Why the world is turning Right

I return to my blog to repost this article, written by George Monbiot and reprinted here (and with his permission). While some references are dated, none the less it remains one of the most illuminating things I’ve ever read in my search to understand why this civilisation is gradually drifting toward intolerance, division and, ultimately, self-destructive violence. George writes mainly about the UK, but I find that everything he discusses applies equally to Russian and Ukraine, to China and Brazil, to Hungary and too many other parts of Europe, and particularly to the collapse of democracy in America.

Why do I think this is so important – perhaps the most important social and political analysis I have read in the last 20 years? Simply because we can never address a problem we do not, or will not, understand. To me, behind every regressive step backward, every repression, every fascist initiative, every far-right lie, there lies a considerable body of deep anxiety, if not fear. I despair at the emaciated understanding that fills the channels and saturates our thinking; every notional blame we read about fails to take account of the true threat that undermines us all, that hovers patiently over and around us in the skies, in the air, in the oceans. I refer of course to climate change, a threat unlike any in our entire history. It imposes an existential layer on every perceived issue where perhaps only nuclear war offers a substantial equivalence in terms of the extent of its destruction of everything we hold dear. If we are to understand what it will take to save this civilisation from its own suicide, we must start by understanding how we – each of us individuals – can become compliant in the descent towards darkness, and that understanding must start here.

Trump and the 2nd American civil war

My unhealthy interest in US politics leads me back to the keyboard, to tell you why I think another civil war is coming to America, how it will start, and the really strange confluence of events that are leading the US towards its own destruction.

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I saw this coming a few days ago, and a Guardian report lends my notion more weight: the strangest proxy war ever seen, where America is the host nation, and the combatants are China and Russia. But instead of arming the various factions, this is a virtual war fought between the disinformation factories of the two countries – China supports Biden by spreading the truth about Trump, while Russia supports Trump by spreading lies about Biden. Once more, it’s a ‘you couldn’t make this shit up’ moment:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/30/trump-claims-china-will-do-anything-to-stop-his-re-election-as-coronavirus-row-escalates

It’s clear that Trump has now chosen a strategy he believes will deflect much of the criticism he will face between now and November over his handling of the virus, and the unfortunate fact that the world’s most technologically advanced and richest nation has exhibited the worst response to the pandemic of any nation on Earth, with the most infections and the most deaths. He will relentlessly blame China, knowing his supporters will subscribe to this xenophobia almost reflexively (and that they are likely a bit bored with pack-hunting socialists, xenophobic attacks on Muslims and spraying swastikas on synagogues, although none of this will ever go entirely out of fashion). I do however predict that Trump is going to get a lot more concerned about foreign interference in a US election when he’s on the end of the kind of disinformation Hilary Clinton endured instead of the pandering Russian support he got last time round, whilst utterly failing to understand why Putin was investing so heavily in splitting America apart and reducing its global influence to that of a nuclear-armed banana republic.

How to miss several boats: Amitav Ghosh on climate change in literature

It’s hard to summarise the gish-gallop that is Amitav Ghosh’s rather self-serving and thoroughly specious article in the Guardian, but this quote seems to provide sufficient material to work with (with my emphasis added):

It is a simple fact that climate change has a much smaller presence in contemporary literary fiction than it does even in public discussion…Indeed, it could even be said that fiction that deals with climate change is almost by definition not of the kind that is taken seriously: the mere mention of the subject is often enough to relegate a novel or a short story to the genre of science fiction.

Amitav Ghosh: where is the fiction about climate change?

So, to sum up; if it’s sci-fi, it’s not serious? Not taken seriously by whom? My first reaction to this elitist nonsense is anglo-saxon in origin. Best move on…

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The comments under the article are well-informed (considerably better informed, actually) and many focus on the self-inflicted nature of Ghosh’s dilemma: an obsession with the validity of genres, and a casual disrespect for the work of so many authors whose work he dismisses because he thinks their work isn’t ‘literary fiction’, while berating authors he admires but who he claims have not contributed to cli-fi, or not contributed enough.

