HYUFD - OT, but responding to a post last night that I was too tired to respond to at the time.
You correctly pointed out that a lot of the Tories gains from the red wall were with big majorities and bigger than a number of the southern seats now. You deduced it makes them safer when there is a swing back. Sorry if I have any of that wrong, but I can't be bothered to reread it.
You may well be correct but surely there is a flaw in that logic. To have won these Labour strongholds and with big majorities and make them safer than seats held in the South, means there was not a uniform swing (although that might be over more than one election). So you have a non uniform swing, but you assume a uniform swing when making a future prediction.
If there is a uniform swing against you will be right, but if not as happened here to create this scenario you won't be.
I guess what is more important is why this happened and whether you still think this will be in play next time. I assume you think it will.
They can actually, because it depends on when you’re asking about. China is a significant player in renewable energy and up until about two years ago was gradually starting to replace its coal plants.
China's installed power capacity is largely coal. Even now it makes up more than two thirds of the mix.
Demand for energy is increasing by mid single % per year
Energy production from coal is increasing, but less than from other sources in percentage terms. But because the coal install base is bigger, the absolute increase for coal was initially greater than from other sources
This is becoming less the case and in 2019 the increase in production from coal was small. Renewables are becoming an increasingly important part of the energy mix.
Most of the investment is going into wind power
Putting some interpretation on this. The big difference between China and the UK is that demand for energy is increasing in China, while it is falling in the UK. When demand is falling it's easy to close coal power stations: you don't need them anyway. If you are also investing in renewables, that's great, you can close those coal power stations faster.
When demand is increasing and you are investing in renewables, you can add that extra capacity, but you still have a gap that can easily be plugged by coal power. You certainly won't close any.
The stats suggest 2020 might be the year coal starts going backwards in China. Renewables now have scale. But we won't see a rapid drop off of coal while energy demand is increasing.
Conservatism struggles to handle big challenges (like this) that demand action at the cost of immediate comfort.
act.
But that's just running around, wailing "but will nobody think of the children".
If you demand action, then be specific about the policies you want. If you're talking about net-zero by 2030, then you need to be looking at things like: - Banning new sales of petrol / diesel vehicles within 5 years; - fuel costs being taxed up to £3/ltr+ quickly; - A 100% tax on air travel tickets; - A 100% tax on electricity generated from fossil fuels
(And while we're at it, Labour stood in the 1935 election on a manifesto of disarmament and putting the abolition of the RAF on the negotiating table)
An excellent article. I also think Casino's analysis looks pretty credible, but sadly I am not as positive as Casino as to the state of the human race at that end point...
Yesterday I made a flippant comment really along the lines of 'I wouldn't start here' re population numbers. I enjoyed the funny responses eg 'Hi Adolf', 'Volunteers'. Although one person seemed to take this somewhat more seriously. As hopefully I made clear all I propose is making progress on eliminating poverty, removing financial incentives to reproduce and think more creatively re how to handle the change in the balance of demographics and economic growth. I noticed Nigelb responded to a post accordingly. Thank you.
I am rather more optimistic than Casino - if only because the scenario he envisages will end up being extraordinarily more costly than acting with a little more haste. And because we have the technologies to act much faster.
Well I agree with both of your reasons as to why you should be more optimistic, but sadly I fear the politicians from around the world will trump those benefits due to short term economic reasons all around and a few extreme idiots in power.
Glass half empty or glass half full view of the world.
We’ll start to have some idea which one of us us right by the end of next year. The world’s fate lies largely in the hands of the US and China, and if they make ill advised choices, that’s another half decade lost. It is a consequential coincidence that the US elections occur at the same time as the next five year plan is to be settled.
Mr. Cwsc, the global warming theory predicts mass doom unless drastic action is taken (some of the proposed measures are sensible either way).
It's entirely legitimate to doubt a theory's predictive powers when its predictive powers have been shown to be wrong multiple times in the recent past.
Where's the Mediterranean climate the UK was meant to get? Why was the total absence of snowfall predicted (in the UK) only for us to get two of the coldest, and snowiest, winters in living memory? Why wasn't the temperature plateau predicted and how can temperatures stay flat for consecutive years when the overall level of carbon dioxide was rising?
Predicting future climatic conditions isn't some sort of side-issue or minor matter for global warming theory, it's the beating heart of the entire proposition. If global warming theory can't accurately predict future climatic conditions it fails as a theory.
Are you really suggesting that people will vote Tory for a "generation" because they are "ideological Leavers"?
Brexit can't be an excuse forever. The "blue wall" is built on sand.
I was thinking about this in light of your comment last night. I was also trying to think of the biggest postwar swings towards an Opposition. I think they were in order, 1997, 1979, 2010, 1964.
To put these swings in context:
A 1964 style swing would roughly speaking take Labour back to 2015 style levels.
A 1979/2010 style swing, both similar in scale, would take them back to 2017.
A Blair style swing, a swing that gave Blair the largest single party majority in the age of universal suffrage, would still see them short of an overall majority. That’s how disastrous Labour’s situation is right now.
That of course makes many assumptions, not least about UNS. At the moment, the electorate is volatile and uncommitted. Tory Support is indeed a mile wide and an inch deep. It is possible that former Labour voters may revert (turnout was not radically lower than last time, so a lot of switching went on). Next time the Brexiteers will not be standing, which probably helps Labour. But it is very hard to see how any party can outperform national swing to a significant degree in over 100 seats. At some point, that would have to be the UNS. And the UNS required is fecking massive. If we assume the SNP hold up better than the Tories, it becomes even bigger.
Labour are in deep trouble. What’s more, nobody has yet offered a map out of it, except to limited extent Nandy. Starmer would do a holding job. Long Bailey and Thornberry would double down. They are reminding me of Westmoreland in Vietnam, who didn’t have a clue how to win but hoped if he bombed North Vietnam often enough they might negotiate.
Mr. Cwsc, correlation does not prove causation. Drownings and ice-cream sales in the UK have a very high degree of correlation.
Furthermore, the climate's been around for billions of years and our data for that could be politely described as limited. We know it's changed drastically in the past without any need for human (industrial) cause. In the late 17th century temperatures in the UK declined significantly, entirely naturally.
How would you explain the temperature plateau of a few years ago if the theory of carbon dioxide fuelling global warming is correct?
Likeliest, a natural cooling period due to cyclical sun activity - which might otherwise have seen frost fairs on the Thames again - was countered by man-made warming such that they cancelled each other out.
We don't know the affect of man on climate. But we can make some informed theories. And on the back of those, we can take a safety-first approach; man MIGHT be changing the climate, to the general detriment of swathes of the planet. So let's take some action. If we are wrong, then we are likely making no difference to the natural course of events (save for perhaps making the next ice-age a tad colder).
But it is up to science to take the lead. Our politicians should be granting great incentives - tax breaks, subsidies, prizes - to those implementing such scientific advances.
(We could also all use central heating far, far less. People in pass-out "toasty" warm houses bemoaning the loss of the polar bear when they have 37 different unworn jumpers in their wardrobe may not be a small part of the problem.)
Which is pretty well my attitude, though I’m rather more convinced of the science.
The gross investment in terms of worldwide GDP would likely be somewhere around 3-5% over the next twenty to twenty five years. As you’d end up replacing your entire energy system (for one with much lower marginal costs), the net cost to the economy is far less than that.
I am inclined towards believing the science, but the evangalists within the cause do themselves no good with the over-egging they engage in.
I agree that the world could make huge strides in approaching zero-carbon, for the cost of maybe little more than a one-off recession. Different horses for different courses. Many countries have a massive advantage in the potential for solar power. Some countries have fantastic wind resources. The UK has one of the world's best regimes for tidal power (along with Chile, Argentina, Mexico, Canada, France, India and Korea). All of these use a domestic resource, without having to import uranium for nuclear.
HYUFD - OT, but responding to a post last night that I was too tired to respond to at the time.
You correctly pointed out that a lot of the Tories gains from the red wall were with big majorities and bigger than a number of the southern seats now. You deduced it makes them safer when there is a swing back. Sorry if I have any of that wrong, but I can't be bothered to reread it.
You may well be correct but surely there is a flaw in that logic. To have won these Labour strongholds and with big majorities and make them safer than seats held in the South, means there was not a uniform swing (although that might be over more than one election). So you have a non uniform swing, but you assume a uniform swing when making a future prediction.
If there is a uniform swing against you will be right, but if not as happened here to create this scenario you won't be.
I guess what is more important is why this happened and whether you still think this will be in play next time. I assume you think it will.
It will as it matches the cultural change across the western world, in the US, Australia, Italy, Canada etc not just the UK ie the white working class moving right and voting for conservatives, the graduate middle class increasingly voting for left liberal parties
I'll dig out the graph later (somewhere on Human Progress Twitter page), but the area of fires in Australia is actually quite low this year.
What's unusual is that this year's fires have been in areas close to human population, as opposed to in the middle of the great nothingness that is 99% of Australia's land area.
A Starmer led Labour Party offering a return to the single market would have more chance winning Tory Remainers in London and the South than Labour Leavers who voted Tory at the last general election in the North, Wales and the Midlands
Starmer would be taking those southern "Tory Remainers" from the LibDems. where they went in 2019. Not huge electoral rewards there, modestly pushing up a Labour vote that in many seats is nowhere near the Tories.
Much of the Blue Wall is now gone for Labour anyway, maybe for a generation, Labour would win Watford, Chipping Barnet, Reading West, Chingford and Woodford Green, Hastings and Rye, Wycombe, Hendon, Milton Keynes North and Milton Keynes South, even Rushcliffe and Worthing East and Shoreham on UNS at the next election before they took Penistone and Stockbridge, Ashfield, Scunthorpe, Bishop Auckland and Great Grimsby.
That chart from electoral calculus, showing the vote churn between parties suggests otherwise.
For every Labour voter that went to the Tories, one went to the Lib Dems and two didn't vote this time.
When you consider the effect of Corbyn's total unpopularity unwinding, that Blue Wall may well be a lot shakier than you suggest. Labour don't need 6% of Tories to change their vote - they mostly need the Labour voters who didn't vote Tory, didn't vote, and a small Tory swing.
Labour to Tory switchers in the bluewall cast a positive vote for Brexit and for Boris, not just an anti Corbyn vote, they are unlikely to switch back whoever the Labour Leader is and are ideological Leavers.
Tory Remainers in London and the South who voted Tory in 2017 and 2019 did so mainly to keep Corbyn out, they might on the other hand consider a Starmer led Labour Party or the LDs with the threat of Corbyn removed, as might Remainers who went from Labour to LD.
Are you really suggesting that people will vote Tory for a "generation" because they are "ideological Leavers"?
Brexit can't be an excuse forever. The "blue wall" is built on sand.
While Boris is leader absolutely, ending free movement and regaining sovereignty is at the top of their agenda.
A Starmer led Labour Party offering a return to the single market would have more chance winning Tory Remainers in London and the South than Labour Leavers who voted Tory at the last general election in the North, Wales and the Midlands
But:
1. Starmer isn't offering a return to the single market
2. The end of free movement won't stop all immigration, and there are enough immigrants in the UK already to keep anyone who is anti-immigration angry for a long, long time.
