BRITAIN is worried about the NHS. The latest Social Attitudes Survey shows less than a quarter of the population are satisfied with the health service. That represents a drop of 29 per cent in just three years — the fastest fall ever.
That’s hardly surprising. Waiting lists at over seven million represent months of pain for people waiting on procedures. Seeing a GP in a hurry is all but impossible in many areas. Waiting times in A&E are breaching targets wherever you look.
This suits private healthcare interests down to the ground.
The number of privatised medical procedures hit a record last year. People who can afford it are going private: people who can’t afford it, the vast majority, are suffering.
The degradation of the NHS, and the consequent pressure for “reform” in the form of ever-greater dependence on for-profit provision, follows a familiar playbook. US academic Noam Chomsky summed it up: “That’s the standard technique of privatisation: defund, make sure things don’t work, people get angry, you hand it over to private capital.”
People are angry about the state of the NHS, but there is certainly no public enthusiasm, or even consent, to increasing the role of private capital.
The NHS’s founder Nye Bevan famously said the NHS would last as long as people had the faith to fight for it.
LABOUR membership is plummeting according to figures reported to the party’s national executive committee this week.
It has dropped by 25,000 in the first two months of 2024 alone, doubtless as a consequence of the Starmer leadership’s full support for Israeli aggression in Gaza.
The total is now 355,000, more than 200,000 down on its Corbyn-era peak.
This contrasts with the ascending membership figures in the period before Labour won the 1997 general election.
The financial impact of the drop will be mitigated, at the very least, by the party’s increasing reliance on large donations from rich backers.
In a further setback for Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer, an attempt to bounce the executive into endorsing a new undemocratic structure for Labour BAME members failed, despite prior commitments to establish a democratic and self-organising body.
Starmer’s time at the CPS is under scrutiny. (Photo: Keir Starmer / Flickr)
The Crown Prosecution Service is refusing to release files on how Starmer blocked the arrest of former Israeli foreign minister Tzipi Livni over alleged war crimes during the brutal bombing of Gaza in 2008.
The coalition government changed UK law in 2011 to enable Israeli ministers accused of crimes to visit Britain without fear of prosecution.
Declassified asks the CPS to conduct an internal review into its decision to censor the Starmer emails.
In October 2011, Keir Starmer was asked by a human rights group and law firm to issue an arrest warrant for former Israeli foreign minister Tzipi Livni, who was visiting London, over alleged war crimes.
Starmer was then Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) at the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS). But two days later, he blocked the application for Livni’s arrest, citing a Foreign Office decision to grant her visit “special mission” status.
Declassified recently submitted a freedom of information (FOI) request asking for all communications to and from Starmer’s office regarding the case.
These files could shine a crucial light on the discussions which led to Livni’s escape from prosecution.
However, the CPS has censored a number of key emails, claiming that the release of such information would prejudice the effective conduct of public affairs.
Starmer’s role in the Livni case requires closer inspection in light of the Labour party’s ongoing support for Israel’s brutal war on Gaza.
One of the redacted emails released to Declassified following our freedom of information request.
Tzipi Livni
Livni was the Israeli minister of foreign affairs between 2006 and 2009, and a member of Israel’s war cabinet during the brutal bombing of Gaza between December 2008 and January 2009, known as Operation Cast Lead.
According to a UN report, “numerous serious violations of international law… were committed by Israel during the military operations in Gaza”, which killed around 1,400 Palestinians, 333 of whom were children.
Those crimes included “the direct targeting and arbitrary killing of Palestinian civilians”, as well as a “deliberate and systematic policy… to target industrial sites and water installations”.
The assault on Gaza, the great crime of our age, adds moralindecency to the pile of dishonesty and vacuity. When Starmer declared Israel had the right to cut off energy and water to Palestinian civilians, he did so as a human rights lawyer who understands the Geneva conventions. After letting shadow cabinet ministers defend him, he claimed it “has never been my view that Israel had the right to cut off water, food, fuel or medicines”. We all have political red lines: mine is supporting what would amount to war crimes against innocent civilians, toddlers and newborn babies among them, then gaslighting the public over doing so.
