The Hot Just Keeps Coming

When data of November comes in, the already record high 12-month running mean will surge further. It will make another jump with December. And with the months after that. This data will only inform those willing to understand.

Leon Simons, Climate Scientist, @LeonSimons8 on Twitter

Roger Hallam (Photo from Film: Magnitude of All Things)

   It is important that Hansen's paper "one of the most important published on the state of the climate crisis in years" is seen as combining two modes of analysis: Sir David King and James Hansen, “I'm of the view that this piece from James Hansen and 17 others last week is one of the most important published on the state of the climate crisis in years.the naturalistic objectivist analysis of the physical and biological environment and a normative subjectivist analysis of the process of social change. Often the latter gets hidden in the former so that embedded in "the science", consciously or unconsciously, are high disputable statements about "how to make social and political change happen."
   The latter is my own area of academic expertise, ie my research at Kings College London, which informed the setting up of Extinction Rebellion and some of the largest civil disobedience campaigns presently operating in the Western World - eg Just Stop Oil and Last Generation.
   The greatest analytical error of "climate scientists" is that they do not understand there are two fundamental logics of social change - reformist and revolutionary, as have been going on for the last 250 years.
   The notion, promoted by the vast majority of the climate scientists, that reformist logic is the only game in town is sociologically and historically illiterate: this has nothing to do with normative preferences; you can hate revolutions while accepting the reality of their central role in social development. The reason why Hansen's paper is "one of the most important published on the state of the climate crisis in years" is not primarily because it is a clear case that humans are heading for effective or absolute extinction - ie 5C increase in temperatures (though they will not make that explicit of course!) - but because they accept, and make explicit, that only revolutionary action by young people will save them and their children in time.
   While this is now objectively obvious sociologically (reformists reducing emissions by half in 5 yrs - good luck with that!) that revolutionary episodes are both necessary and inevitable, the climate science " community is in almost complete denial about this social science.
   This would be fine if they stuck to the natural science, but they do not. Their communications are saturated with reformist purposive statements which are completely ridiculous. Hansen's paper shows a way for them to redeem them-selves. In short: it's revolution or total death.
   At a time when Sir David King, arguably Britain's top public scientist, confirms the view of arguably America's top climate scientist, Dr. James Hansen, that governments have locked in 5C of global warming, enough to destroy civilization and very likely the extinction of the human race, the question has to be asked as to why the British legal profession is standing by and even about to facilitate the imprison-ment by its magistrates and judges of scores of people in the worst prisons in Europe for the supposed crime of march-ing down a London street to stop the drilling for new oil and gas. The level of contempt I feel leaves me speechless.

Roger Hallam, Co-Founder of Extinction Rebellion, via @RogerHallamCS1 on Twitter