Climate Demonstration Quotes

The power of the intelligentsia is demonstrated not only by their ability to create a general climate of opinion that strikes fear into those who oppose their agenda but also by their ability to create a climate of opinion which richly rewards those political leaders whose decisions are consonant with the vision of the intelligentsia.

By this point in history—after the 2008 collapse of Wall Street and in the midst of layers of ecological crises—free market fundamentalists should, by all rights, be exiled to a similarly irrelevant status, left to fondle their copies of Milton Friedman’s Free to Choose and Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged in obscurity. They are saved from this ignominious fate only because their ideas about corporate liberation, no matter how demonstrably at war with reality, remain so profitable to the world’s billionaires that they are kept fed and clothed in think tanks by the likes of Charles and David Koch, owners of the diversified dirty energy giant Koch Industries, and ExxonMobil.

Our elders have failed us, they have not provided leadership, they have not provided counsel, they have been silent and compliant in the face of power. They have said nothing on fracking, climate collapse, the extinction crisis and done even less. The old have, for the most part, betrayed the young. This is as true of witchcraft as it is of our wider culture. It is therefore down to us as individuals to take our lead from the only source of initiation, living spirit, and through it embody the new witchcraft. We must become a witchcraft with a renewed sense of meaning and purpose, of responsibility to the land which is in crisis, or we are nothing more than consumers of the earth which will all too soon eat of us. Those who do not feel the imperative to act on this information demonstrate that they are not orientated, that is, they have no connection to the land and its denizens. Their magic is little more than a cerebral construct, and without being embodied is meaningless.

Whether the subject is climate change or the life span of unicorns, when you cite demonstrable facts to counter another person’s belief, a phenomenon that researchers call “the backfire effect” takes over. Your brilliant marshaling of data not only fails to persuade the believer, it backfires and strengthens his or her belief. The believer doubles down on his or her position—and the two of you are more polarized than ever. If

Change is part of life. Civilizations rise and fall, the tides wax and wane, the planet undergoes periods of climatic revolution, the young grow up, and the old die. What will come is that what shall be. Survival as individuals and as a species demands fluidity of human thought and the demonstrated ability, temperament, and perseverance to change.

Projections of future climate and weather events rely on models demonstrably unfit for the purpose.

But as reasonable as it is to expect our climate knowledge system to be good overall and accurate on questions of science, this is demonstrably not the case.

The late twentieth century has witnessed a remarkable growth in scientific interest in the subject of extinction. It is hardly a new subject—Baron Georges Cuvier had first demonstrated that species became extinct back in 1786, not long after the American Revolution. Thus the fact of extinction had been accepted by scientists for nearly three-quarters of a century before Darwin put forth his theory of evolution. And after Darwin, the many controversies that swirled around his theory did not often concern issues of extinction. On the contrary, extinction was generally considered as unremarkable as a car running out of gas. Extinction was simply proof of failure to adapt. How species adapted was intensely studied and fiercely debated. But the fact that some species failed was hardly given a second thought. What was there to say about it? However, beginning in the 1970s, two developments began to focus attention on extinction in a new way. The first was the recognition that human beings were now very numerous, and were altering the planet at a very rapid rate—eliminating traditional habitats, clearing the rain forest, polluting air and water, perhaps even changing global climate. In the process, many animal species were becoming extinct. Some scientists cried out in alarm; others were quietly uneasy. How fragile was the earth’s ecosystem? Was the human species engaged in behavior that would eventually lead to its own extinction?

Social democracy as we now know it underwent its moment of speciation when Eduard Bernstein began to question the orthodoxy of revolution. His essential postulate was the absence of crises. The Steven Pinker of socialism, he pointed to the empirical fact that no serious crisis had rocked the capitalist economy for the past two or three decades, which invalidated the Marxian prophecy of a system trending towards collapse. Since it was not prone to malfunctioning, the idea of seizing power, smashing decrepit capitalism and installing a completely different order had become redundant; instead social democracy could continue to grow in strength, extract piecemeal reforms and gradually lift the working class out of the mire. Rosa Luxemburg very famously objected that the crisis tendencies had merely been postponed. In the near future, they would burst forth with even more dreadful violence. Ignoring her prognosis, the social democrats in the making went ahead and presently gave their first demonstration of how they dealt with catastrophe: by expediting it through consent.

