Johann Hari
Columnist for the London Independent
Posted: August 27, 2010 08:29 AM This Is the Hottest Year Ever, and the Climate Catastrophe Has Begun Thank god man-made global warming was proven to be a hoax. Just
imagine what the world might have looked like now if those conspiring
scientists had been telling the truth. No doubt NASA would be telling
us that this year is now, so far, the hottest since humans began
keeping records. The weather satellites would show thateven when heat
from the sun significantly dipped earlier this year, the world still
got hotter. Russia's vast forests would be burning to the ground in
the fiercest drought they have ever seen, turning the air black in
Moscow, killing 15,000 people, and forcing foreign embassies to
evacuate. Because warm air holds more water vapor, the world's storms
would be hugely increasing in intensity and violence -- drowning one
fifth of Pakistan, and causing giant mudslides in China. The world's ice sheets would be sloughing off massive melting chunks
four times the size of Manhattan.The cost of bread would be soaring
across the world as heat shriveled the wheat crops. The increased
carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would be fizzing into the oceans,
making them more acidic and so killing 40 percent of the phytoplankton
that make up the irreplaceable base of the oceanic food chain. The
denialists would be conceding at last that everything the climate
scientists said would happen -- with their pesky graphs and studies
and computers -- came to pass. This is all happening today, except for that final stubborn step. It's
hard to pin any one event on man-made global warming: There were
occasional freak weather events before we started altering the
atmosphere, and on their own, any of these events could be just
another example. But they are, cumulatively, part of a plain pattern
where extreme weather is occurring "with greater frequency and in many
cases with greater intensity" as the temperature soars, as the US
National Climatic Data Center puts it. This is exactly what climate
scientists have been warning us man-made global warming will look
like, to the letter. Ashen-faced, they add that all this is coming
after less than one degree celsius of global warming since the
Industrial Revolution. We are revving up for as much as five degrees
more this century. Yet as the evidence of global warming becomes ever clearer, the
momentum to stop it has died. The Copenhagen climate summit
evaporated, Barack Obama has given up on passing any climate change
legislation, Hu Jintao is heaving even more coal, David Cameron has
shot his huskies, and even sweet liberal Canada now has a government
determined to pioneer a fuel -- tar sands -- that causes three times
more warming than oil. True, the victims are starting to see the
connections. The Russian President Dmitri Medvedev has been opposed to
meaningful action on global warming, until he found the smoke-choked
air in the Kremlin hard to breathe. But if we wait until every leader
can taste the effects of warming in their mouths, the damage will be
irreparable. Given the stakes, the reasons why so many people still refuse to
accept the evidence can seem oddly trivial. A common one is: "It
snowed a lot in the US and Britain last year. Where was your warming
then, eh?" But scientific theories are based on patterns, not
individual events. You might know a 90-year-old woman who has smoked a
pack of cigarettes every day of her life and is totally healthy. (I
do.) It doesn't disprove the theory that smoking causes lung cancer.
