roads of stone

188. The eagle and The Shark: British Open 2008

Roads — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 01:48:48 +0000

It was the greatest shot I have ever seen, in any major championship.

In telling you that Padraig Harrington’s second to the seventeeth hole in the final round of this year’s British Open at Royal Birkdale eclipsed even Tiger Woods’ remarkable chip-in on the sixteenth at Augusta in 2005, I’m setting the bar high, but there’s no doubt in my mind.

Leading by two strokes from Greg Norman and Ian Poulter with two holes to play, Harrington could have been forgiven for playing conservatively.

Certainly, in the commentary box there was some concern when he pulled a five wood from his bag. Having hit the penultimate fairway with that club from the tee, surely now he should go for position with an iron, and play safely for a five?

That’s what the pundits always say. Take as many strokes as you need.

Harrington didn’t see it that way. The seventeeth hole had been lengthened especially for this championship, but its 572 yards played downwind for most of the week.

Norman smashed a huge drive off the tee, leaving him an excellent birdie chance to cut into Harrington’s lead, and the faint scent of an eagle to draw level. Suddenly, playing short didn’t seem safe at all.

Up ahead, the dangerous eighteenth was definitely not the kind of hole to yield an easy par four to win the British Open. So with 249 yards to go on the seventeeth, and in a vicious left to right crosswind, out came the five wood.

The Harrington of 2007 won despite a six at the 72nd hole. But on Sunday, that man was nowhere to be seen. This was fearless, attacking play to define a great of the game. Such is the change that a year as British Open champion brings.

Well struck and aimed high through the breeze towards the grandstand to the left of the green, Harrington’s ball flew long enough to carry the difficult bunker 30 yards short of the putting surface. Drifting gracefully to the right on the wind, it landed safely on the apron, bounced obligingly forwards and climbed casually on to the top tier before rolling just four feet from the hole.

A short single putt later, with the most memorable of eagles to write down on the card, Harrington was four strokes in front.

Now he needed only to find the final fairway to claim the claret jug for another year. And Pod finished off in style, a masterful second shot threatening the flag on the last and setting up the easiest of pars. Victory was his.

It was the finest British Open I have ever had the pleasure to watch. Harrington’s homeward nine of 32 under pressure must rank as one of the best of all time, and there was much more to savour.

The thrill of seeing Greg Norman emerge from his semi-retirement and recent wedding to Chris Evert to glimpse one more trophy for the game fishing net.

KJ Choi was almost successful in bringing Korea and Asia their first major win. And with Ian Poulter as runner-up and Chris Wood as leading amateur, the supporting parts of this drama were both colourfully and promisingly filled.

But above all this year, it was the weather which made the Open Championship. How many years have we seen British Opens played out on tranquil July days?

Across hot sunny weeks, when the fire of the links was doused by warm sunshine and the true difficulty of our top British courses faded to a frazzled and distant memory. Times when sparse dried-out rough and fast-running fairways left the toughest of links almost defenceless. Disappointingly marvellous weather.

We’ve seen a day of rain, or a few blustery hours in several British Opens, but never in recent memory has it blown hard, through all four days. And how it transformed the tournament.

Suddenly this was a sport of survival, where courage, endurance and sheer adaptability came to the fore.

This truly was golf, as she was meant to be played.

Not on some manufactured landscape. Not cosily comfortable. Golf not calculatingly plotted across predictably soft parkland on a benign, lazy day.

But golf across the loneliest of windswept wildernesses, where a man must fight and carve out his path with just the howling of the wind and the lashing of the rain for company, as the cries of thirty thousand bedraggled but enthralled spectators vanish thinly above the dunes.

Harrington’s five wood will ring out across years, but I’ll remember another shot from the gusts of Saturday’s round. On the type of afternoon where the yardage chart becomes useless, and you have to rely on feel and guts alone.

Midway through the round, Norman found himself with 121 yards to the flag. Straight into the wind. A pitching wedge distance, but now calling for a full eight iron, or even a seven.

A high-tariff shot into Birkdale’s tightly-bunkered greens, surrounded by those monstrous traps half as deep as a house.

