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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Oooooo-EEEEEE-oooooo!
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 !
Does he believe what he writes or is it just a job!
I think Mr. Monbiot’s brain melted long ago.
Going forward as global temperatures decline this will put end to this nonsense. And they will be going down from this point in time forward.
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.
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.
“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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“This, will be, on current trends, the hottest year ever measured.”
What’s ‘hot’ about 14 point something degrees C ?
I think George Monbiot is pretty much out of touch with the MSM and science. Poor fellow.
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.
He did use the word salient. Twice. He must know what he’s talking about.
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.
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
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.
Of course, I was eventually blocked.
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!
Don’t they have psychiatrists in England? This guy needs help and medications.
No known cure.
bh2, + 1
Good to have you here!
Splendid Isolation. They won’t Brex Him.
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.
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)
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).
I am sure it ended in 1970
It ended the day after tomorrow.
And there’s that broad success phenomenon.
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