Is this the end of climate denialism?

Front page of The Sun newspaper.  Source: JPratt

From The Guardian:

It’s not always easy to recognise a historical tipping point when you see one, but I believe I spotted one when I walked into my local newsagent last Wednesday and saw the front page of the Sun. Over a map of the world which was coloured bright scarlet, the splash headline screamed: “THE WORLD’S ON FIRE”.

Britain’s biggest-selling daily newspaper was not mincing its words. The subheading on the left-hand side proclaimed “PLANET GRIPPED BY KILLER HEATWAVE”, while the right-hand one announced: “HUNDREDS DIE IN EUROPE AND JAPAN”. And if you were wondering what the cause of all this might be, the accompanying news report carried a quote – just the one – from Len Shaffrey, professor of climate science at Reading University, who said: “Global temperatures are increasing due to climate change. The global rise in temperatures means the probability that an extreme heatwave will occur is also increasing.”

I nearly choked on my KitKat when I read that. Is this really the Sun? The shoutiest outlet belonging to Rupert Murdoch, the media mogul who famously characterised climate change as “alarmist nonsense”? Is something happening here?

I think something is, and I think what the appearance of this front page in a rightwing tabloid signals is that the summer of 2018, which is throwing up extraordinary climactic extremes all over the northern hemisphere, from north Africa to the Arctic, is finally puncturing the bubble of so-called climate scepticism, at least in Britain. Let us at once say that it will take a lot more to puncture that bubble in the United States, where unabashed and brazen denial of the overwhelming scientific evidence for global warming is an article of faith not just with Donald Trump, but with the Republican party as a whole.

[W]hat we are witnessing now is a historic shift in the way that the threat of climate change is perceived by the world, from prediction to observation. Remember: from the first report by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in May 1990, the whole argument that global warming is a potentially disastrous danger has been based on the predictions of supercomputer models of the climate system; they were essentially the same computer models that forecast the weather up to six days in advance, but were now being tasked with forecasting the climate up to 100 years into the future. So most of the biggest climate change headlines for the last three decades have been based on prophecy, as it were, from successive IPCC reports calculating that unless we cut our greenhouse gas emissions, global average temperatures will rise by four or even six degrees celsius by 2100, and that sea levels will rise by up to a metre by the same date, and so forth. There have been five IPCC reports, and with each one the computer models have been more refined and the predictions more reliable, so the conclusions are likely to be more robust. Yet the uncertainty of predicting the future remains.

These predictions have been the scientific strength of the argument for acting to combat the warming to come, but also, its political weakness. The large degree of uncertainty they inevitably contain has provided the soil in which climate denial has sprouted and flourished, after the issue so lamentably became politically polarised between left and right. It has allowed climate action to be characterised by its rightwing opponents merely as an unnecessary and colossally expensive bet about the future, without overwhelming numbers of ordinary people – voters – disagreeing. This is because for the 30 years that ordinary people have been hearing these predictions, they have not seen anything much to worry them when they look out of their windows.

But observation is different. Seeing things happening around you cannot be gainsaid like predictions can, and in this remarkable summer of 2018, events in the real world have been starting to catch up with the climate models’ forecasts of an overheating globe. Not only has Britain sweltered in the five-week heatwave that finally ended last Friday, record-breaking heat has subjected Norway, Sweden and Finland to unheard-of temperatures – above 32C, that’s 90F, recorded 60 miles north of the Arctic Circle. Meanwhile in Ouargla, a Saharan desert city in Algeria, a temperature of 51.3C (124.2F) recorded on 5 July is thought to be the highest ever reliably measured in Africa. And so in Japan, and so in Greece, and so in Canada: all over the northern hemisphere, record-breaking heat.

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We're going to get more and more actual evidence (as opposed to theory and models) that global warming is happening, and the pressure to do something about it is going to intensify.  Voters are going to insist that de-carbonisation happens, and as temperatures rise, droughts and floods worsen, and heatwaves become more intense, public concern will increase.  Given that there are technologies which are cheaper than fossil fuels, the shift to a fully de-carbonised economy could happen much faster than everybody now expects.