Climate change could mean the extinction of our species

[filghy2]

An after-thought: the one thing that has not changed since pre-revolutionary France is that the right still favours the interests of those who have wealth and power.

[Stavros]

Thinking of politics in terms of simple dichotomy between left=big government and right=small government is not very helpful.
Use of the terms left and right actually originates from pre-revolutionary France. The conservatives, who wanted to preserve the power and privileges of the monarchy, aristocracy and the church sat on the right of the national assembly. The reformers and/or radicals who wanted to reduce these privileges and increase the rights of the common people sat on the left. This dichotomy between conservatives and reformers/radicals is less relevant nowadays given how far the status quo has shifted in the reformist direction.
It is probably more useful to think in terms of three different dimensions: economic, social and defence/national security. It may also be useful to add a fourth dimension that cuts across these: nationalism vs internationalism.
Political parties characterised as 'right' these days generally favour less regulation/taxation of economic activity, but more regulation of social behaviour in the name of traditional values/'morality' and a more hawkish stance on defence/national security. The latter two positions are actually 'big government'. Moreover, there is a growing element on the right that favours economic nationalism (with tighter controls on trade and immigration), which is where the fourth dimension comes in. Parties characterised as 'left' generally favour more regulation/taxation of economic activity, more tolerance of diverse social behaviour and more emphasis on diplomacy/international cooperation rather than military power.
This shows why RV's simplistic notions are really very silly.

I usually find myself in agreement with your posts, but consider this one confused. I think that is because in addition to the problems of defining Left and Right in general terms, differences emerge in specific countries where left and right do not mean the same thing.

Replacing class struggle -at one time the acme of left-v-right, with Marine Le Pen's concoction: Mondialistes ou Patriotes is little more than an attempt to refurbish Nationalism as the driving force of politics, but where the definition of the Nation for Le Pen is quite clearly White and Christian and nobody else. It repudiates the Imperial past which incorporated France's Black colonies into the Republic -even today French citizens in the Caribbean vote in General Elections- but is most intense in its rejection of the idea that a citizen of France can be Jewish or Muslim.

Thus, on the one hand France's alt-right is close to the US alt-right and an element of the Republican Party that bases the whole of the American project from Jamestown to this morning as the realisation of the rights of White Christians to rule for their own benefit, regardless of class. There are differences, because the immigrant experience means that White Christians can be Catholic rather than Protestant, and while Jews for some should be expelled from America along with Muslims and Black Americans, other Republicans and possibly some alt-right even if they want them expelled, accept this is not a realistic option, whereas preventing the further influx of Latin Catholics is a keenly felt problem they wish would go away.

The problem deepens in Europe, because there has been a long-established connection between Socialism and Christianity, something Americans find inexplicable, if they even know about it. If the left has resonance here, it is because of a trend in early industrial Britain for artisans and unskilled labourers to choose local Christian community churches against the Established Church of England, doing so on the basis that the Gospels provided them with a moral authority that government and the church lacked.

These non-established religious groups stressed the importance of communities sharing the benefits of their labour in a moral economy where a person's needs were to be met from the community that produced it, notwithstanding the ownership of landowners and capitalist merchants. The roots of the Labour Party are thus found in thousands of working class communities which developed their own networks of power and representation that, until the creation of the party in 1900 were disparate and poorly organized.

This Christian basis for policies of justice and equality are also found on the continent in the Netherlands and Germany, but less so in Italy and France, where the left has since 1789 been anti-clerical, as has also been the case in Spain. Ireland, again, offers a quite different profile owing to the almost complete dominance of the Catholic Church, and where left and right has been a weak distinction to make, as politics tended to be shaped more by the conflict with Britain than the conflict within Ireland.

Into this mix, Marxism has had a varied career, and not a particularly successful one, but in its British expression, one sees its weaknesses and failures. The British Labour movement was, as is also true of the continent, split asunder by the Russian Revolutions and the success of the Russian Communist Party in creating alternative socialist parties that sapped working class loyalty often handing parliamentary success to its opponents. The creation of 'ghettoes' on the left meant that many Marxists gave up on the Communist organization to choose Labour as an effective vehicle for their careers, even though they were outnumbered in the party until Corbyn's spectacular rise to the leadership. The weakness lies in the fact that Labour is not an internationalist party so that even Marxists like Corbyn and McDonnell may give lip service to international causes but are in fact small-time nationalists.

