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	Charity is a fine thing, but it can"t justify the wealth of the 1% by Polly Toynbee for The Guardian / UK   The rich pretend the option is the status quo or outright communism. But giving is no excuse for gross inequality.   If members of this government want a picture book to give any small children for Christmas, I have the perfect thing. Here is early indoctrination on why inequality is good for us, Ayn Rand for baby beginners, trickle-down economics for trustafarian toddlers, a nursery Hayek for every little Conservative. Those loutish Tory MPs who jeered their way through this week"s Commons debate on food banks, mocking "families who don"t budget properly" and "need food edu"tion", will find this perfect for their offspring.   Published last year, I saw it when my small granddaughter borrowed it from the library. Denver, by David McKee (of Elmer the Elephant fame), flouts all the traditions of myth, fairytale and legend. By age-old convention the poor are good (Charlie Bucket, Robin Hood, baby Jesus) and the rich are bad (the other gold ticket winners, the sheriff of Nottingham, Herod). But not in this.   Denver is a rich man, kindly and smiling in his checked suit and mop of curls. He gives his money generously, dresses as Father Christmas to hand out toys, supports local businesses; everyone loves him. The people are happy until a dark stranger arrives to spread discontent, asking why everyone can"t share more equally in Denver"s great wealth? The foolish townsfolk are easily swayed by the stranger (let"s call him a scheming social democrat) and Denver is so mortified he shares out everything and leaves. The silly citizens squander their new money, but now have no benefactor. Denver sets up in another town where he takes up painting and is so successful he becomes rich all over again and generous to his new neighbours, leaving his old town full of regret. Here"s the last line, the moral of the tale: "As for the stranger, he"s still wandering around breeding discontent. If he comes your way, don"t listen to him."   I called McKee, an immensely successful author who lives in Paris and the south of France. I asked why he thought children"s books usually make the rich villainous? "I suppose most books aren"t written for rich people"s children," he said. "I don"t believe in Robin Hood, stealing from the rich to give to the poor. If you took everything from the rich, workers at Rolls-Royce would be out of a job. My parents brought me up to be happy with what we had: Denver"s villagers were happy, as people were with a lord of the manor."   Difference is inevitable, some will always succeed: "People shouldn"t be so poor they sleep in the streets, but they can"t be equal. Wealth doesn"t make you happy, though people think it will. I could tell them owning a house in the south of France was a lot of worry, about the roof and the gardener and people coming to stay. We"ve sold it and we sold the house in Paris, so we rent our houses now. The wealth tax in France was the problem, as you have to pay tax every year if you own wealth worth over a million and I realised it was worth avoiding. I pay my taxes – I have to – but a lot of tax money is wasted."   Let"s not begrudge a successful children"s writer his earnings, but McKee neatly encapsulates what you hear from many of the rich. They pretend there is no option between outright communism and the present rising tide of inequality. Taxation is theft, avoidance is natural and philanthropy is the best redistribution.   Charity is a fine thing, the backbone of a good society. But too often it"s used to justify the 1%"s mushrooming wealth. Pointing to the fine monuments to Victorian philanthropists, the rich imagine a better era before the intrusive state stepped in: if only taxes were lower, they would give as their ancestors did. But they conveniently ignore the facts.   Figures from the Charities Aid Foundation show £9.3bn donated in 2012 – a goodly sum, but a flea bite beside the state"s £700bn spending. If good works replaced social security and public services, we"d be back with Victorian destitution. The better-off give most cash because they have the most – but they make a far smaller sacrifice. Surveys always show the poorest 20% give considerably more of their incomes – 3.2% – while the richest 20% donate a meagre 0.9%. That is remarkable when you consider how much harder it is for those living near the poverty line to give anything, while the top 1% takes an enormous 14% of national incomes. Those closest to needing help seem the most understanding about the difference small sums make to those on the edge. After the crash, the professional classes dropped their giving by more than those who earn less. But in the world charts, Britain does well, as sixth largest giver.   What"s best about charity is also what"s worst about it: it is paid out by the whim of the giver and among the rich often with strings attached. Women give more than men, the older more than the young. Charities that top the giving register are not purely altruistic, but causes that might one day benefit the giver – medical research, hospitals then hospices.   Only after them come children and young people. Religion draws most cash – and you wonder why that"s a charitable cause at all. Unpopular causes struggle. As an inefficient method of funding, just try computing the amount of time, effort and money that goes into each charity trying to squeeze small sums out of many, or beseeching the few to part with a lot – causes competing for the same pots from foundations or government grants.   