The IPCC 1.5 degree report summary authors

The IPCC released a report which included a "Summary for Policy Makers" titled "Global warming of 1.5 C". This report was prepared to justify the Paris Meeting "aspiration" to limit the world's average temperature increase to 1.5degrees C. This aspiration seems to have been pulled out of the hat during the meeting, but now it seems to be the politically correct target. A target that's impossible to achieve. 

I should point out I consider the IPCC approach, to consolidate the content of numerous papers into one report, without doing much original work to support their conclusions and prescriptions, to be seriously flawed. The IPCC and the politicians behind it intend its content to be used to justify policies which would cost $ trillions (10^12), are impractical, have no sound engineering, project feasibility or schedule, or economics analysis to back them. 

In other words, they intend to use a nearly religious worship of "wise scientists" who have absolutely no idea of what it costs to get things done, nor know how to choose the best alternatives, to drive the developed world (excluding China and Russia who aren't about to participate in these lemmings jump over the cliff policies) into adopting what's evidently mad hatter policies. 

I was curious to see who was responsible for the Summary for Policy Makers, so I took a few hours to research their backgrounds. Summarizing, they are all climate scientists, some with a lot of experience, with a staff of very young recent graduates. The most powerful positions are held by Europeans, men from China, India, and Africa, and a South African (Debra Roberts) whose career has been hard to descipher, listed as "local government practitioner-scientist". 

The only one exposed to economics modeling is the Indian fellow, who has experience in dynamic models which ought to include economics modules. 

The summary of the "Summary for Policy Makers" most relevant participants follows: 

Valerie Masson-Delmotte is a French climate scientists and Research Director at the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission. Her doctoral thesis was "Climate simulation of the Holocene means using general circulation models of the atmosphere; Impacts of parameterization”

After her PhD, Masson-Delmotte began working as a researcher at the the Laboratory of Climate and Environmental Sciences. She became head of a paleoclimate group in 2010, head of a research group in 1998, and completed her habilitation in 2004. Since 2008, she has been the Research Director/Senior Scientist at CEA. Her research includes water vapour monitoring and combines past climate variability (ice cores, tree rings) with simulations, to address current climate models.

Panmao Zhai has in B. S. degree in Climatology, Nanjing University, and M. S. degree in Physical climatology, Nanjing University. He is a Research professor in the Chinese Academy of Meteorological Sciences, the largest multi-disciplinary and comprehensive research institution on atmospheric sciences in China. 

He has more than 30-years working experience in climate change and variability studies. He has published more than 100 papers in Chinese and English. Leads a group of meteorologists, studying the formation mechanism and prediction method for persistent extreme events in China.

Hans-Otto Pörtner is a German ecologist and climate researcher.  He heads the Department of Integrative Ecophysiology at the Alfred Wegener Institute. He received his doctorate in 1983 at the Westphalian Wilhelms University and the Heinrich Heine University in Zoology. Since 2005, Pörtner has been a professor at the Alfred Wegener Institute and the University of Bremen.

His work includes the effects of climate change, ocean acidification, and hypoxia on marine animals and ecosystems, with a focus on the links between ecological, physiological, biochemical, and molecular mechanisms that limit tolerance and shape biogeography and ecosystem functions. 

Debra Roberts. PhD in Urban Biogeography at the (then) University of Natal, South Africa, Debra Roberts initially pursued a career as a researcher. Currently Head of the Sustainable and Resilient City Initiatives Unit in eThekwini Municipality in South Africa. She is described as "A local government practitioner-scientist with over 30 years experience in addressing and documenting urban climate change adaptation and biodiversity planning and management in Durban, South Africa."

James Skea is a Scottish academic, PhD in Physics at Cavendish Laboratory in 1979. Professor of Sustainable Energy at Imperial College London's Centre for Environmental Policy, and a member of the Bureau of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the British government's Committee on Climate Change.

Priyadarshi Shukla, Distinguished Professor, Amrut Mody School of Management and Chair, Global Centre for Environment and Energy.

