Real News Network interviewed climate scientist Michael Mann, who has come under vicious and persistent attack by right-wing groups who decided to play a reductivist game and focus their attack on one chart Mann developed which became important in popular discussions of climate change.
One of the things that I find remarkable is when some readers at NC and people in the comments section at other sites claim that climate scientists are saying climate change is real and in large measure caused by human activity either because that’s a profitable position for them to take or that they are under peer pressure. As for the “follow the money” notion, the oil industry has vastly deeper pockets than any other industry group involved in this debate and has been actively funding anti-climate change PR, some of it pretty crassly. For instance, from a 2007 post:
Scientists and economists have been offered $10,000 each by a lobby group funded by one of the world’s largest oil companies to undermine a major climate change report due to be published today.
Letters sent by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), an ExxonMobil-funded thinktank with close links to the Bush administration, offered the payments for articles that emphasise the shortcomings of a report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).Travel expenses and additional payments were also offered…
The letters, sent to scientists in Britain, the US and elsewhere, attack the UN’s panel as “resistant to reasonable criticism and dissent and prone to summary conclusions that are poorly supported by the analytical work” and ask for essays that “thoughtfully explore the limitations of climate model outputs”.
Climate scientists described the move yesterday as an attempt to cast doubt over the “overwhelming scientific evidence” on global warming. “It’s a desperate attempt by an organisation who wants to distort science for their own political aims,” said David Viner of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia.
“The IPCC process is probably the most thorough and open review undertaken in any discipline. This undermines the confidence of the public in the scientific community and the ability of governments to take on sound scientific advice,” he said.”
As for peer pressure, reader sittingstill pointed out,
As a scientist myself, in a field overcrowded with Phd’s jockeying for limited positions, I’ve noticed the opposite of what you describe – there is a sizable vocal subset of professionals that will go far out on theoretical contrarian limbs in order to professionally distinguish themselves from the rest of the crowd. This is much more pronounced in fields of study where the theory is more ambiguous than AGW. Conversely, the effect is less pronounced where the underlying theory is less ambiguous. On a macro scale, AGW fits best into this latter category. Timing and degree, though likely more severe than we want to hope, are still up for debate, but not the central tenet. I know many clear thinking scientists who switched over from the skeptical side 10 years ago.
And finally, Real News Network’s summary of Mann’s bio:
Dr. Michael E. Mann is Distinguished Professor of Meteorology at Penn State University, with joint appointments in the Department of Geosciences and the Earth and Environmental Systems Institute (EESI). He is also director of the Penn State Earth System Science Center (ESSC).
Dr. Mann was a Lead Author on the Observed Climate Variability and Change chapter of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Third Scientific Assessment Report in 2001 and was organizing committee chair for the National Academy of Sciences Frontiers of Science in 2003. He has received a number of honors and awards including NOAA’s outstanding publication award in 2002 and selection by Scientific American as one of the fifty leading visionaries in science and technology in 2002. He contributed, with other IPCC authors, to the award of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. He was awarded the Hans Oeschger Medal of the European Geosciences Union in 2012 and was awarded the National Conservation Achievement Award for science by the National Wildlife Federation in 2013. He made Bloomberg News’ list of fifty most influential people in 2013. He is a Fellow of both the American Geophysical Union and the American Meteorological Society.
Dr. Mann is author of more than 160 peer-reviewed and edited publications, and has published two books including Dire Predictions: Understanding Global Warming in 2008 and The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines in 2012. He is also a co-founder and avid contributor to the award-winning science website RealClimate.org.
111 comments
Comments are closed.
will koch industries benefit or suffer as a result of climate legislation?
nc covers rent extraction like no other resource. isn’t energy the largest plum there, easily dwarfing healthcare or education?
obamacare didn’t stick it to the hmo’s, if anything they got to purge their rolls of the patients with the highest healthcare costs, at least given the experience of those around me. obamacare did nothing to rein in big pharma.
how will koch industries suffer? will their profits be reduced?
That could be asking the wrong question.
Here’s another one: “will the Koch Bros. see a lot of money already committed to anti-environment causes go to waste if climate legislation is passed?”
Or maybe: “will the Koch Bros. appear lame and ineffectual if climate legislation is passed?”
Or: “will the Koch Bros. wee-wees shrink significantly if climate legislation is passed?”
When you’ve got their kind of dough mere profit margins are of little significance. What matters most is ego, power and the appearance of power. It’s called megalomania.
Posted Query:”how will koch industries suffer? will their profits be reduced?”
There is a very good chance!
Solar (and some Wind development) really scares the “Poison-dwarf-bros” and their plutocrat parade because
1. Countervailing power is beginning to operate; Big Solar and companies benefiting from it is being born and they want their share of the fast bucks!
2. Startups (like some connected to Musk battery-car industy) with lots of funding, want to make solar and eventually storage the way to provide electricity for normal use.
3. Meantime, “poison-dwarf-bros” and utilities like Duke (the biggest, and smokiest and dirtiest coal-smoke generator in the USA) find the basic economics against them. Solar (and all the related issues) is declining deeply in price, and has nowhere to go but down; and therefore gradually is stranding much of the investment in fossil fuel, including the Alberta grease-pits, “fracked” oil and gas, and not least Qatari and Saudi and Russsian hopes of oil Heaven here on earth.
“Poison-dwarf-bros” and all the rest will eventually shift their funding from destruction of SS and Medicare to a desperate rush to “grease up” DogPatch-DC, DogPatch-Austin, DogPatch-Tallahassee, and all the rest to put the brakes on their decline by trying pass laws agains any progress, which will almost certainly fail.
Kyomo,
I believe he referenced ‘Coke’ in the video.
i don’t think anyone here puts any great store in coca-cola’s position on agw. i brought koch up because of their lavish funding of pro-fossil fuel propaganda.
what i’m saying is that they’re far from stupid, and are likely to have buttered their bread on both sides. i think it’s a fair bet that the verbiage in any new climate legislation will be written by a team of koch attorneys. (or, if you prefer, exxon or bp or shell or jpm or gs attorneys). nancy pelosi will say ‘we have to vote for it in order to see what’s in it’ (well, actually, probably not, as obama will be forcing it thru via the epa)
climate legislation might reduce carbon emissions. it might very well result in an increase, for example that hoexter ‘pedal to the metal’ plan would probably double u.s. emissions for at least a decade.
i’ve scanned the list of koch holdings. i believe the vast majority will simply pass on any increased costs to the consumer. i fail to see how a tax on carbon will cause koch/exxon et al to limit their carbon emissions.
