THE CONTINUING EDUCATION OF ALBERT GORE

I ENJOYED HIS  1969 HARVARD COURSE TOO.

ABANDONED CLIMATE REFUGEE TURNS BLUE WITH COLD

RETREATING QUANDRY GLACIER BLAMED FOR NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCE 

AS ENDANGERED MUPPET FLEES GLOBAL WARMING

TOUJOURS LATOUR

Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime

Publisher: Polity Press Translator Cathy Porter  Date: 2018

The present ecological mutation has organized the whole political landscape for the last thirty years. This could explain the deadly cocktail of exploding inequalities, massive deregulation, and conversion of the dream of globalization into a nightmare for most people.
What holds these three phenomena together is the conviction, shared by some powerful people, that the ecological threat is real and that the only way for them to survive is to abandon any pretense at sharing a common future with the rest of the world. Hence their flight offshore and their massive investment in climate change denial.
The Left has been extremely slow to turn its attention to this new situation. It is still organized along an axis that goes from investment in local values to the hope of globalization—and just at the time when, everywhere, people dissatisfied with the ideal of modernity are turning back to the protection of national or even ethnic borders.
This is why it is urgent to shift sideways and to define politics as what leads toward the Earth and not toward the global or the national. Belonging to a territory is the phenomenon most in need of rethinking and careful redescription; learning new ways to inhabit the Earth is our biggest challenge. Bringing us down to earth is the task of politics today.

THE DENIAL WARS: DOUBLING DOWN ON DOUBLE STANDARDS

byAnastasia Berg and Jon Baskin  

Nobody shares all their private complaints with an audience, but how do we know how much to share and with whom? Certainly, in the name of various kinds of shared commitments, it seems best to hash out your differences in private... But how far does the strategic logic behind these decisions extend into public intellectual life? 

Should we attempt to publicly air disagreements with those who are, broadly speaking, on the same “side” of a political, social or spiritual debate as we are, or should we shelter those disagreements from public view in the name of some greater good?

In our issue 18 “Letter on Denialism,” we criticized the habit among leftist and liberal commentators of denying the existence of political projects that have become the targets of right-wing criticism (e.g. “cultural Marxism,” “political correctness,” “identity politics,” etc.), as opposed to defending, evaluating or proposing a new vocabulary for discussing them. We received plenty of thoughtful responses... But... perhaps the most challenging current of criticism had to do with... the charge that... although criticizing others on one’s side was permissible in “the smaller circles of the university, scholarship, conversation, and personal writing....the political-intellectual public sphere” was a place where intellectuals should be singularly focused on “positioning” themselves to achieve their political objectives. 

In fact, our refusal to appreciate the impermeability of the wall separating the private (or semi-private) and the public spheres was enough to raise the suspicion that we were not operating in good faith: that we were trolls or “crypto-conservatives” who, under cover of pretending to want to improve progressive discourse, really hoped to undermine it.

It is useful to see such an argument spelled out. The assumption that public intellectual life is mainly about positioning helps explain some peculiar features of our public conversation, such as the extent to which it rewards posturing and selective criticism. But the rigid distinction these commentators drew between how we ought to talk to our trusted allies and how we should speak when we suspect we are being listened to by those without similar educations, political assumptions or moral fortitude... suggests the ascendancy among some leftist intellectuals of a public vs. private distinction that has traditionally been thought of as a product of elitist conservatism.

FACEBOOK EXTINCTION LINKED TO AIRHEAD REBELLION SENATOR WARREN DEMANDS IMPERIAL TROOPS INTERVENE

INCONVENIENTLY REAL PHOTO 

Facebook is a big obstacle to averting climate catastrophe, scientists say

Facebook escalates war on truth with fake Pelosi video.

