THE recent UK council elections showed how we can act in a totally illogical manner. We could all think of many ways our councillors could improve our daily lives but instead of voting for the candidate most likely to do something about potholes, for instance, we used the opportunity to tell Keir Starmer what we thought of him. Illogical, but in this instance understandable.
There are more serious examples of what seem to be reasonable deductions based on apparently plausible arguments. For instance, surveys show that people are very worried about our climate.
An EU website reported that ‘Eighty-five per cent of Europeans see climate change as a problem and think that fighting it should be a priority to increase public health.’ A Yale survey in November 2024 found that ‘68 per cent of people in the UK think climate change should be a high or very high priority for the government of the United Kingdom.’ That worry is at the top of their list. Action by governments should therefore be a priority.
But instead of bluntly asking people whether they are worried about the behaviour of the climate, what if you simply ask them what they are most concerned about? Our government did this in March and found that ‘the cost of living (87 per cent), the NHS (81 per cent), and the economy (72 per cent) remained the most commonly reported important issues facing the UK today’. Climate change and the environment came seventh, after international conflict, immigration and crime.
Global temperatures compared with the 1850-1900 period are rising year by year, we are told. Therefore the climate is changing and the danger is real. But research (c/o that link and see Section 5 fig 1 maps and fig 3 graphs) has shown that there were very few recording stations before 1900, and even then mostly in Western Europe and North America, so where did the global information for those fifty years come from? Another possibly invalid conclusion based on questionable data.
The world’s weather is throwing tantrums, apparently. ‘Climate change is impacting our planet faster than anyone had predicted . . . we’re seeing more and more records getting broken.’ And ‘recent years have seen a rapid succession of climate-related records broken’.
First, I should point out that these are weather not climate records. Second, they refer only to the 130-odd years over which we have reliable data. There is no knowledge of daily weather for the ten thousand years before 1900. Once again the premise (weather records broken) does not really justify the deduction (climate change).
The same comment applies to ‘extreme’ weather. ‘Nasa data reveals dramatic rise in intensity of weather events . . . Extreme events such as floods and droughts are becoming more frequent, longer-lasting and more severe.’ How do we know? What, for instance, was the frequency of extreme weather events in England during the reign of Edward III, 1327-1377? Or in China during the Qin dynasty, 221-206 BC? Answers, anyone?
There’s a ‘climate emergency’ as well. Of course there is. Several organisations seem to delight in telling us about it every few months. ‘The world is closer than [we] thought to a point of no return after which runaway global heating cannot be stopped,’ scientists have said. Other scientists ‘sound alarm as multiple climate systems near critical tipping points’. And there’s another pessimistic lot warning that ‘the Earth is on track to become uninhabitable . . . multiple climate systems are all much closer to collapse than previously thought.’
The meteorological situation to many scientists, then, is quite serious. Others have noted that the gatherings of the 30 (so far) annual conferences run by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) have not achieved their aim of global emission reduction. Therefore we must try something else before it’s too late. What about Solar Radiation Management (SRM), dimming the sun by spreading aerosols in the high atmosphere?
A recent Royal Society report said that ‘SRM could ameliorate many, but not all, of the adverse impacts of climate change . . . There is robust evidence that globally co-ordinated deployment of SRM could reduce global-mean surface temperature.’ It is currently the most favoured approach because any effect would be felt quickly.
There we are, another of these apparently incontrovertible conclusions. Rising emissions are causing increasingly dangerous climate change. Many scientists, and others whose knowledge of climatology is questionable, are sounding the alarm every week. The world is not taking notice of UNFCCC resolutions. The world needs urgent action: dim the sun. Never mind that it would be an uncontrollable experiment on the sunlight that every living thing must have, and on the very atmosphere that we breathe.
Doubtful judgements and decisions are all around us. As I write there is a naked (and unashamed) scramble for power going on in the Labour party. Some of them think all we need is more of the same leftward drift but with added intensity. Rejoin the EU and turn off North Sea oil and gas.
You can’t get more illogical than that.
