Climate change science resources

Eally? And that is true of all those over one hundred organisations from nearly every country in the world?

 

Your graphic is lying propaganda.

 

Yes. In no case does the political position on anthropogenic climate change taken by such organizations at the behest of their political administrators represent an actual position expressed by the majority of their individual members. Not one. That's because it is a political position, not a scientific one.

 

Yes, necessarily, if the antiscientific CAGW narrative is to be sustained.

I just browsed several issues. Very few of the papers have anything to do with AGW. Most seem to be about energy policy and technology with special reference to poor countries, and written by authors in such countries, who typically have impaired access to publication in the more prestigious peer-reviewed journals. So you are just makin' $#!+ up again.

 

And meanwhile Milton Friedman's 4-decade-old supply-side economics based on now dysfunctional free markets (google's monopoly power, public costs of covid emergency etc) is creating near civil-war conditions in the body politic, as poverty remains endemic in the midst of plenty, and spiralling inequality continues apace.

 

A bit overwrought don't you think? We are nowhere near "civil war conditions" and poverty in the midst of plenty is a natural condition of life.

 

"It's the economy, stupid".

And given there is no actual shortage of resources or productive capacity which would preclude the elimination of poverty, then the failure to eliminate poverty must be a political choice, rather than economic 'natural law'.

 

Unfortunately, history shows that people generally think that right up to the moment the civil war starts.

No it isn't. It doesn't occur, ever, in the kind of hunter-gatherer and nomadic herding societies that human beings naturally evolved in. Poverty in the midst of plenty can only be created artificially, through government policies that forcibly transfer wealth from the poor to the rich. In modern capitalist economies, that transfer is almost always effected through privileges such as land titles, bank licenses, IP monopolies, broadcast spectrum allocations, and oil and mineral rights that remove people's liberty rights and convert them into the private property of those who own the privileges.

 

I am sure some poverty is being generated by political policies, but some is due to the person who has mental deficiency or just refuses to stay off drugs and other bad decisions that takes away their opportunity to get out of poverty.

 

Poverty is the result of myriad choices, some collective and some individual. It is also a product of simple bad luck. I don't claim it can never be eliminated, but I observe that it never has been, so I'm not holding my breath.

 

Private property is a foundation of liberty. And if you want to live as a nomadic herder or a hunter-gatherer, be my guest.
As for civil war, I've actually been in the middle of one. I can tell the difference.

 

There are three basic causes of poverty in the midst of plenty:
1. Least important is bad luck -- illness, accident, crime, the roll of the genetic dice that comes up snake-eyes, etc. that render a small number of people unable to be responsible for themselves.
2. Next is individual choice, or the fecklessness you identified -- profligacy, laziness, addiction, dishonesty, violence, etc.
3. But by far the most important is privilege: the legal entitlements of the privileged to benefit from the abrogation of others' rights without making just compensation. Most of the poor would not be poor if they did not constantly have to pay the privileged full market value just for permission to work, shop, get an education and health care, access desirable public services and infrastructure, etc.

 

And of slavery. Can you find a willingness to know the fact that property in the fruits of one's labor is a foundation of liberty, but privilege -- property in others' rights to liberty -- is a foundation of slavery?

My point is that those economies are natural, but contrary to your claim, they never produce poverty in the midst of plenty. Only the artificial legal construct of privilege can do that.

Maybe you can, maybe you can't. Did you predict it before it started? How long before? What odds would you have given? The fact remains that historically, the great majority of people have always been caught off guard by the outbreak of civil war: "all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed." -- Declaration of Independence

 

Slavery was for almost all of human history an accepted form of property. It is no longer, and our modern sensibility finds it repellent. So be it; times change.
You are correct that hunter-gatherer and nomadic herder societies don't produce poverty in the midst of plenty; they produce poverty in the midst of poverty.
The Liberian Civil War and the incompetence with which it waged were indeed foreseeable.

 

Poverty is self-inflicted and that is not Milton Friedman's fault.

So, here's some guy on a video with $1,200 of butt-ugly tattoos whining incessantly that he doesn't have $400 cash for an emergency.

Gosh, if he put $400 in a savings account and then only got $800 of butt-ugly tattoos he'd have $400 for an emergency.

 

Global warming is a lie. Period.