Au contraire – coke and others a very keen, why do you think they are mad crazy in securing long term water rights, many industry’s are now inviting David Suzuki into their board rooms, after years of attacking him.
Skippy… what is said in public is not always the corporate position in private.
The “follow the money” rhetoric applied to academic climate research usually comes from those who haven’t. It’s not like it’s particularly difficult to identify where funds were procured for a particular study, the grant numbers are always listed at the bottom of the paper and the various federal and national granting agencies around the globe are usually quite happy to tell you about specific grants (in the usual case, the existing reporting is quite extensive, the funds usually being public or managed by a charitable organisation).
The vast majority of academic science is performed by graduate students and postdocs. Graduate student stipends in North America are frequently below poverty line, a typical academic postdoc will be happy to take 35-40k with no benefits, irrespective of the 9 letters after their name or the 4 high-impact papers under their belts. These are very frequently the people designing the experiments and writing the papers, too- at the very least, they’re collecting and analysing the data, so to the extent that economic motivations should show up to skew data or collection in academic work, they should show up here.
Tenure-track positions are an endangered species and multiple postdocs have become de rigeur as the average age for the first grant extends beyond 40 and toward 50. The incentive for someone scraping by on their 18k PhD stipend to produce a paradigm-shattering paper to secure access to a faculty investigator position is immense. [b]sittingstill[/b]’s comments are spot on. The fact that there aren’t routine theoretical skirmishes in the pages of Nature or Science is remarkably telling. Despite the fact that novelty and sexiness is almost the sole criterion on which research is judged, climate research produces very little that is not paradigm-following, iterative, additive, Kuhnian “normal science”. The incredible solidity of the evidence and the enormous difficulty in challenging the weight of the theoretical constructs’ empirical foundation is the cause of this homogeneity, not economic incentives.
For a much clearer example of how monetary incentives can and do have an effect on academic research, a much clearer example is the various biomedical disciplines which receive direct support from the corporate pharmaceutical companies. Interestingly, while you frequently find questionable papers by authors who have fairly obvious conflicts of interest, field-wide theoretical constructs (in eg cell biology, receptor pharmacology, etc) are almost never brought into alignment by monetary incentives, except in dependent pseudo-empirical specialties like psychiatry.
Money increasingly becomes a dominant factor in US science. In the past Europe and Canada were way more relaxed about research money. The current state in these places isn’t known to me.
My dean said once: “if you are in a field that is low on research money, switch fields.” His smarts and morality falls short here. Knowledge, i.e. research, should be the goal; money shouldn’t. He does reflect our crooked value system, however.
Grants do not increase the university salaries of climate science professors. Instead, they can be used to pay the salaries, or part of the salary, saving the university money.
Scientific research, once published, is scrutinized in fine detail in order for others to find defects or ways to do something better. There is no such thing as a perfect paper. Of course, papers that merely do something a bit better are not ground-breaking, but realize that only a small percentage of researchers are actually going to do great research.
What your Dean said explains in one sentence why the university administrative layers should be gutted.
University research in the UK is stacked out with people on 2 year rolling contracts. They have to lie to get mortgages.
I’m still a global warming by humans sceptic – I just don’t feel competent in the area or know enough not to be. One can be sceptical like this and still be very worried about why we aren’t doing huge green energy projects. I probably know more about the relevant science than most passionate advocates of GW and those of the energy companies and chronic vested interest. The real issue for me is why we can’t see the obvious case for developing green capacity anyway. Here in United Krassdom we even stopped dredging rivers near flood zones because of political idiots, demonstrating decision-makers can’t even do simple thinking, let alone understand complex models of climate change.
Main media rarely let us see and question actual climate scientists. What we get is akin to not being allowed to see actual witnesses and relying on pub gossip. What is utterly obvious is we have disasters around the world that cause much misery and could often have been prevented, or at least some system design could have limited. We should be developing capacity to prevent and act. This while the real unemployment-underemployment rate may be 50% across the globe and ‘growth’ means yet another television channel playing repeats.
My focus would be on what interests are suppressing an obvious growth area for our economies that would make people’s lives safer, more secure and so on, rather than the distraction of the propaganda war. I’d welcome the climate scientists telling us what is going on directly instead of the vapid actors, lackeys of vested interests and autocue readers cluttering our newsrooms.
“I just don’t feel competent in the area or know enough not to be.”
Yeah, it’s pretty simple. We’ve got plenty of examples of scientific paradigms that turned out to be mistaken. Why default to assuming the scientists are right?
Hell, I’m skeptical of science as an enterprise altogether. Don’t misunderstand, it’s a powerful tool and I’m not dismissing it. But it’s only one way of knowing and understanding the world, and maybe more limited than the hosannahs we give it would suggest. Check out Morris Berman’s 1980s best-seller _The Re-enchantment of the World_ for some fascinating insights on this.
I support sensible environmentalism like you, I just see AGW as a (possibly) fear-mongering politicization of science.
Well, on the one hand we’ve got people studying ocean buoy data and measuring polar ice caps and studying glacier retreats and tracking animal migrations, and on the other hand, we’ve got a 1980s best seller.
Hmm… Tough call. Let me think a bit.
That wasn’t to make my case, just an aside about an interesting read.
I posted a long reply but it didn’t go through…
When I tried again, it said it was a duplicate comment.
Also, none of that data collection you cite suggests a necessary human link to global warming. There could be literally cosmic factors involved that we haven’t even grasped yet.
The effect of significantly increasing greenhouses gases is fairly to easy understand and is well documented. The increase in greenhouse gases exists due to human activity. It is not complex science. Try Wikipedia for a quick overview.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas
“Also, none of that data collection you cite suggests a necessary human link to global warming. There could be literally cosmic factors involved that we haven’t even grasped yet.”
I have following this debate subject closely since about 1970 and the political debate that emerged in the last 20 years or so.
