Global warming

The politics of climate change will eventually turn, partly because the policies are often so un-Green in their effects. Wood-burning is not good for the environment. Nor is diesel. The government paid people to switch to diesel cars to help save the planet, thus damaging the breathing of thousands. At the Global Warming Policy Foundation last week, Fritz Varenholt, an environmentalist, scientist and SPD adviser in Germany, reported the increasing split between Greens and conservationists there. You can either have constantly functioning wind farms or healthy bird populations, but not both. The common buzzard and the red kite are now endangered in Germany.

The global warming 'pause' never existed, say the headlines. It's a claim that has been made before, only to be refuted, yet now it's back again. If there is one topic that sends a small subset of climate scientists' temperature into the stratosphere, it's the topic of the global warming 'pause' or 'hiatus'. This is the idea that global surface temperatures haven't changed much for almost 20 years. Never in my experience of science have I come across a topic like it, and that's because it means nothing, and everything. Global warming is about energy imbalance. Greenhouse gasses stop heat leaving the earth, so the planet is getting warmer. This is fundamental physics. Temperature goes up; oceans warm up, expand and sea level rises; pole caps melt.

Remember how rises in global temperatures were reported earlier in the year? Here is a taste from the Guardian in July. Funny thing is, though, global temperatures are now falling equally sharply – and no-one, with the exception of the Mail on Sunday last weekend, seems to be bothered about reporting it. Not even Nasa seems interested in reporting its own data for global temperatures. Instead, Nasa last week put out a press release about a study which claimed to have found a reason to explain the hiatus in global temperatures between 1998 and 2013 – the conclusion of which was, in as many words: it was all an illusion. The oceans were still warming up, but they were storing much of the Earth’s increased heat, which will be spewed out into the atmosphere in due course.

So I made £250 betting on Trump to win the presidency. It would have been more, except that every time I got close to topping up my stake, this boring, mimsy, responsible voice in my head kept saying: ‘Now, now James. Don’t be silly. All your sensible friends who know much, much more than you do about politics have been telling you that President Trump just isn’t going to happen.’ One of them was m’learned colleague Toby Young. Until recently we used to do a podcast together.

Global greening is the name given to a gradual, but large, increase in green vegetation on the planet over the past three decades. The climate change lobby is keen to ensure that if you hear about it at all, you hear that it is a minor thing, dwarfed by the dangers of global warming. Actually, it could be the other way round: greening is a bigger effect than warming. It is a story in which I have been both vilified and vindicated. Four years ago, I came across an online video of a lecture given by Ranga Myneni of Boston University in which he presented an ingenious analysis of data from satellites. This proved that much of the vegetated area of the planet was getting greener, and only a little bit was getting browner.

We seem to be wilfully blind when it comes to nature. Right now, Australia is in the grip of an unprecedented environmental disaster. The largest living structure on Earth, the Great Barrier Reef, is mortally sick. Across hundreds of miles of ocean, from Papua New Guinea and all the way southwards along the east coast of Australia, the reef is dying. Famously, the GBR is the only living structure visible from space – almost two thousand miles long and about the size of Germany. It’s suffering what the scientists call ‘bleaching’, a process where corals eject the algae that give them their bright colours, and turn white. They do it when they suffer stress, most commonly when the water in which they live warms up by more than 1°C above what they are accustomed to.

This article, in Nature magazine, ought to have been front page news - and might have been, had it suggested that global warming was worse than we had thought.  Instead, it underlines the sound science behind an inconvenient truth: that there has been a 15-year hiatus in global warming. To those of us who have been following the debate, this is no surprise. In 2007 I pointed out that it was curious that in recent years the global annual average temperature had not increased at a time when greenhouse gasses were increasing rapidly and when the media was full of claims that the earth's temperature was getting higher and higher. I proposed no explanation but said that it was a curious observation that would probably change in the near future.

Because I used to go to venues like Bataclan an awful lot myself, I’ve been dwelling a great deal on what the fans must have gone through that night. And the conclusion I’ve reached is how utterly random the whole business must have been: whether you survived or died was almost entirely dependent on being at the right or wrong bit at the right or wrong time. Even the band Eagles Of Death Metal, it turns out, only escaped by the skin of their teeth. The bassist barricaded himself into a room; the singer and guitarist escaped into the street and went briefly back to look for a missing girlfriend only to meet a gunman lowering his assault rifle at them; the drummer crawled out using his drum kit for cover.

Climate change is the subject of a complex debate in which, increasingly, experts disagree with each other. Nearly all of them believe in man-made global warming, but they're not sure how bad the problem is or how to tackle it. Meanwhile, the 'sceptics' are no longer dominated by scientifically illiterate amateurs. Many of them believe in anthropogenic global warming, though they don't think it's happening today. So you'd expect the BBC's 'Environment and Energy Analyst', Roger Harrabin, to proceed with caution. Not so. Here are two tweets he sent out yesterday (links here and here): Quentin Letts is the Daily Mail's parliamentary sketchwriter and theatre critic, celebrated for his sometimes caustic but more often gentle wit.

Is the world still getting warmer? If so, how fast? Has there been a global warming ‘pause’ or ‘hiatus’ or not? Or has the recent warming rate been as fast, or even faster, than that measured in the 1990s? These are fundamental questions. They depend not on the complex computer models on which scientists base their projections of the future, but on simple measurement, on readings from thermometers sited in thousands of locations across the world, on land, on buoys in the oceans and in balloons and satellites. Yet their answers are far from simple, and like many other areas of critical importance in climate science, subject to uncertainty and fierce debate – not that you would know this if you relied on almost all media reports.

'The Church has got no mandate from the Lord to pronounce on scientific matters.' In that one sentence, Cardinal Pell puts his finger on what is wrong with Laudato Si', Pope Francis's encyclical on the environment. In that document, Francis waded into an argument about climate change and took sides. Moreover, he gave the impression that he was speaking for all Catholics when he did so; and, if by any chance he wasn't, errant faithful should fall into line. In an interview in Thursday's Financial Times, the Prefect of the Secretariat for the Economy stepped out of line. See above. It was a brave thing to do: Pell's wholesale reform of the Vatican's finances is making him plenty of enemies as it is, and now he's even more vulnerable to attack. Why take the risk?