EU Referendum


Climate change: the edge of dishonesty


08/11/2021




In the Sunday Times yesterday, there was a lengthy piece by the paper's colour-writing expert, Tim Shipman, who also disguises himself as the chief political correspondent.

It is headed, "Johnson’s green machine gathers steam to turn Cop into a coup" yet, despite its length, is deeply uninformative, telling us little more than we already knew – that Johnson has approached CoP26 with the zeal of a convert, and is now planning a "spectacular" to give the uninspiring conference a veneer of success by the time it closes.

What precisely this might be is not specified but other papers are suggesting that a global deal on the sale of new petrol and diesel cars might be on the cards, a 2035 deadline to be set for richer countries and 2040 for developing countries. A major announcement is expected in Glasgow on Wednesday.

The Telegraph is running this story, with the added news that Biden is resisting the idea. This, though, is hardly surprising. Any US president who wants to live would be unwise to stand between Americans and their love affair with the automobile.

Germany, still in the throes of selecting a government, has been unable to sign up to such a deal and China has also opted out. This leads Juan Pablo Osornio, head of Greenpeace's delegation at Cop26, to complain that, for any Johnson initiative to have "credibility", all major auto manufacturing countries need to be part of it, including Germany and the US. And that ain't going to happen.

But such is the fevered atmosphere of the conference that no-one is pointed out that, if every major auto manufacturing country did join in the scheme, there would be nowhere near sufficient raw materials to go round.

Careful and guarded reports from the likes of Reuters are ignored, despite the agency point out that shortages are driving process up which, even in the short-term, would make climate change targets unachievable.

Although unreality is the staple fare in Glasgow for the moment, there are times when climate change coverage brings us to the edge of dishonesty, witness a piece in the Guardian (where else?), written by Heidi Peltier, a senior researcher at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University, and director of programmes for the Costs of War Project.

The heading and sub-heading reveal the thrust of Peltier's piece, the former stating, "It's time to shift from the 'war on terror' to a war on climate change", while in the latter she declares: "Climate-related disasters have killed more Americans from flooding and wildfires than the 2,996 people who died in the 9/11 attacks. Let's treat the climate crisis with equal seriousness".

Compared with the 2,996 people who died in the 9/11 attacks, she writes, climate-related disasters have killed more Americans from flooding and wildfires. Wildfires, she claims, have resulted in over 3,200 deaths in the US since 2000, according to recent research in The Lancet. Hurricane Katrina alone killed over 1,800 people in 2005.

As so often, there is this blithe assumption that these recorded events are climate-related, with the ever-present (although in this case unstated) assumption that they are increasing. As regards wildfires, though, official US data (conveyed by the Congressional Research Service) has it that the number over the last 30 years has actually decreased slightly.

The area burned, however, has increased but, as the linked briefing note makes clear, the reasons for this are complex, while some fires may have a beneficial impact on ecological resources.

Where damage to structures has occurred, most of this has been experienced in California. In that state, the number and extent of the fires has been attributed in part to overgrown forests caused by decades of fire suppression, and poor forestry management. The rapid population growth along the edges of forests has contributed to the property losses.

Climate change has, as one might expect, been cited as exacerbating the problem, but to assert that forest fires are solely a function of climate change - and that the deaths arising are thus attributable – is disingenuous to the point of dishonesty.

The position on wildfire-related deaths, though, is doubly disingenuous. While Peltier cites 3,200 deaths in the US since 2000, i.e., in 21 years, many of those are entirely due to that rapid population growth along the forest fringes. There are, quite simply, more people in harm's way.

But, just as significantly, if one looks at official US fire statistics, one sees that the average death rate from all fires is over 3,000 each year, and rising. Of those, 72 percent occur in residential premises. As aside, in 2019, there were recorded 131,400 accidental deaths in homes and communities in 2019.

If ever there was an example of cherry-picking data, therefore, is it. Despite "climate change" – even at the most generous assessment – causing a fraction of the deaths due to other causes, Peltier would have the US divert the trillions of dollars and millions of lives fighting a war on terror, to "mobilising to combat climate change".

It is this sort of argument that provokes much of the cynicism attendant on claims of climate-related disasters, and climate change in general. From the same wellspring, we have former green leader and now MP, Caroline Lucas stomping the streets of Glasgow, prattling: "The oceans are rising - and so are we".

And yet, a dispassionate view of this issue, from a paper in 2017 has it that "no consistent or compelling evidence (yet) exists that recent rates of rise [in sea levels] are higher or abnormal in the context of the historical records available across Europe, nor is there any evidence that geocentric rates of rise are above the global average".

On the other hand, of some of those Pacific islands threatened with extinction because of rising sea levels (for which there is no discernible global warming signature), we learn that hundreds are actually getting bigger.

As to the generality, of the case for there being a "climate emergency" – now largely downscaled to "climate crisis", we have been having a robust discussion in the comments on previous posts – with the usual quota of time-wasters.

But what some commenters fail to realise – with some not bothering to find out – is that while I make no claims to being a climate scientist, I have spent over 30 years examining the scare phenomenon (sometimes known as "moral panics"), having cut my teeth on the Salmonella in eggs scare of 1988.

With Christopher Booker, I wrote a book on the subject, first published in 2007, called "Scared to death", which included a long chapter on global warming. There, we found that this had all the hallmarks of a scare.

As time progresses and the noise-level increases, I am less and less inclined to accept the claims made by the purveyors of peril. And I am not alone. The greater the hype, the more ordinary people are left cold.

That notwithstanding, even if one was to accept that there was a treat, there are no circumstances where I would accept that Johnson's "net zero" policy was an adequate or necessary response. Again, that sentiment is shared, with a survey reminding us that few people are willing to change their lifestyles "to save the planet".

With that in mind, despite a disappointing absence of dark money coming our way, we continue to promote our petition which, at the time of writing, was very close to 17,000 signatures after 11 days, placing us in the top 60 in the list of 1,625 petitions.

Also published on Turbulent Times.