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Bill – good on you in that case, I am very happy to be corrected. Thank you. If there’s anything you want to discuss about it so far, I am sure participants here will be very pleased to do so.
For a little light relief Bill you could watch Sabine Hossenfelder’s video on YT.
I Misunderstood the Greenhouse Effect. Here’s How It Works.She gives some interesting information in it, particularly how density/gravity affects the greenhouse gas effect.
I’d just like to say to all the “climate has always changed (so let fossil fuel companies do whatever they want)” brigade that around 300 million years ago, millipedes grew as big as cars, and flying insects bigger than dustbin lids. Earth’s atmospheric oxygen ratio has been up to 67% higher than it is now, and 33% lower. But obviously civilisation can survive anything, because Hollywood.
Jon, “sweeping and rather vague conclusions” whut. Fossil fuel emissions are the most significant factor in causing the climate to change” is not “sweeping and vague”. I assume you are talking about the IPCC summary, which is well known for minimising some of the danger to appease policy makers. I suppose I could refer you to the Royal Society position on the matter, but I’m quite sure you can look at that for yourself.
Here is a list of resources. the discussion forum is available for whatever questions you desire more precise answers to.
https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/05/start-here/Fat Jon, I promised you a reply weeks ago, but I couldn’t formulate what I wanted to say and I still can’t, and I have been very short of time. So here is a post by Tom Murphy that I think says what I feel better than I could say it myself:
You’re absolutely right that climate change is used as an excuse, a sop, and a distraction from the broader problem; “oh, we just move to renewable energy and the problem is solved. Look, we’re already doing it!”
Yeah, right :-/
(I seem to remember spotting a few half-truths in your claims about climate change, but it’d be petty to bang on about them. Suffice to say that climate change is serious; details can be confirmed from appropriate sources.)
Here; I’ll quote the paragraph that resonated with what you wrote and prompted me to post the link. The “boat” is a metaphor for technology or “progress”:
– “Probably the most common reaction among the subset of the billions of privileged humans in the boat who even acknowledge the danger is to focus on the boat, and how it might be modified to continue insulating us from limits and danger. Technology, innovation, ingenuity, science, and extraction/exploitation have done marvels in getting us to this state (overlooking the dominant role of the river itself, as we are prone to do), so let’s double down and do more of that! Such reactions tend to be piecemeal: dividing the predicament into identifiable problems that individually might have viable “solutions” but do little to change the overall state of affairs. Solar panels might address CO2, for instance, but not the “meta” peril of ecological overshoot enabled by a hubristic, supremacist relationship to the natural world.”
Glenn_nl, brilliant! Arnold Schroder, and here is his website:
https://www.againsttheinternet.com/
You’re a more hardcore atheist than me, Glenn. It’s coincidences like that which convince me there is something, well, divine going on in our universe.
I hope Fat Jon sees my reply; I feel I have let him down, taking so long about it.
I think glenn_nl’s generalisation about denialists’ “baseless assertions” (28th October) – which is itself a baseless assertion – indicates it’s rather unlikely honest debate is actually being sought but rather to use Craig Murray’s site to promote his own views on climate change. Calling someone a “denier” or denialist or some similar term is predicated on one’s own position being self-evidently true and the so-called “denier” being willfully ignorant. That’s not the basis for starting an honest debate. If you want honest debate you first need to stop using terms like “denier”, “denialist”.
Andy – thanks for writing.
My motivation for starting this thread was pretty much as stated. I was a bit irritated with people who drop into conversation that climate change is all a hoax, but then refuse to discuss the point past such assertions to any level of seriousness. They make a few standard simplistic assertions, ignore the rebuffs, and later just make them again and again.
Do you think ‘sceptic’ is any more honest? Is a person really a ‘sceptic’ when it comes to physics and chemistry generally, or is this scepticism reserved for things they simply do not want to believe, and science then suddenly becomes – for this single subject – suddenly all bullshit and full of charlatans and hoaksters?
Since these denialists or sceptics never – and I do mean never – stick around to argue their point, their position has gone way past scepticism and into denialism.