3. Regaining sovereignty is an amorphous blob. People wanted to "take back control", but who will actually feel like they're more in control once Brexit is over? Without Europe to blame, the govt of the day will be more directly in the firing line.
Are you really suggesting that people will vote Tory for a "generation" because they are "ideological Leavers"?
Brexit can't be an excuse forever. The "blue wall" is built on sand.
I was thinking about this in light of your comment last night. I was also trying to think of the biggest postwar swings towards an Opposition. I think they were in order, 1997, 1979, 2010, 1964.
To put these swings in context:
A 1964 style swing would roughly speaking take Labour back to 2015 style levels.
A 1979/2010 style swing, both similar in scale, would take them back to 2017.
A Blair style swing, a swing that gave Blair the largest single party majority in the age of universal suffrage, would still see them short of an overall majority. That’s how disastrous Labour’s situation is right now.
That of course makes many assumptions, not least about UNS. At the moment, the electorate is volatile and uncommitted. Tory Support is indeed a mile wide and an inch deep. It is possible that former Labour voters may revert (turnout was not radically lower than last time, so a lot of switching went on). Next time the Brexiteers will not be standing, which probably helps Labour. But it is very hard to see how any party can outperform national swing to a significant degree in over 100 seats. At some point, that would have to be the UNS. And the UNS required is fecking massive. If we assume the SNP hold up better than the Tories, it becomes even bigger.
Labour are in deep trouble. What’s more, nobody has yet offered a map out of it, except to limited extent Nandy. Starmer would do a holding job. Long Bailey and Thornberry would double down. They are reminding me of Westmoreland in Vietnam, who didn’t have a clue how to win but hoped if he bombed North Vietnam often enough they might negotiate.
Indeed, if Labour got the 5% swing Cameron got in 2010 they would gain 56 seats, still well short if a majority but possibly enough with the LDs and SNP if the LDs also picked up enough southern Tory seats
An emergency indicates an immediate threat or impending crisis demanding serious action. With mild warming of 1degree or so this is clearly nothing of the sort. Hardly anyone could identify this on a daily basis and as current crop reports have shown, highly beneficial to food production. The media have lied,manipulated and continue to whip up frenzy on the basis of weather events that have happened in the past (eg Oz fires 1974) and falsehoods (eg more extreme weather) that have been shown inaccurate(IPCC agreed no evidence of increasing severe weather). People have not done their homework...the likes of the Guardian etc are proven liars and the BBC truly compromised.I implore everyone to check the historical records for themselves or read independent blogs(eg.WUWT,Paul Homewood and Tony Heller) and come back here and still say they believe this extremist nonsense.
HYUFD - OT, but responding to a post last night that I was too tired to respond to at the time.
You correctly pointed out that a lot of the Tories gains from the red wall were with big majorities and bigger than a number of the southern seats now. You deduced it makes them safer when there is a swing back. Sorry if I have any of that wrong, but I can't be bothered to reread it.
You may well be correct but surely there is a flaw in that logic. To have won these Labour strongholds and with big majorities and make them safer than seats held in the South, means there was not a uniform swing (although that might be over more than one election). So you have a non uniform swing, but you assume a uniform swing when making a future prediction.
If there is a uniform swing against you will be right, but if not as happened here to create this scenario you won't be.
I guess what is more important is why this happened and whether you still think this will be in play next time. I assume you think it will.
The Tories only picked up 40-50 seats. Many had been trending Tory gradually for many years. It is not unreasonable to assume some of them will buck the trend further by becoming more safely blue as say, Mansfield and Morley have, just as others in the south may follow the lead of Canterbury or Hove by trending Labour.
The problem is Labour need at least double that even to be able to put together a vaguely realistic minority governement. They have only ever twice made net gains of over sixty seats since the Second World War - 1945 and 1997.
A Starmer led Labour Party offering a return to the single market would have more chance winning Tory Remainers in London and the South than Labour Leavers who voted Tory at the last general election in the North, Wales and the Midlands
Starmer would be taking those southern "Tory Remainers" from the LibDems. where they went in 2019. Not huge electoral rewards there, modestly pushing up a Labour vote that in many seats is nowhere near the Tories.
Not all, I canvassed a number of Tory Remainers in Chingford who were not happy with Brexit but still voting Tory to keep Corbyn out.
Chingford and Woodford Green is now a far likelier Labour gain than say Great Grimsby
A Starmer led Labour Party offering a return to the single market would have more chance winning Tory Remainers in London and the South than Labour Leavers who voted Tory at the last general election in the North, Wales and the Midlands
Starmer would be taking those southern "Tory Remainers" from the LibDems. where they went in 2019. Not huge electoral rewards there, modestly pushing up a Labour vote that in many seats is nowhere near the Tories.
Not all, I canvassed a number of Tory Remainers in Chingford who were not happy with Brexit but still voting Tory to keep Corbyn out
But they are still Tories - and when push comes to shove, likely to stay so. Labour can't be relied upon to "do a Livingstone" and push out the moderates when they next get power. (As we will be telling such voters on the doorsteps....)
Much of the Blue Wall is now gone for Labour anyway, maybe for a generation, Labour would win Watford, Chipping Barnet, Reading West, Chingford and Woodford Green, Hastings and Rye, Wycombe, Hendon, Milton Keynes North and Milton Keynes South, even Rushcliffe and Worthing East and Shoreham on UNS at the next election before they took Penistone and Stockbridge, Ashfield, Scunthorpe, Bishop Auckland and Great Grimsby.
That chart from electoral calculus, showing the vote churn between parties suggests otherwise.
For every Labour voter that went to the Tories, one went to the Lib Dems and two didn't vote this time.
When you consider the effect of Corbyn's total unpopularity unwinding, that Blue Wall may well be a lot shakier than you suggest. Labour don't need 6% of Tories to change their vote - they mostly need the Labour voters who didn't vote Tory, didn't vote, and a small Tory swing.
Labour to Tory switchers in the bluewall cast a positive vote for Brexit and for Boris, not just an anti Corbyn vote, they are unlikely to switch back whoever the Labour Leader is and are ideological Leavers.
Tory Remainers in London and the South who voted Tory in 2017 and 2019 did so mainly to keep Corbyn out, they might on the other hand consider a Starmer led Labour Party or the LDs with the threat of Corbyn removed, as might Remainers who went from Labour to LD.
Are you really suggesting that people will vote Tory for a "generation" because they are "ideological Leavers"?
Brexit can't be an excuse forever. The "blue wall" is built on sand.
While Boris is leader absolutely, ending free movement and regaining sovereignty is at the top of their agenda.
A Starmer led Labour Party offering a return to the single market would have more chance winning Tory Remainers in London and the South than Labour Leavers who voted Tory at the last general election in the North, Wales and the Midlands
But:
1. Starmer isn't offering a return to the single market
2. The end of free movement won't stop all immigration, and there are enough immigrants in the UK already to keep anyone who is anti-immigration angry for a long, long time.
3. Regaining sovereignty is an amorphous blob. People wanted to "take back control", but who will actually feel like they're more in control once Brexit is over? Without Europe to blame, the govt of the day will be more directly in the firing line.
Starmer wants single market alignment which means free movement again and an end to the Boris points system for EU migrants
When it comes to the measures required to mitigate GW - the balance between state and market, coercion and incentives, unilateral and international - it is logical that there is a left v right split because these things are political. Where you stand on them will depend on your political outlook. But one would not expect a left v right split regarding the reality of GW. This is not a matter of politics but of climate science and probability theory.
There is no left or right wing science. There is no left or right wing probability theory. The boiling point of water at sea level does not depend on who owns the kettle. If I spin a coin I am not more likely to get tails because I am a Hard Left Social Democrat. Ergo it should not matter what a person's politics are in their coming to a view on GW and the human contribution to it.
There is a scientific consensus which you can accept or not. It is rational to accept it unless you both disagree and are a fully clued up expert in the field. The vast majority of those who reject the consensus do not fit that bill.
So why this odd behaviour from so many? I think we know why.
As explained above there ought logically to be no left v right split on this. Yet there is. A big one. Almost all of the dissenters are of the right and the reason for this is clear. They dislike the politics of most of the proposed solutions. They dislike the politics of GW and thus are motivated to find fault with the science. They should be taken seriously on the first but not the second.
A Starmer led Labour Party offering a return to the single market would have more chance winning Tory Remainers in London and the South than Labour Leavers who voted Tory at the last general election in the North, Wales and the Midlands
Starmer would be taking those southern "Tory Remainers" from the LibDems. where they went in 2019. Not huge electoral rewards there, modestly pushing up a Labour vote that in many seats is nowhere near the Tories.
Not all, I canvassed a number of Tory Remainers in Chingford who were not happy with Brexit but still voting Tory to keep Corbyn out
But they are still Tories - and when push comes to shove, likely to stay so. Labour can't be relied upon to "do a Livingstone" and push out the moderates when they next get power. (As we will be telling such voters on the doorsteps....)
No, many of them also voted Labour from 1997 to 2005 and given Labour will only get in power at the next general election with say Starmer and the LDs there will be no Labour majority in prospect.
Tory complacency after over a decade in power will not end well, the next election is not a certainty, we have to fight for it
O/T: great piece David Herdson, and thanks for mentioning the elephant in the room: human over-population.
It is also worth referring to "the tragedy of the commons" (Hardin).
I`ve come to believe that some form of global governance is the only answer, run on non-democratic lines.
It is called the UN but the US and China will never agree to global governance, if they change it will be by their choice
Yes - and that`s the problem. There is no practical answer, life on earth will become more and more impoverished. Wars will be fought over the last of the resources. The global species-count will fall and fall, mainly through habitat loss.
The tragedy is that no single human wants this, but collectively it the effect that our species has.
Mr. kinabalu, there was a strong consensus on the property of light for decades (perhaps centuries), namely that it's made of particles. This is because that was Sir Isaac Newton's view and deviation from that was considered heretical, putting back advancement in that area (wave-particle duality now being the dominant theory) significantly.
Science is inherently sceptical. Nothing is less scientific than blind faith and credulous acceptance without even a pause for thought.
You can just as easily rephrase your final paragraph: "As explained above there ought logically to be no left v right split on this. Yet there is. A big one. Almost all of the zealots are of the left and the reason for this is clear. They like the politics of most of the proposed solutions. They like the politics of GW and thus are motivated to find no fault with the science. They should be taken seriously on the first but not the second."
The primary message of David Attenborough and Greta Thunberg is that national politicians need to take on board the scientific consensus, which in general they have been reluctant to do. Comparing one's behaviour with others is a luxury we can not afford - in a sinking lifeboat one doesn't stop bailing out because others aren't doing their fair share.
When it comes to the measures required to mitigate GW - the balance between state and market, coercion and incentives, unilateral and international - it is logical that there is a left v right split because these things are political. Where you stand on them will depend on your political outlook. But one would not expect a left v right split regarding the reality of GW. This is not a matter of politics but of climate science and probability theory.
