Monbiot: The Climate Crisis has Arrived – but the Media are Keeping it Secret

/ August 5, 2016

6ad9a-georgesmonbiot

Guest essay by Eric Worrall

George Monbiot, a prominent Guardian Environmental Reporter, has accused the “corrupt” media establishment of not telling anyone that the world just ended.

The climate crisis is already here – but no one’s telling us

What is salient is not important. What is important is not salient. The media turns us away from the issues that will determine the course of our lives, and towards topics of brain-melting irrelevance.

This, on current trends, will be the hottest year ever measured. The previous record was set in 2015; the one before in 2014. Fifteen of the 16 warmest years have occurred in the 21st century. Each of the past 14 months has beaten the global monthly temperature record. But you can still hear people repeating the old claim, first proposed by fossil fuel lobbyists, that global warming stopped in 1998.

Arctic sea ice covered a smaller area last winter than in any winter since records began. In Siberia, an anthrax outbreak is raging through the human and reindeer populations because infected corpses locked in permafrost since the last epidemic in 1941 have thawed. India has been hammered by cycles of drought and flood, as withering heat parches the soil and torches glaciers in the Himalayas. Southern and eastern Africa have been pitched into humanitarian emergencies by drought. Wildfires storm across America; coral reefs around the world are bleaching and dying.

Throughout the media, these tragedies are reported as impacts of El Niño: a natural weather oscillation caused by blocks of warm water forming in the Pacific. But the figures show that it accounts for only one-fifth of the global temperature rise. The El Niño phase has now passed, but still the records fall.

…

To pretend that newspapers and television channels are neutral arbiters of such matters is to ignore their place at the corrupt heart of the establishment. At the US conventions, to give one small example, the Washington Post, the Atlantic and Politico were paid by the American Petroleum Institute to host a series of discussions, at which climate science deniers were represented. The pen might be mightier than the sword, but the purse is mightier than the pen.

Why should we trust multinational corporations to tell us the truth about multinational corporations? And if they cannot properly inform us about the power in which they are embedded, how can they properly inform us about anything?

If humanity fails to prevent climate breakdown, the industry that bears the greatest responsibility is not transport, farming, gas, oil or even coal. All of them can behave as they do, shunting us towards systemic collapse, only with a social licence to operate. The problem begins with the industry that, wittingly or otherwise, grants them this licence: the one for which I work.

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/aug/03/climate-crisis-media-relegates-greatest-challenge-hurtle-us-collapse-planet

The problem is George, your Climate Crisis was never going to be newsworthy. No “Day After Tomorrow” superstorms, no surge in bad weather, no collapsing nations or mass migrations to polar regions. Your friends in New Zealand can’t even convince the courts they found a climate refugee.

Even if a few degrees of warming did happen, and thats a big if, the sad truth is it won’t change anything – nobody will notice. At most a few people might turn their air conditioners up a notch in the warm months.

You’ve blown it George – you and your friends are claiming the climate crisis is upon us. But nobody cares – because nothing bad is happening, except in the fevered imaginations of climate zealots like yourself.

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331 thoughts on “Monbiot: The Climate Crisis has Arrived – but the Media are Keeping it Secret”

    • “George Monbiot, a prominent Guardian Environmental Reporter,”
      The reality is that your stupid Chicken Little,we are in big trouble crap is stale worn out propaganda that has not been supported by the data. You have been whining for more than 20 years now yet manage to be alive and well despite that the world according to YOU little George is gonna die soon………. for 20 years.
      The Guardian is a cesspool of warmist bull crap that is so laughably wrong so many times, that I do not bother reading their crap anymore, as I am tired at finding obvious errors,lies and omission in their overt scaremongering articles. They are an excellent example of the ugly side of the human being,since they promote a clear paternalistic big government agenda, or the purpose of herding people into obeying the select warmist leaders and their respective authoritarian governments.
      Amazed that anyone wants to continue reading that bird cage liner quality anymore. Why throw away your birthright as FREE individual human being to others,who then exploit you for their own sinister purposes?

      • If you love a good conspiracy (and who doesn’t?) check out who’s on the board of The Scott Trust…which ‘owns’ the left leaning, loss making Guardian.
        Anthony Salz
        Joined The Scott Trust in 2009. Anthony is an executive vice chairman of Rothschild and director of NM Rothschild & Sons Ltd.
        Ole Jacob Sunde
        Joined The Scott Trust in 2015. He is the founder and chair of Formuesforvaltning AS private bank.
        Fascinating to think the UK Left is being fed its regular diet of eco alarmism, political correctness and ‘anti establishment’ attitude by….big Bankers!

      • “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”
        H. L. Mencken

      • ” The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”
        H. L. Mencken

      • It’s already an accepted practice in Illinois public administration for decades now, A.D.. Except “fixing it” has a slightly different connotation. But I think Mr. Obama has applied it in the fashion he learned it here.

    • If it has finally arrived where is it hiding ? The media can keep it a secret; well actually they are the last ones to tell a secret to. But so far as I know, they can’t actually hide something that is as plain as your face. So where is it ?
      I think Moonbat is bonkers.
      g

  3. Seriously? The MSM that will put globalwarmingclimatechange into almost EVERY story it can is HIDING the “facts”?
    This guy knows even less about his own industry than he does about science.

    • And poll after poll shows the public just doesn’t care. That’s because they see nothing about the weather has changed.

        • Barbara commented: “…Carbon Tax Initiative Goes To November Ballot…..”
          “I-732 would impose a carbon tax of $25 per metric ton of emissions from fossil fuels such as gasoline, coal and natural gas. Meanwhile, it would lower the state sales tax by one point, virtually eliminate business taxes for manufacturers and provide rebates for working families.” I bet it passes.

      • Not true. I care a lot. This has been one of the coolest summers I remember, and I hate to think what the winter is going to be like.
        The idea that this is ‘THE WARMEST YEAR EVAH!’ is simply laughable. We’ve barely had a summer worth the name here.

      • Not true. I care a lot. This has been one of the coolest summers I remember, and I hate to think what the winter is going to be like.
        The idea that this is ‘THE WARMEST YEAR EVAH!’ is simply laughable. We’ve barely had a summer worth the name here.

        Hence the problem with “global temperature” It gives a false impression to the ignorant.

    • Well, there is a reason we nicknamed this guy Moonbat.
      Not only does the Media scream up global warming every chance it gets. Not only are Moonbat’s seeming facts produced by considerable alteration of the actual records or taking only the most alarmist of the 3 main temperature records, not only is this heavily dependent on a current El Niño. Worse, the screaming HAS severely damaged the coal and fracking industries, leading to a crash in the entire global economy.
      The alarmists have sensed CORRECTLY that something serious is going on; it is NOT getting better and it IS getting worse. Therefore they are frustrated beyond words. The catch is that they have the wrong problem. The globe isn’t really warming, and it would be a good thing if it were. The rising Keeling Curve is also a very good thing in itself. It causes both plants and animals (including people here) to thrive. That masks the real problem.
      Our enemies are not mostly scientists, as we have noticed over and over again. They are intuitives. Mother Earth (the biosphere) is HURTING and they aren’t getting that across. It is damned hard to convince facts-oriented people with lies.
      The REAL problem is the near STERILIZATION of the world’s soils. The dead organisms have decayed to water vapor (which isn’t noticed) and carbon dioxide, which is the real source of the Keeling Curve. That curve has not flattened out with less fossil fuels because the poisoning of the soils has increased. Most of the CO2 is coming from the deaths of tiny organisms. We have gotten away with it so far because of fertilizers including carbon dioxide, but ultimately, the situation is not sustainable. It is going to crash eventually.
      Killing most of the insects and bacteria seemed harmless after Pasteur’s Germ Theory, but 21st century studies have shed a new light on the tiniest life forms. We cannot maintain our health without them.
      The situation could indeed become a catastrophe if the intuitives never match up their sense of impending doom with real world facts. But I am not too worried. The Paris Treaty fingered the actual solution: something called Regenerative agriculture. And that can heal things awesomely fast.

      • Hypocritical of them to mention AGW when so many people flew into Rio, there were plenty of fireworks and they were using plenty of power to light up the stadium and sports venues.
        Is Brazil expecting to be classified as one of the ‘developing’ nations who will get a handout from the developed nations who will be required to pay out for their climate crimes?

