So how has 2015 been for you? And how will it be remembered by history?

It was the year of terrorist attacks in Paris and on a Tunisian beach – and other, bigger, ones elsewhere that attracted far less international outrage.

It was the year ISIS mutated by stages into Daesh, while further establishing itself as the world’s most feared and hated organisation.

It was the year Europe woke up to the biggest mass migration since World War II – and started closing its eyes and its borders to the desperate victims of war and famine.

It was the year Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the United Nations became chairman of a UN panel on human rights. The year his country beheaded more people than ISIS. And condemned a poet to death for writing about losing his religious faith.

The year that same very rich UK ally unleashed British-built planes and missiles on its pitifully poor neighbour Yemen.

Here in little Britain, it was the year 24 per cent of the electorate put the Tories back in power. The year Scotland became a one-party state within a state. The year the Labour Party either destroyed itself from within or rose, phoenix-like from the ashes. History will tell us later which it was.

In America it was another year when more people were shot dead by toddlers than were killed by terrorists. When 19 people were killed and 41 seriously injured in 20 school shootings. And when more guns were bought by more American citizens than ever before.

Yet, amid all the apocalyptic gloom, there is a chance – just a chance – that 2015 will be remembered as the year things started to get better. The year the world looked over the edge into the abyss … and stepped back.

The rhetoric was good coming out of this month’s climate summit in Paris. Almost every nation in the world signed up to what US secretary of state John Kerry called “a victory for all of the planet and future generations”. Phew.

The aim is to stabilise global warming well below two degrees above pre-industrial levels, “and less if possible”. Right. Define “possible”.

There was ecstatic talk of the end of the era of fossil fuels. Pity, then, that just days later the British government was cutting subsidies for renewable energy. And reneging on its promise to protect our national parks from fracking.

Not that the national parks are really so special. Beauty is beauty, and it seems a shame to risk spoiling it – but fracking is bad news wherever it takes place.

The geo-physics of its link with earthquakes is not yet fully understood. But we know the frackers’ record of toxic pollution. We know some of the damage that can do to people’s health.

And we know the methane belched out contributes around 25 times more to global warming – molecule by molecule – than carbon dioxide. And that’s before the extracted gas is burned.

The only safe thing to do with fossil fuel – and the only way to meet the Paris agreement – is to leave it in the ground. Yet in the very week Britain’s last deep coal-mine closed we go charging headlong into fracking. Madness.

Oh, and there’s another way 2015 will be remembered by history. As the warmest year ever recorded on the planet. Until 2016, anyway.
 
 
----


 
A year from now we will know who the next President of the United States will be, though it will still be three weeks before he or she takes office. Polling isn’t until November, yet the candidates are already jostling for position.

I’m sure I’ve said and thought this before, but it really does seem as if the world’s future rests on the outcome of one of the world’s weirdest and most protracted electoral procedures.

Right now there are 17 contenders to succeed Barack Obama in the White House – three Democrats and 14 Republicans. Many of the latter are mad, bad and dangerous to know. None more so than the current front-runner and mopper-up of most media attention, Donald Trump. If he gets in, it’ll be time to emigrate to Mars.

On the other side stand the one we all know, Hillary Clinton; the one we don’t, Martin O’Malley; and the one we’re going to hear a lot more of, Bernie Sanders.

Senator Sanders will be 75 by the time of the election, which makes him an unlikely fresh face. Even more unlikely for America, he is a lifelong avowed socialist, with a keen interest in the environment. Most remarkable of all is his connection with ordinary people.

It’s said US elections are won by whoever has most money – which normally means a few big backers. Obama did it in 2008 by getting small donations from a massive number of supporters. Sanders already has twice as many.

Opinion polls suggest that if the Democrats pick Clinton as their candidate they could be missing the chance of a landslide Sanders victory.

A victory which would be good news for ordinary Americans and for the world. And, incidentally, a good omen for his British equivalent, Jeremy Corbyn.

