Climate change could mean the extinction of our species

[trish]

Apparently it was the National Review that first made the "Sandusky comparison."

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/climate-scientist-sues-for-defamation/

[Stavros]

After Hansen and 17 other climatologists published their newest assessment of global climate change


The paradox of this comprehensive article is that it is based on solid scientific evidence that presents a negative scenario of environmental change that future generations will struggle to live with, and a utopian belief in the ability of politics to prevent the worst case scenarios from taking place. The paper on the one hand acknowledges the fact that hydrocarbons are not only still in the driving seat of the energy machine but are likely to be so in the foreseeable future because of the development of unconventional hydrocarbons, yet on the other hand makes claims for the development of renewables that are out of touch with reality precisely because the greater proportion of investment in energy technology is going back into hydrocarbons rather than renewables:

Most renewable energies tap diffuse intermittent sources often at a distance from the user population, thus requiring large-scale energy storage and transport. Developing technologies can ameliorate these issues, as discussed below. However, apparent cost is the constraint that prevents nuclear and renewable energies from fully supplanting fossil fuel electricity generation.

First of all until the recent development of shale in the US (as an example) brought the industry to your doorstep, most petroleum resources have been in remote locations or offshore, where they still are. Second, 'developing technologies can ameliorate these issues' assumes the level of investment in renewables technology not only taking place, which it isn't, but in finding the solutions, which so far doesn't look so good either -an example of the utopian argument that goes nowhere. When they discuss the logic of carbon taxes they simply can't cope with the hostility to new taxes that has been fundamental to the opposition to climate change science where the science is in reality not the issue but the taxes are -and which is considered to have been a signal feature of the change of government in Australia which is repudiating climate science and specifically carbon taxes.
The appeal to our sharing of the earth's atmosphere as a 'human right' also ignores the campaign against human rights that is taking place in a country like the UK where it is part of the anti-European agenda being driven by disaffected Conservatives and the United Kingdom Independence Party. Although I don't think it has long term effect, the debate on the validity of human rights is under challenge more today than I can recall in recent years.

The bleak reality is that politics is not a long-term project outside of grand ideological statements, the 'international community' has been arguing about this issue for decades and we are no closer to meaningful co-operation now than we were in 1992, sorry to sound cynical but that is how I see it.

In the US, the obsession with energy security and a decrease in imports from the Middle East with fracking is indeed changing the energy landscape and, paradoxically for Obama, his approval ratings are low at a time when his energy policies appear to be a runaway success. As we have discussed before I think the dangers of fracking are on balance emerging in some areas as greater than the benefits, but this isn't going to change and surely this is the bleak conclusion of the way in which we live.

One small point: figure 1 is based on data from the BP Statistical Review of Energy but refers to the source as 'British Petroleum', but this company changed its name to BP Amoco in 1998, and BP plc in 2001, precisely because it merged with two American, one British and one German company and thereby ceased to be a 'British' company. I would expect small facts like this not to appear in a paper of this calibre and assume other similar errors have not been made.

[dderek123]

Using the worlds deserts to produce biofuels would be great. There would still be plenty of carbon going into the atmosphere though.

http://www.energypost.eu/exclusive-report-boeing-reveals-biggest-breakthrough-biofuels-ever/

Exclusive report – Boeing reveals “the biggest breakthrough in biofuels ever”
January 27, 2014 - Author: Karel Beckman

http://www.energypost.eu/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/green-in-the-desert-in-Abu-Dhabi.jpg

Oil companies watch out. Biofuels are on the verge of a breakthrough that will transform the oil market. Not only that: it will also green the planet. In an exclusive interview with CleanTechnica.com and Energy Post, Darrin L. Morgan, Director Sustainable Aviation Fuels and Environmental Strategy at Boeing, reveals that researchers at the Masdar Institute in Abu Dhabi, funded by Boeing, Honeywell and Etihad Airways, may have achieved “the biggest breakthrough in biofuels ever”. Alarmed by the poor quality of fuel made from shale oil and tar sands and frustrated by the blunt refusal of oil companies to provide fuel of better quality, Boeing and its partners have over the past four years sponsored research into alternative fuels that has led to spectacular results. They found that there is a class of plants that can grow in deserts on salt water and has superb biomass potential. “Nobody knew this”, says Morgan. “It is a huge discovery. A game-changer for the biofuels market.” Karel Beckman has the story.

We are sitting on a shaded patio in Masdar City – the famous sustainable living project in Abu Dhabi – with a small group of people and listening to what seems a truly sensational story. It is Wednesday 22 January, we are in the middle of Abu Dhabi’s Sustainability Week – Siemens is about to open its new Middle Eastern headquarters for 800 employees that same afternoon right next door in Masdar City – and Darrin Morgan of Boeing takes the opportunity to reveal to two journalists and a science writer a new development in biofuels which he is convinced will change the world. “The 20th Century saw Norman Borlaug’s Green revolution”, he says. “This is the next step after that.”

Morgan is not some green dreamer. He is Director of Sustainable Aviation Fuels and Environmental Strategy at The Boeing Company in Seattle in the US. He has worked on Boeing’s biofuels program for 10 years. And he is convinced that researchers at the Masdar Institute, sponsored by Boeing, Honeywell’s UOP and Etihad Airways, have achieved a breakthrough in biofuels that will make it possible for countries all over the world to turn their deserts into biofuel-producing agricultural lands. We are on the verge, says the Boeing man, of a totally sustainable solution that does not require any arable land and that is going to replace a very big chunk of the oil currently used in transport.

But before we come to that, Morgan tells the story of how it got that far. A story that’s fascinating in itself as it reveals some troublesome facts about the existing oil market, increasingly based as it is on unconventional oils like tar sands and shale oil.

Ahead of the game
For a number of years now, says Morgan, Boeing has been actively looking at how to help develop the biofuels market. They learned a lot as they went along. Morgan: “One of the lessons of early generation biofuels was: ignore stakeholder consequences at your peril.” He mentions corn ethanol as a “perfect example” of how NOT to do things. “There were policies in place before there was a clear understanding of the system. Look what happened. This is not a good environmental story and it is not a good economic story. This is so not what we’re looking at.”

“The biofuels that are now approved for use in aircraft are technically superior to kerosene jet fuel. There is no question about that”
“We took a play from that book and realized that is not the play we want to have”, he continues. “We realized we need to get ahead of the game in terms of understanding the right paths.”

To do so, Boeing realized that they needed to involve stakeholders – “to help us direct our thinking on where to go, to learn how to use sustainability as the criterion to drive us.” The company entered into various partnerships around the world, with NGO’s like WWF, and with agricultural and biological researchers and developers. “We have partnerships around the planet now. Some are formal research collaborations, like this one with the Masdar Institute. Some are more like stakeholder engagement processes.”

Morgan says Boeing and its partners have “a common goal: we want to have a strong market for sustainable biofuels”. There are two good practical reasons why the company takes sustainable biofuels seriously, he explains. First, they have discovered that the biofuels that are now approved for use in aircraft are technically superior to kerosene jet fuel. “There is no question about that”, says Morgan. “It surprised us. We had not expected that. We had expected the opposite. But the hydrotreated fuels we now use work very well for us. The biological sources of these fuels end up making jet fuels that are much better than petroleum jet fuels.”

Shale oil and tar sands
At the same time, Boeing found that while biofuels turned out to be much better in quality than expected, the quality of the existing oil supplies was going down. This, says Morgan, is the result of the poorer quality of the new types of unconventional oil that are coming onto the market like shale and tar sands – and the unwillingness of the oil companies to do anything about it.

“There is a trend going on in parts of the world, especially in North America, where there are alternative forms of crude being produced. The backpage story out there is that there is stuff in those fuels that appears to be causing problems in terms of contamination of jet fuel. There are additives that go into those types of crude that are getting through the refining system and into our supply and are actually causing problems for us. Our existing supply chain is increasingly being fed by these heavy forms of crude that are less jet-friendly, to put it simply.”

“We are such a small market, the oil companies are not particularly motivated to help us with our problems”
The new forms of crude “cause inefficiencies and problems in the system”, says Morgan. “That’s not a good trend. But we can’t do anything about it. The crude is where the crude is.” The aviation industry did ask oil companies to help them with their problem, but the oil suppliers, Morgan says, were not very helpful. “We are such a small market, the oil companies are not particularly motivated to help us with our problems. That’s fine. That’s their decision. So we realized we got to get ahead of this.” Later, Morgan says: “You know Shell, in the Netherlands, is just not supportive of biofuels. That’s fine, they don’t have to be, they have their own interests. But we have ours. We are going to move this.”

http://www.energypost.eu/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/halophytes-by-Tony-Rodd.jpg

So Boeing decided to enter upon a different path: a search for biofuels with higher sustainability and lower cost. “Those two things are really the same”, notes Morgan. “The things that are causing first-generation biofuels to be expensive, like the use of valuable arable land and water, are also making them less sustainable. The leadership of the company decided we would go down the road of decreasing costs and increasing sustainability.”

“We are not going to go into biofuels”, he adds. “But we are going to steer those partnerships, those technologies, more towards aviation than they would otherwise be, because our incumbent energy providers wouldn’t do that. If we do nothing, the outcome will be tar sands and shale oil and that’s not a good outcome. But if we do something we can drive the technology towards a more sustainable pathway and get something that will be cost-effective and will cause biofuels to be better than they otherwise would be.”

Talking with NGO’s “and others who are deeply concerned about the effects of biofuels”, says Morgan, “we realized we need to get serious about sustainability. We need to live it. We actually need to use this as design criteria. Biofuels are not hurdles to be overcome, they are design criteria.”

Sustainability pledge
In 2008, Boeing and others set up the Sustainable Aviation Fuel Users Group (SAFUG) of which by now a-third of all airlines are members of. The CEO’s of these companies “signed up to a pledge which states that they will work through strong sustainability criteria for their sourcing”. The sustainability standards used by SAFUG are “probably the strongest out there”, says Morgan. “They are recognized in the EU as a legally applicable standard. We have set the bar very high. We do this for sustainability reasons. But also to get lower costs.”

Which bring us to the research that has been going on at the Masdar Institute in Abu Dhabi. “It is probably the best example of what we are looking for”, says Morgan.

“These plants tend to liberate these sugars relatively easily, so you need relatively low temperatures in the production process. Nobody knew this. It is a huge discovery that was made here”
What researchers at the Masdar Institute have been studying is a category of plants called halophytes. These plants have naturally evolved to be able to live on salt water. Not only that: they are also able to live in arid lands, in deserts. “If you look around you here [in Abu Dhabi], most of the plants you see are halophytes.”

Clearly if it is possible to grow plants in deserts around the world, and use them for biofuels, that would be an ideal solution. It would solve the major problems of traditional biofuels – use of fresh water and arable land – at one stroke. “Twenty per cent of the world’s land is either desert or becoming desert through overuse or mal-use”, Morgan notes. “And 97% of the world’s water is salt water. So if you can use those two factors that turns the scarcity problem that plagues all biofuels on its head.”

Boeing and its partners Honeywell UOP and Eithad Airways founded a research consortium called the Sustainable Bio-Energy Research Consortium (SBRC) which was invited by the government of Abu Dhabi to set up shop in Masdar City. Since 2009, the researchers at Masdar have studied the possibilities of halophytes. Remarkably, the consortium discovered that not much work had been done on halophytes up to that time. “We started to ask, who is working on this, because there is a lot of biomass potential out there. The science was there. The science said this can be made into biofuels pretty well. But if you looked at the patents, who is doing this, not really anybody. It was a whole new realm that nobody was looking at.”

And the researchers made a very pleasant discovery. It turned out, Morgan says, “that the types of halophytes we are working on are very amenable to being converted into sugars.” This is crucial in terms of the potential the plants have to produce energy cost-effectively, Morgan explains. “Plants contain lignin that keeps them stiff. The cellulose in the plant has to be separated from the lignin to liberate the sugars. Production costs are heavily influenced by how easy or difficult it is to do this. This is the name of the game for next-generation biofuels.”

“What the scientists here have found”, he adds, “is that the halophytic family tends to be low in lignin and high in the right type of sugars, which can be converted into hydrocarbons. These plants tend to liberate these sugars relatively easily, so you need relatively low temperatures in the production process. Nobody knew this. It is a huge discovery that was made here. We found it and repeated it.” This was about six months ago.

Combination with aquaculture
The consortium then decided to set up a pilot production facility which is now being built in Abu Dhabi right next door to Masdar City. There is yet one more element to this to complete the story, because what the researchers decided to do in this pilot project is also unique: they decided to combine the production of biofuels from halophytes with aquaculture.

Morgan explains the reason behind this. “With the earth’s oceans increasingly being emptied of fish, aquaculture is growing fast all over the world. The problem with aquaculture, however, is the waste it produces. This goes right into the ocean and creates a lot of environmental problems.” This “fish waste”, he says, is essentially a fertilizer containing nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium suspended in salt water. “And guess what halophytes need to grow? Fertilizer containing nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium suspended in salt water.”

“Integrating those two systems you get sustainable acquaculture that does not pollute the oceans and biomass that can be used for fuels”
“So the concept we took up here”, says Morgan, “is to build a pilot facility that integrates aquaculture with the growing of halophytes. Integrating those two systems you get sustainable acquaculture that does not pollute the oceans and biomass that can be used for fuels. We are now figuring out the optimal combination of the two systems.”

Morgan expects that the two-hectare pilot facility will up and running in a year. If all goes well, they will then develop a plot of land of 500 acres in western Abu Dhabi for the initial scale-up. “After that, if the results are what we expect them to be, you will start seeing thousands and thousands of hectares being developed”.

He notes that while the technology is being developed in Abu Dhabi, it has potential for the entire world. In fact, everywhere where there are deserts.

Does this mean we could see the world’s deserts turn into agricultural land producing sustainable biofuels that will be able to replace oil in transport? “Yes”, says Morgan. “I believe this will be the big gamechanger for biofuels. Nobody has looked at this before.” And it would not just be relevant for the air transport sector. “It will be much bigger.”

