The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Arctic Permafrost Defrosting and the Age of War and Revolution

Globe on FireFor well over a decade, I have written that we are past the point of no return on climate change. My reasoning was that hothouse gasses already in the atmosphere, or which were for sure going to enter the atmosphere given our lack of action, were enough to trigger massive carbon and methane releases.

Methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon…

We’ve seen that methane, which accounts for only 14 percent of emissions worldwide, traps up to 100 times more heat than carbon dioxide over a five-year period. This means that even though carbon dioxide molecules outnumber methane 5 to 1, this comparatively smaller amount of methane is still 19 times greater a problem for climate change over a five year period, and four times greater over a 100 year period.

It is even more potent in the short run. Meanwhile, the arctic circle was about 30 degrees warmer this year than normal, and permafrost is un-perma-ing.

Huge slabs of Arctic permafrost in northwest Canada are slumping and disintegrating, sending large amounts of carbon-rich mud and silt into streams and rivers. A new study that analyzed nearly a half-million square miles in northwest Canada found that this permafrost decay is affecting 52,000 square miles of that vast stretch of earth—an expanse the size of Alabama…

…Similar large-scale landscape changes are evident across the Arctic including in Alaska, Siberia, and Scandinavia

There is no way we are avoiding near-worst case scenarios for climate change without aggressive geo-engineering (completly unproven, and requires political willpower). We will see temperature increases in some parts of the world which are currently highly populated. These increases will make those places uninhabitable outside of air conditioning. Changes in rainfall patterns will large current agricultural powerhouses to fail; an effect which will be compounded by the fact that we have vastly drained and polluted our groundwater in prime agricultural areas.

Later on, we will see vast rises in the ocean level. Virtually every city sitting on a seashore today will be gone in a hundred years, some of them a lot sooner.

This stuff is baked into the cake. It is essentially unavoidable. It has been effectively and politically unavoidable for quite some time now.

Do not expect the political, economic, and social arrangements you favor to survive this. The waves of refugees will be magnitudes larger than those currently shaking the Middle East and Europe. There will be water wars; people will not sit still while they are dying, they will fight. Some of those wars will involve, at the least, the use of tactical nukes.

Capitalism, Democracy, the Chinese Communist Party, etc…any system and group of people who can reasonably be blamed for this, will likely be on the block. When hundreds of millions to billions start dying, they will not go gently into that long dark night. No, they and those they leave behind will look for people, ideologies, and organizations to blame, and they will plenty of them, because everyone and everything who had any power has failed to prevent an entirely forseen and largely preventable disaster.

Our failure will not be considered acceptable to those who pay the bill, and our “capitalism” and “democracy” and “corporations” and “free trade” and everything else you can think of will be on the block, liable for destruction.

This is coming on faster than many expected. Added to ecosphere collapse, the current cyclical capitalist sclerosis, and vast arsenals, it is going to be immensely damaging.

If you aren’t old, or sick, you’re going to suffer some of this. If you’re young, you’re going to suffer a lot of this, assuming you aren’t an early casualty.

So it is. So it shall be. We were warned, we chose not to act, because corporations needed profits or something.

So be it.


The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

Previous

So Trump and Republicans Are STILL More Popular than Clinton and Dems

Next

Trump Couldn’t Buy Coverage Like This

122 Comments

  1. realitychecker

    As long as nobody hurts any of the people responsible for all this mess, I’m OK with it./s

  2. The Stephen Miller Band

    I’m glad you brought this up because it shows the hypocrisy of so-called Liberals like nothing else. Climate Change is like a pledge for Liberals. They have to say they wholeheartedly believe that it is mostly anthropogenic (keep in mind I’m neither confirming or denying that it is) as though it’s a party pledge, yet they fervently support other party planks that completely contradict their pretentious overwrought concern with climate change induced by human activity.

    For example, rampant, uncontrolled immigration and Neoliberalism. The two go hand in hand and yet they are completely and unequivocally incompatible with concern for the environment and human-induced climate change.

    The more mobile humans become, the worse this predicament will be if you truly believe in human-induced climate change, yet, if you dare to criticize Globalization and the concomitant immigration and mass mobilization that accompanies it, you are quickly labeled a cold-hearted, close-minded bigot and any constructive, intelligent debate & discussion is thwarted.

    Chain Immigration is terrible for the environment whether you accept human-induced climate change or not. The skies are increasingly filled with highly polluting jet planes transporting people to all corners of the planet. The seas are increasingly covered with massive cargo ships that are the worst polluters on the planet. This mass mobilization is killing the planet whether you accept human-induced climate change or not. It is simply not sustainable and yet Liberals will not address this massive contradiction in their undeniable ideology. That’s the problem with Political Parties and Political Ideologies. You’re forced to accept contradictions and to ignore, at your own peril, the waves of cognitive dissonance generated from those contradictions that wash over you and drown your positive intent if there is any.

    Obama doesn’t seem too worried about any of this. Have you noticed how the Mainstream Media has been covering him and purposely presenting him? He’s as cool as a cucumber and as happy as a lark while his fanboys are apoplectically wringing their hands in catastrophic consternation.

    Does Obama know something we don’t? Isn’t it peculiar how he presents himself and how the Mainstream Media juxtaposes his presentation with Donald Trump? It’s almost as though he’s amused by it all. If so, and it seems to be the case, what a psychopath. If Guy McPherson is correct, humans and most life on the planet will be extinct by 2026 and this prick Obama, who has heralded human-induced climate change, is kicking back and enjoying life high on the hog. Come to think of it, I guess he’s doing precisely what McPherson suggests since our extinction is already baked in the cake.

    Obama Yucking It Up With Billionaire Richard Branson During His Recent Vacation/A>

  3. Neoliberalism help climate change – are you on glue?

  4. someofparts

    2026 is less than a decade out. Even geezers will make it to a party coming up that fast. And I’m figuring that the people around me who manage to be unpleasant when they are prosperous won’t become nicer when they find themselves broke and hungry.

  5. Sam

    Y’all might find this to be an interesting supplement: https://youtu.be/kMLYLcniXIc

    Anyway, this is as good a time as any for me to finally learn how to shoot and stock up on guns.

  6. brian

    I still don’t see the long term harmful effects of global warming. We are in a inter-glacial period. Hopefully the man-made global warming prevents the next ice age and pulls us out of the inter-glacial. Raises in sea level? Seems gradual enough that people can migrate from the shore or be stupid enough to stay and lose the land and have to start over. Temperature unbearable? Migrate to the north. Antarctica is currently uninhabitable and nobody seems to complain about that. Large portions of the permafrost will become open to human settlement. The only really catastrophic outlier I see is ecosystems changing to fast that animals can’t adapt causing mass die off. Humans are already doing a magnitude more killing of ecosystems then global warming. Past epochs have had much warmer weather and also violent climate swings.

    So I am seeing the positives of large areas of uninhabitable lands being opened, plants will love the conditions of extra CO2 in air causing feedback, the hydrological cycle will increase due to increased evaporation, and current northern areas will become more tropical. Seems like it tips the scale for win for me.

    Some humans will survive and thrive and some will refuse to adapt. But that always happens. Besides outliers of ‘global heat death’ which have little fact behind them what is the catastrophe?

  7. There are bugs and viri, bacterium and dog knows what else frozen up there since before humans were human.

    Several years ago I wrote about chaos and the best laid plans of mice and men. One can spend years, decades, generations… perhaps even a thousand years lining up all the ducks to put a plan for world domination in place and just as those plans are coming to fruition WHAM! along comes Anthropogenic Atmospheric Disruption to scatter it all in the wind. We are, afterall, fleas agitating the hide of a far greater organism.

    Whatever astroturf outfit is paying The Stephen Miller Band to publish such trite nonsense is paying too much.

  8. brian

    Why should someone that thinks for themselves be astroturf? When it comes down to it we have had a huge ice age not long ago. Don’t you think a return of ice sheets covering a third of earth is bad? This global warming may be a gift for the Earth. Sure, I could be wrong – but why aren’t people talking about this in a discussion rather than shutting people down? Bugs frozen in mud aren’t going to be evolved as the plague in mongolian rodents. Is that just trying to scare people to get them to agree to your cause?

  9. The Stephen Miller Band

    See, this is where labels fail. What shall I call Obama and Hillary and Gore et al and their entourage? These are the hypocrites to whom I’m referring.I’m not saying the Koch Brothers aren’t scumbags too, because they are. The Rich are scumbags, period.

    My concern is with the ones who feign concern about climate change, anthropogenic or otherwise, and yet their solution is no solution at all because they are the ones in positions of power who purportedly can do something about it, but for them it’s yet another reason to exploit and provide more return on investment for the wealthy shareholders who own the world.

    They contend the economy can still grow amidst the calamity to come, that all it takes is a reconstitution of what comprises that growth. That’s balderdash. This is why. No one in the mainstream, whether they be Liberal or Conservative, Left or Right, or whatever you want to label them, is addressing this issue at its root, and the root is that, considering our behavior, nature appears to have spawned its own poison pill when Human emanated from it because Human is rapidly destroying that which spawned it.

    This System we live in and under is at odds with what engendered us. We have forgotten our roots and in fact, are spurning those roots. Despite the upheaval and catastrophe(s) to come as a result of our relationship with nature, we need to change our ways entirely and part of changing our ways is to contract substantially, not grow. Our growth, the growth of this System, is terraforming the planet into an uninhabitable toxic dump.

    Can Economic Growth Last?

  10. Ian Welsh

    Climate Change Denialsm

    The Nazis are pounding on the door and someone is saying “let’s debate this, maybe they only want tea? Why are you people so unreasonable, we should talk this out.”

  11. The Stephen Miller Band

    Climate Change Exploitation

    The Nazis are pounding at the door and someone is saying “let’s invite them in and show them our PowerPoint Presentation on how we can make their uniforms and tanks and guns for less and their gas showers and crematoriums more efficient & effective. They’re businessmen, afterall, and as businessmen they can’t refuse a great offer.”

    Are there any honest brokers? We Humans are destroying the planet and even that basic fact is relegated to a Binary Camp Mentality that inadequately addresses the immense entirety of the issue.

  12. highrpm

    @stirling,
    the danger of using labels. what is perhaps the defining characteristic of neoliberalism? unrestrained free market strategy and tactics. a market driven economy, with little or no government involvement. (though not true in America’s recent form of capitalism, government intervention style.) the result? globalism. which drives the endless trail of massively polluting container vessels trekking between china and here. seems pretty elementary. (who’s on glue?)

  13. highrpm

    @ian,
    I’m a bit hazy on your use of the term Nazis pounding at the door. having equated them with their pursuit of their beloved nationalism. what nation-state presently pursues such policy? with the world suffering the affects?

  14. Ian Welsh

    It’s a simple metaphor. There is a danger that is imminent I have no time left for people who want to debate if it is real. Arctic temperatures averaged 30 degrees higher this year than normal.

  15. atcooper

    The winds have been much colder, despite the relative warmth of the winter in most of North America.

    It’s the collective response to global warming that’s led me to believe we are no longer capable of large projects anymore. I think it’s been too long emphasized, this notion that the consumer trumps the citizen. We’re too atomized.

  16. Tom

    Well this is it then. A full scale system crash of human civilization.

    I live in Michigan, we still have ample farmlands, we’ll have to raze subdivisions in the suburbs, but we can weather the storm for a while, but our tools are no longer made in the state and if we can’t fix that, we’re fucked long term.

  17. Willy

    If an ELE asteroid was headed our way, we have so many barking deniers around we’d never get a single missile off the ground. I’m not so much interested in what causes denialism, but how facts can be presented that will poke through all the mental defenses.

    Yeah I know, Dunning–Kruger… compulsive need for closure… tribalism… all that. But knowing how to present reality to these types might also be a useful skill in one’s own daily interactions.

  18. brian

    I don’t deny human caused climate change is real. It’s obviously proven. If Nazi’s are knocking on the door and you live in Nazi Germany or there are only Nazis in the whole world, it makes sense to debate what will life be under Nazi’s – because there is no alternative. At least it’s better than a communist gulag?

  19. wendy davis

    given that the two largest carbon footprints in the US are i) the ‘defense’ department, and ii) factory farming including animal feed lots, toxic run-off into aquifers and rivers, as ian notes, shouldn’t we be vexed that herr trump is continuing O’s foreign military adventurism, and shouldn’t we hope that he’d i) end big ag farm and oil subsidies, ii) not allow his administration to okay the monsanto/bayer merger looming, and iii) and instruct his epa to actually call glyphosate a carcinogen, and prohibit genetically modified food products, at the very least under the precautionary principle?

    as far as carbon sinks, iirc, wetlands are one of the most helpful, and they are disappearing quickly. how much will his administration’s having ended the withdraw the Waters of the United States (WOTUS) rule, which expands the number of waterways that are federally protected under the clean water act (though likely not enforced, in any event).

    @ian welsh: what sort of geo-engineering do you have in mind? as far as i know, that’s sort of a school of thought that says some unknown monstrous PTB are already using it to create climate disasters by way of jets dumping chemicals they call ‘chemtrails’, if i have the term right. ha, one author at my site quit as i didn’t subscribe to that point of view, even after reading his ‘proof’ links (smile).

    i will say that methane is sort of hot potato right now from what i’ve seen at naked capitalism, and by way of a commenter at my home site who adamantly believes that methane clouds are beneficial, in that they ‘turn over the oceans’ or something close. i’ve had to stop rebutting her as the science is overly-complex for me

  20. Peter

    The technocrats and catastrophe mongers have failed to effectively market their fears and nostrums even with their battalions of goose-stepping climate scientists behind them and their agenda. The deniers of belief in the cult of the Warmers has steadily expanded because people can’t help but see the NWO agenda pushed by the Warmers may be more dangerous than the effects of GW.

