In which the reptiles keep up their climate science denialism ...

Of course it was just a feint and a fraud, a pious pretence at paying attention … with Lloydie on his best behaviour ...

"Alarming" of course is just polite reptile speak for "alarmist" but Lloydie kept trying to play it straight ...

But how did the pond know it was a pretence, a fraud, a bit of cursory window-dressing?

Well the real space was handed over to another, confirming that climate science denialism remains the heart and soul of the lizard Oz …

The pond knew it was serious … because Plimer had been sanctified with a Krygsman.

This isn't quite the same as being blessed with a Lobbecke, but in the reptile scheme of things, it's a considerable honour, and full of the usual droll Krygsman wittery, and what's more it allowed the reptiles to provide a link back to Lloydie in the sidebar…

Remember, print the controversy, and don't let any science get in the way of having fun ...

Rather than argue with Plimer, who is sounding more and more silly, with his bellowing metaphors, the pond thought it might run a little Tim Flannery, because the pond knows that sends the reptiles into a frenzy … and Flannery was out and about in the latest NYRB to land in the pond's mail box, but was also online, though sadly inside the paywall here …

What set Flannery off was his review of Mark C. Serreze's Brave New Arctic: The Untold Story of the Melting North ...

...In the summer of 2007, Artcic ice cover reached an all-time low and was so far outside the range of the climate model projections that it shocked scientists. In summer 2012 there was so little ice in the Arctic Sea that open water reached close to the pole; for comparison, in 1980 Arctic summer ice covered an area around the size of the contiguous United States, minus Arizona. By 2012, it covered only 46 per cent of that area. As Serreze explains, after that summer, scientist realized that it was a case of when, not if, the Arctic will lose all of its summer ice.

From a hard-to-detect start, climate change quickly gathered speed, and soon had the momentum of a charging rhino. So breathtaking was the shift that Serreze began to speak of the scientific community's "utter astonishment" at the rate of melt and of a "death spiral" of the Arctic sea ice. Deep concern was sparked globally when, in the summer of 2012, almost the entire surface of the Greenland ice cap began to melt. Then, at the end of December 2015, air temperatures over the Arctic briefly reached above freezing. Serreze, seemingly in disbelief, describes the event as "simply unheard of."

In February 2018, after the completion of Serreze's book, the Arctic experienced its fourth winter heatwave, with temperatures rising above freezing four years in a row. The 2018 heatwave was the most extreme, with a temperature of 43° Fahrenheit recorded at Greenland's northernmost observatory, which is just 440 miles from the North Pole. For ten consecutive days, the station recorded above-freezing temperatures, and overall this year, temperatures in the Arctic have been up to 70° Fahrenheit higher than average. Unsurprisingly, the NSIDC website reveals that winter ice cover in the Arctic this year is the second-lowest on record, with the four smallest areas occurring over the last four years...

Now it's back to more reptile-fuelled denialism …

Back for another gobbet of Flannery …

As Serreze makes clear, the Arctic climate system is now entering uncharted territory, with the computer models no longer providing a reliable guide to the future. Will we see an ice-free North Pole in 2018? Or an ice-free Arctic just twelve years from now, in the summer of 2030? Since the US North Pole Environmental Observatory was shut down in 2015, it has been much harder to answer such questions. And the public seems apathetic. On the phone with Serreze, the veteran journalist Seth Borenstein lamented, "How many times can a journalist report on what is happening in the Arctic before it becomes so repetitive that people lose interest?"

The great Dutch writer and historian Geert Mak once told me that in 1933 the Dutch newspapers were full of stories of the threat of Nazism, het by 1938 those same papers were all but silent on the subject. Sometimes, it seems, threats to our future become so great that we opt to ignore them …

Or, to keep the Godwin's Law busting metaphor running, because it irritates the reptiles so, because sometimes certain newspapers are active supporters of Nazism and/or climate science denialism …

Sometimes the neo-Nazism is best left to Sky News and luminaries of the Bolter kind, so that the lizards of Oz can keep the denialism running for their luddite readership ...

And so to a little background on Serreze …

In 1983, as Serreze was about to embark on his research career, he was "thinking about Arctic cooling and instantaneous glacierization" (the rapid growth of glaciers), and despite the computer models, "even secretly hoping for it." The evidence for human impacts was not yet in. In 1990 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported that the changes in the Arctic "could still be largely due to natural variability," and that unequivocal physical evidence of what the models were predicting might not be seen for at least a decade. Part of the problem was that the Arctic has a highly variable climate, influenced not only by year-to-year fluctuations but also by decadal cycles such as the shifts in atmospheric pressure known as the North Atlantic Oscillation.

It was not until around 1996, when oceanographers circulated a letter urging coordinated study of the changing Arctic, that the scientific community began making a concerted effort to understand what was happening there. Serreze played a major part in that research, yet as late as 2003 he was unconvinced that the data were showing anything beyond natural variability. That August, however, at a retreat hosted by the National Science Foundation, he had what he describes as "an OMG moment" as researcher after researcher spoke of "melt, thaw, disruption, destabilization, warming, moving, weakening, and uncharted trajectories." Others took even longer to be convinced: Jim Overland, a leading oceanographer at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, finally accepted that humans were changing the Arctic in 2008. Soon thereafter, however, things began happening so fast that only paid lobbyists and those deluded by them, were denying the facts …

Oh and there's also the climate-denialist reptiles, and a shameless climate denialist with a book to flog ...

And there laid bare is the truth behind the token Lloydie effort, and the shamelessness of the reptiles …and to make it all the more piquant, they do it at a time when the country is currently in severe drought and even your average denialist begins to wonder whether climate change might be playing a role …

Well it would be wrong to end on a flat and sour note, so here's a couple of cartoons celebrating the work of the world's greatest comedian, keeping the punters on the good ship planet Titanic wreathed in smiles, safe in the knowledge that soon there won't be any pesky, tricky icebergs floating around in the sea …