Up yours, IPCC!

George Monbiot has produced a chilling assessment of the way the recent IPCC report has been ignored. Here are some excerpts.

Climate Breakdown

How governments bemoan the problem but keep stoking the fires.


By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 28th September 2013

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What the (IPCC) report describes, in its dry, meticulous language, is the collapse of the benign climate in which humans have prospered, and the loss of the conditions upon which many other lifeforms depend. Climate change and global warming are inadequate terms for what it reveals. The story it tells is of climate breakdown. This is, or so it seems, a catastrophe we are capable of foreseeing but incapable of imagining. It’s a catastrophe we are singularly ill-equipped to prevent.

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But denial is only part of the problem. More significant is the behaviour of powerful people who claim to accept the evidence but keep stoking the fires. This week the former Irish president Mary Robinson added her voice to a call that some of us have been making for years: the only effective means of preventing climate breakdown is to leave fossil fuels in the ground(9,10). Press any minister on this matter in private and, in one way or another, they will concede the point. Yet no government will act on it.

As if to mark the publication of the new report, the department for business, innovation and skills has now plastered a giant poster across its groundfloor windows: “UK oil and gas: Energising Britain. £13.5bn is being invested in recovering UK oil and gas this year, more than any other industrial sector.” The message couldn’t have been clearer if it had said “up yours.”


Complete article