Establishing Equivalence: Difficulties For Interpreters In A Globalizing: Fill & Download for Free

It’s impossible to spend much time in the cryptocurrency and blockchain world without hearing about Ethereum, or ETH for short. In this article, you’ll learn what Ethereum is, what makes it different and why it’s better than Bitcoin, at least for certain purposes.Guess the price directionBitcoin/TetherBTCUSDT33,743.81−2.71337493372733743.81UpDownWhat is the Ethereum cryptocurrency?Strictly speaking, Ethereum refers to an open-source software platform that is based on blockchain technology, enabling developers to create decentralised applications, or dApps. However, Ethereum is also used to refer to the Ether coin (ETH), a cryptocurrency built on the Ethereum platform. When someone talks about buying, trading or paying with Ethereum, they mean the Ether currency.Ethereum’s historyEthereum’s story starts with Vitalik Buterin, who became involved with Bitcoin as a 17-year-old programmer in 2011. Buterin became aware of Bitcoin’s shortcomings and created Ethereum as superior blockchain technology.I thought [people in the Bitcoin community] weren’t approaching the problem in the right way. I thought they were going after individual applications; they were trying to kind of explicitly support each [use case] in a sort of Swiss Army knife protocol.— Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum co-founder.A timeline of Ethereum’s early history:2013: Buterin released a white paper describing the basis for Ethereum.2014: Buterin and the other co-founders crowdfunded Ethereum through an ICO that raised more than $18 million.2015: The first live release of Ethereum, known as Frontier, was launched.What is Ethereum’s purpose?Ethereum is a blockchain technology platform designed to enable a large variety of functions. A popular comparison is if Bitcoin is e-mail, then Ethereum is the whole Internet.Ethereum is used for computer services that are based on dApps and smart contracts, which saves time and money by eliminating intermediaries, third-party brokers and inefficient monopolies like big companies or even government authorities.In essence, it follows the decentralised philosophy of Bitcoin but is applied to much more than just money.What is Ethereum written in?Given that the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) functions as a ‘world computer’ with many nodes, it uses multiple programming languages, including C++, Python, Ruby, Go and Java. A specialised language called Solidity is used to write smart contracts in the Ethereum Virtual Machine.ETH’s hard forkIn 2016, $50 million worth of Ether was stolen by a hacker, an act that raised concerns about the platform’s security. The resulting controversy split the community, and Ethereum forked into two blockchains: Ethereum (ETH) and Ethereum Classic (ETC).ETH tokensEthereum has both the Ether (ETH) crypto coin and Ether tokens. The latter can function as a currency within the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). ETH tokens are transferred within the EVM to execute smart contracts.What is a smart contract in Ethereum?A smart contract is a computer program that functions as a contract, i.e., it binds individuals and/or businesses to meet obligations.The smart contract’s code automatically executes the terms when tokens are deposited. The benefits include:Digital format: There’s no need to print or post paper, and it’s easily shareable.Autonomous operation: It cuts out intermediaries, there’s no back-and-forth.Trust: Information on a smart contract is encrypted and backed up on a shared ledger.Security: Encryption makes contract information incredibly difficult to steal.Speed: Automatic execution makes smart contracts faster.Cost: It saves on paper costs, lawyer fees, etc.Smart contracts act as multi-signature accounts, only executing if the specified percentage of parties agree.Smart contracts can be encoded on any blockchain, but developers working on Ethereum can programme smart contracts with a much broader range of instructions than what’s possible on Bitcoin. It allows Ethereum smart contracts to be more complex and versatile. They can serve as the base for a decentralised application or other autonomous functions on the blockchain.Why is Ethereum better than Bitcoin?ETH has several advantages over Bitcoin. It isn’t limited in the same way that BTC is. Ethereum uses the Ethash method for its mining algorithm. As a result, the block processing speed is faster.What is the difference between Bitcoin and Ethereum?BTCETHCoin Limit21 MillionNoneAlgorithmSHA-256EthashAvg block time10 minutes12 secondsHowever, Ethereum’s main advantage over Bitcoin is its functionality. Bitcoin can only record transactions. Ethereum powers apps that can be used for almost anything a programmer desires.What is an ETH wallet?An Ethereum wallet is where the private keys to access the cryptocurrency are stored. The StormGain crypto trading platform comes with a built-in ETH wallet, in which you can earn up to 10% annual interest on your currency.Cryptocurrency tradingEthereum is the crypto coin with the second-largest market share after Bitcoin. Ethereum also has the second-highest trading volume among cryptocurrencies. By using StormGain, traders can earn significant bonuses and rewards for trading Ethereum.The price history of ETH, in USD and BitcoinEthereum miningEthereum is currently mined via a proof-of-work algorithm. Much like Bitcoin, Ethereum miners dedicate their computing hardware to solving tasks that support the blockchain and receive ETH in return.What is a good hashrate for Ethereum mining?The frequency with which the ETH mining hardware can process hashes determines how likely it is to earn a reward.A hashrate of around 45.0 MH/s is considered suitable for a consumer GPU. However, the whole mining system may soon become irrelevant for Ethereum.What is Ethereum’s future?Ethereum will upgrade soon to version 2.0, a move planned for 2020. The main feature is a change from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake validation.Ethereum 1.0 is a couple of people’s scrappy attempt to build the world computer; Ethereum 2.0 [with PoS] will actually be the world computer — Vitalik ButerinThe current system is notoriously wasteful of energy. A proof-of-stake protocol will mean that users stake their ETH as collateral to verify a transaction (and claim the reward).On 18 August 2008, the domain name bitcoin.org was registered.[11] Later that year, on 31 October, a link to a paper authored by Satoshi Nakamoto titled Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System[12] was posted to a cryptography mailing list.[13] This paper detailed methods of using a peer-to-peer network to generate what was described as "a system for electronic transactions without relying on trust".[14][15][16] On 3 January 2009, the bitcoin network came into existence with Satoshi Nakamoto mining the genesis block of bitcoin (block number 0), which had a reward of 50 bitcoins.[14][17] Embedded in the coinbase of this block was the text:The Times Jan/03/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks.[18]The text refers to a headline in The Times published on 3 January 2009.[19] This note has been interpreted as both a timestamp of the genesis date and a derisive comment on the instability caused by fractional-reserve banking.[20]:18The first open source bitcoin client was released on 9 January 2009, hosted at SourceForge.[21][22]One of the first supporters, adopters, contributors to bitcoin and receiver of the first bitcoin transaction was programmer Hal Finney. Finney downloaded the bitcoin software the day it was released, and received 10 bitcoins from Nakamoto in the world's first bitcoin transaction on 12 January 2009 (bloc 170).[23][24] Other early supporters were Wei Dai, creator of bitcoin predecessor b-money, and Nick Szabo, creator of bitcoin predecessor bit gold.[14]In the early days, Nakamoto is estimated to have mined 1 million bitcoins.[25] Before disappearing from any involvement in bitcoin, Nakamoto in a sense handed over the reins to developer Gavin Andresen, who then became the bitcoin lead developer at the Bitcoin Foundation, the 'anarchic' bitcoin community's closest thing to an official public face.[26]The value of the first bitcoin transactions were negotiated by individuals on the bitcoin forum with one notable transaction of 10,000 BTC used to indirectly purchase two pizzas delivered by Papa John's.[14]On 6 August 2010, a major vulnerability in the bitcoin protocol was spotted. Transactions weren't properly verified before they were included in the transaction log or blockchain, which let users bypass bitcoin's economic restrictions and create an indefinite number of bitcoins.[27][28] On 15 August, the vulnerability was exploited; over 184 billion bitcoins were generated in a transaction, and sent to two addresses on the network. Within hours, the transaction was spotted and erased from the transaction log after the bug was fixed and the network forked to an updated version of the bitcoin protocol.[29] This was the only major security flaw found and exploited in bitcoin's history.[27][28][30]Satoshi Nakamoto[edit]Main article: Satoshi Nakamoto"Satoshi Nakamoto" is presumed to be a pseudonym for the person or people who designed the original bitcoin protocol in 2008 and launched the network in 2009. Nakamoto was responsible for creating the majority of the official bitcoin software and was active in making modifications and posting technical information on the bitcoin forum.[14] There has been much speculation as to the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto with suspects including Dai, Szabo, and Finney – and accompanying denials.