INDEX	August 9, 2022
When the climate doesn't change, I change my view. What do you do?
In 2012 James Lovelock said he had been "alarmist" about climate change. "All right, I made a mistake," about timing, he said when interviewed on MSNBC, an American pay tv channel. In particular he judged the documentary An Inconvenient Truth and the book The Weather Makers as similarly alarmist. Ten years later what has changed? Three decades ago climate models predicted that global mean surface temperatures would increase by about 0.3 degrees C a decade. Have those models been junked as useless (which they are)? Not at all. Recently the perpetrators of them got Nobel prizes. In that case did temperatures go up by 0.3 degrees in the decade since James Lovelock made his observation? If they did the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change didn't notice, since it is now quoting an increase in temperature over 1850-1900 (the standard baseline) of about the same as it did in 1990. James Lovelock's words should be taken to heart by all who take an interest in the climate because he is probably unique in saving the Earth from environmental catastrophe. He invented an electron capture detector, which assisted in discoveries about the persistence of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and their role in stratospheric ozone depletion. The banning of CFCs and subsequent junking of millions of fridges across the planet was the most remarkable environmental victory of the	James Lovelock in 2005.
20th century. Oh, and he also came up with the idea of Gaia. He also did some work for MI5, but the less said about that the better. Lovelock used to argue that most of the Earth would become uninhabitable for humans and other life-forms by the middle of this century, but he changed his view a decade ago. Well he did about the timing. He still thought keeping adding CO2 to the atmosphere was a bad idea, as does every reasonable person. So the relentless increase in CO2 continues unabated reaching the extraordinary figure of 416.96 ppm in July 2022. This is despite the fact that we have had 26 annual UN sponsored climate jamborees (the oddly named Conference of the Parties) designed to find ways to reduce CO2. So far the parties have been a lot better at partying than actually doing anything about CO2. It is going up now faster than ever. Meanwhile other climate catastrophes (like fertiliser run off from agriculture into the oceans), are virtually ignored as the world concentrates on a problem it does not appear to know how to solve, and which, with hindsight, doesn't appear to be as serious as was once thought.
INDEX Jonathan Brind	August 9, 2022