Johann Hari: Writer, Climate Claptrap

Johann Hari. Remember the name. Especially, if you live in America, because British journalist Hari wants to warn you that a "startling amount" of " "climate claptrap" is -- unlike British planes currently -- traversing the Atlantic.

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Fearing you, dear North American reader, may not be sufficiently clued up to identify 'flying' claptrap, Mr Hari, has taken a leaf out of Bill O'Reilly's "looking out for the folks" deal, and is giving Americans claptrap-spotting lessons. Mostly, in how to spot those pesky Brits piloting said flying claptrap. If we should wonder why much of the mass media is in its death throes, one reason can be found by reading Hari's patronizing piece to Americans in May's The Nation; another, of course, in the wholesale sell-out by MSM hacks, who, long ago, sold their journalistic heritage for a mess of populist, sensationalist-headline grabbing, pottage. Not least, by buying into whatever fashionable claptrap claims to be "consensus" science -- you know, the one that can't be certain what the weather will be like next week, but insists it can predict it 100 years down the line -- and writing it up as fact. Not that the trend is entirely new. Many decades ago, Graham Greene was prompted to write, "A petty reason ... why novelists more and more try to keep a distance from journalists is that novelists are trying to write the truth and journalists are trying to write fiction". And, like all adherents to the latest cult, the cause is self-righteous and self-evidently allows for wholesale ad hominen attacks on all who have the temerity to disagree. Step forward Johann Hari. And here is the UK Independent's (independent in name only, in reality a strongly leftwing paper) Hari in full Quixotic tilt.

"A startling amount of denialism now, like Climategate, travels across the Atlantic from my country--Britain--to the United States. Yes, I know our accents make us sound instantly plausible, but it's time Americans knew who these Brideshead bull-scientists really are. "And while the United States has been engaged in these fake rows, the world may have just crashed into one of the climate's tipping points. For years, climate scientists have had a nightmare scenario. Buried in the hard Arctic permafrost is a massive amount of the gas methane, which causes thirty times more warming than carbon dioxide. There is more carbon in the world's methane deposits than in every lump of coal and barrel of oil on earth. As the poles defrost, it becomes possible that all of this gas will be farted out into the atmosphere--and trigger catastrophic warming.

Some years ago I suggested that when the anti-science, media-induced hysteria, the product of the man-made warm-mongering 'consensus' was finally busted by empirical scientific facts, there should be a reckoning for those in the mass media who, assuming the 'hypocritic' oath, ditched their historic journalistic ethics, and signed up to write prediction as fact. Come the day, nothing but public square ritual humiliation (nothing physical you understand) will do. Reading through Hari's litany of anti-science and general vitriol towards fellow Brits who disagree with him in May's The Nation, it is clear Hari is a full convert to the Apocalypse Sometime-Soon School of Eco-Faith. A faith system that preaches islands are sinking (when, patently, they're not); polar bears are becoming extinct (when they're thriving), CO2 is the enemy (when it's nuke-seeking Islamists) and the globe is warming (when global temperatures have been steady, if not cooling, for over a decade while CO2 levels continue to rise -- which they could not if CO2 alarmism was truly the enemy). It seems these are scientific facts about which Johann Hari is in denial. (Yet isn't "denial" the centre-piece of Mr Hari ire?) Hari's deepest angst , however, is, on this occasion, rooted in the fear that a melting Arctic ice cap may (note the ubiquitous alarmist get-out clause of may, could, might) be about to eclipse even the Icelandic ash event; by 'farting out' quantities of trapped methane. Leaving aside the Bovist overtones, that's a frightening scenario. After all, that could ground Britain's planes for years. I mean think of the appalling whiff frequent Atlantic flyers would be forced to endure. But here's the factual rub. Antarctica, way larger than the Arctic, has never been in meltdown. Far from melting, the Antarctic ice has grown and thickened in extent. Not that the Johann Hari's of this world, like to talk about Antarctica. They know only too well they'd be on thin ice (pun thoroughly intended). So the warming Arctic waters (and they are mostly waters, not being much actual land) have always warmed and cooled cyclically. Thus the Vikings, growing their Greenland crops, were, shocking as it must have seemed to the NYT (the Norse Yorvik Times) headline-writer alarmists at the time, NOT a consequence of John Deere tractor emissions. Neither, in 1937, was the North-west Passage made temporarily navigable because Sarah Palin's father took a blow torch to it (an accusation bound to be levelled sooner or later); a passage yet to re-open in our day. Above all, however, Mr Hari is totally at sea, not due to rising waters you understand, but due to the fact that, since 2007, the Arctic has actually regained 27% of its ice mass. Mass it only lost during a warming period where temperatures never strayed outside the normal climate parameters. Now space precludes me from presenting a litany of facts here, that's all in my upcoming book. Okay, okay so why can't I make a shameless plug for my book, just as Fox presenters do? Mr Hari, at least, might just find it informative. But, being dismissive of empirical science and the arguments of those presenting them, Hari seems to prefer the path of speculative gloom over fact-based optimism. As with innumerable alarmist journos, Mr Hari appears intent on writing his own ticket to the burgeoning Mass Media 'Hall of Shame'; for services to Climate Claptrap, above and beyond the call of journalistic verity. Peter C Glover is co-author, Energy and Climate Wars: How naive politicians, green ideologues and media elites are undermining the truth about energy and climate now available for pre-sale at Continuum or Amazon.