[31][32] The possibility that Satoshi Nakamoto was a computer collective in the European financial sector has also been discussed.[33]Investigations into the real identity of Satoshi Nakamoto were attempted by The New Yorker and Fast Company. The New Yorker's investigation brought up at least two possible candidates: Michael Clear and Vili Lehdonvirta. Fast Company's investigation brought up circumstantial evidence linking an encryption patent application filed by Neal King, Vladimir Oksman and Charles Bry on 15 August 2008, and the bitcoin.org domain name which was registered 72 hours later. The patent application (#20100042841) contained networking and encryption technologies similar to bitcoin's, and textual analysis revealed that the phrase "... computationally impractical to reverse" appeared in both the patent application and bitcoin's whitepaper.[12] All three inventors explicitly denied being Satoshi Nakamoto.[34][35]In May 2013, Ted Nelson speculated that Japanese mathematician Shinichi Mochizuki is Satoshi Nakamoto.[36] Later in 2013 the Israeli researchers Dorit Ron and Adi Shamir pointed to Silk Road-linked Ross William Ulbricht as the possible person behind the cover. The two researchers based their suspicion on an analysis of the network of bitcoin transactions.[37] These allegations were contested[38] and Ron and Shamir later retracted their claim.[39]Nakamoto's involvement with bitcoin does not appear to extend past mid-2010.[14] In April 2011, Nakamoto communicated with a bitcoin contributor, saying that he had "moved on to other things".[18]Stefan Thomas, a Swiss coder and active community member, graphed the time stamps for each of Nakamoto's 500-plus bitcoin forum posts; the resulting chart showed a steep decline to almost no posts between the hours of 5 a.m. and 11 a.m. Greenwich Mean Time. Because this pattern held true even on Saturdays and Sundays, it suggested that Nakamoto was asleep at this time, and the hours of 5 a.m. to 11 a.m. GMT are midnight to 6 a.m. Eastern Standard Time (North American Eastern Standard Time). Other clues suggested that Nakamoto was British: A newspaper headline he had encoded in the genesis block came from the UK-published newspaper The Times, and both his forum posts and his comments in the bitcoin source code used British English spellings, such as "optimise" and "colour".[14]An Internet search by an anonymous blogger of texts similar in writing to the bitcoin whitepaper suggests Nick Szabo's "bit gold" articles as having a similar author.[31] Nick denied being Satoshi, and stated his official opinion on Satoshi and bitcoin in a May 2011 article.[40]In a March 2014 article in Newsweek, journalist Leah McGrath Goodman doxed Dorian S. Nakamoto of Temple City, California, saying that Satoshi Nakamoto is the man's birth name. Her methods and conclusion drew widespread criticism.[41][42]In June 2016, the London Review of Books published a piece by Andrew O'Hagan about Nakamoto.[43] The real identity of Satoshi Nakamoto still remains a matter of dispute.Growth[edit]2011[edit]Based on bitcoin's open-source code, other cryptocurrencies started to emerge.[44]The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a non-profit group, started accepting bitcoins in January 2011,[45] then stopped accepting them in June 2011, citing concerns about a lack of legal precedent about new currency systems.[46] The EFF's decision was reversed on 17 May 2013 when they resumed accepting bitcoin.[47]In June 2011, WikiLeaks[48] and other organizations began to accept bitcoins for donations.2012[edit]In January 2012, bitcoin was featured as the main subject within a fictionalized trial on the CBS legal drama The Good Wife in the third-season episode "Bitcoin for Dummies". The host of CNBC's Mad Money, Jim Cramer, played himself in a courtroom scene where he testifies that he doesn't consider bitcoin a true currency, saying, "There's no central bank to regulate it; it's digital and functions completely peer to peer".[49]In September 2012, the Bitcoin Foundation was launched to "accelerate the global growth of bitcoin through standardization, protection, and promotion of the open source protocol". The founders were Gavin Andresen, Jon Matonis, Patrick Murck, Charlie Shrem, and Peter Vessenes.[50]In October 2012, BitPay reported having over 1,000 merchants accepting bitcoin under its payment processing service.[51] In November 2012, WordPress started accepting bitcoins.[52]2013[edit]In February 2013, the bitcoin-based payment processor Coinbase reported selling US$1 million worth of bitcoins in a single month at over $22 per bitcoin.[53] The Internet Archive announced that it was ready to accept donations as bitcoins and that it intends to give employees the option to receive portions of their salaries in bitcoin currency.[54]In March, the bitcoin transaction log, called the blockchain, temporarily split into two independent chains with differing rules on how transactions were accepted. For six hours two bitcoin networks operated at the same time, each with its own version of the transaction history. The core developers called for a temporary halt to transactions, sparking a sharp sell-off.[55] Normal operation was restored when the majority of the network downgraded to version 0.7 of the bitcoin software.[55] The Mt. Gox exchange briefly halted bitcoin deposits and the exchange rate briefly dipped by 23% to $37 as the event occurred[56][57] before recovering to previous level of approximately $48 in the following hours.[58] In the US, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) established regulatory guidelines for "decentralized virtual currencies" such as bitcoin, classifying American bitcoin miners who sell their generated bitcoins as Money Service Businesses (or MSBs), that may be subject to registration and other legal obligations.[59][60][61]In April, payment processors BitInstant and Mt. Gox experienced processing delays due to insufficient capacity[62] resulting in the bitcoin exchange rate dropping from $266 to $76 before returning to $160 within six hours.[63] Bitcoin gained greater recognition when services such as OkCupid and Foodler began accepting it for payment.[64]On 15 May 2013, the US authorities seized accounts associated with Mt. Gox after discovering that it had not registered as a money transmitter with FinCEN in the US.[65][66]On 17 May 2013, it was reported that BitInstant processed approximately 30 percent of the money going into and out of bitcoin, and in April alone facilitated 30,000 transactions,[67]On 23 June 2013, it was reported that the US Drug Enforcement Administration listed 11.02 bitcoins as a seized asset in a United States Department of Justice seizure notice pursuant to 21 U.S.C. § 881.[68] This marked the first time a government agency claimed to have seized bitcoin.[69][70]In July 2013, a project began in Kenya linking bitcoin with M-Pesa, a popular mobile payments system, in an experiment designed to spur innovative payments in Africa.[71] During the same month the Foreign Exchange Administration and Policy Department in Thailand stated that bitcoin lacks any legal framework and would therefore be illegal, which effectively banned trading on bitcoin exchanges in the country.[72][73]On 6 August 2013, Federal Judge Amos Mazzant of the Eastern District of Texas of the Fifth Circuit ruled that bitcoins are "a currency or a form of money" (specifically securities as defined by Federal Securities Laws), and as such were subject to the court's jurisdiction,[74][75] and Germany's Finance Ministry subsumed bitcoins under the term "unit of account" – a financial instrument – though not as e-money or a functional currency, a classification nonetheless having legal and tax implications.[76]In October 2013, the FBI seized roughly 26,000 BTC from website Silk Road during the arrest of alleged owner Ross William Ulbricht.[77][78][79] Two companies, Robocoin and Bitcoiniacs launched the world's first bitcoin ATM on 29 October 2013 in Vancouver, BC, Canada, allowing clients to sell or purchase bitcoin currency at a downtown coffee shop.[80][81][82] Chinese internet giant Baidu had allowed clients of website security services to pay with bitcoins.[83]In November 2013, the University of Nicosia announced that it would be accepting bitcoin as payment for tuition fees, with the university's chief financial officer calling it the "gold of tomorrow".[84] During November 2013, the China-based bitcoin exchange BTC China overtook the Japan-based Mt. Gox and the Europe-based Bitstamp to become the largest bitcoin trading exchange by trade volume.[85]In December 2013, Overstock.com[86] announced plans to accept bitcoin in the second half of 2014. On 5 December 2013, the People's Bank of China prohibited Chinese financial institutions from using bitcoins.[87] After the announcement, the value of bitcoins dropped,[88] and Baidu no longer accepted bitcoins for certain services.[89] Buying real-world goods with any virtual currency had been illegal in China since at least 2009.[90]2014[edit]In January 2014, Zynga[91] announced it was testing bitcoin for purchasing in-game assets in seven of its games. That same month, The D Las Vegas Casino Hotel and Golden Gate Hotel & Casino properties in downtown Las Vegas announced they would also begin accepting bitcoin, according to an article by USA Today. The article also stated the currency would be accepted in five locations, including the front desk and certain restaurants.[92] The network rate exceeded 10 petahash/sec. TigerDirect[93] and Overstock.com[94] started accepting bitcoin.In early February 2014, one of the largest bitcoin exchanges, Mt. Gox,[95] suspended withdrawals citing technical issues.