The right’s silent spring on climate — a damp blessing in a hot world

Well, it’s possible that we just may get a silent spring — but in a good way. The silence will be that of the right after the release of the IPCC’s sixth assessment report (or part one thereof). It hit the world webs two days ago and is effectively the world scientific community’s announcement that the target of holding increase to 1.5 degrees in this century has gone by the bye. So far there’s been precious little by way of the usual right responses — the data cherry-picking, the reproduced communiques of Lord Monckton, the guffawing jokes about it being winter, we could do with some global warming in Melbourne fnar fnar fnar. Has the denialist right finally run up the white flag?

Let’s hope so, because the sixth report is another example of that grisly modern genre — your own suicide note, but received through the mail. We will need zero-net emissions by 2050 to hold things between 1.5 and 2 degrees, and warming will continue for 20 years after that before it is slowed to a halt. It’s the 1.5 degrees-plus threshold that the news has focused on, in part because the report has focused more specific attention on modelling multiple scenarios of a zero-by-2050 scheme — and also because the sixth report has had some criticism of the way in which the fifth report had communicated threshold risks, such as the possible mass methane release from the thawing of Siberian permafrost. 

But the melancholy fact from the sixth report is that the possibility of catastrophe hasn’t gone away. Threshold events such as the permafrost melting or disruptions of ocean currents are of low probability but they are still possible, and they would threaten the ability of modernised human society to reproduce itself, a massive and epochal reversal of the human condition. The report has also remedied earlier reports’ lack of attention to warming inequality, and how it will impact the rich and poor differently — hence the attention to the inundation of the Pacific Islands. Africa — where, the report says, effects will be disastrous for hundreds of millions — didn’t get much of a look-in. 

But as I say, despite this stepping back from the more apocalyptic scenarios, nothing from the right. In past years it would have jumped on it — not so bad after all, we might get a tan fnar fnar fnar. Has it suddenly come to its senses? Well, not it, but possibly “he”. As a glance at London’s The Times shows, global warming is once again accepted within the Murdoch empire, and the politics has shifted to the question of what to do about it. The brave contrarians who populate the News Corp papers have suddenly all discovered they would rather talk about anything else. Will the Bolter bolt on this? He hasn’t yet. Perhaps The Spectator or Quadrant will have a go. If the loon pond is drying up, good to keep a puddle to remember it as it was. 

Whether this was Rupert’s deep and brooding study of the science, or News Corp’s simple realisation that he couldn’t get away with it any more in his mainstream product (I haven’t, and won’t be, checking Fox or Sky AF, sorry Sky AD) is a mystery for the ages, but it’s just another stage in the lurching hysteria that is the right on global warming. 

News Corp pursued a strong denialist position for a number of years in the 1990s and 2000s, with all its major, mainstream, comparatively “centrist” figures joining in. Ian Plimer’s shoddy book Heaven+Earth was pushed hard, and so too was denialist bug-eyed loon Monckton — before he jumped off climate change and became an Obama birtherist. 

Then under the influence, it seems, of James Murdoch, News Corp announced its green conversion, that the organisation would be carbon neutral, and Rupert announced that the carbon neutral message would be pushed in his papers’ articles, which was a great demonstration of his view of a free press. Then it was all change again, and a new wave of denialism returned. Was it a last hurrah? 

Let’s hope so. If what has to be fought over is whether a genuine commitment by us to zero-net by 2050 or earlier makes a difference — it does — then that is an enormous advance. If Barnaby Joyce is now obstructing a net-zero commitment for rural privilege, then Labor should use that in the Melbourne, Sydney and Adelaide middle-class marginals (poster/ad with a photo of Morrison and a photo of Barnaby: “Vote for Scooter, get the Beetrooter”. No, you’re welcome). All of it is at least on a plane of rationality. We’ve won that battle, and that battle was the Somme. 

But what sheer destruction of possibility and the future it has been! What a waste of time and energy! What stupid, narcissistic self-indulgence on the part of people who live in a scientific civilisation, whose every part of life is created by the same science that goes into forecasting global warming. Bolt, Planet Janet, Piers the Nose, Tim the Bag, crazy Craig Kelly the furniture king, loofah in a suit Rowan Dean, and the “centrist” equivocators who didn’t have the guts to fight for a rational approach on the right. We wish them all long life — so that they can spend their old age explaining to the people looking after them why they damaged their lives and prospects with their pernicious, amoral, nihilistic two-decades-long continental-scale methane release of lies. Fnar fnar fnar.