JOE ROMM

“When it comes to efforts to avert catastrophic climate change, Facebook is no ally. They are an enemy.”
Those are the sobering words of leading climatologist Michael Mann in the wake of Facebook’s astonishing admission that it isn’t concerned with whether or not the information people post on the social media site is actually true.
The latest instance of Facebook doubling down on its failure to avert the spread of misinformation came after an altered video of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) went viral on the social media platform last week. Facebook was widely criticized for refusing to take down the video — even after admitting that it had been doctored to make her look like she was slurring her words or drunk.
What was particularly shocking is that in defending this move, Facebook told the Washington Post, “We don’t have a policy that stipulates that the information you post on Facebook must be true.”
Equally stunning is what Monika Bickert, the company’s head of global policy management, told CNN’s Anderson Cooper on Friday. “We think it’s important for people to make their own informed choice about what to believe,”
“Facebook is complicit in spreading outright falsehoods and misinforming the public about matters of public concern,” environmental sociologist Robert Brulle wrote in an email.
Mann...said. “We must view them now as another tool in the toolbox used by fossil fuel interests and plutocrats to confuse the public and policymakers.”
Because Facebook refuses to be a responsible actor, Brulle concluded, “Senator Elizabeth Warren is right — it is time to break up Facebook.”

CUE FABIUS MAXIMUS LAMBASTING CATO THE CENSOR

POLITICS

Cato closes its climate shop; Pat Michaels is out

Scott Waldman, E&E News reporter

Published: Wednesday, May 29, 2019

Pat Michaels, who until recently worked at the libertarian Cato Institute, is seen speaking at a free-market event in Las Vegas in 2016. Gage Skidmore/Flickr

The Cato Institute quietly shut down a program that for years sought to raise uncertainty about climate science, leaving the libertarian think tank co-founded by Charles Koch without an office dedicated to global warming.

The move came after Pat Michaels, a climate scientist who rejects mainstream researchers' concerns about rising temperatures, left Cato earlier this year amid disagreements with officials in the organization.

"They informed me that they didn't think their vision of a think tank was in the science business, and so I said, 'OK, bye,'" Michaels said in an interview yesterday. "There had been some controversy going around the building for some time, so things got to a situation where they didn't work out."

A spokeswoman said Cato's shuttering of the Center for the Study of Science does not represent a shift in the institute's position on human-caused climate change...

"While it is true that, with the departure of Pat Michaels, we have deactivated our Center for the Study of Science, we continue to work on science policy issues," Khristine Brookes, the spokeswoman, wrote in an email. She didn't mention climate change...

Michaels was not asked to take part in the White House plan for an "adversarial" review of climate science related to the National Climate Assessment. Michaels has been critical of government climate reports for decades and has published research in major scientific journals. Both of those are seen as attributes by recruiters in charge of finding experts for the White House panel.

DID THE $10 M INCLUDE CARBON OFFSETS FOR THE R&D?

Chemist Martin Fleischmann (pictured with US politician Marilyn Lloyd) was part of a team that claimed to have produced cold fusion in 1989.

Since 2015, Google has spent $10,000,000 0n cold-fusion work  Since 2015, Google has funded a group of around 30 researchers across several laboratories to take a fresh look at one of science’s greatest taboos: cold fusion. Specifically, the controversial results reported in 1989 by chemists Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons that the thermal energy produced by the electrolysis of heavy water using a palladium cathode exceeded the input electricity. Google’s US$10-million project found no evidence whatsoever of cold fusion, but made some advances in measurement and materials-science techniques. FEW FOUND THIS OUTCOME SURPRISING: https://www.nature.com/articles/339185a0

CORNWALL ALLIANCE ISSUES NEW GUIDE TO THE CLIMATE SAINTS OF THE APOCRYPHA

THE ANTHROPOCENE DEVOURS ITS CHILDREN

Les Temps Modernes: Paris mourns passing of the intellectual left’s bible

Simone de Beauvoir called its Sunday afternoon editorial meetings “the highest form of friendship”, but after 74 years Les Temps Modernes, the monthly journal she founded with Jean-Paul Sartre, has closed.

Reading issues from its first decade feels as novel today as it did then. Its tone is original, the reportage reads like literature, the style is uncompromising, and the analysis combative. New Journalism is often considered to have emerged in New York in the late 1950s. But it could be argued it came from Paris in the late 1940s with Les Temps Modernes, which was among the first to break down the divide between literature and journalism.