There is no left or right wing science. There is no left or right wing probability theory. The boiling point of water at sea level does not depend on who owns the kettle. If I spin a coin I am not more likely to get tails because I am a Hard Left Social Democrat. Ergo it should not matter what a person's politics are in their coming to a view on GW and the human contribution to it.
There is a scientific consensus which you can accept or not. It is rational to accept it unless you both disagree and are a fully clued up expert in the field. The vast majority of those who reject the consensus do not fit that bill.
So why this odd behaviour from so many? I think we know why.
As explained above there ought logically to be no left v right split on this. Yet there is. A big one. Almost all of the dissenters are of the right and the reason for this is clear. They dislike the politics of most of the proposed solutions. They dislike the politics of GW and thus are motivated to find fault with the science. They should be taken seriously on the first but not the second.
Climate change as a conspiracy perpetrated by venal and dishonest scientists in groupthink is less fashionable than it was. Not to say people holding that frankly bonkers idea have had a Damascene moment. They're keeping a bit quiet about it.
As explained above there ought logically to be no left v right split on this. Yet there is. A big one. Almost all of the dissenters are of the right and the reason for this is clear. They dislike the politics of most of the proposed solutions. They dislike the politics of GW and thus are motivated to find fault with the science. They should be taken seriously on the first but not the second.
The problem really lies rather in the proposed solutions, and here I think it does matter that many of the messengers are very left wing. Their proposals are to essentially make people poorer. Well, that’s very easy to preach, and it may be the correct solution. But when you have nutcases like Robin Boardman Petterson talking about banning air travel for the plebs while he jets off all over the world on holiday, it doesn’t exactly look good. Far too many scientists, as well, preach the need to reduce consumption while living in overheated houses (@MarqueeMark makes an excellent point) and buying a new car every year.
What would convince those on the right is if solutions were proposed that kept economic growth as at least a possibility while eliminating the carbon element. Yet when that is proposed, climate campaigners shout and scream. Look at HS2. Build it, put tolls on all road use and make parking in central London very expensive and suddenly a great deal of traffic disappears from our roads onto electric railways. And yet, when people try to build it, climate campaigners compare the loss of 34 hectares of ancient woodland to the deforestation of the First World War, which saw pretty much all of North Wales stripped of trees.
So it’s no wonder that they struggle to attain credibility - and this is the tragic part, even when they are right.
HYUFD - OT, but responding to a post last night that I was too tired to respond to at the time.
You correctly pointed out that a lot of the Tories gains from the red wall were with big majorities and bigger than a number of the southern seats now. You deduced it makes them safer when there is a swing back. Sorry if I have any of that wrong, but I can't be bothered to reread it.
You may well be correct but surely there is a flaw in that logic. To have won these Labour strongholds and with big majorities and make them safer than seats held in the South, means there was not a uniform swing (although that might be over more than one election). So you have a non uniform swing, but you assume a uniform swing when making a future prediction.
If there is a uniform swing against you will be right, but if not as happened here to create this scenario you won't be.
I guess what is more important is why this happened and whether you still think this will be in play next time. I assume you think it will.
It will as it matches the cultural change across the western world, in the US, Australia, Italy, Canada etc not just the UK ie the white working class moving right and voting for conservatives, the graduate middle class increasingly voting for left liberal parties
Cheers.
Although I haven't looked at this my gut feeling is what you say is correct, although I wasn't aware of this re Canada.
It is a bit scary as this is the route to fascism.
A personal point but I do not agree with the mixing of the terms 'left' and 'liberal' although I appreciate it is common and on the right is often confused. I consider myself to be liberal, but definitely not from the left. I am certainly to the right of you I suspect on many issues in particular the economy and authoritarianism of Government.
The primary message of David Attenborough and Greta Thunberg is that national politicians need to take on board the scientific consensus, which in general they have been reluctant to do. Comparing one's behaviour with others is a luxury we can not afford - in a sinking lifeboat one doesn't stop bailing out because others aren't doing their fair share.
Welcome, and agreed.
But that means climate campaigners need to ensure their own behaviour is beyond reproach.
Labour to Tory switchers in the bluewall cast a positive vote for Brexit and for Boris, not just an anti Corbyn vote, they are unlikely to switch back whoever the Labour Leader is and are ideological Leavers.
Tory Remainers in London and the South who voted Tory in 2017 and 2019 did so mainly to keep Corbyn out, they might on the other hand consider a Starmer led Labour Party or the LDs with the threat of Corbyn removed, as might Remainers who went from Labour to LD.
Are you really suggesting that people will vote Tory for a "generation" because they are "ideological Leavers"?
Brexit can't be an excuse forever. The "blue wall" is built on sand.
While Boris is leader absolutely, ending free movement and regaining sovereignty is at the top of their agenda.
A Starmer led Labour Party offering a return to the single market would have more chance winning Tory Remainers in London and the South than Labour Leavers who voted Tory at the last general election in the North, Wales and the Midlands
But:
1. Starmer isn't offering a return to the single market
2. The end of free movement won't stop all immigration, and there are enough immigrants in the UK already to keep anyone who is anti-immigration angry for a long, long time.
3. Regaining sovereignty is an amorphous blob. People wanted to "take back control", but who will actually feel like they're more in control once Brexit is over? Without Europe to blame, the govt of the day will be more directly in the firing line.
Starmer wants single market alignment which means free movement again and an end to the Boris points system for EU migrants
And yet he's specifically said their have to be controls on free movement (a quick search finds quotes from 2017, right up to last week).
And the other points I made? Do you really think people will feel they've taken back control? Will people stop noticing the million Europeans that are already here?
When it comes to the measures required to mitigate GW - the balance between state and market, coercion and incentives, unilateral and international - it is logical that there is a left v right split because these things are political. Where you stand on them will depend on your political outlook. But one would not expect a left v right split regarding the reality of GW. This is not a matter of politics but of climate science and probability theory.
There is no left or right wing science. There is no left or right wing probability theory. The boiling point of water at sea level does not depend on who owns the kettle. If I spin a coin I am not more likely to get tails because I am a Hard Left Social Democrat. Ergo it should not matter what a person's politics are in their coming to a view on GW and the human contribution to it.
There is a scientific consensus which you can accept or not. It is rational to accept it unless you both disagree and are a fully clued up expert in the field. The vast majority of those who reject the consensus do not fit that bill.
So why this odd behaviour from so many? I think we know why.
As explained above there ought logically to be no left v right split on this. Yet there is. A big one. Almost all of the dissenters are of the right and the reason for this is clear. They dislike the politics of most of the proposed solutions. They dislike the politics of GW and thus are motivated to find fault with the science. They should be taken seriously on the first but not the second.
"Where you stand on them will depend on your political outlook. But one would not expect a left v right split regarding the reality of GW."
The reality of global warming is simply a matter of looking at thermometers. The planet has warmed by one degree centegrade over the last century. This cannot be denied unless you are insane.
But true environmentalists (I mean deep ecologists not the anti-capitalists that call themselves environmentalists) are frustrated by the almost 100% focus and obsession with climate change when deep ecologists know that the main issue is loss of biodiversity due to human over-population and habitat loss. For example, the loss of primary rainforest in Madagascar and Borneo to palm oil plantations and other industry is utterly appalling and makes me feel physically sick and so it should you.
The left has deliberately steered environmentalist groups (including the Sierra Club for goodness sake) in the climate change direction for political reasons not environmental ones, and are consequently very much now part of the problem.
Mr. Cwsc, the global warming theory predicts mass doom unless drastic action is taken (some of the proposed measures are sensible either way).
It's entirely legitimate to doubt a theory's predictive powers when its predictive powers have been shown to be wrong multiple times in the recent past.
Where's the Mediterranean climate the UK was meant to get? Why was the total absence of snowfall predicted (in the UK) only for us to get two of the coldest, and snowiest, winters in living memory? Why wasn't the temperature plateau predicted and how can temperatures stay flat for consecutive years when the overall level of carbon dioxide was rising?
Predicting future climatic conditions isn't some sort of side-issue or minor matter for global warming theory, it's the beating heart of the entire proposition. If global warming theory can't accurately predict future climatic conditions it fails as a theory.
I have things to do, but quickly. Any theory has to do two things ---- (i) explain the past data, and (ii) make predictions. Climate change theories can do (i) reasonably well, but (ii) rather poorly. (In fact, (ii) is very hard with mesoscale physics).
My point is merely this.
Morris_Dancer can't even do (i). You don't even have a theory that explains the the main trends in the past data on carbon concentration and climate change.
Just because a scientific theory can't explain everything does not mean it is wrong. We have no idea how supernovae explode, despite forty years of computer simulations including more and more physics. But, that doesn't mean we can't predict the future evolution of the Sun or other main sequence stars.
No matter how poor the predictions of climate change theorists, they have a basic theory that makes scientific sense and explains the major trends in the historic data.
You do not even have that
You literally have nothing, other than anti-scientific wibbling.
".... wibble, wibble, wibble .... the climate has always changed ... wibble, wibble, wibble ... the Thames used to freeze over, you know ... wibble, wibble, wibble ... what about this temperature plateau ... wibble, wibble, wibble.... we used to grow grapes in England in Roman times "
Get yourself a proper well-thought out theory that explains the historic data, and we can talk.
There is no left or right wing science. There is no left or right wing probability theory. The boiling point of water at sea level does not depend on who owns the kettle. If I spin a coin I am not more likely to get tails because I am a Hard Left Social Democrat. Ergo it should not matter what a person's politics are in their coming to a view on GW and the human contribution to it.
There is a scientific consensus which you can accept or not. It is rational to accept it unless you both disagree and are a fully clued up expert in the field. The vast majority of those who reject the consensus do not fit that bill.
So why this odd behaviour from so many? I think we know why.
As explained above there ought logically to be no left v right split on this. Yet there is. A big one. Almost all of the dissenters are of the right and the reason for this is clear. They dislike the politics of most of the proposed solutions. They dislike the politics of GW and thus are motivated to find fault with the science. They should be taken seriously on the first but not the second.
"Where you stand on them will depend on your political outlook. But one would not expect a left v right split regarding the reality of GW."
The reality of global warming is simply a matter of looking at thermometers. The planet has warmed by one degree centegrade over the last century. This cannot be denied unless you are insane.
But true environmentalists (I mean deep ecologists not the anti-capitalists that call themselves environmentalists) are frustrated by the almost 100% focus and obsession with climate change when deep ecologists know that the main issue is loss of biodiversity due to human over-population and habitat loss. For example, the loss of primary rainforest in Madagascar and Borneo to palm oil plantations and other industry is utterly appalling and makes me feel physically sick and so it should you.
The left has deliberately steered environmentalist groups (including the Sierra Club for goodness sake) in the climate change direction for political reasons not environmental ones, and are consequently very much now part of the problem.
It’s one reason why I suggested in my article on this topic earlier this week that we should be looking at conservation of habitat and not just climate change and that the non-left should be coming up with solutions rather than simply criticising others. The left - where it has held power - has been responsible for some appalling environmental disasters.
Cyclefree: "It’s one reason why I suggested in my article on this topic earlier this week that we should be looking at conservation of habitat and not just climate change and that the non-left should be coming up with solutions rather than simply criticising others. The left - where it has held power - has been responsible for some appalling environmental disasters."