      • John, you got it. Of course Brazil is a developing nation expecting to receive billions from the climate fund which the elites can steal.

  4. I had to chuckle when he infers that the media controls what people think. This guy has some ego!

  5. I kind of feel sorry for the author & his alarmist friends. I mean , their glass isn’t even 1/2 empty – it is more like 9/10ths empty – always. What a depressing world they live in.
    Like the song says “Don’t worry, be happy ” 😀

      • Actually, he exhibits a lot of the symptoms of Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). Like all BPDers, if that’s what he has, he can’t stop doing it, nor will he ever be able to. The alien living in his brain won’t let him.

      • He’s a reverse masochist. He enjoys other people’s suffering.
        Perhaps a lazy sadist – he doesn’t want to go to the effort of actually making other people suffer – just watch their suffering.

      • Tom Halla,
        What is it called when you take delight in making up crap that predicts the future suffering of others based on nothing but conjecture, assumption, and flawed methodologies?
        Social Science. 🙂

    • Spot on Jeff L. When this piece appeared I pointed out that La Niña was on the way and possibly a Maunder Minimum, the planet will cool so Monbiot should be happy (l used that exact phrase). My comment was deleted by the mods because it did not meet the Grauniad’s community standards. When a fellow commenter remarked that a lot of comments were being removed I replied to him that my comment about La Niña and a cooler sun had been removed, my reply was deleted because it did not meet the Grauniad’s community standards. Do NOT bring science into a global warming piece in that newspaper – they absolutely hate it!

    • Jeff L, Negative thinking is just another form of bondage of the soul. These folks might not even realize that the positive thought of adaptation is what brought our species this far.

  6. Yes. And the space alien crisis is already here, but no one’s telling us.
    It’s a travesty.

  7. “Why should we trust multinational corporations to tell us the truth about multinational corporations?”
    Why should we trust progressives with an agenda to tell us the truth about progressives with an agenda? As they have been repeatedly caught in lies, why should we trust them about anything at all?

    • Also-
      “The media turns us away from the issues that will determine the course of our lives, and towards topics of brain-melting irrelevance.”
      Someone needs to tell George very gently that he works in multinational media. Just ensure there are no sharp or blunt instruments present.

    • I’m afraid that multinational corporations will be the justification for global government.

      • Um, you’d rather trust a multinational corporation to tell you the truth? I have this lovely bridge…

      • Tony, nice straw-man you have there. I see nothing in Pop’s comment that remotely suggest he trusts multinational corporations. It is clear he does not trust the establishment of global government. Would you prefer a global government that could, on a whim, take your wealth, your liberty, your life, to a corporation that must get you to buy something to survive?
        I trust neither, but I fear big government more. I believe Pop feels about the same.

      • “Would you prefer a global government that could, on a whim, take your wealth, your liberty, your life, to a corporation that must get you to buy something to survive?”
        Now that’s a straw-man. Nicely played FB.
        Frankly I’d rather take my chances with an elected body than a mob of banksters, oligarchs and robber barons who are at this very point in time fleecing every one of us.

    • Gotta laugh. I thought the Left hated multinationals because of all that nasty, wasteful competition between multinational corporations?
      And who does he think makes all the windmills and solar panels? And who will make the carbon capture and other silly ideas?
      Just a braindead claim.

    • They need the “carbon tax” to bail out Obamacare–which is crashing and burning as we speak.

      • Assuming your contention is correct (an assumption requiring the belief that climate quakes even care about the fate of Obamacare) both fires will continue to grow.

  9. That the world ended and no one bothered to report it has HILARIOUS consequences for Warming Alarmism and its claims! For example, it’s funny how he pulls the “el Niño accounts for only one fifth” of the climate changes out of his butt. This is where most guesstimated Alarmist figures come from.

    • Given the “record” temperatures are only records by the odd hundredth of a degree, 1/5 of that is still …….. all, in fact all of it is very little indeed.

  10. I don’t need a model to tell me that these people are all crazy, just look around.

  11. “Why should we trust multinational corporations to tell us the truth about multinational corporations?”

    But we should trust the governments to tell us the truth about governments? E.g. “Who benefits from carbon (sic) credits?”

  12. Wait…something frozen in Siberia since 1941 has only just now thawed? How could something freeze, and stay frozen for 75 years in such a catastrophically warming climate?

    • At least this conveys the message about deadly soil-organisms. Remember the anthrax affair in the U.S. a few years ago?

      • 2005 was a bad year for anthrax outbreaks in US livestock.
        Weather and soil conditions in some areas of the U.S. lead to severe livestock losses from anthrax.
        The Anthrax spores can survive in the soil for decades and heavy rain or construction-related disturbances can bring the Anthrax spores to the surface.
        More information on this with internet search.
        Burning the dead animals is one way to control the spread of Anthrax.
        Found one case of human gastro-intestinal Anthrax in the U.S. in 2009.

      • Yes. Of course it does.
        We need to be better than childish name-calling in an attempt to close out debate.

      • No,because Skeptics are not denying a warming trend from the late 1600’s and not denying that climate changes. Most skeptics accept some warm forcing CO2 effect and have said so at least 100,000 times on the internet.
        People who are called warmists, because they focus solely on warming only,ignoring cooling trends,record cold and snow,so on. They ignore anything that does not support their belief. That is a mark of a cult,focusing on a set belief that can not be abrogated no matter what.
        Skeptics try to see the whole picture,the warming and cooling trends. While Warmists ignore large areas of climatology for the singular purpose of trying to prop up a bogeyman that has amazed many here. That CO2 is the cause of most or all of the warming since 1600’s? or from 1850’s? or 1920? or 1979?….
        Warmists in general are the true,”deniers” since they deliberately overlook a lot of contrary evidence and facts,that doesn’t support the whole AGW conjecture. A pseudoscience cabal is what characterizes most members of the warmist group since they make many bald faced lies,deliberate deceptive claims,attack many reputable scientists personally with bogus claims and criminal allegations,for the singular purpose of trying to overcome their good science based claims.
        It is time for warmists to grow up and drop the endless chicken little stupidity. Embrace the Scientific Method again,run with reproducible research that stands the challenges against it.

  16. “In Siberia, an anthrax outbreak is raging through the human and reindeer populations because infected corpses locked in permafrost since the last epidemic in 1941 have thawed …”.
    =================================
    There’s a clue there George.

    • He won’t look that closely. That clue is not pointing at anything he wants to see so he won’t see it. [Hint, George: It must have been at least as warm back then in 1941 as it is now. Got it yet?]

    • I posted above, and I really do think he has Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). It comes across as clueless but, in actual fact, they see things in black and white. You’re either with them or against them. Anyone against them is deleted, by himself, or his Grauniad grunts.
      Something that is so obviously idiotic (media not pushing the climate fkin crisis narrative) is a way of getting attention from his co-dependents while causing high conflict. It’s classic symptoms.

  17. I think what Mr Monbiot is trying to say is “hey your lying through your teeth concerning the US presidential election cycle why can’t you folks in the media do that for climate change?”

  20. What’s the climate catastrophe equivalent of a fall out shelter? Someone could make millions selling them to these zealots. How about an inflatable 10’X10′ room with a peltier cooling system run off a PV panel?

      • Flyover Bob
        Given amount of electric energy that aluminum production uses, it can’t be green, no way, no how.
        We can call it green though. Why not? Windmills are known to be green, even though they very destructive in many way to environment.

    • A co2 fallout shelter is a small bio-dynamic ginger bread house, solar-panelled roof, walls and floor, wind-powered ice machine churning out Himalayan Glacier Emergency Relief, with a Polar Bear pond and a Mann-hole. And a nice drink, stirred not shaken (to avoid methane release). Burp.

    • ..If you REALLY want to make money, invest in my new portable “Safe Space” for the next generation…it is anti-rhetoric, anti-Global Warming D^nier and of course…safe from REALITY..
      ..Disclaimer…This product consist of a simple black balloon strategically placed upon ones head, thus denying the light of day !! We are not responsible for the extraneous CO2 that collects in said balloon !