The first issue in October 1945 provoked a big bang in journalism and politics, and not just in France.

Its manifesto was translated and published widely, including in Cyril Connolly’s Horizon in London. It read: “Every writer of bourgeois origin has known the temptation of irresponsibility. I personally hold Flaubert personally responsible for the repression that followed the Commune because he did not write a line to try to stop it. It was not his business, people will perhaps say. Was the Calas trial Voltaire’s business? Was Dreyfus’s condemnation Zola’s business? We at Les Temps Modernes do not want to miss a beat on the times we live in. Our intention is to influence the society we live in. Les Temps Modernes will take sides.”

 Jacques Derrida was among the philosophers who featured in the journal. Photograph: Les Temps Moderne

To carry its distinctive voice far and wide, Les Temps Modernes (named after Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times) could rely on a diversity of talented writers and philosophers from across the political spectrum. Communists, Catholics, Gaullists and socialists: philosopher Raymond Aron, Marxist phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, anthropologist and art critic Michel Leiris, and even Picasso, who had agreed to design the cover and logo.

The Observer

Paris  May 25 2019

A HIPPO IN A TUTU AND A MAGA HAT PICKETED THE EVENT

 QUEER DANCE PARTY FOR CLIMATE JUSTICE 
AT IVANKA TRUMP'S HOUSE

Activist group WERK for Peace organized the latest in a series of dance actions bringing an LGBT twist to hot political issues. Our protests are like no other – hip-shaking, fist-pumping, ass-twerking, head-thumping dancing! ...We’ve protested around a number of intersectional issues, including ... climate justice... covering the streets with biodegradable confetti...

Saturday’s display of intersectional activism involved a march on Ivanka’s recently-acquired DC residence ... protesting Trump’s recent reversal of key Obama-era policies on carbon emissions and clean power production. Dancers made their way through the streets to Ivanka’s home... “Ivanka, come dance,” chanted the jubilant crowd, as several of her neighbors came out to watch the party, some with wine glasses in hand. 

When Ivanka did not join to dance the event’s organizer proclaimed by megaphone into the night : “It looks like Ivanka doesn’t really care about the queer or trans community, does she?  What about climate justice?” 
To which the crowd replied by chanting: “Complicit!”

6,425 Undead Languages Threatened By Translation Of Tendentious Extinction Rebellion Climate Playbook Into All Of Them

LINGUISTICS

Climate variability and linguistic diversity

1. Tage S. Rai     
Science  24 May 2019:    Vol. 364, Issue 6442, pp. 747-748

NO CLIMATE CHANGE, NO FLOOD
 NO FLOOD, NO NOAH, 
NO NOAH, NO NIMROD
 NO NIMROD, NO
 MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION

Different parts of the world vary in the number of languages they contain.

 Prior research has suggested that climate plays a major role in this variability. When social groups live in areas with high seasonality and unpredictable rainfall, they are more likely to develop a shared language with other communities across larger land areas to mitigate ecological risks. 

Hua et al. draw on a global dataset of 6425 languages to confirm the climate variability hypothesis against competing hypotheses related to landscape features and biodiversity, while statistically controlling for spatial and phylogenetic factors. These results provide insight into how stable climates support small social group living and how more-variable climates support the formation of larger coalitions.

Global distribution of language diversity. Left panel: values on a logarithmic scale of number of languages are shown for 200 × 200 km cells of an equal-area grid.

Nat. Commun. 10, 2047 (2019).

CLIMATE LITIGATION: TORT NINE FROM OUTER SPACE

Lawyers Are Gearing Up For Lawsuits Over Asteroid Strike... Seriously

Were you or a family member struck by an asteroid? 

 You may be entitled to compensation.

One wouldn’t imagine that an extinction-level event would generate a lot of litigation, but apparently that’s a topic that more than a few people spend their time worrying about as more and more asteroids are reported skirting dangerously close to the Earth.

