【每日电讯20050102】灾难没有毁灭人民——贫穷才是

灰仔

【中文标题】灾难没有毁灭人民——贫穷才是
【原文标题】Disasters don't kill people: poverty does
【登载媒体】Ross Clark
【原文链接】http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/personal-view/3613933/Disasters-dont-kill-people-poverty-does.html
【正文】

The most telling remark about last week’s tsunamis was made by a man who was in Scandinavia when the wave struck. In response to the reported deaths of 1,500 of his countrymen, Swedish Prime Minister Goran Persson declared: “It is probably the worst [disaster] of our time and will impact on everyday Swedish life for a long time to come.”
关于上一周的海啸的最生动的评论来自一个当海浪袭击时正在斯堪的纳维亚的人。根据报道已经有1500位他国家的人死亡，作为回应，瑞典首相约兰·佩尔松宣布：“这大概是这个时代最严重的一起自然灾害，它将在未来很长一段时间影响每一位瑞典人的生活。”

In other words, in a country of fearsome winter storms, and where roads and railway lines are affected by ice and snow for many months of the year, the worst disaster to strike its people in living memory has occurred in a string of holiday destinations 8,000 miles away in the tropics. The point is that it isn’t natural disasters which kill people, so much as poverty – which prevents them protecting themselves.
换句话说，在一个国家的令人恐惧的冬季暴风雪中，在那里一年中的许多个月份里公路和铁路都被冰和雪所影响，在人们记忆中袭击人们的最严重的最然灾害发生在一串度假胜地，它们位于8000英里之外的热带。重点是，夺去人们生命的自然灾害并没有贫困死亡的人数多，因为贫困阻止了受害者保护自己。

Had the tsunamis struck Scandinavia or the west coast of America, people would have died but in nothing like the numbers who died on the shores of the Indian Ocean. A flood warning system such as that employed in Britain after the catastrophic floods of 1953 would have evacuated most people to safety well in time. Communications would have been affected, but whole stretches of coastline would not have been cut off for days as they were last week in Indonesia. The beaches would not still be lined with bodies nearly a week after the disaster. The affected areas would not be facing starvation and infectious disease for weeks to come.
当斯堪的纳维亚或者美洲西海岸遭受海啸袭击的时候，或许有人会死亡，但是这与死在印度洋沿岸的人数相比不可同日而语。在1953年的洪灾之后，英国政府采用了洪灾预警系统，这个系统可以及时将绝大多数人撤离到安全地区。通讯会受到影响，但是与上一周的印尼不同，整个海岸不会失去通讯长达数天之久。灾害过后的将近一周，沙滩上不会还是排满了尸体。在之后的几个星期，受灾地区不会面临饥饿和传染病。

Contrary to the many fatalistic leading articles and columns written last week, which marveled at the awesome power of Nature and encouraged us to believe that we are entirely at her mercy, there is something countries can do to improve their chances of surviving natural disasters: namely to do everything they can to achieve prosperity and the true security that comes with it.
与上周的许多宿命论的主流文章和评论，让我们对自然的力量感到惊讶并且鼓励我们去相信我们完全在自然的掌控之后。与之相反，国家可以做一些事情来提高自然灾害中的生存概率：那就是，做他们所能做的一切去实现繁荣，真正的安全会与之相随。

A fully industrialized Indonesia would have had a transport system capable of getting help to the required areas. It would also have been able to react to the earthquake alerts which were issued by US seismologists hours before the disaster. At the very least it would have had a network of refrigerated mortuaries to cope with the bodies of victims without leaving them to putrefy on the beaches.
一个完全工业化的印尼会具备一个能够将所需要的帮助送达到需要地区的交通运输系统。它将也会具有应对美国地震学家在灾害前发布的地震预警的能力。至少，它会有具有一系列冷冻功能的太平间去处理受害者的遗体，而不是将遗体放在沙滩上腐烂。

It would be fatuous to make these points were it not for the fact that the world’s strategy for averting natural disasters increasingly revolves around a policy of stunting the processes of industrialization. For the past 15 years the governments of most developed nations and most international development agencies have been preoccupied with one threat: that of steadily rising sea levels caused by global warming.
如果世界防止自然灾害的政策没有持续向阻止工业化的方向倾斜，这些观点都将是愚蠢的。过去的15年里，多数发达国家的政府和国际组织都对一种威胁全神贯注：全球变暖所导致的海岸线逐渐上升。

Last week’s tsunamis aside, almost all recent natural disasters have in some way been blamed upon global warming: the hurricanes which struck the Caribbean last summer, the heatwave that killed hundreds of Parisians in the summer of 2003, and the various famines to have struck sub-Saharan Africa over the past decade. The blame for all meteorological events, according to the doom-mongers of global warming, can be traced back to mankind’s excessive burning of fossil fuels.
抛开上一周的海啸，近期几乎所有的自然灾害都被归结于全球变暖：去年夏天袭击加勒比海的飓风，2003年夏天导致数百巴黎人死亡的热浪，还有过去十年间撒哈拉以南非洲的饥荒。所有气象时间的罪魁祸首，根据传播世界末日的全球变暖，都可以追溯到人类过度燃烧矿物燃料。