Although the RGI is the architect, BLM and its media allies are the driving forces behind today’s anti-cop climate; ignoring the normality of black-on-black homicide to chase the anomaly of blue-on-black homicides. This BLM-induced avalanche of destructive propaganda — such as cops are hunting black men — is demonstrably false, but still has effectively appealed to peoples’ emotions instead of critical thinking.

The National Academy of Sciences undertook its first major study of global warming in 1979. At that point, climate modeling was still in its infancy, and only a few groups, one led by Syukuro Manabe at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and another by James Hansen at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, had considered in any detail the effects of adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. Still, the results of their work were alarming enough that President Jimmy Carter called on the academy to investigate. A nine-member panel was appointed. It was led by the distinguished meteorologist Jule Charney, of MIT, who, in the 1940s, had been the first meteorologist to demonstrate that numerical weather forecasting was feasible. The Ad Hoc Study Group on Carbon Dioxide and Climate, or the Charney panel, as it became known, met for five days at the National Academy of Sciences’ summer study center, in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. Its conclusions were unequivocal. Panel members had looked for flaws in the modelers’work but had been unable to find any. “If carbon dioxide continues to increase, the study group finds no reason to doubt that climate changes will result and no reason to believe that these changes will be negligible,

There are many ways we might further enhance the albedo, including brightening the land surface with “white roofs” on buildings, engineering crops to be more reflective, brightening the ocean with microbubbles on the surface, and putting up giant reflectors in space, to name a handful. However, creating aerosols in the stratosphere might be the most plausible way to make a significant global impact. The haze in the stratosphere that occurs naturally after major volcanic eruptions demonstrably cools the planet for a few years as the haze particles settle out.

The proper attitude toward human activity and climate is expressed in the 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. Consider the following passage, where industrialist-philosopher Francisco d’Anconia remarks to steel magnate Hank Rearden how dangerous the climate is, absent massive industrial development. The conversation takes place indoors at an elegant party during a severe storm (in the era before all severe storms were blamed on fossil fuels). There was only a faint tinge of red left on the edge of the earth, just enough to outline the scraps of clouds ripped by the tortured battle of the storm in the sky. Dim shapes kept sweeping through space and vanishing, shapes which were branches, but looked as if they were the fury of the wind made visible. “It’s a terrible night for any animal caught unprotected on that plain,” said Francisco d’Anconia. “This is when one should appreciate the meaning of being a man.” Rearden did not answer for a moment; then he said, as if in answer to himself, a tone of wonder in his voice, “Funny . . .” “What?” “You told me what I was thinking just a while ago . . .” “You were?” “. . . only I didn’t have the words for it.” “Shall I tell you the rest of the words?” “Go ahead.” “You stood here and watched the storm with the greatest pride one can ever feel—because you are able to have summer flowers and half-naked women in your house on a night like this, in demonstration of your victory over that storm. And if it weren’t for you, most of those who are here would be left helpless at the mercy of that wind in the middle of some such plain.

I would have offered a somewhat different statement, based upon my familiarity with the assessment reports and literature: The earth has warmed during the past century, partly because of natural phenomena and partly in response to growing human influences. These human influences (most importantly the accumulation of CO2 from burning fossil fuels) exert a physically small effect on the complex climate system. Unfortunately, our limited observations and understanding are insufficient to usefully quantify either how the climate will respond to human influences or how it varies naturally. However, even as human influences have increased almost fivefold since 1950 and the globe has warmed modestly, most severe weather phenomena remain within past variability. Projections of future climate and weather events rely on models demonstrably unfit for the purpose.