A cardinal feature of Marx's concept of class was that it was like capitalist, international in character. But whereas Marx was careful to use class as a component of the social relations of capitalist society, he had no empathy with or even understanding of nationalism, even though it was becoming a more dominant factor of politics in the 19th century than class struggle. In fact the revolutionary role of the proletariat, a mission discovered through their development of an awareness of their own, actual power to create change, collapsed in 1914 as working class parties in Britain and Germany opted to support the nationalist rather than the revolutionary cause, a factor which persisted after the war and into the darker era of the Third Reich and the Second World War.

Thus emerged, for want of a better use of words, a 'soft left' which believed in the Parliamentary Road to Socialism, its best exemplar being the Attlee government of 1945. But while this suppressed the hard left, their persistence, and the drift of the 'soft left' to the 'Third way' incoherence of Tony Blair's New Labour, has emerged as a more powerful force than it was before. But, where is their internationalism? Corbyn and McDonnell have both campaigned against the UK's membership of the EU since 1973, as was true of their socialist guru Tony Benn, who, though he had an American wife, was completely uninterested in the USA as a country and usually dismissed its foreign adventures much as Corbyn does today. There is not even a shred of sympathy or understanding, and thus no solidarity with workers in China or Vietnam, and while Corbyn's Latin wives have given him a penchant for the state capitalism of Chavez or Morales, he has been markedly quiet about the drift to dictatorship in Venezuela and Bolivia.

The old tradition of Labour, its Christian sense of justice and equality may still reside in parts of Labour, but today the party is mostly a confused mess of pro-European technocrats and -were it not grotesque to use the term- national socialists who yearn to impose Socialism in One Country. The meaning of left and right was never more exposed as a confusing if meaningless distinction than in this unfit-for-purpose movement of second-rate party hacks and deluded students.

But if you want a even more toxic problem, consider the roots of the environmental movement, which today appears to most as a 'left-wing' movement because it takes on Big Business, Government and their supporters variously described as 'climate change deniers', Lumberjacks and Morons. Those roots are closer to what we think today of as Fascism than socialism, largely because the environmental movement elevated nature to the status of something close to religion as being, indeed, our 'natural condition'. It may have begun with the 'back to nature' movement that was a signal feature of the Romantic poets like Wordsworth, or part of the early hostility to industry that one finds in Goethe and Schiller in Germany, but it took off in the late 19th century when anxieties over population begged the question: can the environment support another billion people?

The answer was no, leading to respectable writers, like HG Wells, long before the Nazi genocide, to suggest a cull of useless humans may be the only way to save our green fields and fishy coasts, our over-burdened towns and cities, indeed, our very 'civilization'. Eugenics, scouting for boys, cold showers and the worship of mother nature became the roots of the movement which now looks so different because in the interim, we discovered that Genocide is not a good way to deal with the 'problem'.

Finally, in this over-long post, one notes that in the US, the environmental movement has been conservative but also effective -one thinks of the Sierra Club, the Wilderness Society and the Audobon Society taking the oil companies to court to delay the development of the oil industry in Alaska for years; whereas the Green Party in Germany emerged as a coalition of groups mostly if not exclusively fed up with the SPD's politics-as-usual and support for the nuclear energy sector. Whereas in the US the Green Party is a day-care centre for cranks and losers.

[Ts RedVeX]

The reason why flighty mentioned that both right and left wingers mean big government and less freedom for individual is exactly why I think it would be much more useful to class them both as left. There are simply no right-wing parties. No liberals - in its proper sense, who should be for freedom from any restrictions, be it social or economical.