In the same way, one heavy snowfall doesn't prove anything if it is
part of a wider overall pattern of dramatic warming. And that snow
probably was. While it snowed a lot in a few places, there were at the
very same time harsher, more bitter droughts in many more places --
making it globally the fifth hottest winter ever recorded, according
to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. (All the
others were in the past decade). And that winter is your punchline
proof that warming isn't happening? But the broader public mood, smeared like sunscreen over us all, isn't
active denial. No -- it's the desire to endlessly postpone this issue
for another day. In 1848, a 25-year-old man called Phineas Gage was
working on constructing the American railroads. It was his job to lay
explosives to clear rocks out of the way -- but one day his explosive
went off too soon, and a huge metal rod went through into his skull
and out the other side. Amazingly, he survived -- but his personality
changed. Suddenly, he was incapable of thinking about the future. The
idea of restraining himself was impossible to grasp. If he had an
urge, he would act on it at once. He could only ever live in an
eternal present. As a civilization, we are beginning to look like
Phineas Gage on a planetary scale. Yet scattered among us there is a fascinating group of people who are
offering a path to safety. Every summer since 2006, ordinary British
citizens have built impromptu camps next to some of the most
environmentally-destructive sites in Britain and taken direct action
to shut their pollution down. So far, it has worked: They played a
crucial role in the cancellation of the third runway at Heathrow and a
big new coal power station at Kingsnorth. That's how earlier this week I found myself on a high wooden siege
tower in a camp in the Scottish hills, staring down across a moat
towards the glistening, empty offices of the Royal Bank of Scotland
(RBS). You own this bank: 84 percent of it belongs to the taxpayer
after the bailouts. Yet it is using your money to endanger you by
funding the most environmentally-destructive behavior on earth, like
burning the tar sands. The protesters chose to come here
democratically -- everything at the climate camps is done by
discussion and consensus -- because they have a better idea. Why not
turn it into a Green Investment Bank, transforming Britain into a
global hub for wind, solar and wave power? Why not go from promoting
misery across the world to being a beacon of sanity? So the protesters risked arrest in marching on RBS' offices because
they know the stakes. As Professor Tim Flannery, one of the world's
leading climate scientists, explains: My great fear is that within the next few decades -- it could be next
year, or it could be in fifty years, we don't know exactly when -- we
will trap enough heat close to the surface to our planet to
precipitate a collapse, or partial collapse, of a major ice shelf... I
have friends who work on the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, and they say
[when a collapse happens] you'll hear it in Sydney... Sea levels would
rise pretty much instantaneously, certainly over a few months. We
don't know how much it would rise. It could be ten centimeters, or a
meter. We will have begun a retreat from our coasts... Once you have
started that process, we wouldn't know when the next part of the ice
sheet would collapse, we don't know whether sea level will stabilize.
There's no point of retreat where you can safely go back to... I doubt
whether our global civilization could survive such a blow,
particularly the uncertainty it would bring. Nature doesn't follow political fashion. Global warming may not be hot
today, but the planet is -- hotter than ever. When you stare out over
the wave of Weather of Mass Destruction we are unleashing, who looks
crazy -- the protesters, or the people who have yet to join them? Debunking the deniers : http://www.youtube.com/user/greenman3610
Columnist for the London Independent
Posted: August 27, 2010 08:29 AM This Is the Hottest Year Ever, and the Climate Catastrophe Has Begun Thank god man-made global warming was proven to be a hoax. Just
imagine what the world might have looked like now if those conspiring
scientists had been telling the truth. No doubt NASA would be telling
us that this year is now, so far, the hottest since humans began
keeping records. The weather satellites would show thateven when heat
from the sun significantly dipped earlier this year, the world still
got hotter. Russia's vast forests would be burning to the ground in
the fiercest drought they have ever seen, turning the air black in
Moscow, killing 15,000 people, and forcing foreign embassies to
evacuate. Because warm air holds more water vapor, the world's storms
would be hugely increasing in intensity and violence -- drowning one
fifth of Pakistan, and causing giant mudslides in China. The world's ice sheets would be sloughing off massive melting chunks
four times the size of Manhattan.The cost of bread would be soaring
across the world as heat shriveled the wheat crops. The increased
carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would be fizzing into the oceans,
making them more acidic and so killing 40 percent of the phytoplankton
that make up the irreplaceable base of the oceanic food chain. The
denialists would be conceding at last that everything the climate
scientists said would happen -- with their pesky graphs and studies
and computers -- came to pass. This is all happening today, except for that final stubborn step. It's
hard to pin any one event on man-made global warming: There were
occasional freak weather events before we started altering the
atmosphere, and on their own, any of these events could be just
another example. But they are, cumulatively, part of a plain pattern
where extreme weather is occurring "with greater frequency and in many
cases with greater intensity" as the temperature soars, as the US
National Climatic Data Center puts it. This is exactly what climate
scientists have been warning us man-made global warming will look
like, to the letter. Ashen-faced, they add that all this is coming
after less than one degree celsius of global warming since the
Industrial Revolution. We are revving up for as much as five degrees
more this century. Yet as the evidence of global warming becomes ever clearer, the
momentum to stop it has died. The Copenhagen climate summit
evaporated, Barack Obama has given up on passing any climate change
legislation, Hu Jintao is heaving even more coal, David Cameron has
shot his huskies, and even sweet liberal Canada now has a government
determined to pioneer a fuel -- tar sands -- that causes three times
more warming than oil. True, the victims are starting to see the
connections. The Russian President Dmitri Medvedev has been opposed to
meaningful action on global warming, until he found the smoke-choked
air in the Kremlin hard to breathe. But if we wait until every leader
can taste the effects of warming in their mouths, the damage will be
irreparable. Given the stakes, the reasons why so many people still refuse to
accept the evidence can seem oddly trivial. A common one is: "It
snowed a lot in the US and Britain last year. Where was your warming
then, eh?" But scientific theories are based on patterns, not
individual events. You might know a 90-year-old woman who has smoked a
pack of cigarettes every day of her life and is totally healthy. (I
do.) It doesn't disprove the theory that smoking causes lung cancer.