The left always will tend towards making matters worse because their unabiding love of humans is baked into their ideology. True environmentalism resides mainly with liberals and some conservatives, not collectivists.
I enjoyed your piece earlier in the week and was dying to contribute, but was abroad. I read the posts but was unable to post myself.
There is no left or right wing science. There is no left or right wing probability theory. The boiling point of water at sea level does not depend on who owns the kettle. If I spin a coin I am not more likely to get tails because I am a Hard Left Social Democrat. Ergo it should not matter what a person's politics are in their coming to a view on GW and the human contribution to it.
There is a scientific consensus which you can accept or not. It is rational to accept it unless you both disagree and are a fully clued up expert in the field. The vast majority of those who reject the consensus do not fit that bill.
So why this odd behaviour from so many? I think we know why.
As explained above there ought logically to be no left v right split on this. Yet there is. A big one. Almost all of the dissenters are of the right and the reason for this is clear. They dislike the politics of most of the proposed solutions. They dislike the politics of GW and thus are motivated to find fault with the science. They should be taken seriously on the first but not the second.
"Where you stand on them will depend on your political outlook. But one would not expect a left v right split regarding the reality of GW."
The reality of global warming is simply a matter of looking at thermometers. The planet has warmed by one degree centegrade over the last century. This cannot be denied unless you are insane.
But true environmentalists (I mean deep ecologists not the anti-capitalists that call themselves environmentalists) are frustrated by the almost 100% focus and obsession with climate change when deep ecologists know that the main issue is loss of biodiversity due to human over-population and habitat loss. For example, the loss of primary rainforest in Madagascar and Borneo to palm oil plantations and other industry is utterly appalling and makes me feel physically sick and so it should you.
The left has deliberately steered environmentalist groups (including the Sierra Club for goodness sake) in the climate change direction for political reasons not environmental ones, and are consequently very much now part of the problem.
It’s one reason why I suggested in my article on this topic earlier this week that we should be looking at conservation of habitat and not just climate change and that the non-left should be coming up with solutions rather than simply criticising others. The left - where it has held power - has been responsible for some appalling environmental disasters.
It is (or ought to be) impossible to separate the two things.
I don't need an alternative theory, in the same way I don't need an alternative religion to Christianity in order to be an atheist. If a theory doesn't persuade me I'm content to be unpersuaded.
Cosworths are priced out of all proportion to their capability now - 50k+. However V6 3 door XR4x4s are still dirt cheap and a great investment. I saw a mint one go for 6k at auction recently when I went to buy my 968.
There is no left or right wing science. There is no left or right wing probability theory. The boiling point of water at sea level does not depend on who owns the kettle. If I spin a coin I am not more likely to get tails because I am a Hard Left Social Democrat. Ergo it should not matter what a person's politics are in their coming to a view on GW and the human contribution to it.
There is a scientific consensus which you can accept or not. It is rational to accept it unless you both disagree and are a fully clued up expert in the field. The vast majority of those who reject the consensus do not fit that bill.
So why this odd behaviour from so many? I think we know why.
As explained above there ought logically to be no left v right split on this. Yet there is. A big one. Almost all of the dissenters are of the right and the reason for this is clear. They dislike the politics of most of the proposed solutions. They dislike the politics of GW and thus are motivated to find fault with the science. They should be taken seriously on the first but not the second.
"Where you stand on them will depend on your political outlook. But one would not expect a left v right split regarding the reality of GW."
The reality of global warming is simply a matter of looking at thermometers. The planet has warmed by one degree centegrade over the last century. This cannot be denied unless you are insane.
But true environmentalists (I mean deep ecologists not the anti-capitalists that call themselves environmentalists) are frustrated by the almost 100% focus and obsession with climate change when deep ecologists know that the main issue is loss of biodiversity due to human over-population and habitat loss. For example, the loss of primary rainforest in Madagascar and Borneo to palm oil plantations and other industry is utterly appalling and makes me feel physically sick and so it should you.
The left has deliberately steered environmentalist groups (including the Sierra Club for goodness sake) in the climate change direction for political reasons not environmental ones, and are consequently very much now part of the problem.
It’s one reason why I suggested in my article on this topic earlier this week that we should be looking at conservation of habitat and not just climate change and that the non-left should be coming up with solutions rather than simply criticising others. The left - where it has held power - has been responsible for some appalling environmental disasters.
The right is talking a about technological solutions, the left is fawning over the travels of a spoilt brat.
Mr. Cwsc, the global warming theory predicts mass doom unless drastic action is taken (some of the proposed measures are sensible either way).
It's entirely legitimate to doubt a theory's predictive powers when its predictive powers have been shown to be wrong multiple times in the recent past.
Where's the Mediterranean climate the UK was meant to get? Why was the total absence of snowfall predicted (in the UK) only for us to get two of the coldest, and snowiest, winters in living memory? Why wasn't the temperature plateau predicted and how can temperatures stay flat for consecutive years when the overall level of carbon dioxide was rising?
Predicting future climatic conditions isn't some sort of side-issue or minor matter for global warming theory, it's the beating heart of the entire proposition. If global warming theory can't accurately predict future climatic conditions it fails as a theory.
So why is the arctic permafrost, which has been stable for many many thousands of years, melting ?
HYUFD - OT, but responding to a post last night that I was too tired to respond to at the time.
You correctly pointed out that a lot of the Tories gains from the red wall were with big majorities and bigger than a number of the southern seats now. You deduced it makes them safer when there is a swing back. Sorry if I have any of that wrong, but I can't be bothered to reread it.
You may well be correct but surely there is a flaw in that logic. To have won these Labour strongholds and with big majorities and make them safer than seats held in the South, means there was not a uniform swing (although that might be over more than one election). So you have a non uniform swing, but you assume a uniform swing when making a future prediction.
If there is a uniform swing against you will be right, but if not as happened here to create this scenario you won't be.
I guess what is more important is why this happened and whether you still think this will be in play next time. I assume you think it will.
The Tories only picked up 40-50 seats. Many had been trending Tory gradually for many years. It is not unreasonable to assume some of them will buck the trend further by becoming more safely blue as say, Mansfield and Morley have, just as others in the south may follow the lead of Canterbury or Hove by trending Labour.
The problem is Labour need at least double that even to be able to put together a vaguely realistic minority governement. They have only ever twice made net gains of over sixty seats since the Second World War - 1945 and 1997.
It’s a gigantic task.
It's amazing to think of all the coalfield seats, where people would have spat at the mention of the Conservatives, 25 years ago, that have now gone blue.
Or, compare Wandsworth, which now has no Conservative seats, with Stoke and Newcastle under Lyme, which now have no Labour seats (the Conservatives reached 62% in Stoke South).
The end of class-based voting has resulted in the Conservatives coming back in places they haven't win since the twenties and thirties.
Mr. B, that doesn't indicate that the industrial activity of man is to blame.
Although it does raise the ironic memory of the ship sent (to the Antarctic, I think) to research into declining ice levels only to become entrapped in ice.
Mr. kinabalu, there was a strong consensus on the property of light for decades (perhaps centuries), namely that it's made of particles. This is because that was Sir Isaac Newton's view and deviation from that was considered heretical, putting back advancement in that area (wave-particle duality now being the dominant theory) significantly.
Science is inherently sceptical. Nothing is less scientific than blind faith and credulous acceptance without even a pause for thought.
You can just as easily rephrase your final paragraph: "As explained above there ought logically to be no left v right split on this. Yet there is. A big one. Almost all of the zealots are of the left and the reason for this is clear. They like the politics of most of the proposed solutions. They like the politics of GW and thus are motivated to find no fault with the science. They should be taken seriously on the first but not the second."
Your rephrasing of my last para is fine. It's true that this works both ways. Just as most dissenters are on the right, most "zealots" (I'll allow the word) are on the left. And the reason in both cases is politics.
But your first para is tosh. My point is that it is irrational to reject a scientific consensus unless you both disagree AND are a clued up expert in the field. Whether the consensus subsequently proves to be true or not is irrelevant to this.
This becomes obvious if you consider the opposite assertion. Science is inherently sceptical, it develops, nothing is ever 100% proven, thus however great is the consensus for any scientific "truth", it is always rational to dissent from it. See what a nonsense that is? Isaac would understand even if you don't.
By the way, whatever happened to the nuclear issue as number one threat which was going to destroy us all? Is it lurking in the same 1970s storage dump as global cooling?
The only reason we haven't had a nuclear war so far is because two Soviet officers disobeyed orders (Vasili Arkhipov in '62 and Stanislav Petrov in '83). So it's going happen at some point.
Well, that would certainly reduce carbon emissions at a stroke. If China and the US took each other out then they'd halve overnight.
Pretty radical policy though.
Yeah, but the heat of the nuclear blasts would do far more to warm up the planet than a few coal fired power stations!
The amount of energy going into the Oceans is equivalent to 5-6 Hiroshima bombs every second.
O/T: great piece David Herdson, and thanks for mentioning the elephant in the room: human over-population.
It is also worth referring to "the tragedy of the commons" (Hardin).
I`ve come to believe that some form of global governance is the only answer, run on non-democratic lines.
Over-population isn't the elephant in the room or particularly relevant; Humans don't need fundamentally need to burn fossil fuels to live much better lives than they do now - it's just tended to be cheaper to do it that way, much of it for legacy reasons. And the additional new CO2 usage isn't caused by growing population, it's caused by industrializing population.
The main issue here is just the coordination problem, that changing to low carbon is expensive, and the world is governed by lots of separate feuding countries, and they each have an interest to let the others do the work and get a free ride off them; That and predatory delay by people with a vested interest in doing things the old way.
But I do think it's funny that David Herdson's written an entire piece complaining Attenborough is missing the politics of the situation, but written entirely from the point of view of a British person, and totally ignores how the comments could be received in China.
O/T: great piece David Herdson, and thanks for mentioning the elephant in the room: human over-population.
It is also worth referring to "the tragedy of the commons" (Hardin).
I`ve come to believe that some form of global governance is the only answer, run on non-democratic lines.
Over-population isn't the elephant in the room or particularly relevant; Humans don't need fundamentally need to burn fossil fuels to live much better lives than they do now - it's just tended to be cheaper to do it that way, much of it for legacy reasons. And the additional new CO2 usage isn't caused by growing population, it's caused by industrializing population.
The main issue here is just the coordination problem, that changing to low carbon is expensive, and the world is governed by lots of separate feuding countries, and they each have an interest to let the others do the work and get a free ride off them; That and predatory delay by people with a vested interest in doing things the old way.
But I do think it's funny that David Herdson's written an entire piece complaining Attenborough is missing the politics of the situation, but written entirely from the point of view of a British person, and totally ignores how the comments could be received in China.
Err, David addresses that:
Besides, there’s an uncomfortable undertone to the preachings of old white men (or the almost religious denunciations coming from rich white teenagers). “What right”, representatives of developing countries might ask, “have white people to enjoy a high standard of living, based on already-high levels of energy consumption, not to mention all the damage done during their own industrialisation during the last 200 years, including the occupation and often misuse of the rest of the world, if the right to develop is to be denied to black, brown and yellow people?”
