Thank god man-made global warming was proven to be a hoax. Just imagine what the world might have looked like now if those conspiring scientists had been telling the truth. No doubt NASA would be telling us that this year is now, so far, the hottest since humans began keeping records. The weather satellites would show that even when heat from the sun significantly dipped earlier this year, the world still got hotter. Russia's vast forests would be burning to the ground in the fiercest drought they have ever seen, turning the air black in Moscow, killing 15,000 people, and forcing foreign embassies to evacuate. Because warm air holds more water vapor, the world's storms would be hugely increasing in intensity and violence -- drowning one fifth of Pakistan, and causing giant mudslides in China.
The world's ice sheets would be sloughing off massive melting chunks four times the size of Manhattan. The cost of bread would be soaring across the world as heat shriveled the wheat crops. The increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would be fizzing into the oceans, making them more acidic and so killing 40 percent of the phytoplankton that make up the irreplaceable base of the oceanic food chain. The denialists would be conceding at last that everything the climate scientists said would happen -- with their pesky graphs and studies and computers -- came to pass.
This is all happening today, except for that final stubborn step. It's hard to pin any one event on man-made global warming: There were occasional freak weather events before we started altering the atmosphere, and on their own, any of these events could be just another example. But they are, cumulatively, part of a plain pattern where extreme weather is occurring "with greater frequency and in many cases with greater intensity" as the temperature soars, as the US National Climatic Data Center puts it. This is exactly what climate scientists have been warning us man-made global warming will look like, to the letter. Ashen-faced, they add that all this is coming after less than one degree celsius of global warming since the Industrial Revolution. We are revving up for as much as five degrees more this century.
Yet as the evidence of global warming becomes ever clearer, the momentum to stop it has died. The Copenhagen climate summit evaporated, Barack Obama has given up on passing any climate change legislation, Hu Jintao is heaving even more coal, David Cameron has shot his huskies, and even sweet liberal Canada now has a government determined to pioneer a fuel -- tar sands -- that causes three times more warming than oil. True, the victims are starting to see the connections. The Russian President Dmitri Medvedev has been opposed to meaningful action on global warming, until he found the smoke-choked air in the Kremlin hard to breathe. But if we wait until every leader can taste the effects of warming in their mouths, the damage will be irreparable.
Given the stakes, the reasons why so many people still refuse to accept the evidence can seem oddly trivial. A common one is: "It snowed a lot in the US and Britain last year. Where was your warming then, eh?" But scientific theories are based on patterns, not individual events. You might know a 90-year-old woman who has smoked a pack of cigarettes every day of her life and is totally healthy. (I do.) It doesn't disprove the theory that smoking causes lung cancer. In the same way, one heavy snowfall doesn't prove anything if it is part of a wider overall pattern of dramatic warming. And that snow probably was. While it snowed a lot in a few places, there were at the very same time harsher, more bitter droughts in many more places -- making it globally the fifth hottest winter ever recorded, according to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. (All the others were in the past decade). And that winter is your punchline proof that warming isn't happening?
But the broader public mood, smeared like sunscreen over us all, isn't active denial. No -- it's the desire to endlessly postpone this issue for another day. In 1848, a 25-year-old man called Phineas Gage was working on constructing the American railroads. It was his job to lay explosives to clear rocks out of the way -- but one day his explosive went off too soon, and a huge metal rod went through into his skull and out the other side. Amazingly, he survived -- but his personality changed. Suddenly, he was incapable of thinking about the future. The idea of restraining himself was impossible to grasp. If he had an urge, he would act on it at once. He could only ever live in an eternal present. As a civilization, we are beginning to look like Phineas Gage on a planetary scale.
Yet scattered among us there is a fascinating group of people who are offering a path to safety. Every summer since 2006, ordinary British citizens have built impromptu camps next to some of the most environmentally-destructive sites in Britain and taken direct action to shut their pollution down. So far, it has worked: They played a crucial role in the cancellation of the third runway at Heathrow and a big new coal power station at Kingsnorth.
That's how earlier this week I found myself on a high wooden siege tower in a camp in the Scottish hills, staring down across a moat towards the glistening, empty offices of the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS). You own this bank: 84 percent of it belongs to the taxpayer after the bailouts. Yet it is using your money to endanger you by funding the most environmentally-destructive behavior on earth, like burning the tar sands. The protesters chose to come here democratically -- everything at the climate camps is done by discussion and consensus -- because they have a better idea. Why not turn it into a Green Investment Bank, transforming Britain into a global hub for wind, solar and wave power? Why not go from promoting misery across the world to being a beacon of sanity?
