Global warming: the deniers may be shrinking in numbers, but they're keeping the volume up...

It was no doubt naive on my part to imagine that fewer and fewer people could seriously still be denying the reality of climate change. You know, I thought it might be the Trumps of this world who know no better, but few others. The overwhelming consensus building up among scientists, and the constantly growing frequency of damaging weather events that all seem to point in the same direction, seemed to make denial untenable.

Well, I was wrong. Or, if I was right, I had underestimated the sheer vociferousness of the dwindling band left. They seem more than capable of making up in sheer volume for their shrinking numbers.

I’d made a couple of references on Twitter to the way the floods in England seemed to provide additional evidence for global warming’s grip. And I found the deniers coming down on my head like a torrent of brimstone.

One of the best responses pointed me at a post by NASA concerning the ice cap at the Antarctic. This, it seems, has been growing, not shrinking.

Let me repeat that. There’s more ice and snow at the Antarctic than there has been for ages. So I could stuff that in my pipe and smoke it, because it certainly refutes the notion of global warming, doesn’t it?

Antarctic sea ice at its greatest extent recorded, in 2014
The previous maximum is shown in red

Well, no, actually. My correspondent didn’t just put up the picture, he pointed me at the whole article. And I read it. Here’s how it starts:

Sea ice surrounding Antarctica reached a new record high extent this year, covering more of the southern oceans than it has since scientists began a long-term satellite record to map sea ice extent in the late 1970s. The upward trend in the Antarctic, however, is only about a third of the magnitude of the rapid loss of sea ice in the Arctic Ocean.

The new Antarctic sea ice record reflects the diversity and complexity of Earth’s environments, said NASA researchers. Claire Parkinson, a senior scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, has referred to changes in sea ice coverage as a microcosm of global climate change. Just as the temperatures in some regions of the planet are colder than average, even in our warming world, Antarctic sea ice has been increasing and bucking the overall trend of ice loss.

“The planet as a whole is doing what was expected in terms of warming. Sea ice as a whole is decreasing as expected, but just like with global warming, not every location with sea ice will have a downward trend in ice extent,” Parkinson said.

So the phenomenon of Antarctic ice growth is (a) too little to compensate for ice loss in the Arctic, and (b) a local event compatible with global warming overall.

Local cooling within global warming? Most of us have got used to this paradox. It seems the deniers struggle with it.

What’s more, the article is from 2014. A year on, NASA reported, “2015 Antarctic maximum sea ice extent breaks streak of record highs.” My denier was quoting last year’s news; this year’s lends itself even less well to his argument.

In fact, he decided to hammer his point with another NASA study on the sheer extent of the growth of the Antarctic ice cap. Again, the headline seems to strengthen his case: “Mass gains of Antarctic ice sheet greater than losses.” The devil, for him, was in the body of the article, when it quoted glaciologist Jay Zwally:

But it might only take a few decades for Antarctica’s growth to reverse, according to Zwally. “If the losses of the Antarctic Peninsula and parts of West Antarctica continue to increase at the same rate they’ve been increasing for the last two decades, the losses will catch up with the long-term gain in East Antarctica in 20 or 30 years — I don’t think there will be enough snowfall increase to offset these losses.”

What this suggests, according to Zwally, is that the IPCC (the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) was mistaken to think that Antarctic ice melt was adding to rising sea levels.

“The good news is that Antarctica is not currently contributing to sea level rise, but is taking 0.23 millimeters per year away,” Zwally said. “But this is also bad news. If the 0.27 millimeters per year of sea level rise attributed to Antarctica in the IPCC report is not really coming from Antarctica, there must be some other contribution to sea level rise that is not accounted for.”

My correspondent must have focused on the fact that the IPCC had got it wrong. He didn’t take into account that the error was on a matter of details. Overall, the picture is if anything more worrying: if the Antarctic isn’t contributing, then the effect of other causes of sea level rise must be even greater than we feared.

Now, I don’t want global warming to happen. I take no joy from the fact that reading the evidence thoroughly only confirms the bad news – after all, it is bad news. I wish we could deny what’s happening. I’m simply amazed by the extent to which deniers are prepared to go to support their rejection of evidence.

It’s faith, and faith at its worst. It sees what it wants to see, and reads what it wants to read. And if it gets its way, it’ll lead the planet, blindfolded, into desperate straits.

