Johann Hari

The democratically elected 43rd President of the United States, Al Gore, has been in Britain this week. He should be here on a state visit as a highlight of his second term, but the Supreme Court had different plans. So he is here as a civilian, delivering packed-out lectures warning that man-made climate chaos “could literally end civilisation”. His speeches are terrifying, true – and contain a hole bigger than the old Ozone hole he spent decades warning against.

He explains out dilemma in the stark, slap-in-the-face, terms we need: “We are recklessly dumping so much carbon dioxide into the Earth’s atmosphere that we have literally changed the relationship between the Earth and the Sun… so the build-up of heat energy that should be re-radiated by the Earth is beginning to wilt, melt, dry out and parch delicate components of the planet’s living systems.” From the Arctic to the disrupted rainfall patterns causing disaster in Africa, we can see these effects every day. He concludes, “What is at stake is the habitability of the earth. Or, as one eminent scientist put it, the pending question is whether an opposable thumb and a neocortex are a viable combination on this planet.” There are only six degrees of separation between us and global crop failure – and many climatologists warn we could be there within a century.

But the gap in Gore’s speeches – the elephant in the eco-room – is the reason why no American government has acted on these warnings. It’s not just Bush. When Bill Clinton and Al Gore were in the White House, their environmental record was abysmal too. They pushed through NAFTA, a free trade area for the Americas which defined environmental regulation as an illegal “market distortion” which must be struck down by the courts. They allowed dioxin dumping in the oceans. They were the main international drivers behind the World Bank and IMF, which have systematically smothered tentative environmental regulations in their developing world cot. They oversaw the largest slashing of publicly owned timber in US history. I could go on. And on.

This is not because Clinton and Gore were unaware of the problem. Back in 1992, Al Gore wrote a superb book called ‘Earth in the Balance’ that laid out the challenge of climate chaos better than anyone else at the time. It was eerily prescient. He warned that global warming was making hurricanes far more intense, threatening American cities like New Orleans. He warned that Siberia’s peat bogs would melt, burping massive amounts of their stored greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. He warned that famine would increase across sub-Saharan Africa as traditional rainfall patterns were disrupted.

So why did they move in the opposite direction? The temptation for journalists is to blame it on personal moral failure. Clinton and Gore are hypocrites, liars, the old story. If only we could find a really morally pure politician – a Jed Bartlett or David Palmer – everything would be okay.

The reality is less glib and more disturbing. Every American politician has to pay for their massive election campaigns, and there is one group waiting with open wallets and a few polite requests – the fossil fuel industry. Democrat or Republican, if you don’t lick the boots of the oil and gas companies, you never get the key to the White House. This legalised bribery is often so naked that many corporations give to both parties, to ensure whoever wins is in their debt. Anybody with environmental leanings is quickly tamed – 28 gas and oil companies gave to Al Gore’s election campaign, from BP Amoco to Enron, from Exxon to Chevron. Corporations like Occidental Petroleum paid for the Clinton-Gore inauguration, and stumped up an extra £50,000 after Gore personally made a begging call to their CEO.

These companies own the American political process – and they are violently opposed to any moves to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. They keep US politicians on a short leash, since Presidents and Senators are forced to spend around half their time fund-raising. According to Bob Woodward, a man who is such a Washington insider he practically inhabits the President-of-the-day’s intestines, Bill Clinton was so exasperated by this corporate-cash treadmill he once snapped, “We spend so much time raising money, when do we get to govern?”