Ten years ago the skeptics challenged the very notion that global temperatures were increasing.
Then they jumped to say that even if it is, there is no proof that it is caused by human activity. Congratulations TimR you have graduated from denying empirical reality. Many of your comrades have not yet been able to do so.
So now the question is one of mechanism. You can state quite correctly that there are cosmic factors that may play a role in global warming that no one has yet thought of. That is logically irrefutable.
However, there are local factors that have been thought of (and were over a century ago by Arrhenius) that the green house gas CO2 can trap heat. Further that CO2 released by human activity is produced in sufficient quantities to influence the heat balance (as was suggested by Arrhenius over a century ago). Further we can actually see a significant build up in CO2 concentrations (again empirical fact, not model) that can be attributed to human activities. It is true that we have not yet proven that the build up in CO2 (undisputed fact) is causing the increase in global temperature (undisputed fact). Hey as we all know correlation if not proof of causation. But we can say that the quantities of CO2 released by human activity is sufficient to alter the heat balance on earth (as Arrhenius predicted).
The case for AGW is quite strong but if want to believe in cosmic factors that no one has yet observed or even thought of then go on and remain a skeptic. Do you happen to believe in ETs? Maybe they are responsible.
>>Ten years ago the skeptics challenged the very notion
>>that global temperatures were increasing.
here’s thomas stocker, co-chair of the ipcc ar5 report, saying that yes, warming has stopped. they use the word ‘hiatus’ to describe the last 15 years.
IPCC: Despite hiatus, climate change here to stay
so, point to the skeptics, yes?
No – and the reason is thermal transfer, from one thermal sink to another, a process not of a few years but, many, sometimes decades. BTW a reduction in the strength of increase, of atmospheric temp, is only one measurement when their are many.
Look you have to observe every region in isolation and how the effects manifest across the whole spectrum, atmosphere, geology, ocean, plant and animal aka all the systems.
skippy… its not just about global mean temp…. shezzzz~
it’s not ‘settled science’ if the mechanism behind your ‘heat transfer’ theory is unknown and unmeasured.
Global warming pause ‘central’ to IPCC climate report
The data is quite heavily to the bad side, so your point is, its not 100% conclusive, and as I’ve pointed out is not just about temp.
Skippy… The myopia on temp is a tell.
I remember the climate scientists predicting that manmade carbon skydumping and its attendant earth-surface heat-retention would measurably warm the Arctic and subArctic more, sooner and faster than it would warm up the mid latitudes. I remember hearing this prediction YEARS beFORE such high latitude warmup began happening. And then it started happening, as predicted based on the MMGW (ManMadeGlobalWarming) theory. A theory is only as good as the coRRECT predictions it makes aHEAD of time, and that has been One coRRECT preDICtion. That got my attention. Does anyone else here remember some OTHer correct predictions that have happened as predicted?
I think minimum training in the area of Ecology should be required since the ecological POV includes systems analysis and the heretical concept that everything is connected. Anyone with a background in even high school level science can understand these concepts with a weekend or two do study.
I have followed the subject since the late eighties and have seen than many of the predictions have turned out to be true. I am convinced that researchers into climate do understand the chemical properties of Greenhouse gases and the physics of the energy dynamics within then atmosphere of the earth fairly well. Skeptics who don’t reject science concentrate on rather absurd notions like “the science isn’t in” and so on. The reason science cannot make Big Decrees about reality is that reality is a complex/chaotic system that can have hidden variables of all kinds. The climate cannot be predicted with certainty but we can put odds on various possibilities and assume that completely unpredictable outcomes are also possible.
But here is my question to you or any skeptic: why play Russian roulette with greenhouse gases? Why take the chance when the solutions are rather simple from a technical POV? Why ally yourself with the most toxic political forces in the world?
The pro-AGW forces have rather toxic political allies as well. “Smart” meters to track and surveil you, anyone? (among other problems — see takebackyourpower.net)
Carbon credit trading schemes that will probably further impoverish the bottom 80 or 90%, and leave the top brackets free to continue using as much as they please?
At the very top of the Oil Biz, do you really think their interests are much different from those of their peers in other industries? They’re in, they’re made men, they can hop ship to the next big thing or go sideways somewhere else; do you think you’re really allying yourself with the “good” elites, and not the “bad” elites when you buy into AGW?
I don’t buy that the boss class all have similar goals other than keep the real political dynamics out of sight to the commoners.
Are oil execs more toxic than say Big Tech? Depends on what you yourself value. For me, yes that are much more toxic since they are, in general, important instigators of permanent war and international intrigue while tech companies are not necessarily interested in war for its own sake. Also tech companies are somewhat interested in innovation and bettering the human experience while Big Energy has virtually no interest in anything other than the dominator culture and actively tries to stop innovation and creativity in all areas that could threaten the power of the mentality of waste and “mass quantities.”
Banger, when’s the last time you’ve heard an environmentalist use the word “conservation”?
Politicking is mostly about perception. The pro-global warming crowd has allied with Goldman Sachs and Wall Street through their carbon trading scheme. That looks bad enough to people now, but what’s left of the environmentalist movement has allied themselves with the nuclear power industry. They were shilling hard for them after the Fukushima incident.
Moreover, grassroots activists have tried the ‘doom & gloom’ strategy to manipulate the general public for the last few decades. It doesn’t even work that well for the US government these days.
This is a mistaken. There have been many progressives that have criticized carbon trading. And there hasn’t been much movement toward nuclear power. It is mostly the nuclear power industry that have been promoting themselves as a (partial) solution to fossil fuels.
Grassroots activists have limited resources. Even so, most people DO recognize that climate change is real and is a growing threat. EVERYONE agrees that the solution is political and systemic. But politicians, thusfar, have been more swayed by oli & gas $$$$.
A. Watts,
“Conservation.” And I’ve said it for nearly 40 years, as have many millions of others over the course of my life. A world with less ‘stuff’ is coming whether we like it or not. Conservation is the route a civilized society would take – I leave how to depict this society to your own thoughts.
@Jackrabbit
Oh, I know that liberals/progressives have formally opposed these measures, but in the public’s mind they are tied to the cause and not the initiative. So few people in the movement realized this before the damage was done.