So actually, I think the term ‘denialist’ is most fair.
Andy G, since you seem to be here to discuss language rather than climate, I think you mean “evident” rather than “self evident”:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self_evident
So what would you regard as convincing evidence?
I was born in 1963, and I remember hearing about anthropogenic global warming (AGW) since the mid 1980s. I remember hearing on TV news that the “signature of AGW…” (namely, stratospheric cooling, though I didn’t know that at the time) had “been detected”, so that would have been 1988, when James Hansen so testified to the US government. I remember hearing that action had been taken about ozone depletion but that global warming remained unaddressed, so that would have been 1989 when the Montreal Protocol entered into force. I remember when the Stern Review described the effect of AGW in economic terms, so that would have been 2006.
That’s essentially my whole adult life, so if I were still ignorant by now, I think it would be fair to call that wilful; wouldn’t you?
Andy G, I think glenn_nl has invited those people who do not agree with the conclusions of AGW science to come and detail their disagreements with the conclusions.
So, for instance, a common argument made against AGW is that it is variation in the radiative output from the sun. There is strong evidence based on first principle science that that cannot be the case because that would imply stratospheric warming whilst what we see is stratospheric COOLING.
What we see when strong first principle science refutes an argument is people changing to another argument without acknowledging or countering with different evidence so that we can all take a look at it and assess it. In other words people have taken a view and will not allow themselves to change their view despite clear first principle science. Neither will they present evidence to back up their view preferring instead to exit the conversation, change to a different argument unrelated to what their original arguments and refuse to deal with the topic honestly. These drive-by grenade type posts get very tedious both here and in other threads. If you are gonna post about your disagreement with climate science, then at least have the decency to take it on properly.
Since this is the latest and hence most active climate change thread, here are a couple of really important articles about COP28 by Nafeez Ahmed. The first includes sections named “Al Gore’s Deception” and “Climate Scientists don’t Actually have the Answers”, which I highlight unashamedly as clickbait for deniers:
‘Keeping Carbon in the Ground’ Missed the Point: How COP28 Signals End of Oil
We’re Crossing a Global Tipping Point on Fossil Fuels and There’s No Going Back
However, comments about these are likely to be off-topic here. If you have a reply but it isn’t about hit-and-run denialism, please continue on the following, older thread, here.
Fellow rationalists, I’m suspecting a strange complementarity.
In the red corner we have George Monbiot, Al Gore, Michael Mann and his ilk; Labour and Democrat ‘centrists’ generally, who stress the extreme danger and urgency of the ecological crisis including AGW, but accept, shall we call it, the Integrity Initiative framing of Russia being the most deadly and immediate threat, Bellingcat being a reliable source, and rarely or never supporting the likes of Julian Assange, Craig Murray, Jonathan Cook etc. They have large platforms and frequently appear in the commercial ‘news’ media.
In the blue corner we have sundry anonymous commenters on blogs such as this one. Their narrative is quite strongly anti-war, they do support the sort of dissidents I list above, but they consistently push the handful of familiar AGW denial tropes, such as “Al Gore bought a beachfront mansion (so AGW must be a hoax)”.
It takes liquid fuel to fight wars; nearly all the machinery of death runs on it. If we imagine a battery-powered military pitched against a military powered by diesel and kerosene, liquid fuel wins hands down, no question. Not only does liquid fuel have higher energy density, it takes only a couple of minutes to refill a fuel tank, whereas the time to charge a battery is comparable to how long it can be used before needing a recharge. Our hypothetical electric military would need twice as many fighting machines, because half would be being charged at any given time. And how do you get electricity to the front line? Liquid fuel can be simply conveyed in tankers.
And wars are fought to secure liquid fuel. Iraq, Libya, the constant manoeuvring against Iran and its ally Syria, supporting the al Saud dynasty against Yemen, and now the assault on Gaza, with the Leviathan field off its coast.
Climate change and war are intimately connected, yet my strange complementarity keeps the movements against each separated. Coincidence?