[96] By the end of the month, Mt. Gox had filed for bankruptcy protection in Japan amid reports that 744,000 bitcoins had been stolen.[97] Months before the filing, the popularity of Mt. Gox had waned as users experienced difficulties withdrawing funds.[98]In June 2014 the network exceeded 100 petahash/sec.[citation needed] On 18 June 2014, it was announced that bitcoin payment service provider BitPay would become the new sponsor of St. Petersburg Bowl under a two-year deal, renamed the Bitcoin St. Petersburg Bowl. Bitcoin was to be accepted for ticket and concession sales at the game as part of the sponsorship, and the sponsorship itself was also paid for using bitcoin.[99]In July 2014 Newegg and Dell[100] started accepting bitcoin.In September 2014 TeraExchange, LLC, received approval from the U.S.Commodity Futures Trading Commission "CFTC" to begin listing an over-the-counter swap product based on the price of a bitcoin. The CFTC swap product approval marks the first time a U.S. regulatory agency approved a bitcoin financial product.[101]In December 2014 Microsoft began to accept bitcoin to buy Xbox games and Windows software.[102]In 2014, several light-hearted songs celebrating bitcoin such as the "Ode to Satoshi"[103] have been released.[104]A documentary film, The Rise and Rise of Bitcoin, was released in 2014, featuring interviews with bitcoin users, such as a computer programmer and a drug dealer.[105]2015[edit]In January 2015 Coinbase raised US$75 million as part of a Series C funding round, smashing the previous record for a bitcoin company. Less than one year after the collapse of Mt. Gox, United Kingdom-based exchange Bitstamp announced that their exchange would be taken offline while they investigate a hack which resulted in about 19,000 bitcoins (equivalent to roughly US$5 million at that time) being stolen from their hot wallet.[106] The exchange remained offline for several days amid speculation that customers had lost their funds. Bitstamp resumed trading on 9 January after increasing security measures and assuring customers that their account balances would not be impacted.[107]In February 2015, the number of merchants accepting bitcoin exceeded 100,000.[108]In October 2015, a proposal was submitted to the Unicode Consortium to add a code point for the bitcoin symbol.[109]2016[edit]In January 2016, the network rate exceeded 1 exahash/sec.[citation needed]In March 2016, the Cabinet of Japan recognized virtual currencies like bitcoin as having a function similar to real money.[110] Bidorbuy, the largest South African online marketplace, launched bitcoin payments for both buyers and sellers.[111]In July 2016, researchers published a paper showing that by November 2013 bitcoin commerce was no longer driven by "sin" activities but instead by legitimate enterprises.[112]In August 2016, a major bitcoin exchange, Bitfinex, was hacked and nearly 120,000 BTC (around $60m) was stolen.[113]In November 2016, the Swiss Railway operator SBB (CFF) upgraded all their automated ticket machines so that bitcoin could be bought from them using the scanner on the ticket machine to scan the bitcoin address on a phone app.[114]Bitcoin generates more academic interest year after year; the number of Google Scholar articles published mentioning bitcoin grew from 83 in 2009, to 424 in 2012, and 3580 in 2016. Also, the academic journal Ledger published its first issue. It is edited by Peter Rizun.2017[edit]The number of businesses accepting bitcoin continued to increase. In January 2017, NHK reported the number of online stores accepting bitcoin in Japan had increased 4.6 times over the past year.[115] BitPay CEO Stephen Pair declared the company's transaction rate grew 3× from January 2016 to February 2017, and explained usage of bitcoin is growing in B2B supply chain payments.[116]Bitcoin gains more legitimacy among lawmakers and legacy financial companies. For example, Japan passed a law to accept bitcoin as a legal payment method,[117] and Russia has announced that it will legalize the use of cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin.[118]Exchange trading volumes continue to increase. For the 6-month period ending March 2017, Mexican exchange Bitso saw trading volume increase 1500%.[citation needed] Between January and May 2017 Poloniex saw an increase of more than 600% active traders online and regularly processed 640% more transactions.[119]In June 2017, the bitcoin symbol was encoded in Unicode version 10.0 at position U+20BF (₿) in the Currency Symbols block.[120]Up until July 2017, bitcoin users maintained a common set of rules for the cryptocurrency.[121] On 1 August 2017 bitcoin split into two derivative digital currencies, the bitcoin (BTC) chain with 1 MB blocksize limit and the Bitcoin Cash (BCH) chain with 8 MB blocksize limit. The split has been called the Bitcoin Cash hard fork.[122]On 6 December 2017 the software marketplace Steam announced that it would no longer accept bitcoin as payment for its products, citing slow transactions speeds, price volatility, and high fees for transactions.[123]2018[edit]See also: Cryptocurrency bubble § 2018 crashOn 22 January 2018, South Korea brought in a regulation that requires all the bitcoin traders to reveal their identity, thus putting a ban on anonymous trading of bitcoins.[124]On 24 January 2018, the online payment firm Stripe announced that it would phase out its support for bitcoin payments by late April 2018, citing declining demand, rising fees and longer transaction times as the reasons.[125]2019[edit]As of September 2019, there were 5,457 bitcoin ATMs worldwide. In August of that year, the countries with highest number of bitcoin ATMs were the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Austria, and Spain.[citation needed]2020[edit]On 2 July 2020, the Indian company 21Shares started to quote a set of bitcoin exchange-traded products (ETP) on the Xetra trading system of the Deutsche Boerse.[126]On 1 September 2020, the Wiener Börse listed its first 21 titles denominated in cryptocurrencies like bitcoin, including the services of real-time quotation and securities settlement.[127]On 3 September 2020, the Frankfurt Stock Exchange admitted in its Regulated Market the quotation of the first bitcoin exchange-traded note (ETN), centrally cleared via Eurex Clearing.[128][129]In October 2020, PayPal announced that it would allow its users to buy and sell bitcoin on its platform, although not to deposit or withdraw bitcoins

What is "world factory"? There are different interpretations of this concept.As early as the second half of the 19th century, after the industrial revolution, Great Britain developed rapidly relying on machinery industry. Although its population only accounted for about 2% of the world's population, it controlled more than 1 / 3 of the world's industrial production and nearly 1 / 4 of the world's trade. Its products dominated the world trade pattern, thus becoming the "world factory" of modern times. In the 20th century, the British Empire gradually declined, and the United States, Germany, Japan and other countries came from behind to replace Britain as the "world factory". Some scholars think that from the perspective of the development of world economic history, the so-called "world factory" is a specific term for the world's industrial powers, especially the manufacturing powers.In 2009, China replaced Japan as the world's second largest trading country after the United States, surpassed Germany as the world's largest exporter, and surpassed Japan as the world's second largest economy in 2010. At the same time, China's manufacturing industry accounts for 15.6% of the world's total manufacturing value, becoming the world's second largest industrial manufacturing country after the United States, thus China is recognized as the "world factory". Obviously, to become a "world factory", it plays an important role in the world industrial production and sales market, and plays a leading role in the world trade pattern is self-evident. Such a position is hard to shake in general countries.Let's take a look at what irreplaceable conditions China has today:1: A large and qualified workforce.The quality of this labor force includes certain professional skills, discipline under specific national culture, and hard work. However, most of the labor force in developing countries can't be compared with the current China in terms of quantity and quality, even with China 40 years ago.Highly disciplined and hardworking industrial workersThe Chinese who rush to buy books in Xinhua Bookstore in the early 1980s2: Stable source of raw material supply.China's influence in Southeast Asia, Africa, South Asia and Latin America is neither overnight nor established by ordinary countries; Southeast Asian countries are the traditional sphere of influence of classical China, combined with the strong ties created by the revolutionary output during the period of the international communist movement; Africa is the layout of China for decades, inheriting the sphere of influence of the former Soviet Union, painstakingly devoted, and invested a lot of human and material resources As a result, China now has more than 3 million people and a naval base in Africa. At the same time, China is also the country with the largest number of peacekeepers in the UN Security Council. It can be said that China's actual armed presence in Africa is much stronger than it seems. Argentina, Venezuela and other countries in South America are also countries that China has long supported in international