Tag Archives: climate change

January 1, 2013 · 10:13 am

Avaragado’s 2013 predictions

2012! Who could forget the glorious summer? The coronation of Queen (formerly Sir Alan) Amidala? Britain’s abject failure in the 1500m tug-of-raw at the organic Spacelympics? The universal acclaim for the politics of austerity?

As the dregs of the year drip from the meths bottle of tomorrow into the tramp’s mouth of history and dribble through the foetid beard of ornithology onto the mangy dog’s head of clinical studies at Guy’s Hospital, it is time to stare resolutely past the tramp’s outstretched palm of invisibility to what 2013 will bring forth, or perhaps fifth. Here’s what I think:

News

  1. The Assad regime in Syria will fall.
  2. There will be no changes in US federal gun-control laws.
  3. The Duchess of Cambridge will give birth to a human boy.
  4. At least one Tory MP will defect to UKIP.
  5. The equal marriage bill for England and Wales will pass in the Commons but not the Lords.
  6. Dangerous idiot Michael Gove will be involved in a scandal over the exam board selection process for the new EBacc exams.

Sport

  1. Manchester United will win the FA Premier League.
  2. Chelsea FC will change manager at least twice.
  3. At least one British person will win a Wimbledon title.
  4. Mo Farah will win at least one gold medal at the World Athletics Championships.
  5. Rory McIlroy will win at least two majors in golf.
  6. At least one footballer playing in the UK will come out as gay or bisexual.

Science and technology

  1. Microsoft will buy Nokia.
  2. Scientists will announce the synthesis of one or more atoms of element 119 or higher.
  3. NASA will declare that Voyager 1 has left the solar system and entered interstellar space.
  4. Scientists will announce the discovery of an ‘Earth twin’ – an Earth-sized exoplanet within the habitable zone of its star.
  5. The year will be one of the ten warmest years in the global record, and warmer than 2012, according to the World Meteorological Organisation.
  6. Archaeologists will confirm that the bones dug up in a Leicester car park are those of Richard III.

Entertainment

  1. Lincoln will receive the Oscar for Best Picture.
  2. Daniel Day-Lewis will receive the Oscar for Best Actor for his performance in Lincoln.
  3. Jennifer Lawrence will receive the Oscar for Best Actress for her performance in Silver Linings Playbook.
  4. The 50th anniversary of Doctor Who will involve appearances (in newly filmed scenes) from at least one former Doctor.
  5. The BBC will cancel The Sky at Night (probably while pretending not to).
  6. The UK entry will finish in the third quarter of the rankings (ie, top half of the bottom half) in the Eurovision Song Contest.

Celebrity Deathwatch

In previous years I’ve named six people. This year I thought I’d round it up to nine, but then discovered three of my names overlapped with Andrew’s (caution: Facebook). Consequently I added three more, to make twelve.

Also, I’m adopting Andrew’s scoring system: each valid death (occurring at any time in the year) scores that person’s age at death subtracted from 100. For example, an 85-year-old’s death would score 15 points, and a 101-year-old’s would score -1 point (thus making it a daft choice). For reference, I’ve included the age of each of my selected celebrities, as at January 1st 2013.

  1. Denis Healey (95)
  2. Nelson Mandela (94)
  3. Mickey Rooney (92)
  4. Nancy Reagan (91)
  5. Richard Attenborough (89)
  6. Robert Mugabe (88)
  7. George H. W. Bush (88)
  8. Richard Briers (78)
  9. Barry Humphries (78)
  10. Shirley MacLaine (78)
  11. Bill Murray (62)
  12. Piers Morgan (47)

Please join me next New Year’s Eve for the official adjudication and other assorted lols.

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August 9, 2010 · 11:21 pm

Climategates

Perhaps this is just proxy angst on becoming an uncle for the first time. Perhaps it’s the dawning fortysomething awareness of life’s rollercoaster clanking over the summit. Perhaps Cynical Dave is on a pols-doncha-hate-em downer.

But, you know, we’re doomed, aren’t we?