Some politicians deal with this double-bind by rote-learning an ideology – neoliberalism – that says there is no conflict between the public welfare and corporate welfare. As President Eisenhower's Secretary of Defence, Charlie Wilson, put it, “If it’s good for General Motors, it’s good for America.” Al Gore is far too smart to fall for this. Global warming show how the public interest (and indeed the future of the species) can collide with the desire of corporations to maximise profit, and one has to give. But he was powerless to act. When Clinton arrived in the White House in 1992, Gore lobbied him hard for the only environmentally sane solution: a broad-based energy tax that would hit the dirtiest fuel, coal, hardest, and have a knock-on effect on natural gas and petrol. Clinton agreed, with a nervous nod in the direction of his campaign contributors – but it was impossible to get it past a (Democratic) Congress also drenched in petrol. This was a bleak dry-run for the Kyoto Protocol six years later, signed by the President, torched by Congress.

Yet in Al Gore’s inspirational lectures on the danger we face, there is only the most fleeting of references to “the special interests that want us to ignore global warming,” and silence about Gore’s own recent dependence on them. In the 408 pages of ‘Earth in the Balance,’ there is only one reference – one – when he asks with faux naivety, “Why would the [first] Bush White House go to such lengths to avoid facing the facts about the environment? Is it because the necessary changes would be sufficiently discomfiting to… companies enjoying the status quo?”

Why doesn’t Gore mention this, the biggest brake on dealing with global warming? Because if he wants to run for President in 2008, he will have to plunge back into the petrol tank to grab some campaign funds. He cannot afford to alienate potential donors, so he cannot give a full and honest account of the problem. And even if a rogue Presidential candidate did manage to somehow busk through while telling the truth, he would still have to contend with a Congress paid not to. “Even if you’re President, you can’t move if… Congress isn’t there,” Gore noted sadly this week.

It’s tempting to believe we are suffering from a Bush-sized blockage in the global warming drain at the moment, and that once he is flushed away, international agreements will begin to flow. But this is a delusion. The problem is that the fossil fuel industries have occupied Capital Hill and built a petrol-filled moat around it. They are also polluting American public opinion, paying for lavish propaganda, ‘astroturf’ organisations (ones that pretend to be grassroots organisations of ordinary people but actually are the creation of petrol companies) and ludicrous ‘experts’ who claim global warming isn’t happening.

The solution is not for Al Gore or some other genuine environmentalist to be treated as a Messianic figure, when in reality he will only face the same hideous compromises. No; the only solution is for the American people to reclaim their political parties from corporations and start paying for their parties themselves, out of general taxation. Right now, this proposal is greeted in Washington as if it was a quasi-communist plan to nationalise the banks. How hot does it have to get in here before the American people start tearing the corporate clothes off their politicians?

POSTSCRIPT: Responses to this article can be sent for publication in the Independent to letters@independent.co.uk

Comments just for me can be sent to johann@johannhari.com

I received this e-mail just now:

"You obviously seriously dislike Catholicism, the last Pope and religion full stop.

But did you see the monastery programme which actually had a positive effect on 5 men's lives...

What about the spiritual cravings which seem to be an inherently human phenomena...Are these to be rejected?

We can't get away from the part of ourselves which is transcendent...Why fight and rage against it...Catholicism is imperfect because it is human, how much harder is it to love in spite of human inadequacies?

I would argue that human beings have to love despite failings ie in every relationship we have to persevere through human weakness"

I replied:

"Hi - thanks for your e-mail.

You say: "But did you see the monastery programme which actually had a positive effect on 5 men’s lives..."

Yes, I did. Did you see the Spanish inquisition, which actually had a negative effect on hundreds of thousands of people's lives? Have you been to Africa and met people who have been told by their Catholic priests that condoms cause AIDS, and are dying of the disease as a result? I'd say that was a negative effect too.

Tell you what - let's ditch the (minor) positive and (massive) negative effects of superstition and have a sensible debate in an atheist world, shall we?

"What about the spiritual cravings which seem to be an inherently human phenomena...Are these to be rejected?"

Sorry, you can't defend Catholicism by saying it is part of an "inherently human phenomena". There are lots of inherently human phenomena which the Catholic Church says should be rejected - homosexuality, sexuality outside marriage altogether... do you want me to go on? Get the mote out of your own eye...