PhD (Stanford University). Area of study: Management Science and Engineering. Areas of interest: Energy Efficiency, Energy-Environment Modelling, Renewable Technologies, Decentralized Planning, Integrated Assessment Modelling and Climate Change Policy Analysis.

Anna Pirani  ICPO Executive Deputy Director (?) at Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP). Coordinates development of ocean computer models. 

Wilfran Moufouma-Okia PhD in Mechanics of geophysical

environments, Polytechnic national institute (INP), Grenoble, France. He worked a decade for the UK Met Office Hadley Centre as “Senior regional climate modelling scientist” – leading the development, configuration, evaluation and dissemination worldwide of spatially detailed weather and climate prediction systems. 

Sarah Connors PhD Atmospheric Chemistry University of Cambridge, Centre for Atmospheric Science. Graduated in 2015. Thesis title: "Development of a method for estimating methane emissions at high resolution". 

Sarah has been a Science Officer at the WGI TSU since January 2017, working on both the Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C and the Special Report on Climate Change and Land, as well as the main WGI report. Her main activities include coordination of the Frequently Asked Questions (link to SR1.5°C FAQs?) and the Chapter Scientists for SR1.5°C and the forthcoming IPCC AR6 report.

Tom Maycock holds a Bachelor’s Degree with a double major in Physics and English Literature from Northwestern University. He earned a Master of Liberal Arts and Science degree from the University of North Carolina at Asheville in December 2018.

Modern Socialism, Communism and Fascism.

It's simple: a rich person becomes rich because he or she has something others want. Oprah Winfrey and Leonardo di Caprio provide entertainment, Elon Musk provides rocketry, and Bezos delivers Chinese products at home.

On the other hand Socialists, Fascists, Communists build systems with centralized controls which stifle ingenuity and abuse human rights. It should be noted that many neomarxists who call themselves "socialists" are closer to fascism, because they only seek partial government ownership of the means of production, use government regulation and industrial policy to direct a command economy. 

China is an example of an evolving fascist regime, which combines some Marxist ideology with a capitalist system with clear fascist characteristics. 

March 2019: Venezuela no longer exports oil to the US

Venezuela exports to the US dropped to zero. The oil is being purchased by Indians and Chinese, and some Russian traders. Production dropped a lot during the mega black out. 

Maduro keeps trying to incite Trump to intervene without international backing, but this is known to be Castro’s plan to interfere in US elections by getting Trump into an occupation where Cuban agents can use terrorism to cause US casualties. Castro’s idea is to get a radical Democrat like Sanders elected, this in turn would lead to US withdrawal, and of course all sorts of concessions or even economic aid to the Castro dictatorship. 

Unfortunately the Venezuelan people are caught in this struggle between US marxists aided by Castro and US Republicans. Thus Trump has to use diplomacy to get Maduro isolated even more, first at the OAS, then at the UN. And meanwhile the level of savagery by the Maduro regime climbs as it seeks to goad the US into an attack. 

Unfortunately I’m not getting much traction with my suggestion to create a 20 thousand strong Venezuelan police force recruited from the 4 million in the Diaspora, who can take a small port and airport with other nations’ naval and air support, and create the conditions for massive defections from the military, who would eliminate the Cubans embedded in their units, move to the liberated area, reorganize, and gradually expand the territory controlled by Guaidó. This is the best option for the Venezuelan people to free themselves, and cut off the Cuban tentacle.

How to discriminate against students of a certain race

On the use of racism to discriminate against smart students: 

So you seem to argue that it's "unfair" when the university population doesn't mimic the "racial distribution" of the general population, and as a good democrat you wish to introduce a remedy. This makes me think you could set up some sort of color palette, measure the skin tone of the candidates, and award points as a function of color? This could be supplemented by a measure of hair curliness and some sort of bone structure measurement with calipers. 

The equation would then look like this X=f (s,c,b) ....you can fill in the details. 

This could yield a number, say 69, you can add to SAT scores. To create an even more level playing field you could argue that people with lower IQs aren't properly represented, and thus an addional correction can be applied to deduct points, proportional to IQ over 110. Thus a teenager with a 150 IQ would get 80 points deducted from the SAT score. That should get rid of a portion of the smart Chinese. 