Sixteen million people at latest estimate – two Londons – are affected by the floods in Pakistan. An area equivalent to about four Manhattans – some very large cocktails indeed, one hundred square miles of ice – has calved from the Petermann glacier off the coast of Greenland, in the largest such event since 1962. Moscow is currently enduring temperatures of 40°C with choking, slice-with-a-knife smog, and Russia has banned grain exports as a fifth of the harvest has been lost to fire (wheat prices recently hit a 22-month high). The first six months of 2010 have been the hottest on record. Indeed, each of the last three decades has been warmer than the decade before.

And slowly, quietly, the already weak agreements made at Copenhagen last year to begin to take some faltering steps towards hopefully starting the process of, if it’s not too much trouble, as long as we don’t step on anyone’s toes, perhaps reducing climate change or mitigating its effects, begin to be rolled back.

The focus of much of the media recently? A woman who wears dresses for a living testifying at the war crimes trial of someone most people have never heard of (this was the lead story on BBC News online all day, even as millions in Pakistan suffered). If not that, then Cameron’s latest alleged gaffe. Or the usual: house prices, immigrants, wheelie bins and/or Diana. Phew What a Scorcher stories, yes, but about the holy trinity of blonde, bikini and beach.

We can’t rely on politicians to fix the climate. They think short-term and are beholden to vested interests for funding and support. They won’t even stop the massive waste of resources that is junk mail, lest it interfere with the god-given right of a moron to try to sell conservatories to people who live in flats. Top-down will not work.

We can’t rely on the people to fix the climate. We are never going to give up our luxuries, our sweat-shop brands, our big gay holidays. Multi-coloured recycling bins won’t save the planet. Bottom-up will not work.

We’re doomed, then. Doomed to more floods, drought, fire, smog, fresh water shortages, pollution, dust bowls, failed crops, famine, disease, war. Civilisation fracturing and falling, just as we’re getting the hang of it.

Perhaps this is how all civilisations ultimately fail: any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from tragic. Perhaps this is the solution to the Fermi paradox: nobody has visited us because all civilisations self-destruct, their technological towers unable to support their own weight. Standing on the shoulders of giants is all well and good – unless you’re the poor schmuck at the bottom.

Hawking says: we must go to the stars! Well, yes. But let’s be realistic. He’s talking about projects that need timescales we don’t have, political will we don’t have, and money we don’t have.

In an ideal world, a strong-willed political leader would allocate billions of dollars and as much brainpower as possible to competing, blue-sky research into new and more efficient energy sources, and into trying to deal with whatever damage we’re doing to the planet. There are, as far as I can see, no downsides for the nearly seven billion of us who aren’t oil company executives.

Sadly this is not an ideal world. Obama can’t do it because it would never pass: vested interests and their hired help in Congress would make sure of that. China has the money and the manpower, but it doesn’t have the will. Current events in Russia suggest Medvedev has the will, but he also has the oligarchs.

If not Obama or any other politician, then who? The most likely candidate: Bill Gates. He has the money. He sees the business opportunities of disrupting the energy industry. And he can’t be bought by vested interests. Gates spoke at the TED conference in February on the subject. It’s well worth twenty minutes of your time.

His original vision for Microsoft was fulfilled – a PC on every desk and in every home – and those devices now guzzle energy like there was no tomorrow, which is uncomfortably close to the truth. Today the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation spends nearly as much each year on global health as the UN World Health Organisation. Gates’ legacy is already assured. But how much greater a legacy he could have: helping to wean the world off fossil fuels and, perhaps, saving the planet from its own dumb, selfish population.

Perhaps.

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February 28, 2010 · 3:56 pm

“Hurrah for the deniers!”

Publications such as the Daily Mail and Daily Express are eager to portray almost any event as proof of the end of civilisation as we know it. The sky is constantly falling. Around every street corner lurks a hooded paedo with a cancer-causing cucumber, employed by the BBC but with a hidden agenda to raise petrol prices to fund Muslim lawyers intent on forcing Britain to adopt Sharia law.