    • They could all relocate (those with a morbid fear of 0.5 degree warming and two-inch sea level rise, I mean) to one of these proposed artificial islands; that would solve a whole lot of problems for the whole world. They could christen the artificial island ‘Fantasy Land’ or something similar. Then they could still be afloat and dry when the sea level rises a few inches (if not several centimeters!) in the future. Complete with CO2 fallout shelter. Buy your share now!
      https://ourworld.unu.edu/en/artificial-island-could-be-solution-for-rising-pacific-sea-levels

  21. You were born too late to employ Stalin’s tactics, George. Thanks to technology, too many people now have the ability to discover the immutable truth of things and not the totalitarian’s truth, which you unfailingly preach.

  22. Moonbat doesn’t even have Greenland to rant about anymore
    CLIMATE CHANGE SHOCK: Ice sheet melt caused by heat from Earth’s core NOT global warming
    http://www.express.co.uk/news/science/696717/CLIMATE-CHANGE-SHOCK-Ice-sheet-melt-caused-by-heat-from-Earth-s-core-NOT-global-warming
    THE MASSIVE Greenland ice sheet is being melted as a result of heat emitted from within the Earth, rather than rising atmospheric temperatures, a new NASA study has claimed.
    The US space agency, which uses satellites orbiting the earth to monitor the environment and study climate change, looked at how much the the huge ice sheet was still attached to bed rock underneath.
    For the first time, the agency obtained a series of temperatures from the base of the sheet – the second biggest in the world after that in the Antarctic – and found it was up to tens of degrees warmer at the base than the surface.

  24. Monbiot should spend more time reading and less time writing about such things. Whether or not El Nino is a major or minor player in current record breaking temperatures is still an underdeveloped science, dare I say still in its infancy. His contention that El Nino is only responsible for 1/5th of the heat is pure unsubstantiated poppycock. He’s making it up as he goes along.
    http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/BAMS-D-15-00220.1

    • I like my poppycock pure. It doesn’t catch coming back up like the mixed stuff. This guys stuff is so pure it’s like smoke. One little chuckle and it just disappears.

    • Pam,: “Monbiot should spend more time reading and less time writing”, Pam , not reading, how about educating himself. Reading doesn’t seem to help him much.

    • Of course he’s making it up as he goes along and judging by the opening two sentences (which on their own were quite enough to make me lose the will to live) the Graun is quite happy to pay him by the word.
      However, I did persevere to the end (I trust my CBE for services to tedium is in the post) and have rated this as the most content-free zone I have ever come across and where the Moonbat is concerned that is saying something.
      Apart from a standard of cherry-picking which left me gaping in awesome wonder his ability to distort facts or wave his readers past awkward factoids (like the anthrax bit) would tax the powers of a Jedi Master.
      Truly a wonder of our age. And a pain in the backside!

    • I think there should be a replacement for Godwin…….Anthony Watts Law “if a debate goes on for long enough eventually someone will liken it to a Monty Python sketch”

    • Plus the MSM must have missed the fact that the crisis shifted from the planet is cooling to the planet is warming, to catastrophic man made global warming (CAGW), to the seas are rising and sinking our islands, to the icecaps are melting, to the polar bears are dying from falling out of airplanes, to the children are being blown up by their teachers, to climate breakdown with lord knows how many other crisis we’ve passed through to get here.
      Oh yeah, and every one of them BS.
      Maybe he’s right and the MSM is not doing its job.

  26. “They told us to expect a climate crisis in the second half of this century. But it’s already here.”
    https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/aug/03/climate-crisis-media-relegates-greatest-challenge-hurtle-us-collapse-planet
    The end is nigh, Monbiot. Your end. And you are not a good loser. Thank you for pinning down this statement, so often elusive, that the climate crises has arrived. Not in the year 2100, or constantly moved forwards, like an ever-present spot on a camera lens, no, it is here and now. Great to have this quote, to confront the alarmists with, because so often they shy away from any concrete dateline for this disaster.
    Who can doubt the mighty George?
    Btw; the Guardian link contains these quite illustrative words: “climate-crisis-media-relegates-greatest-challenge-hurtle-us-collapse-planet”
    I’m going to dig a deep hole and wait for the planet to collapse.

    • Looking back on Monbiot’s initial foray into global warming, many years ago, he had apparently visited a village in Uganda, then went back to it a year or two later. On his second trip he found everyone dead, massacred by a neighbouring tribe. The Monbiot immediately put this down to competition for scarce resources because the fertility of the land had been reduced by global warming. (I didn’t say his thought processes were particularly logical).
      Had the Monbiot done a little research he would have found that raids on neighbouring villages, for cattle and women, were a normal part of life in pre-20th century Uganda. You do it to us this week, we’ll do it to you next week. When the British came to rule Uganda they took a dim view of this sort of thing, and suppressed it. After Uganda became independent, the custom was revived. However, instead of bows and arrows and spears, they now used AK-47s, which provide the attackers with a much more efficient means of slaughtering the other side.
      In short, the Monbiot sees what he wants to see, regardless of the facts. I`m sure there is a lengthy psychological term for this, but I can think of it at the moment.

      • As I’ve mentioned twice above, it’s probably Borderline Personality Disorder with support and encouragement for his idiotic lying coming from the well established UK masters of idiotic lying.

  27. The pen might be mightier than the sword, but the purse is mightier than the pen.

    I’m just curious what purse is behind Moonbat’s pen to pen this apocalyptic drivel.

  28. Mother Nature is not cooperating with his vision of the climate apocalypse. Tends to make warmunist believers shriller and shriller. The media is starting not to go along on occaision because they occasionally now report a true fact. Stuff like temperatures falling after El Nino blip, with last 4 months the sharpest 4 month fall since sat records began. Stuff like GBR coral bleaching is a natural symbiont exchange response to changing conditions caused by that same El Nino.
    Guardian’s readership is in freefall. Monbiot yelling Climate Wolf is unlikely to change that. Might even accelerate it. Poor fellow might have to get a haircut and a real job.

  29. Arctic sea ice covered a smaller area last winter than in any winter since records began.

    Lessee here… Earth, 4.5 billion years old or somewhere thereabouts. Cook to North Pole, 1908. Peary to North pole, 1909 (alternates between Peary and Cook getting the nod). Satellite coverage starting in ’78. Glad Monbiot wrote, “since records began.”
    A little maths here (avert thine eyes ye who are averse to numerical prestidigitation).
    4.5 billion… square root of purple… by #blue moons in 1547… carry the 2… plus #angels can dance on the head of a pin… gozinta fourx(average number of big toes) = we don’t know $%#*~&! about Arctic sea ice.
    Get back to me in a few thousand years, George.

    • Still in moderation. Oh well. Makes Monty Python sweeter for the wait.
      [Witch Monty Python? .mod]

      • The Life of Brian. And it is now showing so everything is great. Love that movie. Reminds me of today’s throng following catastrophic climate scientists.

    • Have you noticed Pamela, that walrus or walruses prefer to gather on land rather than on ice. The land is more stable underneath their feet; or whatever it is they have instead of tramplers.
      With a piece of floating ice (it needs to be a piece to have edges to climb out onto it) the ones climbing onto the edges keep breaking the edges off so the piece gets smaller until it won’t hold them anymore. That doesn’t happen when they climb out on land.
      No I know this doesn’t have anything to do with dingbats, but I thought you would find it interesting.
      G

  31. The media is keeping it secret?
    What has he been smoking?
    The Graniaud, BBC, and most of the UK and US media has been pushing the alarmist version for years now. Unfortunately for them, the public have stopped believing their lies.
    As for the crap about being frozen since 1941, has it not occurred to Moonbat why it was not frozen in 1941?

  33. Take a look at our weather in NZ. Covered in snow and freezing. I can’t even ride my motorcycle today and burn lots of lovely fuel. Coldest winter EVA I tell ya.

    • Just like Holdren in the White House Science Office. See, global warming causes warming so children won’t know what snow is—until it causes cooling so children cannot go to school because of too much snow. Now repeat 100 times to memorize. But DO NOT think about it.

    • Can’t snow in NZ, there’s no suitable place to get the water. Never ever snowed at our house on Ponsonby Road.
      You must be drunk or something.
      g

  34. The greens are rather like those evangelical preachers who have proclaimed the date of the Second Coming, and had that date pass. Preaching imminent doom since the late 1960’s gets a bit old when the doom never comes.