"We can't get away from the part of ourselves which is transcendent...Why fight and rage against it...Catholicism is imperfect because it is human, how much harder is it to love in spite of human inadequacies?"

I cannot "fight and rage" against something that does not exist. If people believe they are interacting with a non-existent supernatural realm that is telling them to fly planes into buildings or to tell Africans condoms are pre-infected with AIDS, then I will fight and rage against that delusion, because it causes obvious and palpable harm.

I love people in spite of human inadequacies, and I hope other people love me in spite of mine; what has that got to do with pre-Medieval texts that claim the world was created in seven days and other manifest nonsense?

"I would argue that human beings have to love despite failings ie in every relationship we have to persevere through human weakness."

Again, many atheists would agree with this statement. What has it got to do with the hallucinatory delusions of desert nomads living two thousand years ago, or the people who claim to be their spiritual descendants in the Vatican today?"

My article about Bjorn Lomborg has been criticised by a right-wing blogger called Scott Burgess, who is one of the last dwindling band of people who deny man-made global warming is happening. Burgess claims it is part of “a natural temperature oscillation on Earth” and is so ignorant of the basic facts that he even claims “there's been exactly zero global temperature rise since 1998” (see http://dailyablution.blogs.com/the_daily_ablution/2006/04/climate_change_.html).

So, naturally, he has leapt to the defence of ‘sceptical environmentalist’ Bjorn Lomborg. He alleges that I have made four errors, which I will quote and address here:

“(1) Lomborg's claims to be an environmentalist are lies - "... nor is he an environmentalist. He claims to have been a member of Greenpeace, but the organisation cannot find any records of him." (This from the text on Mr. Hari's website. The relevant passage in the dead tree edition reads "He claims to have been a member of Greenpeace, but the organisation says he was never active in their campaigns." It's unclear which version came first, or why the strange change was made).”

It’s not strange – I often tinker about with my pieces after they’ve gone to press and before posting them on my website. Both statements are entirely accurate, I just thought the second one sounded a bit better.

“Mr. Lomborg reiterates that he was a regularly paying member of Greenpeace in the 80s.”

Greenpeace says he wasn’t. Given the countless findings of “scientific dishonesty” against Lomborg by eminent scientific organisations and Lomborg’s inability to provide any proof at all, I think I’ll take Greenpeace’s word on this one.

“I'll let Mr. Hari's apparent assumption that only Greenpeace members (or, perhaps, only those "active in their campaigns") may call themselves environmentalists pass without further comment.”

At no point do I assume that. I am not a member of Greenpeace, and I am an environmentalist. It is Bjorn Lomborg himself who has repeatedly raised his elusive Greenpeace membership as evidence of his environmentalist credentials. I think it’s revealing that the one thing he waves as proof of his green credentials is (let’s be generous) contested, and if it existed at all, consisted simply of sending off a fiver for a membership card.

(2) "He has never written a peer reviewed scientific paper, and there's a reason for that." This claim represents either shocking ignorance or a shocking lie on Mr. Hari's part. In fact, the entire book The Skeptical Environmentalist - the one which so offends Mr. Hari - was stringently peer reviewed by its publisher, Cambridge University Press. Indeed, anticipating controversy, Cambridge subjected Mr. Lomborg's work to a more than usually rigorous review process, which included a climatologist, an environmental economist (and IPCC reviewer), and an expert in biodiversity and sustainable development (see my prior post for details).”

Perhaps Burgess doesn’t know the difference, but ‘The Sceptical Environmentalist’ is a piece of statistical-economic analysis, not a scientific paper on climatology. Its ‘scientific’ claims have been annihilated by countless bodies who have severely questioned the nature of the peer-review process, asking how on earth it could have passed Cambridge University Press. Lomborg’s own colleagues set up a website to warn the scientific community about his dishonesty and questioning how this work could have passed peer-reviewers. This might explain the exasperated and defensive tone of the CUP source Burgess quotes.