Where is my gratitude for Starmer delivering a now inevitable landslide victory, you may ask? Well, he didn’t force Boris Johnson and his cronies to violate their own pandemic rules, or to trash the NHS, or oversee the worst squeeze in living standards in history. Nor did he propel to power Liz Truss, whose unhinged economic experiment crashed the economy – the moment when the electorate turned on this Tory party for good.
The absolute power a landslide victory will give Labour should scare you. When Starmer allies deployed antisemitic tropes – with one joking about a “run on silver shekels” when two Jewish businessmen missed out on peerages, and another calling a Jewish Tory donor a “puppet master” – an apology was deemed to be sufficient. When another racially abused a journalist and had a sexual harassment complaint upheld, they were reinstated after investigation.
Contrast this with Diane Abbott, Britain’s first Black female MP, who was suspended after immediately apologising for an Observer letter in which she argued that Irish, Jewish and Traveller people are not subject to racism “all their lives”. She has been left in limbo for 10 months and counting while the party investigates – only for Labour to use the racist abuse directed at her by a Tory donor for political capital, while still refusing to reinstate her.
Getting to net zero emissions by mid-century is conventionally understood as humanity’s best hope for keeping Earth’s surface temperature (already 1.2°C above its pre-industrial level) from increasing well beyond 1.5°C – potentially reaching a point at which it could cause widespread societal breakdown.
At least one prominent climate scientist, however, disagrees.
James Hansen of Columbia University in the US published a paper with colleagues in November which claims temperatures are set to rise further and faster than the predictions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). In his view, the 1.5°C target is dead.
He also claims net zero is no longer sufficient to prevent warming of more than 2°C. To regain some control over Earth’s rising temperature, Hansen supports accelerating the retirement of fossil fuels, greater cooperation between major polluters that accommodates the needs of the developing world and, controversially, intervening in Earth’s “radiation balance” (the difference between incoming and outgoing light and heat) to cool the planet’s surface.
You can listen to more articles from The Conversation narrated by Noa.
There would probably be wide support for the first two prescriptions. But Hansen’s support for what amounts to the deliberate reduction of sunlight reaching Earth’s surface has brought into the open an idea that makes many uncomfortable.
Michael Mann from the University of Pennsylvania in the US and another titan of climate science, spoke for many when he dismissed solar radiation management as “potentially very dangerous” and a “desperate action” motivated by the “fallacy … that large-scale warming will be substantially greater than current-generation models project”.
Their positions are irreconcilable. So who is right – Hansen or Mann?
Earth’s radiation balance
First, an explanation.
There are only two ways to reduce global warming. One is to increase the amount of heat radiated from Earth’s surface that escapes to space. The other is to increase the amount of sunlight reflected back to space before it lands on something – whether a particle in the atmosphere or something on Earth’s surface – and is converted to heat.
There are many ways to do both. Anything that reduces the amount of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere will let more heat escape to space (replacing fossil fuels with renewables, eating less meat and tilling the soil less for example). Anything that makes the planet brighter will reflect more sunlight to space (such as refreezing the Arctic, making clouds whiter or putting more reflective particles in the atmosphere).
But the key difference between the two, in terms of their impact on global warming, is their response time. That is, the time it takes for a change in the factors that allow more heat to escape or sunlight to be reflected to appear as a change in Earth’s surface temperature.
Intervening to speed up the loss of heat from Earth’s surface cools the planet slowly, over decades and longer. Intervening to increase the sunlight Earth reflects back to space cools the planet more or less immediately.
The essence of the dispute between Mann and Hansen is whether reducing greenhouse gases, by a combination of reducing new emissions and permanently removing past emissions from the atmosphere, is now enough on its own to prevent warming from reaching levels that threaten economic and social stability.
Mann says it is. Hansen says that, while doing these things remains essential, it is no longer sufficient and we must also make Earth more reflective.
When will warming end?
Mann aligns with IPCC orthodoxy when he says that emissions reaching net zero will result, within a decade or two, in Earth’s surface temperature stabilising at the level it has then reached.
In effect, there is no significant warming in the pipeline from past emissions. All future warming will be due to future emissions. This is the basis for the global policy imperative to get to net zero.
In his new paper, Hansen argues that if the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases remains close to its current level, the surface temperature will stabilise after several hundred years between 8°C and 10°C above the pre-industrial level.