Norman saw it differently. He chose a five iron. From the back foot, with a short swing and panache, he pulled out a perfect punch shot into the teeth of the wind. Flying no more than head high, straight for the flag to finish right by the hole.

It was the classically inventive stroke which a true links should always demand.

I played Royal Birkdale once, a long time ago. We had a great girl golfer in our team that year, who was friends with the Pro. With his sadistic encouragement, we set out to play the links from the Open tees on a blustery March day. In weather that doesn’t often feature in the Championship script.

It was like no other round I have played. The fairways were hidden behind huge sandhills and waist-high rough, and hardly visible on a handful of holes. Many more were completely unreachable.

I hacked my way to a miserable score.

Only an unlikely birdie at Palmer’s famous sixteenth hole and two closing fives averted abject despair. Little did I expect my 88 to take the money, from all of our group.

Three Royal Birkdale Opens since then have been won at scores well under par. Many times, I’ve thought about that round. I’d love to go back there, to take on the course in fine weather. And play it properly.

But this week, at last I thought differently. Because in the wind and the rain, Birkdale showed all its teeth bared. The course presented a true test for the world’s greatest - a demanding, unforgiving links in the stiffest of conditions.

This was the greatest Open of all - when an eagle hailed victory, from the jaws of The Shark.

Short film clip

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187. This is the Modern World - From The Jam, Guilfest 2008

Roads — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 21:01:58 +0000

A police car and a screaming siren
Pneumatic drill and ripped-up concrete
- The Jam: That’s Entertainment, 1981

Better stop dreaming of the quiet life
‘Cos it’s the one we’ll never know
- The Jam: A Town Called Malice, 1982

Gritty urban realism. Recession.

That’s how it was then, and this is how it sounded. The Jam captured the mood of Britain at the start of the eighties. The loss of hope and the mindlessly brutal banality of an existence with no glimpse of economic rescue or absolution.

It all began not far away from here, in Woking. And that’s where it began for me, too, when I came back to Britain in 1991, in the depths of John Major’s recession which purged the middle classes of the 1986 loadsamoney boom.

But 1980 was different, and on a different scale of hardship entirely. The start of Margaret Thatcher’s reign. The time of her doomed obsession with monetarism.

Labour isn’t working read her famous election poster, decrying the one and a half million unemployed at the end of the 1979 Winter of Discontent. And just two years later, she had successfully doubled that figure.

The manufacturing heart of this country, long battered by industrial disputes throughout the seventies, simply folded. Within just a few years, the car industry in the Midlands was destroyed.

Coventry had become The Specials’ Ghost Town and with jobless totals rising to 10%, the reggae band UB40 (the group itself named after the serial number of the unemployment benefit form) proudly proclaimed I am a One in Ten.

Thirty years on, after a decade and more of prosperity under a Labour government, we’ve almost forgotten what economic hardship is.

But thanks to The Jam, we can still remember exactly what it sounds like.

Whilst America’s industrial desolation played out through the bleak longing of Springsteen, so we sang to the bloody-minded strains of social resignation and youth unrest which poured from the post-punk ironic urgency of The Jam.

London was a city of scarcely-suppressed urban strife then. An economic desert.

It’s hard to imagine now. Tony Blair’s Cool Britannia may be long forgotten, yet the optimism, the belief and the relentless regeneration of the capital has endured long enough since then to make us believe that it could go on for ever.

But there’s a cold wind blowing through the British economy today. The credit crunch has finally and belatedly pulled the trigger on our long-extended property boom. A massively bloated construction sector, living off borrowed money, is shedding jobs across the country.

London today has a GDP larger than Sweden and Switzerland. The financial sector in the City has powered the nation’s economy for years. But now the paymaster of prosperity is choking off outward investment, whilst begging chastened shareholders for more cash to stuff down its corporate plugholes.

Property prices are in freefall, on their way towards a drop of 30% or worse. Unemployment is rising faster than at any time in the past sixteen years. The signs are bright and flashing neon: we’re going to have to dust off that old recession hymn sheet, and sing it one more time with feeling.

Three decades later, The Jam’s following has fattened out a bit. Two of the three original band members are playing, but the absence of frontman Paul Weller means we’re watching ‘From the Jam’ rather than the definitive article.