As an instrument of empowerment oil has been spectacularly effective in removing the levers of power from the reach of the populace. "No matter how many people take to the streets in massive marches," writes Roy Scranton, "they cannot put their hands on the real flow of power because they do not help to produce it. They only consume." Under these circumstances, a march or a demonstration of popular feeling amounts to "little more than an orgy of democratic emotion, an activist-themed street fair, a real-world analogue to Twitter hashtag campaigns: something that gives you a nice feeling, says you belong in a certain group, and is completely divorced from actual legislation and governance." In other words, the public sphere, where politics is performed, has been largely emptied of content in terms of the exercise of power: as with fiction, it has become a forum for secular testimony, a baring-of-the-soul in the world-as-church. Politics as thus practices is primarily an exercise in personal expressiveness.

President Obama warned that the use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime would pose a “red line” that would trigger an American military response. In August 2013, word filtered out that Assad’s forces had used poison gas against a rebel suburb of Damascus, killing as many as fourteen hundred people. This was a key moment. The United States was just a few hours away from launching airstrikes. “Our finger was on the trigger,” General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, later said.13 Obama decided otherwise. He concluded that airpower would be insufficient and ineffective, and he wanted congressional authorization but could not get it. He had come into office to end America’s two wars—in Iraq and Afghanistan—and he was loath to slip into a third, with no clear path to success. Air power in Libya had helped remove Gadhafi, but it had left chaos behind. Obama was also demonstrating that, as he later said, he had broken with the military response “playbook” of the “foreign policy establishment.” Moreover, he feared that an air strike would not eliminate all the chemical weapons, and Assad could then claim that “he had successfully defied the United States.”14 Still, an American president had said using chemical weapons was a red line, but had not acted on that. Coming on top of Mubarak, it made leaders in other countries question the credibility of the United States and its reliability as an ally.

Environmental pollution is a regressive phenomenon, since the rich can find ways of insulating themselves from bad air, dirty water, loss of green spaces and so on. Moreover, much pollution results from production and activities that benefit the more affluent – air transport, car ownership, air conditioning, consumer goods of all kinds, to take some obvious examples. A basic income could be construed, in part, as partial compensation for pollution costs imposed on us, as a matter of social justice. Conversely, a basic income could be seen as compensation for those adversely affected by environmental protection measures. A basic income would make it easier for governments to impose taxes on polluting activities that might affect livelihoods or have a regressive impact by raising prices for goods bought by low-income households. For instance, hefty carbon taxes would deter fossil fuel use and thus reduce greenhouse gas emissions and mitigate climate change as well as reduce air pollution. Introducing a carbon tax would surely be easier politically if the tax take went towards providing a basic income that would compensate those on low incomes, miners and others who would lose income-earning opportunities. The basic income case is especially strong in relation to the removal of fossil fuel subsidies. Across the world, in rich countries and in poor, governments have long used subsidies as a way of reducing poverty, by keeping down the price of fuel. This has encouraged more consumption, and more wasteful use, of fossil fuels. Moreover, fuel subsidies are regressive, since the rich consume more and thus gain more from the subsidies. But governments have been reluctant to reduce or eliminate the subsidies for fear of alienating voters. Indeed, a number of countries that have tried to reduce fuel subsidies have backed down in the face of angry popular demonstrations.

The Keeling Curve Courtesy the NASA Earth Observatory. NASA graph by Robert Simmon, based on data provided by the NOAA Climate Monitoring and Diagnostics Laboratory.   If the scientific story of global warming has one great hero, he is James Hansen, and not only because he is the most important climatologist of his era, whose massive computer models were demonstrating by the early 1980s that increased CO2 posed a dire threat.

If we seek to change our circumstances, we will jump from the frying pan into the fire. We must be triumphant exactly where we are. It is not a change of climate we need, but a change of heart. The flesh wants to run away, but God wants to demonstrate His power exactly where we have known our greatest chagrin.

