Farmers and Global Warming

I also read the print version of the lead article for the March 2005 edition is (you will need to either buy the magazine or subscribe online to read the whole article):

Scientific American: How Did Humans First Alter Global Climate? [ CLIMATOLOGY ]
A bold new hypothesis suggests that our ancestors' farming practices kicked off global warming thousands of years before we started burning coal and driving cars

Some banal comments are:

• Trees bad, farming good (unless you like lots of snow and ice)
• Fatulence good for the same reason
• Chinese rice farmers good for the same reason

I find it hard to believe that there were enough people in the whole world 8,000 years ago to clear enough forests in order to farm, that the downward trend in the proportion of carbon dioxide in the air was stopped and reversed. Our ancestors must have been beavers to clear that much timber - puts the Tasmanian Timber Industry to shame (slackers!).

On the other hand, irrigated rice production in Southern China stopped the downward trend in the proportion of Methane in the air at about 5,000 years ago. All that rotting vegetation lying in water produces Methane. Again, I am amazed that there were enough people alive then to have such an effect.

The author contends that, so far, farming has contributed 0.8 degree C to global warminng while industrialisation has contributed 0.6 degree C (but is gaining fast).

The problem of global warming is not that it is occurring but how can we manage it for the survival of the human species, and other species as well?

There is a sidebar to this article that purports to show that pandemics influence the proportion of Carbon Dioxide in the air by killing enough people so that forests have time to grow back and stored away Carbon Dioxide. The accompanying graph belies his whole thesis. Maybe I am just a dunderhead.

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More on Behind the Hockey Stick

I have got around to reading the article

Scientific American: Behind the Hockey Stick
Seven years ago Michael Mann introduced a graph that became an iconic symbol of humanity's contribution to global warming. He has been defending his science ever since

My own thoughts on this matter are that science has come into conflict with the ruling ideology of Capitalism and one of them must give way. Since the Capitalists control the State with its instruments of terror, I would say that the scientists would have to give way. This is not strictly true as there is a significant minority faction of the ruling class who would benefit from tackling climate change. I think this faction would like to preserve Capitalism in a 'nicer' form.

There is a Dummies guide to the latest “Hockey Stick” controversy by Michael Mann et.al.

I think I understood what it was all about.

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The Disabled and the Left

Mickey Z (MZ) gives Mary Johnson (MJ) The Million Dollar Interview after first commenting that:

Journalist (and crip) John Hockenberry recently wrote that the same critics heaping praise on Clint Eastwood and "Million Dollar Baby" have "failed millions of Americans with disabilities by accepting as utterly plausible the plot-twist that a quadriplegic would sputter into medical agony in a matter of months and embrace suicide as her only option in a nation where millions of people with spinal cord injuries lead full long lives."...

I might add that the disabled are more than crips. We have mental, motor, auditory, and visual impairments among others.

Towards the end of the interview, there is this exchange:

MZ: Why have progressives/radicals been so hesitant and/or resistant to aligning with the disability rights movement? It seems like a natural fit.

MJ: This is a theme I seem to return to over and over, for it is very painful for me-and for most of the disability activists I know-to realize that progressives are rarely any better on our issues than conservatives, and sometimes actually much worse. The concepts of individual rights and an egalitarian society, concepts that drive disability rights thinking, are borrowed from liberal ideology, and most of the activists in the movement today come from backgrounds in the civil rights, women's rights, anti-war movements of the 60s and 70s. Yet, get any group of disability activists together for more than a few minutes and you'll start hearing the familiar griping about how liberals don't "get" disability rights. ...

Emphasis Mine

I think this came to the fore during the case of Amar Ahmed Mohammed who was a Mongoli that was set up as a suicide bomber during the Iraqi elections. The conservative bloggers all condemned the plotters for this dastardly deed (rightly so) and also condemned the apparent silence from the liberal bloggers (again rightly so). (Mine is an obscure one). The conservatives were further justifying the war on Iraq in terms to get rid of these bastards, and were claiming the moral high ground over the liberals.

In this case, the conservatives were using the disabled to beat the liberals over the head for their indifference to the fate of Mr. Mohammed. Even mine own comment on this matter was pathetic.

My previous rants on this subject are at:

• Ode To Failure
• How Dirty Harry Turned Commie
• Piss On Pity

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Behind the Hockey Stick

Following on from Tide turns on the green-mongers, there is an article at Scientific American. In accordance with their terms of use, here follows their link:

Scientific American: Behind the Hockey Stick
Seven years ago Michael Mann introduced a graph that became an iconic symbol of humanity's contribution to global warming. He has been defending his science ever since

Michael Mann maintains a weblog at www.realclimate.org

The lead article for the March 2005 edition is (you will need to either buy the magazine or subscribe online to read the whole article):

Scientific American: How Did Humans First Alter Global Climate? [ CLIMATOLOGY ]
A bold new hypothesis suggests that our ancestors' farming practices kicked off global warming thousands of years before we started burning coal and driving cars

As I only got the magazine today, I will not comment further until I have read and digested these article.

