The G20, human health and sustainability: an interview with Jeffrey D Sachs

To the Editor: I am both amazed and disappointed that the Journal would assault the goodwill and common sense of its readership by publishing uncritical barracking for the unproven thesis of human-induced climate change,1,2 at a time when we expect evidence-based medical practice as a maxim.

To suggest that there is any consensus on climate science is an untruth that disenfranchises the many genuine physicists, geophysical scientists, climate engineers and astrophysicists who refute the anthropogenic proposition (consensus is not a scientific discipline). Neither Jeffrey D Sachs1 nor the eminent signatories petitioning the Prime Minister2 are entitled to any more scientific credibility than Joe Blow in urging massive changes to our economy and society on the basis of an unproven precautionary principle. One would hope that their climate prognostications are more accurate than those of Tim Flannery, who stated that we would never see worthwhile rain again (http://www.abc.net.au/landline/content/2006/s1844398.htm), before Australia-wide flooding left a several billion dollar legacy of rusting desalination plants. We need not mention pink batts and their resultant death and destruction.

For someone who expresses concern for the impoverished, Sachs makes no mention of the opportunity cost of misguided low-CO2 emission (not carbon) policies that have wasted billions of dollars which could have been used more productively in health, infrastructure, education and aid. Direct investment in dams, levees, vaccine development, improved agriculture and technology to reduce genuine pollution (not CO2 levels) are more effective than chasing the CO2 phantom. Alarmists do not acknowledge the enormous contribution that cheap energy has made to lifting billions of people throughout the world out of poverty and pestilence. The resultant development of a middle class in China, India and elsewhere will lead to a better environment both socially and physically. Interestingly, the alarmists are the same people who vehemently reject large-scale replacement of fossil fuel sources with advanced nuclear power plants or dam building for hydroelectric power. A combination of green evangelism and condescending paternalism seeks to rob the poor of developing countries of equal opportunity in power generation. While Sachs despairs of continuing poverty in Africa because of climate change, many would argue that endemic corruption is a greater threat to African nations.

Sachs's trajectory for global warming of 4–6ºC by the end of the century flies in the face of the absence of global warming over the past 17 years, acknowledged by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and the recent controversy over the homogenising of the Australian temperature record by the Bureau of Meteorology to convert a slight cooling trend to a warming trend (http://jennifermarohasy.com).

Sachs has spent too long at the United Nations. His reference to the immorality of greed and power is misguided, and code for the massive economic redistribution that socialism failed to achieve but seeks to realise through the deep-green (and red) politics embedded in the UN. Sachs's gratuitous demonising of a major public figure such as Rupert Murdoch is unworthy of a true professional.

A social conscience is no excuse for outsourcing opinion to the socialist left and green movements. Most readers of the Journal would prefer to see debate rather than pronouncements. I hope that the Journal wakes up to itself before it is too late.