The entire modern enterprise of catastrophic climate change predictions, the enterprise that threatens our energy supply, is based on equating a demonstrated scientific truth, the greenhouse effect, with extremely speculative projections made by invalidated models.

The coronavirus crisis demonstrated the degree to which digitalization has become a competitor with transportation, using electrons to connect people rather than molecules to move them.

In his recent critique of fashionable ecological philosophies, Andreas Malm pointedly remarks: 'When Latour writes that, in a warming world, 'humans are no longer submitted to the diktats of objective nature, since what comes to them is also an intensively subjective form of action,' he gets it all wrong: there is nothing intensively subjective but a lot of objectivity in ice melting. Or, as one placard at a demonstration held by scientists at the American Geophysical Union in December 2016: 'Ice has no agenda - it just melts.'' The reverse claim is that human interventions have only had such a menacing and even fatal consequences for our living conditions within the Earth system because human agency has not yet sufficiently freed itself from its dependence on natural history. This seems to be the conviction behind the 'Ecomodernist Manifesto,' for instance, which claims that 'knowledge and technology, applied with wisdom, might allow for a good, even great, Anthropocene,' and that a good Anthropocene 'demands that humans use their growing social, economic, and technological powers to make life better for people, stabilize the climate, and protect the natural world.' In this confrontation, an age-old dualism has assumed a new guise: the attempt to establish a complicity with the forces of destiny - if necessary at the price of surrendering human subjectivity or perhaps involving other forms of self-sacrifice - is juxtaposed with the attempt to achieve human autonomy by subordinating the planet under the superior power of human ingenuity. These two positions, a modernist stance and a position critical of it, are usually considered to represent mutually exclusive alternatives. Actually, however, the two positions have more in common than first meets the eye. At the beginning of chapter 3, I referred to Greek philosophers who suggested that the best way to protect oneself against the vicissitudes of fate was to learn how to submit oneself to it willingly, sacrificing one's drives and ambitions while expecting, at the same time, that this complicity with destiny would empower one to master worldly challenges. What unites the seemingly opposite positions, more generally speaking, is a shared move away from engagement with the concrete and individual human agency (i.e., with empirical human subjects and with the unequal power distribution in human societies) toward some powerful form of abstraction, be it 'to distribute agency' or to use the 'growing social, economic, and technological powers' of humanity for a better Anthropocene. I suggest that we take a more systemic look at the role of humanity in the Earth system, taking into account both its material interventions and the knowledge that enabled them.

The fall of Hosni Mubarak had dramatic impact on the balance of power in the region. “Our allies in the Middle East,” Robert Gates later said, “were wondering if demonstrations or unrest in their capitals would prompt the United States to throw them under the bus as well.” What the Gulf Arabs saw as the unreliability of the United States in a crunch heightened their sense of vulnerability in the face of Iran’s deployment across the region.

Note that when people talk about climate change, they are referring to the frequent droughts that occurred during the last decade in Burundi. Many people talked about lack of land – logical in a country where 57 percent of households have less than one hectare to live off (ibid.: 42). All this demonstrates that even in countries at war, there is more going on than war. War may capture the attention, dominate the political discourse, and its resolution may be a sine qua non for meaningful change, but it is not the full story of life, and people know it.

Chinese authorities demonstrated during the climate-related civil war that began in Sudan in 2003 that they would support mass murderers when doing so seemed to serve their investments. In

I argued against the view that the only obligation we have to strangers is to avoid harming them; but even if we were to take that view, the facts of climate change would demonstrate clearly that we are harming hundreds of millions, perhaps billions, of the world's poor.

After more than three decades and many hundreds of studies, the overwhelming scientific consensus is that GMO foods are safe to eat. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine commissioned a comprehensive study of the science, and in 2016 their report declared GMOs both safe to eat and environmentally benign. Of the scientists in the American Association for the Advancement of Science, 88 percent think it’s safe to eat GMO foods. This is almost exactly the same percentage of those scientists who say climate change is real and man-made, the latter a data point regularly used to demonstrate right-wing antiscience craziness.

