This has resolved me to watch the "What The Green Movement Got Wrong" again. So glad I recorded BOTH sections of the programme because all that's still available now is the studio debate.

I'm thinking of the criticisms that said that the greens had failed to engage with the people who NEEDED to be convinced of "the argument"; that they'd assumed a Messianic identity and, in leading from the front, had lost sight of the people they were leaving behind in their wake, condemned for their inability to keep up.

(Just wish the first half of the programme had been more balanced. Very badly edited.)

We could speed up all this 'green' stuff just by putting a high tax on FF, would soon sort it all out. Probably find that there is then a demand for Welch hill sheep.

Posted By: SteamyTeaWe could speed up all this 'green' stuff just by putting a high tax on FF, would soon sort it all out.

That is, I agree, the “right” answer and I'm sure the politicians will be happy to apply such taxes the moment they see that the electorate will support it. In the mean time, what?

Tom: "If activists are successful, it's because as well as the hopeless campaigning, they are also 'leading from the front'".

Fine. But one should always be careful...

http://www.wimp.com/flagprank/

Steve
It is the signal to noise ratio problem that makes getting a true reading out of observations.
Sea levels are also rising because we are pumping fresh water from aquifers, and that eventually makes it way back to the sea. Also, in Cornwall, the land is sinking (remember that Newlyn is very important when it comes to sea levels).
Urban Island effect is well understood and is often accounted for, and new stations/satellites are always being double checked.
As time goes by we get a better picture of what is going on, but only a total nonce will predict with certainty what will happen in the future. Now who has predicted with certainty what will happen, generally popular press journalists. Says it all.

Not sure which bit of Cornwall your in, but St. Ives can have very different weather from Penzance, as can Bude and Freathy, Take data from weather station there for a couple of hundred years and you would have a different climate. Satellite record are still a bit low res, but getting better. The aim is to get 1 km^2 resolution.

There are better reasons to reduce FF usage than climate change, mainly preservation of natural resource and global equality.

Posted By: SteveZThe reported local temperatures go up or down by a little or a lot, but a global effect should have them all rising.

Most of what you write is fairly weak but this is just plain wrong. It is quite plausible that general warming would cause cooling in certain areas, e.g., by changing the way that jet streams flow. The persistent use of misrepresentations of this sort is one of the reasons that there's been a change of emphasis from the term “global warming” to the more general term “climate change”.

...and I assume that the effect of that development would be to warm rather than cool the immediate surrounding area, which could account for the increasing temperatures reported.

Better tell the HadCRU and GISS people, they might not have thought of that!!! (<-- That's sarcasm.) This has been thrashed to death — even the most rabid deniers don't bother with this argument any more; State of Fear is not exactly recent. Of course the temperature records adjust for these sort of effects. The deniers accused GISS, etc, of fiddling the numbers with these adjustments and did their own survey (Watts and friends) of met stations then quietly dropped the whole matter when they found that, if anything, GISS had overcompensated and the true temperature rises where probably actually slightly higher than those reported.

Back to the original proposition. Here's the text, if you couldn't view the link:

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Where are the left’s urban visionaries?

Urban farming and pop-up hipster urbanism alone do not bode well for a serious progressive architectural vision

Wouter Vanstiphout

If we accept that urban projects are the most visceral expression of public policy and political positions, then it is a tragedy that we find it impossible to imagine what a truly progressive, collective urban agenda would look like.

This points to a disturbing emptiness at the heart of left-wing politics. But it also leaves us without any alternative to how we have been doing things for the past 30 years.

Yet, elections all over Europe — from France to local council elections in England — are causing left-wing pundits to hail a new dawn.

Finally, it’s claimed, there will be an end to austerity and to neo-liberal politics. Finally justice, equality and progressive politics will come back. Despite Europe’s economic implosion, there’s a suppressed euphoria: if things have become so bad, surely they can now only get better.

Let’s just assume that they will. That there will be a new left consensus that will lay the groundwork for a Europe of proudly progressive and collective nations. Let’s just disregard the left’s deep rifts, and imagine that the various factions will get together and actually reform our cities and countries with the same élan and certitude as did their forefathers in the late forties and fifties when the welfare states in western Europe were constructed. But what would the left actually do? And how would it be different from what we are getting right now?

The problem with left-wing politics is that over the last 30 years they have been reduced to a reactive, derivative position of softening the blows or spreading the damage a little bit differently. If we look at how left and right distinguish themselves on an urban or architectural level, we see only small, gradual differences, often merely rhetorical.

Left-wing mayors and ministers have probably been even more active than right-wing ones in promoting a happy capitalist paradigm of trickle-down urbanism and architecture, throwing themselves behind the Olympics and massive regeneration projects that swiftly degenerate into gentrification and public private partnerships.

Yet, whatever we might think of London’s Canary Wharf or any of its descendants in dozens of European waterfront and gentrification projects, as a heady mixture of post-sixties non-plan models, postmodern neoclassicism and hardcore Milton Friedmanesque ideology, it really did offer another model. It really did destroy the past and bully itself into the future.

And what can the current left come up with that is truly “different”? Urban farming, do-it-yourself architecture, pop-up urbanism — slight, temporary, hipster incidents for a tiny elite. That is not enough; worse still, it does not bode well for the seriousness or the inner coherence of a progressive agenda for our cities that this is all there is.

There might be some hope for the left-wing renaissance if architecture could come up with something just as ideologically rigorous, just as aesthetically specific, just as reckless as the neo-liberal planning of the early eighties, but then completely different.