A KINSLEY GAFFE FROM LEON TROTSKY?

A contributor to World Socialist Web Site reveals a state secret.  "European states commit to climate inaction as heat wave begins to recede."

That's always been the case with climate panics: there's a protracted January thaw, which sometimes happens, or a heat wave, which is as much part of July and August as the corn tasselling and some baseball fans getting frustrated with the local nine.

If it's science, it isn't settled.

Sometimes, you have to look for the lying with statistics.  Case in point: a local weather yakker put up a visual of July average temperatures over the past fifty years that showed an up-trend, and used that as evidence of "climate change."  (It used to be "global warming," but those yakkers are more likely to show the past thirty days' of a month of above average temperatures than below average temperatures, and hope we don't notice.)  That time series looks different if you show the past hundred years (many of the all-time high temperatures still date to the Dust Bowl years) and a chart from a rural weather station, if there is one, is likely to look different from one at a major airport near an urban heat island.  Love the albedo of tarmac!

The avatar of Leon Trotxky offers a similar distraction.  "Since the pre-industrial era the world’s temperature has risen 1.1 degrees Celsius."  What's the start date?  The end of the Medieval Warm Period?  Does it include the Little Ice Age?  Does nobody understand a fundamental methodological point?  "Science progresses by making sense of the anomalies."

Never mind that, though, the solution to any social problem, real or imagined, is always the same.

Workers and young people must draw the necessary lessons from the inaction of capitalist governments across Europe and the world against wildfires and global warming. The struggle against climate change and to protect the environment is a political and class struggle. As is the case with the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, war and inflation, the only solution to global warming is a direct assault on the ill-gotten wealth of the capitalist class and the socialist transformation of world society.

Never mind that attempts at such transformations quickly lead to a falling-out among the vanguardists.