So far, Boeing and its partners have not given much publicity to their expectations. They did announce the results of their research, but in fairly technical terms. “We have been quiet about it”, says Morgan. But he is too excited to keep quiet any longer. “To me this is the biggest breakthrough out there. The 20th Century saw Norman Borlaug’s Green revolution, this is the next step after that.”

[trish]

Articles on Boeing’s exploration into biofuels are curiously lengthy and uniformative. Here’s another

http://cleantechnica.com/2014/01/27/boeing-biofuel-breakthrough-big-deal/

1. What problems are Boeing engines experiencing? Boeing says the chemicals used to extract oil from shale and fuels refined from high bitumen crudes “cause problems for their engines.” What trouble? Is the public is danger? Or is it just an efficiency issue?

2. What halophyte is Boeing experimenting with?

The plus side of biofuels is that they are renewable. Growing them sucks carbon from the atmosphere. Burning them puts it back in. The rub is in the balance. With corn based methanol fuels, production, refinement and transportation put more carbon in the atmosphere than the corn removes. This is partly because fossil fuels are used in production, refinement and transportation.

Many land use issues also arise with the use of biofuels. In the U.S. the price of corn has gone up. Fields that should have been rotated to restore vital nutrients are replanted year afte year with corn. Soils are losing their fertility. One might think growing a crop of halophytes in the desert poses no environmental issues. However, deserts number among the most delicate ecologies on the face of the planet. What, for example, will irrigating halophytes with salt water do to the water table below and distant fresh water wells?

[trish]

It's cold outside, so much for global warming, eh?

[Ben]

The Most Terrifying Video You'll Ever See

The Most Terrifying Video You'll Ever See - YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zORv8wwiadQ)

[dderek123]

The World's Largest Solar Plant Started Creating Electricity Today

http://img.gawkerassets.com/img/19fjwr4pyb893jpg/ku-xlarge.jpg

http://gizmodo.com/the-worlds-largest-solar-plant-started-creating-electr-1521998493/+nak

"The Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System is now operational and delivering solar electricity to California customers. At full capacity, the facility's trio of 450-foot high towers produces a gross total of 392 megawatts (MW) of solar power, enough electricity to provide 140,000 California homes with clean energy and avoid 400,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide per year, equal to removing 72,000 vehicles off the road."

http://ivanpahsolar.com/

[Stavros]

The Guardian today has published an article on a report from the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in California on Nuclear Fusion, which has the potential to solve our energy problems. It is still in its experimental stages but progress is encouraging, but I don't know enough about this aspect of energy to know if nuclear fusion is any safer than other kinds of nuclear energy. One trivial point is that the lead author of the report is called Omar Hurricane. I could say something but I won't.

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/feb/12/nuclear-fusion-breakthrough-green-energy-source

[dakota87]

The World's Largest Solar Plant Started Creating Electricity Today

http://img.gawkerassets.com/img/19fjwr4pyb893jpg/ku-xlarge.jpg

http://gizmodo.com/the-worlds-largest-solar-plant-started-creating-electr-1521998493/+nak

"The Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System is now operational and delivering solar electricity to California customers. At full capacity, the facility's trio of 450-foot high towers produces a gross total of 392 megawatts (MW) of solar power, enough electricity to provide 140,000 California homes with clean energy and avoid 400,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide per year, equal to removing 72,000 vehicles off the road."

http://ivanpahsolar.com/
Two and a half billion dollar bird roaster:
http://www.kcet.org/news/rewire/wildlife/ivanpah-solar-bird-kill-count-rises.html

[trish]

One could also say a skyscraper is a half-billion dollar bird hazard. But of course that's confuses intended function with unintended (though foreseen) effects. A skyscraper is a half-billion dollar corporate home, a source of jobs for construction workers, maintenance crews, security crews as well as a source of income for investors and stock owners.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird-skyscraper_collisions
http://www.terrain.org/articles/15/kousky.htm
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/28/world/americas/casualties-of-torontos-urban-skies.html?smid=pl-share
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/4134773/ns/us_news-environment/t/plate-glass-blamed-billion-bird-deaths-year/#.Uv1RLfbjmHk

The same confusion lies behind the headline claiming Ivanpa Solar Electric Generating System is a half-billion dollar bird roaster. In fact, it's coal and oil that's is currently roasting birds and the rest of the planet along with them. Of course, that's not the reason we mine, pump and burn fossil fuels. It's mined and pumped for the money you can sell it for. It's burned for the energy.

Every energy source that has the power to supply a chain of cities with electricity also has the potential to be destructive to the same degree. The trick is too regulate production and use to minimize risk and optimize safety.

The hazards that oil, gas, coal, hydro, nuclear, wind, solar (and all other methods in use for the large scale production of power) present to birds, fish and ultimately humans are not something that we can afford to ignore. Solar and wind are new and present new hazards. Something that needs to be addressed. But certainly the use of fossil fuels has no high moral ground here, as the global threat it imposes looms over all of us.

[dderek123]

Two and a half billion dollar bird roaster:
http://www.kcet.org/news/rewire/wildlife/ivanpah-solar-bird-kill-count-rises.html

Bird slicer and dicer

https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRA1qplH3lhNnNW0jMjBFTi6awlMhYXS nPlfe7Bih6AkUyTwts2mg

[trish]

Planetary deep fryer->

[dderek123]

The bird should be marinated prior to cooking

http://aviewfromtheright.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/oil-covered-bird.jpg

[martin48]

It's an end goal - unlimited clean energy - but long, long way to go.




The Guardian today has published an article on a report from the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in California on Nuclear Fusion, which has the potential to solve our energy problems. It is still in its experimental stages but progress is encouraging, but I don't know enough about this aspect of energy to know if nuclear fusion is any safer than other kinds of nuclear energy. One trivial point is that the lead author of the report is called Omar Hurricane. I could say something but I won't.

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/feb/12/nuclear-fusion-breakthrough-green-energy-source

[dderek123]

It's an end goal - unlimited clean energy - but long, long way to go.

Yep the goal is to economically produce more energy than you put in to the fusion process. Right now they get about 1% of the energy back that is put in. They're making progress but still there's a long way to go.

[trish]

Without a doubt gas and oil are some of the most energy dense fuels available. There are about 33 to 34 kilowatt-hours of energy in one gallon of gasoline. Still, we spend energy seeking it, drilling for it, pumping it out of the ground, transporting it, refining it and transporting it again. When we finally burn it, we burn it inefficiently. The net energy produced per gallon of tar sand oil is about zero kilowatt-hours.

http://insideclimatenews.org/news/20130219/oil-sands-mining-tar-sands-alberta-canada-energy-return-on-investment-eroi-natural-gas-in-situ-dilbit-bitumen

[Stavros]

Sorry Trish you should have been more specific -unconventional hydrocarbons, heavy oil, oil sands, tar sands yes; 'oil and gas' -as in conventional hydrocarbons, no. Still one of the cheapest sources of energy on the planet. Your link also says "As the supply of sweet, light crude diminishes, it is being replaced by unconventional alternatives, including tar sands", yet most Middle Eastern crude is heavy in sulphur, to get the lighter sweeter crudes you need to travel west to North Africa, esp Libya, and Nigeria. What your link could also have added is the staggering amount of water used in hydraulic fracturing, in some cases probably more than it is worth wasting, as it leaves communities high and dry, and given the amount of dry land in the United States, you and your government might want to review this aspect of the industrial operations currently taking place...

[trish]

Sorry Trish you should have been more specific -unconventional hydrocarbons, heavy oil, oil sands, tar sands yes; 'oil and gas' -as in conventional hydrocarbons, no. Still one of the cheapest sources of energy on the planet. Your link also says "As the supply of sweet, light crude diminishes, it is being replaced by unconventional alternatives, including tar sands", yet most Middle Eastern crude is heavy in sulphur, to get the lighter sweeter crudes you need to travel west to North Africa, esp Libya, and Nigeria. What your link could also have added is the staggering amount of water used in hydraulic fracturing, in some cases probably more than it is worth wasting, as it leaves communities high and dry, and given the amount of dry land in the United States, you and your government might want to review this aspect of the industrial operations currently taking place...All correct. Thank you.

Perhaps instead of "fracking" we should use the more technical "hydraulic fracturing" as you have done since the very term underscores the vast volume of water it requires. The water is mixed with chemicals and pumped at high pressure down into strata below the water table. The process can force the mixture through fissures up into the ground water. It can also cause the shifting of ground masses to redirect underground springs. The used mixture is brought up and stored in vast lagoons that may leak into the water table from above. Eventually it is pumped at high pressure back down into the lower strata for permanent storage. This process entails the same hazards as hydraulic fracturing itself. As you say, the volume of water involved is more than the surrounding community can afford to waste, not to mention the danger of pollution. Moreover, companies refuse to reveal the chemical composition of the mixtures they use claiming such knowledge is proprietary.

[Stavros]

The New York Times published a review of a book by Elizabeth Kolbert The Sixth Extinction by Al Gore, on Feb 10 which looks at the impact humans have had on plant life.

"Over the past decade, Elizabeth Kolbert has established herself as one of our very best science writers. She has developed a distinctive and eloquent voice of conscience on issues arising from the extraordinary assault on the ecosphere, and those who have enjoyed her previous works like “Field Notes From a Catastrophe” will not be disappointed by her powerful new book, “The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History.”
Kolbert, a staff writer at The New Yorker, reports from the front lines of the violent collision between civilization and our planet’s ecosystem: the Andes, the Amazon rain forest, the Great Barrier Reef — and her backyard. In lucid prose, she examines the role of man-made climate change in causing what biologists call the sixth mass extinction — the current spasm of plant and animal loss that threatens to eliminate 20 to 50 percent of all living species on earth within this century.


Extinction is a relatively new idea in the scientific community. Well into the 18th century, people found it impossible to accept the idea that species had once lived on earth but had been subsequently lost. Scientists simply could not envision a planetary force powerful enough to wipe out forms of life that were common in prior ages.
In the same way, and for many of the same reasons, many today find it inconceivable that we could possibly be responsible for destroying the integrity of our planet’s ecology. There are psychological barriers to even imagining that what we love so much could be lost — could be destroyed forever. As a result, many of us refuse to contemplate it. Like an audience entertained by a magician, we allow ourselves to be deceived by those with a stake in persuading us to ignore reality.
For example, we continue to use the world’s atmosphere as an open sewer for the daily dumping of more than 90 million tons of gaseous waste. If trends continue, the global temperature will keep rising, triggering “world-altering events,” Kolbert writes. According to a conservative and unchallenged calculation by the climatologist James Hansen, the man-made pollution already in the atmosphere traps as much extra heat energy every 24 hours as would be released by the explosion of 400,000 Hiroshima-class nuclear bombs. The resulting rapid warming of both the atmosphere and the ocean, which Kolbert notes has absorbed about one-third of the carbon dioxide we have produced, is wreaking havoc on earth’s delicately balanced ecosystems. It threatens both the web of living species with which we share the planet and the future viability of civilization. “By disrupting these systems,” Kolbert writes, “we’re putting our own survival in danger.”
The earth’s water cycle is being dangerously disturbed, as warmer oceans evaporate more water vapor into the air. Warmer air holds more moisture (there has been an astonishing 4 percent increase in global humidity in just the last 30 years) and funnels it toward landmasses, where it is released in much larger downpours, causing larger and more frequent floods and mudslides.
The extra heat is also absorbed in the top layer of the seas, which makes ocean-based storms more destructive. Just before Hurricane Sandy, the area of the Atlantic immediately windward from New York City and New Jersey was up to nine degrees warmer than normal. And just before Typhoon Haiyan hit the Philippines, the area of the Pacific from which it drew its energy was about 5.4 degrees above average.
Our oceans, a crucial food source for billions, have become not only warmer but also more acidic than they have been in millions of years. They struggle to absorb excess heat and carbon pollution — which is why, as Kolbert points out, coral reefs might be the first entire ecosystem to go extinct in the modern era.
The same extra heat pulls moisture from soil in drought-prone regions, causing deeper and longer-lasting droughts. The drying of trees and other vegetation leads also to an increase in the frequency and average size of fires.
Food crops are threatened not only by more pests and the disruption of long-predictable rainy season-dry season patterns, but also by the growing impact of heat stress itself on corn, wheat, rice and other staples.
Earth’s ice-covered regions are melting. The vanishing of the Arctic ice cap is changing the heat absorption at the top of the world, and may be affecting the location of the Northern Hemisphere jet stream and storm tracks and slowing down the movement of storm systems. Meanwhile, the growing loss of ice in Antarctica and Greenland is accelerating sea level rise and threatening low-lying coastal cities and regions.
Viruses, bacteria, disease-carrying species like mosquitoes and ticks, and pest species like bark beetles are now being pushed far beyond their native ranges. Everywhere the intricate interconnections crucial to sustaining life are increasingly being pulled apart.

This is the world we’ve made. And in her timely, meticulously researched and well-written book, Kolbert combines scientific analysis and personal narratives to explain it to us. The result is a clear and comprehensive history of earth’s previous mass extinctions — and the species we’ve lost — and an engaging description of the extraordinarily complex nature of life. Most important, Kolbert delivers a compelling call to action. “Right now,” she writes, “we are deciding, without quite meaning to, which evolutionary pathways will remain open and which will forever be closed. No other creature has ever managed this, and it will, unfortunately, be our most enduring legacy.”
Kolbert expertly traces the “twisting” intellectual history of how we’ve come to understand the concept of extinction, and more recently, how we’ve come to recognize our role in it. When mastodon bones were first studied, in 1739, many scientists reasoned that the large and unique bones belonged to an elephant or hippopotamus. But in 1796, the French naturalist Georges Cuvier presented evidence of an entirely new theory: The bones belonged to a lost species from “a world previous to ours.” Cuvier collected and studied as many fossils as he could, eventually identifying dozens of extinct species, and over the next several decades, with the contributions of Charles Lyell and Charles Darwin, extinction evolved as a scientific concept.
Since the origin of life on earth 3.8 billion years ago, our planet has experienced five mass extinction events. The last of these events occurred some 66 million years ago when a six-mile-wide asteroid is thought to have collided with earth, wiping out the dinosaurs. The Cretaceous extinction event dramatically changed the composition of biodiversity on the planet: Marine ecosystems essentially collapsed, and about 75 percent of all plant and animal species disappeared.
Today, Kolbert writes, we are witnessing a similar mass extinction event happening in the geologic blink of an eye. According to E. O. Wilson, the present extinction rate in the tropics is “on the order of 10,000 times greater than the naturally occurring background extinction rate” and will reduce biological diversity to its lowest level since the last great extinction.
This time, however, a giant asteroid isn’t to blame — we are, by altering environmental conditions on our planet so swiftly and dramatically that a large proportion of other species cannot adapt. And we are risking our own future as well, by fundamentally altering the integrity of the climate balance that has persisted in more or less the same configuration since the end of the last ice age, and which has fostered the flourishing of human civilization.