HYUFD - OT, but responding to a post last night that I was too tired to respond to at the time.
You correctly pointed out that a lot of the Tories gains from the red wall were with big majorities and bigger than a number of the southern seats now. You deduced it makes them safer when there is a swing back. Sorry if I have any of that wrong, but I can't be bothered to reread it.
You may well be correct but surely there is a flaw in that logic. To have won these Labour strongholds and with big majorities and make them safer than seats held in the South, means there was not a uniform swing (although that might be over more than one election). So you have a non uniform swing, but you assume a uniform swing when making a future prediction.
If there is a uniform swing against you will be right, but if not as happened here to create this scenario you won't be.
I guess what is more important is why this happened and whether you still think this will be in play next time. I assume you think it will.
The Tories only picked up 40-50 seats. Many had been trending Tory gradually for many years. It is not unreasonable to assume some of them will buck the trend further by becoming more safely blue as say, Mansfield and Morley have, just as others in the south may follow the lead of Canterbury or Hove by trending Labour.
The problem is Labour need at least double that even to be able to put together a vaguely realistic minority governement. They have only ever twice made net gains of over sixty seats since the Second World War - 1945 and 1997.
It’s a gigantic task.
It's amazing to think of all the coalfield seats, where people would have spat at the mention of the Conservatives, 25 years ago, that have now gone blue.
Or, compare Wandsworth, which now has no Conservative seats, with Stoke and Newcastle under Lyme, which now have no Labour seats (the Conservatives reached 62% in Stoke South).
The end of class-based voting has resulted in the Conservatives coming back in places they haven't win since the twenties and thirties.
But has class based voting stopped or should our definitions of class be considered.
How do we define middle class ? Education ? Employment ? Home ownership ?
If home ownership is part of the definition of being middle class then the Conservative coalfield constituencies are more middle class than Wandsworth.
Conservatism struggles to handle big challenges (like this) that demand action at the cost of immediate comfort.
Reminds me of the rise of fascism in the 1930. Even up til 1940, people thought peace was possible. Sometimes the easy way of life isn’t on offer and you have to change, get off your backside and act.
Under capitalism we're just going to rage on until we've burn every scrap of fossil fuel that is accessible in the Earth's crust - if we last that long. That much is obvious as the accretion of wealth to the capital owning class is the prime directive that dominates all other considerations.
What do those glorified VW cars of yours run on?
Living in a state pf perpetual driving ban is a small but noble contribution to reduction of carbon emissions.
O/T: great piece David Herdson, and thanks for mentioning the elephant in the room: human over-population.
It is also worth referring to "the tragedy of the commons" (Hardin).
I`ve come to believe that some form of global governance is the only answer, run on non-democratic lines.
Over-population isn't the elephant in the room or particularly relevant; Humans don't need fundamentally need to burn fossil fuels to live much better lives than they do now - it's just tended to be cheaper to do it that way, much of it for legacy reasons. And the additional new CO2 usage isn't caused by growing population, it's caused by industrializing population.
The main issue here is just the coordination problem, that changing to low carbon is expensive, and the world is governed by lots of separate feuding countries, and they each have an interest to let the others do the work and get a free ride off them; That and predatory delay by people with a vested interest in doing things the old way.
But I do think it's funny that David Herdson's written an entire piece complaining Attenborough is missing the politics of the situation, but written entirely from the point of view of a British person, and totally ignores how the comments could be received in China.
Yes, Africa is where the world population is growing, but in places like Malawi the carbon footprint is around one twentieth of that of a UK citizen.
One increasing concern for me is the rise of aircondioning in middle income countries, a positive feedback loop accelerating warming, and creating the desire for more AC.
O/T: great piece David Herdson, and thanks for mentioning the elephant in the room: human over-population.
It is also worth referring to "the tragedy of the commons" (Hardin).
I`ve come to believe that some form of global governance is the only answer, run on non-democratic lines.
Over-population isn't the elephant in the room or particularly relevant; Humans don't need fundamentally need to burn fossil fuels to live much better lives than they do now - it's just tended to be cheaper to do it that way, much of it for legacy reasons. And the additional new CO2 usage isn't caused by growing population, it's caused by industrializing population.
The main issue here is just the coordination problem, that changing to low carbon is expensive, and the world is governed by lots of separate feuding countries, and they each have an interest to let the others do the work and get a free ride off them; That and predatory delay by people with a vested interest in doing things the old way.
But I do think it's funny that David Herdson's written an entire piece complaining Attenborough is missing the politics of the situation, but written entirely from the point of view of a British person, and totally ignores how the comments could be received in China.
Err, David addresses that:
Besides, there’s an uncomfortable undertone to the preachings of old white men (or the almost religious denunciations coming from rich white teenagers). “What right”, representatives of developing countries might ask, “have white people to enjoy a high standard of living, based on already-high levels of energy consumption, not to mention all the damage done during their own industrialisation during the last 200 years, including the occupation and often misuse of the rest of the world, if the right to develop is to be denied to black, brown and yellow people?”
That's not the point of the Attenborough's comments at all, see my post upthread.
The problem really lies rather in the proposed solutions, and here I think it does matter that many of the messengers are very left wing. Their proposals are to essentially make people poorer. Well, that’s very easy to preach, and it may be the correct solution. But when you have nutcases like Robin Boardman Petterson talking about banning air travel for the plebs while he jets off all over the world on holiday, it doesn’t exactly look good. Far too many scientists, as well, preach the need to reduce consumption while living in overheated houses (@MarqueeMark makes an excellent point) and buying a new car every year.
What would convince those on the right is if solutions were proposed that kept economic growth as at least a possibility while eliminating the carbon element. Yet when that is proposed, climate campaigners shout and scream. Look at HS2. Build it, put tolls on all road use and make parking in central London very expensive and suddenly a great deal of traffic disappears from our roads onto electric railways. And yet, when people try to build it, climate campaigners compare the loss of 34 hectares of ancient woodland to the deforestation of the First World War, which saw pretty much all of North Wales stripped of trees.
So it’s no wonder that they struggle to attain credibility - and this is the tragic part, even when they are right.
OK, noted, but I can't add enormous value to a discussion about the relative merits of different solutions to the climate crisis. I suppose we need a mix of state and market. Certainly I'd be suspicious of those who argue it should be exclusively one or the other. The insight I was keen to share with people is that the reason dissenters from the scientific consensus around this matter are almost all on the political right is that their dissent is driven by political not scientific concerns. Some admit this, many do not.
When it comes to the measures required to mitigate GW - the balance between state and market, coercion and incentives, unilateral and international - it is logical that there is a left v right split because these things are political. Where you stand on them will depend on your political outlook. But one would not expect a left v right split regarding the reality of GW. This is not a matter of politics but of climate science and probability theory.
There is no left or right wing science. There is no left or right wing probability theory. The boiling point of water at sea level does not depend on who owns the kettle. If I spin a coin I am not more likely to get tails because I am a Hard Left Social Democrat. Ergo it should not matter what a person's politics are in their coming to a view on GW and the human contribution to it.
There is a scientific consensus which you can accept or not. It is rational to accept it unless you both disagree and are a fully clued up expert in the field. The vast majority of those who reject the consensus do not fit that bill.
So why this odd behaviour from so many? I think we know why.
As explained above there ought logically to be no left v right split on this. Yet there is. A big one. Almost all of the dissenters are of the right and the reason for this is clear. They dislike the politics of most of the proposed solutions. They dislike the politics of GW and thus are motivated to find fault with the science. They should be taken seriously on the first but not the second.
The politics of Climate activists seem to call for big state intervention on everything, which is why people on the right recoil from the suggestion that big state intervention is needed to tackle climate problems. Maybe they’re wrong on this occasion but I think it probably works both ways.
By the way, whatever happened to the nuclear issue as number one threat which was going to destroy us all? Is it lurking in the same 1970s storage dump as global cooling?
The only reason we haven't had a nuclear war so far is because two Soviet officers disobeyed orders (Vasili Arkhipov in '62 and Stanislav Petrov in '83). So it's going happen at some point.
Well, that would certainly reduce carbon emissions at a stroke. If China and the US took each other out then they'd halve overnight.
Pretty radical policy though.
Yeah, but the heat of the nuclear blasts would do far more to warm up the planet than a few coal fired power stations!
The amount of energy going into the Oceans is equivalent to 5-6 Hiroshima bombs every second.
This is utter tosh. And obscenely disrespectful to all those involved and their families. People were vaporized by the A bomb and cities razed to the ground. The latest NOAA ocean heat map shows masses of cool water all over the globe and This analysis is grade one propaganda.
The largely non-partisan approach taken by David is right (right EiT's comments below are as always sensible too). The issue is not primarily a left vs right thing, it's a recognised (by nearly everyone, including the Chinese) problem with known but expensive remedies. The problem is that the problem is devastating but mostly long-term, while the expense is short-term and directly against the interest of nervous governments, corporations and individuals. As David hints in the last para, it may be that the problem needs to get worse and then force drastic action, but it would certainly be better if we could stem the tide earlier.
Where party politics comes in is that there are measures consistent with either wing of politics that could help. The left could balance rising costs from more environmentally-friendly policies with vigorous distributive measures: ultimately, it's not a sensible solution to poverty to say we'll follow damaging practices to make food artificially cheap, and if people are better off then cheap food becomes less critical. The right could stimulate free-market solutions with policies that will make carbon emissions increasingly expensive over a known timescale, pushing creative companies into seizing the market opportunity for lpow-carbon solutions. What neither side can usefully do is sit around pointing the finger, as some of the posts below do.
O/T: great piece David Herdson, and thanks for mentioning the elephant in the room: human over-population.
It is also worth referring to "the tragedy of the commons" (Hardin).
I`ve come to believe that some form of global governance is the only answer, run on non-democratic lines.
Over-population isn't the elephant in the room or particularly relevant; Humans don't need fundamentally need to burn fossil fuels to live much better lives than they do now - it's just tended to be cheaper to do it that way, much of it for legacy reasons. And the additional new CO2 usage isn't caused by growing population, it's caused by industrializing population.
The main issue here is just the coordination problem, that changing to low carbon is expensive, and the world is governed by lots of separate feuding countries, and they each have an interest to let the others do the work and get a free ride off them; That and predatory delay by people with a vested interest in doing things the old way.
But I do think it's funny that David Herdson's written an entire piece complaining Attenborough is missing the politics of the situation, but written entirely from the point of view of a British person, and totally ignores how the comments could be received in China.
Err, David addresses that:
Besides, there’s an uncomfortable undertone to the preachings of old white men (or the almost religious denunciations coming from rich white teenagers). “What right”, representatives of developing countries might ask, “have white people to enjoy a high standard of living, based on already-high levels of energy consumption, not to mention all the damage done during their own industrialisation during the last 200 years, including the occupation and often misuse of the rest of the world, if the right to develop is to be denied to black, brown and yellow people?”