When Bell Labs first demonstrated the solar cell in the 1950s, it was deemed technically brilliant but financially impractical—at the time, it would have cost $1.5 million to power a house. By their nature, innovations may seem impossible at first—even the ones that wind up changing the world.

The moral climate is dramatically shifting, as Scripture prophesied it would at the conclusion of the age. But we who refuse to make room for compromise in our faith must hold our position with confidence, understanding that we have been ordained by God to live in this hour. We were chosen for this moment to demonstrate victorious living in Jesus Christ — by His all-sufficient grace — in a world that has run amuck.

There are only three possible fates for a technical civilization: it can of course die out before reaching technological maturity, as we’re so magnificently demonstrating with pollution, climate change, the sixth extinction etc. I personally believe that, simulated or not, we’re going to die.’ The president shrugs, but Wesley keeps going.

We have become a nation of consumers. Our primary identity has become that of consumer, not mothers, not teachers, farmers, but consumers. The primary way that our value is measured and demonstrated is by how much we contribute to this arrow, and how much we consume. And do we!

By examining these settlers’ decisions about agricultural, architectural, and cultural policy, Cronon demonstrates persuasively that one of their primary goals was in fact “to reproduce the mosaic of the Old World in the American environment.”10 Indigenous fauna and flora were to be replaced by European imports; cows, pigs, and horses to supplant beavers, bears, and buffalo; and wheat and rye to substitute for maize and acorns. Despite the fact that these decisions were detrimental to the health of these settlers (European architecture was ill-suited to the American climate, and native foods were far more productive than imported grain crops), they perversely insisted upon this doomed experiment of re-creating Europe in America. This fear of “Americanness” thus was paradoxically linked with the earliest phases of European expansion into the New World.

Plimer condemns the entire movement: “Climate change catastrophism is the biggest scientific fraud that has ever occurred. Much climate ‘science’ is political ideology dressed up as science. There are times in history when the popular consensus is demonstrably wrong and we live in such a time. Cheap energy is fundamental for employment, living in the modern world, and for bringing the Third World out of poverty…. Furthermore, the education system has been captured by activists, and the young are inculcated with environmental, political, and economic ideology. During their education,

So while climate change threatens our quality of life and the actual lives of millions who live at or below sea level, we’re paying attention to a billionaire launching himself into space. At least he said, “Thanks to all the Amazon Prime subscribers.” If this doesn’t demonstrate our gross idolatry of tech innovators, I don’t know what does.

From a wellness perspective, our current culture, viewed as a laboratory experiment, is an ever-more globalized demonstration of what can go awry. Amid spectacular economic, technological, and medical resources, it induces countless humans to suffer illness born of stress, ignorance, inequality, environmental degradation, climate change, poverty, and social isolation.

when solar and wind are so cheap. But I believe it is critical to fund them, if only to determine whether the science can work at scale. When Bell Labs first demonstrated the solar cell in the 1950s, it was deemed technically brilliant but financially impractical—at the time, it would have cost $1.5 million to power a house. By their nature, innovations may seem impossible at first—even the ones

But I believe it is critical to fund them, if only to determine whether the science can work at scale. When Bell Labs first demonstrated the solar cell in the 1950s, it was deemed technically brilliant but financially impractical—at the time, it would have cost $1.5 million to power a house. By their nature, innovations may seem impossible at first—even the ones that wind up changing the world.

Intuitively, I am hard-pressed to believe that most people would endorse the notion that the future of humankind is worth no more than a single apartment. Chichilnisky, a major figure in the IPCC, has argued that this kind of thinking about discount rates is not only ridiculous but immoral; it exalts a “dictatorship of the present” over the future. Economists could retort that people say they value the future, but don’t act like it, even when the future is their own. And it is demonstrably true that many—perhaps most—men and women don’t set aside for retirement, buy enough insurance, prepare their wills, or a hundred other precautions, even if they have sufficient resources. If people won’t make long-term provisions for their own lives, why should we expect people to bother about climate change for strangers many decades from now?