But it doesn’t matter - since they’re as good as they ever were. Bruce Foxton beats out the bass whilst still doing that splits thing in mid-air. Rick Buckler builds the drums as menacingly as he always did.

They’re not even headlining today, but opening with the sharp satire of This is the Modern World and Strange Town, it doesn’t take long to grab the crowd.

As the set warms up, the merits and social documentary of tracks such as That’s Entertainment, Going Underground, A Town Called Malice and Down in the Tube Station at Midnight can’t be denied, and neither is the energy that’s put into them on this showery Sunday afternoon in Guildford.

The band has moved just six miles down the road to get here. A fifteen minute journey spanning three decades and the gulf between an angry youth of suburban deprivation and a contented middle age, deep in the stockbroker belt.

But standing here in the pouring rain, suddenly it’s undeniable. This is the sound of a recession in England.

And just for a moment, nothing has changed at all.

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186. Firth of stone and fire - North Berwick, Scotland

Roads — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 23:06:15 +0000

The afternoon has flown me here, all across a summer sky of grey. The evening beckons now, and outside the window the narrow streets are empty, the shops all shut up for the night.

Scotland. June. Long hours of daylight reaching out ahead.

I stretch my legs along the main street, past red sandstone houses, cafés, bistros and grey tile roofs. It’s a dull old Monday, and the North Berwick weekend bustle, if there ever is one, is hidden far from sight.

The town runs out on me with just the links ahead, and so I try the steps down to the beach. The tide is low and the shore is softly rippled, quiet. No traffic noise. No planes. Just grey sky, grey water, and the lonesome cawing of a gull.

The tiny harbour has seen much better days, but atop its brown stone wall there’s an open view along the coast and across the Firth of Forth.

The busy streets of Edinburgh lie unseen just half an hour from here, but they might as well be half a world away.

Below the harbour, beneath the Seabird Centre, stands a purple wall of rocks. Basaltic lavas, recording the violently fiery geological past of this famous stretch of coast, some 200 million years ago. Along the firth, the scattered islands here each recall a volcanic vent or plug.

Low-slung and to the west lies Fidra, whilst further east lies the looming mass of the great Bass Rock, once housing a prison and now home to the largest colony of gannets in the world.

The volcanic mass of North Berwick Law stands tall above the town, and in front the seafront promenade threads Victorian seaside villas tight beside the beach. I follow past Glen Golf Club and up the climb beside its closing hole.

At the top, I rest on the tee of a stiff par 3 and breathe the view before the cliff path calls me down to find the beach.

No geologist worth his salt can ever pass a rock, and I’m firmly no exception.

Five happy minutes vanish at a spectacular outcrop of hugely coarse, partly cross-bedded pyroclastics and breccias. Long words to describe a thick pile of wickedly large and angular chunks of volcanic stone and bombs once ejected skywards from a volcano not that far away, before raining down like death and remobilising in surface flows to sweep everything before their path.

My mind recalls the fate of Pliny the Elder, the ancient writer and naturalist, stranded near Pompeii in 79AD, recording the eruption of Vesuvius for posterity whilst standing amidst a lethal rain of pumice with a puny protective pillow strapped to his head, before suffocating from the fumes.

I remember the tales of backwoodsmen and geologists struggling desperately to flee the pyroclastic flows shed off the slopes of Mount St Helens in Washington state in 1980. And I’m glad it’s quiet here.

This coast has given much to the science which earns my humble crust. At Siccar Point, eight miles east and two hundred years ago, James Hutton observed the dipping of the rocks, correctly deducing that older strata had been uplifted and folded before the younger rocks were formed.

The description of Hutton’s Unconformity in 1788 still underpins much of the geological knowledge we use today.

The tide is creeping gently back towards the beach.

I trot over crushed shells and sand, past a couple wandering with their dog, and a fisherman returning from his crab pots behind the submerging reef.

The incoming waves beneath my feet are slow and lazy, just like me, whilst across the bay the town lies grey and red and calm beneath the clouds.

Half an hour later, a shower and change complete, I’m walking towards my dinner, with city shoes upon my feet and business cards in hand.

