"Global Warming Is Over" - or how the media change the laws of science

The last week has seen perhaps the most twisted response yet of climate change deniers to the global warming that is heating up our planet, melting the ice caps and changing our weather disastrously.

A new report noted that some of the more extreme predictions of global warming have not been reached - and since 1998 there has been no further warming.

But is this in fact true?

Well, yes if you look at global warming in a very peculiar way. And no, not at all if you look at it in a logical way.

1998 is frequently cited by deniers as proof that global warming has stopped: every year since then has been cooler than in that year. So, you see claims of no warming in the last 15 years.

But this is baloney - 1998 was the warmest year in recorded history; the tarmac melted on Heathrow airport runways as the mercury rose to a record level. This was because of the impact of an unusually strong El Nino weather current, beginning in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Peru which warmed the world significantly more than normal: no one in the climatology community thought that the next year would be as warm as El Nino goes in cycles and would almost certainly not be so strong in 1999, as indeed it was not. 1998 saw a heat spike - but to use that as the starting point for measuring global warming is nonsensical. No one anywhere at any time has suggested temperatures will rise in a nice, smooth incremental curve. Inevitably, there are fluctuations, as happened in 1998 for perfectly explicable reasons.

"Global warming is over" - Really?

And so whilst temperatures since 1998 have been lower than in 1998, in 10 of the 14 years since, they have been the warmest in history other than in 1998. So set against pre-1998 level, the trend is still upwards to levels of heat not seen in several millenia.

Now comes the next conundrum, reported by the BBC last week: temperatures may be continuing to rise, but more slowly than the climate models have predicted. Well, again true if you look at the upper range of the climate predictions (which like all predictions are not and could not be an exact science). But, as leading scientist James Hansen has pointed out, they have risen within the range of predictions plus there is increasing evidence that much of the excess heat from increased carbon dioxide is being absorbed by the sea.

Hence we have seen the much faster than predicted melting of the Arctic ice cap - so much so that an ice-free Arctic in the summer may be just a few years away. Similarly, we see the destruction of coral reefs, a key component in the biology of the oceans, owing to temperature increases that have disturbed the delicate balance that keeps coral alive. While most people probably understand the role played by trees and other land vegetation in the photosynthesis process that turns carbon dioxide into oxygen, less well known is the major role played by plankton and other marine plants in the same process - over fifty per cent of our oxygen comes from miniscule photoplankton in the sea, tiny podules of life that are being massacred by a combination of pollutants and climate change. Their destruction by heating the oceans will in turn fuel a cycle of saturation of the natural carbon sinks that have made life possible, creating in their place ever more dangerous scenarios for the survival of our own and thousands of other species.

How long the sea will absorb excess heat that is unknown - what is pretty certain is that in this process many more species of plant and animal life in the oceans will be gone, further threatening the delicate balance of biosphere; while in due course overall global warming driven by emissions into the atmosphere will sooner or later speed up again. This is not an even process: as we cross particular barriers such as the melting of Arctic and Siberian permafrost, more and more other greenhouse gases, such as methane, will be released, with an even greater environmental impact - methane is nearly twenty times more effective than carbon dioxide in trapping heat. Fortunately, for over the last million years, much of it has been trapped deep under ice - ice that is now steadily melting. If you don't believe it, watch the evidence in the video below.

Sea Change - surface level marine temperatures
are also rising

The equivocation driven on by the climate change denying, UKIP-compliant media this last fortnight has been dreadful. It has come at  precisely the moment when a global warming milestone has been reached: carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere crossed the 400 parts per million barrier. This is a rise of over a third in the last century and the highest it has been in over two and a half million years. All this at the same time that humanity has burned more carbon fuel than in all the rest of history put together.

And this is where no amount of wishful thinking, equivocation or downright lies will make any difference - the science is irrefutable: if you increase the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, you thicken it and make it harder for the heat from the sun to escape the Earth's atmosphere, making for a rise, steady or not so steady, in the temperature of the only home we have - planet Earth.

The clock is still ticking towards a 4 degree rise in temperatures by the end of this century: it may not sound much, but the last time they were so high, humans had not even emerged as a species and the Arctic was covered in tropical jungle. The impact of so rapid a rise in heat will lead to massive disruption of weather, food and energy, plus growing parts of the world becoming uninhabitable and driving mass migrations of desperate people around the globe. It is nigh inevitable that conflict will follow - and well before we reach the full impact of 4 degrees. Many of our food and water systems are already breaking down under the pressures of record demand set against increasing temperatures, with some scenarios predicting global catastrophe within just 15 years.

