger, better, more - and his preaching of their virtues was by no means confined to mere deterrence: "We cannot and must not try to limit the use of weapons," he wrote, claiming also that "Properly defended, we can survive a nuclear attack ... As a nation, we shall survive, and our democratic ideals and institutions will survive with us, if we make adequate preparations for survival now". The way Teller rhapsodised about the benign powers of nuclear weapons made one wonder why he advocated wasting them on the evil Russians. These days, of course, we do not make such mistakes; those innocent Iraqis and Lebanese civilians, with whom we have no quarrel whatever, are precisely the ones who have felt the fraternal warmth of our depleted uranium. In the good old days of the Cold War, when the Great Satan of the moment largely knew its place and did not attempt to sneak nail-scissors onto civil aircraft, Teller was sometimes allowed foaming and sputtering onto national television so as to give a near-reasonable cast to whatever atrocities the US Government and its little helpers happened to be perpetrating at the time; nowadays opinions like his are slightly to the left of the political mainstream. Progress is a wonderful thing.

This gentleman of science once wrote, regarding radioactive fallout from nuclear weapons tests: "Its effect on human beings is so little that if it exists at all, it cannot be measured. Radiation from test fallout might be slightly harmful to humans. It might be slightly beneficial. It might have no effect at all. ... Deploring the mutations that may be caused by fallout is something like adopting the policies of the Daughters of the American Revolution, who approve of a past revolution but condemn further reforms." Radiation is an agent of evolution; radiation is emitted by nuclear explosions; therefore nuclear explosions are a Good Thing. Climate change wove the swaddling clothes in the cradle of civilisation; cars and cheap flights are agents of climate change; therefore you, yes you, by going your very own traffic-jamming, overconsuming, carbon-emitting way, are driving civilisation towards its second childhood.