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Car thieves, not police, to blame for chase deaths

The concerns of the consumers of the Liberal Media are on display at Car thieves, not police, to blame for chase deaths. The comments from these SMH readers can be summarised as that property is more important than human life. This is the typical class interest of the liberal media readers who are petite bourgeois or worker aristocracy (or, in Ward Churchill's term, 'the Little Eichmanns'). The police are there to protect property and the lives of the property owners before that of those who do not have as much property or none at all. And of course, the problem of crime is due to people living in these places such as Macquarie Fields, Redfern, Gaza, Fallujah, Genoa, Chicargo, Los Angeles, etc.. In all of these cases, repression breeds resistance and the nature of the oppression determines the nature of the resistance. We are all now living in a war-zone - the class war zone.

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Cuban Elections

As of today, there are only four (4) news stories about the upcoming municipal elections in Cuba (from Google News):

• Head of Cuban Parliament Calls Election Process a Unique Privilege
• Cubans Will Nominate Thursday Candidates for Municipal Assemblies
• Cuban Massive Turnout Expected for April Vote
• Participatory Democracy in Cuba

I suppose you would not find any mention in the Liberal Media or otherwise about democracy in Cuba. The corporate media has to maintain the pretense about the Cuban dictatorship.

What I find intriguing about the Cuban elections are:

• The high percentage of independents (non-Communists) that are elected. I think the percentage is greater than 50%.
• Electoral campaigning is prohibited. Candidates have be selected on their achievements and ability to do the job. Biographies about the candidates are posted in prominent places so the electors can view them.
• The electors first choose the list of candidates to stand at the election. No more branch stacking or back room deals.
• Voters are 16 or older. Voter registration is automatic once you turn 16.
• Most politicians are not paid. Those employed full time by the municipality are paid their old wages.

Most intriguing of all is this, at Participatory Democracy in Cuba

Every six months, all representatives, from the municipal president down, must account for their work to the electorate, who can revoke their mandate at anytime.

I wonder how many Australian politicians can withstand such scrunity?

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An ode to failure

Lexington of the Economist has An ode to failure in which he starts off with some reactions to Million Dollar Baby:

Dirty Harry's former friends on the right have reacted with horror to the film's unAmerican enthusiasm for euthanasia. In fact, the film is most remarkable as an extremely American parable on success and failure. When Ms Swank gets injured, her trainer is eaten up with guilt. But she tells him not to be so hard on himself: she is far happier to have tasted a little success and ended up a cripple than to have remained a nobody.

I have been unable to see the movie myself. All I know of the movie is from other people's reactions.

It would seem to me that success is defined by several things:

• Health
• Wealth
• Glory

Whereas Jesus had:

• An early death
• Poverty
• Infamy of the crucifixation

Thus Jesus was a failure by American standards. Ms Swank would rather die than live as a failure.

It is all these failures that keep the world going. We are the ones that toil and sweat to keep the farms, mines, factories, transport, and services running. You may spit on us but we are the blood that you suck so greedily.

For me, success is measured by:

• Honour
• Integrity
• Fortitude
• Courage
• Love

My previous rants on this subject are at:

• How Dirty Harry Turned Commie
• Piss On Pity

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Tide turns on the green-mongers

Miranda Devine hopes that Tide turns on the green-mongers and that

While breaking the jaws of Greenpeace protesters is not to be recommended, the story does illustrate that the good-natured, hear-them-out tolerance most of the world has afforded green hysterics for the past 30 years may be running out. After all, the dissent-crushing intolerance of the green movement is legendary.

Oh how, history is constantly being rewritten by the Ministry of Truth. All of those people killed, injured, jailed, fined, ignored, and bankrupted by the corporations over the decades by ...the good-natured, hear-them-out tolerance... must be shaking their heads at Ms Devine (except for the dead ones).

Ms Devine then writes

Another sign green-mongering is wearing thin is the bestseller success of Michael Crichton's latest thriller State Of Fear, a novel in which the bad guys are extreme greens who plot to create artificial environmental catastrophes, like a tsunami, to bolster support for their crusade.

Instead of tackling the corporations and governments for creating ecological catastrophes, like deserts, salination, soil erosion, dust bowls, depleted fish stocks, polluted rivers, Ms Devine posits a fictional world in which the Greenies are the bad guys - just like in the corporate media of which novels are a part. She says that because there is a market for such ideas, then such ideas must be valid. She ignores the fact the corporate media controls which ideas are presented to the public.

What's more, [Bjorn Lomborg] said the cost of one year's compliance with Kyoto "could give clean drinking water and sanitation to every human being on Earth".

No mention is made of the enormous amounts of money that is spent on the military worldwide of which one day's spending could achieve the same thing. So, the impression is that the Greenies are responsible for all the poverty in the world by diverting funds from the poor instead of the military which protects the corporations.

Ms Devine has well and truly earnt the pay of her corporate masters today in the Liberal Media.

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