    Now that Trump is moving quickly to dismantle the administrative state many careers at the EPA and elsewhere dependent on climate hysteria will be cut short. We’ll probably see these displaced Warmers marching with the snowflakes waving their hockey stick graphs.

    The Big Green industrial revolution snake oil being hawked by true believers such as Jeremy Corbyn probably won’t get the government coercion needed to supply the trillions of dollars the technocrats want but it will continue to grow.

  21. TimmyB

    Whenever someone says “people can move” to avoid the effects of climate change, I like to ask “How do you plan to move the crop land needed to feed all those people?” You can move away from a rising sea if you have the means to do so. However, you cannot move away from a drought induced famine.

  22. Tom

    https://theintercept.com/2017/03/09/women-and-children-in-yemeni-village-recall-horror-of-trumps-highly-successful-seal-raid/

    We attacked a village that was ostensibly on our side and who thought they were being attacked by the Houthis.

  23. “There is no way we are avoiding near worst case scenarios for climate change without aggressive geo-engineering…..any system and group of people who can reasonably be blamed for this, will likely be on the block.”

    I’ll certainly do my damnedest to ensure that most of all the type of denialist espousing geoengineering or any other fraudulent, abominable misdirection scam guaranteed to make things much, much worse, is on that block. What vileness.

    There’s one and only one way to avert the worst: Greatly reduce GHG emissions, stop destroying sinks, and embark on a vast campaign to rebuild sinks.

    Most of all this means abolishing industrial agriculture with all possible speed and globally deploying agroecology, which is a fully demonstrated science and set of practices ready for full deployment.

    That’s the only solution, and anyone who says anything different is a fraud. And anyone who advocates doing nothing while adding even worse atrocities like geoengineering is the most vile criminal of all.

    Even just sticking with the status quo isn’t destructive enough for your like, is it? You won’t be happy till all is destroyed completely.

  24. Duder

    Thank you for being frank about the situation facing us. Most people cannot accept or discuss what is coming because it is unimaginable by them. That goes for politicians as well, whether they accept or deny the science of climate change. The only possible analogy in human history to what the next few centuries will mean for human society would be the end of the last ice age 10,000 years ago. That saw the birth of agriculture and what we call civilization. Beyond a sketchy archeological record, we have almost no idea how that great transformation transpired, and therefore have little to base our future projections on. But it is foolish to think that the bases of the last 10,000 years of human civilization will continue once the environmental basis for them are long gone. And as Ian correctly points out, this next great transformation will begin within most of our life times.

  25. different clue

    @Sam,

    I remain as gunless as the day I was born. At this late date, I am decades behind the curve on getting proficient with guns. If the local and regional civilization in my own area dies, I will likely die with it. I am not equipped or skilled to live in the woods.

    If I am to survive the violence-waves, it will be through being so clearly and visibly valuable to collective local survival efforts that too many other people have a selfish interest in keeping me alive to let non-productive elements kill me. Probably the best way to do that would be to tool up and skill up for quality alcohol and marijuana production in a post-electricity environment.

  26. different clue

    Well . . . @brian . . . . with regard to your basic question of what’s the worst that could happen . . . I would reply “Watch. And learn.” ( As Doctor Zoidberg once said on Futurama).

  27. The Stephen Miller Band

    As far as me being on glue, I guess I am. The glue I’m sniffing is common sense and I’ve been addicted to it for awhile now. In fact, I was sniffing it when I wrote this about Obama before he was elected POTUS in August of 2008.

    I was referring to debating & discussing Globalization, Neoliberalism and Mass Immigration and how they relate to and contribute to Anthropogenic Climate Change. For that, I’ve been labeled a Climate Change Denier and I’ve been told I’m on glue. Okay, that’s constructive.

    Obama’s ascension is the pinnacle of success of the campaign by the Plutocracy to pacify and incapacitate any shred of progressive reform in the U.S. For starters, it’s a blasphemy to label Obama an African American. Sure, his father was an African, but he was never an American. His mother was Caucasian, and Obama was raised by his Caucasian grandparents. So, culturally speaking, Obama has not truly lived the African American experience. His parents were not the descendants of slaves, and he was raised outside the culture. And you know what, it shows. He’s perfectly suited for the liberal vote. The following is tongue in cheek for those who don’t understand satire. He’s so articulate for a Black man, and so intelligent. He doesn’t mumble like Jessie Jackson or talk jive like Al Sharpton.

    Of course, many, if not all Back folks will vote for him because of the symbolism. It won’t matter that the symbolism is mere projection, and when the veil is pulled back, there resides yet another establishment pawn. It’s masterful, you must admit, and actually quite riddled with plutocratical hubris. The plutocracy seems to be thumbing its nose at us, once again. The guy’s name alone is an in your face joke. As others have mentioned, you can’t make shit like that up. He was tapped long ago for this, and I’m sure they got a huge laugh at the time, and continue to laugh to this day, that they can pawn off this transparent trojan horse on a completely unwitting, uncritically accepting, somnambulant Liberal voting block.

    It’s approximately 40 years since MLK was murdered, and we’re still electing presidents and politicians on the color of their skin, be it black, white, brown, yellow and their gender. How the hell can one call that progress? Let’s not forget, MLK was offed because he crossed the line, not because of his stance on the issue of race. When he sought to wage a class war, and a war against imperialism and empire, he had to go, and when they placed him in the dirt, any progress he had inspired in that regard was buried with him. Face it, there is no choice here. It’s the same choice. I so want to believe, but common sense and critical analysis preclude my irrational desires. Obama has been vetted & groomed, and he is a witting tool of pacification. If he wasn’t, he never would have made it this far, this fast. He’s where he is because tails you lose and heads they win. The Plutocracy is that smart, and yes, we’re really fucked. The Empire is choosing to go down in a Blaze of Glory and the next president will share the infamy of Captain Edward Smith. Full Steam Ahead. Let’s not equate realism with despair. It only serves to marginalize and dismiss, which doesn’t make for constructive dialogue.

    Wow, I’m stunned. I might as well be talking to Fundamentalists, because that’s exactly what it is. Religion comes in many forms. Believe me, Obama can do no wrong with people this blind. He could launch a preemptive nuclear strike against Russia and they would find a way to rationalize his actions, as their skin melts and their children scream in agony, just as those on the so-called Right rationalize the actions of their chosen ones. Like I said, it’s masterful. Unlike many of you, I refuse to watch any of the spectacle, because marketers are the magicians of yesteryear. You’re being hypnotized and your objectivity is clearly compromised. Don’t take my word for it, though, I’m on glue, remember?

  28. See beyond the windscreen Brian, or as it is see beyond the end of the last ice age. There have been several, you know, and indeed we know great deal about them from existing ice and seabed sediment cores, both before and after. We are indeed in an interglacial period, and as historical trends only recently disrupted indicate were we not experiencing the warming we are we would in fact be cooling to the next iteration.

    It’s important, Brian, to see beyond not the end but the beginning of the last ice age, an ice age not unlike previous ice ages triggered by massive increases in methane and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere resulting from massive volcanic eruptions. Not any little pissant eruptions like Mt St Helens or Kakatoa, but for example the entire state of Oregon a massive pool of lava, and a few hundred million years prior Siberia.

    Re. your theory of the benefits of increased CO2 in the atmosphere: seal up the garage and start the car, get back to us on how that turns out.

  29. different clue

    @Willy,

    I don’t think denialism can be cured or even lessened. I do begin to wonder whether denialism can be harnessed and guided in such a way as to lead the denialists to exterminate themselves preferrentially, to the betterment of the rest of us. Can we think of cliffs to point the denialemmings towards as we help them all over those cliffs?

    I wish I had serious skills and contacts throughout the High Reaches of the Money Management and Financial Operator sectors. I would create a Fund for denialists. I would call it the Climate Skeptic Fund. It would invest all the money it raises in things that will remain in profitable existence if Global No-Problem unfolds as the denialists predict. For example , the Climate Skeptic Fund would invest in seaside land and resorts and industries and real estate and so forth. It would be sold as an opportunity for the Climate Contrariarian Investor to invest against the “Global Warming Hysteria Trend”.

    It would be a real fund, totally legal, etc. It would do everything a real fund already does nowadays. The only difference is, that in my strong hands, it would be a cynical decoy designed to give the denialemmings a cliff to throw their money over and then throw themselves over it after the money.

  30. The Stephen Miller Band

    I think we need to call Chomsky in to make a determination of who is worse, the Climate Change Deniers or the Climate Change Exploiters. I love Chomsky. He proved to me that Bill Clinton bombing the pharmaceutical factory in Al-Shifa was more morally repugnant than Hitler’s atrocities. Let’s apply Chomsky’s logic, logic I agree with by the way, to this issue. I believe if you do that earnestly, you can’t help come to the conclusion that it is more morally repugnant to herald Anthropogenic Climate Change, to sound the alarm so to speak, and then proceed to exploit it for economic gain without providing viable solutions to mitigate it but instead scams to profit from it.

    Remember Bill Hicks? Remember that comedy sketch where he talks about how much he deplores marketers because they can usurp anything for marketing purposes? That’s what this is like.

    For example, how many people who subscribe to Anthropogenic Climate Change are invested in Wall Street, meaning how many have investments where they receive a return on investment? How many of the scientists who are part of the consensus have skin in the Wall Street pillaging? I would submit that those who are or do, well, they’re morally repugnant and talk about not having time for people, those are people who do not deserve my time.

    FYI, I have no investments and I have ceased directly contributing, to the best of my ability without being incarcerated, for ten years now at great personal cost. Because it’s the moral thing to do.

    Everyone needs to start learning to say “no” and “no more.”

  31. MojaveWolf

    In my state of general despair over humanity, the fate of other species and the environment is the one thing that keeps me politically engaged. Not all humans are awful, but the ones that are worse than worthless have the wheel, with an army of easily manipulated idiots to keep anyone from grabbing it away. I would not much mourn any of them.

    Sadly, the rest of us are stuck here too, and, worse, all the birds and the bees, the myriad beasts of field and forest, the flowers and the trees and all the fishies in the deep blue sea. They REALLY don’t deserve what’s coming, and it would be nice to save some. Some humans are pretty cool too, and they really don’t deserve what’s heading our way either, any more than most of those suffering the worst deserve it now.

    Yes, yes, once hundreds of thousands or millions of years have past, there’s a chance the world will once more be a wondrous place, full of magic and beautiful delight. Not much consolation to those of us who love the good things about the world now. Or we could go full Venus effect, and the “don’t worry, the planet shall eventually carry on” types will be proven horribly wrong, long after their demise.

    This subject fills me with more anger and despair and sadness than all other others which make me want to disengage from meaningful discussion with my fellow humans, but the stakes are sufficiently high that I don’t see disengagement as an option, so even when no world rulers are behaving in a way that offers realistic hope, what else is there to do but keep plugging away, and hope you get through to either enough people to trigger some sort of revolutionary mass mobilization and insistence on real solutions (with said masses having an ability to discern what does and doesn’t have the best chance of being a real solution) or penetrate the psyche of someone in power who actually has a soul, and some sense and imagination, and some concern for other living things, or at least some concern for their kids and grandkids and great-grandchildren, that they wish them to have decent life and not hide away in a tiny, pinched faux oasis amidst the greater hell, praying the technical support systems survive their lifetime without significant glitch.

    Hoping for either of those things to happen may be a fool’s hope, but it’s what we have left. May one or the other happen before it’s too late, and may a workable solution be found.

    I don’t have much hope in geoengineering either, but it’s probably going to take a multiplicity of different solutions and given the magnitude of the challenge *everything* should get at least a look. In the meantime proven solutions like solar and wind (which in many cases can also be used to decentralize and make the population less dependent on a massive energy grid) and for all of us to quit having so many kids (and for everyone everywhere to be encouraged to quit having so many kinds, with it being made known that having huge families is tantamount to setting forests on fire for the fun of it–it’s one thing if people don’t know, but global warming is hardly the only issue our overpopulation is causing, as Ian mentioned, water table depletion is about to cause huge problems, and we’re both depleting and polluting the oceans at a frightening rate. Deindustralizing is no solution–wood and coal are horrible for global warming, and humans in a pre-technological state and MUCH smaller numbers were wiping out species at an alarming pace wherever we went; the First Nations in the Americas eventually learned to live in harmony with nature for the most part, after their ancestors wiped out the continent’s mega fauna, but other than that our record as a species is pretty dismal).

    Ah well, we’re still breathing, so we keep trying and hope something breaks our way.

  32. BlizzardOfOz

    Have ocean levels risen millimeter in the past century? Water is denser than ice, so if the ice melts, shouldn’t we expect the ocean levels to drop?

  33. Synoia

    Let’s put some facts on the table:

    There are approximately 160 sewage plants on the coats in the US, serving around 200 million people. Coastal Sewage plants are generally close to sea level, and very difficult to move. When they become flooded, make large areas uninhabitable, because of the rise of water borne diseases.

    The failure modes are predictable, increasing earthen berms around individual sewage plants at great public expense, coupled with and increasing rate individual plant flooding, combined with so catastrophic events, such as a ice sheet of glacier driven tsunami.

    For example, the Orange County , CA Sanitation districe has a sewage plant at the mouth of the Sanata Ana river and server all or northern orange county, some 3-4 million people, and about 750,000 to 1,000,000 homes. If it became flooded to where would the displace families go?