affairs. Pakistan and Sri Lanka in South Asia are familiar to you. These regions are the main sources of industrial and agricultural raw materials in the world. Without the support of these areas, your industry can't turn at all. The establishment of such a wide and huge raw material supply system is not at the level of the five permanent members of the United Nations. Don't even think about it. I don't even think it's possible to have four other permanent members besides China. Some are due to strength, some are due to industry.In the last century, a large number of aid projects to Africa represented by "Tanzania Zambia Railway" laid the foundation for China's presence in AfricaEnergy doesn't mean that you can buy it if you have money. Even the United States was put together by oil producing countries in the Middle East in the 1970s. China often used rare earth to contain the United States and Japan; Russia, Ukraine, Middle East countries often played political games around energy; the game of various global energy, mineral futures and spot markets is treacherous, and small and medium-sized countries have no voice in the period. In a small and weak economy like Vietnam, if the price of some raw materials fluctuates violently, your whole industry will be destroyed directly. Does the Vietnamese government have any subsidies? Is there any industry in Vietnam capable of competing for pricing power internationally? (the shipbuilding industry is in a global downturn. The Chinese navy is making a wave of dumplings. On the one hand, it's expanding the Navy's strength. On the other hand, it's a disguised subsidy. Is Vietnam OK? Southeast Asia's economic and financial crisis, China's wave of dead top Hong Kong dollar in the 1990s is not very strong. Can Vietnam do thatIn recent years, Africa's exports to China mainly include agricultural and forestry raw materials, oil and related products, and mineral raw materials. The distribution and structure of African exports to China are as follows:Oil and related productsAfrica's exports of oil and related products to China mainly include: crude oil, asphalt, refined oil and residual products, liquefied propane, butane, natural gas, etc. From 2008 to 2014, Africa's total exports of oil and related products to China amounted to US $316.73 billion, accounting for 52.27% of China's total imports from Africa; during the same period, Africa's exports of similar products to the world amounted to US $2.27 trillion, and its exports to China accounted for 13.96% of its exports of similar products.Mineral raw materialsAfrica's exports of mineral raw materials to China mainly include: coal, copper, iron and iron products, silver, platinum and other metals, pearls, gemstones and other products. From 2008 to 2014, Africa exported 63.376 billion US dollars of the above-mentioned commodities to China, accounting for 10.46% of China's total imports from Africa; during the same period, Africa exported 267.93 billion US dollars of the same kind of products to the world, and 23.65% of the same kind of products to China.Raw materials for agriculture and ForestryAfrica's exports of agricultural and forestry raw materials to China mainly include: timber and related products, cotton, oil crops and tobacco. From 2008 to 2014, Africa exported 21.35 billion US dollars of the above-mentioned commodities to China, accounting for 3.52% of China's total imports from Africa; during the same period, Africa exported 66.81 billion US dollars of the same kind of products to the world, and 31.95% of the same kind of products to ChinaChina has the largest number of United Nations peacekeepers in Africa and has become the actual military presence.China has the first overseas military base, Djibouti naval support base, which has been put into use.According to David dollar of the Brookings Institution, a think tank in Washington, China's banks invest more in infrastructure in Latin America than the world bank and the Inter American Development Bank combined. Last year, Chinese companies invested at least $21 billion in Brazil, not just in power plants and ports. Bolivia has a $10 billion Chinese credit line for highways and hydroelectric dams. China has agreed to build two nuclear power plants in Argentina.3: The global industrial division of labor has undergone profound changes. Even if it is to undertake technology transfer, the requirements for engaging in production activities are no more than in the past. After the information revolution, the industrial chain must not only be complete, but also be able to quickly respond to changes in demand! The requirement for micro enterprises is that you can not only produce one thing for a long time, but also change the product structure quickly. How can this be done? It's not that I've been changing production lines. It's impossible. In fact, it is to split the parts of an industrial finished product into the smallest unit, each of which only produces the smallest unit, and then continuously arrange and combine them. Different component enterprises constantly change the combination mode according to the upstream order demand! This is the biggest advantage of China's industrial chain at present! Is not only all, but also very flexible! Without massive, comprehensive and even overcapacity SMEs, it is impossible to achieve this.4: Certain R & D capability.Shenzhen "Huaqiangbei" mobile phone market is the epitome of China's industrial chainChina's scientific research capability began with the Soviet Union's massive assistance to China (thanks to the Russians here). That's why China can be transformed from a backward agricultural country into an industrial country. Then we would like to thank ourselves for our efforts and western industrial investment, which gives China the ability to conduct 'integrated R & D'. In response to the first point, for some high-end capacity undertaking, we need to have strong scientific and technological strength and industrial strength. At present, only India can be compared with China in developing countries;China has assimilated all the technologies of the second industrial revolution in the 1970s5: Their own needs are huge markets.This is the premise of three or four points. At the same time, we should also ensure that there are enough chips to do two things: first, market for technology, along with foreign exchange control; second, market barriers, and the cultivation of local enterprises. I'm being used by you to share the market with cheap labor, but you can't make a mistake. If we say that the withdrawal of western multinational companies in other developing countries is like a love break-up or not, the withdrawal in China is a divorce, and it basically needs to lose a layer of skin. There's no way. It's natural and beautiful. The market is big. It's still going to come. If it's not a huge and attractive market, then the United States won't have to fight trade war with you. That's the way to play the Southeast Asian financial crisis. Take time out directly. What else can we talk about? And then Vietnam, when its per capita GDP is close to the level of Thailand, will you wait, Soros, they will be polite to you? What are you fighting against? parade? Don't be naive. There are not so many miracles in the world.6: Driven by ethnic groups: China has Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore and tens of millions of overseas Chinese, equivalent to a developed country composed of Chinese in the world. These people, especially the big consortia (for example, the Kerry Group, which is known as the "Kerry Center" in the big cities of China, once imported white sugar as an agent in the most difficult times of new China.) They are inextricably linked with the mainland and the mainland government and play an irreplaceable role in China's economic development. Do India and other countries really have some elites overseas and political and economic entities like Taiwan? How much did the so-called "elite" in the period of the Republic of China do to old China? It's Foxconn! It will help you find hundreds of thousands of jobs and build industrial bridges between the mainland and the United States, Japan and South Korea. This is the power of Taiwan and Hong Kong. (although the propaganda often weakens Taiwan, in fact, Taiwan's economy is still very competitive internationally. According to the latest statistics in 2018, Taiwan's per capita GDP is very close to South Korea!)7: Focus on upgrading the manufacturing industryIt is true that economic globalization is an irreversible trend. On the premise that the speed of technology diffusion is faster than the speed of technology innovation (most of the time for human society to be established), the gap between the developed countries and the backward countries will always be relatively narrowed, that is to say, production will always spread out. For example, some of the production capacity of clothing, shoes and hats has been transferred.But manufacturing industry is also a concept of dynamic development, its industrial composition is not immutable. Like the electronic products of the 1980s, home appliances are now synonymous with low added value, and local stores. It doesn't cost a lot to buy a complete set of home appliances at home, let alone clothes, shoes and hats. Tmall Taobao shops them out and throws them when they wear old, or even when they just don't look good, which means that the value of these products has been infinitely tending to zero!The main body of manufacturing industry in the future must be the emerging industries listed in the so-called "made in China 2025". Not only China, but also Europe and the United States are basically