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George Monbiot Profile picture
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19 Oct, 4 tweets, 1 min read
Crucial paper by Mark Lynas et al, showing how strong the scientific consensus around climate chaos really is.
In a nutshell, it's climate science on one side, and Piers Corbyn on the other. You can take your pick.
Fun fact about Piers Corbyn.
He was thrown out of a climate meeting this year for heckling his own brother (Jeremy), but has been noisily championed by Boris Johnson.
Once, at a meeting I was chairing, I told Piers that if he didn't stop interrupting the speakers, I would ask our security guards to throw him out. Luckily, he believed me. We didn't have any security guards.

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More from @GeorgeMonbiot

George Monbiot Profile picture
12 Nov
I'm on my way home from #COP26, full of frustration and fury after reading the draft declaration. The world's powerful governments propose to do more to defend the fossil fuel industry than to defend life on Earth.
If they were serious about preventing more than 1.5C of heating and, potentially, systemic environmental collapse, they would decide to burn no more fossil fuels after 2030, and to launch today an emergency programme of fullscale economic transition.
But they are not serious.
Some delegations will be glowing with satisfaction about defending their fossil fuel industries from anything more challenging than the "perhaps ... one day ... but only if you feel ready" draft text.
But there are no winners here. We are all losers.
Read 5 tweets
George Monbiot Profile picture
1 Nov
The general lack of knowledge about the prospect of systemic environmental collapse reflects the greatest failure of public information in history.
Hand on heart, without searching, how many of the following 3 very basic questions about our predicament can you answer?
Thread/
1. Name more than one greenhouse gas.
2. Within a few parts per million, what is the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere?
3. What is the global average temperature rise since 1880?
I suspect that far more people could list all the teams that played in the quarter finals of the Euros than could correctly answer these three questions. We have been kept in a state of ignorance about the greatest challenge humans have ever faced. How can we act unless we know?
Read 4 tweets
George Monbiot Profile picture
21 Oct
When ministers slap down effective environmental laws, when they cross their fingers instead of taking the action needed to stop Covid from spreading, it’s because they believe in fairytales: the “invisible hand of the market” will somehow sort it all out.
Thread/
Why do they believe in magic? Because throughout their lives they’ve been surrounded by it. Food magically appears in front of them. When they throw their clothes on the floor, they reappear in the wardrobe, washed and ironed. Houses clean themselves. They live in a fairytale.
They are surrounded by invisible hands, the unseen, unappreciated work of mothers, nannies, wives, servants and underlings, making things happen, while they strut and posture and build their castles in the air.
Read 4 tweets
George Monbiot Profile picture
21 Oct
The magnificent @frannyarmstrong has been hard at work editing the world's first live investigative documentary, #Rivercide, down to 60 crisp and compelling minutes. You can watch it any time for free at Here's a glimpse, prangs, filth and all.
Here's the shocking pollution event we covered on the River Llynfi. Disgracefully, no one from @NatResWales turned up for 13 hours, by which time the pulse of poison had passed, making it much harder to identify the culprit. Watch the whole movie here:
Here's the moment at which two citizen scientists, *doing the work our governments should have done*, reveal the major cause of death of one of the UK's most treasured and protected rivers, the Wye. See the rest on
Read 5 tweets
George Monbiot Profile picture
15 Oct
I'm very glad the BBC has made this.
But it distresses me that in 2014, after a team of us had spent months developing a very similar series, it was instantly dismissed by a BBC channel controller, with three words:
"Monbiot? Fuck off!"
It's easy to forget that, until a couple of years ago, the BBC was fiercely hostile to any but the most muted and anodyne discussion of environmental issues. Senior bosses remain hostile to those who challenge the status quo. Yet our survival depends on doing so.
It wasn't until Greta broke through that the BBC twigged that one of the reasons it had lost so many young people was its disgraceful neglect - actually, not just neglect but active dismissal - of the only issue that ultimately counts: the survival of our life support systems.
Read 8 tweets
George Monbiot Profile picture
14 Oct
Current climate plans are based on a mistaken belief:
That, through incremental change, we can stop a complex system from crashing. But complex systems don’t work like this. They steadily absorb stress, then suddenly flip. We don’t know how close the tipping points might be.
By 2050 it might be all over. And I mean all.
It's possible that we could see cascading environmental collapse, flipping Earth systems into an uninhabitable state. What is needed now is sudden and drastic action to stabilise our life support systems.
Can it be done? Of course! The US switched its economy from civilian to military in a couple of months, following the attack on Pearl Harbour. And that was before digitisation made everything faster.
What's lacking is not money or technology. It's political will.
Read 10 tweets

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