A wildfire has ripped through one of the wealthiest neighbourhoods in the US, damaging Rupert Murdoch鈥檚 $28.8 million vineyard estate in the Santa Monica mountains at the edge of Los Angeles.
The media-mogul鈥檚 palatial house was saved, thanks to firefighters who spent the afternoon and night battling the conflagration. Others weren鈥檛 so lucky. Hundreds of homes and scores of lives have been lost in both northern and southern California in a spate of recent wildfires that were fiercer and moved faster than any in recent memory.
Such fires are made more likely as the world warms. California has just had its hottest summer on record, and the recent wildfires came much later in the year than normal. We also know that seven of California鈥檚 10 largest recorded wildfires have occurred in the last 14 years.
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California isn鈥檛 alone. Wildfires are occurring with greater frequency from Siberia to Australia. Climatologists see these as a flashing red early warning sign of the coming catastrophe as global mean temperatures continue to rise due to anthropogenic climate change.
Not that you would know it from Murdoch-owned news outlets. His vast holdings of newspapers, magazines and TV stations on four continents are megaphones that spread the view that climate change isn鈥檛 happening, or at least not because of human activities.
Imperilling the planet?
Murdoch has called climate change 鈥溾��. On a flight he : 鈥淛ust flying over N Atlantic 300 miles of ice. Global warming!鈥�
These foolish words 鈥� and those of his ill-informed pundits 鈥� are putting all of us at risk, not just the firefighters who rescued his property. Murdoch is imperilling the planet at a time when it has never been more crucial that we see clearly and act decisively.
Scientists are no longer debating whether human-generated greenhouse gases have raised global temperatures, fuelled wildfires, intensified hurricanes and exacerbated punishing heatwaves and droughts. The question isn鈥檛 whether climate change is real, but how fast things are going to go from bad to worse.
Sadly, we aren鈥檛 doing enough to slow that change. Indeed, despite the world鈥檚 nations making some half-hearted pronouncements of intent in Paris two years ago, we aren鈥檛 even successfully slowing things down. That is in part because of well-orchestrated campaigns to cast doubt on the fact that human-created greenhouse gases are rapidly destabilising the critical life support system that we call the climate.
People like Murdoch, along with US President Donald Trump, know that they don鈥檛 have to convince people with well-reasoned scientific arguments, which of course they don鈥檛 have. It is enough to steadily sow small seeds of doubt, and the human tendency to ignore the obvious whenever it threatens our deep-seated complacency will kick in.
Al Gore has it exactly right 鈥� climate change is indeed 鈥渁n inconvenient truth鈥�. It is tempting to pretend that it might not actually be happening after all. We must resist that temptation, no matter what Murdoch鈥檚 media empire would have us believe.