As early as the 1840s, scientists noticed large gaps in the fossil record — time periods in which earth’s biodiversity declined rapidly and could not be explained by a static system. Some scientists theorized that abrupt climate changes had caused past mass extinction events. But in the modern era, three factors have combined to radically disrupt the relationship between civilization and the earth’s ecosystem: the unparalleled surge in human population that has quadrupled our numbers in less than a hundred years; the development of powerful new technologies that magnify the per capita impact of all seven billion of us, soon to be nine billion or more; and the emergence of a hegemonic ideology that exalts short-term thinking and ignores the true long-term cost and consequences of the choices we’re making in industry, energy policy, agriculture, forestry and politics.
“People change the world,” Kolbert writes, and she vividly presents the science and history of the current crisis. Her extensive travels in researching this book, and her insightful treatment of both the history and the science all combine to make “The Sixth Extinction” an invaluable contribution to our understanding of present circumstances, just as the paradigm shift she calls for is sorely needed.
Despite the evidence that humanity is driving mass extinctions, we have been woefully slow to adopt the necessary measures to solve this global environmental challenge. Our response to the mass extinction — as well as to the climate crisis — is still controlled by a hopelessly outdated view of our relationship to our environment.
Fortunately, history is full of examples of our capacity to overcome even the most difficult challenges whenever a controversy is finally resolved into a choice between what is clearly right and what is clearly wrong. The anomalies Kolbert identifies are too glaring to ignore. She makes an irrefutable case that what we are doing to cause a sixth mass extinction is clearly wrong. And she makes it clear that doing what is right means accelerating our transition to a more sustainable world.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/16/books/review/the-sixth-extinction-by-elizabeth-kolbert.html?hpw&rref=books&_r=0

[dderek123]

http://observationdeck.io9.com/bill-nye-to-debate-climate-change-on-sunday-1523345002

Bill Nye to "debate" climate change on Sunday

http://img.gawkerassets.com/img/19fqa2ny99njzjpg/ku-xlarge.jpg

Bill Nye is apparently the new person to go to talk about scientific issues. Good work for an engineer!

Meet the Press, a Sunday morning political talk show on NBC, will feature a "debate" on climate change this Sunday, the 16th. On the side of science! will be Bill Nye, who you've heard of probably. On the side of ??? will be Representative Martha Blackburn (R-TN).

"It's not a debate when one side is wrong." - Bill Maher

[martin48]

Finally, UK Government accepts climate change! Forget all the scientific evidence, it's flooding in our Home Counties and an election on the way that done it. Shocking scenes like this have convinced the British public!

PS - For US readers, the above is irony

[broncofan]

PS - For US readers, the above is irony
Reminds me of the epilogue of my favorite British comedy routine.

A man with bad teeth and a powdered wig: "That's humor, or humour, my dear North American friends. Don't you get it old chap! What he's really saying is that they have ignored all of the scientific evidence in favor of that which has impacted their lives. Or put another way..it has finally hit close to home in a manner such that they can no longer ignore the data. Nothing? Not even a smile? You Americans are thick as ever".:D:D

[Ben]

David Cameron is playing fast and sluice with climate-led flooding facts:

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/john-prescott-floods-david-cameron-3150493

[dderek123]

http://i.imgur.com/Gi64Qtj.jpg

[Stavros]

A bleak assessment from James Lovelock The Guardian in March 2008-for those of you still under 40, you might want to make long term plans to move to Greenland...

James Lovelock: 'enjoy life while you can: in 20 years global warming will hit the fan'

The climate science maverick believes catastrophe is inevitable, carbon offsetting is a joke and ethical living a scam. So what would he do? By Decca Aitkenhead



In 1965 executives at Shell wanted to know what the world would look like in the year 2000. They consulted a range of experts, who speculated about fusion-powered hovercrafts and "all sorts of fanciful technological stuff". When the oil company asked the scientist James Lovelock, he predicted that the main problem in 2000 would be the environment. "It will be worsening then to such an extent that it will seriously affect their business," he said.
"And of course," Lovelock says, with a smile 43 years later, "that's almost exactly what's happened."
Lovelock has been dispensing predictions from his one-man laboratory in an old mill in Cornwall since the mid-1960s, the consistent accuracy of which have earned him a reputation as one of Britain's most respected - if maverick - independent scientists. Working alone since the age of 40, he invented a device that detected CFCs, which helped detect the growing hole in the ozone layer, and introduced the Gaia hypothesis, a revolutionary theory that the Earth is a self-regulating super-organism. Initially ridiculed by many scientists as new age nonsense, today that theory forms the basis of almost all climate science.
For decades, his advocacy of nuclear power appalled fellow environmentalists - but recently increasing numbers of them have come around to his way of thinking. His latest book, The Revenge of Gaia, predicts that by 2020 extreme weather will be the norm, causing global devastation; that by 2040 much of Europe will be Saharan; and parts of London will be underwater. The most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report deploys less dramatic language - but its calculations aren't a million miles away from his.
As with most people, my panic about climate change is equalled only by my confusion over what I ought to do about it. A meeting with Lovelock therefore feels a little like an audience with a prophet. Buried down a winding track through wild woodland, in an office full of books and papers and contraptions involving dials and wires, the 88-year-old presents his thoughts with a quiet, unshakable conviction that can be unnerving. More alarming even than his apocalyptic climate predictions is his utter certainty that almost everything we're trying to do about it is wrong.
On the day we meet, the Daily Mail has launched a campaign to rid Britain of plastic shopping bags. The initiative sits comfortably within the current canon of eco ideas, next to ethical consumption, carbon offsetting, recycling and so on - all of which are premised on the calculation that individual lifestyle adjustments can still save the planet. This is, Lovelock says, a deluded fantasy. Most of the things we have been told to do might make us feel better, but they won't make any difference. Global warming has passed the tipping point, and catastrophe is unstoppable.
"It's just too late for it," he says. "Perhaps if we'd gone along routes like that in 1967, it might have helped. But we don't have time. All these standard green things, like sustainable development, I think these are just words that mean nothing. I get an awful lot of people coming to me saying you can't say that, because it gives us nothing to do. I say on the contrary, it gives us an immense amount to do. Just not the kinds of things you want to do."
He dismisses eco ideas briskly, one by one. "Carbon offsetting? I wouldn't dream of it. It's just a joke. To pay money to plant trees, to think you're offsetting the carbon? You're probably making matters worse. You're far better off giving to the charity Cool Earth, which gives the money to the native peoples to not take down their forests."
Do he and his wife try to limit the number of flights they take? "No we don't. Because we can't." And recycling, he adds, is "almost certainly a waste of time and energy", while having a "green lifestyle" amounts to little more than "ostentatious grand gestures". He distrusts the notion of ethical consumption. "Because always, in the end, it turns out to be a scam ... or if it wasn't one in the beginning, it becomes one."
Somewhat unexpectedly, Lovelock concedes that the Mail's plastic bag campaign seems, "on the face of it, a good thing". But it transpires that this is largely a tactical response; he regards it as merely more rearrangement of Titanic deckchairs, "but I've learnt there's no point in causing a quarrel over everything". He saves his thunder for what he considers the emptiest false promise of all - renewable energy.
"You're never going to get enough energy from wind to run a society such as ours," he says. "Windmills! Oh no. No way of doing it. You can cover the whole country with the blasted things, millions of them. Waste of time."
This is all delivered with an air of benign wonder at the intractable stupidity of people. "I see it with everybody. People just want to go on doing what they're doing. They want business as usual. They say, 'Oh yes, there's going to be a problem up ahead,' but they don't want to change anything."
Lovelock believes global warming is now irreversible, and that nothing can prevent large parts of the planet becoming too hot to inhabit, or sinking underwater, resulting in mass migration, famine and epidemics. Britain is going to become a lifeboat for refugees from mainland Europe, so instead of wasting our time on wind turbines we need to start planning how to survive. To Lovelock, the logic is clear. The sustainability brigade are insane to think we can save ourselves by going back to nature; our only chance of survival will come not from less technology, but more.
Nuclear power, he argues, can solve our energy problem - the bigger challenge will be food. "Maybe they'll synthesise food. I don't know. Synthesising food is not some mad visionary idea; you can buy it in Tesco's, in the form of Quorn. It's not that good, but people buy it. You can live on it." But he fears we won't invent the necessary technologies in time, and expects "about 80%" of the world's population to be wiped out by 2100. Prophets have been foretelling Armageddon since time began, he says. "But this is the real thing."
Faced with two versions of the future - Kyoto's preventative action and Lovelock's apocalypse - who are we to believe? Some critics have suggested Lovelock's readiness to concede the fight against climate change owes more to old age than science: "People who say that about me haven't reached my age," he says laughing.
But when I ask if he attributes the conflicting predictions to differences in scientific understanding or personality, he says: "Personality."
There's more than a hint of the controversialist in his work, and it seems an unlikely coincidence that Lovelock became convinced of the irreversibility of climate change in 2004, at the very point when the international consensus was coming round to the need for urgent action. Aren't his theories at least partly driven by a fondness for heresy?
"Not a bit! Not a bit! All I want is a quiet life! But I can't help noticing when things happen, when you go out and find something. People don't like it because it upsets their ideas."
But the suspicion seems confirmed when I ask if he's found it rewarding to see many of his climate change warnings endorsed by the IPCC. "Oh no! In fact, I'm writing another book now, I'm about a third of the way into it, to try and take the next steps ahead."
Interviewers often remark upon the discrepancy between Lovelock's predictions of doom, and his good humour. "Well I'm cheerful!" he says, smiling. "I'm an optimist. It's going to happen."
Humanity is in a period exactly like 1938-9, he explains, when "we all knew something terrible was going to happen, but didn't know what to do about it". But once the second world war was under way, "everyone got excited, they loved the things they could do, it was one long holiday ... so when I think of the impending crisis now, I think in those terms. A sense of purpose - that's what people want."
At moments I wonder about Lovelock's credentials as a prophet. Sometimes he seems less clear-eyed with scientific vision than disposed to see the version of the future his prejudices are looking for. A socialist as a young man, he now favours market forces, and it's not clear whether his politics are the child or the father of his science. His hostility to renewable energy, for example, gets expressed in strikingly Eurosceptic terms of irritation with subsidies and bureaucrats. But then, when he talks about the Earth - or Gaia - it is in the purest scientific terms all.
"There have been seven disasters since humans came on the earth, very similar to the one that's just about to happen. I think these events keep separating the wheat from the chaff. And eventually we'll have a human on the planet that really does understand it and can live with it properly. That's the source of my optimism."
What would Lovelock do now, I ask, if he were me? He smiles and says: "Enjoy life while you can. Because if you're lucky it's going to be 20 years before it hits the fan."


http://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2008/mar/01/scienceofclimatechange.climatechange

[trish]

It is interesting to compare the two contentions,

1. We are beyond the tipping point,

and

2. Global climate warming is not anthropogenic.

Both claims entail the conclusion that there is nothing humans can do to stay the oncoming disaster. It therefore makes no sense to spend money on wind turbines etc.

Of course the current climate change is anthropogenic. The question is, “Have we reached the tipping point to inevitable catastrophic climate change?” Even if we haven’t, my general pessimism leads me to believe that humans, motivated by inertia and profit, will likely do nothing of real consequence until it’s too late.

But suppose it is too late. Should we really not build wind turbines? Of course wind turbines alone won’t allow us to consume energy at our current rates. But they don’t spew carbon into the atmosphere. They won’t make a bad situation worse. Everything we ought to have done to avert the catastrophe will lessen its future severity.

If we are beyond the tipping point, whether the change is anthropocentric or not, it is imperative to the survival of our modern civilizations to adjust our energy consumption, to use our energy more efficiently and to utilize energies that don’t aggravate our climate problem. I’ve said in this thread elsewhere that nuclear is an option we cannot ignore. But we need to solve the problems of nuclear waste and nuclear proliferation first. It seems to me that we should be able to extract more energy from hot nuclear wastes, effectively recycling our nuclear fuels.

If we really are beyond the tipping point it may be time to consider global engineering efforts like pouring reflecting particulates high into the atmosphere to correct the energy imbalance that we’ve already caused.

[Stavros]

I think you are right. Lovelock seems to me to see things in terms of the whole planet, and he may be right about many things, but practical solutions to contemporary problems can have an impact for people living today and over the next say, 50 years, though I will not survive that long (unless...). As you say, even for people who can't bring themselves to believe in climate change and global warming, there are practical things that can be done to make life more pleasant, while protecting the environment that we have left. One example is provided by the Netherlands' 'Road to the River' project which is dealing with the fact that much of the Netherlands is below sea level, and requires long term planning to enable fields and rivers to flood the land having moved people to new locations. No such planning exists in the UK where recent flooding has seen rational people descend into futile arguments about specific measures that were or were not taken, without a more holistic view of the problem. I fear the same lack of long term planning is not being addressed in those states, like California, which are facing genuine long term water shortages. It is mad, because there are often solutions, and it doesn't mean throwing one's hands in the air and saying but the earth will shrivel up and die, in a billion years time. Even I can't live that long.