How on earth did I do my job before there was an internet? How did I ever learn anything, check anything, look anything up? I can scarcely remember how we operated at all before the net revolution overtook us, about 20 years ago. I’d better research it online to remind myself…

The wonderful web has totally transformed both the way I do my job and the way I conduct my social life. But like any web it can be a trap for the unwary. As Abraham Lincoln said: “Any quotation you see on the internet has probably been made up.”

Same goes for statistics. The truth is out there – but so is an awful lot of absolute balderdash, and it can sometimes be a tricky business sorting out which is which.

Particularly risky – because particularly tempting – are those phoney figures (and phoney quotes) that seem to support your particular point of view. And that risk is multiplied by another massive danger hidden in plain view wherever you look on social media. I think of it as the intensifier effect. You get back what you put in – intensified.

Out in what used to be the real world, there was an element of randomness in who you met. Among your neighbours, in the pub, at work you’d come across people who were interested in different things, had different opinions from you. In the world of Facebook and Twitter, everything is there.

You might meet and become friends with people from Hawaii, Waikato, Warsaw and Wythenshawe (just to take a sample of my own online acquaintances). But you choose each other. Your interests and opinions are likely to be similar. If you share jokes, articles – and yes, made-up quotes and false figures – they are likely to confirm the views you already hold.

So if you’re a dyed-in-the-wool Tory, a redneck Southern Baptist, a New Age hippy or a true believer in the reincarnation of Egyptian gods, you probably find the world is full of people like you. People who share and uphold your values. Who confirm your fundamental rightness.

My world is full of people who think like me, more or less. Which can make it very tempting to pass on their jokes, their insights, their “facts”, without due thought or investigation. Tempting, and occasionally dangerous.

For example, I was caught out for a few minutes the other day by one of those “Abraham Lincoln”-type quotations. Or, in this case, a “Mark Twain” quote.

Now, I love the wit and wisdom of Mark Twain. There has never been a better newspaper columnist. He is also one of the most quoted people on the net. And one of the most misquoted.

So there’s this: “Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason.”

Brilliant quote, and well in line with the way Twain might have thought of politicians. But would he have expressed it in quite those words? My immediate thought was that he wouldn’t. It just felt too modern for a man who died in 1910. So I looked it up.

And lo and behold, there it is, all over the net, attributed to Twain. The more serious, apparently reliable, websites dedicated to Twain don’t have it, however – as they surely would if it was a genuine quotation. Neither do any of my printed, pre-internet books of quotations.

So I’m forced to believe the rather dry site that dates that particular witticism’s first appearance to a 1992 car bumper-sticker.

OK, maybe passing that off as Twain might not have put me in great peril, beyond any possible slight damage to my reputation for accuracy. But had I believed – and not checked – one supposed “fact” circulating on Facebook I could have been in trouble. Possibly legal trouble.

It might, on the face of it, have made my piece here last week about BBC news bias stronger. But only if it were true – and I could prove it was.

Using false evidence to support a good case only weakens it. As does sinking to personal abuse of your opponents.

This is a point Charles Moore makes in the latest instalment of his biography of Margaret Thatcher. That those who found the woman as ghastly as he found her glorious couldn’t get past their loathing to oppose her effectively.

It is also what undermines Richard Dawkins’s increasingly splenetic attacks on religion.

There’s nothing I like less than bad arguments for a view I hold dear. As Abraham Lincoln and Mark Twain probably didn’t say. But Daniel C Dennett probably did.

Do you believe everything you read in the papers? Or do you just think you don’t?

There’s a common view that the national press affects the outcome of elections. A view held not least by the newspapers themselves. Remember: “It’s The Sun Wot Won It”? That was that paper’s crowing front page after its hatchet job on Neil Kinnock apparently helped John Major into Downing Street in 1992.

The biggest-selling papers certainly have a relentless anti-left agenda. You only have to glance at the newsstands on any day to confirm that. It undoubtedly gives the political right an advantage – and the left a ready-made excuse for electoral failure. But how much effect do the papers really have?