What"s best about charity is that it can power new ideas as a beacon to show how the state could run its social services better, or foreign aid, arts, sports or anything else. But as all charity leaders say, they are no substitute for state funding, as the right imagines. The idea of the "big society" was a good one, though once purloined by politicians it killed the very quality it pretended to promote. Cynicism flowed once charities found themselves cut to ribbons, used as a front for contracts that flowed instead to Serco, A4e and G4S.   Argue as you like about giving to beggars who may be addicts, they pluck at a primal conscience – there but for great good luck go any of us. When the Wall came down, a most chilling revelation about communist states was their lack of any civil society – no charities, no buffer zone, no voluntary spirit, all natural generosity deliberately atrophied. The impulse to give is hard-wired into most human hearts.   Writers share a few hopes for the new year:   Polly Toynbee: The sudden shaming of this government   The best hope for this year is the sudden shaming of this government and the unravelling of its plans. Let"s hope that more eyes open to the fact that deficit reduction at this ruthless rate never was a fiscal necessity, but a gleeful Tory opportunity to diminish the public realm and shrink the state. The result has been services slashed and benefit cuts that reverse decades of social progress.   Let this be the year Duncan Smith"s "scrounger" attacks rebound on him. The independent Institute for Fiscal Studies shows government plans for the years after 2015 would require yet deeper cuts, devastating the National Health Service (NHS). So far, many voters seem to believe the propaganda that deficit-cutting is worth the sacrifice, though economic growth has been sluggish and deficit-reduction delayed.   As foodbank queues grow, let this be the year when most people start asking why the highest price is extracted from the lowest-paid half of the population, their incomes falling while the proceeds of growth only flow to the better off. Let this be the year scales fall from the eyes and a majority see beyond doubt that we were never all in this together.   Zoe Williams: A 2014 choreographed by Danny Boyle   It"s an Anglo-Saxon disease, apparently – the tendency to see poverty and wealth as merely the outward signs of inner value. It is disastrous enough applied to rich people, leading to an overestimation of their intelligence that is both tragic and comic. Applied to poor people it feeds other, harsher attitudes about social security and safety nets, what our responsibilities are to one another and whether we resent them or feel OK about them.   It does appear that the UK, though, unlike the US, has a natural point of retreat: when everybody sees their incomes fall and gets just poor enough to realise that it"s systemic, and has nothing to do with how much effort they put in. At that point, generosity of attitude re-establishes itself, and people start ticking "disagree strongly" to Ipsos Mori statements like "I think the unemployed should just look harder for work".   So my hope for 2014 is not for national poverty as such – rather, the re-establishment of the principles and ambitions of social justice, which have been at the wellspring of everything the country has ever done that had any meaning or value.   Patrick Barkham: A piece of land not fracked   Nature is uplifting and exhilarating, and yet writing about it is often a gloomy business of confronting the ways in which we are consuming and despoiling it. Each year brings small spits in the wind – a clean energy advance here, a new nature reserve there – but these gobbets of good news are blown away by the logic of global capitalism: nature is a finite public resource to be annexed by private individuals for short-term profit.   After a 2013 of "green crap", species loss and ever-rising exploitation, a realist might wish for 2014 to be a bit less bad. But I would love to see just one glorious occasion where people choose nature over profit – a piece of ground not fracked, a runway not built, a badger not culled. A few such exercises of gentle restraint and voices in mainstream politics and the media may belatedly begin questioning our society"s crazy fixation on economic growth as the source of all wellbeing and happiness. Reframing this miserable, myopic vision is too much to ask for 2014. It"s probably too much to ask for 2041. But it"s never too early to start trying.   Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett: An end to online hate   The wish closest to my heart would be to see an end to the sweeping cuts being made to disability benefits. These cuts are affecting disabled people and their families in heartbreaking and often tragic ways. Our government should be ashamed. It should also go without saying that I"d like to live in a kinder, more accepting society that treats individuals as human beings, whether it"s allowing women to be fully clothed in music videos, refusing to stigmatise those on benefits or giving those with no quality of life the right to die.   As I"m not going to get that, however, I"d settle for people being nicer to one another on the internet. My general rule is, if you wouldn"t have the guts to walk up to someone in a room and say it, then don"t say it online. I"d like 2014 to be the year that people close their laptops instead of being nasty – and realise that very little of significance ever happens on Twitter.   Aditya Chakrabortty: Policy on real benefit scroungers – employers   I kept running into a type in 2013: the impoverished worker, on wages too low to keep them afloat. University cleaners doing two or three jobs a day, or staff at high street banks forced to turn to payday lenders. And they told stories of colleagues who were worse off, begging from foodbanks.   Impoverished workers are fast becoming the norm. According to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 2013 was the first year that the majority of people in poverty were from working families.   