Life can be hard in Moscow. The Russian capital is sweltering in temperatures that reached a record 37.7˚C last week. Vast stretches of peat bog surrounding the city have dried out and caught fire covering Moscow with choking smog. The changing of the horse guard in Cathedral Square was canceled as sentries wilted in traditional woolen uniforms. Elsewhere, more than 2,000 Russians — many drunk — drowned trying to cool off in lakes and rivers and at least 10 million hectares of crops have been ruined. States of emergency have been declared in 23 regions.
Nor is Russia alone. New York has baked in a thick tropical heat and humidity that is gripping the eastern US. Public cooling centers have been set up, while black-outs are common. In the Arctic, sea ice coverage continues to dwindle, while a report last week revealed that levels of phytoplankton — tiny marine plants that are the foundation of the oceans’ food chain — are plummeting, victims of global warming.
Our world is starting to sizzle as rising levels of greenhouse gases trap more and more of the sun’s heat in the lower atmosphere — a point that was confirmed on July 28 when the London Meteorological Office reported that sensors from around the world were showing that this year would be the hottest, or just possibly the second hottest year on record.
Either way, the news surprised many people, despite those tales emanating from New York and Moscow. A freezing UK winter and the collapse of the Copenhagen climate talks — along with the damaging leak of “climategate” e-mails from the University of East Anglia — had persuaded many that global warming was a dead issue. If only.
In fact, that record rise in global temperatures, far from appearing unexpectedly, had been predicted. January last year, the London Meteorological Office announced that it believed this year would, indeed, be a record scorcher. Given that Britain was then coated in thick snow, the prediction was brave.
It was accurate nevertheless. Western Europe and the eastern US may then have been going through a grim, cold winter, but other areas — including Asia and the western US — were experiencing unexpectedly hot weather. The overall trend was a warming one. However, few took notice and a myopic view of the world — that only local events matter — continued to dominate newspaper columns and blogs. Global warming was nonsense, they insisted.
Thus, the deniers got it wrong while climate scientists got it spectacularly right. Indeed, we should note just how prescient the latter have been. In 1999, the London Meteorological Office’s head of climate modeling Peter Stott — working with Oxford University’s Myles Allen and other meteorologists — published a paper in Nature on the likely impact of greenhouse gas emissions. Using temperature data from 1946 to 1996, the paper estimated future global temperatures and included a graph of a range of predicted outcomes for 2000 to 2040 with a dotted line indicating the most likely path. Crucially, for this year, that dotted line showed there would be a rise of 0.8˚C since the Second World War — which is exactly what we are experiencing today.
So scientists not only predicted how hot this year was likely to be six months ago, they forecast a decade ago just how much the world would heat up 10 years later. Bear this in mind when deniers tell you climate science is a conspiracy or the work of charlatans. They are talking nonsense.
Such precision is encouraging for it indicates climate scientists know what they are talking about, though at a deeper level, the news is disturbing — for it is clear that few people are actually listening to this message.
Why? What lies behind scientists’ failure to get their warning across?
Most answers have concentrated on the difficulty of explaining science — riddled as it is with uncertainties and qualifications. And to some extent, these explanations are correct. Atmospheric physics and meteorology are complex. However, there is a second, more sinister explanation, one that forms the focus of Merchants of Doubt, by US academics Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, which is to be published this month by Bloomsbury. This analysis of right-wing politics and its impact on science shows how a handful of individuals have managed to obscure the truth on issues that range from the dangers of smoking to global warming. These right-wing libertarians include such scientists as Fred Seitz and Fred Singer — who both worked on Cold War projects, such as the US hydrogen bomb, and who helped set up institutions like the US’ Heritage Foundation and Marshall Institute.
Funded by corporations and conservative foundations, these outfits exist to fight any form of state intervention or regulation of US citizens. Thus, they fought and delayed smoking curbs in the 1970s even though medical science had made it clear the habit was a major cancer risk. And they have been battling ever since, blocking or holding back laws aimed at curbing acid rain, ozone-layer depletion and — mostly recently — global warming.
In each case the tactics are identical: discredit the science, disseminate false information, spread confusion and promote doubt.
As the authors state: “Small numbers of people can have large, negative impacts, especially if they are organized, determined and have access to power.”
In Britain, links between deniers and big business are less obvious. Yet it is clear lessons have been learned and tactics copied. Consider these examples: the leaking of the “climategate” e-mails and the wild over-reaction to the mistaken insertion of a paragraph in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s last climate assessment, that suggested wrongly that Himalayan glaciers are melting rapidly.
Both created a furore with the former revealing “a massive fraud” that represented “the final nail in the coffin” for the theory of global warming, deniers argued.
This claim was later shown to be nonsense, though it took three inquiries to establish the point. However, the overall effect was the spread of confusion among the public and an increase in doubt about climate change. And given that the e-mail leak involved a specific act of computer hacking, one must conclude this was the specific goal of that electronic “break-in.”
In this way, scientists’ warnings — that without action the world will get at least two degrees hotter this century — have been obscured by a small group of ideologues who believe individual liberties are more important than any other cause. Our planet may burn, millions may die, and cities such as Moscow and New York may smolder, but at least we will be free of petty regulation and bureaucracy. It seems a stiff price to pay.
There is much evidence that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is sending soldiers from the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) to support Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — and is learning lessons for a future war against Taiwan. Until now, the CCP has claimed that they have not sent PLA personnel to support Russian aggression. On 18 April, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelinskiy announced that the CCP is supplying war supplies such as gunpowder, artillery, and weapons subcomponents to Russia. When Zelinskiy announced on 9 April that the Ukrainian Army had captured two Chinese nationals fighting with Russians on the front line with details
On a quiet lane in Taipei’s central Daan District (大安), an otherwise unremarkable high-rise is marked by a police guard and a tawdry A4 printout from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs indicating an “embassy area.” Keen observers would see the emblem of the Holy See, one of Taiwan’s 12 so-called “diplomatic allies.” Unlike Taipei’s other embassies and quasi-consulates, no national flag flies there, nor is there a plaque indicating what country’s embassy this is. Visitors hoping to sign a condolence book for the late Pope Francis would instead have to visit the Italian Trade Office, adjacent to Taipei 101. The death of
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), joined by the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), held a protest on Saturday on Ketagalan Boulevard in Taipei. They were essentially standing for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which is anxious about the mass recall campaign against KMT legislators. President William Lai (賴清德) said that if the opposition parties truly wanted to fight dictatorship, they should do so in Tiananmen Square — and at the very least, refrain from groveling to Chinese officials during their visits to China, alluding to meetings between KMT members and Chinese authorities. Now that China has been defined as a foreign hostile force,
On April 19, former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) gave a public speech, his first in about 17 years. During the address at the Ketagalan Institute in Taipei, Chen’s words were vague and his tone was sour. He said that democracy should not be used as an echo chamber for a single politician, that people must be tolerant of other views, that the president should not act as a dictator and that the judiciary should not get involved in politics. He then went on to say that others with different opinions should not be criticized as “XX fellow travelers,” in reference to
RSS