Last Wednesday in Rome, the World Health Organisation and the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation jointly launched an independent expert report on diet, which stated, among other things, that free (that is, added) sugar should not exceed ten per cent of the calories in normal daily food intake. The US-based Sugar Association has gone into overdrive to discredit the report, demanding that US Health Secretary Tommy Thompson use his influence to get the WHO-FAO report withdrawn, and 'sugar caucus' Congress-men are threatening to cut off the annual contribution of $406 million that the United States pays to the WHO if it doesn't back down.
You have to admire the cheek of industry representatives who can maintain with a straight face that it's perfectly all right for 25 per cent of the average person's calories to come in the form of free sugar, even as they have watched an alarming proportion of the US population turn into blubbery, lumbering Michelin-tyre men and women over the last generation. But then, if the pay was right they'd probably be willing to argue that 25 per cent ground glass in the diet was all right.
Jamaica Gleaner April 28, 2003Two weeks ago, for example, the Bush White House censored a government report issued by the Environmental Protection Agency that analysed global warming and its sources. It eliminated any suggestion that human activities, notably industrial and vehicle emissions, were at least partly responsible for climate change. It removed references to a widely accepted 1999 study showing how sharply temperatures had risen in the previous decade compared with the 1 000-year pattern, and substituted a controversial later study, partly financed by the oil industry, that disputes the evidence. The green lobby complained, and the media covered the story in a desultory way, but everyone continued to behave as though there was lots of time.
The problem is that "global warming" was the first aspect of climate change to catch the public's attention, and for the vast majority of people it remains the only threat - if indeed it is a threat. After all, warmer isn't necessarily worse, and anyway it's a gradual process and we'll all probably be safely dead before it gets too serious. Climate researchers have known that this is untrue for about 20 years, since the evidence of the Greenland ice-cores became available, but it has still not affected the public debate.
Those cores go down three kilometres into the Greenland ice-cap and bring up year-by-year evidence of weather that goes back a quarter-million years. What the shocked researchers realised when they examined the cores is that climate change - real climate change - is not gradual at all.
It's a threshold phenomenon, a sudden flip into a radically different state that may then persist for a very long time. The real danger we face is that gradual warming of the sort we are experiencing now will trigger a sudden cooling that could drop average global temperatures by 5'C in 10 years.
Natal Witness (SA) 7 July 2003Viridian reprint of same article with Papal Insertions
