“Total Climate Meltdown Cannot Be Stopped,” screams the headline in The Guardian. The quote is from a new book by Bill McGuire, an expert in these things. So if the climate meltdown can’t be stopped, what are you doing at home reading this? If anything ever called for a wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling blowout party, the end of the world has got to qualify, right?
But wait! We may yet be saved.
“Blistering heatwaves are just the start. We must accept how bad things are before we can head off global catastrophe,” says McGuire.
But didn’t he just write that it’s too late and we can’t stop a climate meltdown?
My head hurts.
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And this is just the beginning, insists McGuire, who is emeritus professor of geophysical and climate hazards at University College London. As he makes clear in his uncompromising depiction of the coming climatic catastrophe, we have – for far too long – ignored explicit warnings that rising carbon emissions are dangerously heating the Earth. Now we are going to pay the price for our complacency in the form of storms, floods, droughts and heatwaves that will easily surpass current extremes.
The crucial point, he argues, is that there is now no chance of us avoiding a perilous, all-pervasive climate breakdown. We have passed the point of no return and can expect a future in which lethal heatwaves and temperatures in excess of 50C (120F) are common in the tropics; where summers at temperate latitudes will invariably be baking hot, and where our oceans are destined to become warm and acidic. “A child born in 2020 will face a far more hostile world that its grandparents did,” McGuire insists.
If McGuire seems a little far out front on the “it’s too late to save the planet” issue to you, you’re right. The consensus view from the 2,000 climate scientists in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is that we still have a few years before the end-of-the-world parties can begin.
Such claims are dismissed by McGuire. “I know a lot of people working in climate science who say one thing in public but a very different thing in private. In confidence, they are all much more scared about the future we face, but they won’t admit that in public. I call this climate appeasement and I believe it only makes things worse. The world needs to know how bad things are going to get before we can hope to start to tackle the crisis.”
“Appeasement,” is it? If it’s attention McGuire wants, he’s getting it. What the world “needs to know” is that hysterics like McGuire are very good at predicting the end of the world but not so good at being realistic and acknowledging when they’re in error.
Wildfires of unprecedented intensity and ferocity have also swept across Europe, North America and Australia this year, while record rainfall in the midwest led to the devastating flooding in the US’s Yellowstone national park. “And as we head further into 2022, it is already a different world out there,” he adds. “Soon it will be unrecognisable to every one of us.”
Is Yellowstone really in the Midwest? The park borders three states — Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho. The only people who believe those states are in the Midwest are ignorant coastal elites and stiff-necked Brits.
Actually, farmers in the grain and corn belts are expecting record crops. And the “unprecedented” nature of the wildfires may be because the U.S. government is partially responsible after it began to encourage them. According to National Geographic, “Many ecosystems benefit from periodic fires, because they clear out dead organic material—and some plant and animal populations require the benefits fire brings to survive and reproduce.”
Not all fires are started by the government, of course. Most are started by careless idiots or firebugs. The point is there is very little “unprecedented” about them. But it sounds apocalyptic to refer to them as “unprecedented,” so grab your wives and daughters and run for your lives!
McGuire wanted to be one of the first to predict that it is too late to save the planet. He says there are plenty of scientists who agree with him but are too chicken to say so out loud. How convenient. Instead of being a lone crackpot, he has plenty of scientists who agree with him — in secret.
This is “science”? Sheesh.
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