    In addition sea level rise will not be uniform. Due to the rotation of the Earth sea level rise is will be spread in a modified cosign of latitude function, where the tropics get the highest rise, and the poles the lowest.

    If you live in a city or county in the following incomplete list, or are served by a coastal sewage plant, move now:

    City State
    Anchorage AK
    Fairbanks AK
    Juneau AK
    Alexander City AL
    Decatur AL
    Mobile AL
    Mobile AL
    Arcata CA
    Carpinteria CA
    Martinez CA
    Palm Desert, Coachella CA
    Daly City CA
    Dublin CA
    Oakland CA
    Santa Barbara CA
    Eureka CA
    San Diego CA
    Goleta CA
    Hayward CA
    Orcutt CA
    Lompoc CA
    Long Beach CA
    Los Angeles CA
    Irvine CA

    Monterey CA
    San Francisco CA
    Fountain Valley Huntington Beach CA
    San Lorenzo CA
    Ventura CA
    San Diego CA
    Richmond CA
    San Jose CA
    San Clemente CA
    San Leandro CA
    Santa Maria CA
    San Mateo CA
    Santa Cruz CA
    San Francisco CA
    Dana Point CA
    San Bruno CA
    Oceano CA
    Summerland CA
    Sunnyvale CA
    Ventura CA
    Watsonville CA
    Greenwich CT
    Stamford CT
    Washington DC
    Wilmington DE
    Boca Raton FL
    Pompano Beach FL
    Miami-Dade FL
    Daytona Beach FL
    West Palm Beach FL
    Pensacola FL
    Hollywood FL
    Hillsborough FL
    Jacksonville FL
    Clearwater FL
    Jupiter, Tequesta, Juno Beach FL
    Melbourne FL
    Clearwater FL
    St. Petersburg FL
    Gainesville FL
    Milledgeville GA
    Savannah GA
    Okatie SC
    Honolulu HI
    Koolaupoko District HI
    New Orleans LA
    Shreveport LA
    Boston MA
    Boston MA
    Dartmouth MA
    Suffolk MA
    Edgartown MA
    Fairhaven MA
    Fall River MA
    New Bedford MA
    Baltimore MD
    Easton MD
    Ocean City MD
    Kennebunkport ME
    Portland ME
    Wells ME
    Yarmouth ME
    Pascagoula MS
    Morehead City NC
    Myrtle Grove NC
    Buncombe NC
    Roanoke Rapids NC
    Durham NH
    Portsmouth NH
    Ocean County Monmouth County NJ
    Newark NJ
    Brooklyn NY
    Astoria NY
    Coney Island NY
    Bronx NY
    Jamaica NY
    Brooklyn NY
    New York NY
    Staten Island NY
    Brooklyn NY
    Brooklyn NY
    Rockaway NY
    Providence RI
    Providence RI
    Buda TX
    Houston TX
    Hopewell VA
    Richmond VA
    Virginia Beach VA
    Bellingham WA
    Olympia WA
    Tacoma WA
    Everett WA
    Seattle WA

  34. BlizzardOfOz

    Global warming is in a funny way the managerialist regime self-delegitimizing. “Our leadership is leading to an accelerating ecological catastrophe that will likely exterminate all life on the planet.” For this they expect a blank check, from which we can only assume will issue more of the same.

    Instead of global warming we should talk about responsible stewardship, of both our human stock and of nature. This is another one of those issues that the nationalist left and right could maybe agree on. Has anyone here looked at Moldbug’s “neocameralism” aka statecraft for the 21st century? All I can say is that it looks interesting, and may be timely. When the collapse comes, and once we’ve ovened all the guilty and non-guilty parties, people will be grasping for a new governing ideology.

  35. StewartM

    @Blizzard

    Have ocean levels risen millimeter in the past century? Water is denser than ice, so if the ice melts, shouldn’t we expect the ocean levels to drop?

    http://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/sealevel.html

    Global sea level has been rising over the past century, and the rate has increased in recent decades. In 2014, global sea level was 2.6 inches above the 1993 average—the highest annual average in the satellite record (1993-present). Sea level continues to rise at a rate of about one-eighth of an inch per year.

    As for your comment about ice and water, it’s the reduction of ice on land, not floating ice, which causes oceans to rise. Here is a series of maps of the Cenozoic era, note the map of North America during the Eocene warming period–Florida and much of the East Coast is underwater. That’s why you find whale fossils there today.

    http://eas2.unl.edu/~tfrank/History%20on%20the%20Rocks/Nebraska%20Geology/Cenozoic/cenozoic%20web/2/Timescale.html

    World map during the last warm period:

    http://www.palaeontologyonline.com/articles/2011/the-paleocene-eocene-thermal-maximum/

  36. MojaveWolf

    @Synoia — most of that list made sense, and no arguments at all as to the main point, but curiosity demands I ask–how the heck does Palm Desert CA make that list? I’m not saying it couldn’t have a coastal treatment plant and I know the Coachella Valley is below sea level in spots, but we’re a long way from the Pacific there, with mountain ranges in between on most of the routes I’m familiar with . . .

    (I don’t live there but am very familiar w/the area)

  37. brian

    I think the issues of our day keep coming back to one problem.

    We need a global management of resources. A world government.
    And the USA is not the solution to that world government.

  38. Synoia

    MojaveWolf

    The Salton Sea is below sea level, and when the Gulf of California sea level rises, and floods past Mexicali, the coastline will come close to Palm Springs.

    Look at the topo maps.

  39. realitychecker

    @ Synoia

    I left Brooklyn, N.Y. 30 years ago.

    How many times must one leave Brooklyn, N.Y. to be truly safe? 🙂

    Many thoughtful and depressing comments above, but all seem to skirt around the most fundamentally disturbing prediction, which is that when food production capacity fails, we will be forced to eat each other.

    If that is indeed what the future holds, then I intend to start with Scarlett Johansson.

  40. MojaveWolf

    @Synoia–Point made. Gratzi. Not sure about the speed w/which will get to that stage but good reminder of how seemingly safe places might not be.

  41. atcooper

    Ice floats. Displacement of volume from melting isn’t enough to slow the direction of change as might seem at first glance.

    Worst is the change in total water circulating through the system. That has knock on effects leading to increased storms and more varied weather. We can’t actually estimate how much damage those changes alone will cause, and it’ll be a challenge.

    The sweet spot is after the new equilibrium is reached. At that point, it will be easier to rebuild in whatever is left over. Things become predictable enough to plan more than a few years out again.

    Please keep in mind as a guard against despair, people are not built anymore to gauge health of systems. It’s just a huge blind spot in cultural values. Too many specialists, not enough value on generalists and trans discipline thinking.

  42. BlizzardOfOz

    So apparently the oldest measurements of the sea level are from Amsterdam, going back to 1700. They show a constant trend of the sea level rising by about 15cm/century. Now I’m no #SCIENCE expert, but I don’t think there was much if any man-made CO2 emission in 1700. And yet evidently the sea level was rising then, at the same rate as when purportedly cataclysmic levels of CO2 were being poured into the atmosphere.

    Nevertheless, the #SCIENCE is settled, because Al Gore is an honorable man. Still, I have to wonder why, if the managerialist elite believed that life on earth was in peril of extinction, they don’t act like it? For example, when the Democrats in 2008 controlled the Presidency, and both houses, wouldn’t they have wanted to address the imminent extinction of the human race, instead of what they actually did first, which was to make the deterioration of US health care slightly worse? When Barack talked about reversing the tides of the ocean, did he maybe think they would obey his command like King Cnut? And yet Barack Obama is an honorable man.

  43. Webstir

    As with all of the bridges humanity has been forced to cross kicking and screaming, one constant persists: No pain, no change.

    Such a paradox the human brain. We have this big ol’ frontal lobe that allows us to rationally observe the fate our future choices may portend, and yet, we only use it when our reptilian brain is screaming at us that we’re getting our asses kicked.

    Bring it on Gaia. Kick the shit out of us. We deserve it.

  44. Ian Welsh

    As others have pointed out, it’s not ice melt in water that matters, we’ve had a ton of that recently during the winter, it is glaciers (ice on land) melting that matters. That stuff comes later than a lot of other changes, but it also seems to be happening faster than most models predicted.

    I expected all of this to happen faster than models because I noticed that virtually every model was turning out wrong — they all underestimated actual change, and because unlike most humans I’m fairly good at understanding how vicious circles / self reinforcing cycles work.

  45. Hugh

    It says so much about how bent and twisted we have become that we refuse to see or remain focussed on the existential threats immediately before us whether it is climate change, overpopulation, or the bankruptcy of our political systems. Yes, it is true that Obama and liberals are being hypocritical to acknowledge manmade global climate and still promote Groff, just as it is crazy, though consistent, for arch-conservatives like Trump to deny manmade climate change and promote fossil fuels. So if the liberals and the conservatives are useless, and more than a little criminal and self-serving, shouldn’t we dump them both, chart a different course, and organize to that end?

    Mother Nature is not going to wait around on the off hand chance we will get our act together. As a species, we are at our childhood’s end. We have set in motion vast forces that we don’t fully comprehend. There are no take backs or do overs. There are no adults to rescue us from our mistakes. For better or worse, we are the adults. And we need to start acting like them. The clock is ticking, and if we don’t act quickly and responsibly, then the results of our past actions and our current non-action will crush us impartially and without the slightest mercy.

  46. Jim

    Ian

    I also have spent well over a decade on various forums/blogs (under a variety of nom de plumes) arguing about climate change and trying to convince the anti-science/anti-rational that they are committing suicide if the do not radically change their ways (in one year alone I wrote about 350,000 words). I have pretty much given up and the reason why is obvious in many of the above comments. Willful ignorance is never in short supply is it? Everyone is wedded to some version of BAU as they are unable to summon the courage to look the problem in the eye and face it. And there is little likelyhood the collective ‘we’ are going to find that courage.

    Re: the methane thingy. As Gavin Schmidt says, focus on the CO2 and deal with that, as, if we don’t, what happens with the methane won’t matter. CO2 drives the bus. While the ‘potential’ methane bomb is a reality it is not an event which is going to happen any sooner than the mid-term (meaning after 2100). If (when) it happens it is lights out of course for any remaining vestiges of civilization.

    But long before that the continuing rise of CO2 and the fallout effects of that will tear this civilization apart. This tearing will happen to a large extent at this point no matter what we do from here on in. It is certainly within the theoretical possibilities to materially lessen the impact of civilization on the biosphere, but it is very improbable we will start making a serious effort until large scale catastrophe is on the doorstep or already well under way. In other words we will not make a serious effort until there is large scale bloodshed underway – and maybe not even then. Global population levels have to be drastically reduced if any possible solution is to have a chance of working and since that is not in the cards due to religious/cultural/evolutionary constraints the only likely way to get this underway are the types of interactions you mention in your opening post.

    So it is fix CO2 or nothing. Methane is just a distraction. It has not had a significant effect on the metrics yet and won’t for some time. It is the CO2.

    I do think your basic timeline is correct (McPherson is just another irrational lunatic). Those of us who are old and live in the wealthy west will live out our days in relative comfort. I expect my children to see the wheels come off from a distance (meaning the 3rd and developing world will go down first – which is likely a feature not a bug) and perhaps across the board as they reach the age I am now. Most of the people being born today will not live full lifespans I expect.

  47. different clue

    @BlizzardOfOz,

    For the less dense ice floating in more dense water, the ice being less dense means the denser water is able to buoy it up a little. As the floating ice melts back into the water upon which it was floating, the effect upon the volume of the now all-liquified water will be isovolumetric.

    For the ice which is currently perched on land up above sea level: as it melts it flows downhill till it reaches the sea. Since this ice-melt is net newly-added-water by volume, because it was derived from ice which is currently perched on land up above sea level rather than floating IN the sea, it will raise the sea level by whatever volume it in itself contains and represents.

    So . . . since the Greenland Ice Cap averages a mile thick and is all above current sea level, it will raise the current sea level as it all melts and adds itself to the currently liquid water currently present in the ocean at this time. The same principle of course obtains for the Antarctic Ice Cap ( as against the floating Ice Shelves). When that cap all melts, it will add the volume of its own melted water to the volume of the ocean into which that melted ice cap water flows.

    You’re welcome. I was happy to help.

  48. atcooper

    Yea, it’s easier to grasp, for me, as an increase in instability. High atmosphere, air current changes, deep water current changes, and crazy to model to any specificity? Do we know which of the major coastal cities will be hit hardest? Arguably New Orleans could be considered the first, US wise? My money’s on Miami for the wake up call.

  49. atcooper

    Not even talking loss in biodiversity. We have so much to learn genes wise, and we’re losing out sample space at a clip. Even the strictly rationalist types have to understand why that’s bad.

  50. Some Guy

    Not to worry Ian, we’ll make great pets.

  51. ED209

    The True Cause of Global Warming.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7_Uyz53MsI

  52. Bruce Lulla

    Since the argument is whether or not human beings are behind the current change in climate, it only follows that the greater the number of humans, the greater the effect on the climate. Therefore, there is a certain population number which the earth can deal with, without any noticeable effect on the climate.
    However, that number has been long ago exceeded, hence the unavoidable current effects and effects yet to come.