And it isn’t just AGW denial; covid denial and trivialisation correlates with AGW denial too. And Twin Tower pre-rigged demolition hypothesis (though that one seems to have been vanquished on this particular site), which shifts the target from Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld to the otherwise fairly obscure US public-sector engineering authority NIST.
This stuff is polluting the anti-war, anti-spook narrative; any rationalist who arrives is likely to be put off, throw out the baby with the bathwater, and consign important geopolitical insights with flat Earth and anti-vax.
Our resident deniers won’t even admit to having seen these two latest comments of mine; they’ll deny ever having looked at this thread.
I came across John Tyndall’s 1861 lecture, one of the earliest experiments to demonstrate that certain gases absorb and radiate heat and one of the earliest experiments contributing to our understanding of the greenhouse effect. It’s a masterpiece of first principle science. I post it for interest sake.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/108724?seq=15
The Wikipedia on John Tyndall is also worth looking at.
I just spent about twenty minutes putting a post together, and for some inexplicable reason it didn’t show up on here. And the most annoying thing is that I didn’t copy and paste it into my word processor as I usually do just in case there’s a problem (whichever site I’m posting on), so I’ve got a backup. I’m at a complete loss.
I really can’t be bothered typing out what I explained initially (in my post that went AWOL), and will just post the links to these two recent articles on Counterpunch:
‘Politicians Ignore Reality as the World Burns Around Them’
https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/03/19/politicians-ignore-reality-as-the-world-burns-around-them/
‘CO2 Bursting into the Atmosphere’
According to climate scientists, we’re fast approaching white-knuckle time. This reinforces the outlook for 2024 as expressed by WMO: “Every major global climate record was broken last year and 2024 could be worse.” (Celeste Saulo, secretary-general, World Meteorological Organization)
Making matters more nerve-wracking yet, Carbon dioxide, CO2, in the atmosphere is setting new all-time records, soaring above expectations and well above previous readings at Mauna Lua Observatory, Hawaii:
March 18, 2024, CO2 measured 426.02 ppm.
March 15, 2023. CO2 measured 420.24 ppm.
That’s +5.78 ppm in only one year. An increase of this magnitude has not been seen before. On a seasonal basis, the month of May is ordinarily the peak reading for the year. That’s still weeks away…..
Meanwhile, Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) confirmed that February 2023 to January 2024 saw warming of 1.52 degrees Celsius above the 19th century benchmark.
It’s almost impossible to grasp the damage happening to world ecosystems because it happens on the fringe of civil society, such as Siberian and Alaskan permafrost leaking methane, Antarctica ice shelves deteriorating, Greenland rain at its summit for the first time ever as the entire ice structure goes off the charts with a summertime melt rate increasing from 30,000,000 tons per day to 720,000,000 tons per day in the time span of only one year. Honestly, this is beyond words!
A few years ago, not that far back in time, people would have freaked out over the threats currently wrought by global warming, but as time passes, people get accustomed to hearing about disaster scenarios like a Hollywood film, but on TV in the comfort of their homes, and they shrug and move on with life as long as it’s not in their neighborhood.
Elsewhere, beyond the weird noises of nature heard in the Amazon rainforest, in everyday life people wake up every morning in cities like LA and NYC and Atlanta and Dallas, London, Tokyo, Rio de Janeiro (record heat 62.3°C or 144.14°F on March 18th), and they go about daily routines, the same ole, same ole, hop into a new EV, motor the freeway to an underground parking garage, up an elevator 20 floors to air-conditioned offices for 8 hours and then reverse the process. These people do not live where climate change damages ecosystems.
Urban ecosystems mainly consist of concrete, asphalt, glass, steel, some wood, chemical-laden textiles, and a sprinkling of flora. What’s to harm? Urban residents are missing, and ignorant of, the deterioration of the planet’s most important ecosystems that sustain life, period! This is called “recognition deficit” and down the road the consequences will be deadly.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/03/22/co2-bursting-into-the-atmosphere/
The disappearing posts has also on occassion happened to me. It’s annoying but relatively infrequent.
As for climate change, this thread has gone quiet.