I have all sorts of bright ideas to equalize society and turn it into a properly designed communist hive. For example, we can also equalize basketball players by making the ones with better aim play with fuzzy glasses, and get the taller ones to play with lead weights on their legs to reduce their jumping ability. Musicians will also require attention, we can hobble the fingers of the more talented ones with rubber bands when they try out for Juilliard. And gifted politicians with a silver tongue can be forced to speak with a potato in their mouths. 

The possibilities are endless. This will help us avoid a solution like the Marxist Pol Pot used in Cambodia, who killed 1 million Cambodians because they were smart, educated, and/or belonged to the Middle Class.

Democratic Socialism is communism

Hickory, the term "Democratic Socialist" was coined by German communists after East Germany collapsed. They knew communism wouldn't sell, so they changed their label. 

Let's recall that Marxist-Leninism, as taught in the Soviet empire (where I was a slave in my youth), taught us (brainwashed most of us) that a) capitalism was evil, b) socialism involved state ownership of the means of production and commerce, and c) society would evolve towards communism, where there would be no private property at all, and everybody would give as much as they could, and receive what they needed (the detail they left out was the fact that the communist party leaders decided who "needed" what). 

Socialism, therefore, is integral to Marxism, and it involves increasing the government's share of the economy, by creating industrial and service structures run by government bureaucrats. 

Socialism has an interesting side branch: national socialism as conceived by Adolf Hitler, which instead of putting everything under government ownership, would create a government command system to dictate to private enterprise every detail of how they were to function. 

Both nazism (a member of the fascist family), and socialism, involve the elimination of individual choice and freedom, censorship, and the use of violence, including torture, concentration camps and genocide, to achieve their ends. So we see that both extremes, fascism and socialism, are similar in practice, the differences being mostly cosmetic as far as a regular joe working in a factory is concerned. 

I use the term communists for what you call socialist because communists do explain socialism is a way station to their utopia, which of course isn't possible to achieve. In the US you have a hard core of communists who are selling themselves as "Democratic Socialists" (call them DSA) copying the East German nomenclature and strategy, which takes them to sell neomarxism. These DSA communists use the European neomarxist recipe, which has four pillars: 1. Identitarian ideology, whereby they define homosexuals, minorities they define as such, women, and inmigrants as "aggrieved and underprivileged classes". 2. Encouraging illegal inmigration to swell the "minority underclass", 3. Encouraging radical feminism which claims the  "white capitalist patriarchate" abuses women. 4. Using measures to control climate change as a Trojan Horse to introduce "climate justice" and the type of legislation they know will turn countries into giant gulags. 

I study these modern communists closely, because they are the enemy. Fortunately they are fairly open about their aims. For example Ocasio mentions "capitalism must end" or similar words in several interviews, and I have minutes of DSA meetings written by their leaders where they discuss the need to hide their real aims from those attending their meetings "because they are not ready". I also saw a document where the DSA author wrote they had to increase recruiting activity in sectors such as the electricity generation and distribution industry, so they could eventually induce large strikes and cause governments to collapse and yield to them. 

These guys are easy to identify because they come out jumping in defense of the two ugliest dictatorships ever seen in the Western Hemisphere: Castro's and Chavez's. When we drill down and research those who come out defending them, we see they are communists (or what you call socialists or sometimes progressives, a name I consider a backwards designation for retrogrades who want to take humanity back 100 years to the early years of the Soviet empire). 

I realize what I explain doesn't sit well with a community taught to think of itself as morally superior dogooders, when in reality they are like a zombie army snapping their jaws, on their way to destroy civilization. What we see in Venezuela isn't an accident, it's what these zombies do. We have seen them defend that monster for many years, and so now here we are, millions of Venezuelans in a desperate diaspora, hundreds of thousands dead who didn't have to die, and 30 million living in a socialist dystopia, drinking sewage and roaming streets looking for food scraps. 

