"Green" policies are destroying this country
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I'm capturing this for the record. Its climate smear site activist John Gibbons spouting his usual nonsense. Listen how he trips himself, yet again! The presenters give him lots of rope and he hangs himself . . . every time.
[Matt Cooper] 1 min 30 seconds in. Ok, John Gibbons is with us for our weekly environment spot. John, did you hear the minister for agriculture Charlie McConalogue there. I put it to him that you have tweeted today about this deal with China. How is it possible to export beef to China as well without increasing our emissions, but he implied basically it will just be beef going to China probably at a better price, rather than going somewhere else.
[John Gibbons] Good afternoon Matt, and happy new year. Am, yeah, I obviously listened to the minister and I noted he made no commitment whatever to actually limiting beef production, so essentially what's happened here is they have opened a new market, fair enough. New markets beget when you've got an outlet like that, that begets increased production. I mean nowhere did the minister saw for example, as we open the Chinese market we'll sell off the French market, we'll cut back on the Dutch market. So essentially they have created a new market and that market naturally will be serviced by increased production. I mean that's a QED situation and I think the minister was fairly clear in avoiding any commitment, even at capping it and it's probably important Matt to say we're not in a capping situation here, we're in a situation where, legally, his department, his sector is bound by law over the next 7 years to reduce emission by 25%, and I should add, that 25% is by far the lowest sectoral commitment of any sector in Ireland. So they've got the lowest targets,a sector whose emissions have been rising the most quickly, as we know over the last decade they are up 19%, and here we have this afternoon the minister for agriculture celebrating the expansion of the most emissions intensive form of agriculture that we have got. So, I'm not really sure how exactly we square this with climate commitments, I would suggest what we are hearing this afternoon is, ah, the agriculture minister simply throwing them out the window.
[MC] OK. Let's move on to other things. We have Sarah Slattery in our travel spot coming up in just a little while, and I am going to ask her about whether people can get their money back, if they go to empty ski slopes, where they find there isn't any snow for them to enjoy skiing on. But, You're going to look at this in a different way, that there is an issue here about why are we not having snow in the Alps this Winter.
[JG] Sure. I mean, again. This is really basic stuff and this isn't specific to the Alps. All over the world snowpacks, are melting, this is basic physics, as the global temperatures increase snowpacks are melting and we've seeing this in the Himalayas, we've seen it, ah, Greenland in particular, we've seen it in the Arctic circle and even within Antarctica, the coldest place on earth we are beginning to see a loss of ice from the land based ice, so all over the world we know that as temperatures go up, ice turns into water, this is basic physics and this is happening Matt, obviously the most vulnerable glaciers are the land based glaciers, the smaller glaciers like for example in the Alps. So, what we see in areas like the Alps in France is areas below 2000 meters are now essentially, above 0 degrees, which is kind of crazy I mean this the first week in January, the absolute depths of Winter, and theses are at high elevations, 2000 meters we are talking about, what's that 6-7000 feet up and above 0 degrees, so this is a complete transformation over the type of climate that existed there, 10, 20, 30 years ago. And a dramatic, and you've seen it I'm sure in the footage from these regions, essentially the ski slopes, the infrastructure that has been built there in the confident expectation that this year will be like last year. They are now basically stranded assets and we are going to see, by the way an awful lot more of this around the world, because we're operating now, not against a fixed background, but against a rapidly changing background. We know we have already increased global temperatures, surface temperatures by about 1.2 degrees and we also know, that that increase has been, ah, extenuated high up in the Arctic, and we know the Arctic is warming much more quickly and that in turn is having other effects on our global climate system.
[MC] But hold on. If you are saying that how come we has such heavy snow in the United States before Christmas?