Which was one of the more tendentious parts of his article. Both Attenborough and Thunberg are appealing to reason rather than faith - which if the US is any guide tends to be lined up on the opposite side of the argument. “Denying the right to develop” is a straw man. If you’re building an energy infrastructure from scratch, the trade offs in opting for renewables are considerably less. And many of those developing nations are more likely to feel the negative impacts of climate change before we do. One might also note that those agitating for overseas aid budgets to be cut tend also to be lined up on the other side of the climate argument...
It's sad that this has become a left/right issue. I think the reasons for that are more complex than is being presented (especially the idea that the left want people to be poorer!). Here's an inexhaustive list:
(1) The history of environmental issues often being a balance between the economic benefit of corporations' activities and their damage to natural resources, tending to place supporters of business on one side of the argument.
(2) The tendency of young people to be more engaged with environmental issues at a time when the young/old left/right divide is as stark as ever. There's always been anger at older generations, and this fits with that.
(3) The fact that, for decades, the fossil fuel lobby manipulated public understanding of the science, just as the smoking lobby did before. It is unsurprising that they had more success with people who viewed them more positively. They have stopped now (as far as I know) and they now see green-tech as an opportunity, but the legacy of that continues, including in comments on this site.
(4) The fact that scientists tend to communicate ourselves much better to liberals than to conservatives, because overwhelmingly that's where our politics is (e.g. not a single colleague has told me they voted Leave, and I am treated like a closet-Leaver because I didn't want a second referendum). That's not left/right politics, but obviously the two are highly correlated.
(5) The fact that "big-state" actions such as regulation and taxation are an essential part of the solution, and the right dislike these.
(6) The tendency of experts (while being very scrupulous about what we say) to avoid calling out exaggerations by Extinction Rebellion and others. There's a good reason for that - the world has been very slow to understand the scale of the problem, partly because of (3) above, and campaigning groups are succeeding where the hard facts failed - but it still jars with me as a scientist. If you already have reservations about the importance of the issue, seeing exaggerations going unchallenged by experts will only heighten those reservations.
I could go on.
And yes, scientists are not much better than actors at modifying our own behaviour. I've been in countless conversations where people have bemoaned the supposed taboo of talking about over-population before going on an inter-continental flight to a non-essential conference. Yes, it's a legitimate thing to talk about, but only if you are doing just about everything you can to reduce your personal emissions.
How do we make this less of a left/right issue? Not sure, but part of it is for the left/liberals to be less self-righteous and take accusations of hypocrisy seriously, rather than dismissing them as attempts to deflect from the issue. Part of it is for the right/conservatives to stop conflating flaws in the messengers with flaws in the message. When people say that this is the largest issue facing the country, they are right.
The reality of global warming is simply a matter of looking at thermometers. The planet has warmed by one degree centegrade over the last century. This cannot be denied unless you are insane.
But true environmentalists (I mean deep ecologists not the anti-capitalists that call themselves environmentalists) are frustrated by the almost 100% focus and obsession with climate change when deep ecologists know that the main issue is loss of biodiversity due to human over-population and habitat loss. For example, the loss of primary rainforest in Madagascar and Borneo to palm oil plantations and other industry is utterly appalling and makes me feel physically sick and so it should you.
The left has deliberately steered environmentalist groups (including the Sierra Club for goodness sake) in the climate change direction for political reasons not environmental ones, and are consequently very much now part of the problem.
The quantum of GW since reliable measuring techniques were found is indeed more of a factual matter than a consensus. The consensus is on the human contribution. Whether to accept this consensus ought not logically to be dependent on one's politics - yet it is and the dissent comes almost exclusively from the right. My explanation for this is that it is driven by dislike of the politics of the proposed solutions rather than (as is often claimed) by informed suspicion of fatal flaws in the science. I sense you agree with me.
O/T: great piece David Herdson, and thanks for mentioning the elephant in the room: human over-population.
It is also worth referring to "the tragedy of the commons" (Hardin).
I`ve come to believe that some form of global governance is the only answer, run on non-democratic lines.
Over-population isn't the elephant in the room or particularly relevant; Humans don't need fundamentally need to burn fossil fuels to live much better lives than they do now - it's just tended to be cheaper to do it that way, much of it for legacy reasons. And the additional new CO2 usage isn't caused by growing population, it's caused by industrializing population.
The main issue here is just the coordination problem, that changing to low carbon is expensive, and the world is governed by lots of separate feuding countries, and they each have an interest to let the others do the work and get a free ride off them; That and predatory delay by people with a vested interest in doing things the old way.
But I do think it's funny that David Herdson's written an entire piece complaining Attenborough is missing the politics of the situation, but written entirely from the point of view of a British person, and totally ignores how the comments could be received in China.
Yes, Africa is where the world population is growing, but in places like Malawi the carbon footprint is around one twentieth of that of a UK citizen.
One increasing concern for me is the rise of aircondioning in middle income countries, a positive feedback loop accelerating warming, and creating the desire for more AC.
Modern prosperity has been made possible by the advent of cheap reliable fossil fuels..something which other countries would like to replicate. Any form of energy policy predicated on renewables will be ruinously expensive and lead to poverty and lack of economic growth. With mild warming the only justification for such transformation is ideological.
I don't need an alternative theory, in the same way I don't need an alternative religion to Christianity in order to be an atheist. If a theory doesn't persuade me I'm content to be unpersuaded.
Here is hypothesis A, here is hypothesis B, let's see which hypothesis explains the data better. The climate scientists have a hypothesis A. What is hypothesis B?
You are "content to be unpersuaded" without any hypothesis. Fine.
But I hope you can see why most people think that -- despite a patchy theory with a poorish predictive record -- the climate scientists have at least engaged with the data & tried to understand it. Whereas you haven't.
I don’t know whether to hope this goes on because it’s hilarious, or hope it comes to an end as otherwise England aren’t going to have much fun bowling.
I don't need an alternative theory, in the same way I don't need an alternative religion to Christianity in order to be an atheist. If a theory doesn't persuade me I'm content to be unpersuaded.
Here is hypothesis A, here is hypothesis B, let's see which hypothesis explains the data better. The climate scientists have a hypothesis A. What is hypothesis B?
You are "content to be unpersuaded" without any hypothesis. Fine.
But I hope you can see why most people think that -- despite a patchy theory with a poorish predictive record -- the climate scientists have at least engaged with the data & tried to understand it. Whereas you haven't.
More to the point, if MD is wrong, and we act on it, we fucked. if you’re wrong, but we act on it, we’ll invest a lot of money, and MD will have no energy bills by the time he’s a pensioner.
I don’t know whether to hope this goes on because it’s hilarious, or hope it comes to an end as otherwise England aren’t going to have much fun bowling.
I don’t know whether to hope this goes on because it’s hilarious, or hope it comes to an end as otherwise England aren’t going to have much fun bowling.
I don't need an alternative theory, in the same way I don't need an alternative religion to Christianity in order to be an atheist. If a theory doesn't persuade me I'm content to be unpersuaded.
Here is hypothesis A, here is hypothesis B, let's see which hypothesis explains the data better. The climate scientists have a hypothesis A. What is hypothesis B?
You are "content to be unpersuaded" without any hypothesis. Fine.
But I hope you can see why most people think that -- despite a patchy theory with a poorish predictive record -- the climate scientists have at least engaged with the data & tried to understand it. Whereas you haven't.
More to the point, if MD is wrong, and we act on it, we fucked. if you’re wrong, but we act on it, we’ll invest a lot of money, and MD will have no energy bills by the time he’s a pensioner.
As explained above there ought logically to be no left v right split on this. Yet there is. A big one. Almost all of the dissenters are of the right and the reason for this is clear. They dislike the politics of most of the proposed solutions. They dislike the politics of GW and thus are motivated to find fault with the science. They should be taken seriously on the first but not the second.
"Where you stand on them will depend on your political outlook. But one would not expect a left v right split regarding the reality of GW."
The reality of global warming is simply a matter of looking at thermometers. The planet has warmed by one degree centegrade over the last century. This cannot be denied unless you are insane.
But true environmentalists (I mean deep ecologists not the anti-capitalists that call themselves environmentalists) are frustrated by the almost 100% focus and obsession with climate change when deep ecologists know that the main issue is loss of biodiversity due to human over-population and habitat loss. For example, the loss of primary rainforest in Madagascar and Borneo to palm oil plantations and other industry is utterly appalling and makes me feel physically sick and so it should you.
The left has deliberately steered environmentalist groups (including the Sierra Club for goodness sake) in the climate change direction for political reasons not environmental ones, and are consequently very much now part of the problem.
It’s one reason why I suggested in my article on this topic earlier this week that we should be looking at conservation of habitat and not just climate change and that the non-left should be coming up with solutions rather than simply criticising others. The left - where it has held power - has been responsible for some appalling environmental disasters.
The right is talking a about technological solutions, the left is fawning over the travels of a spoilt brat.
You have some nerve.
Read this - https://www7.politicalbetting.com/index.php/archives/2020/01/20/political-cross-dressing/ - to understand why I wrote that. Too many on the right are either denying the reality of loss of habitat/biodiversity and the effects on climate or refusing to take any action, as can be evidenced by some of the comments made and actions taken by the Trump administration.
Most recently, he has taken steps to remove pollution controls on a very significant proportion of the US’s waterways. What sort of a solution is that?
Please tell us more about those 'technological solutions' being proposed by Trump, Bolsonaro and Morrison?
A large proportion of, say, renewable energy production is happening under conservative governments. Meanwhile all the left can come up with is diversionary pseudo-messianic complexes.
I don't need an alternative theory, in the same way I don't need an alternative religion to Christianity in order to be an atheist. If a theory doesn't persuade me I'm content to be unpersuaded.
Here is hypothesis A, here is hypothesis B, let's see which hypothesis explains the data better. The climate scientists have a hypothesis A. What is hypothesis B?
You are "content to be unpersuaded" without any hypothesis. Fine.
But I hope you can see why most people think that -- despite a patchy theory with a poorish predictive record -- the climate scientists have at least engaged with the data & tried to understand it. Whereas you haven't.
More to the point, if MD is wrong, and we act on it, we fucked. if you’re wrong, but we act on it, we’ll invest a lot of money, and MD will have no energy bills by the time he’s a pensioner.
The politics of Climate activists seem to call for big state intervention on everything, which is why people on the right recoil from the suggestion that big state intervention is needed to tackle climate problems. Maybe they’re wrong on this occasion but I think it probably works both ways.
Fair point.
No issue with those (on the right) who say "Sure, I accept the diagnosis and the prognosis. But the best treatments are all free market based, such as this and that and this."
You can debate this. It's fine. Out of that sort of debate come solutions to the climate crisis. No doubt in the end a mix of state and market, national and international, coercion and incentive.
That is different to rejecting the core diagnosis/prognosis purely because you do not like the sort of solutions being floated by certain groups. Out of that sort of debate comes precisely nothing of any value.
As explained above there ought logically to be no left v right split on this. Yet there is. A big one. Almost all of the dissenters are of the right and the reason for this is clear. They dislike the politics of most of the proposed solutions. They dislike the politics of GW and thus are motivated to find fault with the science. They should be taken seriously on the first but not the second.
"Where you stand on them will depend on your political outlook. But one would not expect a left v right split regarding the reality of GW."