Asteroids really need better lobbyists because we’ve done wonders converting all sorts of activities to lower standards of liability over the years.

FROM COSMOS:One problem is what would happen if one country, worried about protecting its own citizens, attempted to deflect the asteroid, screwed up, and accidentally dumped it on a neighbour.Space law, says David Koplow of Georgetown University Law Centre, Washington DC, is based on the principle of strict liability.

“The concept is that space activities are hazardous and therefore the harm should not fall on an innocent bystander,” Koplow says. It’s a particularly important problem, [Petr Boháček, of Charles University in Prague] says, because the nations at risk of being hit by an asteroid may not be the ones with the greatest geopolitical power. “Asteroids do not discriminate,” he notes. 

The nation-state concept of sovereignty, he adds, dates back several hundred years.“I’m not sure how many concepts from the seventeenth century you use in your decision-making,” he says, “but making decisions for planetary defence based on this dinosaur method of decision-making may not be the best choice.”

Still, this adds a wrinkle to the film Armageddon, where the U.S. sent a bunch of untrained oil rig workers who hadn’t, to that point, caused a massive oil spill, armed them with nuclear weapons, and sent them to blow up an asteroid

. Would America have thought twice about that plan that only gets more absurd every time you think about if it expected to face strict liability for sending a number of city-smashing chunks into other countries?

The answer is almost assuredly “no” because America’s concern for the countries that would get smashed in this scenario is next to nil.

But this is the struggle for lawyers studying the asteroid hypothetical: who is responsible for failing the world and, probably more importantly, who is responsible for saving it?

TORIES GREET UKIP CLIMATE SUPREMO'S 10 DOWNING RUN

 WILL MONCKTON STAND IN IF DELINGPOLE FALLS?

ASPIRING CLIMATE REFUGEES CROWD EVEREST SUMMIT

"I am thinking you  cannot  be too precautionary " said Dacca resident Ali Sundarban, grasping the guide rope as he sheparded his extended family past the 8,800 meter  elevation mark on Mount Everest. 

"With so much talk of sea level rise in quality newspapers and the monsoon coming on, we are beating the uphill rush hour with just 341 people in front of us in queue for highest climate refugee status In applying for Miami visa, it is downhill all the way from the summit"

POTATO FAMINE FEARED AS GREENS GO POSTAL ON PLASTIC

Subscription Rebellion

A RISE IN NUT CUTLET
PRICES MAY FOLLOW

All UK subscriber copies of the
LRB  will  be in  potato - based biodegradable wrapping from this issue forward.

Overseas  wrapping  will  take longer as every country’s postal service has different guidelines, but the hope is that eventually all LRBs  across the world will travel in non-plastic wrapping.

Chris Larkin

LRB, London WC1

THEY DON'T MAKE CHEMTRAILS LIKE THEY USED TO

IN DAYS OF OLD, WHEN GASLIGHTING MEANT LIGHTING WITH  GAS, THAT LIGHT WAS BRIGHTENED BY THORIUM OXIDE 'WELSBACH MANTLES'.

THORIA'S CURIOUS INFRARED EMISSIVITY ENHANCED ITS INCANDESCENCE, AND LED HUGHES AIRCRAFT TO PATENT A NEW USE FOR THE OLD RADIOACTIVE REFRACTORY:

PALEODATA PUTS AOC 2020 PRESIDENTIAL RUN ON HOLD

  CANDIDATE NOW CONSIDERING 2156 & 2272 PRIMARIES

Temporal Scaling of Carbon Emission and Accumulation Rates: Modern Anthropogenic Emissions Compared to Estimates of PETM Onset Accumulation

Philip D. Gingerich  30 January 2019    https://doi.org/10.1029/2018PA003379
Abstract

The Paleocene‐Eocene thermal maximum (PETM) was caused by a massive release of carbon to the atmosphere. This is a benchmark global greenhouse warming event that raised temperatures to their warmest since extinction of the dinosaurs.

