MICHAEL SMITH, emeritus consultant physician to Royal Surrey County Hospital, Guildford, qualified in medicine in Newcastle in 1957 and held junior posts in professorial departments of paediatrics and medicine and a year with Dr Henry Miller in neurology. After two years of national service with the RAMC, he returned to Newcastle as registrar and then was appointed as research registrar at the Royal Postgraduate School of Medicine. Smith spent a year as research fellow at the University of California, Los Angeles, developing an interest in diabetes, endocrinology and metabolic medicine. He was appointed consultant physician in Guildford. Undergraduate and later postgraduate tutor and regional adviser in postgraduate education. Honorary senior lecturer in biochemistry, University of Surrey.
ANDREW TAYLOR is a consultant clinical scientist in the Clinical Biochemistry Department at the Royal Surrey County Hospital in Guildford and an honorary reader at the Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences of the University of Surrey. He is the director of the Supra-Regional Assay Service Trace Elements Centre at Guildford and has more than 30 years’ experience with the clinical biochemistry and measurement of trace elements in biological and environmental samples. Taylor’s research interests have involved the clinical biochemistry of mercury, gold, aluminium and lead, and current work includes the release of metals from prosthetic implants. Improvements in measurement techniques have been another interest and he established a proficiency testing scheme to monitor performance of analytical laboratories. This now involves collaboration with the organisers of similar schemes in other countries to ensure international consistency of results.
AUSTIN WILLIAMS is an architect and project manager. He is the Director of the Future Cities Project; past editor of the Architect’s Journal. He is the author of Towards a New Humanism in Architecture and more recently of Enemies of Progress, a book on the effects of sustainability. He is the producer and chair of the Bookshop Barnies and a contributor to the Battle of Ideas.
PAUL WITHRINGTON is the director of Transport Watch. He has an honours degree in civil engineering from Bristol University and a masters degree in transport planning, having graduated in 1967. He is a member of the Institution of Civil Engineers (a chartered engineer). As a transport planner he first worked for the Greater London Council (1967 to 1970). At that time four ring roads of motorway proportions were planned for the capital. It was in that organisation that he had contact with the Railway Conversion League. Subsequently, he lectured at Portsmouth Polytechnic, had experience with a small PTRC, a firm that specialised in providing a range of courses for local and central government and in 1975 he joined Northamptonshire County Council, where he worked for 20 years as the project manager of Transport Planning Department. He retired in 1994 to work as the director of Transport Watch.
THE DOOMSDAY VIEW OF THE WORLD
THE IDEA THAT MAN is born into sin is as old as the story of Adam and Eve. It spawns the doomsday cults and the belief that only through repentance and self-denial can man aspire to redemption and save the world. It is manifest in the abstinence of Lent, the fasting of Yom Kippur and Ramadan and the various New Age groups that deny themselves material pleasures and seek solace and forgiveness by adopting a primitive lifestyle that they claim is compatible with nature. This has given rise to the ‘back-to-nature cults’ that predict that man’s tampering with nature will lead to the end of the world as we know it. In the early days it spawned the Luddite movement and opposition to mechanisation of transport and the telephone. Today it sees industrialisation, modern farming methods, genetically modified crops, scientific medicine, nuclear power and the internal-combustion engine as heralding the end of civilisation.
Fortunately, all the end-of-the-world cults have been proved wrong, but, undeterred by this abysmal record, they continue to echo a deep-seated, inherent fear that, unless man repents and changes his way of life, he will be instrumental in destroying his world.
The aesthete, the hermit and the back-to-nature movement all reflect this mindset. Today, politicians and persuasive pressure groups play on this same basic fear. They scare us with tales of an inevitable catastrophic effect of global warming, which they blame on the carbon dioxide (CO2) we produce; they play on a fear that an epidemic of obesity, caused by overeating, will kill our children before they reach a mature age; they claim that our indulgent lifestyle is consuming Earth’s precious resources, that pesticides will kill off life in our oceans, that chemicals in food will poison us all and that invisible rays from nuclear power stations, overhead electric cables or mobile phones will kill us with cancer. They are today’s prophets of doom using modern media methods to disseminate fear so as to propagate their belief that the end of the world is nigh. This book examines the evidence for and against some of their apocalyptical predictions.
The philosophies of one age have become the absurdities of the next, and the foolishness of yesterday becomes the wisdom of tomorrow.
—Sir William Osler, Aequanimitas and other addresses
SEVERAL YEARS AGO we were told that all the computer systems would fail at the turn of the millennium. Millions of pounds were spent on the so-called ‘millennium bug’. It proved to be nonsense.
The panic caused by public concern over the toxicity of DDT and the prediction it would lead to a sterile sea and famine on Earth caused its use to be suspended. As a result, millions have died of malaria and insect-borne diseases.
The health authorities told us that we should avoid cholesterol, or else our arteries would clog up and we would die young from heart disease. Eat only one egg a week, drink only skimmed milk and consume no cream or butter. Millions of pounds were spent on low-cholesterol diets. We now know it is a waste of time: it is not the cholesterol one eats that causes heart disease.
We are told our children are getting so fat that they will die younger than their parents. It is nonsense. We are being scared stiff.
Following two relatively dry years in 2004–05, we were told by government officials that, because of global warming, we should get used to droughts and obtaining our water from standpipes in the streets, that we should rip out our flowering shrubs and replant with drought-loving plants. So successful was this propaganda that the Chelsea Flower Show in 2007 featured grasses and succulents. It was followed by a series of the wettest summers on record, with sodden gardens and floods.
Today our children’s school meals are subject to the ‘food police’, who inspect their sandwiches, control their lunches and lecture them on their parents’ bad eating habits and the dangers of junk food. They ban fizzy drinks and stop the children using salt. They are taken on ‘school trips’ to the depots to be indoctrinated on the virtues of recycling, shown propaganda films to scare them stiff about the dangers of global warming and told they must walk to school and stop their parents using the car and destroying the Earth. They are not allowed to expose themselves when the sun shines in case they get melanoma, they must avoid foods that contain chemicals and weigh themselves regularly to make sure they are not part of the obesity epidemic that will kill them before they reach maturity.
With such a busy schedule, lessons on reading and arithmetic take second place in the curriculum. This might possibly be justified if the message they are being given was likely to improve their wellbeing and prevent future disease. The trouble is that there is increasing evidence that it is, like the ‘millennium bug’, a belief that is in part or entirely untrue. Often it is based on numbers picked out of the