[Stavros]

For those of you who are interested, the latest issue of Geographical is devoted to climate change and has a useful set of articles on a range of issues, there is a link here. It costs I think £4.99 in the shops.

http://www.geographical.co.uk/Home/index.html

[Ben]

The March of Anthropogenic Climate Disruption:

http://truth-out.org/news/item/22002-the-march-of-anthropogenic-climate-disruption

[Ben]

California's Mega Drought:

California's Mega Drought | Kicking Back with Ana and Dave - YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7BlsOCEHjz0)

[Ben]

George Carlin - What would happen if we didn't have electricity

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZWA_cw9tss

[trish]

The New York Review of Books ran a review of Elizabeth Kolbert’s newt book The Sixth Extinction. The review was written by Verlyn Klinkenborg. I haven’t read the book, but it made onto my short list today. The review was thought provoking. Here are a few excerpts (from the review...not the book).

Klinkenborg, presumably channeling Kobert eloquently describes how we have unhinged the synchronicity of nature’s dynamic processes.

“Nothing we will ever do will ever change the speed at which tectonic plates shift and continents wander. But everything we do now shifts the speed at which other natural processes occur__natural processes that once shifted at roughly geological speed. The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere (and the oceans) has changed again and again in earth’s history, but almost always at a rate imperceptible to humans. The same is true of the mix of species on this planet. Catastrophes apart, species haven’t become extinct very often. They disappear at a roughly measurable, roughly steady background rate.
The way we live now__and have lived for the past couple of centuries__has accelerated climate change and the extinction of species into a wholly different dimension.”

In the second half of the review Klinkenborg takes up a question Kolbert leaves in unresolved suspension.

“...’Why should we care.’ Kolbert has compressed that chapter into... ‘It doesn’t matter whether people care or not.’ ...Caring and not caring are merely indiscernible emotional effluents emitted by the dominant species on this planet. How much we care or don’t care about the well-being of other species is overwhelmed__utterly overwhelmed__by how much we care about ourselves.
...
The general tendency of our species is to decrease diversity. We do so by destroying habitats, overconsuming natural resources, and spreading invasive species, willingly or not.
...
Kolbert is right. Whether you care or not is immaterial. The question is this: Have we arrived at this point because of something inherent in our nature? Or has something peculiar in our circumstances brought us here, something we can still hope to alter?”

Klinkenborg reports on an observation Kolbert makes in her book. By quickening the pace of processes that once moved on geological timescales, we have effectively quickened the pace of continental drift.

“As the continents drifted into their present positions, Pangaea slowly broke apart, new barriers arose and they became separated from each other.”

With the isolation enforced by the geographical barriers of this break up, species diverged.

“But species no longer need to move only under their own power. We carry them about the world with us, on planes, in the bilges of ships, unintentionally, on purpose, in business and in pleasure. It’s as though the continents have reconverged, reconstituting Pangaea. As Kolbert puts it, ‘humans are running geologic history backward and at high speed.’ "

Our activities have triggered and continue to trigger the mass extinction of species at rates unseen since the demise of Dinosaurs 65 million years ago. When we so indiscriminately prune the evolutionary tree, we not only terminate species, but we also remove them as pathways to new and diverse evolutionary experiments. We effectively clog the arteries of future evolution.

“...we’re not only altering earthly existence now. We’re also altering the very potential for earthly existence.”

[martin48]

The New York Review of Books ran a review of Elizabeth Kolbert’s newt book The Sixth Extinction.


Is this the right newt book?

[martin48]

As ecologist Paul Ehrlich put it: "In pushing other species to extinction, humanity is busy sawing off the limb on which it perches."

[envivision]

This global warming is a BYATCH, ain't it Obama kool aid drinkers?????

March 17 - 2014: FIVE INCHES OF SNOW ARE FORECAST FOR WASHINGTON DC...

BRRRRRRRRRRR! Hot - hot hot!

[trish]

January 2014 Worldwide hottest month on record since 1880. Envision the difference between climate and weather.

http://www.weather.com/news/science/environment/january-4th-warmest-record-continuing-warming-trend-20140220

[buttslinger]

In the Revolutionary War the Conservatives were called TORIES, they considered those tea party guys to be traitors to their King.
And by their King, I mean El Rushbo, who else?

[Ben]

Climate Change: Evangelical Scientists Say Limbaugh Wrong, Faith and Science Complement One Another:

http://www.christianpost.com/news/climate-change-evangelical-scientists-say-limbaugh-wrong-faith-and-science-compliment-one-another-103470/

[Ben]

Abby Martin Interviews Guy Mcpherson: Human Extinction by 2030

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SU9nf7V_4O4

[Ben]

What is Wrong With Our Culture [Alan Watts]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMDu3JdQ8Ow&list=UUkSH88oT4dDl3aZQZKM_BIw

[martin48]

The impacts of global warming are likely to be "severe, pervasive and irreversible", a major report by the UN has warned.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-26810559

We don't need anymore doubting.

[Ben]

Time to Consider Ecocide a Crime?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jgHsTPuAsZ8

[Ben]

The impacts of global warming are likely to be "severe, pervasive and irreversible", a major report by the UN has warned.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-26810559

We don't need anymore doubting.

The core of the problem is the market system. In that it ignores external costs.
Now the external cost is to future generations. I mean, we are, collectively, saying, because of global warming, that future generations just have no value. None. And as Chomsky explicates that's inherent or deeply rooted in the market system. You consider the cost to you. Not to others. And those others are future generations.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHJCLErHORI
It's quite pathological. There's an interesting book called: Sociopathic Society. And the system is sociopathic in that respect. As we don't take into consideration future generations. Ya know, we just totally ignore the consequences -- long-term -- of our selfish actions.

[buttslinger]

Cash,

You can't really judge a Man, if you were him you'd do Exactly as he does.

But you can measure his money down to the point zero zero.

Years ago, when I was suffering from depression, I told my shrink if I had eight million dollars, I would be completely well. He said NO, I'd still have lots and lots of problems.

Of course he's right, but I can't tell my doc that if I had eight million dollars I wouldn't CARE if I had problems!! That would make ME the bad guy!!!

[trish]

You can't really judge a ManSure I can. I can line his DNA up next to mine and point precisely to those genes where he is deficient. :)

Cash is what wealthy men wield to compensate for their deficiencies, the way a poorer man might use a big gun; or a whole collection of guns. The insecure among us, who would impress us with their power and potency, can never have enough money, enough profit, enough displays of wealth and status to fill the hole, to compensate for their lack. Fuck the future. The pit they face in the here and now is bottomless. Rosebud!

[buttslinger]

Sometimes I wonder who's got it better, the young transsexual minx that can command a thousand dollars for an hour's time, or the fat old businessman who can afford to pay it.

[Dino Velvet]

Cash,

You can't really judge a Man, if you were him you'd do Exactly as he does.

But you can measure his money down to the point zero zero.

Years ago, when I was suffering from depression, I told my shrink if I had eight million dollars, I would be completely well. He said NO, I'd still have lots and lots of problems.

Of course he's right, but I can't tell my doc that if I had eight million dollars I wouldn't CARE if I had problems!! That would make ME the bad guy!!!

You would be upgraded from crazy to eccentric. Crazy people end up on skid row but eccentric people have insanity insurance still remaining in their homes after screwing up.

[buttslinger]

You would be upgraded from crazy to eccentric.

If I had money I would make the Jacksons look normal.

[buttslinger]

Sure I can. I can line his DNA up next to mine and point precisely to those genes where he is deficient.

Trish, if your Mom and Dad had sex in a position 180 degrees different from when you were conceived, you would be Asian downstares, and Black upstairs.
Your screen-name would be RICK!!!!

If God hadn't intervened, I might be my dumb sister!!!

That would be a WRONG a million times worse than global warming!!!

-------

Six years of Obama and I don't see any big Environmental Headlines.
When I was a kid the Potomac River was a sewer. They passed legislation to clean it up, now you see bald eagles and herons, all kinds of wildlife came back.

But the creek I used to play at with all the kids, nobody plays there. All the kids are watching cable TV or playing video games.

[broncofan]

You can't really judge a Man, if you were him you'd do Exactly as he does.

I'm not even sure I understand this point though. You mean if you had his mind in his body with his circumstances you'd do as he does? But you judge people with your mind. You only lose the right to criticize someone if with your mind and the other person's identical circumstances you would do exactly as they do. But I don't think everyone would react the same way to the same circumstances (again if your own personal psychic features are spared; otherwise the argument is circular).

[Dino Velvet]

If I had money I would make the Jacksons look normal.

I like that. Good one.

Janet Jackson 'slaps' Paris Jackson - YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gd-CQV5UmpI)

[trish]

Trish, if your Mom and Dad had sex in a position 180 degrees different from when you were conceived, you would be Asian downstares, and Black upstairs.Nonsense. I simply would not have been conceived. That would've been somebody else.

[buttslinger]

I'm not even sure I understand this point though.

I mean yes, you can judge anybody you want, you can even get to know a pet so well you know when they're out of character. But no way can you ever get into his skin.
There is no such thing as the same circumstances.
No Judge in Court would buy this, of course,
Judges see guys because of actions they do on the worst day of their life.
But if you're on a jury, you might get four guilty, four innocent, and four undecided.
When you're asleep you see people do all kinds of things, but you don't prosecute because it's all imaginary.
When you're awake, you see people do bad things, and you call em on it, or even call the cops.
But your judgement is only as wise as your are.

There was a guy at work who was a complete and total asshole. Eight out of ten agreed and the other two were too polite to say. Something was obviously wrong with the guy, he eventually got booted out. I don't know what idiot hired him, but when it comes to running a business, it's not so much judging as making a business decision. In school, you grade on ability.

So my point is judgement is ALWAYS flawed, and flawed is bordering on wrong.

You can not judge a man, you make an educated guess based on the available facts. Just like the doctor when you're sick.
take it, Hank

Hank Williams "Mind Your Own Business" - YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2Ls6CD3s4w)

[broncofan]

You can't be certain you know what someone else dealt with I agree. I was just saying it's a bit extreme to say you can never judge anyone no matter what they've done. You cannot literally superimpose your psyche on theirs or know precisely what decisions you would make under a set of constraints you haven't experienced.

You can for instance guess that you would not stab someone because they mocked you or massacre a crowd of people over some imagined grievance. Again, if you have to account for the subjective experience of the other person you leave no variable to consider. For every person who does something worthy of condemnation there are people who experience similar though not identical circumstances who made different choices.

This is what Republicans complain about(or should complain about) when they talk about moral relativism. To say that nobody can ever be judged by anyone else is to completely give up on making any sense of the world.

[broncofan]

Edit: and yeah I realize this is the climate change thread so we're off track a bit. Substitute out the stabbing and massacre examples with spilling oil all over the coast and emitting a lot of greenhouse gases.

[buttslinger]

To say that nobody can ever be judged by anyone else is to completely give up on making any sense of the world.

Now you're catching on.

Some A-rab is going to decide all us Americans are Devils and explode a few atomic bombs in the states, the politicians all know this, that's why they drink champagne and tell everybody whatever they want to hear.
So don't sweat the pollution. We got forty, fifty years max.

[trish]

There was a guy at work who was a complete and total asshole. Eight out of ten agreed and the other two were too polite to say. Something was obviously wrong with the guy, he eventually got booted out. I don't know what idiot hired him, but when it comes to running a business, it's not so much judging as making a business decision. In school, you grade on ability.

So my point is judgement is ALWAYS flawed, and flawed is bordering on wrong. So what's the difference between 1) a businessman judging that a certain employee's reliability isn't worth the paycheck he's getting, and 2) a jury judging that a woman is innocent (or guilty) of the crimes for which she's being prosecuted? They're both judgments. They're both made with imperfect knowledge by people who are engaged in making the best decision they reasonably can. In the first case the motivation may be provided by profit and in the second by a sense of duty. But in practice I don't think juries are any less seriously engaged than a mid level management man behind a desk.

[Ben]

Profiting from Climate Change:

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2014/03/31-6

[buttslinger]

So what's the difference between 1) a businessman judging that a certain employee's reliability isn't worth the paycheck he's getting, and 2) a jury judging that a woman is innocent (or guilty) of the crimes for which she's being prosecuted? .

You don't care, you just get off busting my chops
A man is not a job, or an arm, or a leg, or an ambition. Or daily actions. These are parts that when taken together become a life.
This life here.

You can not judge a man. Correctly.
Until the game is over.
Judgements, people, mistakes, events, sins, they all come in thousands of flavors, Am I responsible for every little thing that passes by my eye?

And what about trannies? (as a topic) Are they women in men's bodies? Weird-os? Are they responsible for being trannies? Or was it the mirror that led them to it???? If there are 13 people in a room, twelve of them are eying the tranny. And you've got twelve different judgements. Are any of them correct?

[martin48]

All too clever for me. Climate change is a much more tractable problem.

"I have experienced the judgement of a lot of people - and deservedly so."




You don't care, you just get off busting my chops
A man is not a job, or an arm, or a leg, or an ambition. Or daily actions. These are parts that when taken together become a life.
This life here.

You can not judge a man. Correctly.
Until the game is over.
Judgements, people, mistakes, events, sins, they all come in thousands of flavors, Am I responsible for every little thing that passes by my eye?

And what about trannies? (as a topic) Are they women in men's bodies? Weird-os? Are they responsible for being trannies? Or was it the mirror that led them to it???? If there are 13 people in a room, twelve of them are eying the tranny. And you've got twelve different judgements. Are any of them correct?

[Prospero]

And lo, as the end times draw into view, otherwise sensible people start to talk total nonsense in a place where a serious issue was once being debated.

[trish]

If there are 13 people in a room, twelve of them are eying the tranny. And you've got twelve different judgements. Are any of them correct?On a given day, in the same hour, twelve different people with meter sticks are asked to judge my height as accurately as they can. In increasing order their judgments (in meters) are 1.6751, 1.6752, 1.6753, 1.6753, 1.6754, 1.6755, 1.6756, 1.6756, 1.6757, 1.6758, 1.6759, 1.9203. Twelve judgements, most of them different. Except for an obvious outlier they are all within one millimeter of each other. Are any of them correct? All depends on whether accuracy to within one millimeter serves the purposes of your inquiry. If you ask them to judge whether or not I'm a woman, I would ask the purpose of your inquiry. If, say, you wish to court me, you have to regard yourself as male, straight and accept me as I am. If your purpose is to put to death all transgender weirdos, then you're going to need restrain me.

