From the Independent (UK) comes an answer to the question posed by the old rock group Kansas: “How long to the point of no return?” An international report by “senior politicians, business leaders and academics from around the world” say it’s “as little as 10 years, or even less,” that “the point of no return with global warming may have been reached.”
The report says this point will be two degrees centigrade above the average world temperature prevailing in 1750 before the industrial revolution, when human activities ? mainly the production of waste gases such as carbon dioxide (CO2), which retain the sun’s heat in the atmosphere ? first started to affect the climate. But it points out that global average temperature has already risen by 0.8 degrees since then, with more rises already in the pipeline – so the world has little more than a single degree of temperature latitude before the crucial point is reached.
So another 1.2 degrees centigrade and we’re plunged into “The Day After Tomorrow” land? You’ve got to be kidding me. And are we supposed to believe that the report’s baseline of global temperatures circa 1750 were static pre-Industrial Revolution? Are they arguing that global temperature change only happened after the Industrial Revolution? The report is imminently dismissable ? the strength of it is apparently on the “we must act now” scaremongering. Which, I note, is fully in keeping with the two criteria for crisis manufacturing I posted last week (see Footnote No. 1).