So the protesters risked arrest in marching on RBS' offices because they know the stakes. As Professor Tim Flannery, one of the world's leading climate scientists, explains:
My great fear is that within the next few decades -- it could be next year, or it could be in fifty years, we don't know exactly when -- we will trap enough heat close to the surface to our planet to precipitate a collapse, or partial collapse, of a major ice shelf... I have friends who work on the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, and they say [when a collapse happens] you'll hear it in Sydney... Sea levels would rise pretty much instantaneously, certainly over a few months. We don't know how much it would rise. It could be ten centimeters, or a meter. We will have begun a retreat from our coasts... Once you have started that process, we wouldn't know when the next part of the ice sheet would collapse, we don't know whether sea level will stabilize. There's no point of retreat where you can safely go back to... I doubt whether our global civilization could survive such a blow, particularly the uncertainty it would bring.
Nature doesn't follow political fashion. Global warming may not be hot today, but the planet is -- hotter than ever. When you stare out over the wave of Weather of Mass Destruction we are unleashing, who looks crazy -- the protesters, or the people who have yet to join them?
An excellent source of clear, accessible videos debunking denialist claims can be found here.
Johann Hari is a writer for the Independent. To read more of his articles, click here or here.
You can follow Johann at www.twitter.com/johannhari101 or email him at j.hari [at] independent.co.uk
To read his latest article for Slate, click here.
Follow Johann Hari on Twitter: www.twitter.com/johannhari101
Loading comments… 
We estimate the effect of extreme weather on life expectancy in the United States. Using high-frequ
http://www
And since
"This was the 304th consecutiv
http://www
... there is obviously, indisputab
Weather is to climate as .....
..........
Warming did not stop in 1998, in fact it has accelerate
Per the NOAA, so far yes it is.
SFTor: "Let's say that 2010 beats 1998 as the hottest year in recorded history"
Per NASA 2005 was the hottest year.
SFTor: "although this is unlikely. (The July anomaly stands at 0.43 degrees Celsius, which isn't very hot.)"
Not according to the NOAA, which says July was the 2nd-hottes
Moreover and more importantl
http://www
SFTor: "Is there any climate model that predicts a drastic increase in extreme weather events at this temperatur
There you go again, confusing the global average temperatur
SFTor: "Are there any empirical studies that point to extreme weather events in this temperatur
The extreme weather events including the Russian heat wave and the Pakistan floodings are consistent with what is to be expected from global warming.
SFTor: "We know our current temperatur
Of the warmest point of the Holocene, several thousand years ago.
Publicola, the entire post above is based on relating local weather events to global temperatur
And to say that "the extreme weather events are consistent with" is just way too vague. The specific reasons that have been suggested for the Russian drought and the floods in Pakistan are that they are related to blocking events around the jet stream. That has nothing to do with man-made AGW.
SFTor, you are honest enough to understand that per the NOAA this is so far the hottest year on record, aren't you?
You are also honest enough to understand that your misleading conflation of an atmospheri
Given the above, why did you misleading
Global affects local, but local does not affect the whole planet.
"Russian drought and the floods in Pakistan are that they are related to blocking events around the jet stream. That has nothing to do with man-made AGW."
Sure it does. You don't think the jet stream is affected by global climate? What do you think instigates change in the jet stream?
Uh, you do understand that you are referring to atmospheri
Again down here on planet Earth per NOAA July was the 2nd-hottes
SFTor: "is at .49 degrees Celsius. "
Your correction of your previous inaccurate statement aside, you do understand that the 0.49 C (0.88 F) increase you are talking about here is only in relative reference to the average UAH lower tropospher
Which is to say what you are talking about here is a close to 1 degree F increase above an average that was and is already above the 20th century average... right?
You also know that your source, Dr. Roy Spencer, also says in relation to said atmospheri
http://www
You knew all these things before you posted your incorrect and misleading statement below... right, SFTor?
The gist of the article is that this is the hottest year ever (presumabl
On to the questions:
• Is this the hottest year in recorded history? Of course we can't say, there's another quarter to go.
• Let's say that 2010 beats 1998 as the hottest year in recorded history, although this is unlikely. (The July anomaly stands at 0.43 degrees Celsius, which isn't very hot.) Is there any climate model that predicts a drastic increase in extreme weather events at this temperatur
• Have we seen extreme weather during other summers when the temperatur
• We know that our current temperatur
Don’t you commie pinko liberals understand that any attempt to in any way interfere with the ability of the world’s power elite to properly lead people by their funding of things like global warming denialism and tea parties is the height of ingratitud
Snark now off....
This is exactly what is happenning
Indeed when one looks at the prediction
In other words, the warming (and resultant effects) is happenning FASTER than originally predicted.