    • Paul Erlich still has his job at Stanford University (considered prestigious by ‘the right people’ in the US), despite being constantly wrong about mass starvation (except when caused by politicians who match his ideological vision). Preaching doom is just so much better paying than stating ‘we’re basically okay, if politicians would leave us alone’. A good antidote is Julian Simon.
      Apologies for the multiple parenthetical comments. I promise to quit… at some point.

  35. We , in fact, have measured global temperatures for earlier periods of “non-measurement” and they show several warm periods within written history that were probably warmer than today. “Warmest ever measured” refers to a skimpy time period of less than a 100 years. I notice no mention of “How much” warmer he thinks this year has been, and how does that compare to the estimates of global warming by the IPCC. Here we have the problem of scientific subject being covered by an emotional journalism major. His rejection of a scientific approach is striking.

    • “Warmest ever recorded” is an easy sell to a populace with only about a 6th-grade science education, and most of it propaganda at that!

  36. Is this the George Moonbat who wrote an article about finding a roadkilled squirrel while camping in Wales? He took it back to camp and skinned and cooked and ate it in front of the grossed-out children and then wrote paeans of glowing self-praise to his own manly self-reliance. That George Moonbat? A very sick puppy. I prescribe Zoloft – lots of Zoloft

  37. …The only “Climate Crisis” they are actually worried about is the fact that the majority of the population doesn’t believe their “We Are Doomed” fantasy’s anymore !

  38. The planet is greening up massively and guys like this look the other way because they don’t want to see it.
    The modest warming that has occurred has been beneficial to most life. Not one life, human or animal has perished from breathing the increase in the beneficial gas, CO2. In fact, many more lives are supported by the massive increase in world food production, with great assistance from CO2.
    Many measures of extreme weather have fallen as the result of the beneficial warming of the highest latitudes(coldest places) which has decreased the meridional temperature gradient.
    As an independent operational meteorologist that estimates crop production(yields) and energy use based on real conditions in the real world, growing conditions for crops and plants have continued to get better and better. The last 4 decades of weather and climate have been the best on this planet in the last 1,000 years.
    To suggest a climate crisis is here now, in the midst of this and most measures in our world suggesting otherwise is delusional.
    With regards to the media, I was chief meteorologist on a local television station for 11 years and know a few things about the media. Crisis and sensationalism is what increases ratings, whether it’s a climate crisis, political or something else. This is the main objective in this “for profit” business……to catch the attention of viewers. This is why they do Nielsen ratings for 4 different months a year.
    http://www.nielsen.com/us/en/solutions/measurement/television.html
    Reporting and exaggerating extreme weather and climate in recent years has become so common place in the media, that most viewers wouldn’t be able to tell if there was actually an unprecedented event vs a jazzed up, expected anomaly, that’s always been part of normal variation in extreme climate/weather.
    George must be describing an alternate universe because my experiences in the media, analyzing and forecasting climate/weather, crops and other realms in this universe paint a different picture than he sees.

    • Actually, some misread the greening from CO2 as being due to global warming – spreading of the tropics.
      The power of group think is remarkable

    • The last 4 decades of weather and climate have been the best on this planet in the last 1,000 years.
      How are you determining that?

      • @ 3:19 Mike Maguire argues from a perspective of an “operational meteorologist that estimates crop production(yields)” so I thought of looking at crop yields to see if his view held up. I found a chart here:
        http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/AG.YLD.CREL.KG
        The chart shows world “cereal yield” in kg per hectare. In 1961 the yield was 1,422 while in 2014 it was 3,886 kg/ha. There were some down years reported but the trend from the 60s to the 2010s is positive. Getting data for the previous thousand years would not likely prove Mike wrong – using his point of view.
        Using other measures may be of interest.

      • John, there are one or two other factors that may be affecting food production more than CO2 levels.

  39. “In Siberia, an anthrax outbreak is raging through the human and reindeer populations because infected corpses locked in permafrost since the last epidemic in 1941 have thawed”
    So in the fall/winter of 1941 animals suffering from anthrax died, there corpses fell into liquid water and this liquid water then froze and remained frozen for 76 years or so. This would suggest that the 1941 summer temperature in Siberia was on par, or slightly greater, than that of 2015/16.

  40. Monbiot, “Why should we trust multinational corporations to tell us the truth about multinational corporations?”
    Why should we trust environmental advocacy groups to tell us the truth about the environment?
    Why should we trust biased persons masquerading as reporters to report the truth about the subject of their bias? Here, for example, is evidence of Mr. Monbiot conniving with Michael Mann to attack a “denialist” “disinformation” video.

  41. Whew that was close…. I’m canceling my vacation to Siberia! Good thing George got to me before… well you know.

  42. This is the same Monbiot who wants to return to the Stone Age. He is free to do so. But he wants us to go with him!

  45. “Each of the past 14 months has beaten the global monthly temperature record” – He seems to be clueless about the quickly lowering temps as we shift towards La Nina conditions. How can he make such a blatant untrue statement?
    That and highest temps ever recorded. Sigh…..
    He has no knowledge of historical natural variation in this Holocene apparently.
    Poor clueless person.
    He is most probably frustrated because the majority people just don’t care or care more about their rising energy bills.

    • John Mason
      The way they will do it is declare in about October that 2016 is on track to exceed the temperature of 2015. That is probably the latest it will still ‘look like that’.
      Then, as the average for the year drops below 2015 they will just clam up leaving the last thing anyone hears the estimate.
      This is called ‘managing the message’. Others might call it crafty lying.

  46. There, there George. You sit down and I’ll fetch you a nice cup of tea and a biscuit

  47. George is just feeling left out.
    Gang Green is composed of wanna be dictators and martyrs .
    And individually or combined have the mental capacity of gaseous gangrene.
    Feeling trump reason.
    Members seem unable to reason, perhaps this is a trait of this Cult of Calamitous Climate?

  48. Poor Mr Monbiot – He must have forgotten to put the tinfoil on his head when he left home his morning (presuming he actually left). The space invaders are messing with his thoughts (assuming he has any). Someone send him our sympathy.

    • A tin foil hat doesn’t work except to keep the sun off. It might even make things worse. What you need is a whole tin foil suit of armor with no openings whose largest dimension is larger than a tenth of a wavelength at the highest frequency you want to block. Those darn radio waves can sneak in through the darndest places darn it all.

      • I have found gaps of a quarter of a wavelength or less to provide sufficient protection at all frequencies. Tin foil is, however, getting very difficult to find. Aluminum doesn’t work at all. I can feel it….

  49. Methinx this [Monbiot] is desperate to fill column-inches — for the ever-gullible, lefty, Chicken-Little Alarmist, Guardian readers — with ever-nurturing pablum to requite their paranoia. This stuff is his meal-ticket, without which he’d barely make Janitor.
    I often wonder if the World really *is* due for a major ‘crash’ to restore us all to the Real Issues in Life .. and cleanse ourselves of trivialities such as this irrelevance.
    His sensationalism wd be typical of the supermarket-check-out thumb-throughs, from which one can conclude that, with crap like his, the Guardian is really of that ilk already .

  50. . “Every age has its peculiar folly; some scheme, project, or fantasy into which it plunges, spurred on either by the love of gain, the necessity of excitement, or the mere force of imitation. Failing in these, it has some madness, to which it is goaded by political or religious causes, or both combined.” Charles Mackay, 1841, Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.

  52. As mentioned in posts above the world is greener crops are more plentiful , world hunger in decline, global living standards improving. If that’s what we get when there is a climate crisis bring it on. More power to CO2 !

  56. It was 100 F two weeks ago. It was 110 F thirty years ago. Today, it was 80 F.
    The prophecy is, isn’t, may be true.

  57. Perhaps George should have a heart to heart with Caitlin Moran from The Times-
    http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/subscribe/news/1/index.html?sourceCode=AAWEB_WRE170_a&mode=premium&dest=http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/lifestyle/sa-lifestyle/theres-no-respite-on-the-horizon-for-lefties-so-heres-my-survival-guide/news-story/3bf7f9379993e96c603220ce646e147c&memtype=registered
    Paywalled at my local rag but you get the gist unpleasant facts are getting to Caitlin and Co and they’re coming out big time.

