New report on climate change released today

[Jimmy Higgins]

Another bump by Angelo who says he never bumps the thread.

We need an intervention to deal with his obsession with a 17 year old girl.

 

[angelo]

Another bump by Angelo who says he never bumps the thread.

We need an intervention to deal with his obsession with a 17 year old girl.

My obsession is not with the 17 year old brat, [who by the way has all her utterances written for her by others] but with the morons who've turned this female version of a junior Al Gore into their messiah!

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Another bump by Angelo who says he never bumps the thread.

We need an intervention to deal with his obsession with a 17 year old girl.

My obsession is not with the 17 year old brat, [who by the way has all her utterances written for her by others] but with the morons who've turned this female version of a junior Al Gore into their messiah!

The first thing to do is admit you have a problem.

 

[lpetrich]

Another bump by Angelo who says he never bumps the thread.

We need an intervention to deal with his obsession with a 17 year old girl.

My obsession is not with the 17 year old brat, [who by the way has all her utterances written for her by others] but with the morons who've turned this female version of a junior Al Gore into their messiah!

Evidence of that alleged ghostwriting?

It's like what AOC gets, that she's an actress who is reading someone else's lines. But who?

 

[ZiprHead]

Earth just had its hottest January in recorded history.

 

[bilby]

My obsession is not with the 17 year old brat, [who by the way has all her utterances written for her by others] but with the morons who've turned this female version of a junior Al Gore into their messiah!

Evidence of that alleged ghostwriting?

It's like what AOC gets, that she's an actress who is reading someone else's lines. But who?

And why would it matter?

If I say that rocks fall down when dropped, you can claim that I am just saying words written by Isaac Newton, but that doesn't make what I am saying any less of a fact.

The question isn't who said this stuff; The question is, are they right?

 

[Keith&Co.]

The question isn't who said this stuff; The question is, are they right?

And that's the question you can avoid by nitpicking the statement.

My coworkers do this all the time. Someone complains about a US action on the news, that it's an unfair law, or racist, or authoritarian. "No, it's not a law. It's an executive order." Then they stop discussing it. They have found a flaw in the statement, thus the whole goddamned charge can be dismissed as inaccurate, no matter the other merits.
One strike and you're out.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

My obsession is not with the 17 year old brat, [who by the way has all her utterances written for her by others] but with the morons who've turned this female version of a junior Al Gore into their messiah!

Evidence of that alleged ghostwriting?

It's like what AOC gets, that she's an actress who is reading someone else's lines. But who?

And why would it matter?

If I say that rocks fall down when dropped, you can claim that I am just saying words written by Isaac Newton, but that doesn't make what I am saying any less of a fact.

The question isn't who said this stuff; The question is, are they right?

It matters because it is critical to Madlib'ing anti-AGW "arguments".

If the anti-AGW people aren't allowed to use other people as shields (like Gore, Thunberg), they'd have fewer red herrings in their arsenal. Then their arguments become fewer and noticeably more vapid. Next thing they know, they'd actually have to argue science using actual science.

So the question isn't "are you right", but "why are you for the extinction of the red herring?"

 

[angelo]

Earth just had its hottest January in recorded history.

Oh dear, I better get my old tinfoil hat out of the shed. Looks like I may be needing it!

 

[lpetrich]

Earth Uprising - "We are a team of young people who want to save the planet."

Strike With Us | Join The Youth Climate Strike - "We recently announced our plans for three days of striking, launching on the 50th anniversary of Earth Day, April 22, and ending on April 24."

Earth Day: The Official Site | Earth Day Network - "On April 22, 1970, 20 million Americans — at the time, 10% of the total population of the United States — took to the streets, parks and auditoriums to demonstrate for a healthy, sustainable environment in massive coast-to-coast rallies. Thousands of colleges and universities organized protests against the deterioration of the environment."

FridaysForFuture

#FridaysForFuture is a movement that began in August 2018, after 15 years old Greta Thunberg sat in front of the Swedish parliament every schoolday for three weeks, to protest against the lack of action on the climate crisis. She posted what she was doing on Instagram and Twitter and it soon went viral.