I stroll on the North Berwick links with its ancient sculpted fairways and crazy greens. The last players are heading home, and behind them the Firth is dropping grey and still beyond the grass. It’s nearly nine, and a midsummer night has three more hours to fall.

I’m a little late - that can happen when you unfold your passions along the beach.

Four miles of rocks and golf and running I stole across one small corner of a Scottish summer. Now North Berwick lies safely stored within my footsteps, and the evening can begin.

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185. On the gallops - Epsom Downs and The Derby

Roads — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 11:01:41 +0000

Summer drifts across these hills. And on warm June days, this is where you’ll find me, the lazy afternoon lagging heavily at my heels all along this steady climb to reach the Downs.

I leave the grey town streets along the old familiar path and follow its narrow cut between the houses. Up ahead, across the road, the first field opens up beside me, but there’s still some work to do.

Rifle Butts Alley rises steadily, a green tunnel of hedging and cowparsley and crunching flint. I labour half a mile towards the sky, the chalklands rushing down to greet me. A copse, a thicket, and the path angles across a slope beside the links, the white clouds hunkering low towards the ridge.

Then all as one they lift back into blue, and the natural order of the elements is restored. Hill, grass, clouds and sky, in ascending order. There’s nothing more I need, not now, just a quiet, grateful minute for great gasps of air to refill my legs as mind and soul are healed.

I slip up a gear, and stride. The turf is soft and springy, the firmament now yawning wide open into empty space above me.

So many places in the world to run, and this today is mine. High green hills, shimmering in the sunshine. To my left, London stretches far below.

There’s the Gherkin, and St Paul’s Cathedral, and away to the right lies Canary Wharf tower, too.

I stand alone on the far edge of this great city, just twenty miles from the busy financial centre of our modern world. And the warm grass is rushing long and soft beneath my feet.

I’m up high, on Epsom Downs.

The folk of London have been coming here for ever, to escape the squalor of the city, to breathe clean air and to take the waters from Epsom’s mineral springs, discovered nearby around 1618.

To the south of town, the well-drained chalky soil was perfect for riding, and a racecourse was already laid out across these hills by 1661.

It was over a hundred years later, in 1779, when the first Epsom Oaks was run for three year old fillies. The winning horse, Bridget, was owned by Edward Smith-Stanley, the 12th Earl of Derby, and amidst the celebrations that followed to mark that victory, Derby tossed a coin with Sir Charles Bunbury.

The winner would name a second race for colts and fillies, to be inaugurated the following year. Bunbury lost the toss, and so the most famous horserace in all the world was born. To match the spirit of fair play, the first Derby (pronounced ‘Dar-bee’) was duly won by Bunbury’s horse Diomed on 4th May 1780.

Every other ‘Derby’ in the world, from Kentucky’s famous showpiece to humbler events in 140 other countries, owes its name to that very first Epsom race. But none has the same tradition as the Derby.

Originally run over a mile, the distance was lengthened to a mile and a half in 1784, including the tight bend at Tattenham Corner for the first time, and remarkably the race is run over the same uniquely testing and undulating course today.

Just across the road, £23.5 million of new concrete and steel are busy building a new grandstand for the racecourse. It’s been slowly taking shape since last winter, and it won’t be finished for a winter still to come.

By Derby day next year, it’ll greet thousands of partying race-goers in their summery finery and festive hats. But this afternoon, there’s only me. On cooler, fitter days, I’ll loop on out to Langley Vale and all around the racecourse.

Time and breath are short today, so I make do with a short lope atop the Downs. Past the Derby Arms pub and then the Derby stables, where on the first Saturday in June each year, the horses await their raceday destiny.

I trot further, beside the finishing post and the run-out, before turning right to find Chalk Lane.

Smooth blacktop, descending evenly and effortlessly through the trees. The easiest glide you’ll ever run, all the way back down to town. Ten minutes of blissful, restful thinking brings me to the outskirts of old Epsom.

Grand Regency houses were built here in the early days of racing, and the pubs here still reflect the names of racing folklore. The Amato - in honour of the 1838 winner, which won the Derby as its only race. And then The Ladas, named after the 1894 Derby champion, belonging to Prime Minister Lord Rosebery and the most heavily backed favourite of all time.

