It is not a crisis. You can object to deforestation of parts of the still vast Amazon, but to call it a 'crisis' is to give drama a disagreement about a political agenda that Bolsonaro has departed from, but which the 'international community' wants to sustain.
You can also object to Bolsonaro and still see that his promise was to put Brazil before the "community" of world leaders and their ambitions and preoccupations. They have turned a sovereign decision into a 'crisis' because he refuses to defer to them.
Again, to observe that this is the dynamic does not mean you have to agree with Bolsonaro or his policies that have allowed the clearing of forest. The point is that the international order took its reach for granted, and has been tested. More tests will follow.
Many are coming to the realisation that the "environment" has become the vehicle for this remote "community", which asserts itself over others, in developing and developed economies, in its own interests, against democratic control over economies and lives.
That agenda has been advanced by inventing 'crises' at ever stage of its development. Its acquisition of power has required the dramatisation of one 'crisis' after another, starting with the population and resources myths of the late 1960s.
Earlier this month, a US academic fantasised about using military power to prevent Brazil's government making its own decisions about the management of its land. foreignpolicy.com/2019/08/05/who…
He asked: "What should (or must) the international community do to prevent a misguided Brazilian president (or political leaders in other countries) from taking actions that could harm all of us?" ...
And "how far would the international community be willing to go in order to prevent, halt, or reverse actions that might cause immense and irreparable harm to the environment..."
He said "In effect, the international community would be subsidizing environmental protection on the part of those who happen to possess the means ..."
And "...it might also give some countries an incentive to adopt environmentally irresponsible policies, in the hope of obtaining economic payoffs from a concerned international community."
The term "international community" was used four times.
It is the "international community" which is on fire, and it is this which upsets those anointed ones who are part of it.
It is notable that it is Macron, who faces a domestic crisis -- yes, and *actual* crisis -- who asserts an environmental 'crisis' to sustain his place on the world stage, speaking to the "international community". What little domestic democratic legitimacy he has is fading.
The more the "international community" and its members assert the "environment" as the basis for international relations, the more we can be sure that the "international community" has detached from their domestic populations.
That is not climate scepticism. It does not say "burn the forests". It is to say that politics precedes claims about the environment, which needs to be understood before environmental problems can be understood.
Blowhards like Dawkins are no help in that understanding.
Unhinged, desperate, degenerate, hollow politics tries to reassert itself and reinvent itself through seemingly "environmental" imperatives.
By my calcs, and on these stats a battery that could power the UK for a two-week midwinter Dunkelflaute would cost £5.8 trillion, and occupy a site with a footprint of 536 square miles, or a square area 23 miles long on each side.
This chap thinks that offshore wind farms grow like seaweed from the seafloor, and that their roots burrow massive trenches across the sea floor all the way to the coast, where they bud into substations to connect to the Grid. Wind is free, you see.
There's a lot of it about. I get dozens of replies like this a day from people, some claiming academic expertise, who are strongly convinced that they know that wind is free, but have never looked at the very simple arithmetic.
Renewable energy is invariably more:
* capital intensive
* resource intensive
* labour intensive
* land intensive
... than conventional energy production. Yet people still believe it is 'free' or cheaper.
It's an article of faith, not a conclusion of a rational process.
I don't think it is possible to overstate the profound unreality that dominates in SW1.
Even mainstream commentators are discussing the collapse of the established parties, the economic recession that has merely yet to be inaugurated, deindustrialisation, a deep crisis of values across the public realm, an immigration crisis that cannot be stemmed, prices out of control, even blandified high streets are disintegrating, and the risk of war...
Yet here is this plonker who believes that society and the entire economy can be reorganised, and the fact of policy failure can be washed away by glib, elongated gaslighting verbiage.
I went to extremely crappy schools. But I at least learned what the antecedents to the French and Russian revolutions were. Political correctness had already dissolved the English civil wars from the curriculum, but I'm pretty sure there are some lessons in that too. Perhaps Miliband and co went to even worse schools, but cannot think it possible that they are mistaken.
I'm not talking about £300 sparking revolutions here. I am talking about the catastrophic indifference to others epitomised by such idiot zealots that believe elections are mere formalities and a sideshow to coronations, whose agendas are set by higher courts.
I get called a "denier" and "big oil funded" -- neither of which is true. My fundamental question has always been: what kind of world do adherents to green ideology want to create and on what basis do they assume legitimacy for their projects?
For those who are preoccupied by "The Science"...
If you can't interrogate ideology, you don't know what science says. And that is because you don't know what you've told it or asked it.
Too many people believe that science is objectivity rather than the attempt towards objectivity. And too many believe that what science seemingly says is self-evident. But if the putative facts that science produces were self evident, then we would have no need of science.
Far from demonstrating "extreme weather", this report shows that there are milder winters, fewer frosts and less snow. It unsafely attempts to link floods to climate change, but even the IPCC reminds us that floods are not a meteorological phenomenon, and it is difficult to find any trends for attribution. "Hotter days" in the MO's metric can mean merely mild winter days, not the "lethal heat" that Guardian headlines will scream about. And on which point, the actually hotter days are merely free holiday weather, despite attempts to link them to "excess summer deaths", which fail as a climate change metric in multiple ways: the summer months see a much lower death rate; heatwave mortality was vastly higher in the past; only extremely vulnerable people are affected (who deserve better care); the death rate has fallen dramatically.
There is no climate crisis, despite the MO's desire to find it.
This is an especially silly chart. It seems to show how many days per year the temperature anomaly exceeds various temperatures. But it doesn't discriminate between summer and winter.
Look at the stupid headline the MO's report has already generated!
There is nothing in the report to make the claim that "extreme weather" has become "normal".
"Possible", as they are now styled, were PKA 10:10 -- and they were created to appear as a "grassroots" green organisation, to support the UK government's policy agenda.
But it all went wrong with some hideous -- and extremely expensive -- TV adverts.
"Splattergate" as it became known showed teachers, bosses, football managers trying to engage their charges with the climate message, and blowing up those who didn't cooperate.
They claimed it was self-satire, but it was too close to the bone.
The Green Blob is recycling its "air pollution" proxy battle of the climate war today with this "new" report from the @RCPhysicians. It claims that air pollution kills 500 people a week and costs the economy £500 million a week.