Bush's electoral prospects

President Bush and the Republican Party are now preparing for the Republican convention to be held in New York beginning August 30 to confirm that President Bush will be the party's candidate for reelection in the November elections.

It is the party's hope that unlike Democrat rival John Kerry, Mr Bush will be able to boost his standing with the electorate as a result of the publicity that a convention traditionally generates, or at the very least that the ongoing erosion in his approval ratings will be stemmed.

Currently, Mr Bush has the advantage of being able to spend a lot of the money he has raised to buy airtime on television for ads at a time when the Democratic candidate is barred legally from using any such funds.

American election law, after the recent reforms, provides that once a candidate has accepted his party's nomination, and has as a result received government funding to the tune of $75 million, the only money he can spend from that date until the time of the election is this government funding.

This restriction will also apply to Mr Bush but only after the Republican convention. In the four weeks or so that remain he can deploy the huge war chest at his disposal only to air officially sanctioned ads to boost his candidacy.

A new factor this year, or at least a factor that has assumed new importance this year, is another provision or lacunae in the law which permits private groups to place political ads to support the candidate of one party, and to denigrate the candidate of the other - without the imposition of financial limits so long as it is clear that the private group is not acting under instructions from the candidate or the candidate's party.

The importance of such ads has been highlighted by a recently launched and privately financed ad campaign that calls into question Mr Kerry's military credentials and the stories of his valour.

The ads have been condemned in the media and by a prominent Republican senator, John McCain. The White House has disassociated itself from the ad campaign but has carefully refrained from calling for its withdrawal.

Such Republican ads are, therefore, likely to continue and, despite what seems to be an agreement between the two parties to avoid personal attacks in official campaigning, a degree of viciousness can be expected from the privately funded ad campaigns.

In the past, it would have been fair to suggest that any such campaigns would work to the advantage of the Republican candidate since this party has traditionally been able to raise more money and has had more dedicated groups working for it.

This year, however, this is no longer a foregone conclusion. One pointer was the fact that in the last couple of months Mr Kerry was able to raise more money for his official campaign than Mr Bush.

For another, the speeches and the general discussions at the Democratic Convention highlighted how aggrieved the general run of Democrats, both the radicals and moderates, were about the manner in which the last election had been "stolen" and their determination to oust Mr Bush.

The general feeling was that they did not have a candidate to elect but they had a candidate to defeat. The fury of the ABB (Anyone But Bush) crowd will, it appears translate into greater privately funded campaigning against the current incumbent.

A head start has been provided by the phenomenal success at the box office of Michael Moore's documentary Fahrenheit 9/11. A more brutal focus on the weaknesses of Bush as a leader, particularly as a wartime leader, and his dubious connections with oil interests inside and outside the country would be hard to visualize.

There were efforts by Disney studios, under whose auspices the documentary was produced, to prevent its distribution. But given its success at the Cannes film festival and the interest it had already generated the abortive effort only gave it greater box office appeal.

Building upon the success of this documentary is going to be relatively simple. Material is available in large quantities. From the question of WMDs in Iraq to the "Mission Accomplished" statements about Iraq, or the more recent "Bring 'em on" to the continuing failure to attract international assistance in dealing with the Iraq and Afghanistan quagmires, there is a rich lode to be tapped.

The donations that Mr Kerry has been able to attract in the last two months would suggest that the anti-Bush camp in this deeply polarized country will make both the talent and the money available to do it right.

It would, under these circumstances, be reasonable to expect private groups working against George Bush to outspend Republican supporters through the rest of the period up to the election in November and to do it with material far more lethal than the record of a vacillating and "flip-flop" John Kerry that the Republicans will seek to highlight. It is a campaign that also stands a great chance of success because of the current economic situation and the continuing concerns about Iraq.

Last week, a Washington Post /ABC News poll showed 25 per cent of voters as listing the economy as the most important issue, with 23 per cent saying Iraq and 20 per cent terrorism.

The latest employment figures released a few days ago showed that in July a mere 32,000 new jobs were added to the economy last month. That was way below forecasts, which had envisaged at least a quarter of a million new jobs. Since Mr Bush came to office, some 1.1 million jobs were reduced and for the American public the measure of economic recovery was the number of jobs created.

