""Every day we delay taking action, the problem gets worse," Mr Jackson said."

But it didn't! It got better! Which should tell you that humans are so arrogant that they think that their actions actually control Global Climate Change (GCC). The energy output of the Sun is not constant, and has a very direct effect on the world's climate. Geologists know that the Earth's temperature goes through up/down swings, and has been doing so for eons ... long before man ever climbed down from the trees and walked upright across the land.

The fact that politicians now have their finger in the GW pie tells me most everything I need to know. It just means that there's a bunch of money to be made from the artificially manufactured problem of "Global Warming". No thanks ... I'm just fine.

Posted by Vulgorilla at September 7, 2006 08:04 AM

Before BM took off, I was a anti-establishment quasi-anarchist for a year while a UC Berkeley student, and lived that both hilarious and idiotic way of looking at the world.

Jason's observation is important, but I'd like to add that "fakeness" he identifies is an echo of:

* "real socialism" that idealistic communists/socialists imagine is possible "after the revolution" and after the Communist state has "withered away."
* "true anarchy" that non-violent anarchists imagine is possible NOW!
* escapist kicks that deadbeat beatniks hunger for regardless of what governments, Islamofascists, or anyone do.

For every utopian strain in Western culture, there's also a critical strain that is both in solidarity with and in opposition to it - "the movement within the movement." Start with Trotsky vs. Stalin in the USSR. Or surrealism (of whose legacy those funny paintings are just one part), which was at loggerheads with the Communist Party in France. Or the Situationist International (just Google it) during the 50s and 60s. Or the role that postmodern critics flatter themselves that they play today.

But there's also a very dangerous aspect to this, a kind of moral weightlessness or vacuum. Anyway, I doubt that everything is so hunky dory out there in the desert during those a few days.

That's my "deep," take on it.

A less "deep" take: It's the antiglobalization and/or yuppie pop/counter-culture crowd's annual tailgate party.

____

(Glad you're back, GM!)

Posted by Jeremayakovka at September 7, 2006 12:03 PM

I've never been able to take Burning Man seriously - a bunch of affluent American guys trying to get in touch with a tribal primative on their terms - safe, sanitized, controlled. None of us really wants to go back living in a primative, uncivilized world where there is no modern world to go back to at our whim.

Reminds me of the Renaissance Faires. Nice to visit, but no one who has grown up in the modern West would want to actually have lived in that world.

Perhaps this is what Jason means by FAKE.

-----------------------------------------------------

As far as the GW article, much ado about little. The article didn't give enough scientific language, but my guess based on my knowledge of statistics is that five years ago, the IPCC issued a report predicting a rise in global temperature with a 95% certainty range [not the correct technical term] of +1.4 to +5.8 degrees C (= +2.5 to +10.5 degrees F). (That is, they expected that the actual magnitude of the temperature rise would have a 95% chance of falling between these two numbers.) The GW alarmists, of course, seized on the top number to shout catastrophe.

Five years later, as is often the case with these kind of predictive models, the modelers have more data and have modified their models, They have narrowed the amount of uncertainty in their models, and have now shrunk the 95% certainty range to between +2.0 and +4.5 degrees C (= +3.6 to +8.1 degrees F). In doing so, they have clipped the wings of the GW extremists.

Nothing out of the ordinary here; this is what you would expect over time with well-behaved models: both number limits have moved closer to each each other. (The top number went down, but the bottom number went up.) Performing a bit of interpolation, it seems that the mean expected temperature rise probably decreased a bit (from around 3.6 to 3.3 degrees, perhaps) but that overall, the new study is basically coming to the same conclusions as the 2001 report. Certainly, they haven't come close to cutting in half their prediction of the magnitude of GW -- and the trend line over the past five years doesn't give any indication that the temperature rise predicted by these models will disappear if we wait longer.

Of course, these numbers alone don't answer key questions by GW skeptics about the validity of these models, the amount of human contribution to GW, the ability of humans to affect these GW, the cost vs. benefits of possible interventions, etc.

My point here is just to point out that this study doesn't provide any ammunition for GW skeptics.

Posted by civil truth at September 7, 2006 01:14 PM

fyi, A pictoral walking tour through San Francisco's 2006 Anarchist Book Fair:
http://www [DOT] zombietime [DOT] com/anarchist_bookfair_march_18_2006/

Posted by Jeremayakovka at September 8, 2006 10:32 PM

My friend Jason at Jason Coleman has a terrific post up on "Burning Man" [...] Take a gander then come back and tell me what you think.

It's badly written and doesn't make any sense.

Posted by Jassalasca Jape at September 13, 2006 12:34 AM