To give just one example of a glaring statistical error, Lomborg tries to back up his argument that “it is far more expensive to cut CO2 emissions radically than to pay the costs of adaptations to increased temperatures” by representing the IPCC’s calculation of the 30 year cost as a single year’s cost. Where were the peer reviewers when that statement made it through?

(3) “The preceding incorrect assertions lead Mr. Hari to conclude, falsely, that "the two central planks of his public image – here is a green guy who has reassessed the scientific evidence and come up with a new reading – are false" (i.e., that Mr. Lomborg is a liar on two fronts).”

Yes. That is the view of many of his colleagues, of the Union of Concerned Scientists, of the most eminent scientists in his own country… I could go on.

(4) Mr. Hari blatantly misrepresents Mr. Lomborg's position on climate change policy, characterising it as an argument that "we should do nothing about run-away global warming", and as a call "for junking the whole idea of restraint and opting for climatic anarchy". In fact, Mr. Lomborg has termed as "optimal" a 6% reduction in current emissions levels, increasing to 10% by 2100."

When asked about global warming, Lomborg repeatedly says, “Just because there is a problem, does not mean we have to solve it.” He proposes instead solving a different problem – drinking water for people in the developing world – that will in fact be made far, far harder to tackle by global warming. Hence the (entirely accurate) headline put on a recent article he wrote for the Daily Telegraph – ‘Save the world, ignore global warming.’

Lomborg does not believe the state needs to restrict greenhouse gases, instead arguing that renewables will naturally come on course in around 30 years and solve the problem. “We” – ordinary people, and collectively through our democratic states – need indeed do nothing in his view – the (woefully inadequate) 6 percent fall he wants will naturally be produced by the functioning of markets. Of course I would have loved a 3000 word slot to explain this point, but I did not have one; as it stands, my point was entirely true. And if the market doesn't work perfectly? Then climactic anarchy will, of course, ensue.

Just as an afterthought, Burgess also seems to be completely unaware of the effect of global warming on hurricanes, hence his perplexed response to my statement that Katrina was almost certainly a result of global warming. Perhaps he was replying on the say-so of his new friend, who has said global warming “will probably not increase storminess.”

Actual scientists, however, have found that it does: Kerry Emanuel of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that hurricanes have doubled in intensity since the 1970s in line with warmer oceans. The Pulitzer Prize winning environmental writer Ross Gelbspan has pointed out that “Katrina began as a relatively small hurricane that glanced off south Florida, [until] it was supercharged with extraordinary intensity by the relatively blistering sea surface temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico” and went on to hit New Orleans.

I think it is very revealing that Bjorn Lomborg has gratefully accepted help from Scott Burgess, and even apparently asked him to draft a letter in his name for the Independent. (The letter the Indie has received uses almost exactly the same words as Burgess). The ‘sceptical environmentalist’ using the words of an outright anthropogenic global warming denier – is anyone surprised?

Sigh. E.O. Wilson, one of the most distinguished biologists in the world, has argued, “My greatest regret about the Lomborg scam is the extraordinary amount of scientific talent that has to be expended to combat it in the media. We will always have contrarians like Lomborg whose sallies are characterized by willful ignorance, selective quotations, disregard for communication with genuine experts, and destructive campaigning to attract the attention of the media rather than scientists. They are the parasite load on scholars.”

I hope my journalistic debunking of him helps to lift that load just a little bit. Fortunately, Lomborg now seems to be over, and the world is now having a serious debate about how to deal with the on-going catastrophe of global warming. The scientifically illiterate deniers like Scott Burgess and the 'sceptical enivronmentalists' like Lomborg will just be a sad footnote in the history of this disaster.

