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Aug 28, 2023·edited Aug 28, 2023

Interesting.

I just wonder if you have any commentary on the grifters in that *other* bourgeois party that don’t even claim to be interested in the environment. I have no problem with you skewering the Dem party hypocrites, but isn’t there any venom left over for that other party, which also has nothing but even more contempt and hatred for working-class people like us… including women like me of every class, emphatically including working-class women?

True, the Repugs usually don’t do that kind of asinine performative politics regarding environmental issues - they just don’t give a shit. But it just seems a little, pardon the phrase, partisan to grill one of the Tweedledum parties while ignoring the ongoing behavior of the other. Or did I miss something?

(OK, full disclosure: I love the way you write, and I would just love to see that turned loose on that other bunch!)

P.S. The climate shift is indeed complicated and certainly involves the factors you mentioned*, but to disregard the human contribution is not intellectually tenable. The data comes from too many places, over too many years, and attributed to too many wildly, varying sources (politically speaking) for it to be otherwise.

*You probably already know this, but the Hunga-Tonga underseas eruption of 2021-2 is another potent input into the current climate picture… but the massive additional amount of water vapor will probably only affect climate in a short (2 to 4 year) term.

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Brother, this is just nonsense. Most of your 'facts' are not correct (and look like they came from right wing and fossil fuel industry funded media). And you seem to have no understanding whatsoever of the Greenhouse Effect - which was discovered in 1824. Here's how it works:

CO2 easily allows in full spectrum light, arriving from the Sun in small, tight bandwidths which collide *less* with relatively spacious CO2 molecules. That light heats the Earth. The heat then radiates upward as larger bandwidth *infrared* light that bounces back down more readily off the CO2 (because larger bandwidth light hits the CO2 molecules more often). This increases heating of the atmosphere, ground, & water.

When there is too much CO2, (as there is now because of unprecedented industrial animal agriculture and fossil fuel burning) that trapped heat keeps increasing, and does not stop increasing. When such CO2-driven heating happens quickly enough (as happened during the Permian Extinction 250 million years ago due to massive CO2-releasing Siberian volcanic eruptions) that situation triggers cascading feedback loops (like the loss of reflective ice and snow at the poles) which make the heating even faster and higher. And at the same time the skyrocketing CO2 rapidly makes all water bodies and oceans far more acid than the life in them is accustomed to.

The heat combined with the acid causes huge collapses in the biosphere. This causes animals and plants to die in huge numbers, and that releases even *more* CO2, even faster. The widespread death of plant life also drives deforestation and soil runoff which loads water bodies and oceans with excess nutrients, and that heavy nutrient load combines with the higher heat and acidity to generate worldwide deadly toxic algae blooms. During the Permian this deadly heat/acid/algae-bloom combination and its feedback loops caused 95% of all life to go extinct.

Humans are now raising temperature, CO2, ocean acidity, deforestation, and water body nutrient load on Earth 10 to 100 times *faster* than during the Permian Extinction. It is the *speed* of change, of these combined factors, that is the danger.

In at least one case in our solar system, on Venus (the planet most like ours in size and distance from the Sun) the Greenhouse Effect caused a runaway heating so bad that it turned Venus into an anvil. It became the hottest place in the solar system besides the Sun - and this wiped out any life, or hope for life, arising there.

This was all understood long before modern day grifters like Gates, Soros, Al Gore, and the World Economic Forum started using their billions to coopt and manipulate the climate response and steer it in wrong directions that would make it impotent, and would trick people like you into doubting the actual, legitimate, climate danger, as well as the legitimate movement to reverse that danger which still exists and is doing crucial work (especially in my home state of California, where I am one of the activists in that movement).

I, and other activists and scientists, were warning people about all of this 40 years ago, long before the 21st century 'Green Grift' started happening.

Here is the link to an essay I wrote comparing our current crisis with the Permian Extinction:

"Nature Is Giving Humanity Our Final Extinction Crisis Warning"

https://ericbrooks.substack.com/p/nature-is-giving-humanity-our-final

In the months since I wrote that essay, 100s of dead sea lions & dolphins have appeared on California beaches due to an unprecedented offshore algae bloom, signaling a possible mass ocean die off. Here's NOAA's report on the sea lion & dolphin deaths.

https://fisheries.noaa.gov/feature-story/toxic-algal-bloom-suspected-dolphin-and-sea-lion-deaths-southern-california

The joint climate/extinction crisis is real, and if we all don't rapidly wake the hell up and do something about it, we are fucked.

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I agree with Eric Brooks' description of the science/climate change phenomenon which is related to worldwide ecological collapse. I would just add to his description that C02 accumulations in the atmosphere persist long beyond their emissions date and that globally though China is a leader in for current greenhouse emissions, it is the industrialized West that is responsible for the historic accumulations and the C02 persistence in the atmosphere - starting with the Industrial Revolution.....And there are different measurements of current responsibility for example while the US population numbers are, compared to the rest of the world low, due to its consumerism it ranks in first or second place behind Saudi Arabia in per capita C02 emissions (individual responsibility for C02)....Australia is also high on the list.

I watched coverage of this event on Due Dissidence - and also have been to Nantucket (via ferry, and not in a yacht I don't own) to bike ride. But back to Due Dissidence whose coverage made the astute observation that there were two issues involved on the current climate change crisis - the science of which Brooks' so eloquently pointed out there is no debate among reputable scientists - and then there is the 'agenda'.....The GOP strategy it seems is to hijack discussions of the science with red herring issues about the fallacies of the 'agenda'....Michael Moore bravely and persuasively and comprehensively addressed these fallacies in his great mea culpa Planet of the Humans....There are two main issues I have with the 'agenda' - proposed by the virtue signalers. First of all it involves the transfer of wealth/resources from the global south to the global north in a process largely enforced through the military industrial complex, a big planetary polluter....It also requires control of those resources/solutions by global elites....One example of this has been the crisis with the farmers in Holland who have been told they must curtail dairy farming. At the end of the day the global elites want to have their cake (i.e., capitalism/economic growth) and eat it too (argue through virtue signalling that they are protecting the planet with green technology).

Also at the end of the day, the only solution is going to be a collaborative planet that is not run by capitalism which wants to have infinite growth on a planet with limited resources. The world can fied billions but not billionaires...On the horizon, I see the emerging multi-lateralism as part of the solution - whether one of the biggest polluters, the US will recognize it is another question.

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No working class present, no surprise there.

But ouch on the climate change.

It's expected that normal people don't trust the news or the explanations proffered by the media. There ARE conspiracies at play. But sometimes I think that the conspiracy is more a lack of action followed by a cover up, rather than a deliberate act.

Take Maui. Suspicious actions that point towards a conspiracy include: 1) power company doesn't fix equipment likely to fail, 2) withholding water to fight the fire, 3) local police directing traffic AWAY from the only route to safety (presumably due to downed power lines on the route to safety) and 4) no government assistance for 12 hours after the start of inferno.

All four of these are evil, and in a fair and just society would be outrageous and decried as such in ALL media.

But when people start saying that lasers started the fire or that humans aren't responsible for climate change, the entire conspiracy argument is trashed. The biggest threat to leftist movements that undercover conspiracies are totally bizarre, improbable conspiracies.

Loose Change, a 9/11 conspiracy film, did more to destroy the argument of those of us who believe the US government was complicit in 9/11 than anything else. Our government often corrupts movements by inserting people with wacky, ridiculous arguments. Normal people see these wacky arguments then discount any notion of a conspiracy.

I have no doubt that a conspiracy killed those people in Lahaina. But I'll take a hard pass on lasers and climate change denial arguments.

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