We got on this sidetrack examining the issue of how capitalism binds one's purposes to the immediate moment and the near future. Libertarians tell us how free markets seek an equilibrium that fairly optimizes everyone's freedom, opportunity and well being. If everyone looks out for himself, everyone will be looked after. Of course this leaves out anyone who is not here yet (future generations) to look after their opportunity and well-being. Unregulated systems (like free markets) seek local equilibria which are not necessarily optimal points of stability. Every steam engine needs a governor, every market needs regulation. We need to regulate the output of greenhouse gasses before it's too late. We need to get serious about regulating against spills in our oceans, bays and waterways, before it's too late.

The invisible hand of the market has no eyes. Theoretically it feels around, judging the slope in each direction and takes a step in the direction that optimizes profits (good luck getting a solid handle on exactly what "optimizing profits" means). In this way it may find a nearby equilibrium and stay there for awhile, but it never looks beyond the immediate range of hills and valleys. It's just a hand. It has no eyes. But what about the humans who operate all this financial and economic machinery? Don't they have eyes? And if they don't give a shit about the future are we not to judge them? If we don't pressure them and pressure our government to pressure them, are we not to judge ourselves?

[buttslinger]

And lo, as the end times draw into view, otherwise sensible people start to talk total nonsense in a place where a serious issue was once being debated.

Hey, butt out, LIMEY, I'm trying to give Trish some RELIGION here!!!

ha ha, yeah, I took this thread way off point, but let me say one last thing then I'll butt out, when it comes to JUDGING, or POLITICS, it is wise to keep a firm yet relaxed grip on the reins. This goes double if you are the one holding the reins and someone is trying to knock you off the horse.

If you truly want to save the planet, you have to either come up with a couple trillion dollars on your own, or you have to convince somebody else to part with their hard earned coin. Divert cash from welfare, defense, social security, education, it's a JUDGEMENT call. It goes to the HEART of the matter, when does one person impose his will on another? Am I my brother's keeper?

I'm very content to pay my damn taxes and let a panel of brainiac whizz kids decide how to cut up my donation. Is that snippy upstart Trish trying to say she's wiser than Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas when it comes to allowing people to spend THEIR money anywhere they like???
No, luckily that's a job for his eight peers.

OK, Prospero, youre right as usual, but I honestly doubt anything we say here will change anything when it comes to Climate Change. The Polluters know exactly what they're doing. They know they're going to lose in the end, they're just getting money while the getting is good. Even the tree-huggers might turn down assistance from "THE HUNG ANGELS" coalition.

This forum is just about opening some eyes, that's all.....folks.

[trish]

Am I my brother's keeper?As long as we're talking RELIGION, I believe Jesus's answer to this question is a YES, YOU ARE.


Is that snippy upstart Trish trying to say she's wiser than Supreme Court Justice Clarence ThomasNo one has to try to say that, it's a given that most of us are wiser than Clarence Thomas. Thank GOD there are eight other Supremes. Too bad that three of those are activists who's vision is stymied by goggles of ideology.


I honestly doubt anything we say here will change anything when it comes to Climate Change.You're discounting chaos. A butterfly's wings can call up a windstorm.

[martin48]

On a given day, in the same hour, twelve different people with meter sticks are asked to judge my height as accurately as they can. In increasing order their judgments (in meters) are 1.6751, 1.6752, 1.6753, 1.6753, 1.6754, 1.6755, 1.6756, 1.6756, 1.6757, 1.6758, 1.6759, 1.9203. Twelve judgements, most of them different. Except for an obvious outlier they are all within one millimeter of each other. Are any of them correct? All depends on whether accuracy to within one millimeter serves the purposes of your inquiry. If you ask them to judge whether or not I'm a woman, I would ask the purpose of your inquiry. If, say, you wish to court me, you have to regard yourself as male, straight and accept me as I am. If your purpose is to put to death all transgender weirdos, then you're going to need restrain me.

I'm impressed that they attempted to estimate to within 100 micron (that's 4 thou in the US)

We got on this sidetrack examining the issue of how capitalism binds one's purposes to the immediate moment and the near future. Libertarians tell us how free markets seek an equilibrium that fairly optimizes everyone's freedom, opportunity and well being. If everyone looks out for himself, everyone will be looked after. Of course this leaves out anyone who is not here yet (future generations) to look after their opportunity and well-being. Unregulated systems (like free markets) seek local equilibria which are not necessarily optimal points of stability. Every steam engine needs a governor, every market needs regulation. We need to regulate the output of greenhouse gasses before it's too late. We need to get serious about regulating against spills in our oceans, bays and waterways, before it's too late.

Most systems (because of limited resources) are mean-reverting. No separate governor as on steam engines.

The invisible hand of the market has no eyes. Theoretically it feels around, judging the slope in each direction and takes a step in the direction that optimizes profits (good luck getting a solid handle on exactly what "optimizing profits" means). In this way it may find a nearby equilibrium and stay there for awhile, but it never looks beyond the immediate range of hills and valleys. It's just a hand. It has no eyes. But what about the humans who operate all this financial and economic machinery? Don't they have eyes? And if they don't give a shit about the future are we not to judge them? If we don't pressure them and pressure our government to pressure them, are we not to judge ourselves?

Markets, like evolution, are blind.

[trish]

I'm impressed that they attempted to estimate to within 100 micron (that's 4 thou in the US)Well, they are fictional characters :)


Most systems (because of limited resources) are mean-reverting. No separate governor as on steam engines.I stand corrected. Or kneeling if you prefer.


Markets, like evolution, are blind.Exactly. We agree on the crucial point.

Apparently some among us prefer to govern blind as well.

The analogy to evolution is apt, yet often libertarians will even bring up survival of the fittest as if that concept vindicates free market idiot-ology. Too often the lay population fails to realize that evolution is not the unfolding of a story of progress, but simply the blind zigs and zags of self-reproducing populations responding to immediate selection pressures.

[dderek123]

It's a wind turbine but better!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kldA4nWANA8

[buttslinger]

OK, here's my shot at getting the last word over Trish.

Will Climate Change mean the extinction of our species?

Some Paleontologist found a cockroach that was 49 million years old, they named it after him. There will still be cockroaches 50 million years from now, but no humans, too many moving parts. We are designed to die. By Nature.
Nature has a way of correcting itself, nature always balances the books, and I am of the mind that if you think it's bad, it's worse.

The USA is one California earthquake away from complete financial disaster. Totaled.

In 1614 North America was a pristine Eden.
What do you honestly think 2414 is going to look like?

Don't worry about the Planet, it will be here in 49 million years. It might be glowing rock, but it will be here.

[trish]

OK, here's my shot at getting the last word over Trish.

Will Climate Change mean the extinction of our species?

Some Paleontologist found a cockroach that was 49 million years old, they named it after him. There will still be cockroaches 50 million years from now, but no humans, too many moving parts. We are designed to die. By Nature.
Nature has a way of correcting itself, nature always balances the books, and I am of the mind that if you think it's bad, it's worse.

The USA is one California earthquake away from complete financial disaster. Totaled.

In 1614 North America was a pristine Eden.
What do you honestly think 2414 is going to look like?

Don't worry about the Planet, it will be here in 49 million years. It might be glowing rock, but it will be here.
It might be a glowing rock. It might be home to a thriving civilization of our humanoid descendants who are grateful we stepped back from the cliffs of extinction. Pessimism is not an excuse for bad action.

[trish]

But look, no one's asking that we plan forty nine million years in advance. Certainly, if we play our cards right we shouldn't go extinct within the next century...and yet we have the capacity on that timescale to make life for humans pretty terrible if we don't play our cards right.

[buttslinger]

....Pessimism is not an excuse for bad action.

If this is a Star Trek future, we're OK.
But if it's a Twilight Zone, we're fucked.

House of Commons - all hell breaks - Nigel Evans roars! - YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-mC4obeDhg)

[trish]

It's a wind turbine but better!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kldA4nWANA8
Interesting concept: go to the elevation where the wind is. I'm wondering if the developers imagine fields of these "blimps". If so, is entanglement a foreseeable problem? And how are these less of a threat to migrating birds?

I am inclined to think we can milk more energy from the temperature gradient between high and low elevations. A space elevator might be both a cheap way out of the gravity well and a conduit of power.

[martin48]

Well, they are fictional characters :)

I do hate having to discipline you again, but they are fictional numbers (not even imaginary ones)

I stand corrected. Or kneeling if you prefer.

Kneeling for starters

Exactly. We agree on the crucial point.

Apparently some among us prefer to govern blind as well.

The analogy to evolution is apt, yet often libertarians will even bring up survival of the fittest as if that concept vindicates free market idiot-ology. Too often the lay population fails to realize that evolution is not the unfolding of a story of progress, but simply the blind zigs and zags of self-reproducing populations responding to immediate selection pressures.

The concept of "survival of the fittest" is often misunderstood. It is not the Wolf of Wall Street, but the best fit to the environment for long term survival. If we properly used Darwin's term, the survival of the fittest would give a very different capitalist system - we would survive. Many of us and not just a very few, as at present.



Martin

[dderek123]

Interesting concept: go to the elevation where the wind is. I'm wondering if the developers imagine fields of these "blimps". If so, is entanglement a foreseeable problem? And how are these less of a threat to migrating birds?

I am inclined to think we can milk more energy from the temperature gradient between high and low elevations. A space elevator might be both a cheap way out of the gravity well and a conduit of power.

There was a discussion on another site about these things that pointed out a few potential weaknesses. First, the gas they use for levitation is helium which there is a limited supply globally. Prices of helium have been rising pretty steadily. So the cost of creating each one of these, in theory, will keep going up. Hydrogen would be a cheaper option. But you know it's kind of dangerous unless the thing is engineered properly. Also, the power output is rumored to be 30kW which is not that much for wind turbines. Therefore the cost per kw wouldn't be very attractive. A diesel generator would be a much cheaper alternative for remote power generation. And finally, the video puts out a kickstarter vibe with very few details offered to the public. Everything is a bit vague which could make most people suspicious that it's a sham. But this is all just speculation on the internet take it for what it's worth.

http://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/220h3k/the_worlds_first_airborne_wind_turbine_brings/

[trish]

I do hate having to discipline you again, but they are fictional numbers (not even imaginary ones)
Fictional characters sometimes make up fictional numbers, but the point of the fiction is not the numbers but to present the idea that "correct" is a relative notion. Is it correct to treat the Earth's surface as a sphere? It depends on the purposes of the treatment. Is it correct to criticize (judge) industry and government when they ignore the problems of climate change? Yes, if you want to minimize that change and the costs it will incur down the road in money and lives. No, if you don't care so much about things that far down the road. (Next time, I won't just use real numbers, I'll use realistic numbers.)


The concept of "survival of the fittest" is often misunderstood. It is not the Wolf of Wall Street, but the best fit to the environment for long term survival. If we properly used Darwin's term, the survival of the fittest would give a very different capitalist system - we would survive. Many of us and not just a very few, as at present. Well said. :Bowdown:

[trish]

Addendum: The above is not meant to endorse wild, laissez-faire, post-modern relativism. It is merely a concession that claims about the world are at best approximations and one expects each to have a limiting range of application. This doesn’t make it unreasonable to assert that some claims can be correct and other claims wrong. It shouldn’t prevent a reasonable person from judging that some of the behaviors of our government leaders and leaders of industry to be near sighted, profit driven and greedy. It is a refreshing counter to the straight-jacketed view (seemingly made by at least one of our number) that no claim is correct because it cannot address every detail and consequently no one can in good conscious judge the actions of another.

[martin48]

Reminded of Charles Babbage's letter to Lord Tennyson - the value of approximation.

Sir:

In your otherwise beautiful poem "The Vision of Sin" there is a verse which reads – "Every moment dies a man, Every moment one is born." It must be manifest that if this were true, the population of the world would be at a standstill. In truth, the rate of birth is slightly in excess of that of death.

I would suggest that in the next edition of your poem you have it read – "Every moment dies a man, Every moment 1 1/16 is born."

The actual figure is so long I cannot get it onto a line, but I believe the figure 1 1/16 will be sufficiently accurate for poetry.

I am, Sir, yours, etc.,

Charles Babbage


(Too much culture on this site)


Addendum: The above is not meant to endorse wild, laissez-faire, post-modern relativism. It is merely a concession that claims about the world are at best approximations and one expects each to have a limiting range of application. This doesn’t make it unreasonable to assert that some claims can be correct and other claims wrong. It shouldn’t prevent a reasonable person from judging that some of the behaviors of our government leaders and leaders of industry to be near sighted, profit driven and greedy. It is a refreshing counter to the straight-jacketed view (seemingly made by at least one of our number) that no claim is correct because it cannot address every detail and consequently no one can in good conscious judge the actions of another.

[Ben]

Charles Eisenstein: Living Without Economic Growth...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDGh58khe_c

[Stavros]

The Daily Telegraph today published a book review article by Charles Moore -former editor of the paper and most recently the biographer of Margaret Thatcher -I won't copy and paste the whole review and it starts with such a howler I would expect even the anti-science deniers to be embarrassed:

Most of us pay some attention to the weather forecast. If it says it will rain in your area tomorrow, it probably will. But if it says the same for a month, let alone a year, later, it is much less likely to be right. There are too many imponderables.

The theory of global warming is a gigantic weather forecast for a century or more. However interesting the scientific inquiries involved, therefore, it can have almost no value as a prediction.

The review is of a book written by an associate of the Centre for Policy Studies, a think-tank created in 1974 by Keith Joseph, also known as the 'mad monk' who converted Margaret Thatcher to monetarism (as it was known in those days), and who set up the CPS because he believed, as Margaret came to believe, that his own party's Research Office was intellectually bankrupt.

The author of the book chooses various historical moments and claims to prove that predictions often go wrong, and the tone is set with this:

The origins of warmism lie in a cocktail of ideas which includes anti-industrial nature worship, post-colonial guilt, a post-Enlightenment belief in scientists as a new priesthood of the truth, a hatred of population growth, a revulsion against the widespread increase in wealth and a belief in world government.