Something remarkable has happened in Britain. Employers are getting into the habit of giving their staff poverty pay – and leaving the government to top it up with benefits. British taxpayers are ultimately handing cash to miserly bosses.   More effectively than any other contemporary figure, the impoverished worker punctures what the Westminster set thinks it knows about the jobs market. From New Labour workfare to Iain Duncan Smith and George Osborne: for decades, the main parties have hammered the unemployed. But they won"t face down firms who don"t pay enough to live on.   Labor leader Ed Miliband so badly wants bosses to give the living wage that he"s promised tax breaks to those who comply; in other words, a Labour government would continue to subsidise Scrooge employers.   But we won"t tackle poverty pay until we tackle the massive inequality of which it is part. Look at Lloyds Banking Group, which racked up £1.7bn pre-tax profits in the first nine months of this year. In 2012 its chief executive, António Horta-Osório, took £3.4m in cash, pension and perks. Yet 45% of his staff are on two salary bands that begin at £13,000 and £17,000 respectively. Unsurprisingly, most of them say they can"t manage financially.   So that"s my hope for this year: that the politicians start talking about a different kind of benefits scrounger – the corporations who pay their staff misery wages, and expect the welfare state to step in.   http://www.theguardian.com/profile/pollytoynbee http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2013/11/5-benefit-changes-government-dont-want-you-know-about http://www.newstatesman.com/frances-ryan Visit the related web page
	The IPCC report: busting the climate myths by Will Steffen, Michael Mann, Dana Nuccitelli ANU Climate Change Institute & agencies   27 September 2013   Human activity will further warm the Earth, with dramatic effects on weather, sea-levels and the Arctic. UN urges global response to scientific evidence that climate change is human-induced.   United Nations officials today called for a global response to combat climate change, following new findings by a scientific panel stating it is 95% certain that humans have been the dominant cause of unprecedented global warming since 1950.   “The heat is on. Now we must act,” Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said at the launch of the report of the UN-backed Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).   “This new report will be essential for Governments as they work to finalize an ambitious, legal agreement on climate change in 2015,” Mr. Ban said. “The task is to generate the political commitment to keep global temperature rise below the agreed 2-degree Celsius threshold.”   The IPCC report, released today in Stockholm, Sweden, calls global warming “unequivocal,” and confirms that there is a 95 per cent probability that most of the warming since 1950 has been caused by human influence.   The report stresses that evidence for this has grown “thanks to more and better observations, an improved understanding of the climate system response and improved climate models.”   “The IPCC report demonstrates that we must greatly reduce global emissions in order to avoid the worst effects of climate change,” said the Secretary-General of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), Michel Jarraud. “It also contains important new scientific knowledge that can be used to produce actionable climate information and services for assisting society to adapt to the impacts of climate change.”   In its report, the IPCC notes that continued emissions of greenhouse gases will cause further warming and changes in all components of the climate system. It adds that limiting climate change will require substantial and sustained reductions of greenhouse gas emissions.   “Climate change is a long-term challenge but one that requires urgent action, not tomorrow but today and right now, given the pace and the scale by which greenhouse gases are accumulating in the atmosphere and the rising risks of a more than 2-degree Celsius temperature rise,” said the Executive Director of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), Achim Steiner.   Mr. Ban urged countries to take action swiftly to limit the effects of climate change. To add momentum to the global response, Mr. Ban intends to convene a Climate Summit in September 2014 for leaders at the highest level – from government, business, finance, civil society and academia.   “As the results from the latest and best available science become clearer, the challenge becomes more daunting, but simultaneously the solutions become more apparent. These opportunities need to be grasped across society in mutually reinforcing ways by governments at all levels, by corporations, by civil society and by individuals,” said the Executive Secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).   Under the UNFCCC, governments have agreed to limit the global temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius to avoid the worst impacts of climate change. They have also agreed to assess the adequacy of this limit and progress towards this goal using the best science, including the IPCC report.   It has been six years since the IPCC, which brings together the world’s leading climate scientists and experts, released its previous report. Back then, scientists stated it was “very likely” that humanity’s emissions of carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide and other greenhouse gases have caused most of the global temperature rise observed since the mid-20th century.   27 Sep 2013   The IPCC report: busting the climate myths, by Professor Will Steffen.   The release of the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report provides details that stamp out the myths and distortions of those trying to discredit climate science. Has the Earth stopped warming over the past 15 years? The answer is an emphatic NO, writes Will Steffen.   