The record in Rio was for heat index which measures what a temperature feels like by taking into account humidity. The actual maximum temperature in the city was 42C on Monday, the Rio Alert weather system said. I don’t think people would actually survive 62C for more than a few hours if that was the actual temperature.Yes, it was a bit misleading of the author not to point that out. But never-the-less, it WAS a record high temperature:
Allan Howard, thanks for the links. I’m sorry your post went missing; the same thing has happened to me many times.
The climate situation is extremely scary. There are technological methods for reducing both global temperature and carbon dioxide levels:
https://www.againsttheinternet.com/post/15-ghg-removal-and-the-worldviews-that-consider-it
But these measures will not even be considered by the current governments of the most powerful countries, which are obsessed with financial and military dominance.
An oft-deployed AGW denialist argument is that, according to palaeontology, atmospheric CO2 increases lag behind global temperature increases, and are therefore an effect not a cause. Their palaeontology is correct, but their causal reasoning is wrong because a phenomena can be simultaneously both an effect and a cause – in which case we have a classic positive feedback loop.
Rising ocean temperature displaces CO2 from solution into the atmosphere, where it raises global temperature, raising ocean temperature, displacing further CO2.
Rising temperature increases prevalence of wildfires, releasing further CO2 to the atmosphere.
Rising temperature melts permafrost, releasing methane…
It’s comforting to now that the world scientific community has moved forward having ‘settled the science’ regards climate change.
With the science so settled, it’s allowed them time to agree how to measure carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere. No longer is there any necessity to quantify CO2 as a percentage of atmosphere, or even as parts per million (ppm). We have Carbon Dioxide Equivalent (CO2e).
They have even found enough time to settle the measurement of temperature in the same manner. No longer is it old school ‘heat’, it is now a “heat index”Bravo the world scientific community…_
– No longer is it old school ‘heat’, it is now a “heat index”
All part of the conspiracy, huh?
No. There is still old school temperature, and heat index is nothing new. Weather measurements were one of the hobbies I went through as a lad, nearly fifty years ago. I bought a max/min thermometer, but never saved up enough for a wet and dry bulb thermometer – heat index could be derived from the two readings:
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=wet+and+dry+bulb+thermometer
Heat index tells you how dangerous conditions are, because it takes humidity into account. When air is very humid it prevents sweat evaporating, defeating the major mammalian cooling system.
And some science is indeed settled. Snooker players do not need quantum physics; Newtonian mechanics does just fine. So apart from the rhetoric, what is your testable objection to climate science?
Heat index is something similar to “wind chill” though obviously for heat not cold and not so frequently heard on weather reports in this part of the world (UK). I guess in hotter climates it’s more important to people. For a given temperature, the higher the humidity the more you will feel hot because the higher the humidity the less effective sweating is able to cool you down.
The wiki article on heat index is informative.
The carbon dioxide equivalent isn’t trying to express the quantity of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e or CO2eq or CO2-e) can be calculated from the global warming potential(GWP). For any gas, it is the mass of CO2 that would warm the earth as much as the mass of that gas. Thus it provides a common scale for measuring the climate effects of different gases. It is calculated as GWP times mass of the other gas.
I posted a link to John Tyndall’s lecture from 1861 above, one of the earliest experiments demonstrating that certain gases absorb and radiate heat. Note, that was in 1861, long before there was any talk about climate change.
Huh. Gone all shy already?!
Look on the bright side; this one’s down to just one snarky comment, and the others have been silent for weeks. Of course “oh, it seems I got it wrong” would be far more satisfactory, but I guess they’ve just invested too many decades. Personally I’d rather look stupid than stay stupid.
Actually, looking at ET’s Wiki link, it couldn’t have been heat index I encountered some fifty years ago, it must have been the closely related Canadian humidex. But obviously this is all bollox; scientists in 1965 and 1979 carefully laid the groundwork so that scientists two professional generations later could pretend there’s a global catastrophe in progress when there isn’t, because that’s what scientists always do, isn’t it? Bastards. And computers are really made from rubber bands and sticky tape; all this quantum stuff about “developing semiconductors” is a hoax.