Thus a man who has no interest or expertise in the science of climate change reinvents it as a political movement which by definition is against everything he believes.

I think these people almost want to see a sequence of catastrophic events take place to prove Global Warming is happening, whereas I think the reality is going to be localised but incremental changes taking place over the next 50-100 years, by which time the actual impact of 'global weirding' will be more evident.

The review is here...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/non_fictionreviews/10748667/The-game-is-up-for-climate-change-believers.html

[buttslinger]

My furnace and hot water heater and stove and car engine are basically all powered by "FIRE" ....serving mankind faithfully for over ten thousand years. If scientists can develop the atomic bomb in two years, I don't see why we can't take some military money and come up with some frightening new source of energy that is CLEAN like sunshine.
Although even the Sun is fire now that I think of it.

What scares me more than an inability to predict the weather in 100 years is the inability to predict the cost of a movie with popcorn and a coke in 100 years,
or the price of 4 years of college,
or any of the thousand calamities that might occur in that time.
One giant earthquake in California and the economy of the USA is toast.

[trish]

Charles Moore must be surprised by each change of season, utterly unable to predict that Spring precedes Summer, Summer precedes Fall and Fall precedes Winter. He's seems unable to distinguish weather from climate, that or he just likes blowing smoke up the collective asses of Telegraph readers.

[trish]

Speaking of the media on climate science, the Union of Concerned Scientists recently published an assessment of how well cable news channels do on the subject.

http://www.ucsusa.org/global_warming/solutions/fight-misinformation/cable-news-coverage-climate-change-science.html

[Ben]

"Science Does Not Exist on Capitol Hill": Rep. Peter Welch on House GOP’s Climate Change Denial:

Peter Welch discusses Climate Change at the 49 minute mark...

http://www.democracynow.org/2014/4/8/science_does_not_exist_on_capitol

[Ben]

Carbon Dioxide Levels Climb Into Uncharted Territory:

http://mashable.com/2014/04/08/carbon-dioxide-highest-levels-global-warming/

[trish]

More on Global Warming and the Media:

Showtime is about to run a series on the dangers of global warming with focus on concomitant natural disasters. Two NYT reviewers ( http://nyti.ms/1qhekjP ) warn that the scare tactic employed by the producers/directors of the series may do more to turn off the public than motivate them. The authors cite several studies that agree.

The difficulty is, the consequences of climatic energy imbalance are global in scale. Changes in weather patterns will (and already are) driving the extinctions of diverse plant and animal species and forcing the poleward migration of plants and crops. Warmer atmospheres hold more water for longer period of time. This creates long periods of drought (think of the wildfires in Texas, California and Australia) followed by torrential rains (floods and mudslides). As arable lands dwindle, the price of food will rise. Etc.

This from the NYT article linked above, "Some people, the report noted, “are likely to buy an SUV to help them through the erratic weather to come” for example, rather than support fuel-efficiency standards."

The rampant denialism, the ideologically driven resistance to science, the me first selfishness and the utter banality displayed right wing on this issue is breath taking.

[Ben]

Growing Evidence That Autism Is Linked to Pollution:

http://time.com/25424/growing-evidence-that-autism-is-linked-to-pollution/

[sukumvit boy]

Speaking of the media on climate science, the Union of Concerned Scientists recently published an assessment of how well cable news channels do on the subject.

http://www.ucsusa.org/global_warming/solutions/fight-misinformation/cable-news-coverage-climate-change-science.html

:geek:Right ,Trish ! A n it looks like Fox News leads the pack.!
http://rt.com/usa/fox-news-misleading-climate-change-500/

[Ben]

We need an apartheid-style boycott to save the planet:

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/apr/10/divest-fossil-fuels-climate-change-keystone-xl

[Ben]

Plows and Carbon: The Timeline of Global Warming (http://dgrnewsservice.org/2013/11/11/max-wilbert-plows-and-carbon-the-timeline-of-global-warming/)

[Ben]

Report: Climate change stunting fish

Fish sizes reduced by as much as 29 percent over past 40 years as ocean temperatures increased:

http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/3/19/report-climate-changestuntingfish.html

[Ben]

More, bigger wildfires burning western U.S., study shows:

http://news.agu.org/press-release/more-bigger-wildfires-burning-western-u-s-study-shows/

Plankton will suffer as oceans warm:

http://www.climatenewsnetwork.net/2013/09/plankton-will-suffer-as-oceans-warm/

[trish]

OOOOOoooOOOOOooooOOOKLAHOMANS who supplement their energy with roof top solar cells will now be charged more for the the energy they draw from their utility company. Take that you alternative energy freaks and get the fuck out of OOOOooOOOOoooooOOOOOKLAHOMA!

http://newsok.com/oklahoma-electric-utilities-want-higher-rate-for-solar-wind-energy-producers/article/4083525

[buttslinger]

I just read in the Science section of the newspaper that a kind of shrew lasted 25 million years, and a kind of elephant lasted 23 million years, as a species we have made it 250,000 years, the chances of us hitting 10 million years is less than one percent.

What if we clean up all the rivers and the atmosphere, and then a big meteor hits the next day?

We've been running our cars and factories on melted dinosaurs, I think it's only fair we raise the temperature of the earth ten degrees so the dinosaurs can come back. What goes around, comes around.

Get me a roast beef sandwich and get me to 2050. Tell me everythings gonna be OK.

[trish]

What if we clean up all the rivers and the atmosphere, and then a big meteor hits the next day?
Shit, what if a meteor strikes before 5:00 PM today! Best walk up your boss right now, tell him to shove this job, then walk out and get yourself laid.

[buttslinger]

Shit, what if a meteor strikes before 5:00 PM today! Best walk up your boss right now, tell him to shove this job, then walk out and get yourself laid.

Now yer catchin on.

[Ben]

Just watching this now.
Dr. Spencer Wells: The Unforeseen Cost of Civilization:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZe4B3nfPJM

[Ben]

Noam Chomsky: Will Human's Create World Wide Extinction?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Axdrh9F3Kqo

[Ben]

If You're American, You're Probably Breathing Unsafe Air:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGlVkoafNPQ

[Ben]

How do we Talk to Climate Change Deniers?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dS8mxgnrb_U

[sukumvit boy]

Recent research confirms that the Antarctic ice sheet is melting at an unstoppable melt. This will dramatically increase previous sea level rise estimates.
http://main.omanobserver.om/?p=81719

[broncofan]

I found this article that includes discussion by three scientists on the effect of rising seas on human habitation in the next century. They discuss it as an inevitability, but city planners, residents, and large property owners are probably not thinking in terms of changes that will occur by year 2100. I won't be around in the year 2100 unless we have changes in the maximum human lifespan (I'm not sure my telomeres are long enough), but it would be fascinating to see if coastal cities are partially submerged and millions of people displaced. I hope not.

http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/05/14/three-long-views-of-life-with-rising-seas/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0

Edit: One of the people in the discussion is a novelist in the genre "cli-fi". A cottage industry I guess.

[Stavros]

Two-thirds of the Earth's surface is covered with water. We should take the Dutch attitude -you can't fight water, so learn to live with it. It raises questions, like -if the Dutch can manage their water problem why can't the British? Two interesting articles on coastal and flood management.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/architecture/10769974/Flooded-Britain-how-can-Holland-help.html

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/feb/16/flooding-netherlands

[martin48]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-27465050

Looks like the water coverage is going to increase. I suppose it's all at the bottom of the Earth so won't get to us :)

[Stavros]

Looks like the water coverage is going to increase. I suppose it's all at the bottom of the Earth so won't get to us :)

Is it any more feasible to colonise Antarctica than Mars? I am surprised there hasn't been more debate about it, given the prospects of climate change opening up previously hostile environments to human settlement. I believe Greenland may be the future...

Colonization of Antarctica - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonization_of_Antarctica)

[sukumvit boy]

Antarctica without ice.
http://akarlin.com/2011/10/polar-civilizations/

[Ben]

Prince Charles: Climate Crisis Demands 'Fundamental Transformation of Capitalism'

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2014/05/28-5

[Ben]

It's simple. If we can't change our economic system, our number's up:

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/27/if-we-cant-change-economic-system-our-number-is-up

[Ben]

John Boehner said he doesn't feel qualified to "debate the science" of climate change:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dsjEN5lN_JQ

[buttslinger]

Here is an article I like about a skeleton from 10,000BC some divers found in a cave in the Yucatan.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/girls-12000-year-old-skeleton-may-solve-a-mystery/2014/05/15/e45a6330-da90-11e3-8009-71de85b9c527_story.html

http://apps.washingtonpost.com/g/page/national/paleoamerican-remains-found-in-the-yucatan/1036/

a 15 year old girl was going through a dark cave when she fell into a huge pit and broke her hip.
They found all these extinct big cats and bears also.

The cool part of the paper says that the people in the Yucatan of this time had traveled well out of their comfort zone to track and kill big game, they were into high risk situations and novelties, like excitement junkies. As Mankind became more agricultural, we became more WOMANIZED.

Kids in my neighborhood don't even play at the creek anymore, while protecting the planet is common sense, I think the evolution of just the last 100 years has threatened turning our species into La-Z-Boy addicted AC Junkies, Even the Bears are getting soft. This pic was taken in Florida a few days ago.

[Ben]

California May Run Out of Water in Two Years:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCwpqFXvnwo

A lot will critique this -- above -- as mere fear mongering. OK. But I think Noam Chomsky is right. Below.
Ya know, say the scientists are wrong and global warming isn't real. OK. So we've spent a bit of money. And did a few things we should've done. But say the scientists are right. Then what? Well, we'll be in deep trouble as a species.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_O3cNc2JoMA

[Ben]

Abby Martin: Revolutionary Technology Could Solve America's Energy Crisis -- solar roadways:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XE6EW7yeRV8

[rudyallan]

Listen I agree with the climate change killing off humans....but

If the climate change thing somehow is corrected there will be 5 more things that will choke off humanity within 50 years.

1) Industrial pollution which is finally being reduced in the US is now exploding in China...responsible for most childhood cancers and many many adult cancers including brain and pancreas
2) Air pollution... expanding heavily in Asia, middle east, Russia, China, India
3) War instigated by the US, Israel...Muslims killing each other in large number and US Army starting major wars in Middle East, soon maybe Russia and China...where men and women will die in very very large numbers
4) Poverty and the violent death surrounding living in poverty
5)Loss of world food and fresh water due to over fishing, pollution, drought, fracking, global warming, pesticides, sewage discharge and ocean oil spills

[trish]

Listen I agree with the climate change killing off humans....but
Suppose your child has leukemia. You want to get him the best medical care...but

your husband’s factory closed down and he has no job, a drunk plowed into your parked car and demolished it, and you just discovered your roof leaks and you need to get it shingled, your brother in the armed forces has been called to Iraq and you just got bit by a bat that slipped through the leaky roof.

Should you just give up, kick back and spend what days you have left watching TV, drinking beer and shooting up meth? Or do you prioritize your problems and work on them as best you can?

[fred41]

I suppose if it wasn't for those god damn war instigators - U.S.A. and Israel - number three on your list would simply be solved. Doesn't seem simplistic at all.

[Ben]

Climate Change Debate: Which Is The Hoax?

Russell Brand comments:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K3BlotUe4G8

[buttslinger]

Emissions don't cause climate change, PEOPLE cause climate change..
Some people examine themselves, express opinions, sometimes based on logic, sometimes based on themselves. Some people accept life as it is, and don't question it. Their Life is family and friends. And sometimes they see people ranting about global warming and guns as trying to force THEIR truth upon them.

If you want anything done right, you have to do it yourself. People will always let you down.

You had the Gang of Six, bi-partisan, sharp guys, ..they came up with a practical solution to the debt crisis. Shepherds protecting the flock. But the wolves killed it.

Ees whay pass time to sit in the henhouse at midnight with a shotgun and kill some wolves.

[danthepoetman]

....

[danthepoetman]

....

[Ben]

The Deadly Cost of Our Addiction to Oil:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZaDerJNaDTA

[Ben]

Truthout Interviews with Dahr Jamail on Politics & Climate Change:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRXjbCl8UKY

[Ben]

Scientists Take Issue With Rupert Murdoch’s Remarks on Climate Change:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-07-16/scientists-take-issue-with-rupert-murdoch-s-remarks-on-climate-change.html

[ohioguy13]

all bullshit

[Ben]

all bullshit

It's probably worth taking a conservative approach.
And, too, if one thinks it's "bullshit," well, who's behind perpetuating this idea that global warming is completely fallacious????
Who invented this storyline that it's all untrue????
Because there's a massive corporate propaganda campaign to convince the American populace that it is, yes, all bullshit. It certainly serves very narrow interests: like the oil and gas sector. Plus they have to. By law. Corporations must, again, by law, maximize shareholder return. So, again, it's in their interest. And they can't concern themselves with future generations.
Ya know, we're collectively saying, because of global warming, that future generations have absolutely no value. None.
Global temperatures are rising. But what's very worrisome is the rapidity of the change. Unless you think it's merely an engineering problem and we can deal with the rapid rise in worldwide temperatures.
So, yes, a 3 degrees change in temperature, well, we can deal with that -- over thousands of years. Now we're talking decades.
OK, if it's all "bullshit" then we've spent a bit of money doing things we should do. But say it isn't bullshit. Then what?
We're effectively playing a game with the fate of the species!

Soaring Meat Consumption Bigger Problem Than Thought

Eating meat is turning up the heat:
http://www.commondreams.org/news/2014/07/22/soaring-meat-consumption-bigger-problem-thought-study

[trish]

Fundamentalist Christians welcome global warming; it's just one of the frills that will accompany the glorious end times. The plus side for libertarian ideologues is the deterioration of government that will consequentially follow global climate change. It's all good news...depending on how bent one's particular POV. "Bullshit" is simply the response of an uncreative mind that can't even be bothered with understanding and why and wherefore of his own biases and opinions.

[martin48]

So what's the point of hell for us heathens? We all burn to death before the Final Day of Judgement.