POSTSCRIPT: Scott Burgess has replied to this point at http://dailyablution.blogs.com/

I've got three pending deadlines so I have to be quick, but briefly -

(1) Burgess now denies being a global warming denier. In the past, he said of climatic changes on Mars, "This of course points to a natural temperature oscillation on Earth - a warm period of several centuries up until roughly 1400, then a cold period for several centuries up to about 1900. Now it appears that another warm period may be beginning." Read the full post - http://dailyablution.blogs.com/the_daily_ablution/2003/12/nasa_has_eviden.html - and see that he is clearly claiming global warming is not anthopogenic, in a post whose whole purpose is to sneer at people who have been warning about anthropogenic climate change.

Burgess has repeatedly claimed that there is "no consensus" on anthropogenic global warming, and ridiculed people who are trying to get greenhouse gas emissions to be cut in response to the unfolding disaster. (e.g. 'Climate change 'consensus' crushed' at http://dailyablution.blogs.com/the_daily_ablution/2006/04/climate_change_.html)

He now claims, however, that he believes there is an anthropogenic component to global warming. Welcome. Shame he doesn't want to do anything about it, but it's a start. What will he confess next week - that maybe evolution played a role in the development of human beings? That smoking can cause cancer?

(2) He does not try to defend his ludicrous claim that "there's been exactly zero global temperature rise since 1998", instead simply saying somebody else had said it and he was quoting them. Yes, but why did Burgess repeat it as fact? Will he admit this statement is preposterous and in total defiance of reality?

(3) He says he is "unaware" of the massive and extensively documented proof of scientific dishonesty against Lomborg, expressing knowledge of only one. Oh, look them up Scott. You could learn something.

(4) He thinks it is a "rather Clintonian evasion" to distinguish between a work of economic-statistical analysis and a scientific paper. In reality, it is a distinction all scientists and all economists make. It is a difference of fact.

(5) Burgess ends his appalled statement that he is not a denier of antropogenic global warming by quoting... the statements of a man who says it "one of the greatest hoaxes ever" and "an alarmist hypothesis made to snare research dollars". Nope, no denials there at all.

(6) I notice he continues to make the bizarre claim that just because the Indie has not run the letter Burgess wrote in Lomborg's name (revealing, no?) the minute it arrived, therefore the Indie will never run it. In fact, it will be published in the next few days. He clearly knows as much about how newspapers work as he does about climatology.

I would love to repond in more detail and provide long references, footnotes etc but I've got a big commission for the New York Times in addition to my normal three columns a week and if I responded to every blog critic in the world I'd never get my work done. I think I've responded more than most journos would - in the meantime, a good place for people looking for graphs and extensive facts on Lomborg and more detailed scientific rebuttals of the nonsense Burgess is peddling should check out the series of articles written by Grist magazine (www.grist.org) on the 'sceptical environmentalist'. I spend my time writing about the war in Congo, lousy council housing in London, ending female genital mutilation etc - Burgess spends his time mocking people who do jobs like this. We don't have infinite time to respond to it, I'm afraid - we're actually going out into the world.

I also recommend the website http://www.lomborg-errors.dk which lists many of the errors and misrepresentations in the work of Lomborg. Among may more, it quotes the following criticisms of Lomborg (which Brugess is, by his own admission, "unaware" of:

"In our experience, we have never seen the immediate and uniformly hostile rejection of a published work by so many senior scientists." . . - Stuart Pimm and Jeff Harvey in their complaint to the Danish Committees on Scientific Dishonesty.

"Many of Lomborg´s critics notice his almost total lack of scientific publications. This is relevant here. When one publishes in reputable journals, there is a requirement to amass the relevant evidence for and against one´s hypotheses. (The contrast to a lawyer presenting a case is obvious: science is not advocacy.) Lomborg shows throughout his book - and particularly in his responses to the case we have laid against him - that he simply does not understand this need for balance. He picks and chooses at will. He has no experience of what scientific publication requires." - Stuart Pimm in his response to the documents in the Lomborg case (letter to the Danish DCSD, 20th May 2002).

