Letting Global Warming Happen

Summer Block’s blog is my primary source of information about China. Here is an article she wrote about the environmental activism in China. I have to be honest; when I read an article like this, part of me wish that these catastrophic things actually happen. I live in the East Village, New York, and some people predict that my neighborhood would be under water. Well, I would like to see that; seriously. I’m not being cynical. Even if it happens, it won’t happen over night. I would have plenty of time to relocate. I like New York, but I’m not attached to it. It would force me to live a different life and it might actually be a good thing.

The problem with preventing these catastrophic events is that we will never learn whether it would have happened or not. It’s like the Y2K frenzy. If those Y2K people didn’t make a big deal out of it, perhaps what they predicted would have actually happened. It was basically a matter of patching enough bugs, and apparently we did. I’m pretty sure if we didn’t do anything at all, it would have been disastrous. Since most of us had very little knowledge of what Y2K was actually about, we would’ve had to turn to those Y2K people for help in dealing with the disastrous situation. They would have been treated as heroes (and make tons of money to boot.). Instead, they were mocked and ridiculed because nothing happened.

It’s quite possible that if nothing happens with global warming, the people like Al Gore would be seen as a hysteric in retrospect, and George W. Bush as a voice of reason. I think those who work in the IT department of big corporations know this well. They have to constantly warn their management about a variety of disastrous things that could happen if they do not do this or that. If you are a good IT manager, you would manage to prevent them all, but then you would be seen as an overly paranoid person, shouting “Fire!” with every little sign. Interestingly enough, when something disastrous does happen, most people do not blame the IT people. It’s usually because they don’t understand the mechanism enough to gauge whether it could have been prevented or not. In short, they don’t understand enough to place the blame squarely on someone. They even become respectful and sympathetic. It’s pretty ironic. In other words, the IT people are often better off letting the disaster happen.

George W. Bush was largely praised for his handling of 9-11. Not many people asked whether it should have been prevented. Most of us are very quick to forgive failure to prevent, because we accept that the future is ultimately unpredictable. With Hurricane Katrina, much of the criticism was about the insufficient response to the aftermath, not the failure to prevent the disaster. I’m sure there were people equivalent to Al Gore who were warning the government about the weakness of the levee. Are they heroes? No, the heroes are those who dealt with the aftermath, like the rescue workers, not the people who tried to prevent the disaster.

How about those few people who actually said that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction before we went to war? Somehow these people are seen as almost freaks or smart-asses, when in fact they should be given the Nobel prize.

That’s how it is also with the police in the US. We treat them like heroes for fighting criminals, but we could argue that if they were really good at what they do, crimes shouldn’t happen in the first place. This is the way many Japanese people see the police. If a crime happens, the police are not doing their jobs. In the US, we take crimes for granted. The police are not in charge of preventing crimes; they are in charge of bringing the criminals to justice. But ironically, I believe the American policemen are appreciated by the public more than the Japanese policemen are. The conclusion: It does not pay to be in the business of prevention. You are better off dealing with the aftermath. By the time a disaster strikes, all of your efforts to prevent it will be forgotten, and new heroes will emerge.