On the 8th of September, Greta decided to continue striking every Friday until the Swedish policies provided a safe pathway well under 2-degree C, i.e. in line with the Paris agreement.

The hashtags #FridaysForFuture and #Climatestrike spread and many students and adults began to protest outside of their parliaments and local city halls all over the world. This has also inspired the Belgium Thursday school strikes.

Where the events are:
Earth Day 2020 | Earth Day - has a map of Earth Day events - all over our planet.
Map - FridaysForFuture - a map of FFF events

The locations of activist events are very interesting. I can find activist events over most of the world, with some exceptions. Some populated areas seem to be "activism deserts" - areas like China and Russia.

 

[lpetrich]

#ChildrenVsClimateCrisis - mostly in their mid teens, it seems.

YouTube advertisers blindsided by climate change denial videos - The Verge

Through song, passion and protest, Varshini Prakash’s Sunrise Movement is changing US climate politics - The Correspondent

In just a few years, the Sunrise Movement has forced US politicians to take action on the climate crisis. And they’ve done it all while singing. I spoke to cofounder Varshini Prakash about what transformational change looks like.

...
For decades, there has been so much inertia and bureaucracy in the climate movement that it is surprising that Sunrise was able to become a force to be reckoned with seemingly overnight.

...
In the few times we’ve spoken in the past few years, Prakash’s enthusiasm has always been infectious. People who’ve met her in person – on stage or in the halls of Congress – say that she has a commanding presence.

...
And Prakash also loves to sing. So that’s what they do.

Sunrise’s strategy isn’t just about song – it’s more about bringing life into the most pressing issue of our time. What that looks like, says Prakash, is not focusing too much on the science, but instead “sharing stories about ourselves and not having to pretend that we’re not human. It looks like allowing emotionality to be in this conversation, to allow sorrow, to allow anger, to allow hope, to allow choice.”

...
For Prakash, singing brings “the ability for us to be human in the process of trying to solve the greatest existential threat of our lifetime”. It brings “relationships and community and the ability to connect with one another and love the world and love each other in a way that the other side will never have because all they have is money. And I think that is an extremely, extremely powerful force that has guided many movements that have preceded us to do great things.”

Varshini Prakash seems to have a lot of charisma.

 

[lpetrich]

Inside the Sunrise Movement: Six Weeks With the Young Activists Defining the Climate Debate | Vogue

Thunderstorms are a good omen, Prakash tells me. She was born during a thunderstorm; Varshini means “the one who brings the rain” in Sanskrit (her family is from the now drought-ravaged Indian city of Chennai). It thundered when she proposed to her partner, Filipe de Carvalho, 25 (another Sunriser), on a Brazilian beach in late November, as it did earlier that month during Sunrise’s occupation of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office, the action that catapulted the Green New Deal, and the Sunrise Movement with it, to the forefront of the nation’s conversation on climate.

Cute.

Born too late to be seduced by the promises of Reaganite neoliberalism and coming of age between late–Obama era languor and early–Trump era despair, Sunrise’s members are furious at what they see as inaction on climate and ready to take matters into their own hands. In this they’re joined by young, angry activists around the world.

...
In the six weeks I spent at Sunrise rallies, boot camps, and debate parties this summer, the young activists I met seemed caught between idealism and fury—and a longing to escape to different worlds. Meisenhelter, who grew up in a commune with goats in Portland, Oregon, routinely shares favorite fantasy or science fiction with her fellow Sunrisers. “Organizing is making science fiction real,” she says. Prakash nods vehemently; she is currently reading Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven, which describes a dystopian American Northwest ravaged by climate change. (Though Harry Potter is her favorite of the genre—“Duh! Is that even a question?!”—and there are plans to name the conference rooms in the new D.C. Sunrise offices after Hogwarts houses.) Growing up, Prakash and her school friend would take Bridge to Terabithia–type adventures into the woods behind their homes in Acton, Massachusetts. “All of the people I know spent lots of time in imagined worlds,” she says.

I don't do as much of that as I used to - I remember being big on Star Trek, and then video games.

They compose songs that are related to their activism.