Standard, if depressing, stuff. They’re trying to sell newspapers and their tactic is to prey upon the fears of their target demographic.

But what this demographic doesn’t fear, it seems, is climate change. This demographic doesn’t believe in such a thing: it’s old enough to remember previous predictions by “so-called scientists” that failed to materialise, such as electricity “too cheap to meter” and space hotels by 2001. It also remembers how “science got it wrong”: thalidomide, Chernobyl. “Large Hadron Collider broken by bird dropping a baguette”. Those scientist fools. And French too, I bet.

When a scientist says that the evidence is clear, that there is strong consensus for man-made climate change and that we have little or no time to prevent its effects, they hear Charlie Brown’s teacher: “wah wah-wah wah wah”. They joke about how nice it’d be if Britain were as warm as the Algarve. They point to our coldest winter for thirty years as damning evidence against “global warming”.

And the newspapers, scenting sales, follow. The Daily Express now denies man-made climate change on its front page. It recently published a list of “100 reasons why climate change is natural” that has been strongly debunked by New Scientist and others. A few days ago its lead story ridiculed a report that claims the world’s had its warmest winter ever (nicely dissected at Enemies of Reason). And it presents small errors in huge reports, or general scientific rivalry, sloppiness and stupidity in email, as the entire house of cards collapsing.

Newspapers prey upon prejudices as well as fears. They feed, digest, multiply by ten, throw in a dodgy foreigner or two, and print. And the readers believe. And the cycle repeats, reinforcing those beliefs.

What does it matter? It’s the papers, not real life. Where’s the harm? The problem is that newspapers are stupidly influential. Newspapers get people on the streets hunting down paediatricians. Newspapers change government policy. In 1992 The Sun claimed It’s the Sun Wot Won It. Rupert Murdoch has the ear of David Cameron, and The Sun might win it again this year.

When a paper claims that X causes/cures cancer, for various values of X, the reader either disengages/engages with X or not: whether the claim is true or not, the world spins on. When a paper wants to Ban This Sick Filth, the reader harrumphs and turns the page, or tries to do something about it. Whether that week’s sick filth is banned or not, the world spins on. When a paper rattles its sabres at the imminent prospect of Sharia law throughout the land, they’re scare-mongering – it’s not going to happen. The world spins on.

But when a paper takes and promotes the position that climate change science is wrong, that we’re seeing natural change, that we have nothing to worry about, the consequences are serious. Politicians stop acting on climate change as it becomes a vote loser – “throwing money at something we don’t need to do while cucumber-wielding immigrant paedo bankers are on the loose”. I fear we’re seeing the start of this already: climate change is not one of the Conservative party’s “six key themes” for the election, and it isn’t front-and-centre on their web site (though there are details in the Policy section).

Broadsheet newspapers such as the Guardian and the Independent do still follow scientific consensus on climate change. But even they cannot resist the allure of the error, promoting a piss in the ocean of evidence to an acid rainstorm in a drought.

I don’t dispute that climate change scientists are on the back foot right now. But just as one fake fossil doesn’t disprove evolution, a bunch of egocentric scientists (pretty much tautological) and a couple of errors in a 2800-page report don’t undermine the remaining evidence. “I’m sorry, Miss Austen, although we very much enjoyed your manuscript Pride and Prejudice, I’m afraid we found a spelling error on page 53. REJECTED.” Small errors break space probes and computer programs: not climate science.

Perhaps the science is fundamentally wrong; perhaps not. But this is not a coin-toss. The odds are not 50-50. If you want to play the percentages, the odds are strongly in favour of the scientific consensus. There’s a distinct possibility that the sky really is starting to descend, that life as we know it will soon begin to change, and change significantly.

My belief is that, fifty years from now, the current crop of Daily Express headlines will look as bone-headed as the Daily Mail‘s 1934 Hurrah for the blackshirts! But by then all the politicians and newspaper editors involved will be long in their graves – and those not yet born will be living with the consequences of their decisions.

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