Politicians make an easy scapegoat. The fact of the matter is that voluntary simplicity really hasn’t gained popularity outside the social fringe that eccentric individuals or radical ideologues habituate.
It’s usually the ideologues who give up that lifestyle.
@Fiver
At least somebody else remembers the days when conservation was one of the main pillars of the environmentalist movement. It’s practically all about green marketing and consumption these days.
If it still was there would be no need for rhetorical debates about the validity of climate science. The arguments would revolve around preserving natural resources for future generations. How we would use our current expenditure to ensure a better world for all and so on.
Nice dodge. I almost never noticed that you entirely ignored Banger’s question. I almost never noticed that you tried diverting me (and almost succeeded) with an entirely irrelevant rhetorical question of your own. Well played . . . almost.
“irrelevant rhetorical question”?
How far environmentalists have fallen! In the case of a historic drought of the American southwest it will be neither a question of relevance or an optional course of action. It’ll be involuntary water rationing. So do I think the Silicon Valley power elite have done a better job of preparing for their future?
Umm, no.
By the way, the amount of mutual recriminations thrown around in topics like these are another reminder why sane people should avoid them. It’s also a classic example of what happens in the aftermath of a failed social movement.
The science here is overwhelming. Wasting time disputing it is simply ridiculous. The political response, on the other hand, shows no consensus whatsoever. This is so because our way of life must be radically altered to mitigate the effects of AGW. Where is the political will for that outcome? I’m afraid the kind of radical change needed will never come voluntarily and the resistance will cross ideological boundaries, making it virtually impossible to implement–until it’s too late. Small changes in human behavior don’t work here, yet we’ll be fortunate to get even that going forward, especially given the emerging world’s desire to live just like us Americans. By the time we do finally achieve consensus, if ever, I fear it will be much too late to effect anything meaningful in turning back the horrid tide awaiting us. The thought of that scenario scares the shit out of me.
This is so because our way of life must be radically altered to mitigate the effects of AGW. Malmo (sadly)
Hair shirts! Get your hair shirts here! :)
Yes we need radical. We need radical repentance from our money system. THEN we might expect mercy wrt the climate, resource depletion, etc.
You suggest that our leaders haven’t/won’t recognize that “the science here is overwhelming” (“no consensus whatsoever”) because our way of life must change dramatically (“radical change”).
This point (“Its just too hard to change”) has been made often, but it fails to recognize that:
– the longer we wait, the more radical the change has to be;
– the world was warned over 20 years ago;
– our leaders have a habit of responding to money, not science;
– energy companies have tens of billions of dollars in profits with which to influence the debate.
The problem is not the people’s willingness to change – it is the greed of monied interests.
Seems that my comment has been lost.
I wrote to dispute the notion that politians haven’t done much because its too hard to make changes. They haven’t done much (for >20 years) because they respond to money and energy companies have tens of billions of profit every year.
Actually we can change our way of life gradually rather than in a highly dramatic manner. Look how many changes most of us have experienced already in the past few decades. We can, culturally, easily digest the needed changes and have fun doing so. The problem is that those currently in power depend on a carbon-based energy system to stay in power. These people are o addicted to power on a day to day basis and are so removed from any system of morality or sense of responsibility towards the planet or society that they are quite happy to lead us and themselves off the cliff in their quest to satisfy their perverse and morbid addictions.
Define gradually? What time frame are you thinking of and how much of our way of life would need to change? That’s critically important to know to effect a meaningful political consensus. Would the change be fast enough to undo the world ending damage forecast or would it be too little too late, and thus would we reach critical mass before the job of gradualism is complete? I’m not arguing that radical change isn’t needed, I’m arguing that the evidence of impending catastrophe absent the change must be a slam dunk before concerted action is embarked upon. People aren’t giving up their way of life without kicking and screaming if they can’t grasp the science. We’re not talking giving up smoking here, we’re talking a comprehensive change in the way we conduct our daily life itself.
5 to 20 years–the technology exists to move us to renewables gradually over that time if the political power of the fossil fuels and war industries could be suspended. The mainstream media will not report on this since they are entirely political and will only report on an increasingly narrow bandwidth of stories.
This would require large investment credits from the Fed towards productive instead of speculative investments. Remember that JFK set a goal to be on the Moon within a decade which was, considering the situation at the time JFK took office, a stunning achievement.
Follow the carbon taxes.
Financial capitals harvest their now global hinterland via this mechanism and a myriad of others of course.
The dogma will not change unless countries such as the Uk needs to burn coal directly for heat and industry and the dash for gas generators are turned off.
If Australian coal has no Asian markets for its product and they find themselves going to Europe then that will be the trigger for “scientific change”
This entire debate has been hijacked by forces who wish to continue with this present system of global trade (what I like to call the global barbell economy) until they cannot.
This debate becomes a moral one in a debt based economy that needs growth.
In many respects its much like the transatlantic slave trade.
The morality will only change if something grounded in economics changes,
Such as the arrival of machines which made direct slavery a thing of the past.
Looks like some people could still use some understanding of willful blindness
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZsPIfQLvdl8&list=PLI46g-I12_9pbIc7FuM0hfUaczb-jSok7&feature=c4-overview-vl
Thank you, gf! That interview with Ms. Heffernan is outstanding and she is spot-on with all her observations. Yet, the most profound, significant and “telling” portion regarding the reason(s) for all of civilization’s “woes” and the accelerating mass-extinction event and why there will be no “mitigation” come in the final 5 minutes. Again, thank you.
Video worth watching. Thanks gf.
Margaret Heffernen states, “It’s extraordinary how if you can just ask the right question, in a meeting, for example, when everyone is ignoring the elephant in the room, and just a gentle question like “is everyone convinced this is safe”? Or, “how could we be more confident this is safe?” Asking the question alone often gives other people the courage and confidence they need to express their doubts too. Because, usually in these cases, it isn’t that nobody can see it, it’s that EVERYBODY can see it, and everybody is pretending not to. Takes very little to tip that balance sometimes.”
I wonder how many working in the oil/gas/fracking and coal industries ever ask the simple questions. Is there any debate from within or does the profit motive always supercede safety and the effect on our environment?
I think she’s raising a serious issue but its more complex than she suggests – at least in this clip.