making efforts in the above industries. And a general thread of human production development is the continuous expansion of production socialization! This expansion includes several aspects1: Participants2: Funds required3: Length of industrial chainFor example, after the second industrial revolution, the largest industry was shipbuilding, with a population base of 340000 for the whole industrial chain coverage;Now, the population base required for the full coverage of the smart phone industry chain is 1.3 million!Therefore, it is not a problem for the enterprises that NOKIA and Volvo both quit the stage of history, but the development of the industry can not be supported by their national platform.Tesla's only overseas super factory is located in Shanghai.BMW electric vehicle project settled in Suzhou.In terms of capital, or in terms of smart phones, the annual R & D investment of apple and Huawei is more than $10 billion. How much market is needed to support such R & D investment? Obviously, in the context of the new industrial revolution, economies with small population base go against the trend of history. In fact, from the period of the G8 allied forces, Austria and Belgium can be called the great powers, to the United Kingdom giving up the world hegemony to the United States, we can clearly see this trend, that is, the demand of industrial development for a larger population scale. The formation of various economic alliances (EU, ASEAN), the signing of various free trade zones, and the signing of various bilateral and multilateral tariff free agreements all show this historical trend;The human quality requirements for emerging industries have also reached an unprecedented height. The intellectualization of production does not mean that the requirements for labor quality are reduced, but in fact, they are increased. The operation of artificial intelligence robot production must be more complex than the operation of mechanical machine tools. For example, the mechanical workshop workers of the last century, now retired, may not even use smart phones. There are parents of laid-off workers at home who have some deep experience. It's the same thing to operate AI production lines as to operate smartphones and computers; China has the largest team of engineers in the world.The increase of the overall productivity of the society will create quite a lot of service jobs. Such as take out in China.It produces 7 million college students every year.The total number of scientific researchers is over 75 million.There are 50% more engineers than there are in the United States, 10 million more.On the one hand, the low-end manufacturing industry has indeed moved out, while the high-end manufacturing industry is clustered in China. Tesla, BMW and other new energy projects have settled in China. Many people worry that the loss of low-end manufacturing industry will cause a large number of people to lose their jobs. In fact, this ignores the changes in the proportion of the three major industries brought about by economic development and industrial upgrading. The high-end industry will inevitably increase with the proportion of the tertiary industry in the national economy. The proportion of the general tertiary industry in the developed countries is about 70%, while China is still in the 40-50% range, from low The labor force liberated by the end processing industry is bound to enter the service industry along with the improvement of the overall productivity of the society. In terms of the absolute quality of life of individuals, the service industry is much more comfortable than the sweatshop.We can see that the above factors are almost impossible for any developing country to accomplish.... secondly, any industry in any country can not escape the development law of the industry itself in any historical period, that is, it will move from free competition to oligopoly. China's traditional OEM processing industries such as clothing, electric tools, construction machinery, etc. have hatched the brand for a long time Giants, such as Anta, 361 and other clothing brands in Jinjiang, Fujian Province, Sany Heavy Industry in Hunan Province, no industry in any successful country will always stay at the stage of mass free competition of small and medium-sized enterprises, if so, it will be the beginning of "beautification".I would like to remind you that China's goal is not always to be a low-end processing center, but to become a manufacturing power!So what are you afraid of when you make clothes and shoes and turn them out? The United States, Germany and Japan have not produced shoes and clothes for a long time. Has that affected their title of manufacturing power?As for infrastructure, including roads and electric power, I don't think it's the essential difference between China and other developing countries, because hardware construction is relatively easy to complete. Basically, as long as you have money, for example, those who sell oil in the Middle East used to be built by South Koreans, but now by the Chinese, Dubai still has five people and six peopleThe only theoretical possibility is India, but it's still a hundred and eight thousand miles away, out of sightVietnam? The total economic output is equal to that of Guangxi, and the per capita GDP is far lower than that of Guangxi. (what's the position of Guangxi in China that everyone knows)... The overall management and technical level of the country is quite backward! Do you think it is possible after reading my analysis? (when I have been to Vietnam, the control power of the Vietnamese government can't be compared with that of China at all. Don't think that a "socialism" is the same as China. In the 5000 year history of Chinese civilization, it has always been very precocious and extraordinary "political governance ability", which has little to do with whether it is "socialism")I have no intention to ignore the difficulties of the current economic transformation here. In fact, I don't think China can be regarded as a real "world factory" if we take "manufacturing power" as the measurement standard, but we have the conditions and possibilities to launch an impact on this title. In fact, we have already stepped on the threshold; but if we say China will soon be more and more important by India South replaced, it is no different from "alarmism" and excessive contempt for the law of economic development! At the same time, it over beautifies the nature of carnivores of capital and global capital groups!

NO. But MIT scientists do not speak for MIT on controversial issues as they are independent in their work and MIT IS NOT A POLITICAL ORGANIZATION. There are many famous MIT scientists who are skeptical for good reason of the unfounded theory of man made global warming.Dr. Richard LIndzen is a great example. HIs new paper “An oversimplified picture of the climate behavior based on a single process can lead to distorted conclusions.” is summarized byTHIS WEEK:By Ken Haapala, President, Science and Environmental Policy Project (SEPP)Greenhouse Warming: Last week, TWTW focused on a new book by Peter Webster, Dynamic of the Tropical Atmosphere and Oceans, reviewed by his spouse Judith Curry, formerly the chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology. There are many issues that we do not understand about the tropics, which render climate modeling used by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change highly questionable and the US climate modeling efforts highly doubtful.Writing in No Tricks Zone, Kenneth Richard brings up a new paper by Richard Lindzen, “An oversimplified picture of the climate behavior based on a single process can lead to distorted conclusions.” A retired professor at MIT, Lindzen was last year’s recipient of the Fredrick Seitz Memorial Award for exceptional courage in the quest for knowledge. The current work is an example of his courage. [Unfortunately, the paper, published in The European Physical Journal Plus, is paywalled, and TWTW relies on what was reproduced in No Tricks Zone.] Lindzen begins:“Although it is often noted that greenhouse warming has long been found in the climate literature, it turns out that this was not generally considered a major cause of climate change until the 1980s.“Many factors, including fluctuations of average cloud area and height, snow cover, ocean circulations, etc. commonly cause changes to the radiative budget comparable to that of doubling of CO2. For example, the net global mean cloud radiative effect is of the order of – 20 W/m squared [minus 20 watts per meter squared] (cooling effect). A 4 W/m squared forcing from a doubling of CO2, therefore, corresponds to only a 20% change in the net cloud effect.“The ‘consensus’ assessment of this system is today the following:“In this complex multifactor system, the climate (which, itself, consists in many variables – especially the temperature deference between the equator and the poles) is described by just one variable, the global averaged temperature change, and is controlled by the 1—2% perturbation in the energy budget due to a single variable (any single variable) among many variables of comparable importance. We go further and designate CO2 as the sole control Although we are not sure of the budget for this variable, we know precisely what policies to implement in order to control it.