[JG] Yeah. The United States was an interesting anomaly. What we have there, basically, One of the effects of climate change that we are seeing. Meteorologists have understood this for some time, is that the jet stream which is basically a high altitude stream of fast moving air, which is kind of pinned between the mid latitudes and the high latitudes. So for examples its the reason why your flight from America comes back maybe and hour quicker going from east to west. It's basically fast moving air. So that jet stream has a huge influence over weather in the Northern hemisphere. Vast influence. Now, when the jet stream basically, what happened last month in December, in the US, the jet stream bulged down from the Artic and because of increased temperatures the jet stream is becoming wavier. It's unable to hold its position on its line so it bulged down into North America, and, basically it dumped Arctic weather directly over North America. So that's what happened there. What we are now seeing in early January, is the jet stream bulging upwards, and dragging up air from Africa up over Europe, in the depths of Winter. Now do, we, If you look back over the record, have we had anomalous weather conditions before?. Yes we have, however, the record breaking that happened in early January this year, there simply, there is nowhere on the record, and I've looked at this in detail, I'll give you a small example, Matt. The temperature recorded in Warsaw on the 1st January, 19.1 degrees. That broke the high temperature record for Poland by fiiive degrees!, in a single day. Now that is the equivalent of somebody running 100 meters in 4 seconds, you'd say what the heck is going on? Essentially we have, we have, if you like we have a weather system that is on steroids, and these remember in Europe, we have fantastic detailed instrumental temperature records Matt, going back hundreds of years, and they are falling like nine pins at the moment.
[MC] Of course there are people who say they are happy enough, because this means we don't have to spend as much money on gas and electricity, maybe on these Winter months.
[JG] Yeah, It's an ill wind that blows no good. I mean the higher temperatures in central Europe may give us some slight reprieve there is no question about that. Unfortunately, its a very small consolation considering the overall disruption that travels with this, and, you know, it's really throwing nature of of whack. Ah, we've got, ah, we're breaking down the seasons and as I say we are seeing temperatures happening, and this, by the way, again, this is not a regional thing. The particular anomaly we are talking about swept from France, Spain, Poland, Germany, the Czech Republic, Holland, Belarus,. This is a huge system.
[MC] I'm just looking at some of the figures, like 25.1 celcius in Bilbao airport in the Basque country. People sunning themselves at the Guggenheim museum, in January. The start of January, you had temperatures of 25 degrees in the Southwest of France as well, not far from there.
[JG] That's right, and that actually brings me nicely to one point as well about this and that is how we talk about these events. So for example I was looking at the BBC website earlier and they had a report on this extraordinary heatwave and they illustrated the report Matt with a picture, of a group of people, one of them wearing a Santa hat having fun on the beach in Spain. Now, of course it's amazing and it's great, but guys we really got to look at this.
[MC] A listener says it was freezing up to Christmas in Ireland. What are ye on about?
[JG] Well, I guess we've got a . . .{interrupted}
[MC] It was only 2 weeks of extreme cold weather in what was the warmest year on record in Ireland.
[JG] That's correct, exactly so that. I think we have to understand the distinction between weather and climate and as you correctly said, what we are seeing is the climate system we have just had our warmest year ever recorded, was 2022. Within that we still have weather variability. We are still going to get days that are cold, of course we are.
[MC] Ok. Listen, a final brief one. Tell us about the new governmental legislation that came into force today on tobacco companies?
[JG] Yeah, The plan here Matt. Is basically . . . Cigarette butts, they are small but they have a huge impact. We find for example that half the plastic litter in Ireland, halt the litter in Ireland is actually cigarette butts. They are very difficult to pickup, they are very difficult to manage, and also they get into rivers, they get into streams and they get into our oceans. Globally these are massively toxic. We know that worldwide nearly a million tons of toxic litter. And people might say well sure cigarettes are harmless they are only a bit of tobacco. The problem isn't really the cigarette, its the filters. The filters are made of a thing called cellulose acetate. It is basically a plastic, and that plastic the tobacco companies discovered a number of years ago, that people thought the the filter made the cigarettes safer. It doesn't at all by the way. So, they put filters on, filters are made of plastic, and those filters are also when you smoke them, they become contaminated with all the gunk there is in cigarettes. Now when they end up in waterways, for example we know that the concentration of one cigarette butt for a liter of water kills all the small fish and plankton in that liter of water, so these are highly toxic. And what's happening here is the minister Smith is making the, basically, bring in legislation that s you said has come into force today, its in line with an EU directive on reducing single use plastic. Now what we'd like to see happen of course would be the an outright ban on plastic filters on cigarettes, that is where we need to get to. Bit, in the short term what the minister is saying to the cigarette companies, is you are creating this mess, you are going to have to pay to clean it up.
[MC] John Gibbons. Thank you for being with us for your first of our weekly environment spots for 2023. John will be with us each Thursday, throughout the rest of the year.
Net Zero means we are paying for the destruction of our economy and society in pursuit of an unachievable and pointless policy.
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