  58. “This, will be, on current trends, the hottest year ever measured.”
    And since when have the years been measured? What has been measured? How was it measured? how were the measurements adjusted? What is the meaning of “…on current trends…”?
    The statement makes no attempt at representing science, but is merely a cheerleader’s chant, or cant.

  59. Just curious as to an explanation for HOW the reindeer got into the permafrost in 1941. Could it be the permafrost had softened after 10 years of hotter-than-now temperatures?
    After all, if the reindeer was simply lying on the ground it would have been eaten or decayed… right? So just how did it get buried into the ice-hard ground in the first place?
    It’s like when you hear the true believers talk about ‘the hottest in 100 years’ or similar – what that tells us is that 100 years ago, it was HOTTER.
    But of course, that’s not what they hear themselves saying – they have a belief that says it only gets hotter and even putting on their anorak to head out in spring will not alter that belief.

  60. Scare alert from Brazil Olympics Opening Ceremony – climate change is going to cause 4 degrees of warming and result in flooding of major cities around the world. So why are they partying?

    • Quite a statement from a country that allowed 100,000s of square miles of rain forest to be clear cut and which is hosting the Olympics in a cesspool of a city.

  61. George has a special place in my mind as one of the greatest purveyors of climate myths and illogic ever to take up space on a newspaper page, and he has had a lot of competition in the 21st Century.
    It is not that George knows nothing, it is that he knows full well that he expressed many time things untrue, and craftily presents his misrepresentations of life in a way so as to have maximum impact on those who he is pretty sure know next to nothing about the subject. When they finish reading, they know even less.
    He is one of the most vociferous on the subject of Himalayan glaciers, even in the piece above. It is his ‘Asian ice story’. Melting glaciers that have been melting for 15,000 years are suddenly doing so solely because of coal combustion and oil furnaces. He believes in miracles I guess. A green religion whose members witness to us by subscription testifying to the many climate miracles that defy all scientific laws. George has claimed so many miraculous things have happened it is a wonder he has not been sainted.
    Just one: if the glaciers melt completely, something that could happen if the next ice age doesn’t start for the next 5-10,000 years, he claims that the Mekong and other major rivers in Asia will dry up due to lack of water. That would be simply miraculous. No other word for it. The annual snowfall in the Himilayan region will melt in spring and run into the streams and creeks and head downhill as usual. Instead of accumulating in an ice reservoir and being released a few centuries later, it will be released the same year it falls. That is what the mountains will be like when the glaciers are gone.
    George has it, in multiple TV programs and innumerable articles, that if the glaciers are not there to delay the annual melt, releasing old water instead of fresh, the major rivers of Asia will literally dry up. In short, with no glaciers in place, rainfall will cease throughout the eastern half of the largest continent for there is no other way his miraculous result could occur. He pretends all the water in the Mekong comes from Nepal, seriously!
    That is nothing less than a claim of a miracle, attributed by him to the supernatural power of CO2, working is metaphysics as a greenhouse gas.
    CAGW is a false religion guided by fanatical believers in the impossible. Guidance on the latest impossible thing is provided weekly by one George Monbiot so that before breakfast each Sunday one can believe a new impossible thing, feel guilty, mentally promise penance in the form of sin-assuaging payments for carbon offsets, and thus indulged, get on with the day.
    Guardian, what and who are you guarding?

    • Al Bore got sainted (Nobel prize) and “The Team” got sainted (Nobel Prize), and Mann and a number of others. The Church, of course, is the infamous Church of Global Warming. I don’t think Moonbat has been sainted yet, but he is working really, really hard.

  62. I figure that since we can now choose our gender, we can also choose our species.
    I personally am going with E.T. I guess I’m actually and “undocumented E.T.” since I don’t have any papers.
    As such, I thought I might be able to now get in on the “Big Oil” gravy train, but it appears to be as elusive as that “book of codewords” that Republicans are said to always use.

  63. “This, will be, on current trends, the hottest year ever measured.”
    What’s ‘hot’ about 14 point something degrees C ?

  64. I think George Monbiot is pretty much out of touch with the MSM and science. Poor fellow.

  65. Oh, how I wish that the George Monbiots of the world would just decide to end it all so as not to suffer the dire consequences they claim are here or coming. Just end it and put us out of their misery.

  67. “CAGW is a false religion guided by fanatical believers in the impossible. Guidance on the latest impossible thing is provided weekly by one George Monbiot so that before breakfast each Sunday one can believe a new impossible thing, feel guilty…”

    It has nothing to do with religion. The revolutionary scientific paradigm shift which took place in the late 60’s and early 70’s is known today as the “Anthropocene Age.” In this scientific paradigm shift, all economic and recreational activity by man triggers dangerous “tipping points” in the fragile environment.
    Under this scientific paradigm, over 10,000 chemicals and substances used by human beings to grow food or make things began to be investigated for being either a carcinogen or for negatively impacting an ecosystem. AGW is only a subcomponent of this structured scientific revolution known as a paradigm shift.
    A religion at minimum must be concerned with what happens to each of us after we die. Because we all do, one day.
    Now back to Thomas Kuhn. In this new environmental paradigm called the Anthropocene Age, any chemical or element or activity or em wave used by man, if it can be proved to be dangerous in enormous quantities, must be reduced to zero exposure in the environment. Foundational to the Anthropocene Age is the wide acceptance of Social Darwinism and overpopulation theory. (These are all scientific theories.) To try to change this into a discussion of religion appears to be a bit of alchemy on the part of the people who hold these theories. Perhaps it is because they really don’t want to give them up. Or perhaps they don’t wish to acknowledge the observational results for their Anthropocene Age Evironmental Paradigm Shift and where it is leading.

    • These are all scientific theories.
      Yep. And there’s a large gain in scientific theories by puzzling words of MSM climate headlines.

  68. Does he take drugs?. Eventually he’ll freak. Existential angst leads to paranoia. (Note the mix of the two in his article?) This will only escalate. Soon he’ll accuse the Guardian of being part of the cover up. Popcorn anyone?
    Eugene WR Gallun

  69. I put my comments on the articles of the author in Guardian but they simply removed as the moderator reviews my comments.
    Dr. S. Jeevananda Reddy
    [Thank you for trying. .mod]

    • The Guardian censor and also sanitize after they close comments, to “win the debate”. After they closed the comments on their Alberta boreal forest fire article, they scrubbed all the comments referring to the Alberta forestry service’s comments about Boreal forests being fire eco dependent.
      They also scrubbed all of my comments on the “polar bear hybrid” article, that pointed out it was a Blonde Grizzly.

  70. If you love a good conspiracy (and who doesn’t?) check out who’s on the board of The Scott Trust…which ‘owns’ the left leaning, loss making Guardian.
    Anthony Salz
    Joined The Scott Trust in 2009. Anthony is an executive vice chairman of Rothschild and director of NM Rothschild & Sons Ltd.
    Ole Jacob Sunde
    Joined The Scott Trust in 2015. He is the founder and chair of Formuesforvaltning AS private bank.
    Fascinating to think the UK Left is being fed its regular diet of eco alarmism, political correctness and ‘anti establishment’ attitude by….big Bankers!

  72. If you do a little research on the Anthrax outbreak–hard to do because it’s media parroting other media and government officials–you find out that its cause is all conjecture. All we know is: two people and some thousands of reindeer died of anthrax, it’s been warm in that region, and the last anthrax outbreak there was in 1941. The idea that it’s due to the bodies of the animals that died of the disease in 1941 now thawing is just a hypothesis. I couldn’t find any mention that such a body was even found.

  73. How come even the trolls do not come out to defend this drivel. (Is it the lack of a safe space where rational comments are edited)

  74. In Robert Heinlein’s novel I Shall Fear No Evil, a televangelist asserts that the world ended in 1999, everything since then being a mere illusion caused by Satan. Perhaps Monbiot ought to confer with him as to the relative efficacy of each method of concealing the end of the world (Heinlein’s apparent death in 1988 being either a Satanic illusion or a hoax by a corrupt media establishment, take your pick).