Lessons and laughter from Maugham, and a dose of denial

Why are we so critical of that invaluable psychological process, denial? It seems to me that it’s often the only defence against devastating self-awareness. Without denial we might have to recognise our faults and then how could we resist the pressure to try to fix them? How would we avoid all the horrors of self-improvement?

Sometimes, though, even the guard of denial fails me. For example, there are moments when I realise that a really harsh critic might regard some of the things I say in these posts as a little sententious. Of course, I retreat into denial as quickly as possible, but the insight leaves me feeling uneasy about the inclination to be self-important. It gives me a sense of affinity with others who might suffer from the affliction, and that makes it peculiarly delightful to catch them out in some authoritative statement proved false by events.

Now, I am a great fan of spy novels. Graham Greene, one of the finest novelists never to have won the Nobel prize, served in intelligence and drew on the experience in his writing, most successfully in Our Man in Havana. It set the benchmark for novels about intelligence fabricators: John le Carré, the master of spy writing, declares that he wrote The Tailor of Panama in conscious emulation of the model set by Greene.

If I say that le Carré is the master I’m really thinking of his writing from the Cold War, the conflict in which he served. The Spy who came in from the Cold, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Smiley’s People as well as the masterful and semi-autobiographical A Perfect Spy aren’t just outstanding spy novels, they’re great novels of any type. So is The Little Drummer Girl which dates from the same period but deals with the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, in a way that combines gripping narrative with unusually balanced insight.

Le Carré has continued to write since the Berlin Wall came down, but somehow it’s not the same: with the Cold War gone as a backdrop, he’s taken to using his novels to denounce injustice, a worthy aim, but one that gives them an unfortunate stridency.

Having admired Greene and le Carré, I was interested in tracking to its source the tradition of writers using personal experience of intelligence work in spy novels. The first I could find was Somerset Maugham, who was with British intelligence in the First World War. So I went Amazoning (I believe in the US grammar principle that ‘every noun can be verbed’) and I now have a copy of the Ashenden stories, with a preface giving a brief manifesto of Maugham’s views on writing in particular within art in general.

He tells us that the experiences he drew on had been ‘rearranged for the purposes of fiction.’ He goes on to explain that ‘fact is a poor story-teller. It starts a story at haphazard, generally long before the beginning, rambles on inconsequently and tails off, leaving loose ends hanging about, without a conclusion.’ Maugham accepts that some think this is exactly what writing should do: ‘There is a school of novelists that regard this as the proper model for fiction. If life, they say, is arbitrary and disconnected, why, fiction should be so too; for fiction should imitate life.’

He, however, argues for artistry, the process by which the writer structures fact to turn it into fiction with literary value.

If Maugham is arguing against trends which culminated in stream of consciousness type writing – in vogue at the time of the preface, published in 1928 – I have to admit that I too find that it lacks – how can I put this – the page-turning quality of, say, Greene’s The Quiet American. Take James Joyce: Portrait of the artist as a young man held me breathless; a dozen pages of Ulysses convinced me that there had to be more to life than ploughing through the rest. Even Proust’s A la recherché du temps perdu eventually lost me, even though at 1500 pages I was halfway through before I realised that I really needed no further information about any of those people. These great works are jewels of our culture and it’s comforting to know they’re out there, but it’s a bit like a town’s drains: my life is doubtless enriched by their presence but I feel no need to visit them.

According to Maugham, Chekov is one of those writers who believed in simply imitating life. Though he did it ‘with mastery’, Maugham wonders whether the work will survive: ‘already it is getting a little difficult to care much what middle-class Russians were like fifty years ago.’ Similarly, in visual art, he points to Claude Lorrain whose fine sense of structure distinguishes him from the Impressionists who ‘were content to render the radiance of sunlight, the colour of shadows or the translucency of air.’ Soon after the death of Claude Monet, ‘it is strange how empty their paintings look now,’ Maugham claims, ‘when you place them beside the stately pictures of Claude.’

Chekov revivals happen every year. Monet’s water lilies decorate a thousand student rooms to say nothing of hundreds of thousands of sheets of wrapping paper. When did you last see a poster of, say, Claude’s Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba?

As opposed to some version or another of Monet’s Water Lilies?

Eventually Maugham may get the last laugh of course, when Claude knocks Monet off his pedestal, when Maugham himself returns from his relative obscurity to overtake Chekov in popularity. In the meantime, though, the laugh’s on him.

That will only add spice to my enjoyment of Ashenden, as will my appreciation of the work's artistry.

And I shall continue to resort to denial to protect myself from the suspicion that I might ever be as sententious as Maugham, or as palpably wrong.