Palaeo data suggest that Greenland must have been largely ice free during Marine Isotope Stage 11 (MIS-11). The globally averaged MIS-11 sea level is estimated to have reached between 6–13 m above that of today. [emphasis mine]

https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms16008

“Even though the warm Eemian period was a period when the oceans were four to eight meters higher than today, the ice sheet in northwest Greenland was only a few hundred meters lower than the current level, which indicates that the contribution from the Greenland ice sheet was less than half the total sea-level rise during that period,” says Dorthe Dahl-Jensen, Professor at the Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen, and leader of the NEEM-project. [emphasis mine]

https://www.nbi.ku.dk/english/news/n...e-of-the-past/

Your vaunted "scientists" (snicker) cannot explain:

1) Why sea levels are lower than all previous 8 recorded Inter-Glacial Periods

2) Why sea levels were higher in all 8 previous recorded Inter-Glacial Periods

3) What the actual true sea level during this Inter-Glacial Period should be.

The whole basis of "global warming" can be dumbed-down to: "We built cities on coasts before we had a freaking clue how the Earth works and our control freak mentalities delude us into thinking we can control sea levels."

 

Is it mere modern sensibility and the changing times that make slavery repellent, or is there something essentially vicious about it? And if so, what? If people being owned as property is inherently wrongful, what is the moral basis of property in other things?

Not really. While primitive economies are not very productive, one can't say that they produce poverty because even their modest division of labor and accumulation of capital goods enables a standard of living well above the chronic want of, say, chimpanzee societies. People living in such economies typically enjoy substantial leisure, which, absent government interventions, the poor in more advanced economies do not.

It doesn't take much thought to understand that most post-colonial African countries have severe governance issues that make civil war likely. But did YOU foresee the Liberian civil war? How long in advance? And how many others did?

 

Read "Nickel and Dimed" by Barbara Ehrenreich, and try to at least minimally inform yourself.

What makes you think he can open a savings account? Are you perhaps unaware of why the poor have to pay exorbitant fees just to get checks cashed?

 

Of course there was always something inherently vicious about slavery. So what? "Inherently vicious" describes much human behavior down through the ages.
Primitive economies do not produce poverty; they are the products of poverty.
Liberia was never colonized. I'm not going to get into details except to say the civil war was not a surprise.

 

So what is it? Why is owning someone else's right to liberty as your private property inherently vicious? What is it that makes that kind of private property a foundation not of liberty but of slavery?

Right. And a lot, if not most of it, has been rationalized and justified as being a necessary ritual of human sacrifice to propitiate the Great God Property.

Liberia was originally founded by the American Colonization Society, and while it was never a formal colony of the USA or any European country, its history is very much in the colonial mold:

"...the Americo-Liberians replicated the only society most of them knew: the racist culture of the American South. Believing themselves different from and culturally and educationally superior to the indigenous peoples, the Americo-Liberians developed as an elite minority that held on to political power. They treated the natives the way American whites had treated them: as inferiors. The natives could not vote and could not speak unless spoken to. Just as people of color were prohibited from marrying white people in most of the United States, the indigenous Africans could not by law marry Americo-Liberians. Even when some indigenous Africans became educated in Western ways, they were broadly excluded from government positions.[24] Indigenous tribesmen did not enjoy birthright citizenship in their own land until 1904."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberia#Early_colonization

 

Wrong.

Oxfam today has noted that since the beginning of the pandemic, the 10 wealthiest individuals in the world have increased their wealth by $700 billion, while 1 billion people have fallen back into poverty.
Even in the 1st world, eg, poverty in the UK has increased while the wealthiest Britons have increased their wealth...without lifting a finger....

Such is the evil of the current neoliberal free market orthodoxy ruling the Western world.

Bill Mitchell – Modern Monetary Theory – Macroeconomic research, teaching and advocacy (economicoutlook.net)

(the above is a link)

"IMF actions in Ecuador expose its venal motivations"

There is clearly confusion among mainstream economists as the fractures in their paradigm are being revealed on an almost daily basis. And the more venal ideological motivations are also becoming clearer, that is, if they weren’t already completely transparent. On January 21, 2021, the World Bank published a Policy Research Working Paper – Does Central Bank Independence Increase Inequality? – which demonstrated that the way central banking has been conducted in this neoliberal era has been instrumental in the increasing income inequality that has manifested.

Note: The IMF lending practices following Friedman's supply side ideology have been devastating nations for decades.

Yes......what happened to his education......

Provided he had secure above poverty employment, and learned how to resist the junk-consumerism pushed by amoral profit-seeking grubs in the private sector free market.

eg "Things go better with (this sugary s***)".
No they don't, you'll get diabetes.