Rosebery won the race again the following year with Sir Visto, and once more with Cicero in 1905. All three horses are buried in the grounds of The Durdans, a massive mansion lurking behind great iron gates beside the lane. Samuel Pepys came here when he visited Epsom to take the waters in 1663.

I leave Chalk Lane at last, turning between the houses and into Epsom Park. Office workers scoff sandwiches here as summer youth lies all around the lawns, flirting in the sunshine and trying not to study. It’s another life now that calls me back inside the office. Just existence, paperwork and dreaming.

But I can’t complain. A day’s not wasted here, when an hour is run to the echoed hooves of history.

Up high, on the gallops of Epsom’s chalky downs.

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184. A beautiful day - Barack Obama wins the Democratic nomination

Roads — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 11:31:09 +0000

“Tonight we mark the end of one historic journey with the beginning of another — a journey that will bring a new and better day to America,” said Barack Obama in St Paul, Minnesota, earlier this week.

He had taken the stage for his Democratic nomination victory speech to the sounds of U2’s ‘Beautiful Day’.

It was a grateful message, for a domestic audience, at the end of a bruising and extended primary campaign. And this November, let’s hope for a better day, not just for America, but far beyond as well.

All around the world, we yearn for a US President who can engage across frontiers. A President who understands foreign policy, because he actually has a passport. A President who’ll belatedly bring change, on global warming and Guantanamo. A President elected by engaged voters, who will re-engage America with the rest of the world.

We’ve all waited such a long time for this moment, and finally it’s in sight at last. Grab onto hope, America, run with it, and take us with you.

Define your vision not with fear and torture, but by building new bridges beyond your shores. Spring the bounds between west and Middle East.

Leave religion and race behind, whilst embracing diversity and tolerance - the watchwords of America’s historic past resounding through the renaissance of her bright new future.

It’s a beautiful day, America. Don’t let it get away.

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183. Kenya 7: new light on a dark continent

Roads — Thu, 22 May 2008 23:01:47 +0000

This poster called as I walked from the station, reminding me that it’s time to wrap up my series on Kenya.

My visit last summer left me with a whole lot to say about the country, about Africa, and our attitudes to the continent and her people. I sat down to write, and the project found life of its own. Today I’ll outline some highlights, final thoughts and reflections.

This journey opens where it ends, on The road to Mombasa. When we look at Africa from within our daily lives, we see it always from a safe distance, on television or in the newspapers. That remoteness prevents understanding. From the comfort of our own familiar existence, we simply can’t comprehend the reality of the different world which exists there.

That’s why, right from the start, I want to take you there, into the heart of an African night. I want to place you deep within the dark continent, as the day is slowly dawning.

From here, we can focus not on the remoteness of Africa, but rather on the sensation of looking back at our own lives in Europe and America from another viewpoint entirely.

Travel offers us the unique facility of reversal through the mirror, as we reflect on lives lived another way.

Can you imagine yourself as a Kenyan woman walking down the broken tarmac of the East African coastal Highway at 4 am, in the rain, with a bright yellow water carrier balanced on your head? Can you see yourself, and your own work, through the hollowed eyes of the emaciated man wearing a muslim headdress, earning a slim living carrying tourist bags through the airport?

In The dusk behind the beach, I greet you in the safe enclaves of little America and little Europe, in that thin beachside strip of land cooled by the ocean breeze, and I run with you to find Africa beyond. Four hundred metres is all that it takes to enter the equatorial girdle of this continent, stretching deep and green and humid for four thousand kilometres.

It’s a mix of cultures here, both imported and indigenous. The crippled beggar in the Arsenal shirt rubbing shoulders with the burkha-wearing women and young couple in student shorts and tee-shirts. ‘Jambo sana’ (Hello, very much) call the shopkeepers as I pass, their friendly smiles welcoming the stranger. Further along the road, I pass houses - mud hovels - and shops - pathetic tin shacks.

Let’s consider the reality of living in a country with no infrastructure, no services, and not enough food either. Women fetching the water for their families before the pitch black of bedtime. Children going to bed on the earthen floor with no mattress or mosquito net and not enough to eat. How can we ever complain about our lives back home, as we routinely eat ourselves to death?