The highly anticipated IPCC Fifth Assessment Report has generated much media interest. A good deal of this, however, has consisted of earlier media reports and articles that broke the embargo on the release of any information from the draft IPCC report.   Such media efforts, based on leaked versions of the IPCC draft, were often aimed at distorting, misrepresenting or undermining the IPCC"s assessment. This type of media coverage frequently states or infers that the warming of the Earth has stopped and thus action on climate change can be slowed or de-prioritised.   This isn"t the first time we"ve seen such behaviour. The appearance of the "Climategate" hacked emails in advance of the 2009 Copenhagen climate conference was designed to discredit the mainstream climate science community and hijack the narrative on climate science. So seeding doubt and promulgating misleading science is nothing new.   Now that the IPCC report has been finalised and released, we can analyse, based on the actual substance of the report, these earlier myths and misleading claims.   So has the Earth stopped warming over the past 15 years? The answer, based on the reputable science contained in the IPCC report, is an emphatic NO!   Here are the facts:   The Earth has warmed significantly over the last century, and particularly strongly since 1970 up to the present. The global average air temperature has risen by 0.89 degrees Celsius over the 1901-2012 period, and the decade 2001-2010 was the warmest on record.   But global average air temperature is only a very small part of the warming story, as the atmosphere absorbs only 3 per cent of the additional heat trapped by the increasing concentration of greenhouse gases. By far the biggest player in the climate system is the ocean.   Over 90 per cent of the warming since the mid-20th century has occurred in the ocean, and the heat content of the ocean has risen steadily since about 1970 with no pause or slowing of the rate over the past 15 years. That is really the "smoking gun" of warming. But there is even more evidence of a strongly warming Earth.   The ice cover over the Arctic Ocean is decreasing rapidly, at a rate of about 4 per cent per decade since 1979. Such rapid ice loss is unprecedented in the last 2,000 years.   Sea level has risen by 19 cm over the 1900-2010 period. This observed rate of rise over the past century is unusually high in the context of the last 2,000 years.   Glaciers and ice sheets around the world are shrinking and losing mass. The combined rate of mass loss from the large polar ice sheets on Greenland and Antarctica was about 350 billion tonnes per year for the period 2002-2011, and is accelerating.   It is even more telling that the rate of sea-level rise, the rate of decrease of Arctic sea ice extent, and the rate of mass loss from Greenland and Antarctica have all increased in the period from the 1990s to the present, compared to earlier periods. This is exactly the opposite of what one would expect if warming of the Earth is slowing or has stopped.   All of this evidence points to the continued strong warming of the Earth since the mid-20th century up to the present, in stark contrast to the erroneous reports purported to be based on leaked drafts of the IPCC assessment.   A second example of distortion and misrepresentation is the claim that, according to the IPCC, the climate is less sensitive to increases in greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere than was earlier thought. The IPCC has said no such thing. Here are the facts:   The range of estimated climate sensitivity in the Fifth Assessment Report, 1.5-4.5C per doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration, is slightly larger than that reported in the 2007 report (2.0-4.5C). The 0.5C decrease in the lower end of the range reflects estimates using the records of atmosphere and ocean temperature change in the contemporary period.   Estimates of climate sensitivity using climate model simulations and observational records from past climate changes (for example, the transition of the Earth from the last ice age to the present warm period) give estimates towards the mid and upper end of the range, while methods based on contemporary observations give estimates towards the lower end of the range. The IPCC gives no estimate of a "most likely" value of climate sensitivity.   In summary, there has been no significant change in our estimate of climate sensitivity since the publication of the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report in 2007.   So much for the myths and distortions of those trying to discredit climate science. What actually are the key messages of the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report?   There is stronger evidence that the Earth"s climate is warming - rising air and ocean temperature, loss of mass from glaciers and ice sheets, and rising sea level.   Scientists are more certain than ever that most of the warming since 1950 has been caused by human activities, primarily the emission of carbon dioxide from fossil fuel combustion.   A warming climate is influencing the frequency and severity of many extreme weather events and is changing rainfall patterns, creating risks for human well-being, the economy and the environment.   Stabilising the climate system will require substantial and sustained reductions of carbon dioxide emissions, and those of other greenhouse gases.   As the Climate Commission, and now the Climate Council, often say - this is the critical decade to get on with the job of reducing emissions quickly and deeply.   * Professor Will Steffen is executive director of the Australian National University Climate Change Institute and a member of the Australian Climate Council.   