So is Antarctic sea ice inversely related to the growth in CO2? Is the world cooling? Maybe the southern half?
Thanks for the informatio
The question I had about El Ninos, was whether or not global warming was causing an increase in the FREQUENCY of El Ninos.
I had heard that or read that somewhere -- that there has been an increase in how frequently they are occurring, and that the hypothesis was that global warming was playing a role.
I do understand that the event itself is unrelated to global warming.
According to 'global warming' advocates,
You have a 'greenhous
My argument is:
It is the sun that changes the temperatur
This all assuming that the earth is completely devoid of trees and other plant life that absorb CO2 and that the sun never goes through periods of intense solar flares and heat cycles or the fact that one volcano eruption can cancel out any new reduction emision of CO2 from all of mankind in one generation
OK.. here is the translatio
"I have no idea what I am talking about but if I repeat or concoct enough nonsense, I will help prevent understand
Got it.
Thanks....
The burden of proof is on you.
The earth has endured various forms of changes in the climate, perhaps because of some of the factors you argue about.
However we have to be clear about identifyin
Mankind does have a problem, it's called pollution.
We need CO2 so plants can use it in their processes of photosynth
That's why when an island volcano finishes a major eruption, plant life begins to grow, this has been proven even after a nuclear blast.
We don't need to tax carbon, we don't need to trade carbon, we simply need to break up the mega-corpo
If you are serious about pollution then I'm sure everyone is ready to join a cause to stop it.
However if you are looking to create a new derivative
wm08:
"You have a 'greenhous
You have exhibited a glaring misunderst
I can't help you if you don't understand your own arguments.
The hotter the world gets the more precipitat
The more precipitat
In earth's history the world was an ice ball. No Clouds, No water. Life was rare and microscopi
my answer to global warming is we heat up the ocean more than normal, and make it rain more, and that way it will counter act too much co2 in the world.
http://www
do you know when we the humans start to use fossils and coal...?
do you believe that Moses and Jesus used cars ,trains and airplanes and they had their rallys in convention centers with electricit
Using the same fear tactics, dogma, absolutism and self important arrogant language.
No Thanks
Not sure if i qualify as a denier. I do not deny that global warming or global cooling does happen, just if mankind's contributi
KOS "do you know when we the humans start to use fossils and coal.." No, but humans have been around for 40,000 years, civilized for 4,000, so I would throw out 4K as my guess on coal.
KOS "do you believe that Moses and Jesus used cars ,trains and airplanes" No, but...can we bring in where scientists are predicting arctic melts and the ocean rising?
You have to either accept the computer models, which are based largely on ice core data, or reject it. The computer/i
And a question for you, what is the largest (by volume ) greenhouse gas, and what percentage of the greenhouse gases does in comprise?
Sure - Arctic melting and rising sea levels were predicted by climate scientists as a consequenc
Illusion: "You have to either accept the computer models, which are based largely on ice core data, or reject it."
Wrong on two levels:
1: Computer models are not "based largely on ice core data" - they are instead based largely on scientific theory.
2: Anthropoge
Illusion: "The computer/i
Wrong again. Far from "much warmer", for example per state of the art science the medieval warm period was slightly cooler than today.
Illusion: "it was warmer in the past than present day, and had to be natural."
Cancer was "natural" before cigarettes
Illusion: "And a question for you, what is the largest (by volume) greenhouse gas, and what percentage of the greenhouse gases does in comprise?"
H2O; ~99%.
And a question for you: Can H2O, like anthropoge
Or do anthropoge
fill up a pot of water and put it on the stove , turn on med-high and let boil ...
it takes for ever to get to the boil point, right ?
now put the cover on the pot and let it boil ...
2-3 minutes and the water is boiling...
so the greenhouse effect from the corbon dioxide produced by the emmisions of burning
fossil fuels and coal is having the same result on the Planet as the cover of the pot, to accelarate the water to rich the boiling point faster..
yes our planet has hot or cold periods but this time we meesing up the normal timing process
BTW, the fossils and coal burning really start with the Industrial Revolution
So called “scientist
No I will stick with absolutely fair and balanced sources of informatio
SNARK OFF
NOAA has repeatedly denied the existence of underwater oil plumes (see this and this), calculated the spill to be only 5,000 barrels a day, and buried core data on the oil spill.
http://www
As NOAA Denies Oil In South Florida Hundreds Of Tarballs Wash Ashore In South East Florida.
http://blo
NOAA denies findings from Gulf oil research vessels it funded
http://cot
Senior NOAA Scientist Admits He Lied That Gulf Spill Oil Is Gone, Puts Administra
http://www
Is it your impression that the entire agency participat