 

The difference is in the evolution of our moral sense. The concept of "no property in man" was a product of the Enlightenment's humanist flowering. Before that, slaves were just like other property. Looking back from our post-Enlightenment perspective it looks vicious; to our pre-Enlightenment ancestors it did not.
As I said, property is fundamental to the establishment and protection of rights.
For the American Colonization Society, establishing Liberia was not a means to extend US control into Africa, but rather to exclude the former slaves from the US. From the US perspective, the behavior of the Americo-Liberians in Liberia was a matter of complete indifference.

 

Note my underlined: economists are increasingly seeing a SYSTEMS problem, in respect of which:

Oxfam today has noted that since the beginning of the pandemic, the 10 wealthiest individuals in the world have increased their wealth by $700 billion, while 1 billion people have fallen back into poverty.
Even in the 1st world, eg, poverty in the UK has increased while the wealthiest Britons have increased their wealth...without lifting a finger....

Such is the evil of the current neoliberal free market orthodoxy ruling the Western world.

Bill Mitchell – Modern Monetary Theory – Macroeconomic research, teaching and advocacy (economicoutlook.net)

"IMF actions in Ecuador expose its venal motivations"

There is clearly confusion among mainstream economists as the fractures in their paradigm are being revealed on an almost daily basis. And the more venal ideological motivations are also becoming clearer, that is, if they weren’t already completely transparent. On January 21, 2021, the World Bank published a Policy Research Working Paper – Does Central Bank Independence Increase Inequality? – which demonstrated that the way central banking has been conducted in this neoliberal era has been instrumental in the increasing income inequality that has manifested.

And the IMF has been imposing "austerity' on any nation unfortunate enough to require a loan nations for decades, following Friedman's neoliberal supply side orthodoxy, which has also resulted in the lower-taxes, lower-government-spending mantra of Consevatives in neoliberal economies.


In fact MMT explains how a minimum (above-poverty) wage can be implemented, BECAUSE there is no shortage of resources (.....or useful employment!) that would prevent that outcome.

MMT: Sense Or Nonsense? (forbes.com)

"Paul Krugman had already been in the fight against MMT for some years, and now eminent mainstream economists Lawrence Summers and Kenneth Rogoff have thrown their hats into the ring. I know I’m not going to settle anything by adding my two cents, but I just have to get this off my chest. Long story short: Krugman/Summers/Rogoff are wrong".

 

Economists shmeconomists. Wake me up when they're done talking.
Some rich people found ways to profit, and some not-rich people have suffered. We call that life.

 

That clearly can't be true. If property in others' rights to liberty isn't fundamental to the establishment and protection of rights now, it couldn't have been during the thousands of years when it was legal and accepted, either. That proves there is something wrong with your idea that property per se is fundamental to the establishment and protection of rights -- a proposition, btw, that you have not even attempted to demonstrate or provide any logical or factual evidence for.

"No property in man" is a red herring because it is easy to prove that property in other things is equivalent to property in man. Consider the earth's atmosphere. It is not a human being; but if it were someone's property, and everyone else had to pay them rent for air to breathe, then we would all effectively be the slaves of its owner. Therefore it is not specifically and exclusively property in man that is the problem with slavery, or with your claim that property is fundamental to the establishment and protection of rights.

No, they were just as different from other property then as now. The difference merely went unappreciated by our ancestors, just as the difference between different kinds of property now goes unappreciated by you.

But it nevertheless was. Our pre-Enlightenment ancestors also did not know that disease is not caused by witches' curses. That doesn't mean disease was caused by witches' curses before the Enlightenment.

Yes, you have made that claim, but have offered no factual or logical evidence for it. It indisputably cannot be true as stated, because both the historical example of chattel slavery and the hypothetical example of the earth's atmosphere (and an arbitrarily large number of other hypotheticals) prove it is false. How do you know you are not as wrong about property as our ancestors were about slavery? Consider:

“When the emancipation of the African was spoken of, and when the nation of Britain appeared to be taking into serious consideration the rightfulness of abolishing slavery, what tremendous evils were to follow! Trade was to be ruined, commerce was almost to cease, and manufacturers were to be bankrupt. Worse than all, private property was to be invaded (property in human flesh), the rights of planters sacrificed to the speculative notions of fanatics, and the British government was to commit an act that would forever deprive it of the confidence of British subjects.”
– Patrick Edward Dove, The Theory of Human Progression, 1850

Please explain the difference between your claim and the logically equivalent claims of the anti-abolitionists.

But was nevertheless effectively colonial, with all the associated implications for Liberia's modern governability problems -- especially the fact that its borders were established without regard for either local tribal divisions or the rights of the indigenous peoples.