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.
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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“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.
I’m just curious what purse is behind Moonbat’s pen to pen this apocalyptic drivel.
Moni-Bot
Or is it ‘Mon Idiot’ ? My French is a bit rusty.
Mon Bigot
Leo, his http://www.thefreedictionary.com/bijouterie
And that sells.
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.
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.
He must have meant September (N. H. “summer”), not winter.
My comment with imbedded video seems to have flushed itself down the black hole?
Never mind. There it is.
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
Unless the land is Guam. Then it could tip over. [Ref.: Rep. Hank Johnson]
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?
This coming from one of the most prominent and consistently shrill alarmists IN the media.
Talk about playing the victim.
The winter of 1941 was exceedingly cold in Russia.
The winter of 2016 is bloody cold in NZ. hate it.
Something Russians should be forever thankful for, given its effects on the Wehrmacht.
Tim, you think St.Petersburg would ever forget 1941.
The grandchildren of 1941 are still alive.
“Why should we trust multinational corporations to tell us the truth about multinational corporations?”
Better yet, Mr. Monbiot… https://youtu.be/j-0vg0-JzZA
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
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.
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!
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
…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 !
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
CO2 groupsink power. That’s new 2.
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?
@ur momisugly 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.
“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.
Doc, that is rational. Proves you are not a Monbiot like warmunist.
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.
Whew that was close…. I’m canceling my vacation to Siberia! Good thing George got to me before… well you know.
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!
Since the peak of the recent El Nino the global average temperature anomoly in UAH has fallen by 0.44 deg C since February to 0.39. The fall is bigger than the current anomoly. What’s he mean “El Nino accounts for only one-fifth of the global temperature rise”?
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/08/01/uah-global-temperature-update-for-july-2016/
They don’t call him “Moonbat” for nothing.
He is certifiable.
“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.
There, there George. You sit down and I’ll fetch you a nice cup of tea and a biscuit
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?
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….
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 .
. “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.