Why Democrats Who HATE Clinton Should Vote For Her Anyway

Americans can review their choice of President every four years. They can never review the Justices a president will appoint to the Supreme Court Of The United States (SCOTUS), the body whose political complexion will shape the future of American democracy for decades to come.

A lifetime appointment, Supreme Court Justices make and break the laws, for better or worse. They are largely unaccountable: the only way an appointee can be removed is by impeachment – which has never happened in since the court was founded in 1789.

The court’s power is hard to overstate. It not only charts the course of US democracy, but frequently holds the pen that writes the country’s history: slavery, free speech, civil rights, abortion, the death penalty – and of course the right to bear arms – are just some of the key decisions that have shaped American society.

In the near future – and depending on who wins the race to the White House – the court will likely be called to rule on socialised medicine, immigration, racial discrimination, privacy and surveillance, affirmative action, voting rights and district boundaries, climate change, energy and environment, to revisit ‘Citizens United’ and campaign finance, the death penalty, second amendment rights, and Roe v. Wade, the cornerstone abortion ruling that enshrines a woman’s right to choose.  These are pressing issues of grave import, and the decisions made will define America for many decades.

Climate change consensus: the percentage game

A notorious lobby group just launched another scurrilous attack on the 97% consensus on climate change. Why do they waste their time, when proving the lack of consensus should be so easy to do?

Once more, environmental scientist and risk assessor Dana Nuccitelli has been obliged to defend the paper he co-authored with John Cook, assisted by a shed-load of Skeptical Science readers: “Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature”. The paper proved – once more – that the vast majority of scientific papers (and the scientists who wrote them) endorse the principle theory of anthropogenic climate change; that the climate is changing so rapidly there has to be a very un-natural cause, and humans are it.

On the off-chance that you’re unfamiliar with this issue, Cook and Nuccitelli’s peer-reviewed paper, published by respected journal Environmental Research Letters, confirmed what a number of previous studies had already found: Oreskes 2004, Doran & Zimmerman 2009, Anderegg et.al., 2010 all discovered that around 97% of climate scientists and/or the papers they published support the basic tenets of global warming caused by human agency. In the common parlance, this 97% are said to form a consensus, which on the face of it hardly seems to merit contention. Needless to say, this consensus is in fact one of the most contentious issues in the entire climate change debate.

The clarion call to action on climate change will be made by the next generation

Closing the extreme weather generation gap brings climate change reality to the public in a way that no amount of demagoguery can defeat

When it comes to doing something about it, the most intractable climate change problem is grass-roots political support. Without a clear mandate, there can be no substantive legislative progress. It’s a brave politician indeed who supports a course of action pretty much guaranteed to terminate his career. A clear, unequivocal mandate is a must: it’s absence to date is the biggest barrier to meaningful and enduring political action.

The reasons are diverse. Foremost in the democratic nations is the divisive nature of the debate, a crucial issue when those divisions are ideological. Scientists, pundits and activists alike may desire more public support based on scientific evidence, but it seems clear that such evidence doesn’t impinge much on the broader public discourse, one way or another.

After all, as I pointed out recently, we’ve had a literal mountain of reports delivered to our doors – well, screens – all free, all staggeringly comprehensive in both scope and weight, and all from authoritative sources as diverse as the Royal Society, the IPCC, the AAAS and the Pentagon. Such diversity precludes the kind of foolish dismissal the denial community indulges in – their projection that climate change science is coloured by ideological intentions, when denial is founded on nothing else but. (They sure as hell don’t have any science, but as we shall see, they don’t appear to need any).

The mountainous reports may have some influence at institutional levels, but in the public domain I fear that they gain little lasting traction.  As the Huffington Post reported recently, “According to the National Science Foundation’s recently released Science and Engineering Indicators 2014, 80% of Americans do not understand what it means to study something scientifically”. Without an understanding of how science works, the public are unlikely to be swayed by its discoveries, beyond a mild frisson over the morning’s first cup of coffee. (Gosh! Ice in that cold place up north is melting, it says here…pass the toast…can’t believe how crap Manchester United are this season…).

