Critique: Global warming is good for you
In the 2002 publication of the Guardian we find an interesting article written by Duncan Steel, from the University of Salford. In this article he takes an unorthodox stand on a rather cliché topic, claiming that global warming does in fact prove beneficial to human civilization and development by preventing a far worse ‘global freeze’. An interesting viewpoint, but the reasons he cites to justify his position seem superficial and poorly supported, making the article look like as if it were a fruit of a pointless literary mission to dwell on the topic from the ‘side not taken’.
Mr. Steel starts off his argument by giving examples of how climate change- or rather global cooling if there is a term like that- has been a recurrent factor in the earth’s history. His argument is as follows. The “snow demon” he claims, if I may summarize metaphorically, has terrorized people from time immemorial- giving rise to epidemics, and wreaking havoc on human civilization, agricultural systems, economies, etc. Worse still the snow demon, once “unleashed”, apparently gains strength quickly. So to save ourselves from this monster, we should enrich the greenhouse gas component in the atmosphere. This may give rise to the Demon of Heat, but that grows more slowly and so we can deal with that- he would explain.
On careful observation we notice that the author has simply extrapolated the pros of the greenhouse effect to global warming to suit his case. That without the greenhouse effect we wouldn’t have lived to learn about it would be known to even a primary school child. The greenhouse gases trap heat to provide the necessary balance for life to exist. But global warming, as the author himself acknowledges, distorts this balance. At least the epidemics that he talks of were temporary, but the pollution related diseases that we talk of today,