    “Destruction of the Environment as the Consequence of Overpopulation”
    http://au.figu.org/destruction_environment.html

  53. Chris Godwin

    Anyone who thinks the current global climate is within the kind of normal variation that humans can adapt to just fine might do well to spend a couple of minutes with the Earth Temperature Timeline that xkcd did a while ago https://xkcd.com/1732/ .
    There’s nothing in our modern education systems or cultural environment that attunes us to concepts of Deep Time and processes that extend beyond our own pitifully brief lifetimes. Huffing and puffing about greedy scientists with nefarious agendas (i.e. ‘it’s not happening anyway’) or pretending that we’ll all adapt just fine (i.e. ‘it’s happening but we don’t need to worry’) are schoolyard childishness.

  54. The modern world is fine.
    Humanity is fine.
    Economy is not fine, and all us depend on it.

  55. The Stephen Miller Band

    @ Hugh It says so much about how bent and twisted we have become that we refuse to see or remain focussed on the existential threats immediately before us whether it is climate change, overpopulation, or the bankruptcy of our political systems.

    Who, exactly, is the “we?” I do not include myself in the “we,” whatever or whoever the “we” is. Those who have been politically active their entire lives or for the majority of their lives, yeah, I would say you’re part of the “we” because you have failed miserably. Imo, because you have failed so miserably, you don’t get to shout down critics like me who had enough common sense not to throw our hats in with charlatans.

    You want to replace the System? First, you must admit it’s a System. I was at a Liberal blog not so long ago and posted about the System and I was laughed at and derided & chastised for calling it a System. That’s helpful. Not. That’s childish, Chris Godwin, not asking people to be consistent in the application of morality and ethics.

    How does this System perpetuate despite some decent people, like Hugh and Che Pasa, trying to change it from within? Via Social Engineering. First, you malform the targets via education and then you reinforce that malformation via a misinforming Press that is tantamount to entertaining propaganda.

    Pink Floyd’s “we don’t need no education” comes to mind. Don’t get me wrong, learning is paramount, but learning and education are two mutually exclusive and very different things per the current education system, and no, Betsy DeVos is not the answer to this predicament — she and her ilk will only make things worse, not better in this regard.

    The Mainstream Media? Donald Trump is right for all the wrong reasons. It is Fake News in the sense it’s purely propaganda intended to do your thinking for you.

    If we’re to replace, not change or reform, the System, we must first recognize it for what it is, and then decide which supporting pillars should receive the blasting charges.

    Education and The Press. That’s where we, or you, should start. Surround all the Mainstream Media outlets and strangle them out of existence. Scatter them, and the entire media apparatus, to the wind to ultimately settle on the ocean’s surface and eventually sinks to its murky depths to replace the methane being exponentially released due to a warming atmosphere.

    Renounce the FCC. Take back the Internet and the Printing Presses and the Airwaves. It all belongs to us, The People, not to the Plutocracy and its sycophantic apparatchiks put in place to keep us in place. Shut down CNN, MSNBC, ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX News, Breitbart News, the NYT, the Washington Post and all the rest that comprises the corporate-owned and plutocratically-controlled Mainstream & Alternative Media.

    Concomitantly, start educating your children, the children, the way the Plutocrats educate their’s. Prepare them for intellectual battle. Give them the mental & emotional tools, or create a learning environment where they can develop them, to overcome this paralyzing, incarcerating System and replace it with something much more egalitarian and sustaining.

    Or, you can laugh at me and call my notion childish and continue to think you can change the System from within, or replace it from within, and I’m here to tell you that is impossible. If you really believe that catastrophe from Climate Change is that imminent and “we” have to act now, then you have to get radical immediately, and radical, as we all know or should know, means you strike at the root. Scientists who are enthrall to, and in bed with, the Plutocracy won’t lead the way. They’re great at telling you we’re doomed, but they lack the requisite backbone, and overall character, to resist and replace that which has cultivated the impending doom.

  56. The Stephen Miller Band

    FYI, I stand in solidarity and sentiment and spirit with the ALL the protesters resisting the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline. Where is Obama and all the leading Liberals on this? Nowhere near it, that’s where. You can hardly find any information related to it in The Press. It’s being largely ignored.

    Tiger Swan Security, the Pinkerton’s of our day, are being used to guard & protect the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline, and if you’re not familiar with these Thugs for Hire, you should be. In the coming years, they will become ubiquitous as they perform private raids on ordinary citizens for the Plutocracy. Tiger Swan Security is related to and associated with the former Blackwater of Erik Prince fame, Betsy DeVos’s brother who had a Field Day in Iraq picking off “Hadji’s” like they were Prairie Dogs.

    Sorry for being childish and sniffing all this glue. If that’s astroturf, I’ll take it over the real thing any day of the week.

    If you want to change the System, if you believe that disaster is imminent and we need to act now, then you must be prepared to die because, if you think about it, considering the imminence you describe, you’re going to die before your time any way, so you may as well perish nobly with dignity and not on your knees or back in full submission.

  57. The Stephen Miller Band

    And no, that is not a call to violence. Violence is playing into the Plutocrat’s hands. That’s what it wants. That’s what the Deep State is cultivating. Non-violence is the way, but radical non-violence, not feckless Occupy Wall Street nonsense.

    We need to be prepared to do this because it’s that time, and not this (the following iconic image) as a plea for the Establishment to shape up, but as an effort to eviscerate the Establishment and send the Plutocracy packing. Deport the Rich. Non-violently blast their pillars of support. Siberia is a yuuuuge place and I hear it’s not as cold as it once was. As an act of mercy, The Rich can have their coats, but that’s it. I’d say, Let Them Eat Cake but I think Let Them Eat Each Other is an even better saying, Botox and all.

    Nothing Can Change If You’re Not Prepared To Die For It

  58. I find it quite telling, regardless the volumn and eloquence of ink spilled, that it has been neseccary to explain to the naysayers, the change deniers, here today one of the most basic of natural law: water runs downhill.

    There are viri and bacterium up there that have been frozen since before humans were human.

    Seven billion people on a ball of rock that can barely sustain one.

    Do the math.

  59. Thomas Frank cuts to the chase: “… opportunism never sleeps, and with the rage and the resistance of recent weeks some far less noble characters have seen a chance to develop a new con. They’re up on the resistance bandwagon right now, rending their garments, shaking their fists and praying that no one holds them responsible for the dead end into which they’ve steered us over the years. Inveighing loudly against Trump has become, for the people I am describing, a means of rescuing an ideology that has proven a disaster.”

  60. RJMeyers

    Currently reading Peter Watts’ Maelstrom. Fiction of the warming, nonlinear future. Strongly recommend it.

  61. BlizzardOfOz

    I have a question. One thing we hear from the warmists at present, almost like a mantra, is “the science is settled”. Is there any official statement of which hypotheses are presumed to be settled, a Nicene Creed of Warmism? Because there is game of motte and bailey being played, where the warmists assume all sorts of premises, and when challenged fall back on an easier-to-defend one like that simply the earth’s average temperature has been increasing. If there isn’t such a creed, then why not, if this is all settled?

    It seems to me there is a fundamental problem the warmists have, which they don’t want to acknowledge. Namely this: it’s impossible to present a clear statement of evidence that would persuade a reasonably skeptical person of above-average intelligence and a college education. That leaves them reliant on the credibility of subject-matter experts. Unfortunately, such experts have poor credibility. Would any moderately skeptical person take on faith a single word that Michael Mann says? He’s suing an obscure journalist critic — that simple fact alone obliterates his credibility.

    To prove what I wrote above, it’s only necessary to look at the behavior of the elite. They all profess fervent belief in the tenets of warmism, but their actions reveal clearly that they don’t believe their own words. The post-world-war managerialist model of “democracy” means that the permanent bureaucracy of experts runs things. The only part where “democracy” enters in, is that the managerialists are duty-bound to persuade the people of the rightness of their policies through propaganda. We’ve seen this in action: as Ian frequently points out, the Wall Street bailouts were passed despite laser-focused, overwhelming public opposition. If the regime believed its own rhetoric about global warming, it could pass whatever laws it wanted to, today. That it doesn’t, is conclusive proof that it doesn’t believe it.

  62. BlizzardOfOz

    @Hugh, question for you.

    You mention overpopulation as an equal or more fundamental problem than global warming. It’s rare to see this. At the popular level, you see warmist votaries expressing their fervor frequently and loudly, while the rare mention of overpopulation has none of the heat behind it. At the elite level, global warming is in the Dem party platform, and the frequent subject of high-level international discussions. If there’s any concern about overpopulation, then they hide it well.

    This is remarkable, is it not? It seems significant to me. Have you noticed before, and if so do you have a theory for why it might be?

  63. ED209

    Maybe when the singularity happens artificial super intelligence will figure out how to fix climate change after it has neutralized humanity.

  64. The Stephen Miller Band

    I’m sure the discussion of over-population is occurs amongst the Davos Crowd, behind conference room doors in hushed tones. They’ve been buying up all the prime real estate and fresh water around the planet. They’re preparing for the calamity to come, and perhaps, if they are smart and I believe they are, they are planning on what to do with all the rest of us when things get really dire.

    John Nissen, for years now, has been lobbying the Davos Crowd to act on this. Maybe Donald Trump will be the new Pearl Harbor they need to move to the next level and manufacture consent from the enslaved to accept the curtailment of any remaining freedom or the illusion of such.

    http://ameg.me

    If they assassinate Trump, and it’s a distinct possibility they will, they will do it via a Liberal Loon thus ensuring Pence serves out not only the remainder of Trump’s first term, but also a second term because the Liberals will now be labeled dangerous pariahs. Massive civil strife will ensue and there will be blood in the streets and a massive uptick in persecutions & pogroms of various stripes. Police State 2.0 will emerge to squash any true change that may have been possible heretofore — the type of change I’ve been proffering.

    That’s one possible way this may play out, but there are many other possibilities also.

  65. If you think that overpopulation is the problem and reducing population the solution, the population that needs to be reduced is, well, those of us who are capable of participating in a discussion like this, us being the biggest CO2 emitters overall. Then we can start talking about the population of poor people.

    Of course, while I do think that global warming, I am also against eliminating, well, us, as a solution to the problem. Population growth probably does need to be slowed down. But many of the problems can be solved with a large-scale technological and economic restructuring that would also reduce the gap between rich and poor without, you know, making the better-off suffer in any absolute terms, at least. That requires a big mentality change.

    In any case, global warming is a matter of risk management. There’s a finite chance it could all be wrong — how much do you want to bet on that? We can’t run the experiment again if we’re wrong.

  66. I’m pretty sure, Blizzard, I said something about overpopulation. EYup, there it is, right there: “Seven billion people on a ball of rock that can barely sustain one. Do the math.” I am one those you call a “warmist”.

    I am also a scientist, albeit a Mad Scientist, who has been studying atmospheric behaviour since witnessing Mount Saint Helens erupt (1980). Let me assure you, the science is settled.

    On the hand, you are welcome to continue to believe as you believe. Afrensis teachs us that it is not necessarily the strong, or the numerous, who survive.

  67. atcooper

    The points about the hypocrisy of the leadership to act effectively on this are absolutely valid. I diverge in thinking scientific consensus is deliberate obfuscation. I suspect our inability to act on the matter is the usual short termism, and varied and calcified competing interests. I mean, it’s no mistake the Saudis have money in uber. Better for them in a energy transitioning world, but not for so many others. And a guaranteed individualized and wasteful energy expenditure for transport. Hell on labor rights to boot.

    Greer put out the notion of banning flights as a practical way to start addressing emissions. It’s a good thing to ponder when wondering why little action is taken on this rather large train coming our way.

  68. StewartM

    @Blizzard:

    Because there is game of motte and bailey being played, where the warmists assume all sorts of premises, and when challenged fall back on an easier-to-defend one like that simply the earth’s average temperature has been increasing.

    Sea levels are going up now, demonstrably, by not only local measurements across the world, but by measurements done by satellite altimeters. Moreover, to drive the point home further, when we look at the geologic record, as I have shown, you see when global temperature goes up, the oceans rise. These are simple facts, not opinions, and not subject to dispute.

    So what further evidence is required, exactly? And which side is going intellectual backflips to avoid the obvious conclusions?

    To prove what I wrote above, it’s only necessary to look at the behavior of the elite. They all profess fervent belief in the tenets of warmism, but their actions reveal clearly that they don’t believe their own words.

    Wrong on both counts. One, a lot of the climate change denialism is financed by those same elites. Two, even when they do acknowledge it as fact it’s just that capitalism encourages lemming-like behavior. No matter how much you think “yeah, this is a problem” when it comes down to next quarter’s profit line, next quarter’s profits Trump all.

    This is a behavior not just limited to climate change. Recently, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, the head of the IMF even admitted “hey, world economic inequality is a huge problem and we have to redistribute wealth”:

    https://shadowproof.com/2017/01/25/davos-panicked-imf-head-calls-wealth-distribution-stop-populism/

    You can also find plenty of articles in business journals that say “stagnating or declining real wages are a problem and businesses need to pay workers more” too. But in a capitalist system, when it’s time to plan for the next quarter, all the good capitalist lemmings run off the cliff in unison. The future of the world and humanity are really being sacrificed for next quarter’s profit margins. The most damning indictment of capitalism I can think of is that it causes clever people to do really stupid things that even they admit are stupid.

  69. Hugh

    Nice to know that my position which I have held for years that you can not reform a thoroughly corrupt system, you can only overthrow it qualifies as working within the system. Who knew?