"The problem with Lomborg´s conclusion is that the scientists themselves disawow it. Many spoke to us at Scientific American about their frustration at what they described as Lomborg´s misrepresentation of their fields. His seemingly dispassionate outsider´s view, they told us, is often marred by an incomplete use of the data or a misunderstanding of the underlying science. Even where his statistical analyses are valid, his interpretations are frequently off the mark - literally not seeing the state of the forests for the number of the trees." . . - John Rennie, editor in chief, Scientific American

"On page xx of his preface, Lomborg admits, `I am not myself an expert as regards environmental problems´ - truer words are not found in the rest of the book." . . - Stephen Schneider in Scientific American.

"The consideration of acid rain in a separate chapter is equally poorly researched and presented. Indeed, the research is so shallow that almost no citation from the peer-reviewed literature appears." . . - Thomas Lovejoy in Scientific American.

" . . more generally speaking, when hundreds or thousands of articles have been published on a given matter, Lomborg bases most of his reasoning on a very small selection of them, doing exactly (by dismissing all that does not please him) what he otherwise accuses (wrongly) the IPCC of doing ! . . . Lomborg deliberately ignores the precautions exposed by the authors . . . As it is possible to find something false or inexact in almost any paragraph, I will stop here, otherwise the list would become boring, and there are other interesting things to say on this book. Indeed, some other surprises come with the economic part, where it is possible to find many times the application of what I would call "Lomborg´s law", which could be stated as `any extrapolation is valid when it suits me. .´ . Well, a close examination of Lomborg´s writings shows that everytime or almost that he attempts an extrapolation, the announced results are not valid. . . " . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . - Jean-Marc Jancovici, France, engineer, specialized in calculating greenhouse gas emissions. link

"If the rest of this book is as out of touch as this chapter [chapter 24], the entire book will be properly dismissed as being fatally contaminated by the very biases the author claims to be correcting." . . - Jerry D. Mahlman, National Center for Atmospheric Research, Colorado, for the Union of Concerned Scientists.

"Waldo is a popular cartoon character with a funny hat, glasses, and a distinctive red and white shirt. Tiny images of Waldo are carefully hidden in large pieces of colorful artwork with hundreds or thousands of small cartoon figures in complex cartoon landscapes. The goal is to find Waldo. Kids spend hours poring over these pages looking for the hidden image. In The Skeptical Environmentalist, "Waldo" became a series of conceptual errors, misunderstandings, and data problems. As I turned each page, the surprise was which Waldo (or Waldos) I would find next. There was no shortage. Some were trivial; others were dramatic in their scope and implication." . . - Peter H. Gleick, Pacific Institute for studies in Development, Environment and Security, Oakland, California, for the Union of Concerned Scientists.

"The biodiversity chapter is so seriously and systematically flawed that we cannot consider it to be scientifically credible." . . - Edward O. Wilson, Thomas E. Lovejoy, Norman Myers, Jeffrey A. Harvey and Stuart L. Pimm, for the Union of Concerned Scientists.

"The text employs the strategy of those who, for example, argue that gay men aren´t dying of AIDS, that jews weren´t singled out by the Nazis for extermination, and so on." . . Stuart Pimm & Jeff Harvey, review in Nature.

"For although the above flaws are irritating and show some disrespect for the huge effort put into professional environmental monitoring and assessment, the third problem - a stunning lack of attention to cause and effect - is far more dangerous. . . . only one paragraph and one note (without a reference) explicitly address the question of whether the observed improvements have come as manna from heaven or have been driven by environmental concerns and the resulting policies. Lomborg simply dismisses the latter suggestion . . ". . . - Review in Science by Michael Grubb, London, Environmental Policy and Management group and Department of Applied Economics, Cambridge University.