The Sun sells just under two million copies a day – little over half the 3.6m it enjoyed in 1992. The Daily Mail sells around 1.7m. It sounds a lot, but between them those two biggest sellers are bought by just 7% of the adult population.

So does the rancid propaganda that pours off those pages really matter so much? It does – and there are three chief reasons why.

The first lies in the industry’s rule of thumb that each copy sold has three readers. Which brings that 7% up to 21% – not so far short of the 24% of the electorate whose votes put the present government in power.

Then there’s the cumulative effect of those front pages, on public display every day. You don’t have to buy the Sun or the Mail to be aware of the splash headlines, and perhaps have your thinking swayed by them. Even if you think you’re immune (and most people do).

Finally – more insidious and more serious – there’s the way the papers drive the national news agenda. Which is, of course, as much about what is not reported as what is.

Another common view is that the BBC has a left-wing bias. It’s an idea constantly put about by the Tory party and the right-wing press. And it’s rubbish.

Neither is the BBC the neutral voice of reason most of us like to believe it is.

Threatened, like all our national institutions, with enforced commercialisation, Auntie Beeb is now dancing more than ever to the government’s tune. It maintains the pretence of objectivity and “balance” - whatever that really means. But compare how often the BBC broadcasts the opinion of City analysts or financiers with that of trade union leaders, for example. And how those opinions are presented – one as “fact”, the other as controversy.

And look who gets the top news jobs.

Nick Robinson, formerly BBC political editor and now presenter of the influential Today programme on Radio 4, is a former president of the Oxford University Conservative Association.

Jeremy Paxman – self-described “one nation Conservative” – was replaced as Newsnight presenter by Evan Davis, a crosser of official picket-lines who was on the team that devised the Poll Tax for Margaret Thatcher and has written a book calling for the privatisation of all public services.

Andrew Neil, host of The Daily Politics, was a right-wing editor of the Sunday Times under Rupert Murdoch. And so it goes.

I’m not suggesting these gentlemen aren’t all honourable and professional in their work. But everyone has a slant on life. Everyone has their own idea of what is worth telling. And these all lean the same way.

Robert Peston, now with ITV News after nine years with the BBC as business and economics editor, is no one’s idea of a leftie. But he found it “most frustrating” the way BBC news “is completely obsessed by the agenda set by newspapers”.

He’s not the only one. It’s an obsession that puts far too much power in the hands of two or three newspaper owners, who don’t even live in Britain.

There’s a reason why one of the first places to be taken over by the rebels in any modern revolution is the national radio or TV station. Most people, most of the time, believe what they are told by those in authority over them. Whoever that is, and however they came by that authority. Josephs Goebbels and Stalin, Benito Mussolini and Mao Zedong all knew that well, and so does the government in Westminster.

The BBC, still the prime and most trusted source of news for 75% of the British population, is still seen as the voice of the nation. That shouldn’t make it the voice of the government of the day. Or just a loudspeaker for what used to be Fleet Street. It should be big enough to have its own voice, to set its own agenda.
 
 
----
 
 
The Crown Prosecution Service has announced there will be no further charges arising from the phone-hacking investigation. So ends an operation that took four years and 10 months, cost almost £50million, brought the arrest of 34 journalists… and nine convictions.

The gnashing of teeth comes not only from the Hacked Off group, denied vengeance against Rupert Murdoch’s News UK. Murdoch himself, and senior executives such as the reinstated queen bee, Rebekah Wade, may claim the whole thing was a waste of time and money.

Yet unorthodox methods of investigation were never the worst of that organisation’s sins.

It should be the job of the press to maintain vigilance over those who govern us. And those authorities have never been shy about using every surveillance tool available to keep an eye and an ear on anyone they take an interest in – including journalists.

As I see it, the crime – if there was one – was not in the hacking of phones, but in the choice of which phones were hacked. There is a great difference between revelations that are “in the public interest” and those “of interest to the public”. Sadly, it is not a difference most of the national press has ever been very clear about.

