Communist Climatologists (and SELF-CRITICISM) (was: Re: Rain)

["Lou Paulsen" <wwchi@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Last night I wrote something stupid, embarrassing, and, yes, Eurocentric.
In an exchange with José. I wrote:

> ...  are there some communist climatologists to whom we can turn
>for guidance?  If you know of some, I would be glad if you would tell us
>about them.


This is a very ignorant thing for a U.S. Marxist to have written.  What is
the subtext here?  It is that there are no communist climatologists, because
communism is weak in the United States (and Europe), and those are the only
places that matter.  It is indeed Eurocentric to the core - or
EstadoUnidencentric.  It is just the sort of thing Jim Blaut would never
have written.

I apologize to the list for it, and will attempt to be more careful of my
own unconscious prejudices in the future.  Of course, there are socialist
countries which have universities and scientists and, indeed,
climatologists.  I am certain there are scores of communist climatologists
in the People's Republic of China alone.  Closer to home, there are indeed
Cuban climatologists, some of whom are, no doubt, communists.  Here is the
website for the Cuban Meteorological Society:
http://www.met.inf.cu/sometcub/default.htm   Here is the website for their
bulletin:
http://www.met.inf.cu/sometcub/boletin/v05_n02/espanol/cubierta.htm   Here
is the program for a conference on global warming which includes presenters
from both Cuba and the PRC:
http://www2.msstate.edu/~krreddy/glowar/archive/gw9cprodetails.html  Various
programs and conferences including a climatic-change component have been
hosted in Cuba.

I have certainly not paid enough attention over the last several years to
the political struggles around global warming within the UN-sponsored
Intergovernmental Panel on Climatic Change (here: http://www.ipcc.ch/  ).
China has played a prominent role in leading a large bloc of developing
countries called the G-77.  Cuba has been supportive of this bloc also.
They have, if I can trust to my brief survey of the stuff on the web, been
taking the position that the problem of global warming should not be solved
on imperialism's terms by restricting on industrial development in the
oppressed countries.  But I have seen no evidence that our communist
climatologist comrades in Cuba, China or elsewhere treat global warming as
being merely a bourgeois lie, or feel the need to separate their own
researches from the general body of climatological science which happens to
be done mostly in the bourgeois world.  This I take as 'guidance'.

Lou Paulsen