Oh dear George!

George Monbiot is someone that in earlier days I always looked to as a reliabla authority.

However, I have had to radically alter my stance as I have seen him, first embrace nuclear power as a 'solution' to global warming after Fukushima (of all times!), then do a 'mea culpa' on Peak Oil.

Now he is saying that 400 ppm is simply a symbolic number and saying idiotically, that we have to 'retrace our steps' back to 350 ppm – as if there WAS a road back.

I can only conclude that George has lost it. 

Perhaps the secret lies in cognitive dissonance that does not allow George to recognise the true situation and adopt the view that it is possible to 'solve' global warming and preserve civilisation.

Oh dear, George!

Climate milestone is a moment of symbolic significance on road of idiocy

The only way forward is back: to retrace our steps and seek to return atmospheric concentrations to around 350ppm

George Monbiot

the Guardian,

10 May, 2013

The records go back 800,000 years: that’s the age of the oldest fossil air bubbles extracted from Dome C, an ice-bound summit in the high Antarctic. And throughout that time there has been nothing like this. At no point in the pre-industrial record have concentrations of carbon dioxide in the air risen above 300 parts per million. 400 is a figure that belongs to a different era.

The difference between 399 and 400ppm is small, in terms of its impacts on the world’s living systems. But this is a moment of symbolic significance, a station on the Via Dolorosa of environmental destruction. It is symbolic of our collective failure to put the long term prospects of the natural world and the people it supports above immediate self-interest.

The only way forward now is back: to retrace our steps along this road and to seek to return atmospheric concentrations to around 350 parts per million, as the 350.org campaign demands. That requires, above all, that we leave the majority of the fossil fuels which have already been identified in the ground. There is not a government or an energy company which has yet agreed to do so.

Just before the 400-mark was reached, Shell announced that it will go ahead with its plans to drill deeper than any offshore oil operation has gone before: almost three kilometres below the Gulf of Mexico.

A few hours later, Oxford University opened a new laboratory in its department of earth sciences. The lab is funded by Shell. Oxford says that the partnership “is designed to support more effective development of natural resources to meet fast-growing global demand for energy.” Which translates as finding and extracting even more fossil fuel.

The European Emissions Trading Scheme, which was supposed to have capped our consumption, is now, for practical purposes, dead. International climate talks have stalled; governments such as ours now seem quietly to be unpicking their domestic commitments. Practical measures to prevent the growth of global emissions are, by comparison to the scale of the challenge,

almost non-existent.

The problem is simply stated: the power of the fossil fuel companies is too great. Among those who seek and obtain high office are people characterised by a complete absence of empathy or scruples, who will take money or instructions from any corporation or billionaire who offers them, and then defend those interests against the current and future prospects of humanity. This new mark reflects a profound failure of politics, worldwide, in which democracy has quietly been supplanted by plutocracy. Without a widespread reform of campaign finance, lobbying and influence-peddling and the systematic corruption they promote, our chances of preventing climate breakdown are close to zero.