Everyone agrees

 By Ben Jennings

Worst president ever

 From Time Magazine

The return of history

 

Forget the "hockey stick". Now we have the "scythe"

 From an article by Michael E Mann in Time Magazine.

“Widespread and severe”—that’s how climate scientists from around the world have described the impacts of climate change in a new United Nations report published today. The report’s findings further affirm warnings scientists like me have been sharing for decades. More than three decades ago, during a congressional hearing on a hot July 1988 afternoon in Washington, D.C., Dr. James E. Hansen told our elected officials that it was already possible to detect a warming of the planet due primarily to an increase in carbon dioxide concentrations from fossil fuel burning.

Hansen was prescient. It would take the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) another seven years after that to conclude that there was a “discernible human influence” on our climate. The IPCC, like many scientific institutions, is intrinsically conservative. So, when they state that the impacts of climate change are now “widespread and severe,”  it means that the impacts of climate change are now widespread and severe. Of course, you don’t need a scientific report to tell you that at this point. You need simply watch the unprecedented extreme weather disasters we’ve witnessed this summer play out in real time on our television screens and in our newspaper headlines.

With the release of the new Sixth Assessment report (“AR6”) on the science underlying the climate crisis, the news is not good. In addition to the finding that climate impacts are widespread and severe, the report shows that many severe impacts are locked in for the future.

Two decades ago, the so-called “hockey stick” curve, published by my co-authors and me in 1999, was featured in the all-important “summary for policy makers” (or “SPM”) of the 2001 Third IPCC Assessment report. The curve, which depicts temperature variations over the past 1,000 years based on “proxy” records such as tree rings, corals, and ice cores, showed the upward spiking of modern temperatures (the “blade”) as it dramatically ascends, during the industrial era, upward from the “handle” that describes the modest, slightly downward steady trend that preceded it.

Featured in the AR6 SPM now is an even longer hockey stick with an even sharper blade. [The "scythe"]

The new report also suggests that the recent warming is not only unprecedented over the past two millennia, but possibly, the past hundred millennia—let that sink in. As the IPCC report lays bare, we are engaged in a truly unprecedented and fundamentally dangerous experiment with the one planet we know that can support us and all other known life.

More than in its previous reports, the IPCC now truly connects the dots between fossil fuel burning, the warming of the planet, and the deadly extreme weather events we’re now enduring. And if we fail to act on the climate crisis, as the new report shows, we can expect more expansive wildfires, more intense hurricanes, hotter heat waves, and increasingly drenching flash floods. Given the horrific extreme weather we are already living through, you can trust me—we do not want this to get worse.

This is the cost we all are already paying for the delay that polluters have been sowing. It didn’t have to be this way. The fossil fuel industry knew a half century ago that their products—coal, oil, gas—would lead to the climate change future that we’re living in today. For them, the quick money was more important than being responsible corporate citizens to help build a sustainable future for mankind.

Instead, they spent millions of dollars on a massive disinformation campaign to convince the public and policymakers that climate change either wasn’t real, wasn’t a threat, or would be too expensive to do anything about (when in fact the opposite is very clearly true). They wrote a check that our children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren will be forced to cash if we fail to act, and which will leave them with a climate that will become increasingly untenable for civilization as we know it. Thankfully, there’s still time to prevent that stark future from occurring.

The new IPCC report shows that we can prevent many of the worst impacts of climate change and keep warming below 1.5°C above preindustrial levels—the target of the global Paris Agreement. While some impacts—like more flooding in coastal areas, continued glacial melt and sea level rise—are now baked in, we can still take steps to ensure they don’t get much more severe. If we can reduce carbon emissions dramatically, and keep warming below 1.5°C, we could, for example, hold sea level rise to just a couple feet over the next century. If we fail, the report shows we could ultimately be facing 20 feet or more of global sea level rise, a scenario where we’d be forced to say farewell to the major coastal cities of the world.

It’s possible to turn the ship around, but it won’t be easy. The IPCC has determined that planetary warming of 1.5°C (and possibly even 2°C) will be exceeded in a matter of decades “unless deep reductions in carbon dioxide, methane, and other greenhouse gas emissions occur in the coming decades.” That means we must reduce our carbon pollution from transportation, electricity and other sectors here in the U.S., and around the world. Climate change will be costly and disruptive, but it’s not yet beyond our capacity to adapt.

To limit warming to 1.5 degrees,

• Developed countries need to slash emissions by 50% by 2030, which means emissions need to fall by a compound 7.5% per annum.  This is feasible if we replace fossil fuels in electricity generation and transition our vehicle fleet to EVs and PHEVs.
• Developing countries (especially China)  need to build no new coal power stations and must start step-by-step replacement of their aging coal-fired power stations, as well as shift their car/lorry fleets to EVs
• To accelerate this process, fossil fuel subsidies must be withdrawn, and a carbon tax must be introduced.

It's not that hard, whatever the fossil fuel apologists say.

Greta Thunberg: Time's person of the year

People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction. And all you can talk about is money and fairytales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!

I want people to unite behind the science... And that is what we have to realize, that that is what we have to do right now.. I’m not the one who’s saying these things. I’m not the one who we should be listening to. And I say that all the time. I say we need to listen to the scientists.