Say what you like about the Labour Party, they have made British politics interesting again. After 20 years or so when you could barely slip a cigarette paper between the front-line policy positions of the major parties, a real gap has now opened up. The catch is that the gulf is not between the two sides of the House, but between the Leader of the Opposition and many of those who sit around him, supposedly on the same side.

At least Jeremy Corbyn now knows the exact identities of the enemy within. Awkward for him that 11 of them are members of his own Shadow Cabinet. For now. 

In the grand scheme of things, a few bombing sorties by British planes in Syria won’t change much. Unless you’re unlucky enough to be one of the Syrians whose home or family are hit by them, that is. Those victims won’t care which nation’s planes launched the assault on them. Most of those planes are still American or Russian. British involvement will make nothing better. But it won’t make anything very much worse either.

You can see why some commentators were saying last week’s dramatic vote in the House of Commons was a bigger occasion for British politics than it was for the Middle East. Though it raised voices and emotions on both sides, its significance was more symbolic than practical.

A philosophical confrontation between those who like to believe that lobbing bombs into the desert, flattening towns and villages, can make anything better – and those who don’t.

Between those who imagine Iraq, Afghanistan and LIbya have been pacified and made safe by the delivery of countless tons of explosives – and those who don’t.

Between those who think you can make people less “radical” by making them homeless and killing their friends – and those who don’t.

It’s hard to see how this can be anything other than an open-and-shut case. But it’s also hard to see what logic there was in drawing a line in the sand – the Syrian-Iraqi border – and bombing one side but not the other. It’s this that made last Wednesday’s vote more about the Labour Party than about ISIS.

There was a truly great speech made by Labour MP Benn. Unfortunately, you had to go on YouTube to hear the late Tony deliver his masterful, impassioned plea to the House against the bombing of Iraq.

Recalling his own experiences during the 1940s London Blitz, he said: “Every morning I saw dockland burning, 500 people were killed in Westminster one night by a landmine – it was terrifying.

“Aren’t Arabs terrified? Aren’t Iraqis terrified? Don’t Arab and Iraqi women weep when their children die? Doesn’t bombing strengthen their determination?

“Every MP tonight who votes for the government motion will be consciously and deliberately accepting the responsibility for the deaths of innocent people.”

The contrast between those heart-felt words and the semi-coherent, illogical rambling of his son Hilary in Parliament last week could hardly be greater. Sitting behind Tony Benn in 1998 was an approving Jeremy Corbyn. It is he, not Benn’s own son, who carries the great man’s flag.

Hilary Benn’s speech was widely declared one of the finest heard in the House in recent times. If that’s true, it’s a sorry sign of how far the standard of debate has fallen.

His clarion call for war was widely interpreted as a bid for the Labour leadership. Muddled though his thinking is, I can’t believe he’s stooped quite that low.

Or that he’s that stupid. There may still be many Labour MPs – left-overs from the despicable Blair regime – who want Corbyn out. But it’s the whole party membership, not the MPs alone, who choose the leader. And there can be little doubt where the party outside Westminster stands. Which is not with the allegedly “moderate” Blairite militarists.
 
 

The British weaponry destroying Yemen
 
 One bitter “joke” doing the rounds on Twitter goes like this: “During WWII the allies bombed the enemy’s weapons factories. We could do the same against ISIS – except it would mean bombing our own country.”

Meanwhile, in what you could call the Middle East’s forgotten war, Saudi Arabia is systematically destroying its southern neighbour, Yemen.

An International Red Cross observer in the devastated capital, Sanaa, said last week: “Yemen after five months looks like Syria after five years.” Around 1.5million people have been made homeless and 82 per cent of Yemenis are in need of humanitarian aid.

Former British ambassador Frances Guy said: “Where is the next place that ISIS will go? The answer is Yemen. Because of the instability caused by the bombing, we have helped created the next space for ISIS after Syria.”

The ordnance being rained on Yemen by the Saudis includes British-made Paveway IV missiles made by Essex-based Raytheon UK, launched from Typhoon and Tornado jets built by BAE Systems.

