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https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/oct/09/hot-air-by-peter-stott-review-the-battle-against-climate-change-denial>
"How on earth did we get here? How did we arrive in a world where temperatures
in British Columbia can come within a whisker of 50C, where a ring of fire made
Athens look apocalyptic, massive floods ripped apart towns in Belgium and
Germany – yet still there is no international plan for how to keep the world
habitable by the end of the century, and those protesting about that are
labelled extremists?
Hot Air, by the leading climate scientist Peter Stott, offers an explanation.
On the one hand it details the four-decade journey taken by him and his peers,
especially in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), to
determine whether the world is genuinely heating at a dangerous rate, and if
human activities are the primary cause. (It is, and they are.) On the other
hand, it exposes the sustained efforts of a coalition of business lobbies,
politicians, maverick scientists and contrarian attention-seekers to discredit
and undermine that enterprise – efforts that continue even now, as the world
literally burns.
We are approaching a point where those denialist efforts are more than cynical,
irresponsible and self-interested: they are starting to look like crimes
against humanity. But they alone do not explain why there has been such a lack
of effective action against climate change. A few loudmouthed pundits and
wrongheaded scientists do not wield such power. Their actions, and the lobbying
of multinationals, would count for far less if they were not so eagerly
embraced by politicians who, for short-term electoral gain, have shied away
from taking difficult decisions. It remains unclear whether they will behave
any differently at the Cop26 meeting in Glasgow this November, which some
regard as pretty much our last hope of averting disaster.
The biggest value of Stott’s account is in giving the lie to the denialists’
accusation that climate scientists are (for reasons they never make clear)
conjuring alarmist narratives from error-prone computer models and shoddy data.
In contrast, he shows – sometimes in a little too much detail – how slowly and
carefully the scientists have edged towards the current consensus since the
1980s, comparing temperature records from many sources, testing their models’
ability to reproduce past climate patterns, exploring their sensitivity to
different assumptions, and looking for the distinctive “fingerprints” in
climate data that can distinguish human-made from natural effects."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