  75. Another comment on the Anthrax outbreak in Russia: Several commentators have said that if it was due to the thawing of an anthrax-killed reindeer that died in 1941 and became permafrost, it shows it was at least as warm then as it is now. Not true. We know nothing about the summer of 1941 from this. The animal’s carcass froze in the winter of 1941-2 and presumably did not thaw till now. This only shows the accumulated thawings between then and now did not thaw it. This could be due to colder winters as well as cooler summers. Only if the animal was locked in the permafrost prior to 1941, thawed out in 1941, ran around and died of anthrax and went back into the permafrost later that year, would it tell us anything about the summer of 1941.

    • What ever the Summer of 41 was, carbon (sic) levels were at “safe” levels.
      Unlike now, as thawing reindeer carcasses apparently show.

    • Does Anthrax cause Reindeer to bury themselves – and in frozen ground, no less? The animal(s) did not die _in_ permafrost, they died _on_ it, and hence were exposed to all future temperatures. If you assert that the animal(s) died in winter, then you’re claiming that air temperatures never rose above freezing point since then. How long do you imagine it takes to defrost a deer at, say, +5C, a year, two? I’d suggest it’s more like two days.

    • The outbreak was caused by hide trading. Buying hides from less than reliable sources, then working with animals, exposing animals and anyone who works with the animals.
      The CDC warn of this problem, it is not uncommon at all

  76. If every person in favour of a carbon tax just went to their doctor for an assisted suicide note, the planet could be saved.

  77. He’s quite correct in suggesting that we can’t trust multinational corporations. But that doesn’t mean that there is anyone that we can trust.

    • As for the comment we cannot trust multinational corporations surely all mainstream press is part of one or other multinational corporation, Greenpeace and FOE are two others so why are they suddenly different? I only trust data I can get hold of and since that, although actually obtained from the same sort of sloppiness widespread in climate work but is subject to accusations of hacking impossible to defend against economically, this cannot be passed on. I have good reason to believe that climate science is not tainted not just by climate deception but by having lost many talented people from the sort of demands by those in power for extra curricular services made by some of its leaders being more prevalent than believed.
      When someone said we engineers were old school sexist at one point this young lady said but they are also old school gentlemen here bless them and none of them ever try to take advantage. We got names and everything and proof she was not exaggerating thanks to passwords like 123456789 being the norm and failure to remove ex employees from lists as well as so many other loop[holes you just wouldn’t believe possible.

    • Of course we can. We can trust their self-interest, which is a good deal more solid and reliable than the “good intentions” of others. Stalin, Mao, Hitler, all had good intentions and thought they were doing what was right for the people.
      I don’t trust the good intentions of the state or individuals, but I’ll thrust their self-interest.

      • “We can trust their self-interest”
        We could… until so many of them were taken over by SJWs.

  78. None of the horrors they said will happen have happened.
    The one that stands out the most is ” children born in England now 2003 will never know what snow is, it will not exist by 2010″
    Viner.
    The thing that will bring the arrogant greedy power hungry propagandists down is that they truly believe that 97% of people have room temperature I.Q’s

  79. It looks to me as though we socially have achieved alarmism saturation. A new normal of daily predictions of mass death and End Days, that no one pays attention to because the predictions have been going on for so long, at least a decade now. The best one can hope for in terms of public response to prediction of imminent extinction of all of mankind is not to buy a year bus token pass, buy a shorter one, you know, just in case you won’t need it. No reason to waste money.

  80. I know that the overall trend of temperature is rising (slightly), but can the climate geniuses explain what happens when it begins falling?

    • Of course they can!! All those solar panels, windmills, better fuel-economy automobiles, all that ‘greeny-eco-mish-mash technology’ they insisted on everyone using, caused carbon dioxide levels to drop, so the Earth is now SAVED from certain doom … … … …
      Oh, wait, … … … … … … … …

      • Ver walter des Friedens, Ver walter der Slaven. Walte Deines Amtes.
        Oh wait. You’re US.

    • If it starts falling there will be a logical explanation – like a major eruption. That might be the only thing that saves our arse from a runaway greenhouse.

  81. It’s not obvious why you are covering the Moonbat. He is widely regarded in the UK as bonkers. He is only taken notice of by the few remaining Grauniad readers, most of whom are BBC propagandists.
    His latest mad idea which is being pushed by the BBC is rewilding. That is, giving up farming in the UK and letting the land return to scrub.

    • Phillip Bratby August 5, 2016 at 11:31 pm

      His latest mad idea which is being pushed by the BBC is rewilding. That is, giving up farming in the UK and letting the land return to scrub.
      Yeah, and the Picts and the Druids will be the main political parties when that happens.

    • Farming is said to release a lot CO2, so by giving up farming in UK they would release less CO2, and could then mob those countries who do the farming for UK food supply.
      They could even stop producing bricks and cement, then UK could be a sink for CO2 when the imported materials take up CO2.

  82. Let me guess, is his solution is to tax the world to death?
    I mean whats the difference it dies either way, Why not just skip the paperwork?

  83. Like all warmunists, Moonbat is anti-capitalist. But he knows he won’t get his way through economic argument so he has to use the environment as his bridge to global socialism.
    Marxists twonks like him no longer campaign in the name of the workers, but of ‘Mother Earth’ and dream of industry no bigger than cute handicraft workshops and organic allotments. Prosperity is a disease to these anti-human, anti-science liars.
    They need man-made climate change to be true and they distort the data to confirm their bias as long as it helps them reach their ultimate goal These people are a danger to human life.
    How will we stop them?

    • DVan commented: “…These people are a danger to human life. How will we stop them?”
      As proven many times in recent history Marxism/Socialism will stop itself but the ideology will live on. Environmentalism is nothing but a hitch hiker on these grand plans and will rise and fall until technology wins out.

  85. My reply to George is – Hey George, you ain’t seen nothing yet, the boot is changing feet and hopefully you will feel the applied depression in your nether regions. Surprisingly what goes around often arrives back to impact the guilty, you get what you deserve, and you certain deserve plenty! All said with a smile of course.!

  86. Are we really getting even the amount of warming claimed? Right at the start when they first claimed warming some engineer I knew showed some climate scientists the the clean air acts made the quality of the Stevenson screen questionable to even a degree let alone the sort of accuracy needed for global warming claims. For a substantially zero error over true air temperature in really clean air, and even the dirtiest in the western world is now ultra clean compared to the average in the fifties only a suction air cooling system is good enough. Even a forced air one gives a significant heating from the energy driving the fan when you are dealing with the fractional degrees of claimed warming.
    I know this was in the pre computer days and the methods looked clunky and Heath Robinson but they were at least real world.
    This together with the total failure to quality control not the instruments but the measuring process makes any results of near zero validity anyway by non climate science standards.

  88. It’s quite beyond comprehension that a so called national newspaper should employ such an idiotic rambling scaremonger, and publish his mentally deficient rubbish.

  90. funny to mention that the arctic sea ice is not following “the hottest” meme…
    yes the maximum was low (below or just at -2 standard deviation), but apart from May with the serious drift event, the arctic ice is nearly following the -2 standard deviation line.
    so it melts at a fairly “normal rate”. nothing of the same large melts as in 2007 or 2012…

  91. Omigod…. The CO2 made the world…. um…. greener….
    As for the warming. It’s natural George. It’s been warming since the end of the “LIA”. The human signal of AGW, if there is even is one, is lost in the background noise of natural variation…. The only thing that can be measured from the extra anthropogenic CO2 is a slightly greener world and increased crop yields.
    Which is all good and fine by me.

  92. The world is getting warmer – ever so slightly. Is it really credible that all these disasters are being caused by an increase over say 2000 of a few tenths of a degree?
    Since 1950 BEST say the temperature globally has increased by 1 degree. Again, is it likely that’s made any difference to anybody anywhere?
    Monbiot is being stupid – if C02 is a problem, it’s not now. It would be a problem in a few decades, but nothing is happening now, and that’s why everybody’s bored of reporting it.