“How did such a naïve seeming picture come to be accepted, not just by the proponents of the issue, but also by most skeptics?”Lindzen gives his views on how this came about and discusses problems therein. In the blog Richard highlights certain points presented in the full paper:“1. Doubling the atmospheric CO2 concentration from 280 ppm to 560 ppm results in just a 1-2% perturbation to the Earth’s 240 W/m² energy budget. This doubled-CO2 effect has less than 1/5th of the impact that the net cloud effect has. And yet we are asked to accept the ‘implausible’ claim that change in one variable, CO2, is predominantly responsible for altering global temperatures.“2. A causal role for CO2 ‘cannot be claimed’ for the glacial-to-interglacial warming events because CO2 variations follow rather than lead the temperature changes in paleoclimate records and the 100 ppm total increase over thousands of years produce ‘about 1 W/m²’ of total radiative impact.“3. Climate science didn’t used to be alarmist prior to the late 1980s. Scientists were instead sufficiently skeptical about claims of climatically-induced planetary doom. That changed during the years 1988-1994, when climate research centered on CO2 and global warming received a 15-fold increase in funding in the US alone. Suddenly there was a great financial incentive to propel alarming global warming scenarios.“4. Concepts like ‘polar amplification’ are ‘imaginary’.“‘The change in equator-to-pole temperature difference was attributed to some imaginary ‘polar amplification,’ whereby the equator-pole temperature automatically followed the mean temperature. Although the analogy is hardly exact, this is not so different from assuming that flow in a pipe depends on the mean pressure rather than the pressure gradient.’”In short, although considered complex, the climate models oversimplify critical parts of the climate system, making the models unreliable. Lindzen’s findings are similar to those of Webster in last week’s TWTW: Critical parts of the climate system are over-simplified, and a minor part (CO2) is over-emphasized. See links under Challenging the OrthodoxyBRACE FOR TURBULENCE —Turbulence, the oldest unsolved problem in physicsThe flow of water through a pipe is still in many ways an unsolved problem./ "Please prepare the cabin for technical discussions of physics..."Werner Heisenberg won the 1932 Nobel Prize for helping to found the field of quantum mechanics and developing foundational ideas like the Copenhagen interpretation and the uncertainty principle. The story goes that he once said that, if he were allowed to ask God two questions, they would be, “Why quantum mechanics? And why turbulence?” Supposedly, he was pretty sure God would be able to answer the first question.Turbulence, the oldest unsolved problem in physicsWeekly Climate and Energy News Roundup #412Lindzen’s lecture at GWPF on turbulence and global warming last year is worth reading in my view.Richard Lindzen Lecture at GWPF: ‘Global Warming for the Two Cultures’Anthony Watts / October 9, 2018by Dr. Richard LindzenOver half a century ago, C.P. Snow (a novelist and English physical chemist who also served in several important positions in the British Civil Service and briefly in the UK government) famously examined the implications of ‘two cultures’:A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare’s?I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question – such as, What do you mean by mass, or acceleration, which is the scientific equivalent of saying, Can you read? – not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language. So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their Neolithic ancestors would have had.I fear that little has changed since Snow’s assessment 60 years ago. While some might maintain that ignorance of physics does not impact political ability, it most certainly impacts the ability of non-scientific politicians to deal with nominally science-based issues. The gap in understanding is also an invitation to malicious exploitation. Given the democratic necessity for non-scientists to take positions on scientific problems, belief and faith inevitably replace understanding, though trivially oversimplified false narratives serve to reassure the non-scientists that they are not totally without scientific ‘understanding.’ The issue of global warming offers numerous examples of all of this.I would like to begin this lecture with an attempt to force the scientists in the audience to come to grips with the actual nature of the climate system, and to help the motivated non-scientists in this audience who may be in Snow’s ‘one in ten’ to move beyond the trivial oversimplifications.The climate systemThe following description of the climate system contains nothing that is in the least controversial, and I expect that anyone with a scientific background will readily follow the description. I will also try, despite Snow’s observations, to make the description intelligible to the non-scientist.The system we are looking at consists in two turbulent fluids (the atmosphere and oceans) interacting with each other. By ‘turbulent,’ I simply mean that it is characterized by irregular circulations like those found in a gurgling brook or boiling water, but on the planetary scale of the oceans and the atmosphere. The opposite of turbulent is called laminar, but any fluid forced to move fast enough becomes turbulent and turbulence obviously limits predictability. By interaction, I simply mean that they exert stress on each other and exchange heat with each other.These fluids are on a rotating planet that is unevenly heated by the sun. The motions in the atmosphere (and to a lesser extent in the oceans) are generated by the uneven influence of the sun. The sun, itself, can be steady, but it shines directly on the tropics while barely skimming the Earth at the poles. The drivers of the oceans are more complex and include forcing by wind as well as the sinking of cold and salty water. The rotation of the Earth has many consequences too, but for the present, we may simply note that it leads to radiation being distributed around a latitude circle.The oceans have circulations and currents operating on time scales ranging from years to millennia, and these systems carry heat to and from the surface. Because of the scale and density of the oceans, the flow speeds are generally much smaller than in the atmosphere and are associated with much longer timescales. The fact that these circulations carry heat to and from the surface means that the surface, itself, is never in equilibrium with space. That is to say, there is never an exact balance between incoming heat from the sun and outgoing radiation generated by the Earth because heat is always being stored in and released from the oceans and surface temperature is always, therefore, varying somewhat.In addition to the oceans, the atmosphere is interacting with a hugely irregular land surface. As air passes over mountain ranges, the flow is greatly distorted. Topography therefore plays a major role in modifying regional climate. These distorted air-flows even generate fluid waves that can alter climate at distant locations. Computer simulations of the climate generally fail to adequately describe these effects.A vital constituent of the atmospheric component is water in the liquid, solid and vapor phases, and the changes in phase have vast impacts on energy flows. Each component also has important radiative impacts. You all know that it takes heat to melt ice, and it takes further heat for the resulting water to become vapor or, as it is sometimes referred to, steam. The term humidity refers to the amount of vapor in the atmosphere. The flow of heat is reversed when the phase changes are reversed; that is, when vapor condenses into water, and when water freezes. The release of heat when water vapor condenses drives thunder clouds (known as cumulonimbus), and the energy in a thundercloud is comparable to that released in an H-bomb. I say this simply to illustrate that these energy transformations are very substantial. Clouds consist of water in the form of fine droplets and ice in the form of fine crystals. Normally, these fine droplets and crystals are suspended by rising air currents, but when these grow large enough they fall through the rising air as rain and snow. Not only are the energies involved in phase transformations important, so is the fact that both water vapor and clouds (both ice- and water-based) strongly affect radiation. Although I haven’t discussed the greenhouse effect yet, I’m sure all of you have heard that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas and that this explains its warming effect. You should, therefore, understand that the two most important greenhouse substances by far are water vapor and clouds. Clouds are also important reflectors of sunlight.The unit for describing energy flows is watts per square meter. The energy budget of this system involves the absorption and reemission of about 200 watts per square meter. Doubling CO2 involves a 2% perturbation to this budget. So do minor changes in clouds and other features, and such changes are common. The Earth receives about 340 watts per square meter from the sun, but about 140 watts per square meter is simply reflected back to space, by both the Earth’s surface and, more importantly, by clouds. This leaves about 200 watts per square meter that the Earth would have to emit in order to establish balance. The sun radiates in the visible portion of the radiation spectrum because its temperature is about 6000K. ‘K’ refers to Kelvins, which are simply degrees Centigrade plus 273. Zero K is the lowest possible temperature (−273◦C). Temperature determines the spectrum of the emit- ted radiation. If the Earth had no atmosphere at all (but for purposes of argument still was reflecting 140 watts per square meter), it would have to radiate at a temperature of about 255K, and, at this temperature, the radiation