    An essential tenet of neoliberalism is the myth of endless growth, that if we just have enough growth everything that is wrong today will sort itself out tomorrow through the magic of the markets. Of course, tomorrow never comes, but that’s the point. It is a deflection, a distraction. Questioning the idea of growth or placing limits on it would undercut neoliberalism, which is a propaganda, and kleptocracy, that which neoliberalism is a propaganda for. It could raise the one question which kleptocrats everywhere never want asked, “How much is enough?” for a country, a planet, but especially, from their point of view, an individual. Kleptocracy is the politico-economic paradigm for our world. This rule by looters whom we call variously the rich and elites and the powers that be is profoundly nihilistic. With them, it is all and always IBG, YBG, I’ll be gone, you’ll be gone. Consequences are for others, for the rubes and muppets.

    One of Hannah Arendt’s great insights into totalitarians was that they could only be understood by applying their own logic and values to them, that a profound mistake that the normal world, i.e. the rest of us, made was in thinking that we could apply our logic and values to their actions. The same can be said of kleptocrats. As I have said before, most of us think that kleptocrats are out to steal the goose that lays the golden eggs, because this is what we would do. A kleptocrat, on the other hand, would steal the goose that lays the golden eggs, eat it for lunch, and then go looking for another goose. This is what people don’t get, but it explains why kleptocrats and their minion neoliberal servants have so little interest in everything from overpopulation, to climate change, to the gutting of the American industrial base, to providing decent healthcare. Anything that gets in the way of the looting needs to be finessed, obfuscated, or completely swept under the rug. That they may be driving us all to destruction? Not their problem. IBG, YBG.

  70. The only good thing about atmospheric methane is that, unlike carbon dioxide, it breaks down fast. It oxidizes with both atmospheric oxygen and water vapor. Unfortunately that doesn’t help if it keeps bubbling up faster than it can oxidize :(.

  71. The Stephen Miller Band

    @ Hugh Nice to know that my position which I have held for years that you can not reform a thoroughly corrupt system, you can only overthrow it qualifies as working within the system. Who knew?

    Sorry for assuming. Is there anything else you take umbrage with, or is there anything else I said that you agree with? It’s respectful, if you’re earnestly trying to build bridges, to burn both ends of the candle, not just the disparaging end.

    Truth be told, I don’t even know if you’re a decent person and that was an assumption also. I made that assessment based on what you write here. I agree with most all of it, but that’s not enough to make a basis of your character outside of this forum in the Real World.

    The System is not so much corrupt as it is operating as intended. Either way, yes, it needs to be replaced but it is important to see it for what it is, because it’s important to address the residual toxins that comprise the current System that will inevitably try to poison the replacement. This System serves the needs of the Plutocracy and I believe it’s doing that quite well. I give it an A+++. The Rich are getting richer and The Poor are getting poorer. Until it’s replaced, that will not change, and in fact, will only operate more effectively in its purposeful endeavor (wealth concentration).

  72. GH

    “How much is enough?”-Hugh

    From what I can tell the answer is as follows:
    You can’t eliminate need/necessity from your life, its too costly.
    And you can’t fully satisfy wants/desires because their appeal fades once they are attained.
    So “enough” is always slightly less than what you need and far less than what you want/desire.

    But since those around me are constantly told “nothing is too costly” and “wants/desires can be easily attained and enjoyed indefinitely” the obvious answer to “what is enough” is either ignored or attacked.

  73. realitychecker

    We on the left sure do love to hear ourselves pontificate. And we are all so, so smart and well-educated, aren’t we?

    But, while we clearly see and condemn all the violence being done in our name and to us, we refuse to consider ever using violence against the killers, because that would be too immoral somehow.

    But, while we all know overpopulation is a deadly problem we all face, we refuse to ever speak sternly about it with those who are the most prolific and irresponsible breeders on the planet, because that would be too politically incorrect, or something,

    And, of course, too many of us secretly dream about having it all, after all.

    Somehow, I don’t think we are ever going to get our act together to avoid the return to the rules of the jungle that is most obviously the place and situation we are heading to.

    It may be time to stop thinking we can come up with a magical, baby-proofed solution to save the whole world as a community, and resign ourselves to the likelihood that we are each going to live and die pretty much alone, fighting to the last breath for the immediate things and significant others we need and love, and nothing more or better than that.

    Sorry to harsh anyone’s mellow. Reality checks are often uncomfortable, the more so when we have spent too much time indulging delusions about ourselves.

  74. BlizzardOfOz

    TenBears, an alleged scientist, says “the science is settled”. This is not how scientists talk. It’s the language of tin-eared propagandists. In the climate hypotheses, there can be no experimentum crucis.

    StewartM illustrates my point about the motte and bailey. You can make a straightforward, convincing case that the ocean levels are rising. You can’t make any such case that it’s due to human activity, or even warming. If the claim is that x amount of carbon dioxide released causes y degrees of warming, you can’t specify the ratio x:y with any accuracy. You can’t prove that warming will be catastrophic, or even not-good.

    Mandos has what seems like the most tenable position: it’s risk management. But the imputed risks are all wild guesses. Climate science relying on statistical modeling, no experimentum crucis being possible, it is closer to economics than to physics. So the managerialists will be right in their element — however big their failure, they will just retrofit their models, print more money, say “whocoodanode” and fail upward to their next lucrative sinecure.

    Most amazing of all: global warming policy requires world government. And the globalists had to blow their last credibility on importing millions of African Muslims into the heart of Europe.

  75. Arthur

    What the hell is wrong with the deniers? Methane realized is very very bad. You know, like when Babu calls Jerry ‘a very bad man’. This is not something to argue about, morons. The last time methane was released at such high levels things did not go well for what ever was roaming the planet at the time. This is science. Not the nonsense one hears on far right Catholic radio or in the halls of the nearest fundie mega-church.

  76. ED209

    “Studies have highlighted the contradictions in trying to correlate population growth with carbon emissions, both historical and predicted.1 They describe how industrialized countries, with only 20 per cent of the world’s population, are responsible for 80 per cent of the accumulated carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. They indicate that the countries with the highest greenhouse gas emissions are those with slow or declining population growth. The few countries in the world where women’s fertility rates remain high have the lowest per capita carbon emissions.

    This partially explains why those considered to be surplus are not those who profit from continued fossil fuel extraction but those most harmed by it and by climate change. From Malthus’s time onwards, the implied ‘over’ in ‘overpopulation’ has invariably been poorer people or darker skinned ones or people from the colonies and countries of the South – or a combination of all three. Other categories are increasingly added to the list of overpopulation “targets”: the elderly, the disabled, immigrants, and those needing welfare”.

    http://www.thecornerhouse.org.uk/resource/climate-change-and-overpopulation

  77. R Bailey

    I agree. I reached the very same conclusion much later, but then, my exposure to the subject, and your writing, has been much shorter. (My attention had been monopolized by my responsibilty for disabilities within my tribe, and when I came up for a breath…. well, I could see there were not as many left as I had assumed.)

    The majority of people must adopt some variation of commercial VR, be it gaming, fantasy or some such, which, vanity ( I guess) will not permit me to accept. Climate wars are inevitable, disguised as this or that for a little while, but still a consequence of our past actions. As you say, all baked in. The deaths of billions (including some humans).

    Thank you for sharing your considerable thought, and feeling on these various matters. I am appreciative. My intent, and effort, to be able to reliably subscribe to your efforts has now been made unavoidable. Your Norwegian fable would have brought a tear, had I any left.

    regards,
    Rob

  78. The Stephen Miller Band

    I refuse to let my concern for the the environment and the destruction of it by human behavior be defined by and filtered through the rubric of Climate Change. My perspective is much broader and its contains the entire biosphere, not just the atmosphere and climate it generates.

    For example, by narrowly focusing on Climate Change and CO2, we get so-called green solutions like ethanol which is a boondoggle and an abomination. Ethanol is a waste of precious and diminishing topsoil and the ozone it creates is actually more pernicious and deleterious to human health than the ozone created by burning gasoline. But since it emits less CO2 into the atmosphere, it gets the seal of approval.

    Ethanol is just one example of so many that prove the Social Fact. The Social Fact says that solutions to problems created by a society’s structure cannot emanate from within the social system that has cultivated the problem.

    So to Mandos and those who say risk management is the way to address this, I will say, no, that’s not the way to address it. In fact, it’s safe to say it’s the way it’s currently being addressed by the establishment and more specifically the Davos Crowd. You know they’re employing a risk-based approach to this already and when the perceived risk escalates to a certain threshold, per their loose, unpublished plan, certain triggers will be activated and we’ll go to the next level according to their plan, not your plan since you don’t have one.

    Are we there yet? Have we reached that threshold on their risk management graph? Maybe so. Maybe it explains Trump. Twenty years ago would you ever have believed someone like Donald Trump would be POTUS? Yet, here we are. Idiocracy isn’t a comedy, it’s a documentary.

    Trump must serve a purpose for the Plutocracy per their risk management plan. If so, what is that purpose? Any other explanation of how Trump could possibly be POTUS makes no sense. They, meaning the Deep State collectively and the Plutocracy, could have easily prevented Trump’s miraculous ascension, but instead, it certainly appears as though his rise, victory and coronation was engendered and enabled by those who reside at the center of the dark heart who are using Trump as their foil & fool for what comes next.

    Another example — Chromium-6 in the drinking water. It’s epidemic and most everyone is affected by it (it can’t be filtered out with typical refrigerator filters), but you hear or see nothing about it. Why? Well, there are many reasons all having to do with greed but the most important reason is because those who should be concerned “ain’t got time for that.” See, they’re too busy battling Deniers and focusing on Climate Change to be concerned for our slow-motion poisoning via the water supply. That’s not to say Climate Change isn’t important and doesn’t deserve focus & attention, but if you don’t take the entirety of the environment into account, any solution proffered, as we see with ethanol, is sure to negate itself with foreseeable negative consequences.

  79. Ché Pasa

    @ED209

    From Malthus’s time onwards, the implied ‘over’ in ‘overpopulation’ has invariably been poorer people or darker skinned ones or people from the colonies and countries of the South – or a combination of all three. Other categories are increasingly added to the list of overpopulation “targets”: the elderly, the disabled, immigrants, and those needing welfare”.

    Precisely. Any discussion of overpopulation almost always has to do with the Overpopulation of the Other — too many poor, dark, “uncivilized,” tribal, and unconforming Others — who aren’t really the problem, at least not in the context of climate change and global warming, but who must be targeted for control or elimination, because there are just too many of them. As there have been for hundreds of years of western colonialism and imperialism.

    Famine, disease and war are still being used against them in the same ways they were used during the height of western imperialism.

    And thus, their populations aren’t growing quite as fast as they otherwise might; keep the pressure on, and they might fall.

    As for whether our elites are “doing something” about climate change, of course they are. They’re making all due preparations to ensure they survive and prosper no matter what.

  80. The Stephen Miller Band

    I do not mean poor people when I say that overpopulation is a problem, but I agree, many, especially those who comprise the establishment, do mean poor people when they discuss overpopulation and perhaps that’s why they keep it hush hush behind closed doors in familiar company.

    I don’t think the Davos Crowd is interested in targeting the poor first, if they have depopulation in mind. They will get much more bang for their buck targeting the middle class, and hey, what do you know, the middle class is evaporating as though by plan. Soon enough, the world over, it will be the poor, no wait, strike that, we’ll have to create a new designation for this forming class. Let’s call them, soon to be most all of us, the dispossessed & destitute, well, soon enough it will be us, the dispossessed & destitute and the fabulously & fantastically wealthy with a small class of courtiers and technical enablers to do the busy work necessary to keep the fabulously & fantastically wealthy happy and comfortable and most importantly, secure from the anemic & emaciated wrath of the resourceless dispossessed & destitute.

    All is not lost though, because there is opportunity in poverty. Blake Mycoskie will keep us in shoes for life and The Clinton Foundation will make sure we always have enough rice to eat with our mud cakes. There’s a business plan for everything. EVERYTHING. Including, and soon to be especially, poverty. It’s important to keep the poor alive, even if just barely, because, contrary to what you believe and have been told your entire life, scientists have now proven that you can endlessly draw blood from rocks even if you can’t fix Climate Change.

    Poverty, Inc.

  81. StewartM

    Blizzard:

    tewartM illustrates my point about the motte and bailey. You can make a straightforward, convincing case that the ocean levels are rising. You can’t make any such case that it’s due to human activity, or even warming.

    First, you started out questioning whether or not warming would cause sea levels to rise. Now you’ve apparently thrown in that towel, and now have shifted to questioning 1) whether the earth is warming and 2) whether warming temperatures are anthropogenic. Let’s deal with both.

    The earth’s temperature is warming, and all the ways of measuring it agree with each other. Here’s a link that explains how temperature change is determined, by measurements on land and from space:

    https://www.carbonbrief.org/explainer-how-do-scientists-measure-global-temperature

    But really, if you have already accepted that glacial ice is melting and that oceans are rising (we know that too by measurements both at the surface and from altimeter data from satellites) then it would seem to me that you have no reason to question global warming.

    Now for the cause. Let’s eliminate some of the boilerplate excuses “explanations” thrown out by Koch-funded denialists.

    1) Volcanism: recent volcanic activity does not account for anything close to the observed greenhouse gas emissions—the human output of CO2 is 100 times greater than the output of volcanoes even when the latter is at a *maximum* (i.e., during a major eruption). Moreover, if volcanoes were the cause we’d be seeing a spike in the atmospheric C13-C12 isotope ratio, which has been in decline since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and is yet another indicator how humans are changing earth’s atmosphere. Finally, when a major eruption occurs, the short-term effect on earth is a *cooling*, not a warming, due to particulate dust ejected high into the earth’s atmosphere scattering light back into space (most famously, the 1816 “year without a summer” caused by the Tambora caldera:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer

    This is not to say that massive volcanic events can’t cause warming–more on that later. It’s just obviously not a cause of what we’re seeing.

