Valery Dunaevsky | Where are you, Miguel Cervantes?

Опубликовано: 23.06.2020

Cervantes’ the immortal novel, “Don Quixote”, uniquely fits our times. If the original Don Quixote became delusional by reading chivalric romances and then set out to fight windmills, mistaking them for wicked giants, the Don Quixotes of our time, spurred by the climate alarmist mantra about the anthropogenic catastrophic global warming, find themselves enmeshed again with windmills, considering them, however (progress, progress!), good giants that, voila, pull energy straight from the thin air. – With such a feat who would dare to accuse them of killing in the process thousands of the poor birds annually by the propellers. These neo–Don Quixotes, the author’s euphemism for the advocates of the Green New Deal, march to eliminate the invisible but allegedly the most deadly enemy of all: the despised gas CO2, which is putatively responsible for the climate change.

Photo copyright: Tim Adams. CC BY 2.0

To solidify their grip on power, regimes or aspiring parties have often strived to find an internal enemy (for the Bolsheviks, the wealthy; for the Nazis, the Jews; for the Khmer Rouge, the educated) to rally the populace against. Yet what an ingenious and PC invention is an invisible and colorless enemy! It is certainly a more elegant and appealing adversary than the pollution and improperly disposed hazardous waste of a different kind, which often carries an immediate risk to a human health. Reportedly, a large increase in the rate of the abnormalities in the newborns has been observed in Russia, and it was connected with improper storage and dispose of the chemical and radioactive waste. However, rephrasing a poet Yevtushenko,

Who cares about Hamlet or Hiroshima?
Don’t pull over my eyes the wool.
Suffering is not cool.

Meanwhile, even if the climate alarmists are right to be alarmed, one does not need to focus exclusively on prevention of the climate change phenomenon to occur (as it happens overwhelmingly) while neglecting the activities for protection against its alleged ravages, especially when protection is long due.

By all accounts, fighting the carbon dioxide for prevention/slowing down of the climate change appears to be a lofty goal, of which attainment, however, may take years even if the entire world will switch overnight from the fossil fuel to the electric power. However, even if we achieve the zero carbon growth, without somehow destroying on the way the word economy, we still will not escape the dependence on the larger culprits responsible for the perennial climate change. One of these is the so-called Milankovitch cycles. [Milankovitch’s calculations and charts, which were published in the 1920s and are still used today to understand past and future climate, led him to conclude that there are three different positional cycles, each with its own cycle length, that influence the climate on Earth: the eccentricity of Earth’s orbit, the planet’s axial tilt and the wobble of its axis. Currently the southern hemisphere is at such a portion of the cycle, so they are enjoying warmer summers, but cooler winters, which likely contributes to snowfall in the hemisphere.]

Thereafter, why in all the brouhaha of the climate change the issue of the protection from its effects is not given a higher priority? Would not it be more prасtical first to attend to the infrastructure weakness, otherwise any attempts to tackle climate change will be fruitless, considering, particularly, that many of these weaknesses are only tangentially climate dependent? A few examples of the relevant deficiencies in the infrastructure are provided below. Our infrastructure is crumbling because of age and the initial poor designs with low margins of safety. In 2003, a single fallen tree knocked out the electrical power for almost the entire Northeastern U.S. and parts of Canada for days. The bridge in Minneapolis that tumbled down in 2007 was designed in the 1950s with a durability goal that surely did not anticipate the substantially heavier traffic of the 21st century. The levees (if there are any, and many are just simple earth dams often built decades ago) are eroding over time thus failing to check the occurrence of floods over the Midwest plains during even moderate rainfall. In turn, Houston’s flood control efforts that have been badly managed and the human follies in zoning and planning of the city were major reasons that rendered the deluge of 2017 disastrous.

In the light of the above, and of other critical literature on the subject of the climate change, Miguel Cervantes of our day is wanted to lampoon the contemporary chivalry-imprасticality of the climate change preventionism-actions not moored by the slightest attempts to improve resilience of the world we know to the whims of Mother Nature.

Valery Dunaevsky, Ph.D., is also the author of the biographical-historical memoir A Daughter of the “Enemy of the People” about life in the USSR in the mid-20th century.