is mostly in the infrared.Of course, the Earth does have an atmosphere and oceans, and this introduces a host of complications. So be warned, what follows will require a certain amount of concentration. Evaporation from the oceans gives rise to water vapor in the atmosphere, and water vapor very strongly absorbs and emits radiation in the infrared. This is what we mean when we call water vapor a greenhouse gas. The water vapor essentially blocks infrared radiation from leaving the surface, causing the surface and (via conduction) the air adjacent to the surface to heat, and, as in a heated pot of water, convection sets on. Because the density of air decreases with height, the buoyant elements expand as they rise. This causes the buoy- ant elements to cool as they rise, and the mixing results in decreasing temperature with height rather than a constant temperature. To make matters more complicated, the amount of water vapor that the air can hold decreases rapidly as the temperature decreases. At some height there is so little water vapor above this height that radiation from this level can now escape to space. It is at this elevated level (around 5 km) that the temperature must be about 255K in order to balance incoming radiation. However, because convection causes temperature to decrease with height, the surface now has to actually be warmer than 255K. It turns out that it has to be about 288K (which is the average temperature of the Earth’s surface). This is what is known as the greenhouse effect. It is an interesting curiosity that had convection produced a uniform temperature, there wouldn’t be a greenhouse effect. In reality, the situation is still more complicated. Among other things, the existence of upper-level cirrus clouds, which are very strong absorbers and emitters of infrared radiation, effectively block infrared radiation from below. Thus, when such clouds are present above about 5 km, their tops rather than the height of 5 km determine the level from which infrared reaches space. Now the addition of other greenhouse gases (like carbon dioxide) elevates the emission level, and because of the convective mixing, the new level will be colder. This reduces the outgoing infrared flux, and, in order to restore balance, the atmosphere would have to warm. Doubling carbon dioxide concentration is estimated to be equivalent to a forcing of about 3.7 watts per square meter, which is little less than 2% of the net incoming 200 watts per square meter. Many factors, including cloud area and height, snow cover, and ocean circulations, commonly cause changes of comparable magnitude.It is important to note that such a system will fluctuate with time scales ranging from seconds to millennia, even in the absence of an explicit forcing other than a steady sun. Much of the popular literature (on both sides of the climate debate) assumes that all changes must be driven by some external factor. Of course, the climate system is driven by the sun, but even if the solar forcing were constant, the climate would still vary. This is actually something that all of you have long known – even if you don’t realize it. After all, you have no difficulty recognizing that the steady stroking of a violin string by a bow causes the string to vibrate and generate sound waves. In a similar way, the atmosphere–ocean system responds to steady forcing with its own modes of variation (which, admittedly, are often more complex than the modes of a violin string). Moreover, given the massive nature of the oceans, such variations can involve timescales of millennia rather than milliseconds. El Niño is a relatively short ex- ample, involving years, but most of these internal time variations are too long to even be identified in our relatively short instrumental record. Nature has numerous examples of autonomous variability, including the approximately 11-year sunspot cycle and the reversals of the Earth’s magnetic field every couple of hundred thousand years or so. In this respect, the climate system is no different from other natural systems.Of course, such systems also do respond to external forcing, but such forcing is not needed for them to exhibit variability. While the above is totally uncontroversial, please think about it for a moment. Consider the massive heterogeneity and complexity of the system, and the variety of mechanisms of variability as we consider the current narrative that is commonly presented as ‘settled science.’The popular narrative and its political originsNow here is the currently popular narrative concerning this system. The climate, a complex multifactor system, can be summarized in just one variable, the globally averaged tempera- ture change, and is primarily controlled by the 1-2% perturbation in the energy budget due to a single variable – carbon dioxide – among many variables of comparable importance.This is an extraordinary pair of claims based on reasoning that borders on magical think- ing. It is, however, the narrative that has been widely accepted, even among many sceptics. This acceptance is a strong indicator of the problem Snow identified.Many politicians and learned societies go even further: They endorse carbon dioxide as the controlling variable, and although mankind’s CO2 contributions are small compared to the much larger but uncertain natural exchanges with both the oceans and the biosphere, they are confident that they know precisely what policies to implement in order to control carbon dioxide levels.While several scientists have put forward this view over the past 200 years, it was, until the 1980s, generally dismissed. When, in 1988, the NASA scientist James Hansen told the US Senate that the summer’s warmth reflected increased carbon dioxide levels, even Science magazine reported that the climatologists were sceptical. The establishment of this extreme position as dogma during the present period is due to political actors and others seeking to exploit the opportunities that abound in the multi-trillion dollar energy sector. One example was Maurice Strong, a global bureaucrat and wheeler-dealer (who spent his final years in China apparently trying to avoid prosecution for his role in the UN’s Oil for Food program scandals). Strong is frequently credited with initiating the global warming movement in the early 1980s, and he subsequently helped to engineer the Rio Conference that produced the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. Others like Olaf Palme and his friend, Bert Bolin, who was the first chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, were also involved as early as the 1970s.Political enthusiasm has only increased since then as political ideology has come to play a major role. A few years ago, Christiana Figueres, then executive secretary of UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, said that mankind was, for the first time in history, setting itself the task of intentionally changing the economic system.1Ms. Figueres is not alone in believing this. Pope Francis’ closest adviser castigated con-servative climate change skeptics in the United States, blaming capitalism for their views.Speaking with journalists, Cardinal Oscar Rodríguez Maradiaga criticized certain ‘movements’ in the United States that had preemptively come out in opposition to Francis’s planned en- cyclical on climate change. ‘The ideology surrounding environmental issues is too tied to a capitalism that doesn’t want to stop ruining the environment because they don’t want to give up their profits’, he said.This past August, a paper appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Littered with ‘could be’s’ and ‘might be’s’, it conclude that ‘Collective human action’ is required to ‘steer the Earth System away from a potential threshold’ and keep it habitable. The authors said that this would involve ‘stewardship of the entire Earth System – biosphere, climate, and societies’, and that it might involve ‘decarbonization of the global economy, enhancement of biosphere carbon sinks, behavioral changes, technological innovations, new governance arrangements, and transformed social values’.Remember, in a world that buys into the incoherent ‘precautionary principle,’ even the mere claim of remote possibility justifies extreme action.Presumably, the power these people desperately seek includes the power to roll back the status and welfare that the ordinary person has acquired and continues to acquire through the fossil fuel generated industrial revolution and return them to their presumably more appropriate status as serfs. Many more among the world’s poorest will be forbidden the opportunity to improve their condition.Nevertheless, when these claims are presented to the leaders of our societies, along with the bogus claim that 97% of scientists agree, our leaders are afraid to differ, and proceed, lemming-like, to plan for the suicide of industrial society. Again, nothing better illustrates the problem that Snow identified.Interestingly, however, ‘ordinary’ people (as opposed to our ‘educated’ elites) tend to see through the nonsense being presented. What is it about our elites that makes them so vulnerable, and what is it about many of our scientists that leads them to promote such foolishness? The answers cannot be very flattering to either. Let us consider the ‘vulnerable’ elites first.They have been educated in a system where success has been predicated on their ability to please their professors. In other words, they have been conditioned to rationalize anything.While they are vulnerable to false narratives, they are far less economically vulnerable than are ordinary people. They believe themselves wealthy enough to