In the same way, one heavy snowfall doesn't prove anything if it is
part of a wider overall pattern of dramatic warming. And that snow
probably was. While it snowed a lot in a few places, there were at the
very same time harsher, more bitter droughts in many more places --
making it globally the fifth hottest winter ever recorded, according
to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. (All the
others were in the past decade). And that winter is your punchline
proof that warming isn't happening? But the broader public mood, smeared like sunscreen over us all, isn't
active denial. No -- it's the desire to endlessly postpone this issue
for another day. In 1848, a 25-year-old man called Phineas Gage was
working on constructing the American railroads. It was his job to lay
explosives to clear rocks out of the way -- but one day his explosive
went off too soon, and a huge metal rod went through into his skull
and out the other side. Amazingly, he survived -- but his personality
changed. Suddenly, he was incapable of thinking about the future. The
idea of restraining himself was impossible to grasp. If he had an
urge, he would act on it at once. He could only ever live in an
eternal present. As a civilization, we are beginning to look like
Phineas Gage on a planetary scale. Yet scattered among us there is a fascinating group of people who are
offering a path to safety. Every summer since 2006, ordinary British
citizens have built impromptu camps next to some of the most
environmentally-destructive sites in Britain and taken direct action
to shut their pollution down. So far, it has worked: They played a
crucial role in the cancellation of the third runway at Heathrow and a
big new coal power station at Kingsnorth. That's how earlier this week I found myself on a high wooden siege
tower in a camp in the Scottish hills, staring down across a moat
towards the glistening, empty offices of the Royal Bank of Scotland
(RBS). You own this bank: 84 percent of it belongs to the taxpayer
after the bailouts. Yet it is using your money to endanger you by
funding the most environmentally-destructive behavior on earth, like
burning the tar sands. The protesters chose to come here
democratically -- everything at the climate camps is done by
discussion and consensus -- because they have a better idea. Why not
turn it into a Green Investment Bank, transforming Britain into a
global hub for wind, solar and wave power? Why not go from promoting
misery across the world to being a beacon of sanity? So the protesters risked arrest in marching on RBS' offices because
they know the stakes. As Professor Tim Flannery, one of the world's
leading climate scientists, explains: My great fear is that within the next few decades -- it could be next
year, or it could be in fifty years, we don't know exactly when -- we
will trap enough heat close to the surface to our planet to
precipitate a collapse, or partial collapse, of a major ice shelf... I
have friends who work on the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, and they say
[when a collapse happens] you'll hear it in Sydney... Sea levels would
rise pretty much instantaneously, certainly over a few months. We
don't know how much it would rise. It could be ten centimeters, or a
meter. We will have begun a retreat from our coasts... Once you have
started that process, we wouldn't know when the next part of the ice
sheet would collapse, we don't know whether sea level will stabilize.
There's no point of retreat where you can safely go back to... I doubt
whether our global civilization could survive such a blow,
particularly the uncertainty it would bring. Nature doesn't follow political fashion. Global warming may not be hot
today, but the planet is -- hotter than ever. When you stare out over
the wave of Weather of Mass Destruction we are unleashing, who looks
crazy -- the protesters, or the people who have yet to join them? Debunking the deniers : http://www.youtube.com/user/greenman3610
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