Is it really some natural psychological process that prevents people from seeing and acting on information? She cites an American town that was being poisoned where the residents refused to believe it. But she ignores societal dynamics that induce ‘willful blindness’ like:
1) a culture that promotes passivity
defeatism – you can’t change anything; and learned incompetence – leave it to the experts
– and –
2) selfishness
don’t waste your time on anything that doesn’t directly affect YOU
– as well as –
3) cult-of-leadership propaganda
leaders are always right and have YOU’RE best interest at heart.
4) Then there is the monied interests that try to tip the scales of what is right and wrong – and take advantage of every social and psychological advantage.
So how much is it really in our nature to not accept the truth of things? Conformism is a problem but cultural and societal manipulation greatly exacerbates it.
Indeed, though I don’t think that Ms. Heffernan was alluding to anything “simple.” However, as you have itemized, I have summarized as “we have all (at least in Western cultures) been programmed, pigeon-holed and played since birth.” Too few of us ever realize that, even when faced with overwhelming evidence, and far fewer still are ever able to break out of the “matrix” into which they have been inured. Humanity’s reign has run its course and there is only one conclusion… and it is imminent.
Thanks gf. That’s another two books that have to go on my ‘must read’ list.
Her second, A Bigger Prize’ apparently has the temerity (!) to suggest that competition isn’t the cure-all it’s invariably represented as and concludes not. More neoliberal snake oil.
How lucky we Canadians are! We have a Prime Minister that is not only willfully blind to climate change, but he is doing everything he can to make sure that climate change is ramped up to higher and higher levels. First, he passes omnibus bills that include the repeal of many, many environmental regulations that once protected our waterways and air from pollution caused by, for example, the tar sands development. Then he ramps up the development of the tar sands while lying about how the land is being returned to its former glory. Then he attacks any charitable environmental groups who spend too much time politicking for better husbanding of the environment. He has muted the voices of our scientists who have been working to understand and protect our environment by telling them not to publicly discuss their research and by de-funding and closing their facilities nation wide.
The Prime Minister does not understand what dialogue is because he has a parliamentary majority and can pass whatever he wishes!! He passes his bills with as little parliamentary discussion as possible. He does not consult with anyone about his major environmental changes. He attacks environmentalists as terrorists who are funded by foreign money. (See: http://www.sierraclub.ca/en/tar-sands/in-the-news/are-canadian-environmentalists-terrorist-threat )
Talk about perverse outcomes that the PM is advocating! I will be dead before the sh*t hits the fan and I don’t have grandchildren who will suffer in the future. Small consolation to the world, I know.
Our Prime Minister is only interested in the so-called “economy” which I understand means that all resources will be extracted at supersonic speed without any regard to pollution of water, land or air. Money and development is what Canada now is all about. So sad and so lethal.
Bottom line…
The Prime Minister only cares about….the Prime Minister.
My comment isn’t posting, so here is a link to my blog where I just posted it if anyone is interested, it’s fairly lengthy — http://TimRocksComics.blogspot.com
The military plans 50 years out. They have known about global warming since the beginning. The atmosphere has been meticulously studied by Nasa and Noaa and the military for a very long time. We are not merely looking at the limits of the planet’s carrying capacity; the limits of capitalist economies;; the limits of population growth, etc. We are looking at the limits to power, or the limits to control. And no corporation alone, like the Kochs, can alter the goals of the military.
I’m not really making sense (above). My point is that the contradictions in modern civilization are making us (“us”) choose the least damaging option. The US military is the biggest oil user on the planet and hence the biggest polluter. And they are secretly the most concerned about the whole state of affairs. They lose control if they cut back prematurely on the use of oil to run their operations; they lose face if they can be accused of their own astroturf (so they use their dependents like the Kochs); they do mental triage on what must be their priorities if they are to maintain control while keeping order. Interestingly, their nemesis, the Russians recently made the public statement that global warming might be a welcome change for them because Siberia would become habitable. Russia faces very little threat from sea level rise along its eastern pacific border. Russia also contains enormous (probably understated) oil reserves. So that’s interesting too. Might help explain why we are snarling and snapping at the fringes of the old USSR. And etc. Anyway my point is that we should not deny global warming but we should put all our cards on the table because the devastation is going to be big.
How much of Siberia is composed of a thin film of taiga and tundra atop a layer of permafrost 10s or 100s of feet deep? How high above sea level are the permafrost-underlain marshes of Western Siberia? I read somewhere that permafrost is close to 50 % water by volume. If that is true, and Russia does its part to skydump so much carbon that the permafrost all permathaws, how much of that “land” would semi-dissolve into permaslop and ooze-flow into the neighboring Arctic Ocean? Or just melt-subside in place to the point of becoming below sea level, thereby allowing the Arctic Ocean to overtop it?
Science will, ultimately, have to follow the money. Journalism has already done that and we can all see the result.
I have mixed feeling about science perhaps because it tends to overvalue certainty which leads to a tendency to group-think, orthodoxy and an almost violent opposition to ideas outside orthodoxy which has and will continue to alienate the general public. Already medical science has become almost completely corrupted by Big Pharma and Big Medicine such that if there are promising therapies that are inexpensive they are vigorously opposed and sometimes become illegal.
Having said that I still feel sad that climate science has been rejected in the United States as a result of political corruption (in the mainstream media in particular) and PR from Big Energy. The current scientific establishment has done a startlingly poor job at explaining the problem caused by greenhouse gases and have left it to AL Gore to provide a rather flawed explanation.
Yves,
“One of the things that I find remarkable is when some readers at NC and people in the comments section at other sites claim that climate scientists are saying climate change is real and in large measure caused by human activity either because that’s a profitable position for them to take or that they are under peer pressure.”
I’m glad that you bring attention to this. It is such a destructive way of thinking/arguing. I’ve seen arguments to the effect that:
1) climate change is a socialist gambit because capitalism has ‘won’
2) climate scientists just want to increase their paychecks
I think someone should write about the many arguments that climate change deniers have used over time:
– they attacked the science
– they attacked the scientists
– they claimed that it will eliminate jobs
– they claimed that there is no consensus
– etc.
Its been one snow job after another in an attempt to sow confusion and doubt. And as they keep losing the ‘debate’, their arguments get more desperate.