Doesn’t it make you proud?

King’s Lynn could be totally submerged and abandoned, and Downham Market a seaside town on Norfolk’s new west coast by the end of the century.

Great Yarmouth will be just a memory, and those Suffolk honeypots of Southwold and Aldeburgh well on the way to becoming offshore islands. Much of Lincolnshire and Cambridgeshire will be lost to the waves, with Ely once again an island.

Everywhere that suffered in the notorious floods of 1953 will be under water again – permanently this time. The risk of another such flood will hang over places now thought safely far from the sea.

It may sound like a Hollywood version of Apocalypse East Anglia, but in fact it’s a vision of the not-so-far future suggested by a serious, well resourced and highly credible American research team.

These images show how rising sea levels could change the shape of our coastline – within our children’s lifetimes, if not our own – unless drastic action is taken now to halt the emission of greenhouse gases.

The maps, produced by Climate Central, show how East Anglia will look beyond 2100 if the world warms by just 2ºC. And that’s not a worst-case scenario – it’s the target.

With the United Nations climate change conference currently taking place in Paris, Steve Smedley of the Eastern Green Party has been examining the latest scientific predictions. And he says: “Recent studies suggest that carbon emissions produced now could have a cumulative effect on temperatures far beyond what is currently thought. The effect would be to lock in long-term sea-level rise that greatly exceeds current projections.”

All that water comes, of course, from the melting polar ice-caps – melting already at an alarming and accelerating rate. It’s a heck of a lot of water.

Dr Smedley adds: “The generally accepted increase in sea level due to climate change by the year 2100 is between half a metre and a metre. But these new studies show that even if carbon emissions were kept low enough to meet the internationally agreed 2ºC of global warming, the cumulative effect of carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere could see sea levels continue to rise beyond 2100 by up to 4.5 metres. This would have catastrophic consequences for communities on the east coast.”

What is not clear is the time-scale for the sea to reach the levels shown. Scientists are rightly wary of making dogmatic predictions that could turn out to be exaggerated. Or under-stated.

But it is clear that the choices we make now will have far-reaching consequences for centuries to come.
Climate Central, whose recent research was published by the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, says: “The sea level rise we map may take centuries to play out, but we set it in motion today.”

• For a detailed view of how various global warming scenarios will affect sea levels anywhere in the world, see sealevel.climatecentral.org

 
 
Maps © 2015 Climate Central. Reproduced with permission.

A human tide of desperate refugees fleeing a murderous regime. Nations jostling to form a knot of alliances not so much loose as tangled. Governments crying poverty one moment then finding unlimited cash for weaponry.
The echoes of the 1930s grow daily louder and clearer, eerier and scarier.

There is so much to be said. About the cant and perfidiousness of Labour MPs who call their leader a “fuhrer” because he wants to lead them not into war but away from it.

About the staggering hypocrisy of those who claim the moral high ground because they want to bomb people.

About the lies – or, at best, ignorance – of those who talk of “precision bombing”, as if the flattening of a country was somehow like a surgeon’s careful knife.

But all this and more is being said elsewhere by others, and I don’t want to add unduly to the already deafening clatter of the war-drums. So I shall just paraphrase the comedian Frankie Boyle, whose voice seems to be one of the few sane ones.

You don’t defend yourself against being stung by beating a wasps’ nest with a stick.

Oh, and there’s this: am I the only one who finds it ominous that China has for the first time decided to involve itself in military operations in the Mediterranean?

There is something imperialistic about any country choosing to get stuck in so far from home.

The Chinese, for now, seem to be on “our” side. Sort of. But then, Japan was on “our” side in the First World War.

Meanwhile, our government is happy – thrilled – to let China build nuclear installations on our coasts. Their finger, as it were, on our button.

Which, in some possible versions of the future, might look like a very clever weapons delivery system indeed.
Far-fetched, you may think. But don’t for a moment imagine the Chinese haven’t thought of it.