GWPF and Bengtsson: Burning Ivory Towers provide convenient smoke screen for the melting ice

While the story of academic Lennart Bengtsson setting his pants on fire dominates the media, are we being distracted from the disaster of the melting ice, and the escalating war on science and fact?

For Nigel Lawson’s Global Warming Policy Foundation, Christmas came early this week. The GWPF is – notionally – an “educational charity” but in reality it’s a lobbying outfit whose purpose appears to be to dismiss or minimise the significance of climate science at the behest of its funders. Frequently accused of disinformation and gross inaccuracy, it is no surprise to find there are numerous documented links between the GWPF, right-wing political organisations, and fossil fuel interests (See Sourcewatch, DeSmogBlog and others) .

In the context of the GWPF and its machinations, it is appropriate to consider a quote from one of the ‘founding fathers’ of modern Public Relations:

“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.”

Edward L. Bernays, Propaganda, 1928.

Is There a Climate Crystal Ball?

When it comes to what society should do about global warming, there is quite a lot to consider. While reducing emissions is the clear end-goal, the speed at which it’s done and how much of today’s time and money is spent on mitigation or adaptation depends on how much immediate danger climate change presents during our lifetimes, or those of the next generation. It’s the near future most people are concerned with — perhaps too concerned when “near future” is a synonym for “my electoral term in office” or “my spell as CEO.”

The overall effect of manmade greenhouse gases on the climate is modeled in different ways, but only one measure is considered “policy relevant.” It’s called Transient Climate Response (TCR), defined as the global mean-temperature change on the day that carbon dioxide (CO₂)has doubled over pre-industrial levels, given a rate of increase of 1 percent per year. Climate scientists believe that Earth will reach a doubling of CO₂ within the lifetime of a child born this year. If TCR is high, society must act very quickly, and the amount spent must be proportional to the immediacy of the danger. If TCR is low, then temperatures won’t go up much, in which case there is more time, and people can spend less money now.

IPCC, AAS, NAS, Royal Society, Pentagon & USGCRP reports: Is it possible to have too much information about climate change?

It’s a brave and foolhardy businessman who ignores instability when it infiltrates all our planning, borrowing, growth and analysis. Equally, those who ignore the risks and costs of global warming are surely in for a shock – and sooner rather than later. It seems increasingly improbable that anyone could still be denying the gravity of our situation, given the wealth of information we now have about it.

In a raft of reports released over the last few months, there is so little room for doubt it makes climate change denial seem not just irresponsible, but plainly irrational. In February the UK’s Royal Society (RS) and the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) jointly issued a report (Climate change: Evidence & Causes) bearing messages that would be repeated weeks later in an initiative from the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), aiming to ‘expand the dialogue on the risks of climate change’. The core message, covering climate change science, the effects and the risks, is summarised in the report, called “What We Know”.

Global Warming: never mind the models, just look out of the bloody window

Provincial myopia prevents us from seeing the bigger picture – and that’s what the contrarians depend on

It’s one of the staples (or perhaps clichés) of the contrarian canon; “it’s happened before”. You don’t need to look very hard to find this premise propping up arguments in the US, the UK, in Australia – pretty much anywhere there are contrarians. Bloggers use it with abandon in comments below any article about extreme weather, as if stating the bleedin’ obvious is going to change the laws of physics.

We’re on the eve of the release of Working Group 2 (WG2) – “Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability” – the next part of the IPCC’s AR5 report. While last year’s WG1 was about the science, this new report is the one that tells us what’s happened so far, and what’s likely to happen in the future. While WG1 alludes to risk, WG2 spells it out.

It’s not the only recent report to do so. Unusually, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) has also released a report that, for them, is pretty blunt. Called ‘What we know’ (PDF), it spells out very clearly the range of risks we can now be very confident we’re going to face if we don’t do something about our greenhouse gases very soon.

Of course, the AAAS report, and that part of WG2 that address risks – threats yet to materialize – are based on models that predict what will happen. There is no other way to make such predictions, except if you think that chicken entrails or Tarot cards can do the trick. It’s very odd how certain the contrarians are we’re not going to face these problems, or that the net result of climate change will, in fact, be positive, when they have no science whatever to back up their egregiously vapid claims.