DiggerUK, please don’t go all shy; “net zero” really is a scam, and many climate scientists really are hypocrites. Al Gore buying a mansion on the coast? That’s the norm among climate scientists! Here; listen to climate scientist and former oil rig engineer Kevin Anderson:
Sabine Hossenfelder has posted a video on YT which is an honest review of the situation of acadimia My dream died, and now I’m here. Unfortunately, she is correct and I’ve seen similar.
However, it’s important to point out that even if this is the case it doesn’t mean that all science is wrong and we shouldn’t throw the baby out with the bath water. Even with this it is still amenable to scrutiny.
ET, thanks. That video had been cropping up in the YouTube sidebar and I had wanted to listen to it. Isn’t neoliberalism wonderful? I remember Thatcher arguing that public funding of universities should be reduced, and that industry should pay for research. Hmmm.
I’d been suspecting for some time that “cutting edge” physics and cosmology had been disappearing up its own arse.
Hossenfelder’s video leads on nicely to a related matter. We’ve all been citing Our World in Data. Hmmm.
When Billionaires Fund Science Education, 21 minute video. Via a YouTube front end:…or for those who feel more comfortable with Big Tech:
Fingers crossed… hopefully THIRD time lucky (I remembered to take a copy this time!)!
Oh no! Not again! Another post that went AWOL… and yet AGAIN, I didn’t copy it. Fortunately this time it was relatively short:
April 15, 2024
The Death of Paris ‘15
by Robert HunzikerAccording to a new report by Global Energy Monitor of San Francisco, at least 20B barrels of oil equivalent has been discovered since the International Energy Agency statement of fact in 2021 that no new oil, gas, or coal development should proceed if the world is to reach net zero by 2050.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/04/15/the-death-of-paris-15/
Says it all really.
BBC News Channel just now: Floods in the Gulf, people dead. Floods in Pakistan (yet again), people dead.
Just did a search….
Lightning and rain kill dozens in Pakistan
https://www.msn.com/en-xl/news/other/lightning-and-rain-kill-dozens-in-pakistan/ar-BB1lGRyx
Fierce storm lashes United Arab Emirates as Dubai diverts flights
Another Sabine Hossenfelder video explaining some of the evidence for human activity being the cause of global warming: How do we know climate change is caused by humans?
Clark, you mentioned George Monbiot in a post above. Today he has written an article about the victimisation of Marcus Decker and Trudi Warner. Decker is subject to a deportation order following his inordinately long sentencing for his protest and this will leave him split from his partner. Monbiot states “not in my name.” Is this just more posturing from the Guardian or do you think it will have any effect?
Allan Howard, I read the article you linked to at Counterpunch, and looked at a couple of others by the same author Robert Hunziker. He’s sensationalising considerably, and he should link to the scientific papers he uses as sources.
In the earlier link (your comment #95575), the title Politicians Ignore Reality as the World Burns Around Them is entirely appropriate, but I looked at the Keeling curve of CO2 concentration, and his claim “That’s +5.78 ppm in only one year” seems exaggerated by cherry-picking. Consequently I wish he had linked to the source for his claim “Greenland rain at its summit for the first time ever as the entire ice structure goes off the charts with a summertime melt rate increasing from 30,000,000 tons per day to 720,000,000 tons per day in the time span of only one year”; that’s a 24 fold increase and I’d like to check it.
In the recent link (your comment #95883), his claim in the 6th paragraph “They’re drilling and increasing production 4-fold, period!” contradicts the preceding paragraphs he bases it on, and isn’t remotely possible geologically. A few paragraphs later he refers to an article at space.com based on a computer simulation by “astronomers”. But the simulation starts with “a global average temperature rise of just a few tens of degrees” [my emphasis]. This is not relevant to Earth’s current climate nor the science of climate change, in which even the worst case scenarios are well under ten degrees of increase.
Climate change denialists call the IPCC projections “alarmist” when in fact they are toned down. However, their criticism would be appropriate for the few like Hunziker.
ET – “Is this just more posturing from the Guardian or do you think it will have any effect?”
Short answer; no, and no.