  95. So he thinks some mythical “den!@r$” are claiming that the pause is continuing during the recent el Nino? Does he have names?
    Strange – I seem to recall the skeptics providing detailed analysis, highlighting all of the temp dataset, confirming immediately when the Pause ended (or paused). The alarmists hid the data, pretended there was no pause, didn’t tell us when it ended (instead, invented a completely fabricated dataset that never had one, right back to 1998), obliterated the 1998 el Nino, made up record years that aren’t happening and didn’t happen, are claiming current records when satellite data is NOWHERE NEAR 1998’s northern summer’s records. I’ve never seen a single writer on the skeptical side claim a pause when not current (except clearly when talking historically), and we haven’t been in pause mode for about 5 months now.
    Wouldn’t have thought droughts and floods in India are a particularly rare event. Nor is coral bleaching, or a wildfire in North America. “Torching” a Himalayan glacier at -30C certainly would be though.
    And if anthrax-infected deer froze in 1941, only to unfreeze now, my untrained brain reads that as though the spot they fell dead was UNFROZEN IN 1941.
    It’s almost as though he’s citing perfectly normal things as being evidence of CAGW, and just completely making up other things.

    • “And if anthrax-infected deer froze in 1941, only to unfreeze now, my untrained brain reads that as though the spot they fell dead was UNFROZEN IN 1941.”
      Well, consider the following thought experiment: A climate researcher in Antarctica wanders away from his station and, lost in a blizzard, freezes to death in -20 C air temperature in 2016. His body isn’t recovered and he becomes part of the icecap. In 1,000,000 AD the icecap thaws due to natural climate change, the air temperature is 20 C and his body thaws. My similarly untrained brain can’t see any correlation between the air temperature when a body froze and when it thawed, except that the first is minus and the second plus C.

  96. This is what Monbiot wrote soon after Climategate:
    ” Yes, the messages were obtained illegally. Yes, all of us say things in emails that would be
    excruciating if made public. Yes, some of the comments have been taken out of context. But there are
    some messages that require no spin to make them look bad. There appears to be evidence here of
    attempts to prevent scientific data from being released, and even to destroy material that was
    subject to a freedom of information request.
    “Worse still, some of the emails suggest efforts to prevent the publication of work by
    climate sceptics, or to keep it out of a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
    Change. I believe that the head of the unit, Phil Jones, should now resign. Some of the data
    discussed in the emails should be re-analysed.”
    .
    As expected, he quickly reverted to form.
    .
    Today’s Daily Telegraph printed an excellent letter about climate change, pointing out, for example, that the world was much warmer 7000 years ago and that the global temperature is currently falling fast as the world switches to la nina conditions. I almost fell off my chair when I read this. It must be quite a few years since the Telegraph printed a letter expressing sceptical views.
    Chris

    • Thanks for the heads up. Perhaps the tide is turning. The letter in full.
      SIR – By any standard, the claim that 2016 will be the hottest year ever is almost certainly wrong.
      Around the time of the “climate optimum” some 7,000 years ago, temperatures were around 1-2 degrees Celsius higher than they are now. These higher temperatures lasted for many decades and, as the name suggests, had no obvious ill effect.
      In the previous interglacial period some 115,000 to 130,000 years ago, hippopotamuses flourished in the Thames and temperatures were around 3 to 5 degrees higher than today. Even in this hothouse it appears that the Greenland ice cap still managed to persist and the sea level rose only a few metres.
      The exceptionally strong El Niño, which caused elevated temperatures over the past year, has now ended more abruptly than was expected. With the onset of a strong La Niña, temperatures are now plunging. By the end of the year we may well find that 2016 has not broken any records.
      David Watt
      Brentwood, Essex

      • Yes DWR – and also it’s not a strong La Nina…
        “Despite some cooling of the tropical Pacific Ocean surface waters, ENSO indicators REMAIN NEUTRAL AND WELL SHY OF LA NINA THRESHOLDS. In contrast, a strong negative Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD) event continues, with ocean temperature well above average in the eastern Indian Ocean and below average near Africa.”
        (my caps)
        http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/enso/
        And:
        SL when the Hippos were in the Thames ……
        “… at peak was probably 6 to 9 m (20 to 30 feet) higher than today, with Greenland contributing 0.6 to 3.5 m, thermal expansion and mountain glaciers contributing up to 1 m, and an uncertain contribution from Antarctica.”
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eemian#Sea_level
        Your “sea level rose only a few metres.”
        and “These higher temperatures lasted for many decades and, as the name suggests, had no obvious ill effect”.
        Did this to the county of Lincolnshire ( where I live ).
        http://www.caitlingreen.org/2014/09/of-chalk-and-ice-white-cliffs-of-louth.html
        (I doubt it – but if you’re interested, I live just off the map centred on Louth, top left).
        The human inhabitants (if there were any) wouldn’t have been troubled by the Hippos or the eroded coastline my friend.
        That may well be why there was “no obvious ill effect” (sarc)
        VERY different if it were to happen in the future.

  97. Well said Eric. I read that article a few days ago and it’s full to bursting of typical Guardian / Moonbat eco-hysteria. Frankly I don’t see a single unusual or extreme element of Moonbat’s so-called ‘climate crisis’ occurring anywhere on the planet, not one. We’re actually living in a benign climate at present, the exact opposite of Moonbat’s alarmist terror-vision. It’s the greatest pseudo-scientific scam bar none.

    • I read that article a few days ago
      I am frankly amazed. I thought only council workers and members of the Labour party and the BBC read the Guardian.
      I tried to read it once, but a rush of nausea cut the attempt short.

  98. The bottom line is this period of time in the climate is in no way unique or different from previous warm spikes the climate has had since the Holocene Optimum. This period of time is not only not as warm as previous spikes of warmth in the climate such as the Roman and Medieval warm periods to name a few but does nothing to alter the fact that the climate since the Holocene Optimum some 8000 years ago has been in a gradual cooling trend with spikes of warmth within this gradual cooling trend.
    If one evaluates the climate since the Holocene Optimum until today and takes into consideration Milankovitch Cycles and superimposes solar activity upon this and further refines this with volcanic activity and more recently more reliable ENSO data a very good correlation will be shown to be established between these factors versus the resultant climate. Further if CO2 is put into this mix one will find a zero correlation between the climate and CO2 concentrations.
    So all this talk about this period of time in the climate being unique is a bunch of BS.
    Further now it looks likely very low solar conditions should prevail for many years going forward and this should end this current warm spike, which has probably most likely already ended and a down trend in temperatures should be the rule for the foreseeable future from here on out.
    If one applies the past climate data since the Holocene Optimum through the present and tries to link it to CO2 it is not going to work.

  100. Monbiot is a massively conceited sly dishonest creep with a huge appetite for toxic green shirt-ery and it’s a matter of some considerable pride to me that he’s banned me from his Twitter account for politely pointing out evidence contrary to his narrative.
    That he continues to be a regular at The Guardian and gets regular BBC gigs says more about those outfits than it says about George.

  102. CAGW zealots have been relegated to ranking years, since there hasn’t been a discernible global warming trend for 20 years, and with the coming cold La Niña, the flat trend will extend its duration to 22 years by mid-2018.
    Low-information leftists are like 38-year old village idiots that think they’re still growing because they’ve been at their tallest height for the past 20 years, when in fact they stopped growing 20 years ago…
    The CAGW zealots will have a HUGE problem from 2020 when global temp trends start to fall, because both the PDO and AMO are in their respective 30-yr cool cycles, and global temp trends ALWAYS fall when this occurs. Always…
    To top it off, the current solar cycle will have near zero sunspot activity from 2018 and the next solar cycle starting from 2022 will be the weakest since1790…
    By 2021, flat global temps should hit 25 years and the disparity between CAGW global warming projections vs. reality should exceed 3 standard deviations, which will be game, set and match against the most expensive Leftist scam in human history.
    CAGW has become a joke.

  103. He’ll be sitting comfortably in his armchair writing that the world has ended for the next 30 or 40 years until he dies of natural causes…

  104. The crazed Monbiot is well known in the UK for his barmy campaigning. He is utterly barking mad, and an embarrassment even to the Climate Change establishment. If he were not a Guardian journalist he would be in an institution being fed pills.

  105. George Monbiot is one of the regulars that US gov’t. radio (NPR) regularly trots out to give “expert” commentary on climate matters. Propaganda, anyone?

    • The guy with a Zoology degree is trotted out to give expert commentary on climate matters?
      WOW! Just wow.

