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I have been searching the web today for confirmation that Perry Anderson has resigned from the editorial board of NLR - no mention on their web-site, and his name just leads to a long list to his contributions - all of which, no doubt, considering my long=time subs to NOR I have read in the past. If true I would beg him to reconsider, because his article of China in the current edition, I regard as the best in the issue, while the article said to be the reason for his resignation is not worth the paper it is written on. As a veteran Marxist I regard the theory of anthropometric (and catastrophic !! climate change) as a new "war on terrorism" - but in this case a war aimed at the working classes of the imperialist world, suggesting "we are all to blame" for the impending end of the planet. I have tried to argue over a number of years against this theory of anthropometric climate change, and the so-called "threat" of carbon-dioxide emissions over quite a number of years on this site, only to be met with ad-hominem opprobrium - and no real discussion of the science involved, The apparent split in the NLR editorial board should bring this to forefront of serious Marxist discussion - as it is crucial to a proper understanding of class struggle, where environmental issues are an important, but subsidiary, issue. No one, surely disputes that climate change is real - so why the opprobrium with the talk of "deniers" (or "heretics", with its suggestion of medieval religious persecutions). Historical and archeological sources are sufficient to indicate that the earth has gone through many climate periods, even during the relatively short time that humans have developed. The discovery of the remains of a mammoth in the cliffs at West Runton, Norfolk, UK, are sufficient to show that some past eras were far warmer than today; and well-authenticated stories and pictures of hog roasts and markets on the frozen Thames in Tudor and Georgian Times are enough to show climate has often been much colder than today. Climate science is a new phenomenon, a closed connection, who seem to take little notice of basic physics, chemistry or biology, and whose basic project seems to be to "prove" their thesis that current climate changes are due to human (and specifically industrial - on which our whole current lifestyle is based) intervention. Their basic hypothesis is based on what they claim is a correlation (over the short period of not more than 100 years of the millennia humans have existed on this planet - and the very much longer time that climate had varied) with carbon-dioxide concentration in the atmosphere. Disregarding the basic criterion of statistics that "correlation does not indicate a cause" - and disregarding the obvious fact that human intervention in CO2 release before the late 20th century was minimal - we are led to believe that current (1940-2000) warming is due to industrial (coal and oil-burning emissions). I have to point out that the greatest sink of CO2 are the oceans (apart from the land deposits in previous sea-beds as limestone !!) - and that solubility of CO2 in water DECREASES with rising temperature - so that rising CO2 cam equally be explained by rising temperatures as rising temperatures can be explained by rising CO2. (Then we have "ecologists" suggesting that rising CO2 is threatening "acidification" of the oceans, disregarding the fact that H2CO3 is about the weakest acid known to chemists). I can only wonder, how such idiocies have not only been taken up by much of the left, parroting the latest idiocies of their imperialist masters, as it has apparently been sucked up by so many scientists, who have not been able to transcend their natural reluctance to criticise scientists in fields outside their own specialism (apart from the fact that currrently the easiest way to secure cash for a research grant is to link the project with such words as " and its effect on global warming"). Consider CO2: it is a very minor consitituent of the atmosphere - around 350 ppm (0.035%) - its IR spectrum (absorbance) is limited almost entirely to 2 specific wavelengths, as distinct from water vapour whose absorbance covers a large proportion of the IR spectrum and a much higher proportion of the atmosphere - both together making CO2 surely a smaller contributor to the "greenhouse effect". Secondly, without CO2 there would be no life at all. All animal (and human if you don't like us being talked of as animals) life depends on the ability of green plants to combine CO2, water, and the energy received from the sun into carbohydrates (sugars and starch), and all plus nitrogen into proteins, which we use as food to supply our needs for energy and growth. The more CO2 (at least up to 1000 ppm, of not more) the faster plants grow - and if CO2 falls much below 100 ppm they give up !!! And yet the US EPA proposes to regard CO2 as a pollutant!! All this is completely apart from discussion of the data used to produce these catastrophic forecasts we are all subjected to - which as accurate measurements, cover an infinitesimal amount of the time of existence of this planet, Has the world gone really mad, I wonder.... It us surely time this list had some serious discussion - avoiding the dogmatic and opprobrious responses that previous contributions of mine have received. Paddy http://apling.freeservers.com ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