The reality of global warming is simply a matter of looking at thermometers. The planet has warmed by one degree centegrade over the last century. This cannot be denied unless you are insane.
But true environmentalists (I mean deep ecologists not the anti-capitalists that call themselves environmentalists) are frustrated by the almost 100% focus and obsession with climate change when deep ecologists know that the main issue is loss of biodiversity due to human over-population and habitat loss. For example, the loss of primary rainforest in Madagascar and Borneo to palm oil plantations and other industry is utterly appalling and makes me feel physically sick and so it should you.
The left has deliberately steered environmentalist groups (including the Sierra Club for goodness sake) in the climate change direction for political reasons not environmental ones, and are consequently very much now part of the problem.
It’s one reason why I suggested in my article on this topic earlier this week that we should be looking at conservation of habitat and not just climate change and that the non-left should be coming up with solutions rather than simply criticising others. The left - where it has held power - has been responsible for some appalling environmental disasters.
The right is talking a about technological solutions, the left is fawning over the travels of a spoilt brat.
You have some nerve.
Too many on the right are either denying the reality of loss of habitat/biodiversity and the effects on climate or refusing to take any action
Your exhortation to non-partisanship sounds fascinatingly partisan. "if only the heathens believed!" Your assumptions are based on the left-consensus, which is not reality.
By the way, whatever happened to the nuclear issue as number one threat which was going to destroy us all? Is it lurking in the same 1970s storage dump as global cooling?
The only reason we haven't had a nuclear war so far is because two Soviet officers disobeyed orders (Vasili Arkhipov in '62 and Stanislav Petrov in '83). So it's going happen at some point.
Well, that would certainly reduce carbon emissions at a stroke. If China and the US took each other out then they'd halve overnight.
Pretty radical policy though.
Yeah, but the heat of the nuclear blasts would do far more to warm up the planet than a few coal fired power stations!
The amount of energy going into the Oceans is equivalent to 5-6 Hiroshima bombs every second.
This is utter tosh. And obscenely disrespectful to all those involved and their families. People were vaporized by the A bomb and cities razed to the ground. The latest NOAA ocean heat map shows masses of cool water all over the globe and This analysis is grade one propaganda.
No it is simple arithmetic based on number of Joules of energy to warm up the ocean. It is quite an impressive heat sink, but not infinite.
Or every person on the planet running 100 microwave ovens 24 hours per day if you prefer.
As explained above there ought logically to be no left v right split on this. Yet there is. A big one. Almost all of the dissenters are of the right and the reason for this is clear. They dislike the politics of most of the proposed solutions. They dislike the politics of GW and thus are motivated to find fault with the science. They should be taken seriously on the first but not the second.
"Where you stand on them will depend on your political outlook. But one would not expect a left v right split regarding the reality of GW."
The reality of global warming is simply a matter of looking at thermometers. The orately steered environmentalist groups (including the Sierra Club for goodness sake) in the climate change direction for political reasons not environmental ones, and are consequently very much now part of the problem.
It’s one reason why I suggested in my article on this topic earlier this week that we should be looking at conservation of habitat and not just climate change and that the non-left should be coming up with solutions rather than simply criticising others. The left - where it has held power - has been responsible for some appalling environmental disasters.
The right is talking a about technological solutions, the left is fawning over the travels of a spoilt brat.
You have some nerve.
Read this - https://www7.politicalbetting.com/index.php/archives/2020/01/20/political-cross-dressing/ - to understand why I wrote that. Too many on the right are either denying the reality of loss of habitat/biodiversity and the effects on climate or ref Most recently, he has taken steps to remove pollution controls on a very significant proportion of the US’s waterways. What sort of a solution is that?
Too much of CC is used as a canvass for socialist policies. Pretty much everything that utters out of the words of greta, XR and the Greens just is not true, not based on evidence and is borderline religious hysteria. The world is not ending in eight years, the human race is not on the edge of extinction and there is no scientific basis for the concept of a 'tipping point'. The body of evidence suggests there is a rising temperature trend and there is a correlation to rising CO2. But the world is not both on fire and disappearing under floods.
Single extreme weather events might be caused by CC, they might not. We do not know. Those that jump to absolute conclusions as these events happen in real time are utter charlatans who know they are scamming us or those filled with such religious zeal they can see no other reason.
As explained above there ought logically to be no left v right split on this. Yet there is. A big one. Almost all of the dissenters are of the right and the reason for this is clear. They dislike the politics of most of the proposed solutions. They dislike the politics of GW and thus are motivated to find fault with the science. They should be taken seriously on the first but not the second.
"Where you stand on them will depend on your political outlook. But one would not expect a left v right split regarding the reality of GW."
The reality of global warming is simply a matter of looking at thermometers. The planet has warmed by one degree centegrade over the last century. This cannot be denied unless you are insane.
But true environmentalists (I mean deep ecologists not the anti-capitalists that call themselves environmentalists) are frustrated by the almost 100% focus and obsession with climate change when deep ecologists know that the main issue is loss of biodiversity due to human over-population and habitat loss. For example, the loss of primary rainforest in Madagascar and Borneo to palm oil plantations and other industry is utterly appalling and makes me feel physically sick and so it should you.
The left has deliberately steered environmentalist groups (including the Sierra Club for goodness sake) in the climate change direction for political reasons not environmental ones, and are consequently very much now part of the problem.
It’s one reason why I suggested in my article on this topic earlier this week that we should be looking at conservation of habitat and not just climate change and that the non-left should be coming up with solutions rather than simply criticising others. The left - where it has held power - has been responsible for some appalling environmental disasters.
The right is talking a about technological solutions, the left is fawning over the travels of a spoilt brat.
You have some nerve.
Too many on the right are either denying the reality of loss of habitat/biodiversity and the effects on climate or refusing to take any action
Your exhortation to non-partisanship sounds fascinatingly partisan. "if only the heathens believed!" Your assumptions are based on the left-consensus, which is not reality.
On the contrary. I am not from the left. Nor do I think this is a matter of belief. It is a matter of science and there are very good reasons why genuine (small “c”) conservatives should have a care for our planet and what we leave behind for our children and grand-children.
Comments
You correctly pointed out that a lot of the Tories gains from the red wall were with big majorities and bigger than a number of the southern seats now. You deduced it makes them safer when there is a swing back. Sorry if I have any of that wrong, but I can't be bothered to reread it.
You may well be correct but surely there is a flaw in that logic. To have won these Labour strongholds and with big majorities and make them safer than seats held in the South, means there was not a uniform swing (although that might be over more than one election). So you have a non uniform swing, but you assume a uniform swing when making a future prediction.
If there is a uniform swing against you will be right, but if not as happened here to create this scenario you won't be.
I guess what is more important is why this happened and whether you still think this will be in play next time. I assume you think it will.
When demand is increasing and you are investing in renewables, you can add that extra capacity, but you still have a gap that can easily be plugged by coal power. You certainly won't close any.
The stats suggest 2020 might be the year coal starts going backwards in China. Renewables now have scale. But we won't see a rapid drop off of coal while energy demand is increasing.
It is a consequential coincidence that the US elections occur at the same time as the next five year plan is to be settled.
It's entirely legitimate to doubt a theory's predictive powers when its predictive powers have been shown to be wrong multiple times in the recent past.
Where's the Mediterranean climate the UK was meant to get?
Why was the total absence of snowfall predicted (in the UK) only for us to get two of the coldest, and snowiest, winters in living memory?
Why wasn't the temperature plateau predicted and how can temperatures stay flat for consecutive years when the overall level of carbon dioxide was rising?
Predicting future climatic conditions isn't some sort of side-issue or minor matter for global warming theory, it's the beating heart of the entire proposition. If global warming theory can't accurately predict future climatic conditions it fails as a theory.
To put these swings in context:
A 1964 style swing would roughly speaking take Labour back to 2015 style levels.
A 1979/2010 style swing, both similar in scale, would take them back to 2017.
A Blair style swing, a swing that gave Blair the largest single party majority in the age of universal suffrage, would still see them short of an overall majority. That’s how disastrous Labour’s situation is right now.
That of course makes many assumptions, not least about UNS. At the moment, the electorate is volatile and uncommitted. Tory Support is indeed a mile wide and an inch deep. It is possible that former Labour voters may revert (turnout was not radically lower than last time, so a lot of switching went on). Next time the Brexiteers will not be standing, which probably helps Labour. But it is very hard to see how any party can outperform national swing to a significant degree in over 100 seats. At some point, that would have to be the UNS. And the UNS required is fecking massive. If we assume the SNP hold up better than the Tories, it becomes even bigger.
Labour are in deep trouble. What’s more, nobody has yet offered a map out of it, except to limited extent Nandy. Starmer would do a holding job. Long Bailey and Thornberry would double down. They are reminding me of Westmoreland in Vietnam, who didn’t have a clue how to win but hoped if he bombed North Vietnam often enough they might negotiate.
If you are interested, figures are here.
http://www.electionpolling.co.uk/battleground/targets/labour
I agree that the world could make huge strides in approaching zero-carbon, for the cost of maybe little more than a one-off recession. Different horses for different courses. Many countries have a massive advantage in the potential for solar power. Some countries have fantastic wind resources. The UK has one of the world's best regimes for tidal power (along with Chile, Argentina, Mexico, Canada, France, India and Korea). All of these use a domestic resource, without having to import uranium for nuclear.
What's unusual is that this year's fires have been in areas close to human population, as opposed to in the middle of the great nothingness that is 99% of Australia's land area.
http://www.electionpolling.co.uk/battleground/targets/labour
It is also worth referring to "the tragedy of the commons" (Hardin).
I`ve come to believe that some form of global governance is the only answer, run on non-democratic lines.
The problem is Labour need at least double that even to be able to put together a vaguely realistic minority governement. They have only ever twice made net gains of over sixty seats since the Second World War - 1945 and 1997.
It’s a gigantic task.
Chingford and Woodford Green is now a far likelier Labour gain than say Great Grimsby
There is no left or right wing science. There is no left or right wing probability theory. The boiling point of water at sea level does not depend on who owns the kettle. If I spin a coin I am not more likely to get tails because I am a Hard Left Social Democrat. Ergo it should not matter what a person's politics are in their coming to a view on GW and the human contribution to it.
There is a scientific consensus which you can accept or not. It is rational to accept it unless you both disagree and are a fully clued up expert in the field. The vast majority of those who reject the consensus do not fit that bill.
So why this odd behaviour from so many? I think we know why.
As explained above there ought logically to be no left v right split on this. Yet there is. A big one. Almost all of the dissenters are of the right and the reason for this is clear. They dislike the politics of most of the proposed solutions. They dislike the politics of GW and thus are motivated to find fault with the science. They should be taken seriously on the first but not the second.
Tory complacency after over a decade in power will not end well, the next election is not a certainty, we have to fight for it
The tragedy is that no single human wants this, but collectively it the effect that our species has.
Science is inherently sceptical. Nothing is less scientific than blind faith and credulous acceptance without even a pause for thought.
