By Ron Horn
My political views come from my experience as a anti-war and social justice advocate and related studies in sociology. Thus I am not a climate scientist, not even a physical scientist. My training in university has been largely in political sociology, but I've learned so much more by independent reading and my anti-war and social justice activities. Since the 1970s when the Vietnam War was winding down, I knew that much was need to be done to clean up the environment, and naively hoped that popular pressure would urge our government (US) to do just that. Over the years since then I have been aware of the growing climate crisis that threatened most life of our planet Earth including our own species. Earlier I came to the conclusion that the system of capitalism was the source of most of the ills of the vast majority of humans, but I then realized that this included the growing climate crisis.
Because I am not a physical scientist I have devoted much less time and effort to the climate crisis than the issue of never-ending wars and social injustice. Over the years I have been astonished at the indifference displayed by my fellow Americans regarding the suffering that capitalism has caused for most humans. But now the very existence of humans is being threatened by the climate crisis and still this indifference exists to a startling degree. I cannot attribute this all to the success of the capitalist ruling class and their incessant propaganda and indoctrination. The old religions which has treated humans as an exceptional species guarded over by their imaginary gods have also contributed to this indifference.
In my weblog I have posted many articles documenting this climate and environmental crisis from scientific sources that are the most credible. Because I don't want to be accused of "cherry picking" my sources related to global warming, I recently posted a "recommended" article entitled "Cutting air pollution would not cause ‘near-term spike’ in global warming" that summarized the implications of a research that was published in Nature (behind a paywall) that contradicted a major contention of biologist Guy McPherson, a pessimist about global warming. McPherson has argued, based on his study of climate change, that cutting emissions of carbon dioxide now would only contribute to global warming (known as McPherson's paradox). I sent the article from CarbonBrief to friends who have contact with McPherson to see what they thought of it. They in turn sent it to McPherson who trashed the study and asserted that there were "abundance of evidence" supporting his contention.
I think McPherson is likely right because of several reasons: 1) research trends clearly show that more recent studies from reputable sources are more pessimistic than earlier ones; 2) capitalist authoritative sources have always and consistently opposed the whole impact of global warming studies simply because their system is incompatible with the implications of global warming (also see this, and even in Russia a major climate scientist finds difficulties); and 3) the scientific community has been reticent and conflicted about the dangers of global warming and environmental degradation.
I recommend to those concerned about this issue (and we all should be) to subscribe to a YouTube channel Just Have a Think. [No! See my revised opinion.] The videos are narrated by Dave Borlace, a Brit. Listen to his clear explanation of arctic sea ice, methane release, and the efforts of Natalia Shakhova, a Russian climate scientist.
(A best post)