Quartets cluster in the hall with the assignment to write a Sunrise-inspired verse to a classic song. ABBA’s Dancing Queen becomes “Gee N Dee/Saves the Earth and economeee/Oh, yeah. . . .” Three different groups rewrite lyrics to Lil Nas X’s Old Town Road: “AOC’s got our back/Markey is on track/Biden’s plan is whack/Elites feelin’ attacked.”

...
But taped to a wall behind a group presenting their parody of “Old MacDonald”—naturally changed to “Old McConnell”—there are savvy diagrams of how to stand during a protest for maximum visual impact.

Sunrise Movement on Twitter: "We are proud to announce that our movement has voted resoundingly to endorse @BernieSanders for President of the United States.
Join the #GreenNewDeal political revolution: [url]https://t.co/3eXE0XsIUv
#Sunrise4Bernie https://t.co/cAO09Irndt" / Twitter[/url]
With a video that explains that endorsement.

 

[TSwizzle]

Rapture like-cult

 

[bilby]

"Arsonists" is a key word in the current debate, that indicates a speaker who is mindlessly parroting climate denialist propaganda. As I pointed out above, arson doesn't cause fires to become catastrophic.

That you even freely admit that you don't know if the (dis)information you are spreading is true, is truly horrifying. But even if it were true, it wouldn't be relevant. So that's at least two good reasons why you shouldn't be saying it at all - unless you care more about "winning" some dumb political game than you care about the truth.

I presume your godlike powers can see the arsonists lighting of fires won't become catastrophic? Even a tiny fire lit at any point in any location has the potential to burn down a whole town in the right conditions.

I find it amusing that you consider the ability to think things through to be a "god like" power.

You apparently can't even comprehend the meaning behind your own statements.

A source of ignition is necessary, but not sufficient, for a catastrophic fire - as you yourself say, it also requires "the right conditions". And if the conditions are right, a fire will inevitably start, and become catastrophic - if not due to arson, then due to accident, misadventure, or natural causes (eg lightning). Ignition sources are everywhere, all the time; arsonists just accelerate an inevitable consequence in catastrophic climatic and fuel load conditions.

But of course, if you lack the "god like" ability to think coherently about stuff, it's easy to completely fail to grasp that simple fact.

 

[angelo]

A rapture like cult and climate catastrophe prophets of doom have among other things in common with say, Jehovah Witnesses, is a sense that they-themselves can change the future, or the destiny of the very planet itself. A forlong conclusion that they can actually change the course of the future of planet Earth and all life upon it. Forgetting that more than 95% of all life on planet Earth became extinct long before the evolution of homo sapiens.

 

[lpetrich]

In 2030, we ended the climate emergency. Here’s how - The Correspondent

In 2021, a new president of the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter, the US, will pass a series of sweeping legislative changes to bring about a Green New Deal and help permanently decentralise political power from the extractive industries that have concentrated wealth for centuries.

That will be good - the corruption of politics by the fossil-fuel companies is a story that has yet to be fully told. We have all the pieces, but someone has to assemble them.

We will criminalise and delegitimise the fossil fuel industry. Fossil fuel executives will be tried for crimes against humanity. Ecocide tribunals will hold those to account for making parts of Earth uninhabitable. We will march through the streets of our coastal cities and along the shores of the future seas in solidarity and celebration as our oppressors are held to justice.

We will courageously name the people who created our burning world without fear of retribution because they will be made powerless by our vision of a better world. History will remember our decades of inaction to tackle the climate crisis as one of humanity’s most profound mistakes.

That seems rather excessive. But I think that that may be worth considering for the likes of the Koch brothers.

We will electrify everything: trains, heating, steel making, farm tractors.

Impractical in some cases. One will need power-to-gas and power-to-liquid synfuels for those cases.

(Rebuilding our cities so that we will need cars less...)

As the decade draws to a close, we will celebrate that our efforts have cut emissions in half globally over the past 10 years. Many countries will reach the goal of zero carbon emissions far sooner than their leaders thought possible. We will finally be on pace for a world without catastrophic climate change. But that will be only a small part of our achievement.

