No! We had that long ago. It’s just that we are now starting to see the impacts “play out in real time”.
We have had
heatwaves and long hot summers before, even in the UK. But record-breaking weather
on its own, especially when confined to particular locations, demonstrates very
little. Even so the coincidence of heatwaves across North America, Europe from
the UK to Greece, and Japan, and, even more dramatically, the extraordinary temperatures
observed in the Arctic.
Scientists, as
opposed to much of the media, have always preferred to concentrate on careful and
painstaking analysis of global average temperatures, rather than extreme events.
The evidence of that is clear from temperature measurements showing a steady upward
trend over many decades, and a trend that aligns closely with the predicted
effect of increasing atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases (GHG). The
serious nature of human-induced warming has been well established for at least twenty
years. More on the scientific debate can be found on other pages on this site.
But the science
is now starting to go further. It has long predicted that global warming would
significantly increase the number and intensity of heatwaves, but improved
analysis is now getting much closer to assigning the causation of particular extreme
weather events specifically to the signal of climate change, at least with increasingly
strong probabilities.
The heatwave currently
scorching northern Europe
was made more than twice as likely by climate change, according to one initial assessment.
Even more extreme conditions could be occurring every other year by the 2040s. “The
logic that climate change will do this is inescapable – the world is becoming
warmer, and so heatwaves like this are becoming more common,” Friederike Otto, at the University of Oxford,
is reported as saying.
“We found that
for the weather station in the far north, in the Arctic Circle, the current
heatwave is just extraordinary – unprecedented in the historical record,” said
Geert Jan van Oldenborgh, at the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute.
The Guardian
reports that previous attribution analyses have shown very strong connections
between climate change and extreme weather events. The scorching summer in New
South Wales, Australia, in 2016-17 was made at
least 50 times more likely by global warming, meaning it can be “linked
directly to climate change”. The “Lucifer” heatwave across Europe’s
Mediterranean nations in 2017 summer was made at
least 10 times more likely by climate change, while the unprecedented
deluge delivered in the US by Hurricane Harvey also in 2017 was made three
times more likely by climate change. However, other events, such as storms
Eleanor and Friederike, which hit western Europe in January, were
not made more likely by climate change. Serious
climate change is “unfolding before our eyes”, according to Professor Sutton,
at the University of Reading.
But disputing the science, and the measurement of change, is an ideological obsession. The same team is trying to bring you Brexit.
What are the
common factors linking the following?
·
The
Institute for Economic Affairs.
·
Nigel
Lawson. John Redwood. Jacob Rees Mogg.
(Conservatives – to name just three)
·
Graham
Stringer (Labour).
·
UKIP
and Nigel Farage.
·
Melanie
Phillips. Christopher Booker. (Journalists)
·
Donald
Trump
All have
displayed strong or passionate opposition to the evidence and logic of climate
science, or to any action to mitigate it. All have also been passionate advocates of
Brexit. Stringer was one of four Labour MPs voting with the government on recent
crucial Brexit votes, and is also involved with Lawson’s Global Warming Policy
Foundation - Lawson of course was a lead figure in the Leave campaign.
Phillips also
has strong anti-science form, supporting disgraced doctor Andrew Wakefield on the subject of MMR vaccination, a subject
where the provision of flawed and inaccurate information to the public has caused
huge damage. So does Booker, on the subject of evolution. To be fair, on
Brexit, he has partially recanted.
I could create
a much longer list (see my earlier comments on Brexit and Brexit economists),
but one interesting question is simply this. Why is there such a strong
correlation? Is it the absence of any
ability to deal rationally with fact and logic, or to comprehend the sophisticated
nature of scientific method, or is it pure ideology?
And when are we
going to hear more from some of the above on the subject of global warming?
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