The bad news came shortly after New Year’s with the announcement by climate scientists that the year 2023 was on average the warmest year ever recorded for our planet, surpassing the previous record holder 2016 by nearly a tenth of a degree Celsius. While a 0.1ºC increase may not sound like a great deal that happening for the entire planet over an entire year represents an enormous amount of extra heat in the atmosphere.
The final tally for 2023 was an increase of 1.48ºC above pre-industrial temperatures; just slightly below the 1.5ºC increase that climatologists have been warning for decades will bring on ever greater climate disasters. Worst still, if you consider the 12 month period from the first of February 2023 to the 31 of January 2024 we broke that 1.5ºC barrier.
Meteorologists point out that the strong El Nino pacific weather pattern that developed around May in 2023 added to the historic heat levels measured from June to December, and now January 2024 as well. That El Nino is expected to continue for some time in 2024 so it is perfectly possible that 2024 may wind up being even hotter than 2023. So we are now getting a taste of a world above that 1.5ºC, a world with severe weather year round, from tornadoes during the winter months to endless wildfires, floodings etc.etc. The question is, are people paying attention.
I’m afraid that the answer to that question is no. The climate deniers are still out there, still trying to convince people that civilization will collapse if we don’t keep on burning coal, oil and natural gas. There has been a shift in their arguments however. With the actual measured data clearly showing that the last ten years, 2014 to 2023, were the hottest ten years ever recorded the petroleum industry and its apologists are no longer trying to assert that global warming simply isn’t happening, or at least that human activity isn’t to blame for it. No, instead they are now trying to convince people that, while climate change may be happening, it’s really not going to be that bad and besides there’s nothing we can do to stop it.
This ‘New Denialism’ is showing up in ever increasing numbers of YouTube videos, facebook posts, and other forms of social media. This new denialism is characterized by attacks on possible solutions to global warming along with the worldwide climate movement. False claims that Solar and Wind energy don’t work and that climate scientists are either alarmists or corrupt, I’ll have more to say about that later, have increased to 70% of anti-climate videos on YouTube while actual claims that climate change isn’t happening have dropped to only 14%. Some of the claims come close to hysteria, ‘They’re trying to take away your cars and stoves’ for example or that wind turbines cause cancer. For the most part however the deniers claim that clean, green energy will simply not work and attempts to reduce green house gas emissions will destroy the economy.
One recent claim even asserted that the sonar surveys carried out in preparation for the construction of wind farms along the US Atlantic coastline were causing whales and dolphins to beach themselves. This is despite the fact that the beachings occurred more than nine months after the surveys had been completed. Republican State Legislators in the State of New Jersey even tried to get a bill passed to ‘Save the Whales’ by halting further development work on the wind farms. I’m certain it’s the first time any of them ever cared about Whales.
At the same time other bills and zoning regulations are also cropping up across the country that are designed to restrict if not halt the construction of clean energy wind and solar energy installations. As many as 15% of the counties in the US have passed bans or moratoriums that effectively make it impossible for anyone to construct a large scale wind or solar farm, even on their own property. Worst still, many of the places that are banning green energy projects are the best places for such projects. Think about it, Texas obviously gets a lot more sunlight than Maine, but Texas is an oil state and the politicians in Texas would rather force people to keep burning fossil fuels than allow anyone to build solar power projects. That’s despite the economic benefits from the money for the energy produced along with all the good paying green energy jobs. It’s an old story, many of the people who oppose wind and solar projects actually accept the need for green energy to combat climate change, they just don’t want them in their backyard.
After all of that bad news I do have a small piece of good news. The climate deniers on the web have many times not only lied about climate science but the scientists who are trying to warn us about the climate disasters we now face. These falsehoods have many times gone far beyond criticizing the work the scientists are doing to include allegations that the scientists are taking bribes for falsifying climate data and even claims that the scientists are guilty of crimes, even sex offenses.
Well one noted climate scientist decided to fight back. Michael Mann is a highly regarded climatologist at the University of Pennsylvania here in Philadelphia who has long been in the forefront of the fight to convince the public of the serious threat that greenhouse gasses pose. It was back in 1998 that Doctor Mann published his ‘Hockey Stick’ graph of global temperatures over the past several hundred years.
Dr. Mann had used his research in tree rings, coral reefs and ice cores to show that global temperatures had been relatively stable for centuries before the start of the industrial revolution but that ever since humanity had begun to burn large quantities of fossil fuels global temperatures had spiked dramatically. The graph of that increase was said to resemble a hockey stick, laid on the ground with its blade pointing up, hence the name. That graph became famous and made Mann the target of right-wing critics more interested in defending fossil fuels than the truth or a dedicated scientist’s reputation.
Two conservative writers in particular, Rand Simberg of the Competitive Enterprise Institute and Mark Steyn of the National Review went so far that in 2012 Professor Mann sued them for defamation. It took twelve years of legal wrangling but in early February a jury in Superior Court for the District of Columbia finally agreed with Mann and awarded the climatologist $1 Million in punitive damages. Of course both defendants have announced that they will be appealing the decision so this case isn’t over yet. Still it demonstrates that those people, not just scientists but everyone who is concerned for our planet, can and should stand up to the bullies who ignore the harm they are doing to the world so long as they can make a quick buck.