THE Daily Telegraph has dedicated a ludicrously long article to a rather silly book by Swedish climate warrior Sverker Sörlin titled Snö: A History.
The Telegraph article starts: ‘Snow, according to Sverker Sörlin,“has started to concern all of us”. In Snö, his lively and mostly entertaining new book, the Swedish writer aims both to deepen our understanding of the white stuff and to sound a klaxon warning of the dire consequences of its depletion. Snö – Swedish for “snow” – is a substance embedded in the author’s psyche: to him it represents hope, renewal and even grace . . .
‘The book is also a call to arms. Over the past century, Sörlin explains, as human activity has warmed the planet, “the annual and daily increase in greenhouse gases is a literal chronology that translates into a corresponding impact on living and dynamic materials all over the world”. In other words, snow is vanishing.
‘A scientist estimates that 500 glaciers have disappeared from Switzerland alone since the 1850s, one of many statistics concerning snow-depletion cited in the book. “Where once there was a real winter with snow,” Sörlin writes of his own country, “now our bare ground makes its appearance during seasons that have lost their rhythm. Snow is in retreat, as part of the great historical drama now known as climate change”.’
The author seems to be blissfully unaware of something called the Little Ice Age. When it ended in the mid-19th century, glaciers around the world began to melt back to their earlier size, a process that continues today.
There is well documented evidence, including photographs and contemporary maps, that glaciers in the Alps began retreating long before any increase in greenhouse gases occurred. Photos of the Rhone Glacier, for instance, bear out that it had already shrunk by half a mile and lost considerable thickness by 1870 – see here. The same process was taking place around the world, from Alaska to South America and even New Zealand.
Three centuries earlier, those same glaciers expanded massively, ushering in the Little Ice Age. To eco-warriors like Sörlin, glaciers are something wondrous to behold, somehow romantic.
They are wrong.
Do they have any idea of what the Alps were like during the Little Ice Age?
Do they know that glaciers had advanced so far that Chamonix was described in the 16th century as ‘a poor country of barren mountains never free of glaciers and frosts . . . half the year there is no sun . . . the corn is gathered in the snow . . . and is so mouldy it has to be heated in the oven. A place covered with glaciers . . . often the fields are entirely swept away and the wheat blown into the woods and on to the glaciers’.
Do they know that in the 17th century glaciers relentlessly pushed downslope ruining thousands of acres of farm land and leaving many villages uninhabitable, such as La Bois where a government official noted ‘there are still six houses, all uninhabited save two, in which live some wretched women and children . . . Above and adjoining the village there is a great and horrible glacier of great and incalculable volume which can promise nothing but the destruction of the houses and lands which still remain’?
The same official visited the hamlet of La Rosiere in 1616 and found ‘the great glacier of La Rosiere every now and then goes bounding and thrashing or descending . . . There have been destroyed 43 journaux of land with nothing but stones, and eight houses, seven barns and five little granges have been entirely ruined and destroyed’.
Do they know that between 1627 and 1633 Chamonix lost a third of its land through avalanches, snow, glaciers and flooding, and that the remaining hectares were under constant threat?
Do they know that by then people near the ice front were planting only oats and a little barley in fields that were under snow for most of the year?
Their forefathers had paid their tithes in wheat. Now they obtained but one harvest in three and even then the grain rotted after harvesting. The people who lived there were described as ‘so badly fed they are dark and wretched and seem only half alive’.
Do they know that Alpine villagers had to live on bread made from ground nutshells?
Do they even care?
These are all contemporary accounts of the time, published by the historian Brian Fagan in his book, The Little Ice Age.
Sörlin’s lack of knowledge is startling by any measure. If he had done some homework, he would have known that many of today’s glaciers in Switzerland did not even exist in Roman times. We know that because there are the remains of trees appearing as the glaciers melt – these trees were growing there 2,000 or more years ago, according to carbon dating.
The shallowness of Sörlin and his ilk appal me, along with their naivety in believing that climate never changed in the past.
Net Zero by the back door
Last week I wrote about how Kemi Badenoch’s plans to scrap Net Zero might be thwarted by the green blob in her own party, the Conservative Environment Network, or CEN.
We have now learned of the CEN’s response. Writing in Conservative Home, Sam Hall, the director of CEN, could not have made it clearer: ‘It was welcome to see the party today recommitting to tackling climate change, and acknowledging that handing on a cleaner environment to future generations is a fundamentally conservative mission.
‘Climate change is one of the greatest threats we face to our country’s prosperity and security. If we do nothing, we face ever higher costs from flooding, retreating coastlines, poorer harvests, declining nature and uninsurable assets. It is not something we can simply opt out of. The UK is only a tiny share of global emissions, but we can and should play an outsized role in addressing this challenge through leveraging our strengths in technology and finance.
‘To encourage others to go further and faster, UK climate leadership must not be abandoned but reinvented in a more credible, conservative fashion.’
He goes on to call for Badenoch to quickly come up with ‘a suite of concrete policies on how we will reduce emissions, drive innovation in clean technology, restore nature, and adapt to warmer temperatures’.
All in all, as far as the CEN is concerned, it will be business as usual. While the Climate Change Act itself might be scrapped, a Conservative government will carry on with basically the same policies as Ed Miliband is pursuing.
And as he finishes by saying it will cost us all a fortune:
‘To be taking climate change seriously, we must be willing to bear some proportionate costs now to tackle it for future generations’ sake.’
It remains to be seen how Badenoch will respond to this, although my guess is that her thinking is already closely aligned with Hall’s.
So it looks like under a Conservative government we will still have Net Zero, just not in name.
What about EVs, Kemi?
There is an interesting addendum to all of this. Mike Graham on Talk TV interviewed Matt Vickers, the Conservative Party deputy chairman shortly after Kemi’s speech, and specifically asked whether the 2030 ban on petrol cars would be lifted.
Answer came there none, just a load of waffle. Clearly it is not something that Badenoch has even bothered to think about, despite the fact that it is the number one issue facing the general public as far as Net Zero is concerned.
It is evidence that the supposed U-turn on Net Zero is no more than window dressing and that nothing will actually change in practice. The interesting thing is that Vickers is, you guessed it, a member of the CEN.