Since your solar constant was 1.228kW 200 years ago, and is now between 1.318kW and 1.548kW then maybe, but only maybe, it would be wise to include its variations in your global warming, since that is a variation of 7.3% to 26% difference - that is shitloads over 200 years, if you ask me. Also, it would be nice to consider Milankovic cycles, and the facts that Earth's orbit is now becoming less eccentric, which equalises season's length, which implicates longer summers and shorter winters. It would also be nice to include axial precession in your global warming considerations, since it seems like it may be the time when the North Pole (ain't that at the same hemisphere North America is on?) is beginning to turn towards the Sun during perihelion and the temperatures in Australia during summer there are rather high. If I were you, I'd really stop bullshitting your fellow Americans about CO2 emissions, and tell them to get some shorts and flipflops as well as maybe plan moving somewhere else if I lived at a place that is already being affected by dangerous weather extremes rather than invest in inefficient solar panels.

[Stavros]

The reason why flighty mentioned that both right and left wingers mean big government and less freedom for individual is exactly why I think it would be much more useful to class them both as left. There are simply no right-wing parties. No liberals - in its proper sense, who should be for freedom from any restrictions, be it social or economical.
.

Liberal theory does not believe in freedom without restriction, as even in its most austere form, it maintains that freedom does not permit one person to harm another -it imposes limits to preserve a basic form of order in society. The claim that 'left' and 'right' can be defined in terms of their relationship to government, and the extent to which individuals are governed is limited to the status of a simple idea that is not met in the real world.

Solar panels have been so efficient in households in the UK they have been able to generate more electricity than they need and sell the surplus to the national grid.

[trish]

Since your solar constant was 1.228kW 200 years ago, and is now between 1.318kW and 1.548kW then maybe, but only maybe,...

As I said, the early measurements were crude. Consider the difficulties and factors that needed to be considered in making those early measurements of the solar flux at the Earth’s surface: atmospheric absorption on the day the measurement was made, exact determination of the experiment’s height above sea level, exact distance from the Sun when the measurement was made, proper measurement of the caloric rise of the measuring apparatus, time of day, day of year etc. Yes, Pouillet’s 1838 measurement was 1.228 kilowatts per square meter. In 1875 Violle’s measurement was 1.7 kilowatts per square meter. The average is 1.46 kilowatts per square meter. These two early measurements bound (below and above) the more accurate modern measurements you cited. The difference (even if we could count it as a surplus) is insufficient to account for the exponential warming of the Earth we been observing for over a century and a half. But yes, the current climate models do take into consideration the variations in the solar constant.

The Earth’s precession (the gyroscopic wobble of its spin axis), it’s orbital eccentricity and other orbital parameters vary through a complex set of not yet thoroughly understood cycles called the Milankovitch cycles. As you say, variations in these parameters will induce variations in the flux of solar energy reaching the Earth’s surface and do (when acting in synchrony) force changes in the Earth’s climate. The cyclic occurrences of Earth’s ice-ages are linked to the Milankovitch cycles. These cycles have (on a human scale) very large periods: on the order of tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of years (the period of Earth’s precession is somewhere around 25000 years and the period in the variations of Earth’s eccentricity is on the order of 112000 years). That’s why over the period of a mere 200 years these variations are largely negligible. However, if you want to include them in the current climate model, know that the Milankovich cycles are now slowing (by a very very small amount) the warming of the Earth. But they are no match against the greenhouse gases that billions of people have been dumping into the atmosphere over the past 1.5 centuries.

[Ts RedVeX]

Of course there needs to be order. That is the whole idea of having a state with its police and military forces. The thing is to restrict the nation's freedom in as little ways possible.

Solar panels are so efficient that government needs to subsidise their use at homes to make it potentially reasonable to buy and install the panels, along with all the batteries, inverters, drivers etc required for them to work properly with the grid. And all that only if you live in a sunny spot anyway.

Yeah the solar constant is measured in kW/m/m rather than kW. Taking some crude measurement from 200 years ago, probably burdened with high inaccuracy and adding it to a measurement taken with a more accurate contemporary instrument to calculate an average does not remove any error from the mean, which means you end up with a value as inaccurate as the most inaccurate value taken into consideration.

By the way, I haven't come across anything related to anything other that observed temperatures' analyses in that report you attached here.

[peejaye]

Solar panels have been so efficient in households in the UK they have been able to generate more electricity than they need and sell the surplus to the national grid.