Can these half-starving millions forgive us? Do they? Should they? The dusk falls as I return to the hotel, the night air thick with the smell of woodsmoke, of insufficient food cooking on an open fire.

Masai Mara - the last wilderness opens as dawn rises on the great plains - daybreak over one of the last wildernesses on the planet. I marvel at the richness of the wildlife here, the drama of the kill, the peril of the chase, the wonder of the wildebeest migration across the landscape and the drama of the river crossing.

And increasingly, as the morning wears on, I ponder that the whole tableau is witnessed by a curious cavalcade of Land Rovers and minibuses, each bearing half a dozen long Canon lenses, poised for the shoot. It’s no desolate endless plain here, but a managed tourist bonanza extending across just a tiny fraction of the continent.

We visit a Masai village, to witness the warm welcome of these people, and their hard business sense. Kicked off their land to accommodate mere elephants, this elegant race now depends on tourism to survive - both exploiting and exploited within the final zoo on Earth.

Back on the coast, I ponder on an orphanage and the disaster of African AIDS. We set up a visit to deliver some old clothes, shoes and toys. By chance, a new orphanage has just opened, run by a British woman who has sold up her house near the town where we live. She’s given her life to the welfare of the children of Kenya, and has braved bureaucracy and intimidation (even deportation) to accomplish her dream.

The children in the orphanage are in many respects the lucky ones, sharing shelter and proper food, sleeping beneath mosquito nets and in safety.

But their happy smiles hide the hardships and family tragedies which have brought them here, and the wider disaster of AIDS which reaches into the lives of every community in Africa.

With no money for the purchase of paracetamol, let alone expensive retroviral drugs, one third of Kenya’s 34 million population will be dead inside a decade.

The situation in Kenya grew dramatically worse in late December 2007 with the outbreak of violence across much of the country following a struggle for the Presidency. In On corruption and a crooked election I describe some basic economic realities of corruption, and how it evolves through the Darwinian struggle to survive.

In 2006, Kenya was the 155th country in the United Nations table of economic prosperity, and that was before its economy was devastated by the outbreak of near civil war and the overnight collapse of international tourism.

The country had previously been targeted in 2003 Al-Qaida attacks near Mombasa, and the tourist trade had only recently recovered when violence broke out.

The eradication of corruption? That will depend on the establishment of a stable government and a dramatic improvement in the economic scene across the country. This will be hard to achieve without sustained foreign support. The country has no real funds of its own - and amongst the many western companies presently doing business in Kenya, the majority pay no tax in the country at all.

That observation leads to a far bigger question: Africa - how can we help? The fact is that the scale of the problems is massive, but every bit helps.

Tourists visiting the country can do much to assist on a small scale, by engaging the services of local tour companies rather than lining the pockets of western hotel owners.

They can inject cash directly by tipping thoughtfully where appropriate, and by donating both to institutions and to people in need.

The shocking truth is that although this part of Africa lies in neither a famine nor a war zone, almost everyone here has real need of charity. Those in employment suffer low and unreliable wages. Those in jobs have to support the many who aren’t, and the majority of the people are, if not starving, then painfully thin.

A vivid debate broke out in the comments here. The point was made that individual tourists had no power to bring change, and that the most constructive action for Africa would be to donate your entire holiday fund to Oxfam.

Criticism also centred on the ecological cost of our visit, in terms of the carbon budget to travel there. And did writing about Africa from a tourist’s perspective run the risk of insulting the country and my readers by imparting an incomplete view?

These criticisms are well taken. Oxfam is the worthiest of causes, and Africa certainly one of the most deserving of her targets.

It’s true that my view of Kenya, and of this continent, only scratches the surface. But I’ve travelled to Africa throughout my professional career, and my work has afforded me the (not always comfortable) opportunity to witness more of Africa than many people can.

Kenya is a large and diverse country, with many more natural wonders and hardships to see. I read about the wild lakeshores, the bandits and flamingoes of the northwest of the country. The wonders of the Rift Valley, and the serenity of the Tsavo East National Park.

