High In The Sky

Might malaria make a return to Mallorca? There used to be malarial mosquitoes. Workers engaged in cultivation of and by Albufera in the later nineteenth century were not immune from it. In current-day Mallorca, victims of malaria have contracted it in countries where it remains a reality. The disease was all but eradicated in European countries where it had been indigenous by the 1960s. Nevertheless, it is still the single greatest health threat that humans have to contend with, and climate change might lead to its return in parts of the world where it was thought they had seen the back of it - and that includes Mallorca.

This possibility has been raised by a professor at IMEDEA (Mediterranean Institute for Advanced Studies). Interviewed in "The Diario", Carlos Duarte hypotheses that intense rains, the consequence of climate change, could see plagues of mosquitoes, a return of malaria or the creation of new diseases. Part of the background to this is that the storms in September did indeed bring a "plague" around Palma, and special dispensation for spraying had to be obtained in order to contend with the number of mosquitoes.

Duarte has much to say about the impact of climate change. Apart from mosquitoes, he comments on the effects on tourism of rising temperatures. He doesn't envisage tourists deserting Mallorca but preferring to holiday in the spring and autumn when the temperatures would be benign but higher than at present.

Interesting stuff, but nothing particularly new. It's a while since I did anything on climate change, but there was a period when it was a regular feature on the blog. The tourism impact was just one aspect. The effect of rising sea levels another. Some of the forecasts for both temperature and sea-level rises have been truly scary, but coincidental with what Duarte says comes a book that may go a long way to disputing much of the thinking behind climate change. In an extract from "Superfreakonomics" in the last "Sunday Times", Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner reported on the work of some extraordinary men from Intellectual Ventures (IV) in Seattle. And they are extraordinary - a close associate of Bill Gates (an investor in IV), an astrophysicist and a climate scientist who has challenged his own assumptions about climate change, ones that had led him to share a Nobel prize with Al Gore, but which now contradict much of the Gore-ist propaganda.

The nub of what these extraordinary men have been working on is that, while accepting the Earth's warming, they dispute many of the crude models upon which predictions have been based and also one of the central tenets of the climate change debate - the role of carbon. Their argument is that carbon dioxide is not, in itself, a bad thing, just that it is increasing too fast. There are numerous sacred cows that the article tackles, but the "big thing" that they have hit upon is to take the experience of a volcanic explosion in 1991 in the Philippines to conclude that small increases of sulphur dioxide, artificially pumped into the stratosphere, would be sufficient to cool the planet. Moreover, they propose how to do it, at very low cost. It would entail a system of very long, very thin hosepipes. It may sound bizarre, but the argument is compelling.

And there is one particular other thing they believe - and that is that the threat of sea levels rising has been blown out of proportion. The most authoritative estimate would have these levels, by the start of the next century, being no greater than many normal tidal variations that occur every day. The people of the Mallorcan coasts can rest easy in their beds.

The IV scientists have proposed something disarmingly simple and cheap. And cheapness can often be best, as it was with DDT to eliminate malaria before the mosquitoes started to fight back. It may be necessary that insecticides have to be used again in Mallorca - on a far more widespread basis than the special spraying last month - but were they to be it would not be costly. But even less costly, in the total scheme of things, would be the hosepipes in the sky. Extraordinary men and extraordinary thinking.

* I would give you a link to the article, but I'm damned if I can find it. Maybe not included on "The Times" site as it is a book extract and therefore copyrighted. Sorry about that. The book, published by Allen Lane, is released in the UK on 20 October. Its full title is "Superfreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance".


QUIZ
Today's title - line from something, the title of which is the first word above; the group used to have its name changed by Steve Wright - weight was the substitute word.

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