I expect Monbiot is genuinely horrified, but he works for the Guardian which betrayed Assange, helped sabotage Corbyn, and is promoting Starmer. Monbiot suffers from what I call the “legacy of reductionism”. He thinks of the climate and ecological crisis as separate from the crisis of war and authoritarianism, as if one could be solved without solving the other. He fails to connect the slaughter of nature, the slaughter of farm animals, and the slaughter of Gazans; fails to see that they’re all expressions of human dominance, and that fossil fuel, particularly liquid fuel, is the primary enabler of human dominance – whether that be over nature, livestock, or other humans.
Monbiot has said on television that “we need to go to the heart of capitalism and overthrow it”, but he needs to look at himself and ask why he isn’t having more effect. He should ask himself why the establishment permit him to continue at the Guardian when Nafeez Ahmed was sacked. He should reconsider his dismissal of Craig as a conspiracy theorist and Assange as persecuted but distasteful and politically unacceptable. Monbiot spent four hours in police cells for his brief theatrical action with Extinction Rebellion. It was a noble sacrifice to make, but he should exercise more respect and humility, and consider that Craig’s four months in actual prison and Assange’s ten years of ongoing confinement may represent the establishment’s assessment of their relative threat.
ET, I suppose I should have answered ‘yes’ to whether Monbiot’s piece was “just more posturing from the Guardian”. Monbiot does excellent “environmental” journalism, but geopolitically he’s a useful idiot. I really think he means well and has no idea of the damage he does. His thinking is just compartmentalised i.e. reductionist, so he fails to fit the pieces together. Here’s a relevant article from 2011 by Jonathan Cook:
The Dangerous Cult of the Guardian
And here is Nafeez Ahmed’s account of being sacked by the Guardian:
How I was censored by The Guardian for writing about Israel’s war for Gaza’s gas
An excerpt from the first link:
– George Monbiot, widely considered to be the Guardian’s most progressive columnist, has used his slot to attack a disparate group on the “left” who also happen to be harsh critics of the Guardian.
– In a column in June he accused Ed Herman, a leading US professor of finance and a collaborator on media criticism with Noam Chomsky, and writer David Peterson of being “genocide deniers” over their research into events in Rwanda and Bosnia. The evidence was supposedly to be found in their joint book The Politics of Genocide, published last year, and in an online volume, The Srebrenica Massacre, edited by Herman.
– Implying that genocide denial was now a serious problem on the left, Monbiot also laid into journalist John Pilger for endorsing the book and a website called Media Lens that dedicates itself to exposing the failings of the corporate media, including the work of the Guardian and Monbiot. Media Lens’ crime was to have argued that Herman and Peterson should be allowed to make their case about Rwanda and Bosnia, rather than be silenced as Monbiot appeared to prefer.
– Monbiot also ensnared Chomsky in his criticism, castigating him for writing a foreword to one of the books.
Just seen your post Clark re Robert Hunziker, and I must admit that it didn’t even cross my mind that his articles weren’t totally factual what with them being posted on Counterpunch. As you probably noticed, there’s a contact email address at the end of his articles, so why don’t you email him and put your points/criticisms to him, or I can do so if you prefer.
Anyway, from Counterpunch to Counterfire (in more ways than one):
Canada faces another grim wildfire season
Canada’s 2023 wildfire season was unprecedented in its scale and devastation, and there are strong indications that this year may also be extremely severe. Speaking at a press conference, the Trudeau government’s Natural Resources Minister, Jonathan Wilkinson, warned that we ‘are preparing for the worst … Early projections for 2024 indicate the potential for early and above-normal fire activity over the spring months as a result of ongoing drought forecasts.’
A government press release amplified this warning, declaring that ‘Canada may be at risk of another “catastrophic” wildfire season due to extreme temperatures boosted by El Niño.’ Wilkinson also noted that widespread regional drought conditions create the prospect of ‘early and above-normal fire activity over the spring months.’