Fifty-two per cent of those polled in the Washington Post/ABC poll thought that John Kerry was more to be trusted than Bush (41 per cent) on the economy: Some felt that this was attributable to the post-Convention "bounce" but, in my view this reflects the general concern about what are seen to be the shortcomings of Bush's economic policies of making the rich richer and the poor poorer. He has also not been helped by the rise in oil prices that have now gone up by a further 10 per cent, touching an all- time high of $44.40 a barrel.

On Iraq, which many had considered to be Mr. Bush's trump card, this poll showed that 46 per cent believed he was the right person to deal with the Middle Eastern country while 48 per cent chose Mr Kerry.

This figure is not likely to improve in the days to come as the situation in Iraq shows no discernible improvement and, more importantly, no other nation offers to step in to assist in the process.

The UN secretary-general has made it clear that he now expects the US forces to provide security for the UN team led by Ambassador Qazi when it moves into Iraq and that not one nation has reacted positively to the UN's request for troops for a UN protection force.

The arrest warrants now issued for the Pentagon's favourite Iraqi, Ahmad Chalabi and his nephew, Salem Chalabi, underline how badly the administration had chosen its tools in Iraq.

The continuing battle on the streets of Najaf and the carnage there may help to break the back of Moqtada Sadr's Mehdi army but it will make the Shia leader a formidable political force.

Ayatollah Sistani's departure from Najaf for London, ostensibly because of health problems, adds to the complications. It is probable that he left because he did not wish to contend with the problem of a large scale American operation which while aimed at Sadr's militia would cause hundreds of civilian casualties. The capture of an Iranian diplomat, presumably by a Sunni organization will add a new and possibly dangerous twist to the sectarian problem in Iraq.

In the meanwhile, the interim government's every act, overseen by the Americans, reveals only its impotence. The amnesty offer as finally issued offers a pardon only to select insurgents and was apparently modified after the Americans insisted that the amnesty must not extend to those guilty of serious offences against the Americans or the interim government.

Prime Minister Allawi's visit to Najaf and his call to the insurgents to lay down their arms can only be termed as a dismal failure.

There is no reason, therefore, to believe that even in the absence of a coherent Kerry policy on Iraq - he has only talked about achieving a substantial reduction in the number of American troops deployed in Iraq within the first year of his administration without explaining how - the country cannot be a selling point for Bush.

On the terror issue it is conventional wisdom that any visible increase in the terrorist threat will redound to Bush's advantage. He, after all, is the incumbent president. Yet I am not at all certain that that is how the latest enhancing of the "alert" level will play with the electorate.

First, it seems more or less certain that all the information gathered from the interrogation of Naeem Khan in Pakistan, the examination of his computer records and even the contact he was forced to maintain with collaborators in the UK and perhaps the US, proved only that Al-Qaeda had surveyed financial institutions in the US before September '01, and not that anything else had been done since then to plan an attack.

There was widespread criticism of the decision to release the name of Naeem Khan to the media since reports from both Pakistan and the UK suggested that doing so had jeopardized ongoing anti-terrorist operations.

With this sort of backdrop, many Americans seemed to accept the contention of the admittedly disgruntled former anti-terrorism chief in the White House that the security alerts put out by the Bush administration were now being treated as jokes by officials in the field.

More importantly, given the WMD fiasco the Bush administration now enjoys little credibility. Such little credibility as exists on the terrorism issue has been undermined by the charge that it is crying wolf too often.

No Democrat can dare to make an issue of this for fear of what the consequences would be if a terrorist attack did occur. But even without a sustained effort by the Democrats, this may become another albatross around the president's neck.

It is probable that the tradition of a presidential debate will be maintained this year. Mr Kerry is not a charismatic figure, but according to some American friends, even he cannot but outshine President Bush.

In the vice-presidential debate, it is just as certain that the eloquent and charismatic Edwards, armed with his forensic skills, will run rings around the dour-sounding and dour-looking Dick Cheney.

While it is always foolhardy to try and call an American election so early in the election year this writer will hazard the view that the Bush campaign, barring some dramatic development, will not be able to overcome the odds and January '05 will find a Democrat ensconced in the White House.

The writer is a former foreign secretary.

Dreaming of world conquest

Scenes of prayer in the Kaaba, and of course of the Hajj in Makkah, witnessed over television, are an inspiring sight. Like all other Muslims, I too feel overwhelmed on seeing them.

Although a hardened rationalist and democrat in the modern sense of the two words, I then revel in nostalgic remembrance of the various Muslim empires of bygone eras in various parts of the globe.

