Freddy Gray speaks to energy specialist Robert Bryce about the policy failures which have contributed to the wildfires, what the clear up could look like and why this crisis will expose the class divide in America.
You’ve all seen the warnings: if we let the global average temperature rise more than one degree and a half above the pre-industrial (1850-1900) level, we are in for unprecedented heat and storms. My New Year resolution was to answer two questions: Where did that figure come from? And is it really that critical?
CO2 emitted into the atmosphere is rapidly and, for all practical purposes, uniformly distributed around the planet.
I may be stating the obvious but it needs to be pointed out. Voters and even political leaders are surprisingly poorly informed on this point.
We have been recording weather properly only in the last couple of hundred. There is no way yet of proving absolutely beyond doubt that the bad weather happening today is worse than anything we have ever had before.
While the public at large suspected they were being gaslit, it was encouraging to see the upstart media, such as Talk TV, rubbishing the claims as well; Mike Graham, Julia Hartley-Brewer and Kevin O’Sullivan, for instance, all made it clear they thought such claims were an insult to our intelligence.
As the energy transition inches through the ‘issue attention’ cycle, a wiser approach should emerge.
“The lithium, the atrium, all of the rare earth minerals that are necessary for the batteries, that are necessary for the solar panels, that are necessary for the wind turbines … are called rare earths.”
One is that we realise that for the last 12,000 years our climate has been changing gradually after the last glacial advance. Secondly, that during this period there have been distinct warm and cold periods that have persisted for several decades or even centuries.
Climate policy based on an assumed relationship between CO2 and Arctic ice levels is problematic, say scientists.
WELL, that didn’t take long! At the beginning of the month the Met Office launched a new Heat Alert system, and lo and behold, within days they issued an amber alert for last weekend, across most of southern England, where temperatures were forecast to rise into the high 20s:
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