...
Perhaps the most radical change of all this decade will be our newfound ability to tell a story – a positive story – about the future and mean it.

What that story looks like will probably be very different than what you’ve just read, but it will feel very much the same. It will feel like something you’ve always wanted, but never thought you’d get. You deserve it.

 

[lpetrich]

Something like this, but more difficult to picture. This video I find very beautiful: A Message From the Future With Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez - YouTube with her Green New Deal

That was inspired by With a Green New Deal, Here’s What the World Could Look Like for the Next Generation

“We Can Be Whatever We Have the Courage to See”: Molly Crabapple’s Art Gives Life to Green New Deal - YouTube - on creating AOC's GND video


Bernie Sanders on Twitter: "Incremental change is not enough. We are going to enact a Green New Deal because we have no other option if we want to save our planet. https://t.co/q3xg9QpeOF" / Twitter by Zina Precht-Rodriguez and Molly Crabapple

NowThis on Twitter: "‘If you care about this crisis, we need you in this with us’ — @sunrisemvmt believes there can be massive change to fight the climate crisis. Just look at American history. https://t.co/OSH0AzA8aL" / Twitter - Varshini Prakash describes how she recognized how little the Obama Administration was doing about climate change. The Waxman-Markey bill of 2009 was a start, and it passed the House, but it got nowhere in the Senate. Political scientist Theda Skocpol reviewed what happened, and she found that intensity and money beat passive majority support.

She and her friends then decided to research mass movements of the past that had achieved great successes, like the civil-rights movement. What they had in common was large numbers of people involved in them. The New Deal had thousands of strikes, with 1.5 million people striking in 1934 alone. The civil-rights movement had the Montgomery bus boycott, lunch-counter sit-ins, and the Freedom Rides. It took years of such activism before the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

 

[lpetrich]

Erika Chenoweth and her colleagues discovered that no nonviolent activist movement has ever failed once it achieved the sustained support of at least 3.5% of the population, and many such movements won with much less.

Why nonviolent resistance beats violent force in effecting social, political change – Harvard Gazette - "Erica Chenoweth discovers it is more successful in effecting change than violent campaigns"

She found four ingredients:

• A large and diverse population that does a sustained effort.
• Loyalty shifts among the security forces especially, and among other elites.
• A variety of methods, and not just protests.
• When repressed, the activists ought not to go into disarray or turn violent.

“Countries in which there were nonviolent campaigns were about 10 times likelier to transition to democracies within a five-year period compared to countries in which there were violent campaigns — whether the campaigns succeeded or failed.”

The Lasting Power of Nonviolent Resistance—Part 1 | Epicenter
The Lasting Power of Nonviolent Resistance—Part 2 | Epicenter

think that the digital age has led to an age of smart repression. My sense is that regimes have basically caught up to whatever advantage there was to the Internet for activists. The Internet provides lots of opportunity for more narrow, discriminating repression that's more effective than the blunt, brute force that would take place in the streets. We even see this in the US context. In Ferguson, Missouri, activists were singled out by police who knew that they were the organizers and leaders of the movement.

...
Organizing an effective nonviolent campaign of the kind that Maria and I describe in our book requires sometimes years of preparation before people are ready to actually mobilize. So, there's a danger that people think that organizing means setting up a Facebook event instead of actually doing the work to prepare a population for years of struggle.

...
The rank ordering is something like this: nonviolent resistance is the most effective, followed by large insurgencies such as the Chinese Revolution or peasant rebellions, and the least effective is terrorism. That doesn't mean terrorism doesn't have any effects. It depends on the strategy of terrorism. Some people argue that the primary strategy of terrorism is to provoke an overreaction. It's impossible to say that al Qaeda or its affiliates have succeeded in creating a global caliphate or destroying Israel or driving the United States out of Saudi Arabia. You can't say that they achieved those aims as such. But it is definitely true that they had some tactical success in forcing the United States into taking on commitments abroad that have been incredibly costly and counterproductive.