Let’s be clear here–there is no “debate” only the application of force. People who deny the general ideas that have come out of climate science aren’t interested in debate only in asserting ideological opinions.
Meanwhile Lake Superior is freezing over?
God will do what He does (including perhaps thwarting my predictions should I dare make any) but He does say this:
Thus says the Lord, your Redeemer, and the one who formed you from the womb,
“I, the Lord, am the maker of all things,
Stretching out the heavens by Myself
And spreading out the earth all alone,*
Causing the omens of boasters to fail,
Making fools out of diviners,
Causing wise men to draw back
And turning their knowledge into foolishness,
Confirming the word of His servant
And performing the purpose of His messengers… Isaiah 44:24-26
New American Standard Bible (NASB)
So then what will Progressives do if global cooing becomes a threat and MORE, not less, CO2 is called for? Repent? Admit they are helpless?
*I keep seeing this testimony of Cosmic Expansion in the Bible and I’m no geologist but the crust of the Earth IS being spread out by ocean volcanoes; see Hawaii.
Blasphemy, Beardo.
Wasn’t Isaiah struggling against the corruption of his time? Didn’t the messiah that Isaiah foretold also struggle against corruption? Its not the progressives/environmentalists that Isaiah is talking about but TPTB of the time.
You are twisting his/His words to make a point that is offensive to most here at NC.
In the Bible, God has TOTAL control over the environment and He’s used it to punish as well as to bless. So be warned.
So quit fretting over the thermostat and concern yourselves with justice – your proper duty: Micah 6:8.
Or do you want to make the banks even richer as they finance every hysterical fear of faithless people?
Tautology and nonsense.
Did God make us mute? Better question: Why do you exalt oil and gas profits over God?
Want to be close to God? Get out more. Then maybe you’d cherish and appreciate others instead of spouting bullsh!t and blasphemy.
In the Bible, profit is GOOD but profit TAKING isn’t. Go figure.
Never mind, I already have. It’s government-backed usury that allows profit taking as opposed to profit SHARING. So how about fighting unethical purchasing power creation?
I could care less about the oil and gas companies, FYI. I look forward to a fusion powered hydrogen economy.
Beard:
You didn’t answer my question. You claim that people of faith should just be meek and accepting. But you don’t ask the same of oil and gas investors/executives. Thus, you allow those executives to trump God will. Why?
Your thinking is similarly convoluted regarding the “fusion powered hydrogen economy.” That is not even close to reality while we ‘lose’ the war against climate change every day. You want to bet millions of lives on futuristic technology? So now YOU are playing God.
What would you call a man who twists scripture, exhibits false piety, and has so little regard for his fellow human beings? HOW MUCH ARE THEY PAYING YOU BEARDO?
I’ve yet to make a SINGLE cent even a gross one – my work is 100% voluntary.
Ya see, I REALLY hate government-backed banks and other forms of tyranny too.
Then why the holier-than-thou Christian facade? You are no man of God. You have an agenda that you dress it up as God’s word.
You think that you will get sympathy because you are against Banks. Pathetic.
Your despicable falseness is obnoxious and an affront to this community. I sincerely hope that you are banned.
So why the Christian facade? You are no man of God, that is clear. You dress up your own agenda as God’s.
Now you want sympathy because you hate Banks? Pathetic.
Your despicable falsity is obnoxious and an affront to this community.
In other words, Progressives stand to (and deserve to) lose a lot of credibility when they hitch their wagon to every pseudo-moralistic cause that comes along. And I can’t figure out what God they are aping unless it is John Calvin’s since I can’t find that God in the Bible.
Hint: Out-flank Calvin and his followers by knowing the Bible better than he/they did/do.
Hint2: Stick to justice and you’ll never be out-flanked yourselves.
Fighting ignorance with ignorance is a winning strategy?
skippy… Ccoming from the Co2 is plant food quip guy.
CO2 is plant food – the most essential one I’d hazard.
In a process called photosynthesis, plants use energy from the sun to change carbon dioxide (CO2 – carbon and oxygen) and water (H2O- hydrogen and oxygen) into starches and sugars. These starches and sugars are the plant’s food.
Photosynthesis means “making things with light”. from http://www.ncagr.gov/cyber/kidswrld/plant/nutrient.htm
As for ignorance, it is ignorance of the Old Testament that has allowed the Religious Right to seize the moral high ground from Progressives. Instead, you knew just enough to shoot yourself in the foot with – ridiculously fighting for the right to commit sodomy in public.
Co2 was in context to a redundant comment you made in the past, erroneously claiming more of it would make things better.
Skippy….Old testament? Why not trace its lineage even further back and capture the pure essence, you know before proto Judaism.
And more CO2 could easily be good since it would normally mean larger crops – not to mention a longer growing season.
Or are Progressives the ultimate in hide-bound, fearful Conservatism?
No, it could not be good given every study shows the increased heat stress and insect predation accompanying rising CO2 overwhelms any benefit from additional nutrient availability. Like deniers claiming a cooling trend since 1998, your conclusion can only be arrived at by deliberate exclusion of relevant data.
I only worry about ignorance dressed up as “Universal Truths” which are contrary to hard data.
skippy… epic institutionalized cognitive bias is not an application of critical thinking, actuality its a case of start with your answer[s and then build your testing metrics around that conclusion. See history on that paradigm.
I won’t continue here since my comments are disappearing which takes all the fun out of making them.
F. Your argument here is manifestly silly. It undermines other, much more valid arguments you make. Try putting more than the recommended amount of fertilizer on a plant. Try taking more than the recommended dosage of most medicines, even, for example, vitamins A or E. With physical processes, if a certain amount is essential, more than that is not necessarily better, at all.
CO2 is not plant food. It is a plant food precursor. Water is the other plant food precursor. The plant uses captured light energy to tear apart molecules of water AND molecules of CO2 and rebond the torn up pieces of H2O and Co2 molecules into bigger molecules of sugars and starches. THOSE are plant food, NOT the water and CO2 which are torn apart to make the pieces into sugar with.