We are facing an existential crisis... it will have a massive impact on our lives in the future, but also now, especially in vulnerable communities. And I think that we should wake up, and we should also try to wake the adults up, because they are the ones who — their generation is the ones who are mostly responsible for this crisis, and we need to hold them accountable.

----Greta Thunberg

Hat tip to Wayne.

Conservatism has lost touch with reality

From Time Magazine, old but still relevant:

"Conservatism is true." That's what George Will told me when I interviewed him as an eager student many years ago. His formulation might have been a touch arrogant, but Will's basic point was intelligent. Conservatism, he explained, was rooted in reality. Unlike the abstract theories of Marxism and socialism, it started not from an imagined society but from the world as it actually exists. From Aristotle to Edmund Burke, the greatest conservative thinkers have said that to change societies, one must understand them, accept them as they are and help them evolve.

Watching this election campaign, one wonders what has happened to that tradition. Conservatives now espouse ideas drawn from abstract principles with little regard to the realities of America's present or past. This is a tragedy, because conservatism has an important role to play in modernizing the U.S.

Consider the debates over the economy. The Republican prescription is to cut taxes and slash government spending — then things will bounce back. Now, I would like to see lower rates in the context of tax simplification and reform, but what is the evidence that tax cuts are the best path to revive the U.S. economy? Taxes — federal and state combined — as a percentage of GDP are at their lowest level since 1950. The U.S. is among the lowest taxed of the big industrial economies. So the case that America is grinding to a halt because of high taxation is not based on facts but is simply a theoretical assertion. The rich countries that are in the best shape right now, with strong growth and low unemployment, are ones like Germany and Denmark, neither one characterized by low taxes.

Many Republican businessmen have told me that the Obama Administration is the most hostile to business in 50 years. Really? More than that of Richard Nixon, who presided over tax rates that reached 70%, regulations that spanned whole industries, and who actually instituted price and wage controls?


In fact, right now any discussion of government involvement in the economy — even to build vital infrastructure — is impossible because it is a cardinal tenet of the new conservatism that such involvement is always and forever bad. Meanwhile, across the globe, the world's fastest-growing economy, China, has managed to use government involvement to create growth and jobs for three decades. From Singapore to South Korea to Germany to Canada, evidence abounds that some strategic actions by the government can act as catalysts for free-market growth.

Of course, American history suggests that as well. In the 1950s, '60s and '70s, the U.S. government made massive investments in science and technology, in state universities and in infant industries. It built infrastructure that was the envy of the rest of the world. Those investments triggered two generations of economic growth and put the U.S. on top of the world of technology and innovation.

But that history has been forgotten. When considering health care, for example, Republicans confidently assert that their ideas will lower costs, when we simply do not have much evidence for this. What we do know is that of the world's richest countries, the U.S. has by far the greatest involvement of free markets and the private sector in health care. It also consumes the largest share of GDP, with no significant gains in health on any measurable outcome. We need more market mechanisms to cut medical costs, but Republicans don't bother to study existing health care systems anywhere else in the world. They resemble the old Marxists, who refused to look around at actual experience. "I know it works in practice," the old saw goes, "but does it work in theory?"

Conservatives used to be the ones with heads firmly based in reality. Their reforms were powerful because they used the market, streamlined government and empowered individuals. Their effects were large-scale and important: think of the reform of the tax code in the 1980s, for example, which was spearheaded by conservatives. Today conservatives shy away from the sensible ideas of the Bowles-Simpson commission on deficit reduction because those ideas are too deeply rooted in, well, reality. Does anyone think we are really going to get federal spending to the level it was at under Calvin Coolidge, as Paul Ryan's plan assumes? Does anyone think we will deport 11 million people?


We need conservative ideas to modernize the U.S. economy and reform American government. But what we have instead are policies that don't reform but just cut and starve government — a strategy that pays little attention to history or best practices from around the world and is based instead on a theory. It turns out that conservatives are the woolly-headed professors after all.

(I did a shorter piece on this before, here)

True conservatives would embrace renewables, because they're cheaper.  True conservatives would worry about rising CO₂ levels because rising temperatures will probably cause major political and social upheaval, something real conservatives would instinctively try prevent.  True conservatives would be in favour of gay marriage, because marriage is associated with more stable and law-abiding citizens.  True conservatives would be in favour of free speech, not just for their side of politics, but also for people like Assange.  True conservatives would be cautious about being friendly with blood-stained dictators.  True conservatives might oppose welfare and high taxes, but would be willing to discuss them, and might see that deficit spending on infrastructure and economic development might be a good thing, even if it means that the government is a larger proportion of the economy.  True conservatives would be reluctant to allow monopolies, because conservatives were once in favour of freedom and the free market.

Economic growth in countries which embraced neo-liberalism, and run these days by the neo-conservatives, all have lower growth than they did under mixed-market Keynesian economics.  These countries also have greater inequality than they used to, and this increased inequality has made them more politically and socially unstable, something which should alarm and worry true conservatives. 

I consider myself a small-c conservative.  I'm in favour of evolution over revolution.   I believe the social compact is vital to civilised societies.  I don't see many true conservatives any more.  Lots of right-wing culture warriors, but no real conservatives.  

The new cover of Time magazine

From Time Magazine