 Rates of carbon emission today can be compared to those during onset of the PETM in two ways: (1) projection of long‐term PETM rates for comparison on an annual time scale and (2) projection of short‐term modern rates for comparison on a PETM time scale. Both require temporal scaling and extrapolation for comparison on the same time scale. PETM rates are few and projection to a short time scale is poorly constrained. 

Modern rates are many, and projection to a longer PETM time scale is tightly constrained—modern rates are some 9–10 times higher than those during onset of the PETM. 

If the present trend of anthropogenic emissions continues, we can expect to reach a PETM‐scale accumulation of atmospheric carbon in as few as 140 to 259 years (about 5 to 10 human generations).

FIFTH ESTATE LATEST VICTIM OF SIXTH EXTINCTION

POLITICAL PLAYBOOK BASED SCIENCE JOURNALISM

The Nation

The Media Are Complacent While the World Burns

But there’s a brand-new playbook for journalists fighting for a 1.5°C world.

By Mark Hertsgaard and Kyle Pope

APRIL 22, 2019

This article is being jointly published with The Nation, Columbia Journalism Review’s partner in a April 30 conference aimed at reframing the way journalists cover climate change.

... the US news media need to remember their Paul Revere responsibilities—to awaken, inform, and rouse the people to action. To that end, The Nation and CJR are launching “Covering Climate Change: A New Playbook for a 1.5-Degree World,” a project aimed at dramatically improving US media coverage of the climate crisis. When the IPCC scientists issued their 12-year warning, they said that limiting temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius would require radically transforming energy, agriculture, transportation, construction, and other core sectors of the global economy. Our project is grounded in the conviction that the news sector must be transformed just as radically... There is a runaway train racing toward us, and its name is climate change. 

YALE CC CONTINUES--

Climate crisis … meet journalism crisis

So it’s into this double-edged conundrum that enters the proverbial knight in shining armor. It comes in the form of a new consortium of journalism interests with the specific purpose of vastly improving media coverage of the climate crisis...With a $1 million grant from the Schumann Foundation and its veteran journalist and author [AND WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY]  Bill Moyers, the new initiative met at Columbia in late April amid an admiring crowd of like-minded media representatives and concerned climate activists. 

... the session featured speakers and panelists who presented a number of salient observations about the nuts and bolts – and also about the heart and conscience and the blood and guts – of journalism in this current era, some no doubt more realistic than others:

• Author and activist Bill McKibben: “It’s not the job of journalists to see that people get upset, but the news is upsetting.”
• Book author, opinion columnist, and self-identified provocateur and activist Naomi Klein: “It is impossible to be apathetic about the end of the world.” ...
• Book author and journalist Hertsgaard discussed plans for “a journalist’s playbook for a 1.5 C [degree] world”
• Author and TV veteran Bill Moyers... bearer of the $1 million Schumann check: quoted David Attenborough as expressing climate concerns and resulting prospects for “the collapse of civilization and the extinction of much of the natural world.”

TIM'S MAD AS HELL, AND READY FOR A NETWORK REMAKE

World Leader’s Ignorance About Climate Change 

Continues Despite Simple, Obvious Evidence.

Guest opinion Dr. Tim Ball

Until Trump, and very obviously with his exception, weak, ignorant, pandering, people lead the western nations...The major reason for the problem of poor leadership is that natural leaders, who are born, not nurtured, know the populace is not ready to be led. They also know that anybody who steps forward to lead immediately becomes the target of a media who believes its divine function is to destroy anybody and everybody

Ignorance is a problem in itself but it is compounds itself because people, especially leaders, will lie and deceive to hide that ignorance... They don’t even know that the claim that CO2, especially from human sources is causing climate change, is completely without theoretical basis.

I know that no world leader read this because if they had, they wouldn’t daily display their ignorance. We are led by ignorant, uninformed, people... these ignorant leaders imposed their ignorance on other leaders.

We are led by fools and incompetents who deliberately choose to stay stupid by not looking at even the simplest of information. Now with the Internet it is easily available so the only excuse left is personal incompetence.