The nightmare summit for the Climate

George Monbiot's take on the Mayor's Summit for the Climate. Boris Johnson is called the new face of Thatcherism, but I compare him to the Beano's Denis the Meanace. Boris is intensely likable as the video shows.

And willing to foil an attack on a woman with differing political views from feral kids! So much for armed resistance or the myth that the British "just stand by and watch". No, Boris swoops by on his bike to save the day! A conservative who endorsed Barack Obama with the praise "Unlike the current occupant of the White House, he has no difficulty in orally extemporising a series of grammatical English sentences, each containing a main verb (Telegraph Column, Oct 21, 2008)."

Why can't US Conservatives be like this? Instead, they have Sarah Palin!

Alas, I am sorry that Boris couldn't save the day in Copenhagen.

Goerge Monbiot said something interesting in his post This Is About Us: "The talks at Copenhagen are not just about climate change. They represent a battle to redefine humanity."

The summit’s premise is that the age of heroism is over. We have entered the age of accomodation. No longer may we live without restraint. No longer may we swing our fists regardless of whose nose might be in the way. In everything we do we must now be mindful of the lives of others, cautious, constrained, meticulous. We may no longer live in the moment, as if there were no tomorrow...

The angry men know that this golden age has gone; but they cannot find the words for the constraints they hate. Clutching their copies of Atlas Shrugged, they flail around, accusing those who would impede them of communism, fascism, religiosity, misanthropy, but knowing at heart that these restrictions are driven by something far more repulsive to the unrestrained man: the decencies we owe to other human beings.

Quite true, the issue is no longer just about the climate and the environment, but how we cooperate with each other.

Society cannot function if there are no more laws making a return to the "laws of nature". Humans have removed nature from the world and created society. As George Mnbiot says "this a battle to redefine humanity, and they (the expanders/unrestrained) wish to redefine it as a species even more rapacious than it is today."

George Monbiot's Banner Headline

http://www.monbiot.com/

Tell people something they know already and they will thank you for it. Tell them something new and they will hate you for it.

Well, not necessarily, but I get his point.

Just in time for Copenhagen

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George Monbiot has a super piece called The Real Climate Scandal:

Even if you were to exclude every line of evidence which could possibly be disputed - the proxy records, the computer models, the complex science of clouds and ocean currents - the evidence for manmade global warming would still be unequivocal. You can see it in the measured temperature record, which goes back to 1850; in the shrinkage of glaciers and the thinning of sea ice; in the responses of wild animals and plants and the rapidly changing crop zones.

No other explanation for these shifts makes sense. Solar cycles have been out of synch with the temperature record for 40 years. The Milankovic cycle, which describes variations in the earth’s orbit, doesn’t explain it either. But the warming trend is closely correlated with the accumulation of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere. The impact of these gases can be demonstrated in the laboratory. To assert that they do not have the same effect in the atmosphere, a novel and radical theory would be required. No such theory exists. The science is not fixed - no science ever is - but it is as firm as science can be. The evidence for manmade global warming remains as strong as the evidence linking smoking to lung cancer or HIV to AIDS.

I'm not sure who introduced me to George, but thank you. His columns are super. I may have picked him up from the Guardian or Andrew could have turned me on to him.

I'm glad George's still alive!