"Lomborg claims to be an economist as well as a statistician. We find this hard to believe. For example, his discussion of the `double dividend´ that may follow the imposition of environmental taxes (pp. 308-309), is so incoherent that it is impossible to know where a critique should begin. . . It is impossible to pick out a wrong statement as the whole two pages in the book are gobbledygook." . . - Clive Hamilton & Hal turton, The Australia Institute.

"The paradox of professor Lomborg´s book is that in making the case for a more rational debate on the environment, he has committed all of the offences for which he attacks environmentalists. He exaggerates for effect, substitutes forceful assertion for weight of argument, sometimes makes sweeping generalisations from particular instances, presents false choices and is somewhat selective in his use of evidence and quotation. These are the familiar features of all polemics - they are only illegitimate in shcolarship. All that renders this book dishonest is only its claim to tell you the real truth about the state of the world - its pretence to scholarship." . . - Tom Burke, executive committee of the Green Alliance, London.

"In his wide ranging attempt to review the literature on economic development and welfare in relation to the environment, Lomborg claims balance and objectivity, but actually presents a thoroughly misleading picture of environmental prospects and research, global economic development, and the real determinants of human welfare. Statistician Lomborg blatantly distorts the evidence by systematically selecting statistics to support his claims that global welfare is generally improving and environmental plicy is unnecessary, while denying catastrophic risks such as prolonged drought in major food growing areas (though such events cannot be ruled out by climate models). " . . - Felix FitzRoy & Ian Smith, review submitted to Scottish Journal of Political Economy.

"One lesson is that reviewing this book is indeed difficult: it is necessary to be well versed in one´s specialized discipline to spot where Lomborg picks and chooses. Those reviews of individual chapters that I have read suggest that Lomborg´s treatment of environmental issues is biased and misleading. Let us add his treatment of fisheries to the litany. . . - Review in Fish and Fisheries, vol. 3 (2002): 364-365 by Daniel Pauly, Fisheries Centre, British Columbia, Canada,

"An old saw advises readers to scrutinize the footnotes of any extended argument, for that is `where the bodies are buried´. On that theory, Lomborg´s study, with its 2,930 footnotes, promises a veritable necropolis of misinterpretations, factual errors, and eyebrow-raising omissions." - Review by Douglas A. Kysar in Ecology law quarterly 30(2003): 223-278.

"Our analysis of TSE´s treatment of environmental health issues exposes a frequent and widespread series of biases . . " - Review by A. Bodnar et al. in Int. j. hyg. environ. health 207 (2004): 57-67.

And on it goes.

I am a member of the last generation of Western teenagers who had to struggle and strive to get hold of porn. I still remember the hysterical burst of testosterone (laced with desperation) that burst over my school playground when I was 11 years old and it was revealed that one of my classmates had swiped a porn mag from his dad. The Penthouse was passed from hand to hand like a fragile Ming vase, its pages studied with the obsessive care of Talmudic scholars poring over the Mishnah. I didn't stumble across another porn mag for years.

But 11-year-olds today have to actively avoid porn. Bodily fluids leak into every inbox from the moment an e-mail account is opened, and every sexual act imaginable (and a few that aren't) are only a google away. It was revealed this weekend in the Independent on Sunday-Nielsen poll that half of all children have now seen porn sites.

This is a drastic social shift - in just one generation, the land of the stiff upper lip has become the land of the permanent stiffy. When I saw that tattered Penthouse, Clare Short was calling for the banning of Page Three girls who now look like seaside postcards compared to the sites 9 million men clicked on last year. But as a culture, we have tucked the new world of internet porn under our duvet like guilty adolescents and refused to discuss it.

What does it mean that most 11-year-olds can now inspect close-ups of genitalia and penetration from their bedrooms? As I look at the generation of kids a little younger than me, I can see some amazingly positive effects. Today's teens and twentysomethings are probably the most sexually literate in European history. Many use the web as a digital Kama Sutra, surfing for new forms of sexual expression. I don't see it as something to tut-tut if consenting teenagers are discovering new ways to experience one of the great pleasures of human life, without the old sterile hang-ups; I see it as something to celebrate.