  108. According to NASA the world has greened since 1980 by the total area of ” twice the continental US”. That would be an area of 16.16 million square miles or an increase of 28% on a global land basis. 70% of this greening came from a 17.6% increase in CO2. Wonderful good news that deserves reporting but it doesn’t fit with Monbiot’s fantasy.

  110. ‘Bigot’ is defined as: ‘A person who is intolerant towards those holding different opinions’.
    And so, as a crossword fanatic, I ‘anagrammed’ George Monbiot, and came up with: “GONE MORE BIGOT”.
    Or, some might prefer the appellation: G. ‘ONE MORE BIGOT’ Monbiot”
    Play with this at yr leisure for improvements.

  115. When did journalists (if that’s what anyone cares to call George Monbiot) openly assume the role of being political kingmakers and planetary saviors? And WHO assigned them these jobs? George, are you talking directly to God? Maybe that ought to be your top story for a while.

  116. Pursuant to last, another anagram:
    George Monbiot??? …. “GOING TO BE MORE!” …. And more, and more pablum/crap for the closed-minded lemmings & disciples.
    He has vastly overstated his position — ‘hubris’ comes to mind — and there’s nothing more I like than to see the purveyors of ‘Snake-Oil’ come a-cropper.
    Carry-on making a fool of yrself, George; the Gallery is itching for the entertainment of the era, and you’ve sure set yrself up for the ‘big fall’.

  117. Maybe National Enquirer might be approached to find him a job using his expertise at spinning sensationalist stories into circulation and revenues? (Assuming, that is, that Monbiot *has* increased circulation and revenues at Guardian?)
    (I’m working on an appropriate anagram for his new position, as well as a letter of recommendation!)

  119. The way the finances of the Guardian Group are going, Monbiot should more worried about where his next job is going to be, than all the “worries” he writing about.

    • Could you elaborate on that please Ross? I thought they had some kind of benefactor-type funding, along with, probably quasi-legal support from the BBC via Job Ads. Has something changed ?

      • Phil
        In the last couple of years the Guardian has survived from the proceeds of the sale of their “AutoTrader” magazine in 2014 ( I think they got about 650 mill pounds). I read recently that they lost approx 170 mill pounds last year so the nest egg will not last long. Historically they have been owned by the Scott Trust but it ran out of assets to sell to keep the group afloat.
        The Wikipedia page gives a reasonably background ( scroll down to the financial part)
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Guardian

  122. It should be noted that several peer reviews papers have come out showing a definite 20% increase in biomass on Earth for the last 40 years since satellites measured the Earth. This is consistent of course with everything we know about increasing CO2 levels. We can easily conclude beside more plants, more forests that this increase also increases food productivity. This means that 20% of our impressive food productivity gains in the last 40 years were the result of the “evil” Co2. How many lives that extra food has saved I have no idea. My guess 20% of all food produced in the world represents quite a significant contribution to the health of the world and without it a lot of people wouldn’t have made it, probably millions.
    However, this apparently isn’t news. Instead, news is anthrax hidden in permafrost killed a few people maybe. The alarmist gets to say this is evidence that we are in hell however, if we had avoided the heat that might have happened anyway by the world cutting use of massive quantities of oil many years ago stunting the growth of the entire world, impoverishing billions of people more than they are today and resulted in millions more deaths due to lack of wealth and other consequences.
    The cures for our disease to lower CO2 by reducing fossil fuels is to kill millions of people more than the disease of CO2. Do the alarmists want us to go back to 270ppm of CO2? If so, we have to absorb a 20% reduction in food productivity. Seems we lose either way according to them.

  124. “In Siberia, an anthrax outbreak is raging… ”
    This is not “climate” crisis. This is policy crisis.
    The local authorities on Yamal just stopped vaccination of Rendeers five years ago.
    Now they have the anthrax.

  126. The real ‘climate crisis’ is that a tipping point has been reached: ever more people are recognizing that the Doom and Gloom predictions of the alarmists have not materialized, and the undecided are leaning away from alarmism. Only the True Believers are holding fast to the faith.
    I expect we will soon be seeing them in airports wearing saffron-colored robes and offering their books for a ‘voluntary donation’.

  128. Interesting to read Wikipedia about out ‘wunderkind’, Snake-Oil Salesman George.
    Education? He graduated in Zoology. Zoology — that’s it folks!
    We, on the skeptic-side, are constantly assailed and harrassed ‘cos we are deemed ‘Unqualified to speak to the subject of Global Warming ‘cos we don’t have relevant qualifications’, Doctorates at a min. in a narrowly-defined & exclusive field that’s sufficiently proximate. Therefore we are “To be dismissed”.
    However, what’s ‘Sauce for the Goose is Sauce for the Gander’. Snake-Oil Salesman George preens as an Emperor, but without clothes! His ink-stained, money-grubbing form of sensationalist journalism (read more on Wikip.) should equally be dismissed for what it is … uninformed & irrelevant to the subject at hand.
    If National enquirer is looking for cheap sensationalist writers, and since S-O-S George is likely to lose his rooftop from which to spout about matters he knows nothing about intellectually, I’d suggest they might have an ideal candidate.

    • A degree in Zoology?
      Yup! That pedigree certainly makes him an expert in Climate Science.
      You betcha!!!

  131. I guess that most of the folks on here are from the good old USA. Where if I remember rightly even one of your presidents had to get a passport after he ran for office. So they can hardly be considered a well travelled nation with the news from the next State being considered the international news. If however they did travel a little more and did listen to international news from more that a few 100s of miles away they may discover that actually climate change is having a fairly large impact on parts of the world they have probably never heard of. After all a nation who dashes out to buy gas masks when Saddam Hussein was on the rampage, in case they launch a Scud missile attack (with a range of a few 100 miles) on the USA, clearly does not have many copies of atlases in their homes.

  132. Did someone yell fire in the theater? There is no fire but there is evidence of tampering with the alarm device for sound and message. There are also a few unofficial fire marshals springing up to charge an exit fee to flee the theater during all the commotion.

  133. GEE, [trimmed] …. We’ve got your number!
    Having spent many past years on the edges of the London & Oxbridge Cocktail & Dinner Party Circuit, I can say unequivocally that this, our modern-day Snake-Oil Salesman, is typically dilettante. Looks good, sounds good, prob’ly carries-off his schtick with practised, witty, conversational flair, plays to the ladies, and is the ‘Dahling’ on the little-black-book invitation-list of the smug, intellectual, leftie-elite (the interests of whom are dedicated to their own self-preservation as a cult, and have NOTHING to do with [the egregious sham that] real socialism, the welfare & real needs of the indigent is the primary raison d’etre of their existence.)
    No …. he is a media hack looking for the next $. His smug, ‘pretty-boy’, promotional photo points to the vacuity and lack of substance, doesn’t it? (Is he looking to be the next Hugh Grant, grasping for a Hollywood-esque promotion? … From mere BBC patronage perhaps?)
    In short, a Poseur & self-promoter. Have the exigencies of $ and self-promotion and lack of alternatives led him to be a shill for Global Warming Alarmists? One who acts the part but has no relevant substance or scholastic prestige to back it up (unless one counts a Zoology Degree as relevant to climate change???) Nor the intellectual capacity to address the societal chaos that will result from his preachings. (Preachers should be careful of what they preach, lest it become reality.)
    Just as Oxbridge “socialism” of the 1970’s was a parody, subscribed to by a cabal of the intellectual elite, so is the modern-day fad of Global Warming Alarmism. Nothing to do with reality; everything to do with tendention, group-promotion & marketing (is this tautological!?), self-promotion and profit motive under the “Banner of the Day” …. ‘Socialism’ then, global Warming Alarmism today? Snake-Oil-Salesmen will seize any ‘fad’ if it makes them a profit and/or gives them prestige in society. Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose.
    Correct me if I’m wrong, esteemed readers, but I doubt if there is a snowball’s chance in Hell of this — as a Letter to Editor of the The Guardian, getting published. Anyway, who cares to get published in what is now an evidently, sensationalist, gutter-press,rag, aimed at the blinkered, rich, powerful, Lefty Party Faithful faithful?

  134. Sheesh! So now I have to be told by the media if there is a climate catastrophe. I can’t just step out my door and discover it for myself

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