Even before our visit, I knew something of the desperate conditions in Kibera - the slums of Nairobi, and last winter’s violence has shown us much more of the conditions there on the television news.

But we’re back to that problem of remoteness again. In this series, I wanted to describe something of what I saw, on the ground, and to share my experiences in visiting just a small fraction of Kenya.

To provide a full account of the whole of a country would require much more time, yet my intention here was never completeness. You can check Wikipedia for that.

If this series has made us think, just a little, then it’s been well worth the effort. In the nine months since I returned, 5,000 people have read these articles, and I hope many more will continue to do so in the future.

Travel offers a different perspective. Reversing through the mirror, and looking at lives lived another way.

Africa has so much to teach us, and she deserves so much more of our support.

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Kenya articles:
161. Kenya 1: The road to Mombasa
164. Kenya 2: The dusk behind the beach
166. Kenya 3: Masai Mara - the last wilderness
168. Kenya 4: on the orphanage, and AIDS
172. Kenya 5: on corruption and a crooked election
179. Kenya 6: Africa - how can we help?

182. The truth about global warming

Roads — Mon, 12 May 2008 19:52:29 +0000

The sun is out again in London, after an unusually cool spring. It’s been a cold winter across much of Europe and North America, too. But the year is turning now, as it always does eventually.

Cooler weather will come and go. Floods, droughts, disasters, snowstorms and heatwaves, too. That is the nature of living on the Earth. You’ll see reporters referring unusual weather events to climate change, but that’s largely misleading, and it’s misinformed as well.

So let’s not get confused. That is only weather, and it’s not the same as climate. Reports like those just serve to confuse the public.

The urgently pressing fact is that climate change is real. And it’s happening.

There’s a clear scientific consensus here, except amongst a tiny minority of scientists who are funded by the very worst elements of the fossil fuel industry. This 2004 article explains the point.

The truth is that just a few vested interests have supported an entirely misguided public belief that real scientists are divided on the issues.

So let me tell you now - they are not.

This delusion of differing scientific opinions is peddled enthusiastically by a small number of isolated but vociferous so-called ‘researchers’, many of them funded by big oil. The tragic legacy of this cynical manipulation of public opinion began with the systematic undermining during the late 1980s and 1990s of the global negotiations leading up to Rio and Kyoto (for details, I recommend the dramatic account within Jeremy Leggett’s book The Carbon War).

A decade on, the scale of misinformation (the denial industry) remains breathtaking, as explored in George Monbiot’s excellent book Heat).

Al Gore’s 2006 film An Inconvenient Truth did much to draw worldwide attention to the critical role of manmade carbon emissions in driving recent climate change. But the involvement of a political figure is in some respects distracting, since this is a debate which we simply can’t afford to politicise.

And whilst the science is straightforward, Gore is guilty of some simplifications. We need to appreciate that global temperature variations reflect the superimposed effects of both anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions (increasing, and accelerating) and a lower amplitude natural cyclicity in solar insolation (currently entering a relative low).

The solar effects are presently counteracting the influence of rising carbon dioxide, but that is only a temporary reprieve, and it’s not really a reprieve at all.

There’s an excellently-framed analysis here: Climate change in the public debate. A basic appreciation of the science along these lines clearly refutes the oft-cited red herring that global warming stopped in 1998.

That’s a view you’ll hear from the climate change sceptics. They’re good at propaganda, since they’re well funded and well versed in the manipulation of public opinion. But that inference isn’t just misleading - it’s tragically inaccurate.

The point is that inside a decade, the insolation budget will fall again, and carbon dioxide levels will have risen even further, with dangerous effect.

So let me reprise Monbiot, just for a moment. He has four simple questions for anyone who might be inclined to a sceptical view of global warming.

1. Does the atmosphere contain carbon dioxide?

2. Does atmospheric carbon dioxide raise the average global temperature?

3. Will this influence be enhanced by the addition of more carbon dioxide?

4. Have human activities led to a net emission of carbon dioxide?

Monbiot continues, “If you can answer ‘no’ to any of these questions, you should put yourself forward for a Nobel Prize. You’ll have turned science on its head.”

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