But I cannot honestly join the ranks of the porn libertines like Gore Vidal or "pro-porn feminists" such as Camille Paglia who celebrate the rise of digital porn as a glorious Dionysian orgy after two millennia of unnatural Christian repression. I find this argument intellectually alluring - until I remember these same people laud men like Larry Flynt - the publisher of Hustler - as "heroes". This is a man who followed up a real gang-rape on a pool table in Baton Rouge by publishing a double-page spread of a woman tied to a pool table with the strap-line, "Welcome to Baton Rouge, Gang Rape Capital of America".

For every positive effect porn has, there is a Larry Flynt and a slew of victims. I have one friend who describes himself as a "chronic porn addict" and sadly laments that his (very beautiful) girlfriend can never match the 10 million infinitely pliable, infinitely-surgeried fantasy women forever splayed in his laptop. I know teenage lads with wildly unrealistic expectations that women are constantly "up for it" - and up for anything.

And, worst of all, I know girls trying to meet those swollen expectations - girls who have internalised the norms of pornography and who try to convince themselves that they enjoy their boyfriends' endless requests for anal sex, sex toys and being "shared" with the mates. Of course, there are some women who genuinely do enjoy all this, and they need to be protected from clucking puritans. But as I look around, I see far more women trying to contort themselves painfully into an internet-shaped dream-girl.

And the harm could be worse still. Professor Jennings Bryant, a US psychologist, wanted to discover what happens to men when they are exposed to massive amounts of porn. His test subjects quickly shifted from being happy with vanilla porn, and started to seek out more and more extreme strands. Men who before had said they found violent or rape-fantasy porn unacceptable were soon eagerly consuming it.

At the next link in the chain, Canadian psychologists James Check and Ted Guloien exposed men to massive amounts of rape-fantasy porn, and discovered that they became more and more likely to agree with statements like "rape isn't so bad", "women complain about rape too much" and "some women enjoy being raped" as they were exposed to more and more porn. So is one of the features of this new age - in addition to the welcome growth in sexual openness - a wave of increased sexual assaults?

While the old Christian puritans who hated the "filth" of porn were clearly wrong, the old Feminist puritans who hated its misogyny had a point. The fact that 30 per cent of women now regularly view internet porn - according to the new survey - seems to undermine this, until you study the figures and see that women are typing dirty in chatrooms rather than watching men being splayed and debased.

But what can we do? Even if we concluded that the negative effects of our new pornutopia outweigh the positive - and I'm genuinely not sure about that - we can't stop it. The web is uncensorable. The police can't even remove images of children being raped from search engines, when we all agree they should. We are, to borrow a phrase from Jean-Paul Sartre, "condemned to be free".

That doesn't mean we should go back into denial. It means we need to start to prepare children to cope with porn from an early age. Young people need to be taught as they approach adolescence to be porn-savvy. Everybody knows from the time they're a child to be wary of advertising, but young people don't know to be sceptical about the claims implicit in porn. As one 17-year-old told me, "My first experience of women in a sexual context was seeing them on websites as 'cum-hungry bitches'. I guess I started looking at it when I was 11 or 12, and it led me to make some terrible mistakes, approaching girls and expecting them to be into the stuff I'd seen."

But the sex education he received was "like something from another age. We were told in class what a vulva was when I was 14, but by that time I had been inspecting them in detail on my computer screen for years, and so had every other lad in the room." He knew what vaginas looked like; what he didn't know was that there was such a huge emotional gap between porn and reality.

Next time there is a vicious row about sex education targeted at pre-teens, remember that very soon, they will be looking at much worse. The only question now is - do you want your kids to plunge into the world of internet porn naive and believing everything they see is normal? Or do you want them to be prepared for this powerful, perilous intoxicant?

j.hari@independent.co.uk