This made me bawl
This is the editorial cartoon in the Guardian today (23/11/09).
I saw the cartoon at lunchtime and sat in the car in tears. I don't know why the death of Bill Barker makes me so much more sad than the death in tragic circumstances of other people I don't know, but I have been close to tears every time his name is mentioned.
I think partly it's the fact that my father was a police officer until I was 11, and I remember that he was put into dangerous situations by his job, including riots. Dad would have done exactly what Bill Barker did, put himself in harm's way to stop other people from getting hurt. Bill Barker disappeared when Northside Bridge in Workington collapsed when the floods rushed down the River Derwent in Cumbria on Thursday night and early Friday morning. He was on the bridge turning people back because the bridge had developed cracks and was unsafe. A flood surge took the bridge and him with it. His body was washed out to sea and found on a beach at Allonby about 20 miles north of Workington 8 hours later. He sounds like he was a really good bloke, a copper in the old sense, he was a police family liaison officer and well liked by his colleagues and people in Workington.
The remains of Northside Bridge in Workington
The climate change deniers on the Guardian website are decrying the cartoon, saying that it is "disgusting" and that the artist, Martin Rawson "should be ashamed of himself". But Bill Barker IS a victim of climate change, the residents of Cockermouth are victims of a warming climate. My friends Claire and Chris who have been flooded out of their house in Coniston are victims of climate change, 3 of my colleagues have had their properties damaged thanks to the anthropomorphic caused rise in C02.
A warming system holds more energy. This 36 hours of record breaking rainfall (380mm/15 inches) came from a weather system which originated far further south in the Atlantic than normal autumn depressions. The depression funnelled warm, moist air up from way south of the Azores, unusually far south for this time of year.
Whilst this particular storm, just like Hurricane Katrina, just like the current droughts in the Sahel, the melting of permafrost in Alaska and the cyclones that caused so much destruction in the Pacific this year cannot be laid directly at the feet of climate change, the warmer closed system has more energy. That energy has to be dissipated somehow. The way it has been dissipated in this case is via torrential rain over unlucky Cumbria, resulting in the death of a brave man and the destruction of homes and livelihoods.
Martin Rawlinson could be accused of hyperbole and tastelessness, but actually I think he's done the right thing here. The deniers and sceptics are becoming more and more angry, but it's because they are wrong, and the majority view is that they are wrong. There is a scale of acceptance of ideas. First people deride and deny ideas, laugh at them and think the people that hold these ideas are cranks and crackpots. This happened in the 1980s and early 1990s. Now people are angry. They don't want to admit that climate change exists because it means that their comfortable lives may be turned upside down. So instead, they rail against the scientists and the scientific method. They deride the scientific method used to analyse data. They lie with statistics and take funding from interested parties and vested interests such as the oil companies. At some point this will change, and finally the world governments seem to have overcome the denial bit. But these deniers are putting the world at risk (this is the official UK government line), and unfortunately, because no-one is doing anything very effective, the sort of event that we have seen here in Cumbria will become far more common.
As Martin Rawson says The Price of Carbon Just Got Higher
I saw the cartoon at lunchtime and sat in the car in tears. I don't know why the death of Bill Barker makes me so much more sad than the death in tragic circumstances of other people I don't know, but I have been close to tears every time his name is mentioned.
I think partly it's the fact that my father was a police officer until I was 11, and I remember that he was put into dangerous situations by his job, including riots. Dad would have done exactly what Bill Barker did, put himself in harm's way to stop other people from getting hurt. Bill Barker disappeared when Northside Bridge in Workington collapsed when the floods rushed down the River Derwent in Cumbria on Thursday night and early Friday morning. He was on the bridge turning people back because the bridge had developed cracks and was unsafe. A flood surge took the bridge and him with it. His body was washed out to sea and found on a beach at Allonby about 20 miles north of Workington 8 hours later. He sounds like he was a really good bloke, a copper in the old sense, he was a police family liaison officer and well liked by his colleagues and people in Workington.
The remains of Northside Bridge in Workington
The climate change deniers on the Guardian website are decrying the cartoon, saying that it is "disgusting" and that the artist, Martin Rawson "should be ashamed of himself". But Bill Barker IS a victim of climate change, the residents of Cockermouth are victims of a warming climate. My friends Claire and Chris who have been flooded out of their house in Coniston are victims of climate change, 3 of my colleagues have had their properties damaged thanks to the anthropomorphic caused rise in C02.
A warming system holds more energy. This 36 hours of record breaking rainfall (380mm/15 inches) came from a weather system which originated far further south in the Atlantic than normal autumn depressions. The depression funnelled warm, moist air up from way south of the Azores, unusually far south for this time of year.
Whilst this particular storm, just like Hurricane Katrina, just like the current droughts in the Sahel, the melting of permafrost in Alaska and the cyclones that caused so much destruction in the Pacific this year cannot be laid directly at the feet of climate change, the warmer closed system has more energy. That energy has to be dissipated somehow. The way it has been dissipated in this case is via torrential rain over unlucky Cumbria, resulting in the death of a brave man and the destruction of homes and livelihoods.
Martin Rawlinson could be accused of hyperbole and tastelessness, but actually I think he's done the right thing here. The deniers and sceptics are becoming more and more angry, but it's because they are wrong, and the majority view is that they are wrong. There is a scale of acceptance of ideas. First people deride and deny ideas, laugh at them and think the people that hold these ideas are cranks and crackpots. This happened in the 1980s and early 1990s. Now people are angry. They don't want to admit that climate change exists because it means that their comfortable lives may be turned upside down. So instead, they rail against the scientists and the scientific method. They deride the scientific method used to analyse data. They lie with statistics and take funding from interested parties and vested interests such as the oil companies. At some point this will change, and finally the world governments seem to have overcome the denial bit. But these deniers are putting the world at risk (this is the official UK government line), and unfortunately, because no-one is doing anything very effective, the sort of event that we have seen here in Cumbria will become far more common.
As Martin Rawson says The Price of Carbon Just Got Higher