Such a pity then that most of the UK population can't fucking afford them! New installations have plummeted by over 80% since 2016!
Figures from the Solar Trade Association(STA)

[Stavros]

Such a pity then that most of the UK population can't fucking afford them! New installations have plummeted by over 80% since 2016!
Figures from the Solar Trade Association(STA)

The Government since 2010 has helped increase the number of homes with solar panels as part of the Clean Growth Plan, and as seen in the Green Match link below local councils remain committed to subsidizing new projects, as indeed they should. There is no logic to leaving the development of solar to the markets as markets don't provide in this instance.

The problem has emerged from the dysfunctional government we have had since the elections of 2015 and 2017, David Cameron's colossal blunder over the EU Referendum, and the shambles of Theresa May's emergency 'government' which has all but knackered rational policy making as Ministers spend most of their time trying to focus on their jobs and careers outside the EU, while bickering with each other as if they were in a school playground. Thus, from the Solar Trade Association:

Since 2015, employment in the sector has fallen by at least two thirds from a high point of well over 30,000. Large-scale solar deployment has stalled (notwithstanding isolated exceptions that nevertheless prove this rule), and the revised feed-in tariff has seen a dramatic year-on-year drop in rooftop installations. In 2015, there were 155,000 new domestic installations that year receiving the feed-in tariff. In the first six months of this year, the number was less than 5,000. It is undeniable that the sector suffered unnecessarily as a result of knee-jerk policy making in the aftermath of the 2015 election where solar was wrongly and public blamed for the LCF overspend. Ministers are keen to describe UK solar as a success story, and so it is. But what we need now from the Government is certainty and partnership for the future, rather than basking in past successes. The fact is, as the recent REN21 report showed, positive policies are still vital to the solar industry internationally. It is ironic that Solarcentury, a stalwart of the UK sector since the late 1990s, is now exporting successfully our UK solar expertise literally all around the world, while the UK domestic market remains in downturn.
http://www.solar-trade.org.uk/one-st...-solar-policy/

Leaving the EU could reverse the trend toward carbon efficient homes as the UK runs out of money, unless some courageous politician steps forward to announce an increase in income tax.

https://www.greenmatch.co.uk/blog/20...ded-by-council

http://www.solar-trade.org.uk/its-ti...reconceptions/

[peejaye]

Your stupid fucking answer to everything! Br-exit? Is that it? What the fuck is "Ministers focussing on careers outside of the EU" supposed to mean? They already have a job as an MP?

Go & see your Doctor to see if you can get something for it! Oh....& good luck! My surgery doesn't do appointments over the phone anymore, they're all taken! You have to go down there at 8am & join the queue(line) to book an appointment for that day! I suppose that's the fucking fault of Br-exit too? You Nutters!

[trish]

Yeah the solar constant is measured in kW/m/m rather than kW. Taking some crude measurement from 200 years ago, probably burdened with high inaccuracy and adding it to a measurement taken with a more accurate contemporary instrument to calculate an average does not remove any error from the mean, which means you end up with a value as inaccurate as the most inaccurate value taken into consideration.

Yes, you got it: the cruder the measurement the wider the margin of error. If the older data is included in say, your calculation of ocean rise or say, your calculation of the Earth’s temperature anomaly, then your prediction will also include a somewhat larger margin of error.

A few posts ago you were eager to include Pouillet’s calculation of the Solar Constant because you thought the higher modern values meant there was an increase in the solar flux that could account for global warming. (It wouldn't have.) But of course Violle’s higher measurement throws a monkey wrench into that maneuver. So now you want to exclude the 19th century measurements.

It doesn’t matter. You can do the calculation either way. Leave out the 19th century measurements of the solar constant altogether, or put them in. You can leave out the effect of Sunspot activity or include it. Leave out the effect of the Milankovitch cycles or put them in. Either way you’ll find that at this moment in time the greenhouse-effect utterly swamps all other factors that might modify the temperature of the our planet. The current warming trend is indisputably due, primarily, to the precipitous rise of greenhouse gases that humans have been dumping into the atmosphere for over a century.