Socialism, fascism, and the New Green Deal

12 years ago a Venezuelan friend explained to me that the left (let's call it the Komintern, because it is evident that they are an international network) knew that Marxism was an obsolete and ill-thought idea, but that they liked the almost religious ideology, its use of  Messianic caudillos and above all their concentration of power in a powerful state that would make society conform to what they thought.

But that Marxism has an additional ingredient: it uses capitalism, but with iron rules (like those of Nehru's India or China that Deng Xiao Ping wanted to develop). The use of industrial policy designed by wise people in a ministry of truth that can not be discussed because it crushes you with a supposed 97% of scientists who have no idea what things cost then brings us to what my friend called the new fascism of the 21st century.

So we see that Ocasio is a product of a group of very dedicated Marxists, many of them millionaires who sell you social justice, as long as they can live in mansions, have guards and escorts, be famous and live well. They are people like Fidel Castro who even had his private island, but they also smell a lot of Franco and Mussolini.

The difference being that, nominally and for now, they work in an international network, and they help each other and spend money with amazing ease. And I'm not talking about Soros, nor about the money that chavismo gave to European parties. It is a much more subtle, and more dangerous issue. And in this drama that New Green Deal is partly what your friend says:

"Of course, the least charitable interpretation is that the GND represents a vast socialist land grab, intended to effectively nationalize the U.S.'s energy and transport sectors by declaring the current assets obsolete and funding an entirely new set from the public purse"

What he does not say is that the neo-Marxist caste is not exactly socialist, they go to something different, similar to today's China, or Raul Castro's totalitarian Cuba, with its drowned freelancers, foreign investors in joint ventures that use rented slaves, and a repressive apparatus that does not bother to imprison the few who protest, because that is resolved by breaking the jaw and teeth.

En español

Hace 12 años un amigo venezolano me explicó que la izquierda (llamémoslo el Komintern, porque es evidente que son una red ínternacional) sabia que el marxismo era una idea obsoleta y mal pensada, pero que les gustaba la ideología casi religiosa, su uso de caudillos mesiánicos y sobre todo su concentración de poder en un estado poderoso que haría a la sociedad amoldarse a lo que ellos pensaban. 

Pero ese marxismo tiene un ingrediente adicional: utiliza el capitalismo, pero con unos reglamentos férreos (como los de la India de Nehru o la China que quería desarrollar Deng Xiao Ping).  El uso de política industrial diseñada por sabelotodos en un ministerio de la verdad que no se puede discutir porque te aplasta con un supuesto 97% de científicos que no tienen ni idea de lo que cuestan las cosas entonces nos lleva a lo que mi amigo llamó el nuevo fascismo del siglo 21. 

Así vemos que Ocasio es un producto de un grupo de marxistas muy dedicados, muchos de ellos millonarios que te venden la justicia social, siempre y cuando ellos puedan vivir en caserones, tener guardias y escoltas, ser famosos y vivir bien. Son gente como Fidel Castro que hasta tenía su isla privada, pero también huelen mucho a Franco y Mussolini. La diferencia siendo que, nominalmente y por ahora, ellos trabajan en una red internacional, y se ayudan y pasan plata con una facilidad asombrosa. 

Y no estoy hablando de Soros, ni del dinero que le pasaba el chavismo a partidos europeos. Es un asunto mucho más sutil, y más peligroso. Y en este drama ese New Green Deal es en parte lo que dice tu amigo: 

"Of course, the least charitable interpretation is that the GND represents a vast socialist land grab, intended to effectively nationalize the U.S.’s energy and transport sectors by declaring the current assets obsolete and funding an entirely new set from the public purse"

Lo que el no dice es que está casta neomarxista no es exactamente socialista, ellos van a algo diferente, parecido a la China de hoy, o la Cuba totalitaria de Raul Castro, con sus autónomos ahogados, inversores en empresas mixtas que usan esclavos alquilados, y un aparato represivo que ni se molesta en encarcelar a los pocos que protestan, porque eso lo resuelven rompiéndole la quijada y los dientes.