Fundamentalist Christians welcome global warming; it's just one of the frills that will accompany the glorious end times. The plus side for libertarian ideologues is the deterioration of government that will consequentially follow global climate change. It's all good news...depending on how bent one's particular POV. "Bullshit" is simply the response of an uncreative mind that can't even be bothered with understanding and why and wherefore of his own biases and opinions.

[trish]

Hell is so we can burn for life after we burn to death.

[fred41]

it's gonna suck saying-"Oooooooooh, hot, hot,hot,hot,hot,hot,hot,hot,hot.......!!!" forever and ever.

[ohioguy13]

Its a combination of a lot of folks trying to keep wealth in the east coast. Natural gas which is going for 12 bucks a foot in Europe keeps Russia going if we could export all the excess of which we have a shit load to Europe, it would hurt putin. It would also double every heating bill up and down the eastern seaboard during a tough winter. Washington doesn't want that wealth coming to places like western pa or west Virginia or Kentucky because then more development would come and more votes in congress and more power so instead we sit on the largest supply of energy and twittle our thumbs oh yeah when they said it 20 years ago it was coal that was bad what do we do now? ship that to china so they can burn it no one really cares about the environment if they did why wouldn't we export build the pipeline and get the entire country out of the shitter? it will be no coincidence that both pres candidates are from new York area they have their interests staked out.

[trish]

Its a combination of a lot of folks trying to keep wealth in the east coast...and...what? A combination is an interaction of two or more things.

Natural gas which is going for 12 bucks a foot A foot of natural gas?? Even if you meant per cubic foot, you're way off. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/03/25/can-u-s-natural-gas-rescue-ukraine-from-russia/

It would also double every heating bill up and down the eastern seaboard during a tough winter.You're somewhat obsessed with the Eastern seaboard. Winters are even harder in the north central states whose climates are not moderated by ocean currents.

Washington doesn't want that wealth coming to places like western pa or west Virginia or Kentucky because then more development would come and more votes in congress and more powerYeah, Congress (which is held by the Republicans) doesn't want those conservative States like West Virginia and Kentucky to have any more political power than they already have.

so instead we sit on the largest supply of energy and twittle our thumbsWho's sitting? Fracking is the thing of the present. We're producing natural gas out our collective wahzoos. We achieved, with fracking, energy independence in less than a decade. Of course we're also burning up and/or selling this natural resource at a phenomenal rate. I would've thought it would be a better strategy to burn up everybody else's fossil fuels first and reserve ours. But that would be long term thinking.

20 years ago it was coal that was bad what do we do now? ship that to china so they can burn it no one really cares about the environmentYou're half right. Our energy policy never fully addressed the long term issues of energy and climate. If we don't soon, it'll be too late.

export build the pipeline and get the entire country out of the shitter? By THE pipeline, I suppose you mean the XL-pipeline. You do realize it's a Canadian company that would own the crude that would be transported through that pipe, and it would be exported to Latin America. Our cut would be minimal (it would create some construction jobs while it's being built) and we would take all the risk to our Midwestern aquifers. Even the conservative governor of Nebraska is against it for just the risk to its fresh water sources.

You claim anthropogenic climate change is "bullshit." When criticized for that "educated" opinion on a scientific issue, instead of addressing the science, you spout political nonsense. You have yet to give an rational critique of what you think is "bullshit." You have yet to address the fundamental science that you seem to think is in error.

[Ben]

Last Week Tonight with John Oliver: Climate Change Debate:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cjuGCJJUGsg

[Ben]

Naomi Klein: CAPITALISM vs. EARTH's CLIMATE:

Naomi Klein: CAPITALISM vs. EARTH's CLIMATE - Chris Hayes - YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofF_CCQt7h0)

[trish]

I saw that interview the other night. So what do you think? Is she right?

[Ben]

I saw that interview the other night. So what do you think? Is she right?

To a large extent.
She's right about CEOs locked into a system whereby they must maximize profits for their shareholders.
So, the CEOs of oil companies aren't, as Klein says, evil. Again, they're trapped within an institutional structure.
Sure, climate change could be absolutely catastrophic. But what can an oil or coal company CEO do? They simply don't have a lot of leeway... to address the dangers of climate change.
If he or she doesn't fulfill their actual legal obligation, well, they're out and someone else is in.
Someone like David Korten (http://livingeconomiesforum.org/) has a bleak outlook. He said that the human race is finished. Naomi Klein refuses to go there.
Anyway, I'm bias. Because I like Naomi Klein.
I'm curious to read her book. Which I will -- fairly soon.

[Ben]

David Korten: Capitalism's Threat to Democracy -2 - YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WUSlhYUlgtk)

[trish]

To a large extent.
She's right about CEOs locked into a system whereby they must maximize profits for their shareholders.
So, the CEOs of oil companies aren't, as Klein says, evil. Again, they're trapped within an institutional structure.
Sure, climate change could be absolutely catastrophic. But what can an oil or coal company CEO do? They simply don't have a lot of leeway... to address the dangers of climate change.
If he or she doesn't fulfill their actual legal obligation, well, they're out and someone else is in.
Someone like David Korten (http://livingeconomiesforum.org/) has a bleak outlook. He said that the human race is finished. Naomi Klein refuses to go there.
Anyway, I'm bias. Because I like Naomi Klein.
I'm curious to read her book. Which I will -- fairly soon.

She also seems to be saying that the only adequate approaches to addressing climate change involve radically rethinking capitalism. Not all of the world's nations are in a position where they can economically afford to curtail their production of greenhouse gasses. She says the rest of the world, for the common good and not that of the stockholder, will have to help these nations get beyond fossil fuel dependency. This will amount to a massive redistribution of the world's wealth.

The right is claiming global warming is just a way to sneak socialism through the backdoor. Of course that isn't the la raison d'être of global warming. Anthropogenic climate change is happening. But, according to Klein, the solution will require that human beings to abandon individualistic libertarianism and adopt economic philosophies more aligned with socialism and communitarianism; i.e. the right's fear of what global warming means for their world-view is in that sense justified.

[trish]

Unless effective solutions can be found that are compatible with rigorous forms of capitalism, I don't believe there's much hope of doing anything of significance before it's too late. Is Naomi Klein doing us a disservice or is she laying out straight?

[Ben]

Unless effective solutions can be found that are compatible with rigorous forms of capitalism, I don't believe there's much hope of doing anything of significance before it's too late. Is Naomi Klein doing us a disservice or is she laying out straight?

I'm hoping to read the book soon.
The solutions to climate change require collective action, which means government. Which, of course, goes against so-called free market capitalism.
But we don't have pure capitalism. Pure capitalism would mean getting rid of child labor laws and minimum wage laws. We do of course have these laws in place.
So, why not put laws in place that regulate the hell outta corporations? Because if the science is correct then we've got to have massive government action... which runs counter to the interests of the Koch brothers and Exxon etc., etc.
It's all a question of whether or not you believe the science. And these guys at all these various Think Tanks know the science is accurate and that's what scares them. Because they then have to reverse course. And demand government action.

Chris Hedges on Wilful Blindness, Climate Corporatism & the Underground Revolt - YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frMArY91HpU&list=UU2Xd902w9u5_2oa7SHFSvZw)

[trish]

This week John Stewart explained why we needed a march to raise awareness of global climate change. Big Oil misdirects deniers (and unfortunately the House of Representative's Committee on Science, Space and Technology) the way one might tease a kitten with a laser pointer.

http://thedailyshow.cc.com/videos/8q3nmm/burn-noticed

At least we can die laughing.

[Stavros]

Unless effective solutions can be found that are compatible with rigorous forms of capitalism, I don't believe there's much hope of doing anything of significance before it's too late. Is Naomi Klein doing us a disservice or is she laying out straight?

I think there is a confusing message. Because capitalism is the dominant mode of economic behaviour, I don't see how we can discuss climate change and its remedies without capitalism being part of the debate, yet if you think of climate change and environmental politics in a different context, one of resource management, capitalism is not necessarily the villain. Historically, the buffalo were hunted almost to extinction by the first nations of America, not exactly capitalism in action; neolithic communities may have invented the slash and burn clearances of ancient forest which changed the climate even if it led to the cultivation of crops, including those for sale. The old USSR -described by many on the left as 'state capitalist'- was infamous for its desecration of the environment, notably in parts of Siberia but also in the grim industrial areas west of Moscow.
And these days major multinationals are watched like a hawk by Greenpeace and other environmental groups and go to great lengths to be environmentally responsible -if anything, governments and the military are more likely to damage the environment than commercial enterprises.
That said, in the long term, if humans societies can be persuaded to engage in the kind of resource management that does not lay waste to forests, nutrients in soils, and water resources, and develops alternative energy sources that can be stored in large volume -we may lay the foundations for a cleaner world in say 100-200 years time. In the meantime, the way we live in cities also needs an overhaul, visiting London for a few days last month was a deeply depressing experience -a physically unattractive city, with an expensive, congested transport network, and an atmosphere of claustrophobic dread. There has to be a better way to live.

[Stavros]

So, Ben, are you delighted now the Rockefellers have decided to sell off their shares in the petroleum industry?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/energy/oilandgas/11116264/What-is-a-Rockefeller-without-oil.html

[Ben]

Naomi Klein on Real Time - YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vi26l8T1c0)

[Ben]

Half of the Planet's Animals Have Disappeared in the Last 40 Years:

http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/Half-of-the-Planets-Animals-Have-Disappeared-in-the-Last-40-Years-20140930-0090.html

[Stavros]

So, Ben, following the decision of the corporate giants the Rockefellers to disinvest from the fossil fuels industry, on which you have said nothing, comes this decision from the University of Glasgow. Glasgow is a large city in Scotland, the country whose 'National Party' recently based its entire economic policy on...fossil fuels....

Glasgow becomes first university in Europe to divest from fossil fuels

University court votes to divest £18m from fossil fuel industry in what campaigners call ‘dramatic beachhead’
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/oct/08/glasgow-becomes-first-university-in-europe-to-divest-from-fossil-fuels

[trish]

Here's a link to a NYT article on the Rockefeller divestment. http://nyti.ms/XIPO1y
It say's they're divesting their philanthropic organization of fossil fuel. I presume that they might still privately own stock in fossil fuel companies or own shares in non-philanthropic entities that invest in fossil fuel?

[Stavros]

It is the Brothers Fund that has disinvested, whether or not individual members of the family retain their interests in Exxon or the other firms I cannot say, and there are other Rockefeller institutions. The Brothers Fund has in any case been involved in philanthropical work since its foundation in 1940.
I think the topical aspect of this is the claim that over the next 10 years or so the fossil fuels industry will lose $50bn worth of investments from institutions switching to alternative fuels. I don't see this is anything other than a cosmetic arrangement, given that $50bn in the petroleum industry is not a crippling sum -less than a year's revenue for most oil rich states. Symbolically it looks good, but the real benefit, if there is one will be determined by the success alternatives have in displacing fossil fuels as the primary source of energy for consumers, industry and the military.
http://www.rbf.org/

[NaughtyJane]

doom.

[Ben]

[QUOTE=Stavros;1537337]So, Ben, following the decision of the corporate giants the Rockefellers to disinvest from the fossil fuels industry, on which you have said nothing, comes this decision from the University of Glasgow. Glasgow is a large city in Scotland, the country whose 'National Party' recently based its entire economic policy on...fossil fuels..../QUOTE]

It's important what the Rockefellers have done. Unquestionably.
But as Naomi Klein has repeatedly pointed out: it's much broader than mere fossil fuels.

Naomi Klein: Economic Model Is at War With Life on Earth:
http://www.bloomberg.com/video/naomi-klein-our-economic-model-is-at-war-with-life-on-earth-xPrW95e6S8eBShzSV6i4qQ.html

It's state-corporate capitalism that is, well, destroying the planet.
Corporations, and the way they're structured, are destroying the natural world, the economy and even capitalism itself. (But needless to say we don't have capitalism; never have. So let us say: existing capitalism... or the way we perceive it.) Anyway, you won't have competition in a system governed by huge corporations.
Corporations because they're getting bigger and bigger (we're witnessing monopoly capitalism which obliterates, say, a competitive capitalist system... but yet again we need to underscore: we've never had capitalism... which means the elimination of ALL government interference) have an institutional imperative to ruin the planet.
I think we'll survive. But the world will be a pretty bleak place in 100 years or so thanks in large part to corporations.

[Stavros]

It's state-corporate capitalism that is, well, destroying the planet.
Corporations, and the way they're structured, are destroying the natural world, the economy and even capitalism itself
I think we'll survive. But the world will be a pretty bleak place in 100 years or so thanks in large part to corporations.

Ben you must know that many of the largest corporations produce (indeed, are obliged to produce) reports on the environmental sustainability of their operations, and that they have had to adapt to environmental legislation as well as public opinion over many years -the regulation of pollution at sea of commercial vessels dates back to the 1920s, extended following the Torrey Canyon disaster in 1967, even more after Exxon Valdez in 1989. There are some offenders, it is true, but often smaller firms in logging with less accountable boards and enough money to bribe local officials.
More worrying is your apparent refusal to admit that individuals abuse the environment, again through illegal logging or forest clearances, through an insatiable demand for fish or meat that can only be met in some places through changes to farming. The huge demand for narcotics in the USA means that in parts of Latin America and Afghanistan farmers have replaced food they can eat with the plant bases of narcotics -poppies, coca and so on which links them into a supply chain controlled by criminal gangs. Individuals have an enormous impact on the environment, from the pollution of rivers and the felling of trees, to the people who throw their used cigarette butts onto the pavement instead of putting them in a bin.

We are all in this together, and there are many ways in which the world would be a cleaner and safer place if we showed it more respect. It is about attitudes as well as capital.