And yet, on cue, the likes of Britain's Daily Mail or America's Fox News, Rupert Murdoch's US propaganda wing, run headlines like Fox's "Global Warming is Over" (although since in their Universe it never began, the headline is typically inept). They trumpet bizarre conspiracy theories about global scientific plots to make up global warming in order to qualify for grants and other funding, and ignore the true science yet alone, increasingly, the disturbed and disturbing weather patterns that hit extreme after extreme again and again. Just yesterday, Oklahoma was devastated by a near-two miles wide tornado in yet another of those once-in-a-century event which seem to happen every few months now.

So don't listen to the siren voices that want to carry on as before. Just like the Sirens of old, they will simply dash you to pieces on the rocks of their own crassly myopic greed and selfishness and gladly drown us all in a Tartarean sea of fire.

Red Maggie - Thatcher's Part in the Great Socialist Warming Conspiracy

Climate change is a "left-wing conspiracy to de-industrialise the world" (US Senator Minchin, 2009)

Santorum: Climate Change is a Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy(US Republican Presidential Primary candidate Rick Santorum, 2012)

"....a disgraceful scam whereby the global depression was prolonged and deepened, where thousands of people died in artificially induced fuel poverty..." (James Delinpole, British journalist, 2013)

Just a smattering of not unfamiliar headlines echoing the now nearly hackneyed claims by right wingers around the world that global warming and climate change are some sort of mass Socialist/Communist conspiracy, which somehow has co-opted virtually the entire scientific community, to de-industrialise the planet - why socialists would want to do such a thing is never actually explained. Indeed, Green Parties often emphasise re-industrialising their home countries - reviving local manufacture rather than destroying it; instead ending the ludicrous and polluting long-distance import of goods made in sweatshops on the other side of the world.

If right wingers are concerned about de-industrialising left wingers, they might look to history and explain why it was the Communist Soviet Union that undertook perhaps the most rapid and massive programme of industrialisation in history, whilst Marxism itself is predicated on the development of an industrial proletariat. By contrast, in recent decades the right wing neoliberal governments in the UK and USA have led the way in shutting down a lot of industrial manufacturing in their countries in favour instead of big multinationals shifting industry overseas to countries with low wage, low safety and insecure protection for workers.

There was always something about Maggie...

This conundrum aside, the right wing's lack of historical awareness in their paper-thin claims is also evident in their ignorance of who was the first major British politician to raise the issue of global warming. It was that wild-eyed Red Menace, Margaret Thatcher, UK Prime Minister from 1979 to 1990. Now, she was/is a scientist by qualification and pre-political profession, so it may well be that, along with almost every other scientist on the planet, Maggie was in fact co-opted into the vast left wing conspiracy to promulgate climate change and use it as a means of de-industrialising Britain: personally, I always thought her economic policies did a pretty good job of that without needing global warming, but who knows?

I have to say, if she was a sort of British Manchurian Candidate, Maggie Thatcher has to have been the most effective socialist sleeper agent of all time. Objectively, she must have been in such a deep sleep that she never actually woke up. Perhaps, rather, she was hypnotised when she spoke to the United Nations in 1990, warning that 

"... the threat to our world comes not only from tyrants and their tanks. It can be more insidious though less visible. The danger of global warming is as yet unseen, but real enough for us to make changes and sacrifices, so that we do not live at the expense of future generations.

In recent years, we have been playing with the conditions of the life we know on the surface of our planet. We have cared too little for our seas, our forests and our land. We have treated the air and the oceans like a dustbin. We have come to realise that man's activities and numbers threaten to upset the biological balance which we have taken for granted and on which human life depends.

We must remember our duty to Nature before it is too late.

Promises are easy. Action is more difficult. For our part, we have worked out a strategy which sets us on the road to achieving the target. We propose ambitious programmes both to promote energy efficiency and to encourage the use of cleaner fuels.

We now require, by law, that a substantial proportion of our electricity comes from sources which emit little or no carbon dioxide, and that includes a continuing important contribution from nuclear energy.

Many of the precautionary actions that we need to take would be sensible in any event. It is sensible to improve energy efficiency and use energy prudently; it's sensible to develop alternative and sustainable and sensible ... it's sensible to improve energy efficiency and to develop alternative and sustainable sources of supply; it's sensible to replant the forests which we consume; it's sensible to re-examine industrial processes; it's sensible to tackle the problem of waste. I understand that the latest vogue is to call them ‘no regrets’ policies. Certainly we should have none in putting them into effect.

We are, as the poet said, in symmetry with nature. To keep that precious balance, we need to work together for our environment. The United Kingdom will work with all of you and all the world besides in this cause—to save our common inheritance for generations yet to come."

