Utopia, you are standing in it!

Ahead of tonight’sParliaments, Politics and People seminarat the Institute of Historical Research, we hear from Anna Harrington, a PhD candidate at the University of Leicester. She spoke at our previous session on 25 February about her research into the campaigning of William Wilberforce following the abolition of the slave trade in 1807…

William Wilberforce (1759-1833) is remembered as the MP who championed the abolition of the slave trade in 1807. He retired from the House of Commons in 1825, after forty-five years as an MP (1780-1825). My PhD thesis, which is a reassessment of Wilberforce’s abolitionist activity throughout his career, argues that in many ways the years after the abolition of the slave trade reflect what Wilberforce had done within that first campaign.

Wilberforce was as active an abolitionist in the second half of his career as he was…

Posted to Energy March 05, 2020 by Curt Levey writes at InsideSources Climate Change Lawsuits Collapsing Like Dominoes.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

Climate change activists went to court in California recently trying to halt a long losing streak in their quest to punish energy companies for aiding and abetting the world’s consumption of fossil fuels.

A handful of California cities — big consumers of fossil fuels themselves — asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit to reverse the predictable dismissal of their public nuisance lawsuit seeking to pin the entire blame for global warming on five energy producers: BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil and Royal Dutch Shell.

The cities hope to soak the companies for billions of dollars of damages, which they claim they’ll use to build sea walls, better sewer systems and the like in anticipation of rising seas and extreme weather that…

The blank look on Jane Fonda’s face revealed that, 50 years on, her activism has aged more than she had. When a BBC Newsnight reporter asked where Fonda got the numbers indicating an existential climate collapse threatening humanity, she replied authoritatively: “From the science!”. When challenged on this, her fumbling revealed how her advisers had assumed that no one was going to question her on that and on whether she had, indeed, read “the science”.

2019 was the year of Celebrity Science – where the cameras focused on stars making a token gesture to some mystical doctrines to be revered rather than read; where virtue signalling meets fear of missing out; and where decades of research could not withstand a mindless celebrity tweet. Anti-vaxx stars walk down red carpets, gurus tout naturopath remedies or celebrities get themselves arrested to help stop the extinction of humanity or collapse of entire ecosystems…

This week former Home Secretary Amber Rudd, who was in charge of the Home Office at the time of the Windrush scandal in 2018, was disinvited by the UNWomen Oxford Society after originally inviting Rudd to speak for International Women’s Day. According to The Guardian, Oxford’s African Caribbean Society claim that they didn’t call for Rudd to be cancelled nor did they plan to boycott the talk, after suggestions were made by the UNWomen Oxford Society. Nevertheless, this story has added fuel to the perception that there is a free speech ‘crisis’ at British universities today and resulted in numerous calls for places like Oxford University to remain a bastion of free speech.

These calls are misleading because there is a long history of students attempting to prevent controversial figures from speaking at Oxford, through the formal use of a ‘no platform’ policy, or by picketing, or disrupting the…

I was chatting to someone yesterday about what was behind the undisciplined, highly political, way in which Reserve Bank Governor Adrian Orr has taken to the job.  My interlocutor reckoned Orr might have his eye on a high place on Labour’s 2023 list (“doing a Brash”).  I was a bit sceptical –  he’d be about 60 and Jacinda Ardern about 43 –  but then I guess this is the era where a youngish (only 72) Trump could be facing off against either Bernie Sanders (77) or Joe Biden (76).   I still doubt Orr has a conscious personal party political goal in mind –  and if he did, it would be highly inappropriate for him to be serving as Governor –  and suspect it is mostly about revelling in being a big fish in a small pond, the opportunity to strut his personal ideological commitments using a statutorily provided (and…

by Judith Curry

My presentation  is provided here.  This is being posted at the start of the event.

(American Cemetery at Normandy)

Last year there were a number of new books that appeared commemorating the 75^th anniversary of the D Day landing in June 1944.  These books include COUNTDOWN TO D DAY: THE GERMAN PERSPECTIVE by Peter Margaratis, NORMANDY ’44: D DAY AND THE EPIC 77 DAY BATTLE FOR FRANCE by James Holland, SAND AND STEEL: D DAY AND THE LIBERATION OF FRANCE by Peter Caddick-Adams, THE FIRST WAVE:THE D DAY WARRIORS WHO LED THE WAY TO VICTORY IN WORLD WAR II by Alex Kershaw, and SOLDIER, SAILOR, FROGMAN, SPY, AIRMAN, GANGSTER, KILL OR DIE: HOW THE ALLIES WON ON D DAY by Giles Milton.  Another important book appeared in 2014, Craig L. Symonds, NEPTUNE: THE ALLIED INVASION OF EUROPE AND THE D DAY LANDINGS.

Symonds the author of THE BATTLE OF MIDWAY, and LINCOLN AND HIS ADMIRALS does a remarkable job describing the preparation and implementation…

U.N. IPCC

“We’ve got to ride this global warming issue.
Even if the theory of global warming is wrong,
we will be doing the right thing in terms of
economic and environmental policy.“
– Timothy Wirth
Fmr President of the UN Foundation

***

46 ENLIGHTENING statements by IPCC experts against the IPCC :

The figure above is from a new paper (Lizundia-Loiola et al. 2020) on recent trends in burned area (BA) and active fires (AF) in the Amazon. The caption for the figure reads: “Country anomalies of BAs (solid line) and AFs (dotted line) for the 2001–2019 period (considering only from January to October).”

The press release on the study from the European Space Agency alludes to the stark difference between actual trends and media coverage of fires in 2019:

“Thousands of fires broke out in the Amazon last year – sparking an international media frenzy. A detailed analysis, using data from the European Space Agency’s Climate Change Initiative, indicates that while there was a small increase of fires in 2019 compared to 2018, fires in Brazil were similar to the average annual number of fires detected over the past 18 years.”