My favourite is the resplendent Muslim rule in Spain when knowledge, learning, chivalry, science, religious scholarship and the fine art of being civilized survived for many hundreds of years in an unprecedented spirit of tolerance in the Iberian peninsula. I wept in sheer anguish when I read Washington Irving's "The Fall of Grenada" although I was not an impressionable youth at that time.

Another favourite is the conquests and triumphs of some the Turkish sultans, as also the success of the secular Mustafa Kemal which has left an indelible impression on my mind and made me a great admirer of the Turks as a nation. I am convinced that but for Ataturk, the Turkish nation would have become a forgotten chapter of history.

So much for the past. The inveterate Muslim in me also dreams of a possible future by way of Muslim cultural resurgence (rather than religious ascendancy) in the modern scientific and technological world.

Possible, yes, for anything is possible, but at the same time highly improbable looking at the manner in which Muslim countries and their leaders comport themselves.

The shining picture of a possibly magnificent future for the faithful is however soon blurred over by the harsh reality of truth. While I am blessed with a rational outlook on life, this rationalism somehow spoils the fun of day-dreaming.

The equine nature of wishes makes even beggars like me ride in glory, but as realism dawns, the horse turns out to be wooden and refuses to march like a conqueror's steed.

In the circumstances I can only marvel at the incorrigible optimists in Pakistan who continue to see dreams in broad daylight of Muslim dominance over the entire world - that at some point of time in the near future the universe will fall into the lap of Muslims without our having to lift a little finger for the purpose. I pray for them that they may not be too deeply hurt when their eyes are opened and the dream evaporates into thin air.

A few months ago my attention was drawn to two articles in a Lahore journal devoted to politics and Islam which, in a way, confirmed my fear that this delusive way of looking at the world as a possible free gift to Islam is quite widespread.

It quoted a former minister of Afghanistan as predicting that, after the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the US too was destined to collapse at the hands of the sons of Islam.

(Shades of Al-Qaeda?) The good man would have us believe that it is Islam and its followers who brought about the end of the godless communist empire. Apparently the editor did not disagree with this view.

Reading such views (and hearing them over mosque loudspeakers every Friday) an impression is created that, in the eyes of most of us, Islam is not the community of Muslims as such but a disembodied force of supernatural character that strikes heathens and atheists like a bolt of lightning whenever they tend to get out of hand, and the fruits of these heavenly visitations are then enjoyed by the faithful.

The other article in the journal was by a well-known Urdu columnist who too was carried away by sentiment. Only he tried to keep his steed of wild chauvinistic ambition reined in to some extent.

While he firmly believed that, like the communist system, capitalism too was bound to come crashing down over the heads of its proponents, he refrained from crediting Islam with bringing about its downfall.

Interestingly, in support of his theory, the columnist cited a former Foreign Secretary of Pakistan who is reported to have asserted in a public speech a couple of years ago (after retirement of course) that the two systems were the two faces of the same coin and thus doomed to destruction.

The presumption was that, thereafter, Islam was bound to prevail. The columnist's own thesis was that just because communism came into being to counter capitalism, the latter too must somehow fail after having done away with its enemy.

The word "somehow" indicated the wishful thinking part of the columnist's whole concept. Further, this gentleman enlarged the scope of his dream to a confederation of Muslim countries comprising Pakistan, Iran, Afghanistan, Turkey and the Central Asian states.

But then, in a burst of realism, he himself said that this was apparently a madman's dream, "though madmen's dreams do come true sometimes!" Thankfully he predicated the fruition of the dream with the prerequisite of Muslim unity.

Therein lies the rub. Positive action of this kind can only come after unity. I think that with the exception of the Turks, as also of the CAS who are suffering from a morbid fear of resurgent Islamic fundamentalism, all other Muslims the world over are given to long reveries somewhat on the lines of the legendary 'Sheikh Chilli', or like the hero of that delightful Danny Kaye movie "The Secret Lives of Walter Mitty."

This character, with an imagination working overtime, transposes himself successively into a number of heroic roles and then comes back from each world of make-believe with a rather rueful countenance, chastened till the next dream.

Most of us love to exist in a dream world where, some day, somehow, somewhere, at the hands of some Salahuddin Ayubi, Muslims will gain control over the globe and prove unerringly that all isms - socialism and capitalism and rationalism - are decreed by fate to give way before an ascendant Islam.

So far we have only convinced ourselves that ours is the best system. Let me submit humbly that we have to make the rest of the world also realize the force of this conviction before we can expect it to give up its antagonism towards Islam and lay down arms at the feet of our verbal crusading zeal.

