Doomsday scenario?
Pitifully, it quite often happens that news events that are of considerable import to many get overlooked, not only by the public at large, but also by professionals working within the media. One such event was a report that appeared recently in The New York Times.
The report said, "more than 60 influential scientists, including Nobel laureates, have issued a statement asserting that the Bush administration has systematically distorted scientific fact in the service of policy goals on the environment, health, biomedical research and nuclear weapons, at home and abroad".
The operative word here is "systematically". For example, according to the report, the Bush administration has been guilty of the intentional misrepresentation of scientific consensus on global warming and the manipulation of scientific findings on the emissions of mercury from power plants, not to mention censoring and suppressing reports by its own scientists, filling advisory committees with unqualified political appointees, disbanding government panels that provide unwanted advice and refusing to seek independent scientific expertise in some cases. The report also accuses the Bush administration of allowing business interests with conflicts of interest to influence technical advisory committees and of subjecting prospective members of scientific panels to political litmus tests. "Other administrations have, on occasion, engaged in such practices, but not so systematically and not on so wide a front," the document says.
In all fairness, it must be said that such practices are not uncommon in many countries, apart from in the United States. Since the beginning of history, the bending or suppression of fact -- scientific or otherwise -- to fit the political objectives of those in power was accepted as a matter of course. More recently, it was common practice in totalitarian countries such as Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Under the New Order in our own country, much relevant information was withheld from the public for the sole purpose of perpetuating the rule of president Soeharto.
The very idea, however, that such things are occurring at present in the U.S. makes one shudder. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the U.S. stands unrivaled as the world's sole superpower. Surely, President George W. Bush must realize that power brings responsibility. The U.S. has obligations to fulfill, not only to the country and its own people, but to all mankind and the world.
That world at present is beset by a host of seemingly interlocking problems, ranging from hunger and disease to terror and warfare. Another U.S. paper, for example, reportedly ordered by an influential Pentagon advisor but covered up for four months by top U.S. defense officials, warns that sudden climatic changes could bring the world to the brink of anarchy as countries develop nuclear capabilities to secure and defend dwindling food, water and energy supplies. The report, which was published by the British news weekly The Observer, warned, "once again, warfare (will) define human life as disruption and conflict become endemic features of life".
The authors of the report -- Peter Schwartz, a U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) consultant, and Doug Randall, of Global Business Network, California -- warn that the issue of climate change should be elevated immediately beyond a scientific debate to that of a U.S. national security concern. Among the cataclysmic effects of such climate change for the world, according to the report, would be Siberian winters in Britain, violent storms in the Netherlands by 2007, breaches in the aqueduct system in California that supplies water to densely populated areas in Southern California, waves of migrants seeking entry into Europe and the U.S., and more disasters of similar magnitude.
Needless to say, for Indonesia, the world's largest archipelagic state with more than 17,000 islands, large and small, a rise in ocean levels due to global warming could have a devastating effect. Many of the smaller islands would simply be inundated by the sea. Coastal populations would be driven further inland, with predictable consequences for food and water supplies, population density and disease control.
Before the optimists among us shrug all this off as mere scaremongering, let them remember that, even in much milder form, the calamities that the scientists foresee cannot but affect even the most prosperous countries in the world. The world's nations today are too interlinked for even the richest among them, such as the U.S., Germany or Japan, to isolate themselves from the effects of a global catastrophe of an order foreseen for the poorer regions of this planet.