You can just as easily rephrase your final paragraph:
"As explained above there ought logically to be no left v right split on this. Yet there is. A big one. Almost all of the zealots are of the left and the reason for this is clear. They like the politics of most of the proposed solutions. They like the politics of GW and thus are motivated to find no fault with the science. They should be taken seriously on the first but not the second."
What would convince those on the right is if solutions were proposed that kept economic growth as at least a possibility while eliminating the carbon element. Yet when that is proposed, climate campaigners shout and scream. Look at HS2. Build it, put tolls on all road use and make parking in central London very expensive and suddenly a great deal of traffic disappears from our roads onto electric railways. And yet, when people try to build it, climate campaigners compare the loss of 34 hectares of ancient woodland to the deforestation of the First World War, which saw pretty much all of North Wales stripped of trees.
So it’s no wonder that they struggle to attain credibility - and this is the tragic part, even when they are right.
Although I haven't looked at this my gut feeling is what you say is correct, although I wasn't aware of this re Canada.
It is a bit scary as this is the route to fascism.
A personal point but I do not agree with the mixing of the terms 'left' and 'liberal' although I appreciate it is common and on the right is often confused. I consider myself to be liberal, but definitely not from the left. I am certainly to the right of you I suspect on many issues in particular the economy and authoritarianism of Government.
But that means climate campaigners need to ensure their own behaviour is beyond reproach.
Brexit can't be an excuse forever. The "blue wall" is built on sand. But:
1. Starmer isn't offering a return to the single market
2. The end of free movement won't stop all immigration, and there are enough immigrants in the UK already to keep anyone who is anti-immigration angry for a long, long time.
3. Regaining sovereignty is an amorphous blob. People wanted to "take back control", but who will actually feel like they're more in control once Brexit is over? Without Europe to blame, the govt of the day will be more directly in the firing line. And yet he's specifically said their have to be controls on free movement (a quick search finds quotes from 2017, right up to last week).
And the other points I made? Do you really think people will feel they've taken back control? Will people stop noticing the million Europeans that are already here?
The reality of global warming is simply a matter of looking at thermometers. The planet has warmed by one degree centegrade over the last century. This cannot be denied unless you are insane.
But true environmentalists (I mean deep ecologists not the anti-capitalists that call themselves environmentalists) are frustrated by the almost 100% focus and obsession with climate change when deep ecologists know that the main issue is loss of biodiversity due to human over-population and habitat loss. For example, the loss of primary rainforest in Madagascar and Borneo to palm oil plantations and other industry is utterly appalling and makes me feel physically sick and so it should you.
The left has deliberately steered environmentalist groups (including the Sierra Club for goodness sake) in the climate change direction for political reasons not environmental ones, and are consequently very much now part of the problem.
My point is merely this.
Morris_Dancer can't even do (i). You don't even have a theory that explains the the main trends in the past data on carbon concentration and climate change.
Just because a scientific theory can't explain everything does not mean it is wrong. We have no idea how supernovae explode, despite forty years of computer simulations including more and more physics. But, that doesn't mean we can't predict the future evolution of the Sun or other main sequence stars.
No matter how poor the predictions of climate change theorists, they have a basic theory that makes scientific sense and explains the major trends in the historic data.
You do not even have that
You literally have nothing, other than anti-scientific wibbling.
".... wibble, wibble, wibble .... the climate has always changed ... wibble, wibble, wibble ... the Thames used to freeze over, you know ... wibble, wibble, wibble ... what about this temperature plateau ... wibble, wibble, wibble.... we used to grow grapes in England in Roman times "
Get yourself a proper well-thought out theory that explains the historic data, and we can talk.
The left always will tend towards making matters worse because their unabiding love of humans is baked into their ideology. True environmentalism resides mainly with liberals and some conservatives, not collectivists.
I enjoyed your piece earlier in the week and was dying to contribute, but was abroad. I read the posts but was unable to post myself.
I don't need an alternative theory, in the same way I don't need an alternative religion to Christianity in order to be an atheist. If a theory doesn't persuade me I'm content to be unpersuaded.
Welcome to PB, Mr. Oniscoid.
You have some nerve.
On a lighter note, I assume that the 'Blue Wall' that is now being referred to was built by Polish bricklayers.
Or, compare Wandsworth, which now has no Conservative seats, with Stoke and Newcastle under Lyme, which now have no Labour seats (the Conservatives reached 62% in Stoke South).
The end of class-based voting has resulted in the Conservatives coming back in places they haven't win since the twenties and thirties.
Please tell us more about those 'technological solutions' being proposed by Trump, Bolsonaro and Morrison?
Although it does raise the ironic memory of the ship sent (to the Antarctic, I think) to research into declining ice levels only to become entrapped in ice.
But your first para is tosh. My point is that it is irrational to reject a scientific consensus unless you both disagree AND are a clued up expert in the field. Whether the consensus subsequently proves to be true or not is irrelevant to this.
This becomes obvious if you consider the opposite assertion. Science is inherently sceptical, it develops, nothing is ever 100% proven, thus however great is the consensus for any scientific "truth", it is always rational to dissent from it. See what a nonsense that is? Isaac would understand even if you don't.
https://twitter.com/CNN/status/1218488489731395585?s=19
But I can’t think of any climate technology he’s come up with.
The main issue here is just the coordination problem, that changing to low carbon is expensive, and the world is governed by lots of separate feuding countries, and they each have an interest to let the others do the work and get a free ride off them; That and predatory delay by people with a vested interest in doing things the old way.
But I do think it's funny that David Herdson's written an entire piece complaining Attenborough is missing the politics of the situation, but written entirely from the point of view of a British person, and totally ignores how the comments could be received in China.
He only has three shortcomings compared to Foakes: he’s not as good a batsman, not as a good a keeper, and not as good a captain.
Besides, there’s an uncomfortable undertone to the preachings of old white men (or the almost religious denunciations coming from rich white teenagers). “What right”, representatives of developing countries might ask, “have white people to enjoy a high standard of living, based on already-high levels of energy consumption, not to mention all the damage done during their own industrialisation during the last 200 years, including the occupation and often misuse of the rest of the world, if the right to develop is to be denied to black, brown and yellow people?”
How do we define middle class ? Education ? Employment ? Home ownership ?
If home ownership is part of the definition of being middle class then the Conservative coalfield constituencies are more middle class than Wandsworth.
One increasing concern for me is the rise of aircondioning in middle income countries, a positive feedback loop accelerating warming, and creating the desire for more AC.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-06-28/air-conditioning-is-the-world-s-next-big-threat
Looks like an outbreak of Empire Mark 2 has taken hold . Some Leavers seem to be lapping this up and need a dose of reality .
People were vaporized by the A bomb and cities razed to the ground.
The latest NOAA ocean heat map shows masses of cool water all over the globe and
This analysis is grade one propaganda.
Where party politics comes in is that there are measures consistent with either wing of politics that could help. The left could balance rising costs from more environmentally-friendly policies with vigorous distributive measures: ultimately, it's not a sensible solution to poverty to say we'll follow damaging practices to make food artificially cheap, and if people are better off then cheap food becomes less critical. The right could stimulate free-market solutions with policies that will make carbon emissions increasingly expensive over a known timescale, pushing creative companies into seizing the market opportunity for lpow-carbon solutions. What neither side can usefully do is sit around pointing the finger, as some of the posts below do.
Both Attenborough and Thunberg are appealing to reason rather than faith - which if the US is any guide tends to be lined up on the opposite side of the argument.
“Denying the right to develop” is a straw man. If you’re building an energy infrastructure from scratch, the trade offs in opting for renewables are considerably less. And many of those developing nations are more likely to feel the negative impacts of climate change before we do.
One might also note that those agitating for overseas aid budgets to be cut tend also to be lined up on the other side of the climate argument...
(1) The history of environmental issues often being a balance between the economic benefit of corporations' activities and their damage to natural resources, tending to place supporters of business on one side of the argument.
(2) The tendency of young people to be more engaged with environmental issues at a time when the young/old left/right divide is as stark as ever. There's always been anger at older generations, and this fits with that.
(3) The fact that, for decades, the fossil fuel lobby manipulated public understanding of the science, just as the smoking lobby did before. It is unsurprising that they had more success with people who viewed them more positively. They have stopped now (as far as I know) and they now see green-tech as an opportunity, but the legacy of that continues, including in comments on this site.
(4) The fact that scientists tend to communicate ourselves much better to liberals than to conservatives, because overwhelmingly that's where our politics is (e.g. not a single colleague has told me they voted Leave, and I am treated like a closet-Leaver because I didn't want a second referendum). That's not left/right politics, but obviously the two are highly correlated.
(5) The fact that "big-state" actions such as regulation and taxation are an essential part of the solution, and the right dislike these.
(6) The tendency of experts (while being very scrupulous about what we say) to avoid calling out exaggerations by Extinction Rebellion and others. There's a good reason for that - the world has been very slow to understand the scale of the problem, partly because of (3) above, and campaigning groups are succeeding where the hard facts failed - but it still jars with me as a scientist. If you already have reservations about the importance of the issue, seeing exaggerations going unchallenged by experts will only heighten those reservations.
I could go on.
And yes, scientists are not much better than actors at modifying our own behaviour. I've been in countless conversations where people have bemoaned the supposed taboo of talking about over-population before going on an inter-continental flight to a non-essential conference. Yes, it's a legitimate thing to talk about, but only if you are doing just about everything you can to reduce your personal emissions.
How do we make this less of a left/right issue? Not sure, but part of it is for the left/liberals to be less self-righteous and take accusations of hypocrisy seriously, rather than dismissing them as attempts to deflect from the issue. Part of it is for the right/conservatives to stop conflating flaws in the messengers with flaws in the message. When people say that this is the largest issue facing the country, they are right.
Lose.
https://twitter.com/naebD/status/1184744915722481664?s=20
I didn’t anticipate that a Broad would screw the Saffers.
And not quite - though England’s performance has been broadly wooden.
You are "content to be unpersuaded" without any hypothesis. Fine.
But I hope you can see why most people think that -- despite a patchy theory with a poorish predictive record -- the climate scientists have at least engaged with the data & tried to understand it. Whereas you haven't.
Technology is the answer to any long term weather trends - not hair shirts.
if you’re wrong, but we act on it, we’ll invest a lot of money, and MD will have no energy bills by the time he’s a pensioner.
I don't think so.
Most recently, he has taken steps to remove pollution controls on a very significant proportion of the US’s waterways. What sort of a solution is that?
We’re.
No issue with those (on the right) who say "Sure, I accept the diagnosis and the prognosis. But the best treatments are all free market based, such as this and that and this."
You can debate this. It's fine. Out of that sort of debate come solutions to the climate crisis. No doubt in the end a mix of state and market, national and international, coercion and incentive.
That is different to rejecting the core diagnosis/prognosis purely because you do not like the sort of solutions being floated by certain groups. Out of that sort of debate comes precisely nothing of any value.
Or every person on the planet running 100 microwave ovens 24 hours per day if you prefer.
Single extreme weather events might be caused by CC, they might not. We do not know. Those that jump to absolute conclusions as these events happen in real time are utter charlatans who know they are scamming us or those filled with such religious zeal they can see no other reason.
all out