Photo: George Monbiot
Every newspaper should have someone like George Monbiot on hand. He's the affable and intelligent UK based Guardian columnist (and the author of Heat - How to stop the planet burning) who keeps readers up to date on the depressing ramp up of human instigated climate change. Furthermore, he often provides a political context to the powerful international denial lobby including its ties to the fossil fuels industry which underpin a number of think tanks. And our rightfully furious George is willing to call for resignations when it makes sense - as he did with a few leading lights at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) who've placed their political ambitions ahead of the safety of the planet.
The UK it should be added is one of the few countries in the world where policies of adaptation and mitigation are built into the functions and considerations of every government agency and department at the national and local level. Climate change is not just the prerogative of the environment ministry there. Montbiot comes out of a culture where all of the three major political parties are heading into a spring election agreed that the overheating of the Earth's atmosphere by fossil fuels emissions has catastrophic consequences for future generations.
That kind of consensus does not exist on this side of the pond. Canada, where I live and work, has been reconfigured into a petro-state living off the sales of dirty oil that is belched from the noxious Alberta tar sands and then exported into energy addicted American market. One leading scientist I spoke to dares not express his opinion publicly of late because he is hoping that Ottawa will reverse its recent decision to curtail funding for academic research into the long term trends in weather and atmospheric patterns.
Climate change denial is the official Canadian government policy and it is reflected here in both the news coverage in the corporate driven media and in the prominence given to the two leading skeptics of climate science, columnists and pundits Margaret Wente and Rex Murphy. I have no doubt these two media machers perform their jobs without the benefit of the assistance of a lobby.
My complaint is that that there is nobody in my country like George Monbiot with an equivalent public perch to counter the nay sayers on global warming. The few scientists willing to stick their necks out with rebuttals in the media lack the ability to respond in language that the public can understand. My suspicion is that this imbalance is a widespread phenomenon across North America and beyond. Monbiot has, for instance, complained of the passivity of British climate scientists in face of recent attacks on their research.
This of course makes the job of the emergency planners who need to keep on top of possible droughts, flooding and extreme weather doubly difficult, especially if their political masters belittle climate change as a possible source for those concerns.
It may be said that someone of George Monbiot's talents comes in short supply. In the past he made himself available for talks outside the UK to articulate a pro-science perspective on climate change. But his reluctance to fly, because of the role that air travel plays as a major generator of greenhouse gases, has restricted his availability overseas. But, we cannot always rely on an outsider.
The challenge for consumers of news about climate change is that scientists are contributing all the time to a large body of arcane knowledge that is inexact and a work in progress. Scientists are, for instance, debating the timing and scale of rising sea levels and glacier melting, not if they will happen at all with global warming. For non-specialists it can be downright confusing.
But there is enough data on hand, remarks economist Jeffrey Sachs to demonstrate the urgency of a global strategy to deal with climate change. "Large scale use of oil, coal and gas is threatening the biology and chemistry of the planet," he wrote recently.
As recounted by Monbiot, the current scandal involving hacked emails at the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia reflects more the typical efforts of a science prima donna -- that is unit head Phil Jones -- to maintain his august reputation to the point of suppressing new data that challenged his flawed 20 year old paper on local heating and urbanization.
And it is true the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change representing the work of thousands of the world's climate scientists, erroneously reported the disappearance of the Himalayan glaciers within three decades - a nonsensical claim considering the enormous 30,000 square kilometer land mass in question - 300 years is the more likely time frame if global warming continues unchecked, experts have told the Guardian.
Monbiot is calling for the resignation of the head of that organization, Rajendra Pachauri for covering up that error. In one delicious Guardian column he wrote about how the current IPCC head - an economist, not a climate science incidentally -- was the choice of George Bush and ExxonMobil to replace a bona fide scientist Robert Watson whose outspokenness on global warming was not of their liking.
Science is too important to be left to the pundits and politicians.
Photo: Wikipedia - CC Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 Generic