    2) Solar flux — the other excuse “explanation” thrown up by Koch-funded denialists is that the sun is just putting out more photons, due to sunspot activity or whatnot. Data collected from earth’s surface since 1750 does not support this, but measuring solar flux is most unequivocally done from space, and we have 35 years of data from that. That data shows the sun putting out *less* flux, *fewer* photons, which would mean we should be getting colder, not warmer. As we’re getting undeniably warmer, it’s not solar flux.

    This leaves the 800-lb gorilla in the room–the anthropogenic release of greenhouse gases. And yes, the fact we’re the cause is really not beyond dispute–as I noted previously, we can see the rise in CO2 (unprecedented in the past 400,000 years) corresponds with the decline in the C13/C12 isotope ratio, it began in the Industrial Revolution due to human output and is continuing. Science doesn’t just rely on correlations, but positing mechanisms, and the mechanism of near-infrared absorbing species trapping heat is pretty well understood. So the explanation of climate change due to anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions is supported by by correlation and by mechanism.

    Finally, here too there is at least one example from the geologic record–the Permian mass extinction 250 years ago, which seems to have been caused by a massive release of greenhouse gases (caused by massive volcanism and/or an asteroid impact) which resulted in the oceans becoming oxygen-depleted, among other things. While this was obviously not due to humans (then again, we’ve not had an asteroid strike or mass volcanism lately), it’s just to show you that yes, a sharp rise in greenhouse gases can have drastic effects on climate and the earth’s ecosystem.

  82. Peter

    @SM

    The Warmer fanatics should have been required to read The Boy Who Cried Wolf before starting on the fear mongering campaign to further the Warmer agenda. There MO was effective for some years with their scientist’s measurements and graphs accepted as accurate. That trust was undermined when Wikileaks exposed that even those measurements were susceptible to political manipulation to help sell the political/economic agenda that required dire predictions of the future.

    Some people seem to thrive on visions of people being swamped and starved by an imagined and hyped existential threat. Many people want the government to do something even if it’s superficial to ease their fears while some people crave world government to force the non believers to submit or face extermination, and not by GW.

    I read the IPCC report on sea level rise and found it confusing and contradictory but they did make one clear factual statement. There was no change in the rate of sea level rise during the 20th century. They did make extreme predictions about the future with the typical, could, might and are possible qualifiers but that’s their job.

    Some of the adverse effects of GW will happen but we are an adaptable species with tremendous technological power.

  83. The Stephen Miller Band

    I do not stand in solidarity and spirit and sentiment with American Indians operating casinos and I don’t think their ancestors would approve either. American Indians running casinos is an abomination. It’s degrading and debased and ignoble. It’s disgraceful to their proud heritage.

    North Dakota Tribe’s Casino Takes $6 Million Hit From Pipeline Protesters

  84. BlizzardOfOz

    @StewartM,

    For the record I do agree with what Peter wrote above, but let me just reiterate my original point. There’s nothing clear-cut, proven, or settled about the claims of the warmists, taken as a whole. I might be easily persuaded about the sea levels rising, if there is a record of direct measurement in Amsterdam, going back to 1700 (beyond suspicion, because that predates the political pressure to get a predetermined result). In contrast, as I know you are well aware, there are almost infinite complexities that afflict the warmist hypotheses. Let me just mention a few examples to illustrate the point:

    * The article you linked to itself notes that even “global temperature” is far from a simple concept, and the map there shows that some regions have actually cooled over the past 30 years.
    * I might assume that the raw measurements and aggregation showing an average global temperature of 0.75 degrees over the past 140 years are reliable. But this still does not imply or prove that temperatures will continue to rise; and we know of course that nothing about the climate is linear.
    * The warmist hypotheses also rely on the claim that current warming is unique to human history. This leads into the question of historical temperatures, for which there are no direct measurements, and thense to the reliability of proxy measurements like tree rings, etc. They rely on there having been no medieval warm period.

    Now, I realize that all of these topics have been explored and debated in depth. Maybe if I spent a few months of intensive research and bought someone like you a beer every week to help me work through conceptual problems, I could be persuaded. I doubt it though, because I think ultimately it would come down to questions of deep expertise inaccessible to a layman, and subjective assessment of probabilities. And so ultimately, it boils down to whom you trust, or just your gut-level belief.

    This complexity of the subject matter, visible to anyone, resounds in stark dissonance to the claims of the warmists, which we hear constantly, that everything is settled, and only a fool or an outlaw could deny it. In short, there is a palpable smell of bullshit around the whole thing. If this is evident to me, then I know it’s evident also to your elected officials in the USA, your party members in China, even scientists, etc, etc. Therefore, of necessity you’re not going to get a consensus for action — *unless*, that is, it were as a foil for some other motive of power, completely unrelated to the warmist question. As it so happens, such an ulterior motive is in fact in play, namely world government, which happens to dovetail – we might say *very* conveniently so – with the designs of the warmists.

  85. The Stephen Miller Band

    In fact, casinos have actually hurt American Indians, not helped. So not only is it an abomination — the American Indian partaking in and administering one of many of the White Man’s vices — but it actually brings them further immiseration & suffering.

    Gaming is not the path to empowerment. Quite the opposite. It’s debauchery borne of desperation.

    Of Slots and Sloth

    Yet a new study in the American Indian Law Journal suggests that growing tribal gaming revenues can make poverty worse. The study looks at two dozen tribes in the Pacific north-west between 2000 and 2010. During that time, casinos owned by those tribes doubled their total annual take in real terms, to $2.7 billion. Yet the tribes’ mean poverty rate rose from 25% to 29%. Some tribes did worse: among the Siletz poverty jumped from 21.1% to 37.8%……….

    But the biggest problem may be the way casino profits are sometimes disbursed. Per capita payments have grown as gaming revenues have risen. “These payments can be destructive because the more generous they become, the more people fall into the trap of not working,” says Ron Whitener, a law professor, tribal judge and a member of the Squaxin Island Tribe in Washington state. Of the 17 tribes in the study that handed casino profits directly to members, ten saw their poverty rates rise. Of the seven tribes that did not, only two saw such an increase.

  86. The Stephen Miller Band

    In fact, for several years now I’ve been mulling over the idea for a documentary entitled No Reservation. It will touch on all the above I mentioned about American Indians and Gaming — the entire sordid history of exploitation upon exploitation or exploitation to the nth degree. It would also compare and contrast American Indians with Palestinians who are also enclosed on their own form of a Reservation and how their leaders have a vested interest in keeping it that way just as the Jewish leaders of the Warsaw Ghetto attained and held onto power by, per Nazi request, oppressing & manipulating their already victimized fellow Jews even further. Some power. And some way to attain it.

    It’s pertinent to this topic because one way we, the unwashed gnarly & nasty masses, may be managed as things become more dire is the herding of us into closer and closer confines resembling a Reservation or a Ghetto, so No Reservation is forward looking and preemptively instructive as well.

    Never, ever think it can’t happen here. It can happen here. It can happen anywhere because it has before and it will again.

  87. different clue

    There are enough comments here to offer several different theories of what is wrong , and several different approaches to fixing it or surviving it. Here’s my theory. We have a crisis crisis. What is a crisis crisis? Different crises unfolding all at once. Each crisis making one or more other crises harder to solve or even survive through. Too many crises for any one person to keep up.

    There is a crisis for every taste in crises. There is a theory of what-to-do for every taste in theories of what-to-do. People do their best work on things they believe in the most or think they know the most about. So perhaps everyone should get to work on their own favorite crisis and work on solving or surviving that. If two or more people agree on any one particular theory of what to do and how to do it, those two or more people can form a TAG. TAG stands for Theory Action Group. Lets pretend Ian Welsh has a hundred million readers. Suppose those hundred million readers divided themselves up into 10 TAGs ( Theory Action Groups) of ten million people per TAG. Each TAGload of people could spend some time and energy solving their priority crisis their way. Every so often the TAGs could send representatives to a Meeting of the TAGs to compare notes on what works and what doesn’t and how and why, and perhaps some TAGs can drop pointless actions and uptake productive activities. Some people might even move from TAG to TAG if they see one particular TAG solving its crisis AND that solution helping to make more solvable one or more other crises.

  88. different clue

    @Webstir,

    Several threads ago, you asked if I had any kind of “survivalist” experience. If you are still interested, here is the answer.

    I have zero experience in the kind of survivalist knowledge which would let me live by myself in the woods, or an abandoned city, or in any other post-apocalypse situation. I won’t even bother trying to learn or prepare for that.

    I have some experience in living lightly on the grid and in the kinds of small minimal psycho-social survivalism which lets avoid some of the surveillance and oversight I would like to avoid, though not all of it. Here is an example. Some years ago I had a mild plague of tiny little picnic-style black ants inside my dwelling unit. If I had told the co-op management about it, they would have told me to “clean this place up” so that the exterminator could come in with his nasty chemicals. Since I didn’t want any nasty chemicals, and I didn’t want to “clean this place up”, I had to think of something else.

    Here is what I did. Upon discovering that the ants just loved little pieces of tuna that escaped my cleanup effort from a tuna spill, I decided to put out some tuna for them in a tuna can. I built a paper bridge so they could get into the can and back out of it. After a couple days, the ants had laid down a strong chemical trail with a steady stream of ants coming to the can for tuna, and leaving the can to go back home. When the stream of ants both ways was steady enough and thick enough, I poured a quarter inch of olive oil into the bottom of the can. The oil covered the ants and smothered them as they went into it. Over the next three days all the ants walked into the can and none lived to go back home. On the last day there were only three or so ants left to go into the can and I waited for those last three to go there. Ants gone, no management supervision called for, no stress to my psycho-social survival.

    As to living lightly on the grid, people like me who depend on the grids for survival should all live lightly enough on the grid so that we can keep alive the grid which keeps us alive to keep keeping the grid alive so it can keep keeping us alive to keep keeping it alive.
    How lightly do I live on the grid compared to co-members of the okay-off working class? I don’t know, because I don’t know what they consume from the grid. I do know this: in a good month I use 2.5 or so kilowatt-hours of electric power per day in my dwelling unit. In a bad month I use 3.5 or so kilowatt-hours of electric power in my dwelling unit. In a good month I use 0.1 ccf of natural gas per day in my dwelling unit. In a bad month I use 1.5 or sometimes even more ccf of natural gas per day in my dwelling unit.

    If that is less gas-electric use than what the average fellow American uses per capita in its dwelling unit, then I know something about grid-based survivalism. If it isn’t , then I don’t.

  89. Willy

    Instead of discussing any adverse side effects of government mandates, deniers just deny the whole thing, and claim all government evil. I guess it’s easier that way.

    It sure is a stark contrast between ghetto Palestinians, and the luckier ones living/working in Israel and the others who moved on to Jordan and elsewhere. Years ago I worked with one and his Jewish buddy in my home town, who’d met each other at IAI. After I figured him out he swore me to secrecy, since to American wingnuts all Palestinians are the same.

    Apparently being a competent skeptic can be hard.

  90. Willy

    @different clue
    “I don’t think denialism can be cured or even lessened…”

    I think denialists mostly come from people with ‘traditional brains’ (with a few crazy haired Tsoukalos types thrown in). I see traditionals as hump-of-the-bell curve average folks forming the ballast of society, wanting things to pretty much remain stable. Since climate change is too harsh and nasty for their mindset, they just deny the whole thing. And then their God, or fearless leader whatever… has a plan just in case. And as you said, they provide endless investment opportunities. If only I was so inclined to take advantage. Something must be wrong with us, since kleptocrats say these are choices open to all.

  91. wendy davis

    @ Ché Pasa and ED 209: thank you. and thank you again. i’ve been biting my tongue on that and a few other claims. stir in the gates foundation’s funding for a remoter-controlled implantable contraceptive device whose target is third world women. billy bob monsanto had said on twitter that he was responding to sweet melinda’s extreme angst over seeing african women walking with baskets on their heads, carrying a babe in a sling, and maybe even holding another child’s hand! think of the possible future implications of such eugenics.

    but fear not, population control advocates: male sperm is in serious trouble, according nick kristoff and others, and will likely get far worse as fukushima radiation enters the food and water chains more thoroughly, and both males and females consume more glyphosate.

  92. Bah, humbug. The idea that a 30 deg rise in temperature, over such a short period of time, would be due to greenhouse gases is silly. There is no need to \”deny\” a temporary 30 degree anomaly.

    However, absent some unintuitive physical process, unknown to mankind (or at least, to me), I think it\’s irrational to favor any such idea. I deny ATTRIBUTION to anthropogenic greenhouse gases.

    Radiative forcing due to methane is about 20% that of CO2 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_methane). Looking at reference 6 of this article, the asymetry in methane concetration between north and south pole is a whopping 10% /s . So, let\’s call it 22% of CO2 radiative forcing up north. I\’m not sure how well this compares to dispersal of CO2, which is well known to be \”well mixed\”, but it sure seems like it\’s in the same ballpark.

    On a global basis, a temperature rise of about 1.5 C over the last 100 years immediately tells us to expect very little in the way of either \’global cooling\’ or \’global warming\’, in any given year, at least if we ignore relatively large fluctuation due to El Nino and La Nina. (See graph here: https://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/11/28/steepest-drop-in-global-temperature-on-record/ ) And that\’s from all causes (obviously), but even if we blame the net global warming on greenhouse gases, the approximate .3C that remains (I\’m eyeballing the graph), is 1/60 the temperature rise that some are all too quick to pin on greenhouse gases.