Bush's rampant terror strategy

The Bush administration attracted a degree of ridicule when it emerged last week that its orange alert and over-the-top security reinforcements at certain financial institutions had been prompted by the discovery of Al Qaeda surveillance files dating back three years or more.

The government immediately went into overdrive, insisting that the high alert was partly based on more recent information. It also pointed out that Al Qaeda is known to sometimes pick its targets years before trying to attack them.

The idea of further terrorist outrages in Manhattan is by no means implausible. The fact that instances of hyper-vigilance provoke suspicions of alarmist zeal suggests that the government of George W. Bush has not succeeded in narrowing the yawning credibility gap created by incontrovertible evidence of its lies over Iraq.

Even the lame excuse that its apprehensions about Saddam Hussein were based on dodgy intelligence is of little help, because it begs the question whether present intelligence is any more reliable.

It has been argued that the heightened alertness may be a response to the 9/11 commission's report, released last month, which highlighted security lapses that enabled the plotters to carry out their plan on September 11, 2001.

That may well be the case: one would obviously expect the authorities to ensure that the same sort of mistakes do not recur. Yet it's hard to shake off the nagging suspicion that developments on the anti-terror front are somehow connected to Bush's political agenda.

Is it, for example, entirely coincidental that the Manhattan alert followed a dip in the president's popularity following the Democratic party convention in Boston? Maybe, maybe not. The point is, almost no one considers the administration incapable of deploying such tactics to shore up its support among the electorate.

There is an apparent contradiction here. If there is indeed the likelihood of an imminent attack, doesn't that signify the hollowness of frequent presidential pronouncements about "winning the war on terror"? And should Al Qaeda - or anyone else - succeed in causing even a fraction of the damage perpetrated on 9/11, wouldn't that bring into question the Bush administration's ability to protect the United States?. That, evidently, isn't how things work in the US. A superpower, after all, must be distinguishable from lesser entities.

And analysts of virtually every stripe agree that a terrorist outrage ahead of November 2 would greatly benefit the incumbent. Pumped-up paranoia serves a similar purpose. Insecurity, it seems, militates against change.

Earlier this year, the Spanish electorate copped a fair amount of criticism from the leading lights of the "coalition of the willing" for dispensing with the services of Jose Maria Aznar just days after Islamist terrorists killed 200 people in Madrid.

The opposition Socialist Party, which had vowed to bring Spanish troops home for Iraq, scored a surprise victory, prompting charges that the voters had effectively bowed to terrorist demands.

Two crucial points were overlooked: that Aznar had committed troops to Iraq in the face of overwhelming popular opposition to the idea, and that his government had conspired to pin the blame for the Madrid railway bombings on the Basque separatist organization ETA. In the event, a majority of the electorate followed the dictates of common sense.

It was claimed at the time that the perpetrators had regime change on their mind, and they succeeded in pushing their agenda. In the case of the US, it is widely accepted that Al Qaeda and its fellow travellers are comfortable with the Bush administration, because its extremism and its studied defiance of reason feeds into their own dynamic.

For example, the terrorists have had a field day on the recruitment front ever since the gratuitous invasion of Iraq. They are, therefore, as keen as the average neoconservative to secure Bush's re-election.

However, should they have their way - as they supposedly did in Spain - don't expect any reprimands for the American electorate. The voters will simply have done their "patriotic duty", and its just too bad if it coincides with the terrorists' wishes.

But, notwithstanding all the analyses and commentaries, there's an element of risk involved in relying on the rampant terror strategy. After all, there has been a sizable backlash in the US against the policies and doctrines advanced by the Bush administration.

And not just from the left: plenty of conservatives have also been getting worked up about the White House's priorities. It is, therefore, not entirely beyond the realm of possibility that any more burning buildings in Manhattan would tend to unite the nation against Bush rather than behind him.

In the circumstances, it would be a safer bet for Bush to rely on a more obvious triumph. Iraq, at least in the short term, appears incapable of offering anything other than death and destruction.

But the capture of Osama bin Laden (if he's still alive) or one of his purported lieutenants would offer Bush a boost that John Kerry would find extremely hard to match.

That would presumably require the continued cooperation of General Pervez Musharraf, who has lately proved himself an exceptionally useful ally. The orange alert as well as the arrest in Britain of a dozen people suspected of terrorist involvement apparently sprang from the capture in Lahore and Gujrat of a couple of high-value Al Qaeda assets, as the jargon has it - Mohammed Naeem Noor Khan and Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani.

The latter was reportedly implicated in the deadly attacks on US embassies in East Africa in 1998, while the former is said to be a computer whiz whose task it apparently was to maintain contacts with fellow members of the terrorist network. It was he, apparently, who led investigators to the computers that supposedly contained all the surveillance details.

There has been some controversy over Noor Khan's identification, with some reports suggesting that the publication of his name jeopardized a sting operation in which he was collaborating with Pakistani intelligence, while others say his arrest may have been a mistake, as he was serving as an ISI mole within Al Qaeda.

These arrests are said to have followed from the capture in Karachi a couple of months ago of a man named by The Washington Post as Mussad Aruchi, described as a cousin of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and a cousin of Ramzi Yousef. All three operations are reportedly the fruit of joint US-Pakistani efforts.

The most intriguing recent captive in Britain, meanwhile, is a mysterious man whose commonest three aliases name-check two nations and two prophets, and who is purported to personally have conducted some of the surveillance of American financial institutions during trips to the US in 2000-01.

Named in the 9/11 commission's report as Abu Issa Al Britani, evidently on the basis of information gleaned from Khalid Sheikh, current reports refer to him as Abu Issa Al Hindi or Abu Musa Al Hindi.

The New York Times has cited claims by US intelligence officials that Al Hindi is the most significant catch in the war against terror since August 2003. Which suggests, apart from anything else, that they are disinclined to conflate that effort with the conflict in Iraq - a conflict that, as Paul Krugman commented in The New York Times last Friday, has steadily shifted off the front pages of the US press since the so-called handover of sovereignty, even though it continues to exact a grisly toll and the occupied nation's future remains as murky as ever.

The Bush administration's current priorities dictate a blurred view of Iraq (which signifies failure, although that will never be admitted) and a sharper focus on the apparent successes against Al Qaeda. Hence the new cycle in news management.

And here's another admission for which we shouldn't hold our breath: that apparent advances against police action are being achieved through police action rather than open warfare.

Why "apparent"? Because in fact we are in no position to pass judgment on the veracity of the information being released or leaked to the press. It may be largely true, but a fraction of the bigger snapshot. It may be a mixture of truth and fiction.

Or it may be mostly concocted, like many of the tales about Iraq. There's cause for particular concern over vague insinuations about a plot to disrupt the presidential election in November.

What could the terrorists possibly have in mind? An explosion of hanging chads? Or is something more insidious afoot, at the behest of those who masterminded the theft of the 2000 election?

Perhaps we'll find out in due course. Perhaps not. Be that as it may, let no one say that George Dubya persistently prevaricates. Because he disproved that impression just that a few days ago.

"Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we," the president pointed out at a ceremony where he signed a $817 billion defence bill. "They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we."

He couldn't get much more honest than that. Tellingly, no one in the audience of top military brass and Pentagon personnel smiled, smirked, coughed, blinked, applauded or sighed.

It was a purely Fahrenheit 9/11 moment, and it'll be surprising if Michael Moore doesn't incorporate it as a punch line in, say, the DVD version of his celebrated movie. More seriously, though, isn't it a pity that we have to rely upon Freudian slips for the occasional sliver of truth?

E-mail: mahirali2@netscape.net.

The truth about climate change

"We live," the cover story of the current Spectator tells us, "in the happiest, healthiest and most peaceful era in human history." And who in the rich world would dare to deny it? The aristocrats, the cardinals, Prince Charles, the National Front, perhaps: those, in other words, whose former social dominance has been usurped by the times.

The rest of us? Step forward the man or woman who would exchange modern medicine for the leech, sewerage for the gutter, the washing machine for the mangle, European Union for European wars, relative democracy for absolute monarchy. Not many takers, then.

But the party is over. In 2,000 words, the Spectator provides plenty of evidence to support its first contention: "Now is good." It provides none to support its second: "The future will be better." Ours are the most fortunate generations that have ever lived. They are also the most fortunate generations that ever will.

Let me lay before you three lines of evidence. The first is that we are living off the political capital accumulated by previous generations, and that this capital is almost spent.

The massive redistribution which raised the living standards of the working class after the New Deal and the Second World War is over. Inequality is rising almost everywhere, and the result is a global resource grab by the rich.

The entire landmass of Britain, Europe and the United States is being re-engineered to accommodate the upper middle classes. They are buying second and third homes where others have none.

Playing fields are being replaced with health clubs, public transport budgets with subsidies for roads and airports. Inequality of outcome, in other words, leads inexorably to inequality of opportunity.

The second line of evidence is that our economic gains are being offset by social losses. A recent study by the New Economics Foundation suggests that the costs of crime have risen by 13 times in the past 50 years, and the costs of family breakdown fourfold.

The money we spend on such disasters is included in the official measure of human happiness: gross domestic product. Extract these costs and you discover, the study says, that our quality of life peaked in 1976.

But neither of these problems compares to the third one: the threat of climate change. In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us. Three wholly unexpected sets of findings now suggest that the problem could be much graver than anyone had imagined.

Work by the Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen suggests that the screening effect produced by particles of soot and smoke in the atmosphere is stronger than climatologists thought; one variety of man-made filth, in other words, has been protecting us from the effects of another. As ancient smokestacks are closed down or replaced with cleaner technology, climate change, paradoxically, will intensify.

At the same time, rising levels of carbon dioxide appear to be breaking down the world's peat bogs. Research by Chris Freeman at the University of Bangor shows that the gas stimulates bacteria which dissolve the peat.

Peat bogs are more or less solid carbon. When they go into solution the carbon turns into carbon dioxide, which in turn dissolves more peat. The bogs of Europe, Siberia and North America, New Scientist reports, contain the equivalent of 70 years of global industrial carbon emissions.

Worse still are the possible effects of changes in cloud cover. Until recently, climatologists assumed that, because higher temperatures would raise the rate of evaporation, more clouds would form.

By blocking some of the heat from the sun, they would reduce the rate of global warming. But now it seems that higher temperatures may instead burn off the clouds. Research by Bruce Wielicki of Nasa suggests that some parts of the tropics are already less cloudy than they were in the 1980s.

The result of all this is that the maximum temperature rise proposed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2001 may be a grave underestimate. Rather than a possible 5.8 degrees of warming this century, we could be looking at a maximum of 10 or 12. Goodbye, kind world.

Like every impending disaster (think of the rise of Hitler or the fall of Rome), this one has generated a voluble industry of denial. Few people are now foolish enough to claim that man-made climate change isn't happening at all, but the few are still granted plenty of scope to make idiots of themselves in public. Last month they were joined by the former environmentalist David Bellamy.

Writing in the Daily Mail, Mr Bellamy asserted that "the link between the burning of fossil fuels and global warming is a myth". Like almost all the climate change deniers, he based his claim on a petition produced in 1998 by the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine and "signed by over 18,000 scientists".

Had he studied the signatories, he would have discovered that the "scientists" included Ginger Spice and the cast of MASH. The Oregon Institute is run by a fundamentalist Christian called Arthur Robinson.

Its petition was attached to what purported to be a scientific paper, printed in the font and format of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In fact, the paper had not been peer-reviewed or published in any scientific journal.

Anyone could sign the petition, and anyone did: only a handful of the signatories are experts in climatology, and quite a few of them appear to have believed that they were signing a genuine paper. And yet, six years later, this petition is still being wheeled out to suggest that climatologists say global warming isn't happening.

But most of those who urge inaction have given up denying the science, and now seek instead to suggest that climate change is taking place, but it's no big deal. Their champion is the Danish statistician Bjorn Lomborg.

Writing in The Times in May, Lomborg claimed to have calculated that global warming will cause $5 trillion of damage, and would cost $4 trillion to ameliorate. The money, he insisted, would be better spent elsewhere.

The idea that we can attach a single, meaningful figure to the costs incurred by global warming is laughable. Climate change is a non-linear process, whose likely impacts cannot be totted up like the expenses for a works outing to the seaside.

Even those outcomes we can predict are impossible to cost. We now know, for example, that the Himalayan glaciers which feed the Ganges, the Brahmaputra, the Mekong, the Yangtze and the other great Asian rivers are likely to disappear within 40 years.

If these rivers dry up during the irrigation season, then the rice production which currently feeds over one third of humanity collapses, and the world goes into net food deficit.

If Lomborg believes he can put a price on that, he has plainly spent too much of his life with his calculator and not enough with human beings. But people listen to this nonsense because the alternative is to accept what no one wants to believe. We live in the happiest, healthiest and most peaceful era in human history. And it will not last long. -Dawn/Guardian News Service