As I mentioned once before, this last Monday when it -1 degree here in Ann Arbor, Michigan; it was 0 degrees in Barrow, Alaska. And it was 37 degrees in Reykjavik, Iceland. If the global really starts recooling, I expect the taiga to reverse its northern march into the tundra of the last 20+ years, the Arctic Ocean icecap to regain its former size, the various glaciers and icefields which have been melting back/shrinking over the last 30 years to grow back to their former size, etc. etc.
What if global warming is God’s Punishment for the Sin of burning fossil carbon?
What sin? Chapter and verse, please?
The God of the Bible is GENEROUS so what skin-flint god are you worshiping?
How about where in Genesis he gave man dominion over the Earth, including all of the maturity, wisdom and responsibility that entails. Unless you think he gave it to us as a toy is given to a child, to do with it exactly as we please even to willfully destroy it if we wish, but that’s not how I read the passage.
Ahhh . . . now I understand. You are a Turing machine programmed to thread-spam your particular religionist hobbyhorse.
I see no further need to bite the hook every time you chum the water.
I think someone should write about the many arguments that climate change deniers have used over time:
– they attacked the science
– they attacked the scientists
– they claimed that it will eliminate jobs
– they claimed that there is no consensus
– etc.
Its been one snow job after another in an attempt to sow confusion and doubt. And as they keep losing the ‘debate’, their arguments get more desperate.
Someone has written about this.
An extensive analysis of the wrong arguments made by climate-change deniers can be found at: Skeptical Science
Their list of “myths” is up to 174 items long, now… Also, they have links to several good books on this subject, such as “Climate Change Denial, Heads in the Sand” by Washington and Cook.
Thanks!
We already know the affects from co2 in the atmosphere because the temperature on Venus and Mars can get over 600 degrees yet the moon that has no co2 rarely gets above -50 (negative fifty) degrees if I remember correctly, so it doesn’t take a genius to figure this out.
We could create God only knows how many jobs installing solar panels on roofs like in Germany but instead we have this stupid idiotic lame fossil fuel economy that has reached its limits on job creation.
Most people want to retire so what’s all this yapping about jobs?
If you want income then just say so and a strong case can be made for a Guaranteed Living Income. That and the opportunity to work (which generally requires land ownership) would make most people content.
Jobs are an abnormality; self-employment and slavery are the historic norm. So maybe jobs are NOT an abnormality but merely a disguised form of slavery?
Please provide evidence “most” people want to retire, not just you.
If they don’t want to now, they will as they are squeezed harder and harder so the bank can get their usury in a shrinking economy.
I think it’s almost a matter of common sense that they do. I know I’m ready for my extremely generous severance package as soon as they care to offer it.
Looking it up I was wrong about the max surface temp of Mars and the Moon but Venus is hotter than Mercury despite being further from the sun so it does show the effect from co2.
Trust me im no fan of jobs either and would like to live in a system that the Copiosis people propose where the basics are free but people get paid extra money to buy luxuries buy creating max net benefit to society rather than the craptastic system we have where a drug dealer or a pimp of child prostitutes can make more money than a teacher or nurse.
http://copiosis.com/what-is-copiosis/
But most importantly people on the local level via town hall meetings should decide how they want to live as long as they dont cause harm to others or the environment or get in the way of anyone else s freedom and not this Soviet central federal nightmare we have with Washington DC making all the decisions for us.
Some interesting concepts – thanks.
It took me awhile to appreciate it and I had to read it more than once but the more I think about it the more I like it.
F. Beard: Jobs are an abnormality; self-employment and slavery are the historic norm.
Umm, no. Jobs, and analogs in non-modern social structures are the historic norm, unemployment, self-employment and slavery are the exception or the extreme case. Human beings are social animals. Autarkic self-employment, being a hermit or a one-man show is not all that common. Slavery was most usually an outcome of war. Inside each society, the usual idea was that if someone wanted to make a positive contribution to the society, the village, the tribe, the family, whatever – and did – he or she would get something back from society. For most of human history, the idea of unemployment – of forcing people to not work for their own and society’s betterment – and that this would have good effects by magic – would have seemed an incredible, outlandish superstition. Far crazier than witchcraft, god-kings, centaurs etc – for the simple reason that it is crazier.
American Slave: Trust me im no fan of jobs either and would like to live in a system that the Copiosis people propose where the basics are free but people get paid extra money to buy luxuries by creating max net benefit to society ..
That’s basically the MMT proposal. Basically all the MMTers propose an income guarantee, a floor, welfare, “basics are free” etc whatever you want to call it. The second part “extra money ..” is the JG – the “extra money” is usually called a “job” Seems like many don’t really understand the JG, and think it is something different from its plain meaning – a job for anyone who wants one.
With sufficient income and other resources, people can find their own meaningful work to do (by definition) or they can work for free for someone else – hence no JG is needed. The Amish do both (e.g. barn-raisings).
Neo-slavery is what the JG people have in mind – for the good of the slaves, of course [snicker].
With sufficient income and other resources, Who decides what income, what resources are sufficient? If the extra-income-desirer always has input – that’s the JG, because if you always give more money, for nothing, to everybody who wants more, the money becomes worthless.
If the Beard-appointed committee of experts, then the committee is committing a crime against the unemployed guy – the extra-income-desirer.
people can find their own meaningful work to do (by definition) People finding their own meaningful work to do IS the JG. The JG is just running national monetary economies the way every other human institution and tribe has been run forever. There is not the slightest reason to think that there will not be unemployed people in Beard’s USA w/o a JG. So this Beard’s USA is inhuman, unjust.
or they can work for free for someone else That is slavery. Why the tremendous resistance to the idea of people working for everybody, the whole society – for something? To the point of preferring actual slavery to it? I note American Slave recognizes the moral superiority of a system with a JG – under another name. Amish Barn-raisings are not work for free. You think that Mr Amish guy can let other people raise his barns and do everything for him, and never help anybody else out in any way, even though he could? Quick road to shunning.
Neo-slavery is what the JG people have in mind – for the good of the slave
If you want to call any cooperation of any two people, any division of labor “neo-slavery”, fine. But with more usual ideas, any money-using “utopia” including F Beard’s, without a JG is obscenely unjust, “neo-slavery” compared to the same society with a JG.
Voluntary work is not slavery. But what is voluntary? Taking government provided make-work when the only alternative is being cooped up in an apartment or wandering the streets?