    In terms of immediate causes, there\’s only one rational explanation that I can think of, and that\’s an anomalous air circulation pattern (in a sense, acting like a polar vortex \”in reverse\”).

    Indeed, a quick google (for \”arctic 30 degrees warmer\”) gets you here (1st hit): http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/arctic-temperatures-warmth-1.3910765
    which says,

    \”David Phillips, senior climatologist with Environment and Climate Change Canada , said that instead of the air flow moving west to east, as it typically does, patterns are changing. Now there is more of a north-south interaction where warm air moves up from the south. However, the northern air can also dip further down, as we saw the past two weeks with unusually cold temperatures across the country. The change in air flow can cause the wild swings we are seeing more often.

    In this case, warm air over Greenland and Norway is being pulled up to the Arctic, causing the unusual weather.\”

    Oh, and BTW, there\’s a lot of fraud in the climate field. A key watchdog is Tony Heller, of realclimatescience.com, who gave testimony to the Washington State Senate recently (https://realclimatescience.com/2017/02/my-washington-state-senate-presentation/ ; note link to powerpoint). Searching his website for \”arctic sea ice\” brings up a lot of info, including \”More Stunning Arctic Sea Ice Fraud\” (see https://realclimatescience.com/2016/11/more-stunning-arctic-sea-ice-fraud/ )

  93. realitychecker

    Too many people means too many white people as well as too many of all the other types.

    I know math is hard, but some idiots just can’t seem to help but see racists in their soup.

    How very sad to have such limited vision, such limited understanding of the interconnectedness of things in nature.

    The earth’s capacity to provide decent food and living space is not infinite. Especially with a polluted planet. Population growth can exceed those limits. Plus, the social stresses that accompany overcrowding lead to horrible behavior.

    Magic doesn’t really happen.

  94. Hugh

    There are all kinds of fallacies flying around. The first is that 7.5 billion people pumping CO2 into the atmosphere has nothing to do with global warming. The second is that 7.5 billion people don’t have immense impacts on the planetary biosphere even if we take global warming out of the equation for the moment. The third is that overpopulation in Third World countries is not a big deal, or is a lesser deal, because by and large these countries contribute less CO2 to global warming. This ignores that many of these countries are in marginal areas that are being heavily affected by global warming and that CO2 production is not the only concern. If, for example, the Amazonian rainforest or forests say in Sumatra are destroyed this will negatively effect the biosphere’s ability to absorb CO2. It also ignores the math. You tell me how a country like Uganda which had a population of 5.5 million in 1950 and is projected to have a population of 93.5 million in 2050, a 1,593% increase, is supposed to survive. Or a country like Nigeria which had a population of 31.8 million in 1950 and is projected to have 391.3 million by 2050, a 1,131% increase, and only slightly smaller than the US’ projected 399.8 million.

  95. “And that’s from all causes (obviously), but even if we blame the net global warming on greenhouse gases, the approximate .3C that remains (I’m eyeballing the graph), is 1/60 the temperature rise that some are all too quick to pin on greenhouse gases.”

    Oops, bad math. .3 deg / 30 deg = 1 / 100, not 1 / 60.

  96. Hugh

    With recordkeeping beginning in 1880, 16 of the 17 warmest years have occurred since 2000. 1998 is the lone outlier. 2016, 2015, and 2014 were the hottest years on record, and in that order. We have had just in the last few weeks floods AND drought in California, giant wild fires in Oklahoma and Texas, both record warmth and frigid cold and blizzards in the Midwest and Northeast, and early tornadoes in the South. So obviously nothing to see here. Move along.

  97. The Stephen Miller Band

    If you believe Anthropogenic Global Warming has led to Climate Change, what’s the point in arguing with those who refute the settled science? It’s time to move on to what to do about it, and that’s where all the fun begins. See, I’m of the disposition that those who are in positions of power & influence don’t really care about the science, settled or otherwise, even if they say they do. They really only care about this controversial topic as a means to a lucrative end.

    They’re the ones with the final say on what ultimately is promulgated to allegedly deal effectively with the calamity to come, and so far, I’d say we have a good idea of what they have in mind. The Magical Market will drive the solution, so, we have expensive and incredibly wasteful hybrid automobiles and expensive and incredibly wasteful lightbulbs that lead to bipolar disorder (okay, perhaps that’s a bit of an exaggeration but CFL’s are stress-inducing because the light rays hit the retina but bypass the visual cortex and instead travel to the circadian pathways).

    In this paternalistic System, what the leaders say and do is symbolic and reflective of the System’s response to the imminent crisis. Once again, look at your leaders. Do they seem concerned? Are they leading by example? Last time I checked, the Clintons and Al Gore and Obama & Family are living high on the hog. If they believed what they preach, they would be leading modest lives where they conserve & preserve, rather than jetting around the world and hobnobbing with fellow murderous potentates inculcating schemes to further defraud The People.

    If Obama really believed the settled science and he isn’t a psychopath and instead a moral, ethical person who lives according to principle, his life style will reflect that. For example, it’s immoral for him to be jetting around the planet the way he does. If he believes the settled science, the moral and ethical thing to do is to self-impose a moratorium on jet travel or any other form of highly-polluting travel. In otherwords, what I have done in my life. If I can do it, he can too. In fact, he should have been the first to do it before I did, but as we see, he hasn’t done it yet and we know he has no intention of ever doing it, yet we’re to trust that these exploitative opportunists will foment solutions to the settled science crisis to come that will be in the best interests of the majority of the planet’s inhabitants? I don’t think so. So, unless you have a way to deal with THAT, you’re just blowing smoke and engaging in useless and senseless banter.

    I’m trying to provide a way to deal with THAT. Are you? How about you? Yes, you too, what about you? What are we to do about THAT?

  98. Attacking global warming requires collective action by governments and regulations and not consumerist-oriented individual sacrifice gestures. The latter is nothing more than “virtue signalling” and hair-shirt wearing for which environmentalists have only ever earned public pillory, the former is the real thing.

    If you believe that the risks of world government to the things you value is higher than the risk of climate change being real, then rejecting action on climate change is the right choice. Take BOO: he values the sovereignty of the racial nation-state so highly, the immense cost of the climate change risk coming true is something he is willing to accept. That is certainly a consistent position.

  99. Anti Schmoo

    Everything you know is shit.
    Everything you think is shit.
    Everything you have been taught is shit.
    Everything you say is shit.
    And everything you believe is shit…
    Thayer Dowd

  100. Peter

    @Metamars

    I’m glad to see you have remained skeptical of the less than ethical Warmer agenda and now that they have been defeated politically more people will be exposed to fact based denials of the lies, propaganda and conditioning about AGW.

    As we have seen some true believers will never be capable of shedding their almost religious special knowledge and facing the fact they have been conned but then many of them still mistake weather for climate.

  101. @hugh

    “With recordkeeping beginning in 1880, 16 of the 17 warmest years have occurred since 2000. 1998 is the lone outlier. 2016, 2015, and 2014 were the hottest years on record, and in that order.”

    Tony Heller claims there’s been little or no warming since the 1940’s. If you take a look at US temperature “adjustments” to some NASA data, which just so happens to be what is necessary to make net temperature track CO2 increases, it SHOULD give you pause. http://theendofthemystery.blogspot.com/2012/10/us-temperatures-have-been-falsely.html

    Heller was a “true believer” in global warming from 1980 – 2003. After examining, in detail, how the climate catastrophism sausage is made, he swung over to the other side. Another lecture of his, but with integrated graphics, is here: http://notrickszone.com/2016/07/25/software-expert-exposes-potential-nasa-climate-data-fraud-trend-completely-fake-and-manipulated/

  102. “I’m glad to see you have remained skeptical of the less than ethical Warmer agenda and now that they have been defeated politically more people will be exposed to fact based denials of the lies, propaganda and conditioning about AGW.”

    Don’t count your chickens before they hatch. Robert David Steele has described Trump as “an accidental President”, as “very smart” bookeepers had put his chances at 1/20, Hillary hadn’t followed the script, resulting in voting machines being secured, etc., etc.. I couldn’t help but notice, during the campaign, that Trump’s “movement” was basically a word he applied to his followers. Trump may be, in many ways, a populist, but he’s a “top down” populist, who shows little tendency to follow Steele’s advice to expand his base. (Unfortunately, as I think Steele’s suggestions are just what the doctor ordered, if not brilliant.)

    We can see that the healthcare proposal he’s pushing, put together by Paul Ryan (freezing out conservatives, not to mention single payer memes), is hardly revolutionary. Not surprising, as re-election of incumbents was over 90%.

    The potential for regressive carbon taxes seems too tempting for Establishment Republicans to deep six by bringing things to a head. Whether the Trump Administration could (or would) do it, basically by themselves, remains to be seen. Just defunding EPA, and the like, isn’t going to make the fraud go away, though it may mute it, somewhat, until the next administration gets installed.

    If the Trump Administration seriously wanted to destroy CO2 catatstrophism, and weren’t politically clueless, I suppose they’d
    1) prosecute data fudgers
    2) launch RICO suits against scientific societies that basically published propaganda letters, pretending to speak for their members (as per Lindzen, they used similar language which didn’t echo what the IPCC reports actually said, but rather what propagandists said that the IPCC reports said)
    3) give educational speeches on climate science, using the bully pulpit of the Presidency
    4) go after scientific fraud, in general, which is certainly NOT confined to climate science

    Activists shouldn’t wait around to see what Republicans will do. I have, e.g., advocated shareholder lawsuits against Exxon Mobil management, ostensibly for their lack of a savvy, clearly defined strategy for dealing with “global warming”, but which has the essential goal, of learning through legal discovery, what Exxon Mobil REALLY knew.

    I’m sure their scientists collectively knew at least as much as I know, and if their management somehow didn’t, all the more reason for shareholders to sue them.

  103. wendy davis

    while musing about ‘racism’ and population control, the images i had concerning the western european imperial projects seemed to have their loci in religious rulers twined w/ kings, emperors, and other rulers depending on the locals one considers. using the crusades as one example, then pope urban wanted the holy land for the church, and i reckon he and his armies actually believed that their god commanded them to set up christian cities and rule them, much in the way that the imperial project on turtle island was an expression of god’s ‘manifest destiny’, and after all, the papal doctrine of discovery gave them the holy right to either convert or kill any ‘non-christian’ pagans who interfered w/ their claims of ‘settling’ the continent. how easy it must have been to see the them pesky redskins as less than human, or: the other. and the doctrine still stands today.

    and oh, my, were the original inhabitants either ‘civilized and converted’, sent to catholic and later mormon, boarding schools, enslaved at catholic missions, or just plain massacred.

    i’m not sure how large a part christianity per se played in the european conquests of the global south, but bye, bye, indigenous again. perhaps it was mainly riches and lands that were the draw; others may know better than i. but i’ve read that in mexico, maximilian by way of napoleon, was greeted as emperor even by some who opposed benito juarez. there are always compradors available, no? look at obama, most recently. but sure, most neo-colonial projects have the similar themes: ‘the others’ are either expendable, or used in rentier finance projects and schemes, and it’s certainly as much a class construct as racial/ethnic, isn’t it?

    in africa, christian missionaries were some of the first europeans to arrive post- stanley and livingstone, as i remember it. their hubris and superiority helped lead to the breakup of sustainable villages with the ‘aid’ of capitalists who always knew what they needed: ‘sorry this road has to go right through your village!’ or ‘dayum, this river should be diverted for more and better crops!’ and so on. but western paternalism and arrogance has always been a feature, not a bug, no? who knows what africa would have been like w/o Imperial help? if bill gates happens to make a shitload of money in his ‘humantarian efforts’, it’s just gravy. “oops, sorry that vaccine killed so many indian kids; we meant well”. today’s iteration of the crusades includes killing mass numbers of muslims who are just in the way of Capitalistic resource theft, but w/ a twist: the empire is wedded to saudi wahhabism, as well, hence: the many proxy wars v. shi’ites.

    if there’s an over-arching global theme for those who’re angling for revolution in aid of an egalitarian and just world for all, anti-capitalist self-determination seems to be key.

  104. Mike

    You lot are all pretty hilarious. Don’t you all see that is is instinctual human behaviour to grow, to expand. And that any non-immediate threats to that instinct will be filtered out and ignored or at best, paid lip service to. Hence, no one actually DOES anything about climate change, because it isn’t going to threaten us in the next 30 seconds. We are doomed by our very own subconscious nature. And meanwhile you just go on calling each other names.

  105. Hugh

    Tony Heller by the way is a blogger who wrote under the name Steven Goddard and has a website called Real Science. He has a BS in geology and an MS in electrical engineering. He is a well known climate change denying quack.

  106. Peter

    @Hugh

    It’s not easy to draw accurate conclusions when many of the Warmers are fanatics who fabricate a story line and some of the Deniers seem to be nuts. What I have noticed is that the Deniers have been asking the right questions and uncovering the methods used to sculpt the data to fit the Warmer agenda. Even somewhat crazy people can do good work when they concentrate on reality.

    The Warmers are taking another simpler path of just circling the wagons, spouting more propaganda and accusations of victimhood. They’ve shown themselves to be untrustworthy and unable to defend or correct their errors so more people refuse to believe them.

    The Warmer’s first, and hopefully last, attempt to impose world government type mandates in the US failed when the Obama/EPA Clean Power Plan was blocked by the Supreme Court and then rejected by the Trump administration. This along with the destruction of the Warmer power bases in the EPA and elsewhere may allow other more mainstream researchers to speak out about the corruption in this agenda without fear of defunding or harassment from the Warmer establishment.