IPCC report underlines the need for climate action, by Michael Mann and Dana Nuccitelli.   The IPCC report released last week finds, again, that humans are to blame for increasing global temperatures. It adds an exclamation mark to the call to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.   It happens every six years or so: the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) publishes its assessment of the current state of scientific understanding regarding human-caused climate change. That assessment is based on contributions from thousands of experts around the world through an exhaustive review of the peer-reviewed scientific literature and a rigorous, several-years-long review process.   One significant change from the 2007 IPCC report involves climate scientists confidence that humans are causing global warming. In 2007, the IPCC stated with 90 per cent confidence that human greenhouse gas emissions were the main cause of global warming since the mid-1900s. Now the IPCC states with 95 per cent confidence that humans are the main cause, even with the new inclusion of the cooling effect from sunlight-scattering human aerosol emissions.   As with all IPCC conclusions, this confidence is based on an evaluation of the peer-reviewed scientific literature. For example, a paper published in 2012 by climate change attribution experts Tom Wigley and Ben Santer concluded with 95 per cent confidence that humans have caused at least half the global warming since 1950, and most likely all of it. Similarly, the IPCC report concludes that humans have caused at least 50 per cent and most likely 100 per cent of the global warming over the past six decades, with external natural factors like the sun and internal natural variation like ocean cycles each contributing approximately zero to the warming during that time.   The robust body of scientific evidence summarised by the IPCC report is the reason behind the 97 per cent expert consensus that humans are causing global warming.   However, in the weeks leading up to the publication of the 2013 IPCC report, climate contrarians have been working overtime publishing opinion articles full of myths and misinformation, to mislead and confuse the public about its sobering message. Most of these opinion pieces have focused on the mythical global warming "pause" (more accurately described as a speed bump), which in reality merely refers to a temporary slowing in the warming of air temperatures at the surface of the Earth.   As the IPCC report notes, the oceans absorb approximately 93 per cent of the warming of the global climate. When we account for all the data, including the heating of the oceans, air, land, and melting of ice, there has actually been more global warming over the past 15 years than during the previous 15 years, with the climate accumulating heat at a rate equivalent to four Hiroshima atomic bomb detonations per second during that time.   The IPCC also notes that the global surface warming speed bump is based on cherry picking.   The surface warming trend from 1997 to 2012 is lower than the average projection made by climate models, but the surface warming trend from 1993 to 2007 was significantly higher than projections. That"s mainly because during the 1990s, ocean cycles acted to accelerate human-caused global warming, while in the 2000s, more heat has been transported to the deep ocean layers. These cycles average out over time, and the long-term human-caused global warming trend is crystal clear.   The IPCC also expresses strong certainty that the Earth is experiencing the impacts of that warming in the form of melting ice, rising global sea levels and various forms of extreme weather. In fact, in order to correct for several overly conservative estimates in the 2007 IPCC report, the 2013 report has increased its projections for the future rates of several climate impacts such as Arctic sea ice melt and sea level rise.   The 2013 IPCC report has taken a conservative approach with regards to the climate"s sensitivity to the increased greenhouse effect. The estimate of the amount of warming we expect from a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide in a best-case scenario from 2°C to 1.5°C. This change brings the estimated climate sensitivity range back to the same values estimated in the IPCC reports published in 2001 and earlier.   This lowered best-case estimate is based on one narrow line of evidence: the aforementioned surface warming speed bump. Yet there are numerous explanations for this temporary change (unaccounted for effects of volcanic eruptions and natural variability in the amount of heat buried in the ocean) that do not imply a lower sensitivity of the climate to greenhouse gases. Moreover, other lines of evidence contradict a climate sensitivity lower than 2°C. It is incompatible, for example, with paleoclimate evidence from the past ice age, or the conditions that prevailed during the time of the dinosaurs.   Despite its conservative approach, the IPCC has expressed much higher confidence than ever before that humans are the dominant cause of the current global warming. We will see far more dangerous and potentially irreversible impacts ahead if we do not choose to reduce global carbon emissions. There has never been a greater urgency to act than there is now.   The latest IPCC report is simply an exclamation mark on that already-clear conclusion.   * Michael Mann is Distinguished Professor of Meteorology at Penn State University and was an expert reviewer of the 2013 IPCC report. Dana Nuccitelli is an environmental scientist and climate blogger for The Guardian and Skeptical Science.   http://www.trust.org/spotlight/extreme-weather-climate-change/ http://theconversation.com/broad-consensus-on-climate-change-across-american-states-20314
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