Climate Breakdown

How governments bemoan the problem but keep stoking the fires.

By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 28th September 2013

Already, a thousand blogs and columns insist that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s new report is a rabid concoction of scare stories whose purpose is to destroy the global economy. But it is, in reality, highly conservative.

Reaching agreement among hundreds of authors and reviewers ensures that only the statements which are hardest to dispute are allowed to pass. Even when the scientists have agreed, the report must be tempered in another forge, as politicians question anything they find disagreeable: the new report received 1855 comments from 32 governments(1), and the arguments raged through the night before its launch(2).

In other words, it’s perhaps the biggest and most rigorous process of peer review conducted in any scientific field, at any point in human history.

There are no radical departures in this report from the previous assessment, published in 2007; just a great deal more evidence demonstrating the extent of global temperature rises, the melting of ice sheets and sea ice, the retreat of the glaciers, the rising and acidification of the oceans and the changes in weather patterns(3). The message is both familiar and shattering: “it’s as bad as we thought it was.”

What the report describes, in its dry, meticulous language, is the collapse of the benign climate in which humans have prospered, and the loss of the conditions upon which many other lifeforms depend. Climate change and global warming are inadequate terms for what it reveals. The story it tells is of climate breakdown. This is, or so it seems, a catastrophe we are capable of foreseeing but incapable of imagining. It’s a catastrophe we are singularly ill-equipped to prevent.

The IPCC’s reports attract denial in all its forms: from a quiet turning away – the response of most people – to shrill disavowal. Despite – or perhaps because of – their rigours, the IPCC’s reports attract a magnificent collection of conspiracy theories: the panel is trying to tax us back to the stone age or establish a Nazi/Communist dictatorship in which we are herded into camps and forced to crochet our own bicycles. (And they call the scientists scaremongers …).

In the Mail, the Telegraph and the dusty basements of the internet, today’s report (or a draft leaked a few weeks ago) has been trawled for any uncertainties or refinements that could be used to discredit the process(4,5). The panel reports that on every continent except Antarctica, manmade warming is likely to have made a substantial contribution to the surface temperature(6). So those who feel threatened by the evidence ignore the other continents and concentrate on Antarctica, as proof that climate change caused by fossil fuels can’t be happening.

They make great play of the IPCC’s acknowledgement that there has been a “reduction in surface warming trend over the period 1998–2012”(7), but somehow ignore the fact that the past decade is still the warmest in the instrumental record. They manage to overlook the panel’s conclusion that this slowing of the trend is likely to have been caused by volcanic eruptions, fluctuations in solar radiation and natural variability in the planetary cycle. Were it not for manmade global warming, these factors could have made the world significantly cooler over this period(8). That there has been a slight increase in temperature despite them shows the extraordinary power of the human contribution.

But denial is only part of the problem. More significant is the behaviour of powerful people who claim to accept the evidence but keep stoking the fires. This week the former Irish president Mary Robinson added her voice to a call that some of us have been making for years: the only effective means of preventing climate breakdown is to leave fossil fuels in the ground(9,10). Press any minister on this matter in private and, in one way or another, they will concede the point. Yet no government will act on it.

As if to mark the publication of the new report, the department for business, innovation and skills has now plastered a giant poster across its groundfloor windows: “UK oil and gas: Energising Britain. £13.5bn is being invested in recovering UK oil and gas this year, more than any other industrial sector.” The message couldn’t have been clearer if it had said “up yours.”

This is an example of the way in which all governments collaborate in the disaster they publicly bemoan. They claim to accept the science and to support the intergovernmental panel. They sagely agree with the need to do something to avert the catastrophe it foresees, while promoting the industries that cause it.

It doesn’t matter how many windmills or solar panels or nuclear plants you build if you are not simultaneously retiring fossil fuel production. We need a global programme whose purpose is to leave most coal and oil and gas reserves in the ground, while developing new sources of power and reducing the amazing amount of energy we waste.

But, far from doing so, governments everywhere are still seeking to squeeze every drop out of their own reserves, while trying to secure access to other people’s. As more accessible reservoirs are emptied, energy companies exploit the remotest parts of the planet, bribing and bullying governments to allow them to break open unexploited places: from the deep ocean to the melting Arctic. And the governments who let them do it weep sticky black tears over the state of the planet.

www.monbiot.com

References:

1. http://www.climatechange2013.org/ipcc-process/

2. http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/sep/26/ipcc-climate-report-slow-progress

3. http://www.climatechange2013.org/images/uploads/WGIAR5-SPM_Approved27Sep2013.pdf

4. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2420783/Worlds-climate-scientists-confess-Global-warming-just-QUARTER-thought–computers-got-effects-greenhouse-gases-wrong.html

5. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/climatechange/10310712/Top-climate-scientists-admit-global-warming-forecasts-were-wrong.html

6. Page 13, Summary for Policy Makers. http://www.climatechange2013.org/images/uploads/WGIAR5-SPM_Approved27Sep2013.pdf

7. Page 10.

8. http://www.climatecodered.org/2013/09/is-global-warming-in-hiatus-not-if-you.html

9. http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/sep/23/fossil-fuel-reserves-left-in-ground

10. https://www.monbiot.com/2007/12/11/rigged/