No, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, Climate Skeptics Are Not in For a "Nasty Surprise"

Passing 1.7°C will just make us slightly warmer

Over at the Telegraph, the paper’s longstanding solar power evangelist, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard-Thunberg, is worried. Of course, constant worry, and trying to draw as many people into it as they can, is every George Monbiot tribute act’s privilege. Accordingly, this week’s AEP special treat opens with the line: “If you have stopped paying attention to global warming, you may soon be in for a nasty surprise.” Citing “a paper by Columbia University”, the self-styled member of “an endangered species: a green conservative” warns that “we will have our first taste of a 1.7°C world as soon as next year”.

AEP believes that once this 1.7°C temperature has been hit, the centre Right will reject the planet-destroying politics of Trump, and British Conservatives will again “be the responsible party of nature and free market”, drawing back “the hard-working silent middle”.

The news comes in the wake of the Trump administration’s reversal of the US Environmental Protection Agency’s “endangerment finding”, which under Barack Obama classified carbon dioxide as a “pollutant”. According to AEP, this reversal is “one of the most astonishing episodes in the long sorry saga of human folly”. And that is why I compare the Telegraph’s eco-warrior to George Monbiot. For as much as he tries to put distance between himself and his counterpart at the more (seemingly, at least) Left-wing rag, what both eco-boomers have in common is a total absence of anything resembling a sense of proportion. And that, I claim, is a symptom of environmentalism. If you’re more “astonished” by a bureaucracy’s reclassification of a substance than any other putative “folly” in our species’s history, then there’s something wrong with your history book – perhaps George and Ambrose should ask Ladybird Books to publish an update.

The lack or loss of a sense of proportion is a seriously debilitating and disorienting condition. It is to a writer as the loss of the use of one’s legs, balance or coordination are to a runner. Yet, unlike runners, such disoriented writers can keep churning out the stream of barely-consciousness as copy. “The paper caught my eye,” explains the lonely green Tory, “because the Columbia team is led by Jim Hansen, the veteran Nasa scientist, whom I interviewed in 1987 after his watershed testimony to Congress on the greenhouse threat.”