As the prospect of another disastrous wildfire season looms, we must appreciate that this situation is but one manifestation of the rapidly intensifying climate crisis. The link between carbon emissions and global warming has long been understood, but the rapidity and volatility of the process are much greater than was previously imagined, and wildfires are a case in point. Last September, the Guardian noted, with regard to Canada’s fires, that this ‘summer, however, as flames devoured one of the largest contiguous stretches of woodland on the planet, 2bn tonnes (2.2bn tons) of carbon dioxide were released into the atmosphere….
https://www.counterfire.org/article/canada-faces-another-grim-wildfire-season/
It just occurred to me to check out the wikipedia entry for George Monbiot, and it’s quite interesting. I interacted with George on a few occasions about fifteen/twenty years ago in respect of the anti-camera propaganda outfits SafeSpeed and the Association of British Drivers, as it was known back then. George wrote a number of articles on the topic, and I’m pretty sure it was me that drew his attention to a great big porky that Jeremy Clarkson dissembled in a Sun article, which George refers to in the following article:
The anti-speed-camera campaign is built on twisted truth and junk science
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2007/nov/13/comment.transport
As for the wikipedia entry, it says that he endorsed Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership election campaign in 2015, and:
Monbiot made an unsuccessful attempt to carry out a citizen’s arrest of John Bolton, a former US ambassador to the United Nations, when the latter attended the Hay Festival to give a talk on international relations in May 2008. Monbiot argued that Bolton was one of the instigators of the Iraq War, of which Monbiot was an opponent.
And, earlier in his career:
Working as an investigative journalist, he travelled in Indonesia, Brazil, and East Africa. His activities led to his being made persona non grata in seven countries[18] and being sentenced to life imprisonment in absentia in Indonesia.[19] In these places, he claims he was also shot at,[20] brutally beaten up and arrested by military police,[20] shipwrecked[20] and stung into a poisoned coma by hornets.[21] He came back to work in Britain after being pronounced clinically dead in Lodwar General Hospital in north-western Kenya, having contracted cerebral malaria./p>
Afterthought: The funny thing is that about three or four days ago – for some specific reason that escapes me now – I was thinking to start a thread on here (the forum) about the anti-camera propaganda and speeding and the annual carnage on the roads etc, etc. And the odd thing is/was – and I can’t remember if it was in Craig’s current thread, or the one before – but a couple of posters (first one, and then another in a reply) referred to the number of kids who are killed and seriously injured on the roads a day or two after I had the idea to start such a thread. I spent many years on pretty much a daily basis ‘combatting’ the propaganda lies and falsehoods of the ironically named SafeSpeed and the pompous-sounding Association of British Drivers, AND, most of the MS newspapers. I could relate literally dozens of examples, but here’s just one, and one that undoubtedly cost the lives of thousands of people…. I think it was 2002… make that 2001, when there was a big debate about whether speed cameras should be hidden or visable, and most of the MS newspapers – and especially the right-wing papers – and the Tories ‘campaigned’ for cameras to be visable, and were successful. Needless to say, they did so knowing that if they were hidden and, as such, drivers prone to speeding didn’t know when and where they would encounter one, then they would be much more likely to drive within the given speed limit most of the time (as opposed to slowing down and then speeding up again in respect of visable cameras).
And just ONE obvious statistic: the reason the vast majority of people who would like to cycle but don’t, is because of their fear of being killed or seriously injured by fast-moving traffic/vehicles. And ditto in relation to parents letting their kids cycle.
Declaration: I was knocked down by a fast-moving vehicle when I was seven years old….. An ambulance!
Oops, I meant to post a link in relation to this at the end of my previous comment. I wonder if the half-million or so who signed the petition all lived in Wales?! I doubt it somehow:
‘Welsh government plans 20mph speed limit u-turn’
More than half a million people have signed a petition against the 20mph limit
Transport Minister Ken Skates is set to announce a change to the policy
https://www.msn.com/en-sg/news/other/welsh-government-plans-20mph-speed-limit-u-turn/ar-AA1nliya
And just one last final point/statistic – ie the number of people killed on the roads globally:
https://www.who.int/teams/social-determinants-of-health/safety-and-mobility/global-status-report-on-road-safety-2023
https://www.who.int/data/gho/data/themes/topics/topic-details/GHO/road-traffic-mortality