  107. @hugh

    A “quack”, eh? Do tell us, won’t you, why Heller qualifies as a “quack”? He’s mostly about data and historical records, so the quack charge doesn’t make much sense. If he made up data, or if his newspaper clippings were fabricated, that would be one thing (though better described as fraud, IMO). AFAIK, nobody has ever caught him fabricating ANYTHING.

    It seems to me that calling a Heller a “quack” is just an easy way to avoid dealing with the treasure trove of information he’s revealed, which calls into question the integrity of the “climate science” establishment. There’s an implicit appeal to authority and a facile ad hominem, not to mention a complete avoidance of serious arguments against his findings.

    Surely you can do better than that – if you’re serious.

  108. BlizzardOfOz

    Guys like Hugh are a puzzle. They can see the self-serving fraud of the managerial class, the lies, spin and faked data — but somehow when it comes to Climate, Inc. they’re perfectly credulous. Everyone has rabbit-holes they don’t want to pursue, but the put-on certainty is a bit – dare I say it – authoritarian.

  109. Hugh

    Please keep talking. You discredit yourselves better than I ever could.

  110. Sure thing.

    For anyone else reading this thread, who wants to know yet more about why taking climate science as free from scandals that plague other areas of science is a laughable proposition, they can read Dr. Tim Ball’s book “The Deliberate Corruption of Climate Science”.(His lectures are on youtube, also.) For good information on how the framing of IPCC report and process is grossly misleading, they can watch Donna LaFramboise’s interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5weFQYBL5w&t=1s . For a scientist who has worked in the climate field, who is not afraid to use the “F” word – FRAUD – see another 50 to 1 interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xI3doCKhI7Q

    For perspective on dysfunctional scientific ‘culture’ (anthropology, sociology), they can read the books “The Trouble with Physics” and “Not Even Wrong”. (mostly, but not totally, about the particle physics community). Dr. Denis Rancourt, an idealistic lefty physicist, has a couple of relevant websites. Especially articles dealing with the peer review process, by David Noble. See http://activistteacher.blogspot.com/ and http://climateguy.blogspot.com/.

    Dr. Patrick Michaels covers “positive results corruption”, which afflicts science, generally, in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpNzwzwm-xU&t=1924s

    Dr. Happer and Dr. Lindzen have both worked on climate models, and are so-called “climate change deniers”. Neither actually denies that climate changes, nor that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, and the work of both actually make quantitative predictions about the warming effect of CO2.

    And both report that framing grant proposals in a way claims some relationship to CO2 catastrophism can make all the difference in getting $funded$.

    Yours truly used to play basketball with a guy at the Princeton YMCA, who has come across 6 scientists in his career, that claimed a CO2 catastrophism angle that didn’t actually exist. His job involved interviewing scientists for jobs.

    At least when he asked them, regarding things on their resumes “What does this have to do with climate science?”, he got honest answers. (“Nothing”) Unfortunately, most American taxpayers don’t have such opportunities, and probably would be clueless if they were just lied to, anyway.

    As Denis Rancourt writes in “Beware Anti-“Pseudo-Science” Agitation” @ http://activistteacher.blogspot.com/search/label/global%20warming

    “Realistically, virtually all citizens are entirely unable to critically evaluate what we take as being scientific truth, regarding public policy and regulatory questions. Thus, “public education” means state propaganda. We are reduced to “scientists have concluded” or “there is a scientific consensus that” and so on.”

    I have, in years past when I payed much more attention to climate science, argued that retired climate scientists be polled about their quantitative and statistical convictions regarding the climate models. “Retired” being a key word, as they are no longer economically motivated to distort their answers, no longer have to worry about making tenure, no longer have graduate scientists to support, etc. This proposal was generally met with crickets (not even a pretense of enthusiastic agreement!).

    I’m left with the impressions that many proponents of CO2 catastrophism actually feel they’re on shaky ground, even if they can’t process, with any certainty, why that would be so…. or admit it, publicly….

  111. BlizzardOfOzzz

    Bruce Charlton is insightful on the subject of the corruption of science generally.

    http://corruption-of-science.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/not-even-trying-corruption-of-real.html?m=1

  112. @BlizzardOfOzzz

    There were some nuggets in there that resonated with what the string theory critics and/or the climate scientists have complained about or called for. E.g., Lindzen has called for climate science to be cut by 80 – 90% “until the field cleans up”. http://joannenova.com.au/2017/01/richard-lindzen-axe-climate-science-funding-groupthink-has-destroyed-intellectual-foundations/

    Unfortunately, the funniest + saddest resonance is with the following: “(The primary and fundamental act of scientific dishonesty is: denial of the pervasive reality of scientific dishonesty.)”

    After reading about 1/4, I started skimming. There were few real life details, no statistical evidence for his claims – this is a very personal account, more a reflection on science, with no evidential references, and quotes that were mostly either of philosophers, or sort of “wise man pronouncements” by scientists or philosophers (even a novelist), which spoke to his still-present youthful idealism.

    Ah, near the end of his article he gets on about evidence.

    “The fact that I have not referenced the text of this book comes partly from idleness, partly from the desire to make the reading experience more enjoyable; but mostly from my intention – or at least hope – of opening eyes to the obvious, of clarifying the already-known – rather than persuading by weight of (supposed) facts.
    (If you need persuading, then you cannot be persuaded.)
    Evidence of the corruption of science, its endemic dishonesty, is all around us and everywhere we look – we need merely to allow the scales to fall from our eyes, need merely to remove our blinkers.
    To pick-up and examine specific items of dishonesty is merely to diminish the impact of the overwhelming whole by arbitrary, piecemeal and detached consideration.
    *
    Nonetheless in the past I have tried to do exactly this – to document the corruptions of modern ‘science’ with referenced papers.
    So, for those who want ‘evidence’, here is a list of my previous publications on themes covered by this book, some of them statistical and historical, replete with a wide range of references to further literature.”

    Well, his statement “If you need persuading, then you cannot be persuaded” is ridiculous. Both the author of “Not Even Wrong” and “The Trouble with Physics” reported that their books did not have the impact they’d hoped for, but it wasn’t for lack of trying. IMNSHO, Bruce Charlton should have tried harder to write a more evidence based summary, if he’s serious about reforming the system. Perhaps he mostly wanted to righteously rant.

    As I recall, not long after Wrong and Trouble, new hires for particle theory positions stopped going exclusively to string theorists. Charlton may want to try again….

  113. BlizzardOfOz

    metamars, I’m working through the links you posted. That 50 to 1 interview with David Evans is very good.

    What you say about Charlton is true of his style in general. He’s not everyone’s cup of tea, I know, but his writing has deeply influenced my worldview.

    The whole global warming thing has long fascinated me, not as a science as such, but as its operation as a pseudo-religion (or more exactly, as it seems to me now, as a millennial strain of the pseudo-religion of progressivism). I recently started reading De Jouvenel’s “On Power, Its History and the Nature of its Growth”. De Jouvenel locates the origins of power in magic, specifically in rites controlled by the elders that were meant to appease nature. He gives an astonishing example which you might suffer me to quote:

    In the Bismarck Archipelago, apparitions of the divine monster, called the Dukduk, awaken at intervals the state of religious panic which holds society together. Before any trace of the new moon’s crescent can be seen, the women hide themselves, for they know that it is death to see the god. The men of the tribe gather on the shore; there to the beating of drums they raise their voices in song — as much to conceal their own fears as to do honour to the Dukduks. When dawn comes there are seen on the water five or six canoes, tied together to support a platform: upon the platform flutter two ten-foot-high beings. At the moment of this contraption coming to shore, the Dukduks jump forth onto the beach, whereat those present scatter in terror: woe to the impious man who should touch these monsters—death by the tomahawk would be his fate. The Dukduks revolve around each other in a dance which they accompany with shrill cries. Thereafter they disappear into the undergrowth, where a house, crammed with presents, has been made ready for them. When evening comes they reappear, the one armed with staves and the other with a club: the men, drawn up in line, let themselves be beaten by them till blood is drawn and faintness supervenes—sometimes even to the death.

    De Jouvenel goes on to comment:

    Are the two Elders who are dressed up as Dukduks aware that it is all an imposture? Do they do it for the sake of the natural advantages which thereby come to them, and to secure their rule over the society’s life? Or do they really believe in the existence of the occult powers to which this play-acting of theirs gives sensible form? Who can tell? Do they know themselves? Whatever may be the answer, we have here a Power, religious, social, and political, other than which these tribes have none: it is centred in these play-actors.

    It will probably seem like a reach to find in warmism a deep connection to this kind of ancient ritual — the high priests securing power as appeasers of monsters, even though the monsters are given physical form by the play-acting of the priests themselves. But one of De Jouvenel’s themes is that each growth and iteration of power inherits in a sense the more primitive form.

  114. Well, I figured out around the age of 7 that human beings were fundamentally irrational. If you read the chapter on Religion, in E.O. Wilson’s Sociobiology, you can appreciate this as an evolutionary feature, not a bug. It’s become more of a bug nowadays, as humans have a great deal of power (nuclear weapons, genetic engineering, etc.), quite unlike the environment where tribalism and even irrationality had great survival value.

    The similarities between CO2 catastrophism and religion have been remarked on, by others. I don’t doubt, at all, that for many CO2 catastrophists, genes for religion are playing a role. I tend to ascribe this phenomenon more towards laymen, who don’t have favorable backgrounds to know when they’re being fooled with science-y sounding and looking stuff. Also, activists who also don’t have favorable backgrounds.

    Having said that, I’m sure there are scientists who are true believers. E.g., Dr. Alan Robock was interviewed for theRealNews.com, and he seems to really believe in the world view he’s propounding. http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=11792.

    At the end of the day, though, human inventions like logic and serious debates should help us overcome SOME of our irrational tendencies. Motivation for using these tools should also flow from scientific ethics, another human invention. It’s not for nothing that Lee Smolin addressed scientific ethics in “The Trouble with Physics”.

    Thus, the scarcity of qualified debaters who are willing to take on the most qualified scientific skeptics for something that they SAY is an existential crisis doesn’t shine a positive light on their scientific integrity. But like the elders dressed up as Dukduks, who really knows what goes on in their heads? If their dominant behavioral mode is religious, they may ‘honestly’ view supporting what the Climategate perps called “the Cause” to be far more important than less-than-sacred ethics. If they emote and act towards the skeptics like they’re “evil spirits”, scientific ethics will have to take a back seat….

  115. Peter

    I don’t think that religion is the best way to describe this Warmer phenomenon although it does display some behaviors we view as religious. First there is no supernatural element involved and the people the most likely to reject this belief are the more religious conservatives.

    To me this disease seems to be a post modern cult of liberalism built and fed by powerful technocratic manipulators with economic and political agendas. The rubes who blindly follow these Al Gores are useful tools who have been conditioned to wallow in victimhood and erupt in outrage when anyone challenges the technocrat’s agendas.

    With so many people indoctrinated into this Warmer cult it won’t be easy to deprogram but the destruction of their power bases in government is a good start. This group and the snowflakes seem to be mostly the same people so their political banishment with no sign of resurgence is another positive development.

    Possibly the last large scale Warmer related PR campaign is over with oil soon to flow through the Dakota pipeline. I supported the tribes for reasons other than stopping the pipeline but the aftermath of the camps and demonstrations leaves little hope that they or their supporters can represent environmentalism. The camp cleanup cost over a million dollars with over 600 dumpsters needed to remove the rubbish that was threatening to pollute the lake they were supposed to be protecting.

  116. BlizzardOfOz

    I watched the Tony Heller video you linked. Now that was an eye-opener. Wow. So the chart that SterwartM linked, showing temperatures rising over the past century, is not based on raw measurements, but “corrected” ones.

    As you say, no doubt many are true believers. But clearly this is not “science” as we understand it, but rather power politics. I’d argue that we just saw something of the same provenance in the Trump/Russia narrative. The progressive hive mind seizes on some meme — its truth or falsity doesn’t matter, so long as it’s meretricious, and capable of whipping up the faction into a righteous fury. If they succeed in a putsch, its mythology would become official history, and anyone who questioned it would be a “conspiracy theorist” or an “extremist”, etc.

    I remember reading that Lee Smolin book years ago, and I followed Peter Woit’s blog for a while. The collapse of physics over the past century is a real catastrophe, and it’s only part of the broader decline of elite culture and institutions. Bruce Charlton has evidence that even average intelligence has been in steady decline since the Victorian era. Of course our elites will not touch any of these questions, except on the fringe and in a jokey way (as in “Idiocracy”). In a way we’re in the position of the fabled Irish monks from the middle ages — all we can do is try to absorb the best knowledge and wisdom from the past, and pass it forward to future generations who might be able to re-build.

  117. “no longer have graduate scientists to support”

    should have been

    “no longer have graduate students to support”

  118. jump

    Totally agree Ian. We have cooked ourselves slowly like those frogs in a pot. Add mass migration, famine and water wars and the only option I see is ‘war of all against all’. It will not be pretty.
    I have resigned myself to this outcome. Saddened but not surprised. I do what I can in my corner of the world to further the experiment of mankind in the best way possible. We are our brother’s keepers. We cannot be happy while there is someone who is not. But strive we must and our evolution will continue–although with much fewer people and a drastically altered world.

    @Stirling
    The modern world is fine.
    Humanity is fine.
    Economy is not fine, and all us depend on it.

    Is the world and humanity fine if we cannot recognize our own souls and therefore the souls of others? Agreed on the economy.

    Your server is still a bit wonky Ian. It can take a week before I see new posts on the site.

Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén