All of which is fine, if you like that sort of thing and agree with everything that preacher Sachs is telling you. If you harbour doubts, the moral certainty of his tone and his robust style of statement will irritate you. The trouble with Sachs is that the world is a complicated and messy place, and few things are as black and white as he paints them. He overstates in order to press his points home and adds spin to prevent the other side having a chance. This may go down well with the politicos and do-gooders who belong to the non-governmental organisations (such as the International Campaign to Ban Landmines) which are praised in Common Wealth as ‘sinews of global society’. But for economists with long experience in the development field Sachs has become tiresome. He would be more persuasive if he were more cautious and even-handed.
Take, for example, chapter four on climate change. This is a huge and controversial subject, to which Sachs devotes the grand total of 15 pages of analysis before presenting six prescriptions all starting ‘we must…’. Now check the accuracy of the chapter’s first three sentences (yes, just the first three sentences) on page 83. The climate is said to have recently ‘been buffeted by extremes’, with 11 of the 12 hottest years on record during 1995 to 2006, while the frequency of droughts has ‘risen significantly around the world’ and ‘the same is true of extreme hurricanes like Katrina’.
As regards the temperature, Sachs’ reliability turns on what is meant by the phrase ‘on record’. Is the matter clarified on page 91 where ‘the climate record’ is said to date back ‘hundreds of thousands of years’? If so, the statement on page 83 is plain wrong. Palaeoclimate research has shown that the earth was warmer than today, by perhaps 1oc to 2oc on average (but by very much more inside the Arctic circle), at the so-called ‘Holocene climatic optimum’, roughly 5,000 to 9,000 years ago. As for Katrina, it was a category 3 hurricane. This may have been ghastly for the citizens of New Orleans, but it was not in fact particularly intense by previous standards. The 20th century saw dozens of category 4 hurricanes and a large number of category 5 hurricanes in the Caribbean, and several of them made landfall in the USA.
Comments
There are currently no comments for this article.