I wrote this book because, with 30 years in the field, I wanted to understand why policy makers were ignoring the low-cost solutions all around them, demonstrated by their own small-scale farmers.

For the results are counterintuitive and they contradict all the tenets on which our lives, thoughts, and actions have been based for almost a century. What we have learned from this experiment is that the patterns of life that modernity engenders can only be practiced by a small minority of the world’s population. Asia’s historical experience demonstrates that our planet will not allow these patterns of living to be adopted by every human being. Every family in the world cannot have two cars, a washing machine, and a refrigerator—not because of technical or economic limitations but because humanity would asphyxiate in the process.

The earth has warmed during the past century, partly because of natural phenomena and partly in response to growing human influences. These human influences (most importantly the accumulation of CO2 from burning fossil fuels) exert a physically small effect on the complex climate system. Unfortunately, our limited observations and understanding are insufficient to usefully quantify either how the climate will respond to human influences or how it varies naturally. However, even as human influences have increased almost fivefold since 1950 and the globe has warmed modestly, most severe weather phenomena remain within past variability. Projections of future climate and weather events rely on models demonstrably unfit for the purpose. Later,

By making no decision, OPEC had ceded control to what might be called the “swing investors”—the financial markets—the hedge funds and traders and other financial players that dealt in “paper barrels.” “Sentiment” among these investors—whether they were optimistic or pessimistic, bullish or bearish about prices and the market—would determine whether they went “long” or “short” on futures contracts. And their cumulative decisions would in turn accentuate price moves in one direction or the other. At this point, sheer bearishness predominated. Prices fell below $30 and seemed headed toward $25 a barrel. Some investment banks warned that oil could fall below $20. “The oil market is much bigger than just OPEC,” Naimi said in February 2016, but other countries had demonstrated “no appetite for sharing the burden.

If we are good to the child and to other people, he will get from us directly a conception of goodness more profound and significant than all the words we may use about goodness as an ideal. If we lose our temper and give way to hard, brittle words which we fling around and about, the child learns more profoundly and significantly than the formal teaching about self-control which may be offered him. If we love a child, and the child senses from our relationship with others that we love them, he will get a concept of love that all the subsequent hatred in the world will never be quite able to destroy. It is idle to teach the child formally about respect for other people or other groups if in little ways we demonstrate that we have no authentic respect for other people and other groups. The feeling tone and insight of the child are apt to be unerring. It is not important whether the child is able to comprehend the words we use to understand the ideas that we make articulate. The child draws his meaning from the meaning which we put into things that we do and say. Let us not be deceived. We may incorporate in our formal planning all kinds of ideas for the benefit of the children. We may provide them with tools of various kinds. But if there is not genuineness in our climate, if in little ways we regard them as nuisances, as irritations, as things in the way of our pursuits, they will know that we do not love them and that our religion has no contagion for them. Let us gather around our children and give to them the security that can come only from associating with adults who mean what they say and who share in deeds which are broadcast in words.

The time is ripe for confronting consumption. Not only are ecological problems like climate change more pressing than ever, consumerism has lost some of its allure in its North American epicenter. A majority of Americans already feel that their quality of life is suffering because of overemphasis on work and material gain. Encroachment of work and shopping on leisure time has millions of people searching for ways to restore balance in their lives—through lifestyles that trade money for time, commercialism for community, and things for joy. These people—”downshifters” or practitioners of “voluntary simplicity”—may one day attract the majority to their way of life by demonstrating that less stuff can mean more happiness. A North America that prospers without overusing the Earth—a sustainable North America—is entirely possible. All the pieces of the puzzle—from bike- and transit-friendly cities to sustainable farms to low-impact lifestyles—exist, scattered all over the continent. All that remains is for us to do the work of putting the pieces together.

