By Paul Homewood
David Attenborough has made the astonishing statement that his generation has done terrible things, and that he couldn’t bear to think of the world he was leaving to his grandchildren because ‘the signs aren’t good’:
Sir David Attenborough has showed his support for students striking over climate change and called their outrage ‘certainly justified’.
The broadcaster and natural historian branded critics of the school strikes cynics in a podcast interview with former UN climate chief Christiana Figueres.
During the podcast, called Outrage and Optimism, he told Ms Figueres: ‘Young people understand the simple discoveries of science about our dependence upon the natural world.
‘My generation is no great example for understanding – we have done terrible things.’
This of course echoes what the likes of Extinction Rebellion and Greta Thunberg have been arguing, that we have destroyed their future.
But has his generation, or indeed more recent ones, done anything to be ashamed of. In particular, are they leaving the world in a worse place than it was when they entered it?
Attenborough is now 92, so let’s just consider what the world was like when he was born.
In the UK and other industrialised countries, grinding poverty was widespread and endemic in the 1920s. Most children were undernourished and poorly clothed. Indeed, far from malnourishment, the biggest health problem for kids today is obesity.
Unsurprisingly, childhood diseases such as TB, diphtheria and polio along with rickets were rampant.
Thanks to improving living conditions, child mortality now is a tiny fraction of what it used to be then:
https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality
In those days, most homes had coal fires and outdoor loos, not warm bathrooms and central heating. Children, who now expect to be taken abroad for holidays, were lucky to get a week in Blackpool back then.
And when they grew up, they had little to look forward to. Just a life of back breakingly hard work down the mines or in factories. That was, of course, if they were lucky enough to have a job, for those were the days of mass unemployment.
If all of that was not enough, people in those days had to go off to fight a war, or stay at home and live through the blitz.
As a result of economic development since then, people can expect to live much longer than their forefathers, but importantly also enjoy a much higher quality of life.
https://ourworldindata.org/search?q=life+expectancy
The young Attenborough may not have been familiar with this grinding poverty, as he seems to have had quite a gilded upbringing. His father was principal at University College, Leicester, and he grew up there on campus.
After graduating at Clare College, Cambridge, Attenborough quickly moved into senior management positions at the BBC, becoming controller of BBC2 in 1965.
He was reportedly one of the BBC’s top earners in 2015, declaring income of £1.13 million, and his net worth is estimated at £24 million.
In short, I doubt whether he ever has had any idea of the day to day stresses and pressures that ordinary people have to cope with.
Environment
But what about the environment that Attenborough professes to be so concerned about?
Air pollution, contrary to what we are told, is probably at its lowest level for centuries. Certainly, the air in our cities is much cleaner than the days when coal fires, road and rail transport and dirty factories were responsible for real pollution which literally killed thousands every year.
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/emissions-of-air-pollutants
Our rivers, countryside and towns are also much cleaner than probably any time since the industrial revolution began. We now make a fuss about plastic pollution, even though this is really down to individuals not disposing of things properly.
But those who complain about plastic would have apoplexy if they went back in time and saw what real pollution looks like.
The developing world
Maybe this is all very self centred, and our improved standard of living has come at the expense of the third world.
But the facts tell a different story. Throughout the developing world, we see the same rise in wealth and living standards as we do in the west.
Just as here, child mortality has fallen in leaps and bounds, while global life expectancy has more than doubled since 1900.
https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality
And thanks to our modern, fossil fuel powered economy, global food production has nearly quadrupled since the 1960s:
Many in the third world now have mobile phones and access to technology their ancestors could not have dreamed of.
OK, we know that Attenborough is worried about the rapid population rise in much of the developing world, but just what has his or my generation have to do with that? (Unless, of course, you believe that providing health services, education and financial aid to poor countries is a “terrible thing to do”!)
Natural disasters
Attenborough has claimed that our weather is getting more extreme, but the evidence shows this simply is not true.
But, much more importantly, economic growth has meant that societies are now much more resilient to natural disasters.
In China, for instance it was quite common for hundreds of thousands to die in floods. The Yangtze floods in 1931, for example, are estimated to have killed as many as 4 million.
Millions more regularly died around the world as a result of drought. In 1769 in India, a great famine which was the result of drought took over ten million people’s lives, a third of the population at the time. The 1876-79 drought in China probably killed even more people, and is regarded as the deadliest drought in history.
Fatalities of this scale would simply be unimaginable now.
Yet some would appear to want us to return to those days.
The Swedish schoolgirl, Greta Thunberg, tells us that the UK has a “mind-blowing historical carbon debt”, because we dared to start the industrial revolution.
Well, I’m sorry Greta, but I have no desire to go back to those pre-industrial days, and I doubt many would. It is a pity that Michael Gove and his colleagues, who were granted an audience with her last week, did not pluck up the courage to tell her a few home truths.
Insult
But back to David Attenborough, and his claim that his generation have done terrible things.
I don’t only find this absurd, but grossly insulting to both his generation and the ones which followed.
I am certainly fully aware of, and grateful for, the hard work and sacrifices made by my parents and the rest of their generation, which enabled me to grow up in a much better world than they did.
Is the world now perfect? Obviously not. But youngsters nowadays should be thankful that they are living now, and not a century ago.
via NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
April 29, 2019 at 08:49AM
Iowa Climate Science Education 