withstand the economic pain of the proposed policies, and they are clever enough to often benefit from them.The narrative is trivial enough for the elite to finally think that they ‘understand’ science.For many (especially on the right), the need to be regarded as intelligent causes them to fear that opposing anything claimed to be ‘scientific’ might lead to their being regarded as ignorant, and this fear overwhelms any ideological commitment to liberty that they might have.None of these factors apply to ‘ordinary’ people. This may well be the strongest argument for popular democracy and against the leadership of those ‘who know best.’What about the scientists?Scientists are specialists. Few are expert in climate. This includes many supposed ‘climate scientists’ who became involved in the area in response to the huge increases in funding that have accompanied global warming hysteria.Scientists are people with their own political positions, and many have been enthusiastic about using their status as scientists to promote their political positions (not unlike celebrities whose status some scientists often aspire to). As examples, consider the movements against nuclear weapons, against the Strategic Defense Initiative, against the Vietnam War, and so on.Scientists are also acutely and cynically aware of the ignorance of non-scientists and the fear that this engenders. This fear leaves the ‘vulnerable’ elites particularly relieved by assurances that the theory underlying the alarm is trivially simple and that ‘all’ scientists agree. Former senator and Secretary of State John F. Kerry is typical when he stated, with reference to greenhouse warming, ‘I know sometimes I can remember from when I was in high school and college, some aspects of chemistry or physics can be tough. But this is not tough. This is simple. Kids at the earliest age can understand this’. As you have seen, the greenhouse effect is not all that simple. Only remarkably brilliant kids would understand it. Given Kerry’s subsequent description of climate and its underlying physics, it was clear that he was not up to the task.The evidenceAt this point, some of you might be wondering about all the so-called evidence for dangerous climate change. What about the disappearing Arctic ice, the rising sea level, the weather extremes, starving polar bears, the Syrian Civil War, and all the rest of it? The vast variety of the claims makes it impossible to point to any particular fault that applies to all of them. Of course, citing the existence of changes – even if these observations are correct (although surprisingly often they are not) – would not implicate greenhouse warming per se. Nor would it point to danger. Note that most of the so-called evidence refers to matters of which you have no personal experience. Some of the claims, such as those relating to weather extremes, contradict what both physical theory and empirical data show. The purpose of these claims is obviously to frighten and befuddle the public, and to make it seem like there is evidence where, in fact, there is none. If there is evidence of anything, it is of the correctness of C.P. Snow’s observation. Some examples will show what I mean.First, for something to be evidence, it must have been unambiguously predicted. (This is a necessary, but far from sufficient condition.) Figure 1 shows the IPCC model forecasts for the summer minimum in Arctic sea ice in the year 2100 relative to the period 1980–2000. As you can see, there is a model for any outcome. It is a little like the formula for being an expert marksman: shoot first and declare whatever you hit to be the target.Turning to the issue of temperature extremes, is there any data to even support concern? As to these extremes, the data shows no trend and the IPCC agrees. Even Gavin Schmidt, Jim Hansen’s successor at NASA’s New York shop, GISS, has remarked that ‘general statements about extremes are almost nowhere to be found in the literature but seem to abound in the popular media’. He went on to say that it takes only a few seconds’ thought to realise that the popular perceptions that ‘global warming means all extremes have to increase all the time‘ is ‘nonsense’.clip_image002Figure 1: Climate model projections of rate of Arctic sea ice loss. Source: Eisenman et al., J. Clim., 2011.At the heart of this nonsense is the failure to distinguish weather from climate. Thus, global warming refers to the welcome increase in temperature of about 1◦C since the end of the Little Ice Age about 200 years ago. On the other hand, weather extremes involve temperature changes of the order of 20◦C. Such large changes have a profoundly different origin from global warming. Crudely speaking, they result from winds carrying warm and cold air from distant regions that are very warm or very cold. These winds are in the form of waves. The strength of these waves depends on the temperature difference between the tropics and the Arctic (with larger differences leading to stronger waves). Now, the models used to project global warming all predict that this temperature difference will decrease rather than increase. Thus, the increase in temperature extremes would best support the idea of global cooling rather than global warming. However, scientifically illiterate people seem incapable of distinguishing global warming of climate from temperature extremes due to weather. In fact, as has already been noted, there doesn’t really seem to be any discernible trend in weather extremes. There is only the greater attention paid by the media to weather, and the exploitation of this ‘news’ coverage by people who realize that projections of catastrophe in the distant future are hardly compelling, and that they therefore need a way to convince the public that the danger is immediate, even if it isn’t.This has also been the case with sea-level rise. Sea level has been increasing by about 8 inches per century for hundreds of years, and we have clearly been able to deal with it. In order to promote fear, however, those models that predict much larger increases are invoked. As a practical matter, it has long been known that at most coastal locations, changes in sea level, as measured by tide gauges, are primarily due to changes in land level associated with both tectonics and land use.Moreover, the small change in global mean temperature (actually the change in temperature increase) is much smaller than what the computer models used by the IPCC have predicted. Even if all this change were due to man, it would be most consistent with low sensitivity to added carbon dioxide, and the IPCC only claims that most (not all) of the warming over the past 60 years is due to man’s activities. Thus, the issue of man-made climate change does not appear to be a serious problem. However, this hardly stops ignorant politicians from declaring that the IPCC’s claim of attribution is tantamount to unambiguous proof of coming disaster.Cherry picking is always an issue. Thus, there has been a recent claim that Greenland ice discharge has increased, and that warming will make it worse.2 Omitted from the report is the finding by both NOAA and the Danish Meteorological Institute that the ice mass of Greenland has actually been increasing.3 In fact both these observations can be true, and, indeed, ice build-up pushes peripheral ice into the sea.Misrepresentation, exaggeration, cherry picking, or outright lying pretty much covers all the so-called evidence.ConclusionSo there you have it. An implausible conjecture backed by false evidence and repeated incessantly has become politically correct ‘knowledge,’ and is used to promote the overturn of industrial civilization. What we will be leaving our grandchildren is not a planet damaged by industrial progress, but a record of unfathomable silliness as well as a landscape degraded by rusting wind farms and decaying solar panel arrays. False claims about 97% agreement will not spare us, but the willingness of scientists to keep mum is likely to much reduce trust in and support for science. Perhaps this won’t be such a bad thing after all – certainly as concerns ‘official’ science.There is at least one positive aspect to the present situation. None of the proposed policies will have much impact on greenhouse gases. Thus we will continue to benefit from the one thing that can be clearly attributed to elevated carbon dioxide: namely, its effective role as a plant fertilizer, and reducer of the drought vulnerability of plants. Meanwhile, the IPCC is claiming that we need to prevent another 0.5◦C of warming, although the 1◦C that has occurred so far has been accompanied by the greatest increase in human welfare in history. As we used to say in my childhood home of the Bronx: ‘Go figure’.This published version of the lecture contains minor editorial changes to the text as delivered by Professor Lindzen.Notes1. ‘This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution.’2. KA Graeter et al. (2018) Ice core records of West Greenland melt and climate forcing.Geophysical Research Letters 45(7), 3164–3172. Ice Core Records of West Greenland Melt and Climate Forcing3. Greenland Ice Sheet's 2017 weigh-in suggests a small increase in ice massPDF version of this lecture: https://www.thegwpf.org/content/uploads/2018/10/Lindzen-2018-GWPF-Lecture.pdfRichard S. Lindzen was Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology until his retirement in 2013. He is the author of over 200 papers on meteorology and climatology and is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences and of the Academic Advisory Council of GWPF.The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF) - Common Sense on Climate Change