 

[lpetrich]

Protests and Principles by Srdja Popovic — Winter 2020: The Power of Protest | The Wilson Quarterly

What the protests of 2019 do have in common is that organizers of “people power” have begun to fill the vacuum left by the failure of existing political elites to address public demands. In many (but not all) cases, 2019 demonstrated that the traditional and institutional ways of creating change – elections, legal systems and dialogue with the elites – are insufficiently effective. So protesters have decided to utilize another form of power to force constructive change.

The climate movement is a perfect example of this trend. The United States withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accord and insufficient progress in tackling the crisis increasingly has mobilized millions of average citizens across the globe with a new sense of urgency to make change.

Author Srdja Popovic mentions four principles:

Principle One: A Vision of Tomorrow - a movement has to be *for* something to succeed, like independence from colonial rule, being socially equal, and the like. Like this:

“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” - Martin Luther King, Jr.

AOC's Green New Deal video is another such.

Failed movements usually lack this clarity of vision. New York Times columnist Joe Nocera noted that the Occupy movement “had plenty of grievances, aimed mainly at the ‘oppressive’ power of corporations,” but “never got beyond their own slogans.” It is not enough to point out what you do not like. What do you want instead?

The Occupy movement did not even try to find new campsites for itself.

Opinion | Two Days in September - The New York Times - "But the main reason is that, ultimately, Occupy Wall Street simply would not engage with the larger world. Believing that both politicians and corporations were corrupt, it declined to dirty its hands by talking to anyone in power."

 

[lpetrich]

Principle Two: It’s the Unity, Stupid - a movement will have active allies, passive allies, neutrals, passive opponents, and active opponents. It is important to know who is where among them and to try to cultivate allies as far as is reasonable.

Successful movements do not win by overpowering their opponents. Instead, they gradually chip away at their support. Activists must start at the receptive end of their spectrum of allies, and eventually work their way through higher and higher thresholds of resistance. First, mobilize active allies and core supporters. Then, engage passive supporters and those who are neutral. Once a movement begins to win over the passive opposition, they are on the brink of victory.

"Attracting your opponents, or simply the people you disagree with on some points, is essential in building successful social movements."

Poland`s Solidarity movement also illustrates this point. What started as a working-class movement in the shipyards of Gdansk in 1980 succeeded only when diverse groups came together to stand with workers: intellectuals, youth and students, the middle class and farmers, and even the Roman Catholic Church. They agreed to agree on getting rid of communism, while agreeing to disagree on many other socioeconomic issues.

Political Engagement — Sunrise Movement - "No permanent friends. No permanent enemies" - "Our only permanent allegiance is to protecting our communities, our shared home, and our future. We have to make it clear to politicians that our power and support are earned, and not a given."

Principle Three: The Key Pillars

If any social change aims to be durable, it requires not only personal change in leadership, but also deep institutional changes. Therefore, while it is crucial to recruit allies from every point along the spectrum of potential support, activists must also identify the institutions that have the power to implement the changes they want. These “pillars of power” can be the police, the media, the education system, government agencies, or social institutions.

Principle Four: The Power of Attraction

One common element in the current wave of uprisings is that most protestors are opting for nonviolent methods over violence. Research suggests movements that maintain this choice are significantly more likely to achieve their goals over time.

Nonviolent discipline can make and break movements, however. Violence by protestors not only allows governments to justify a crackdown, but it also affects a movement’s reputation, and compromises its ability to mobilize numbers. An example of this danger can be seen in Hong Kong, where numbers at protests fall with increases in violence.

Even in the absence of systematic studies like Erika Chenoweth's, it is evident that nonviolent activism has greater moral capital than violent activism. Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King are remembered much better than the Palestine Liberation Organization, for instance.

That was the calculation of the founders of the Sunrise Movement, that the Sunrisers would do nonviolent activism because that has more moral capital than violent activism.

This is why it is often best for movements to start with small, achievable goals. Gandhi’s allies questioned his idea to make the salt tax a primary focus of the Indian independence movement, because they favored a plan for comprehensive change. But Gandhi saw that a single issue, even a small one, could unify the nation and break British Raj’s monopoly on power.

Cheap, easily replicable, and low-risk tactics are the most likely to succeed – especially if they are seen as positive and good-humored.

Like what the Sunrise Movement does.