I wouldn't be getting my hopes up. The climate change monster is out of the cage, nothing is going to happen - and words are cheap.
Kerry Rips Climate Change Deniers as 'Flat Earthers'
Says the science is undeniable, warming is 'most fearsome' WMD.
16
February, 2014
John
Kerry delivered an urgent call to action on global warming today,
calling it the "most fearsome" WMD we face, and sternly
backhanding those who don't believe climate change is happening as
"flat Earthers." "The science is unequivocal,"
Kerry said, "and those who refuse to believe it are simply
burying their heads in the sand. We don't have time for a meeting
anywhere of the Flat Earth Society." He didn't exactly tone it
down from there, as the AP reports, telling his Indonesian audience
that, "This city, this country, this region, is really on the
front lines of climate change. It's not an exaggeration to say that
your entire way of life here is at risk."
Kerry
pivoted to hit "big companies" that won't spend money to go
green, and "extreme ideologues" who "compete with
scientific facts." Kerry's speech comes at the tail end of an
Asian tour in which he wrangled an agreement with China to work
together with the US to curtail greenhouse and vehicle emissions, as
well as improve the energy efficiency of buildings
Climate
change: time for the sceptics to put up or shut up
If
climate change sceptics have a coherent explanation for the events we
are witnessing, it's time they held an international conference and
told us what they believe
Say
I were to ask you to prove that the dinosaurs were wiped out when an
asteroid collided with the Earth 66m years ago, in what is now
snappily called the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event
So
you would quote more evidence, such as the presence in the K-Pg layer
of iridium, an element rare on Earth but not in asteroids, as well as
the altered state of quartz, which can only be made under extremely
high pressure, such as is caused by a huge impact of a 10km asteroid.
You would mention the long darkness when only ferns grew and the fact
that the seas were emptied of all but the most tenacious species.
Ah,
but this is still all very hypothetical, the sceptic would say, at
which point you might give up and tell him, yes, a spacecraft might
have visited Earth and exterminated 75% of the world's species, but
you're going with the best available evidence. The sceptic would walk
away, satisfied that he had achieved a draw, not from the merit of
his argument, but simply because he had not let you convince him.
This
is where we are with the climate
change
deniers. The absolute proof of manmade global warming is unlikely to
arrive until it is too late and so the deniers are scrupulously
indulged with equal time in the argument, where, taking the part of
Little
Britain's
wheelchair user Andy to our Lou, nothing is ever good enough for
them.
They
are always the sniping antagonists, rarely, if ever, standing up to
say: we believe in the following facts and here is our research. It
is a risk-free strategy – at least for the moment – that comes
almost exclusively from the political right and is, as often as not,
incentivised by simple capitalist gain. Hearing Lord Lawson argue
with the impeccably reasonable climate scientist Sir Brian Hoskins on
the BBC Today
programme last week, I finally boiled over. It is surely now time for
the deniers to make their case and hold an international conference,
where they set out their scientific stall, which, while stating that
the climate is fundamentally chaotic, provides positive, underlying
evidence that man's activity has had no impact on sea and atmosphere
temperatures, diminishing icecaps and glaciers, rising sea levels and
so on.
Until
such a conference is held and people such as Lawson, Lord Monckton,
Christopher Booker, Samuel Brittan and Viscount Ridley – names that
begin to give you some idea of the demographic – are required to
provide the proof of their case, rather than feeding off that of
their opponents, they should be treated with mild disdain. I don't
say deniers should be banned from media outlets, as the website
Reddit has attempted to do, but just that there should be agreement
that they must now qualify, with argument and facts, for the balanced
coverage they receive in such places as the BBC.
I
believe so passionately in the Natural Causes Climate Change
Conference (the NCCCC, perhaps) that the fee for this column is
offered to start the ball rolling. And I will be the first to buy a
ticket, because the deniers' case has about a tenth of the strength
of the warmists' case and I want to see them flounder, as all the
scientific guns are trained on them. Of course this will not happen –
why would someone such as Lawson exchange the comfortable position of
ringside critic for the roll of protagonist? But for him and the rest
of the deniers, a failure to put up will soon mean they have to shut
up, simply because no one is listening.
With
each new freak weather event, they look more and more superfluous to
the debate about how we survive the 21st century.
For
the moment, however, they have a disproportionate influence because
they've created the illusion that this is a finely balanced
discussion where a person can reasonably support either side. They
empower a certain amount of stupidity, laziness, selfishness and
ignorance in the minds of many, and I hope some of the younger
deniers, though few, live to acknowledge responsibility.
I
mentioned that most deniers come from the right and it is true the
uninterrupted business of capitalism, which often entails waste of
resources and energy, is a priority, but there is something deeper
that explains why there are so few deniers from the left and that is
to do with conservative mind. In his 1956 essay "On Being
Conservative", the philosopher Michael Oakeshott wrote that the
man of conservative temperament is "not in love with what is
dangerous and difficult; he is unadventurous; he has no impulse to
sail uncharted seas. What others plausibly identify as timidity, he
recognises in himself as rational prudence. He eyes the situation in
terms of its propensity to disrupt the familiarity of the features of
his world".
This
is so perceptive about the conservative instinct and I think it
explains the reluctance among many sane people to come to grips with
the enormous implications of manmade climate change: the radical
actions we must take to avert further rises and how we should adapt
our societies and economic systems to cope with extreme weather
events associated with even the tiniest temperature rise, which are
now agreed by both sides.
To
suspend hostilities for a moment, it seems to me that both sides
should start by considering the undeniable waste of energy in British
cities, where office lights shine through the night and supermarkets
pump out hot air at open entrances and cold air in their freezer
sections. Energy saving and a huge insulation programme might prevent
the construction of more wasteful wind turbines, some of which, in
the extreme weather of last week, burst into flames or had to be shut
down.
We
have to come to some agreement soon or the deniers won't be the only
dinosaurs.
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