Moreover, according to these people, there is only one way we can hope to reduce the death toll from future disasters, and that is to reduce our consumption of fossil fuels drastically. They do not deny that the policy of reducing carbon emissions will severely hamper world economic growth, only the possibility that there could be any alternative strategy for coping with the problems posed by global warming. It has been left to Bjorn Lomborg, the Danish environmentalist who has become a pariah in the scientific world, to point out that the Kyoto treaty, which commits signatory nations to sharp reductions in fossil fuel use, is extremely poor value for money.
另外，根据这些人的理论，我们只有一个可以减少未来自然灾害不断敲响的死亡警钟的方法，那就是大量减少使用矿物燃料。他们并不否认削减碳排放量的政策会对世界经济增长带来严重的损害，仅仅是有可能，或者有其它方法可以解决全球变暖带来的问题。这个问题已经留给了Bjorn Lomborg，一位丹麦的环境主义者，他已经变成了科学界的贱民，因为他指出确保签约国会大量减少矿物燃料使用的的东京条约根本就是在浪费钱。

The effect of the treaty will be to reduce global economic growth by some $150 billion year – all in the cause of postponing alleged global warming by a few years. Yet for half that sum, Lomborg calculates, the world could provide clean water, education and healthcare for all. To Lomborg, it is obvious that money would be better spent protecting vulnerable settlements from sea level rise, or rebuilding them in more elevated positions, than in sacrificing economic development.
这个条约将会导致全球经济增长减少大约1500亿美元，所有这些只会将环境变暖延后很少的几年的事情。用这些钱的一半，Lomborg计算，世界可以为所有人提供清洁的水，教育和医疗。对于Lomborg，相比于牺牲经济增长，这些钱可以更好地用在保护脆弱的人们免于遭海岸线上升带来的危害，或者为他们重建一个疏散地。

Yet to make this argument is to invite scorn. Global warming has become a dogma from which no dissent is to be tolerated. And so the world persists in a policy that will do little to abate global warming – such as it is – but will certainly prevent third world countries attaining the living standards of the West. The overall result will be to leave their populations more vulnerable to natural disasters.
但是说出这些观点会引来嘲笑。全球变暖已经成为一个教条，这个教条不能容忍任何不同的意见。所以这个世界还在坚持这一项将对减轻全球变暖起到很少作用的政策，尽管这项政策没什么效果，但却会阻止第三世界国家获得西方国家的生活水平。总体上，这项政策的结果就是让第三世界国家的人民面对自然灾害的时候更加脆弱。

The skewed sense of priorities shown by most Western governments was demonstrated in their response to last week’s disaster. Britain, which kept raising its donation towards the relief funds in line with the scale of the disaster, was one of the more generous. Yet the sums are trifling compared to the money spent annually on research into global warming. Ever keen to latch on to what is important, the EU proposed a conference on disaster aid. You can bet that the sums spent feeding the delegates will dwarf the £2.2 million that the EU released last week for actual disaster relief in the wake of the tsunamis.
西方政府所表现出来的扭曲的优越感在上周他们对灾害的反应中展现出来。英国，一直致力于按照灾难的程度筹措救济资金，是比较慷慨的一个国家。但是那总额与投入到全球变暖的研究中的显得微不足道。从来都很热衷于抓住重点的欧盟，提议召开一个关于灾害救助金的会议。我们可以打赌，花费在与会代表身上的费用会多于220万英镑，220万英镑是上周欧盟给予海啸受灾国的救济。

No one is more irritated by the West’s warped sense of priorities than the developing nations themselves. The Johannesburg Earth Summit in 2002 was supposed to mark the commencement of a new era of cooperation between the rich and the poor, yet it merely served to show how far they are apart.
没有人比发展中国家更对西方扭曲的优越感感到愤怒。2002年，约翰内斯堡地球峰会提议开开启发达国家和发展中国家合作的新时代，然而这仅仅体现出发达国家和发展中国家的距离有多远。

As far as the developing nations were concerned, the most important issue for discussion was that of trade. In particular, they wanted an end to the agricultural subsidies and tariff barriers that prevent them from bettering themselves by competing in our food markets. Most Western leaders, however, opted to skip these discussions, only flying in for a photo-call when the agenda had moved on to climate change.
就发展中国家而言，最重要的话题是贸易。特别是，发展中国家想要终结农业补贴和关税壁垒，这些补贴和关税阻止了发展中国家通过在我们食品市场上的竞争来更好地发展自己。然而，绝大多数西方国家领导人，倾向于跳过这些讨论，只在日程进行到环境变化的时候才出现。

If any good might come out of last week’s tsunamis it will be to remind the world that natural disasters are just that: acts of nature that have no human cause but whose effects may be reduced by industrial development. The obsession with reducing carbon emissions will do nothing to prevent a repeat of last week’s tsunamis and virtually nothing to arrest the steady rise in sea levels predicted over the next 100 years. But it will hamper the development of modern roads, airports and communication systems that could have saved tens of thousands of lives.
如果上一周的海啸能带来什么好的东西的话，那就是提醒我们自然灾害只是：自然的作用并没有人为的原因，但是自然灾害的影响会因为工业进步而减小。对于减少碳排放的痴迷无助于防止上一周的海啸再次发生，并且事实上不会阻止下100年预计内的海岸线的稳定上升。但是它会危害现代公路，机场和通讯系统的发展，而这些发展将会拯救数以千计的生命。

The world’s poor are being sacrificed in a misguided effort to save them.
世界上的穷人正在被牺牲，通过被误导的拯救他们的努力。