Your problem is this: You ignore the thieving nature of a government-backed usury for stolen purchasing power cartel and offer make-work as a substitute for JUSTICE.
Define voluntary / agreements.
How about you define justice and explain why the victims of theft should have to work for their restitution? Hmm?
The way it works beardo, is when asked a question you answer it first, then you get your turn.
Did you explain to the North Vietnamese how they should fight too?
So you won’t add detail to your theory’s or define what terms mean in your utilization, how Austrian non sequitur of you.
Your victims of theft trope is based on Austrian hard values meme. How about the divergence of wages to productivity from the 70s, was that theft[?] and who pray tell played that gambit, guberment.
You seem to have a pathology about credit beardo, you know dilution of something.Funny thing is – historically – its when its issued fraudulently that things go wrong. That and when wage earners are not payed enough to service their credit or have to use fraudulently issued debt to engage in market place activity’s.
Skippy… you really never can support your opinions I’ve noticed, just emotive rhetoric dressed up as universal truths.
PS. Love the I’m leaving – I’m out of here – throws toys out of the play pen tropes your mob always plays. Yet they always come back with a mouth full of “totality of thought” rhetoric re-branded to try again.
How about the divergence of wages to productivity from the 70s, was that theft[?] skippy
Yes, it was theft since the productivity gains were financed with the workers’ stolen purchasing power via loans from the government-backed credit cartel.
What part of purchasing power creation must be ethical don’t you get?
And no, I won’t do all the work, even philosophically since justice is coming one way or another. So if the tender is wet wrt ethics in money creation then too bad; I did not create the problem and have hated usury all my life.
For one thing we need to lower the retirement age by a hell of a lot since it no longer takes a million workers to make a million cars a day but a fraction of a percent of that.
That Baxter robot will change the way the world works forever once its improved.
Ha ha! The future has arrived but our money system was only designed to create and concentrate wealth, not justly share it.
How are you a slave – American slave? You wouldn’t by chance be a Volunteerism sort, would you.
Beard – MMT, the JG is more moral, more just than your vision. People voluntarily contributing to a society as a whole, as society as a whole decides is not “make work”, or everything is. Your vision seems to imbibe the far right dogma that government work must be inferior to all-holy private sector work. Sure, get rid of the banks, design your perfect world, none of the current theft-victims have to work for restitution, whatever. But what about the thefts that Beard’s JG-less USA will perpetrate? It it is a monetary economy, then it is hell for someone, it is robbing someone if it doesn’t have a JG.
people can find their own meaningful work to do (by definition) or they can work for free for someone else So they can work for the capitalists – them who has the dough – in Beard’s USA. Or “they can work for free for someone else” – which is slavery in my book, or OK “volunteer work”. The one thing which is forbidden is money for the individual when the individual wants it, not the all-wise planner.
As I said earlier, the unemployed have every moral right to “rob” these genius planners – and Mr. & Mrs. Calgacus have every right to sell them burglar tools, drive their getaway car, etc. For that is the JG, the meaningful work they have found in Beard’s USA.
The industrial system produces a huge surplus……..however that surplus is destroyed via the credit / scarcity system of banking emissions.
That is the primary reason for work in the modern era.
To gain access to scarce money tokens , most work as we know it today is a waste of time and energy.
Its merely a method of social control.
A MMT style jobs programme is no different to a war economy with extra flesh added , we have had a war economy for 100 years or so but it is much more capital centric these past 60 or 70 years
A war economy is just a capital goods dumping economy.
In many ways the motorized tank and lorry columns of the past is no different to the private car armies of today (with their bases in driveways.)
No different from a war economy, except, of course, for the war. Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln….
@lambert
Well I live in a economy where they are rationing milk consumption so as to purchase more cars (tanks) at 0% interest.
This sounds like a war economy to me.
http://notesonthefront.typepad.com/politicaleconomy/2014/02/losers-and-not-so-losers.html#comments
According to your link on copiosis, they believe “3. The Free Market for goods/services should operate in an unrestricted manner, but designed to curtail negative externalities or systemic abuse.”
As Margaret Heffernan stated, “We can’t let markets decide everything because markets get it wrong…they’re not fair, they’re unequal, people use secret information, there is profound disequilibrium in markets. There is NO FREE Market anywhere.”
And if you “design” the market, how is it free to operate in an “unrestricted manner”?
At the same time I highly agree with “2. Human Sovereignty comes with it Basic Needs meaning all human beings have access to basic food, basic clothing, basic shelter, education and healthcare at no cost to them as needed for their basic survival and ability to thrive.”
“According to your link on copiosis, they believe “3. The Free Market for goods/services should operate in an unrestricted manner, but designed to curtail negative externalities or systemic abuse.”
Trust me I dont believe in everything they say especially the whole free market thing and private property of what I think should be public but if you click on the tags on the blog they do explain things like resource management.
Now, they do make a point about being paid for creating net benefit such as if I bought land and turned it into a public park with full public access for free while still privately owning it and maintaining it I would be generating an income for creating net benefit to society vs if I closed it off to the public or charged a fee which I couldn’t do anyway with non transferable money.
Or take the example if I bought or made a small fishing pond and left it open for free public access at no cost but made sure to maintain fish stocks rather than letting them be over fished to the point that there are none left I would be creating max net benefit for society and therefore generating an income.
Lets take another example that there is an endangered species and I am able to successfully create a reserve on my land with a breeding program to release them into the wild I would be generating an income for creating net benefit.
And for another example, if someone owns farmland in a previously deforested area and plants trees and turns it into a nature preserve they will generate an income for creating net benefit to the planet.
What they do seem to realize is that money is the ultimate control mechanism and can be used for good or evil.
“Now, they do make a point about being paid for creating net benefit such as if I bought land and turned it into a public park with full public access for free while still privately owning it and maintaining it I would be generating an income for creating net benefit to society vs if I closed it off to the public or charged a fee which I couldn’t do anyway with non transferable money.”
Scratch that, I would be able to charge a fee but it wouldn’t go to my account as money from what I understand is used to ration luxuries.
I have a friend in Alaska and they have already been hurt bad by it and they are Believer’s.
Salmon and Bears have suffered.
“A Mann for one season?”