Contents:

• Chasing Ice
• COP18 Meeting in Qatar in Dec
• It’s a Gas
• UEA Results Discredited
• 2013 IPCC Leak
• Wake Up and Do Something Part 1: What is the Post Modernist headspace? Am I suffering from it?

Chasing Ice Film at Chapter Arts Cardiff Jan 4^th (Friday) to 10^th (Thurs)   http://www.chapter.org/29227.html

Highly recommended film using James Balogs time lapse film and photo’s of glacial retreat in several locations around the globe. See what’s happening for yourself for only £5.10 for students/unwaged. We should be getting a copy of the DVD in mid June when it is released.

Manufacturing Consent

Also highly recommended is the documentary Manufacturing Consent about Noam Chomsky’s work that unpicks and describes how governments and states go about conning people into accepting war, law and policy that is against their interests.

Love on the Dole: Does anyone have a copy of this 1941 film on DVD or avi / xvid ?

COP18 Meeting in Qatar in Dec

Well it was rubbish as expected. Unseemly squabbling over money to pay off less developed (i.e. victim) nations politicians. Talks about talks about maybe an agreement by 2015 to maybe do something by 2020. It is interesting to contrast this with the recent global agreement to police the internet against copyright infringement that was negotiated and passed into law virtually in secret without public discussion or consultation in record time. This is as big a pile of bullshit and deceit on a global scale as the promise of bank reform on a national scale.

It’s a Gas

Well as expected George Osborne is now an expert in geology and the environment. Well actually no he is not but he has decided that Shale Gas is what is needed ….. to keep the lights on! Yes that’s what he says; he must mean those lights on motorways that make it safe for squirrels to cross at night. Unlike in the US the mineral rights here are owned by the government so its really about the government making huge wads of cash from license and tax revenue … FCUK the future. Incidentally there are an awful lot of those lights on roads which could be turned off.

UEA Results Discredited

As you no doubt do a Google news search every day for ‘climate change’ you will have seen how many deniers are using the line that all the IPCC results and climate change in general can be ignored because they are all dependant on the University of East Anglia historical temperature data. These of course were discredited by climate gate! Well they were not but if you are told this it is easier to bring up the BEST results. This was a bunch of mostly physicists at Berkley in California who were funded by Kock Bros coal money to produce a new and untarnished data set that did not have any of the issues that UEA had. Working under Prof Phillip Muller after 2 years they published their results with a wider data set. It was the same as UEA and they then went on to conclude also that greenhouse gas emissions were the only plausible cause.

2013 IPCC Leak

The review copy of the next Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change report due for release in 2013 has been leaked. It says that, in their view human induced climate change is virtually certain. This is a big step up from the 2007 report, virtually certain means 99% probable. Such a consensus after so much research by such a large body of scientists for so long is unprecedented.

Wake Up and Do Something Part 1

What is the Post Modernist headspace? Am I suffering from it?

It is clear that people are having difficulty in addressing the serious and pressing problems of damage to our shared environment. This is particularly obvious with the issue of climate change. So why is this?

Looking into the past to see how we got to where we are now it is clear that ideas have changed. Two hundred years ago around the time of Napoleon most people in Britain believed in a God and in heaven and hell, they went to church on Sunday. They studied the Bible from which they got their morality and derived their ethics.

One hundred years ago the general situation was very much the same but scientific method of measurement and comparison to nature had already led to substantial changes in the format of society. Life was becoming easier, people moved into the towns and cities, there was more time for leisure and study, social reform was an issue. Democracy had expanded with the less well off men and then women gaining the vote. Trade unions fought for workers rights.

There was the disaster of the First World War. It is difficult now for a young person to really appreciate the industrialised carnage and upheaval that was the First World War. The effect it had on the mind of the people in the years following was profound and many began to seriously question the idea of a God and the world view presented in the Bible. There were by this time no shortage of philosophers and thinkers to turn to who took the position that there was no God.

After the war the people of Britain looked back with a real sense of loss to the pre-war society. In Germany there was a revolution following World War One and the monarchy collapsed. The monarchy and church were closely related and over the following years two anti-church ideologies rose to compete for power, the Marxists and the Nazis. In Russia following the defeat by the Germans the monarchy fell in1917, the Marxist revolutionaries that took over set out to destroy the church by killing the monks and priests. This was supported by most of the people who blamed the church for having failed them and sold them out to a ruthless free market in the decades before the war.

Then the Second World War begins and the slaughter is renewed in a more ferocious and unlimited way claiming around 60 million people. During the war faith in the idea of a God was renewed somewhat during the conflict but afterwards there was a re-evaluation. In Britain the idea of the benign Christian God began to be progressively discredited. The people still went to churches as social organisations and tradition but the faith progressively waned. By the 1970’s belief became unfashionable and for the majority of people God as an unquestioned faith died.

It is sobering to consider how the morality of war changed in the last hundred years. In World War One 10% of the casualties were civilian, in World War Two it was 50%. In Vietnam the civilian casualties were 70%, in Iraq and Afghanistan it has been 90%. We do not hear or see our current church leaders calling for an immediate end to these criminal wars or going on hunger strike to bring the politicians and soldiers to their senses. The ancient Greeks, soldier and civilian would consider such a state of affairs repugnant and barbaric.

Now this brief attempt to summarize the process in the mind of the people in UK is cursory and incomplete but it is a reasonable overview. It would be fair to say that by the 1980’s UK was a post theistic (post God) society. This is an interesting situation because the faith in God and Bible underpinned morality and ethics. It is like deciding at the end of winter to get rid of an old and unreliable heating system that clearly was not working properly. In the spring you rip it out and dump it on the scrap heap. Summer comes and you feel satisfied and content without need of heating. When autumn comes and it gets colder it begins to occur to you that something is missing. This is similar to what is happening now and our great difficulty in doing the obvious about the environment and climate change. This is fundamentally an ethical and moral problem.

So what happened in the mind of the people when faith in God died? God the deity was not alone, along with God there was self. In many ways self has become the new deity and selfishness the new religion. For want of a better and less unflattering term this can be called postmodernism.

If you wish to give any feedback or ask questions on any of these issues email on deassart@btinternet.com or start a discussion on crabgrass group 4nobletruthsofclimatechange  https://we.riseup.net/4nobletruthsofclimatechange