Goodstein demonstrated that in every case, when compared with the actual costs paid, the estimates were grossly inflated.6 His examples range from asbestos to vinyl, and in all instances but one the estimated cost flowing from regulatory change was at least double the actual cost paid, while in some cases estimates were even more exaggerated.

Whatever vision you have for your perfect garden, you need to listen to the garden, and not cling to ideas that simply won't work for your climate, your soil, or your lighting. Faith in your garden vision is important. But belief in ideas that are demonstrably false is not the same thing as faith.

In 1988 the German oceanographer Hartmut Heinrich was the first to come up with the firm geological evidence for such a cataclysmic 'iceberg-calving' process during the last Ice Age. By examining deep-sea drill cores sampled at various points across the North Atlantic he demonstrated the existence of widely dispersed layers of 'ice-rafted detritus' -- millions of tonnes of rocks and rocky debris that had once stood on land, that had been clawed up by the ice-sheets and that had ultimately been carried out to sea frozen into huge icebergs: 'As they melted they released rock debris that was dropped into the fine-grained sediments of the ocean floor. Much of this ice-rafted debris consists of limestones similar to those exposed over large areas of eastern Canada today. The Heinrich layers as they have become known, extend 3000 kilometers across the North Atlantic, almost reaching Ireland.' The Heinrich layers record at least six separate discharges of 'stupendous flotillas of ice-bergs' into the North Atlantic -- discharges that are now known, obviously enough, as 'Heinrich Events' and that are thought to have unfolded in concentrated bursts of activity that may, in each case, have lasted less than a century. Because of the progressive thickening of the Heinrich layers towards the western side of the Atlantic and the continuation of this trend into the Labrador Sea in the direction of Hudson Bay, it is obvious to geologists that 'much of the floating ice was sourced from the Laurentide ice-sheet'. However, other debris has been found intermingled in some Heinrich layers that 'could only have come from separate ice-sheets covering not only Canada, but Greenland, Iceland, the British Isles and Scandinavia'. Likewise, research into southern hemisphere ice-caps in the Andes and New Zealand shows that these too 'grew and then collapsed synchronously with the ice-rafting pulses recorded in the North Atlantic'. The implication [...] is that some 'global rather than regional forcing of climate change' must have been at work.

Just as Leninists knew what was good for the proletariat, thereby conferring on themselves a gratifyingly providential role, so the environmentalists now know what is good for humanity and likewise confer on themselves a providential role. The beauty of preservation of the environment as a cause is that it is so large that it would justify almost any ends used to achieve it, for a livable environment is the sine qua non of everything else. You can demonstrate and riot for the good of humanity to your heart’s content; your questions about what life is for are answered.

Reflecting a long-standing schism within the profession, which persists into the twenty-first century, RASSW argued that “a dichotomy exists within NASW between” social activists and clinical practitioners, which is exacerbated by the promotion of licensing. When all social services are threatened by the conservative political and ideological climate, a focus on licensing undermines the profession’s efforts to fight for “the survival and well-being of millions” (RASSW, February 1,1976, p. 3). Citing the opposition to licensing by such groups as the National Association of Black Social Workers (NABSW), RASSW asserted that efforts by NASW to promote licensing contradict its stated intent to fight racism within the social service field and were destructive of professional unity. Promoting licensing, in lieu of uniting around this struggle “is to fiddle while Rome burns” (p. 3). The paper also disputed the linkage between licensing and service quality. It added an interesting twist to the growing debate over professionalization by arguing that “under current political conditions licensure may actually decrease the accountability of social workers to their clients” (RASSW, February 1,1976, p. 5). The paper concluded that licensure neither protected nor improved service quality; rather, it divided workers and undermined their job security, as the recent attack on public education in New York City had demonstrated. Instead of fighting for licensure, RASSW proposed an alternative strategy that focused on building worker-client-labor-community coalitions and combating racism in social service agencies and other institutions.