Diary Of The Last Age

Sabrina Tavernise in an op-ed at the New York Times makes a good point, that the current partisan divide can be explained as tribal: Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at New York University, calls it the clash between globalists and nationalists. The globalists, who tend to be urban and college educated, want a world like the one described in John Lennon’s song “Imagine” — no religion, walls or borders dividing people. The nationalists see that as a vision of hell. They want to defend their culture and emphasize the bonds of nationhood — flag, Constitution, patriotism. They also want to limit immigration, an instinct that globalists are often quick to condemn as racist. This seems right to me, but as a person who regards global warming as the greatest looming threat to human civilization, I wonder why this divides us on global warming, but it does. For example, Doug Palen, a Midwest farmer who lives in a State populated by members of the nationalist tribe, and a fourth-g...

Climate scientists generally believe that if we keep the increase in the global atmospheric temperature below 2°C (3.6°F) , we would avoid the most serious consequences.  The increase has to be measured from some baseline.   Scientists have recently looked that baseline, A study just out  in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society tackles this question head on. In this article, lead author  Dr. Ed Hawkins from the University of Reading  and an international team of colleagues take into account many climate records that date back decades and centuries. Based on their analysis, they determined that the period 1720-1800 is the best selection for “pre-industrial.”  [....] Using three different analysis methods, the authors are able to conclude that from their pre-industrial time to the 1986-2005 period, there was a likely global temperature increase of 0.55–0.80°C (1–1.4°F).   What this means is that we passed the 1°C (1.8°F) level...

Oil's dark secret   --   Government-owned firms control most of the world's oil reserves. Name the biggest oil company in the world. ExxonMobil? British Petroleum? Royal Dutch Shell? In fact, the 13 largest energy companies on Earth, measured by the reserves they control, are now owned and operated by governments. Saudi Aramco, Gazprom (Russia), China National Petroleum Corp., National Iranian Oil Co., Petróleos de Venezuela, Petrobras (Brazil) and Petronas (Malaysia) are all larger than ExxonMobil, the largest of the multinationals. Collectively, multinational oil companies produce just 10% of the world's oil and gas reserves. State-owned companies now control more than 75% of all crude oil production.... Another country has joined this club, With a Major Offshore Discovery, Guyana Is Poised to Become a Top Energy Producer What this all means is that it is going to be very difficult to get the cooperation of these countries for the fight against global warming bec...