Doomsday is nigh

“I always want to sit on the fence
—I’m not stoopid, just kinda dense —
Yesterday is the very past tense
I wish I had more money than sense.”
From Bachchoo the Bimbo,
an opera

To Bee or not to Bee. Sorry! I’ll start again. Perhaps it ought to be Bees or not to Bees. I get my quotations from Hamlet constantly muddled but I do remember that “there’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow” which, as Miss Katy Shroff explained to us in our Pre-Degree Science English lectures in Pune, means that God knows about the movement and death of everything and intends it to be so. But I started with bees and not sparrows because I now hear from the alarmists of the liberal newspapers that providence has decreed that the bees of the world are dying out.

If one believes Shakespeare, or the character who speaks those lines, or even Ms Shroff’s particular interpretation, one would conclude that God intends the bees to be wiped off the face of this earth. Dead as Dodos.

But before you shed a tear for the extinction of the buzzies consider the simple truth that 95 per cent of all the species that ever existed on earth are now extinct. The Darwinian process is ruthless and whether or not God intervenes, evolution lays down the law. And the natural law is not kind, but as our own Rudyard noted, red in tooth and claw.

I grew up with a certainly rational fear of bees. At the end of our road in Pune cantonment was a compound with a red brick synagogue brooding in it. The synagogue had long sad windows and a tower with square hollows through which the wind blew and which I always avoided looking at when dusk was falling, lest I see the ghosts that inhabited it. Far more dangerous and certainly more evident than these ghosts were the huge bee-hives that would develop and grow in a particular season under the eaves of the laal deval as the synagogue was locally known. The hives would grow to gigantic proportions. I had seen hives elsewhere, but the synagogue ones were special as at that great height they developed rapidly and unmolested.

This unmolestation wasn’t, alas, reciprocated. Children would be taken by their ayahs to play in the laal deval compound and the younger brother of a friend of mine, when only an infant, was surrounded by a swooping swarm of bees who stung him and caused him to faint. His life had been saved by the action of the ayah and the availability of medical help, but he remained a simple lad and it was always said that the stings had affected the speed of his thought processes. Dumbed-down by bee-sting.

I used to see him very many days of the week, inarticulate, blowing bubbles with his spit, always attended by a servant and this slowness of mind was a constant warning as to the danger of bees.

So it was with no great alarm that I read that GM Research Pharmaceutical Services were killing off the bee population. Let the vicious little stingers go the way of all dinosaurs, I thought, until a little further in the article I was told that bees are responsible for 80 per cent of the pollination of the world’s food crops and if the bees died out then so would we as there would be no food to eat.

I think readers all round the world have become used to the Doomsdaywallahs (No, it is NOT a Parsi surname!). There are still cranks parading around Oxford Street and Hyde Park with signs on sandwich boards saying “The End of the World is Nigh” but today everyone who laughs at them goes home and is confronted with a programme on the BBC, a Guardian article or a film by Al Gore saying the same thing, but this time with, purportedly, science on their side.

Politicians have taken up the bee-causes in absolute earnestness. The European Union and the British Parliament are to debate the crisis. A British MP has the following quote from Einstein on his website: “If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe then man would only have four years of life left”.

Einstein only said B=(mc)x(c) or something similar, nothing about Bees, but then a doomster made up the quote. Now on reliable information from the New Scientist, evidence of which has been featured on these very pages, a couple of world experts in pollination studies declare that the bee population of the world has actually increased in the last five years.

The extinction of bees is not the only doom scenario with which the world is threatened. Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) has become the ethic-lyric of every government in the world. India, China and the fast-industrialising nations argue that they ought to be allowed their share of development and the political world and the ubiquitous ecology lobby have come up with off-setting schemes whereby one country, more developed and virtuous than the rest, can sell its quota of pollution to one less developed or fortunate.

In the corridors of the AGW empire, the doom-sayers grow more vociferous. By 2012, every polar bear will be standing on a cube of ice small enough to fit into a Punjabi whisky tumbler etc. And yet the scientists who contradict AGW, admittedly a minority of the weighty names in pursuit of these truths, either deny that global warming is taking place at all (the minority within the minority) or attribute the changes in temperature on the earth to conditions other than the rise of carbon emissions.

In a demonstration of AGW denial, an Australian professor of geology has proved that the mean temperatures of the ocean, while rising in the late ’90s and early noughties have actually fallen from 2006 on till the present. At the same time the graph of the growth of carbon emissions has continued in its upward slope.

The other fact that the AGW-wallahs don’t account for is the flatulence of cattle. Tying plastic bags to both ends of a cows alimentary canal, scientists in Britain proved that their digestive systems give out methane gas which is 26 times more harmful to the Ozone layer than CO2 emissions from cars. So what about Bovine Global Warming (BGW)? Are the governments of the world going to slaughter the herds? Are we all to turn vegetarian?