So what if Global Warming is a scam?

There’s been a lot of heat on the proponents of Global Warming over the past year, especially regarding the repugnant tactics of “scientists” (or should that be cheerleaders?) at the university of East Anglia’s Climate Study Department.

Many people remember the 1970s “Global Cooling” scare, and are aware of the notorious inaccuracy of even short-term weather forecasts, let alone long-term climate predictions. They point out the vested interests of those in the Climate Change industry. What about the medieval warm period, when monks grew wine grapes in England, and the Little Ice Age, when people skated on winter rivers? What about dodgy hockey-stick graphs? What about sun spots? What about the coldest British winter in recent memory? What about the urbanisation of temperature sensor sites over the past 100 years? And what about my freedom to go on holiday to Thailand and drive a 3-litre 4×4?

The consequences of this argument are not academic, as anyone who hasn’t been living in a cave for the past decade will testify. It is not about putting on or taking off an extra layer of clothing. It is not ‘just’ about life and death for billions of people and flooding on a biblical scale. It is about potentially spending hundreds of billions or trillions of pounds on measures to reduce greenhouse gases (There’s a footnote here: Freakanomics 2 devotes a chapter to a bunch of ex-Microsoft geeks who claim they can cool the Earth very cheaply by sending sulphur dioxide into the upper atmosphere through gargantuan funnels. Like an errupting volcano. Hmm.)

I guess we will continue to debate Global Warming until 2050 or so (or civilisation collapses, whichever is the sooner), when its manifestation will or will not become obvious to all. And I’m going to come right out, probably the only Green Party parliamentary candidate to do so, and say loud and clear: “I don’t know what the climate will be like in 50 years”.

So, what’s up? Am I a closet denier? Am I mad, a heretic, a lone voice of truth? None of the above. Let me stick my neck out even further:

I T  D O E S N ‘ T  M A T T E R.

In one sense, it doesn’t matter whether climate change is happening or not, because the solutions TO climate change (with one exception – carbon [dioxide] sequestration) are just coincidently, the solutions to a whole host of other problems. And that is probably one reason why the whole carbon climate caboodle has such massive support. It doesn’t matter because all these fossil fuels that we are debating reducing our consumption of have reached peak extraction anyway. When people have to spend more on fuel to commute to work than the difference between their salary and the dole… well you do the ‘math’ my friend.

Whatever we do to mitigate climate change, we need to do anyway, for a whole host of reasons. We need to transform our society into one which is not dependant on fossil fuels, one which is not dependant on manufacturing and recycling plants at the other end of the World, one which treats people as human beings, not automatons, one which respects our environment as something to nurture and pass on to our children, not a stinking sewer, “somebody else’s problem”.

Yes, we are at a tipping point. But the point is not just about temperature and flooding. It is about the necessity to evolve. We have been through industrialisation, through globalisation, and now as we are entering the information age, we need to realise that we cannot simply  socially notwork into a debt-based future where distant foreigners manufacture our things, our food is grown virtually by machines and chemicals and a self-purpetuating elite rules by casino finance. Our entire economy is going to transition, whether we like it or not, into locally-based structures where the provision of simple sustainable necessities becomes our paramount priority.

Our choice is whether to plan for this transition into a better world, or whether to cling on to an unsustainable model of living which will probably collapse in a violent revolution.

Thanks to Jonathan Porrit for the cartoon.