Of this, at least 2°C will emerge by mid-century, and probably a further 3°C a century from now. A temperature increase of this magnitude would be catastrophic for life on Earth. Hansen adds that to avoid such an outcome, brightening Earth is now necessary to halt the warming in the pipeline from past emissions.
Bright surfaces, like ice sheets, reflect light to space. Tobetv/Shutterstock
But at the same time, we must also largely eliminate emissions if we are to stop recreating this problem in the future.
Still getting hotter…
We are scientists who study the feasibility and effectiveness of alternative responses to climate change, addressing both the engineering and political realities of enabling change at the scale and speed necessary.
We find Mann’s rebuttal of Hansen’s claims unconvincing. Crucially, Mann does not engage directly with Hansen’s analysis of new data covering the last 65 million years.
Hansen explains how the models used by IPCC scientists to assess future climate scenarios have significantly underestimated the warming effect of increased greenhouse gas emissions, the cooling effect of aerosols and how long the climate takes to respond to these changes.
Besides greenhouse gases, humanity also emits aerosols. These are tiny particles comprising a wide range of chemicals. Some, such as the sulphur dioxide emitted when coal and oil are burned, offset the warming from greenhouse gases by reflecting sunlight back to space.
Others, such as soot, have the opposite effect and add to warming. The cooling aerosols dominate by a large margin.
Hansen projects that in coming months, lower levels of aerosol pollution from shipping will cause warming of as much as 0.5°C more than IPCC models have predicted. This will take global warming close to 2°C as early as next year, although it is likely then to fall slightly as the present El Niño wanes.
Underpinning Hansen’s argument is his conviction that the climate is more sensitive to greenhouse gases than previously reported. The IPCC estimates that doubling atmospheric CO₂ raises Earth’s temperature by 3°C. Hansen calculates it to be 4.8°C.
This, and the much longer climate response time that Hansen calculates from the historical record, would have a significant impact on climate model projections.
Time for reflection
The differences between Mann and Hansen are significant for the global response to climate change.
Mann says that allowing emissions to reach net zero by mid-century is sufficient, while Hansen maintains that on its own it would be disastrous and that steps must now be taken in addition to brighten the planet.
Brightening Earth could also reverse the reductions in reflectivity already caused by climate change. Data indicates that from 1998 to 2017, Earth dimmed by about 0.5 watts per square metre, largely due to the loss of ice.
Given what’s at stake, we hope Mann and Hansen resolve these differences quickly to help the public and policymakers understand what it will take to minimise the likelihood of imminent massive and widespread ecosystem destruction and its disastrous effects on humanity.
While 1.5°C may be dead, there may still be time to prevent cascading system failures. But not if we continue to squabble over the nature and extent of the risks.
Don’t have time to read about climate change as much as you’d like?
Roger Hallam was involved in starting the climate activism groups Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil. He is still involved with Just Stop Oil and often gets arrested and imprisoned. [22/3 Apologies had a typo calling Roger Roget]
I used to be a social science researcher at King’s College, London. The name of the game in that trade is to look at everything in context. So I will provide some context. There is overwhelming evidence that the climate science industry is structurally underestimating the realities we face. “Worst than expected” is the standard phrase of just about every article as new stats are published. A few years ago we were going to pass 1.5C around 2050 – now it is already happening. I remember reading reports that the Arctic will melt in the summer around 2100. Papers now predict 2035, if not before. AMOC – the ocean current that stops the 60 million people on these islands from starving to death – was going to collapse at some point next century. Now a recent paper tells us the odds are it will collapse by 2050. If you have not been paying attention, this will create a collapse of temperatures overnight of 3-8C across Europe. So don’t be surprised if it happens before your pension comes due.
I’m like you. I don’t like to believe things are true if they conflict with my baseline beliefs – like “we will muddle through”. But then it becomes more difficult when it actually comes true. Scientists have been telling us privately and then publicly for years that staying under 1.5C was bollocks – and now here we are. For two decades or more the best kept secret of the climate space has been that aerosols (pollution from burning fossil fuel emissions) have been holding down temperatures by .5C-1C. As we passed 1.8C last September the pretence started to collapse as scientists raged about each other on a dark corner of Twitter. It’s the start of the exposure of the world’s biggest cover up. That they knew we were fucked a decade or more ago. Not that the media is interested. Everyone is still in on the pretence, it seems.
