The record loss of sea-ice in the Arctic represents a grave threat to the future of life on Earth, not least human life. For the past few years we have been told that the ice caps are not melting, that the ice is thickening. Throughout 2009 and 2010, Christopher Booker made constant reference to the fact that from September to January, ice in the Arctic thickened rather than thinned, thus contradicting politically motivated claims that the ice was melting. Well I never, George Monbiot commented, the ice thickens in winter! Who would have thought!
So let us repeat Booker’s claims, lest anyone think I am making them up: ‘droughts, hurricanes, killer heatwaves, melting icecaps …. none of these things is happening… There is no less ice at the Earth's poles today than there was 30 years ago.’ (Booker Daily Mail, Monday, November 23,2009). Well, they were happening at the time and they have happened to an alarming extent throughout 2012. Records are being broken the world over. Booker, it goes without saying, has no scientific credentials whatsoever. Yet it is amazing how often his views are quoted by journalists covering climate change. ‘There is no less ice at the poles than there was 30 years ago’ writes Leo McKinstry (Daily Express Dec 2009), the same line which appears in Booker’s article in the Mail. None of these people know any real science, yet they say the same things, with complete certainty and confidence. They are merely repeating claims that fit their own prejudices. This copy and pasting of glib lines is not science at all. These views are repeated not because they are true, but simply because some people want them to be true and some believe them to be true. There is no commitment to or pursuit of scientific evidence and truth here at all, just what Orwell called the ‘pure wind’ of politics.
Well, there is a record loss of ice in the Arctic. Greenland has melted too. The Andes has also lost some 30-50% of its glaciers since the 1970s, a rapid melt entirely due to the 0.7C temperature increase due to global heating. (see the science journal Cryosphere). The very thing we were told isn’t happening, has happened and is happening. To a record extent. But don’t wait for any apologies. The ice has barely melted, and the oil companies are queuing up to drill in the arctic. They say crisis is an opportunity – it certainly is for the very commercial interests that have caused the crisis in the first place. In other words, the very companies and industries that have been instrumental in stoking up global warming are welcoming the effects of the changing climate as an opportunity to open up new markets. Shell, for one, have already invested a massive $4.5bn in Arctic exploration. If people are daft enough to let them get away with it, and destroy the life support systems upon which we depend, then the human race is too stupid to deserve to survive. Civilisation will end the same way it began. Here is Rousseau in What is the Origin of Inequality Among Men:
The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying ‘This is mine’ and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch and crying to his fellows ‘Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody’.
Rousseau 1973:76
What is a vicious circle in ecology, with carbon sinks turning into carbon sources, and positive feedback kicking in, accelerating warming, is actually a virtuous circle in business. An ecological crisis caused by business has been turned into an opportunity for doing further business. Where businessmen – and the workers who cannot free themselves from their dependence on ‘the economy’ - see only money and profits, environmentalists see nothing but dangers. Sooner or later, the fragile ecosystem of this pristine environment will be destroyed by an oil spill. It’s just the way it has always been with the capital system.
Is money to be gathered? cut down the pleasant trees among the houses, pull down ancient and venerable buildings for the money that a few square yards of London dirt will fetch; blacken rivers, hide the sun and poison the air with smoke and worse, and it's nobody's business to see to it or mend it: that is all that modern commerce, the counting-house forgetful of the workshop, will do for us herein.
William Morris The Lesser Arts in Political Writings of William Morris AL Morton ed 1973 International Publishers p 55
Yet it is environmental groups and activists who are being targeted as the main problem, not only by business but also by those workers who cannot imagine a livelihood other than through the exploitation of nature – who cannot see that the commercial exploitation of nature involves relations of production that ensures their own exploitation. Shell have obtained an injunction in the US Federal District Court in Anchorage Alaska, that "prohibits Greenpeace from taking unlawful action against vessels owned or contracted to Shell in support of Arctic Ocean exploration".
Workers, shareholders, governments and politicians, even the world of business itself, should understand that such crass exploitation is not intelligent, sustainable, far-sighted economics, but the spasms of a dying economic system. We should not let those who gain most directly from that system take the rest of us and the planet itself with them.