This call to action was part of a speech to the Second World Climate Change Conference in Geneva in November 1990 and echoed sentiments she had voiced in speeches over the previous two to three years. It's importance was overshadowed by the crisis that was engulfing her collapsing Premiership, which was to come to an end shortly afterwards. Only in 2003 did she ever suggest any contrary views and then only in a rather rambling diatribe pitched mainly at the disputes raging between her devotees (who had adopted climate scepticism as an ideological cri de coeur for a non-interventionist state) and (slightly) more liberal elements in the Tory Party.

Greens disagree profoundly with Thatcher's economics, which deregulated markets and encouraged the conditions which have led to an ever upwards spiral in global greenhouse gas emissions; nearly all would also disagree with her support for nuclear power as a useful, safe or efficient alternative to carbon fuels; but none would disagree with her analysis or her apparent call to action on global warming. To be fair, she called for further research - which has been done and has done nothing but confirm her analysis and fears for the future. And in the 22 years since, both warming and emissions have continued upwards. 

So, Daily Mail readers, Mr Delingpole, UKIP leader Farage and all the other right wingers who laud Thatcher as your role model, inspiration and guru, if you won't listen to the Greens, perhaps you might take some time to read Thatcher's speech - in full here. And then ask yourselves, if global warming really is a load of Bolshevik propaganda and part of some bizarre conspiracy too fantastical for even a Dan Brown novel, how on earth did we manage to get Margaret Thatcher on board the vanguard of revolution?

Nothing Wrong...Really.. part 349

"If we do not exert the right of eating our neighbour, it is because we have other means of making good cheer"

                                                                                        - Voltaire, Candide, Chapter 16

Denial

Wisdom may not quite entirely lie with the gloomy; but the continued denial of global warming, not by scientists, but by a range of right-wing politicians and their profit-seeking corporate sponsors has reached Panglossian levels of delusion as, this year, more and more climate extremes are being reached and records broken. The results are devastating communities across the planet by fire and flood, severely damaging natural resources and pushing the price of food significantly upwards as the US grain belt is devastated by drought unprecedented in 80 years - just a year after Russia suffered similarly.

NASA, no left-wing conspiracy, has published charts this week showing how the summer ice melt in the Arctic has reached unprecedented levels: most observers are now expecting an ice-free Arctic in summertime by 2020 if not earlier. This is already affecting the weather in northern Europe, with increasing rainfall and gales as colder oceans whip up storms unknown in the region in human times. Yet again, the Gulf Stream "conveyor" which has traditionally kept Britain milder than similar areas at our geographic latitude, may be slowing as cooler northern waters, chilled by melting ice, drive the warmer waters and air from the south-west away.

Arctic summer ice 1984

Arctic ice cover last week

The NASA website can be accessed here. 

Yet, even at the highest levels of political life, climate change denial remains widespread: Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney has mocked President Obama's commitments to tackle global warming thus: "President Obama promised to slow the rise of the oceans and to heal the planet. My promise is to help you and your family."  His words deny the reality that should strike the heart of any loving parent stone cold - that, if not in their own lifetimes then certainly in the lifetimes of their children global warming, if unchecked, threatens to overwhelm our biosystems: their offspring may trade inaction now for a long, lingering farewell to any sort of civilised way of life.

Yet Obama, for all his emissions of promises and commitments to curb carbon emissions has presided over a massive expansion in fracking for dirty coal and gas to the extent that the US is now energy independent for the first time and private investment in research and development of renewable sources of energy is plunging (more evidence of how the market system can not deliver truly green solutions). Carbon and other greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise unabated across the world.

And, behind all this, misinforming, misleading and ripping off the bewildered public, mass media continues to proselytise for us all carrying on as if nothing is wrong, as if the party never needs to stop - those who warn the house is on fire are decried as hair-shirted killjoys. As the ice cap melts across the Arctic, rather than sounding a global emergency, politicians from Putin to Palin and corporations from Moscow to Dallas are rubbing their oily palms with glee at the prospect of new fields of carbon energy opening up to them. 

In his satire, "Candide", 18th century French philosopher Voltaire has the main character reject the eternal optimism of his teacher's belief that the "all is for the best in the best of all worlds" somehow follows naturally - instead, we need to take responsibility and act ourselves: "we must cultivate our garden".

Yet, as multinationals tear down our forests and rip open ever new fissures to drill and frack for dirty energy, our garden is distinctly wilting and barren in many places. But still it is the words not of Candide, but his Professor Pangloss, that echo in endless, selfishly complacent denial of reality: "Troubles are just the shadows in a beautiful picture."

Better perhaps to heed Candide's own thoughts on the Professor's boundless optimism in the face of the truth:  "It is a mania for saying things are well when one is in hell...I confess that when I consider this globe, or rather this globule, I think that God has abandoned it to some evil creature"