[Stavros]

From the Guardian's obituary of Tony McMichael (full link at the end)

Tony McMichael obituary

Australian public health researcher who established the link between climate change and disease

The scope of epidemiology has expanded dramatically over the past 150 years, from its origins seeking to understand the causes of epidemic diseases, through the role of specific risk factors in non-communicable diseases, to the really big, and complex, questions facing humanity, and in some cases threatening its very survival. Tony McMichael, who has died aged 71, after complications of pneumonia, pioneered this third strand, showing how epidemiological techniques could be applied to global environmental change.
Although, by the 1980s, he had long been concerned about what he termed "planetary overload" (later the title of one of his bestselling books), whereby the Earth is no longer able to sustain its expanding population with its increasing desire to consume natural resources and degrade the environment, it was not obvious how the debate could be shifted from speculation to empirical evidence.
Tony developed conceptual models of the global ecosystem, refined the methods needed to understand it and analysed an array of data to quantify the effects on human health of climate change that many suspected but that could not yet be measured. These included the impact of changes in the seasonal variation of deaths among older people in temperate climates and the distribution of insect vectors of diseases, such as Ross River virus in his native Australia.
Although this emerging understanding of the complex links between global ecology and human health involved various academic and research institutions, Tony was the most senior health expert in the team and, by virtue of his personality, powers of persuasion and, especially, his highly respected status in epidemiology, he was able to legitimise this topic as a field of research.
He was an obvious choice to chair the committee assessing health risks for the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change between 1993 and 1996, during which time he moved to the UK, becoming professor of epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in 1994. In 2001 he returned to Australia to take over as head of the National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health at the Australian National University in Canberra. There, he added greatly to understanding of the complex interaction between climate and infectious disease, researching topics such as the association between the El Niño phenomenon and the pattern of dengue fever in Thailand.
This research subsequently informed the 2013 report of the World Health Organisation's tropical diseases research programme on the combined climatic, environmental, agricultural and nutritional influences on the emergence of infectious disease, which he chaired after stepping down as director of the centre in Canberra in 2007.
Although Tony's arguments were based on solid research, he also recognised that publications in peer-reviewed journals, of which he published more than 300, would not in themselves lead to action. He was on the board of several NGOs, was a tireless advocate for action on climate and health and, just before his death, was a lead author of an open letter to the Australian prime minister Tony Abbott (http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/aug/10/tony-abbott-under-pressure-to-put-climate-change-on-g20-meeting-agenda), calling for climate change and health to be placed on the G20 agenda. Given the hostility to such a move among the few people who, for whatever reason, still refuse to accept the international consensus on the causes of climate change, he was amused when one accused him of being a scurrilous fascist, and another, a socialist lackey.
http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/oct/13/tony-mcmichael

[Stavros]

Interesting article on the impact of man-made adaptations and climate change on the disappearing south of Louisiana. Might be best to call it a day, abandon the south and move New Orleans further north...

Lost Louisiana: the race to reclaim vanished land back from the sea

World’s fastest submerging state is looking to nature in an ambitious plan to turn back the tide, and to BP to fund it – but will it work?

The GPS showed David Morgan still on dry land – but the waves bumping beneath his boat revealed the reality of this lost Louisiana landscape. Rising seas have obliterated 30 points on the map in the last three years at Plaquemines Parish where Morgan lives.
Sugarcane fields, citrus groves, backwoods – all gone. “This was all land here when I was a kid. There was no water anywhere,” said Morgan, 57, slowing the boat to pass oyster beds. “I used to hunt rabbits there with my dog,” he said.

Louisiana is losing land to the sea faster than anywhere else in the world.

full article here:
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/oct/14/lost-louisiana-the-race-to-reclaim-vanished-land-back-from-the-sea

[Ben]

Global Warming Is Our Eugenics Says Hot Air Expert - YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7HHtVUc9Wg&list=UU1yBKRuGpC1tSM73A0ZjYjQ)

[Ben]

Sarah Palin Compares Climate Change 'Hysteria' To Eugenics:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/27/sarah-palin-climate-change-eugenics_n_6057934.html

[Ben]

Climate Change Denier to Lead Senate Environment Committee:

Climate Change Denier to Lead Senate Environment Committee - YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_nj-CDruhHU)

[Ben]

Wrecking nature for short term profit:

Noam Chomsky: Wrecking nature for short term profit - YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FisA1z4OT70)

[trish]

The Collapse of Western Civilization by Oreskes and Conway is a quick and easy read on the socio-economics of climate change.


For your edification and enjoyment the sculpture (currently in Berlin) pictured below is titled: Politicians Debating Climate Change.

[Ben]

Conservatives Don't Hate Climate Change, They Hate The Proposed Solutions: Study

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/11/07/climate-change-conservatives_n_6124028.html?utm_hp_ref=tw

[Ben]

G20 uses $88 billion of taxpayers' money to support fossil fuel exploration:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRiLQKEkGnY

[Ben]

Animal Agriculture: A Neglected Agent of Global Warming?

Animal Agriculture: A Neglected Agent of Global Warming? - YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EN7sQNDc5PY&list=UUrmm_7RDZJeQzq2-wvmjueg)

[Ben]

Climate change occurring ten times faster than at any time in past 65 million years: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/08/130801142420.htm (http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/08/130801142420.htm)

[martin48]

Cows farting again?


Animal Agriculture: A Neglected Agent of Global Warming?

Animal Agriculture: A Neglected Agent of Global Warming? - YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EN7sQNDc5PY&list=UUrmm_7RDZJeQzq2-wvmjueg)

[Dahlia Babe Ailhad]

Good morning everybody,

MAN!
What can we expect from a species that poisons it's own bodies and families with tobacco smoke and thinks it's alright.

I am not sure if this video was already posted into this thread or not.
I don't have time, nor the desire, to sift through all 116 posts.

I am not sure how many HU members have seen this video as it's received over 11 million views, so far. So, it's nothing new.

It really relates to this thread topic.

It's sad but, seemingly, true.

Babe,
xoxo


youtube.com/watch?v=WfGMYdalClU

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[trish]

Apt video. Haven't seen it before. Your post reminded me that once the planet's atmosphere had very little oxygen. The first photosynthesizing bacteria arrived about three billion years ago. They produced oxygen as a waste product, having no use for it themselves. To most lifeforms back then oxygen was toxic. But instead of building up in the atmosphere this new form of "pollution" was largely used up in oxidation reduction reactions (the weathering of ferrous rock formations etc.) About 50 million years ago, with the arrival more successful photosynthesizing organisms, oxygen started to build up in the atmosphere. As photosynthesizing plants evolved they inadvertently started poisoning themselves and the planet. The new atmospheric gas even kicked off an "ice age" known as the Huronian Glaciation.

Luckily there was a workaround: lifeforms that produced energy with the help of oxygen and produced carbon dioxide as a waste product. One particular species of oxygen user (humans) learned to produced energy by burning fossil fuels outside its body. The process produces even more carbon dioxide waste than their internal metabolic processes do. They use the energy to run their complex hive societies and they're flooding the atmosphere with carbon dioxide. The species is so successful it covers the face of the planet, and doing so it's denuding vast areas that were devoted to photosynthesizing plants that drink up carbon dioxide and produce oxygen. The mean temperature of the planet is consequently rising. The hotter atmosphere holds more water vapor for longer times before releasing it as rain or snow, creating long periods of drought in some regions and torrential downpours in others. The energy imbalance increases the amplitude of jet stream meanders resulting in frigid winters where the meanders dip far to the south and hot crispy summers plagued with forest fires where the meanders climb north.

The moral of the story is that a biological species can (and have many times in the past) effect global climate patterns, cause mass extinctions and resurface the face of the planet. The planet is not an inertial sink which can nonchalantly absorb our abuse like a mother lion might tolerate the rough play of her frolicking cubs. We can and are doing damage to our ecosystem and ourselves: not because we're evil, or greedier than other species...but simply because we're too ignorant to curb our success before it consequences secure our demise.

[Dahlia Babe Ailhad]

Hi trish,

I will have to disagree on that last bit when you say humans are not greedier than other species.

Humans are the only species on the planet that is greedy.
We are no longer so ignorant as we were eons ago.
However back then, there were no factories to pollute the earth.
Today, "Big Business humans" are greedier than ever - and they know the risks involved and the damage they are doing but they just don't care until someone sees them and complains about the dumping of toxins into the oceans and landfills EVEN if the landfills drain into into bodies of water that become human drinking water.
They still continue to dump without a care when no one is looking.

Maybe the New World Order should happen and the rules on the Georgia Guide Stones should be the new laws. Maintaining a limited population might be the solution, but not for people like you and me - we are not the elite who will benefit from such a New World Order. We'll be executed like wounded horses,instead.

Call it what you will, but it all boils down to what man has created - industry.
When the automobile was invented, they should have stopped production when they realized the stench of exhaust fumes, but they didn't. Money!!
Perhaps, yes, Ford, was ignorant to the damage his stinking invention would cause years later but they are GUILTY to continue to make and sell cars with the combustion engine.
Electric cars were made years ago and were destroyed because they would KILL the car industry which would hurt the economy - like, WTF?
They would rather kill the planet instead of a money-making pollution machine that we never really needed.
Something else would have been invented which might have been much cleaner than a stinky car engine.

Same with smoking cigarettes.
Greedy tobacco companies would rather kill people for profit just because closing down all the cigarette companies would hurt the economy. The governments are well aware, now, of all of this and they still ALLOW it to continue for profit.

Remember, Valiant Thor once offered the USA government a cure for all human diseases that would stop people from dying from disease.
The USA government refused the offer saying, "It would hurt the economy of the planet earth."
GREED!

Humans have far too many useless "toys" and we think they are necessary for our comfort and even our survival. Good ole advertising for ya. They convince us to buy and eat crap just because they make us THINK we would like it.

Wanna save the environment?...we should all stop watching television and listen, instead, to internet radio stations such as www.wbai.org or www.prn.fm

Far too many soda pops on the market, candy companies, too much junk food.
Far too few companies in charge of the food supply. They control it all. I've read in some USA states it's forbidden by law to even grow your own food in your back yard. I think the reason was because they claimed the ground is not safe enough to grow food in.

I thought homemade, whole wheat, bread was healthy if i used organic flour, until i learned that all the wheat, itself, has been genetically modified. Sure it's organic, organic crap! Not the same strain of wheat is being grown today as was back in the day when all food was all organic.
Wheat today is addictive. Literally addictive. And it's making people fat and unhealthy.
Check out William Davis' book called Wheat Belly. There are videos on youtube, also.

Greed. Humans are all about greed and personal profit- unless forced to do otherwise.
Look at that bogus carbon tax law thingy (whatever it's called) where companies are granted the right to dump.

People are only looking at the state of the earth and not looking at the real issues, the real problem - and that is industry for profit. So long as money is being made, the government will allow it.

Who ever structured our civilization should be have been shot.
People are still living in the Amazon jungle untouched by modern man. They survive without candy, tv, and all the rest of the crap we would die for.

Babe,
xoxo

[trish]

The (paradoxical) trouble with humans is we think we're the exception to every rule.

Rabbits overbreed in Australia.
Kudzu displaces most other plantlife in the South.
Parasitoid flukes kill their hosts.
Lions overhunt their territories.
Life, by its very nature is greedy.

In a balanced ecosystem every species is kept in check by another.
When a check is eliminated (or a new species is introduced that has no check), then a few species will overwhelm and often collapse the whole system. Human's have destroyed almost all the checks. We live in a state of Koyaanisqatsi: Life Out of Balance.

The one thing that could save us is that humans are self-aware: we know that we're greedy and what that greed is doing to the world. But the compulsion to be greedy (that evolution has instilled in us) may be too strong to obviate.

[Stavros]

[QUOTE=Dahlia Babe Ailhad;1554726]Hi trish,

I will have to disagree on that last bit when you say humans are not greedier than other species.
Humans are the only species on the planet that is greedy.
--There is no doubt that humans are acquisitive, it probably began with the need to store food to make sure there was something to eat in the winter -squirrels do it too. Other birds and animals collect things to make and protect nests. It may be that the accumulation of things generated systems of barter and exchange that created the capitalism which you call 'greed'.

It is also a fact that even before modern industry humans were capable of denuding forests, through slash and burn agricultural strategies; it is claimed that the 90 million odd Americans who lived in your country before the arrival of 'the others' in some places hunted the buffalo to extinction.

Remember, Valiant Thor once offered the USA government a cure for all human diseases that would stop people from dying from disease.
The USA government refused the offer saying, "It would hurt the economy of the planet earth."
--Valient Thor? The 464 year old visitor from Venus with six fingers who had an apartment in the Pentagon, met Eisenhower and Ford, and one day flew back to Venus in his flying saucer, lift off from Virginia....please, be realistic: of the two 'known' photos of 'Thor' one has been identified as an army officer who was at the meeting in the Pentagon where he was photographed, the other was a model. There is no life on Venus. The man who proposed this theory was widely recognised as a Christian Evangelist crank; Presidents meet cranks all the time. Eisenhower met one every day, his name was Dicky. Perhaps he was really from Uranus.

There really are more important issues facing planet Earth to deal with that all have practicable solutions. We don't need visitors from Venus to help us defeat smallpox, polio, TB or any other disease.

[Dahlia Babe Ailhad]

Ooops. I tried something that didn't work, so we are stuck with this post, now.

Sorry about that.

[Dahlia Babe Ailhad]

Hi stavros,

Honestly, sweety. You used all of that effort trying to quote just to try to make a point which you didn't do very well on both accounts, in my humble opinion. I will try to explain.




--There is no doubt that humans are acquisitive, it probably began with the need to store food to make sure there was something to eat in the winter -squirrels do it too. Other birds and animals collect things to make and protect nests. It may be that the accumulation of things generated systems of barter and exchange that created the capitalism which you call 'greed'.
First, let's address the definition of the word, "greed".

"Greed (Latin, avaritia), also known as avarice, cupidity, or covetousness, is the inordinate desire to possess wealth, goods, or objects of abstract value with the intention to keep it for one's self, far beyond the dictates of basic survival and comfort. It is applied to a markedly high desire for and pursuit of wealth, status, and power."








It is also a fact that even before modern industry humans were capable of denuding forests, through slash and burn agricultural strategies; it is claimed that the 90 million odd Americans who lived in your country before the arrival of 'the others' in some places hunted the buffalo to extinction.
Yes, EXACTLY! THAT is human greed i was talking about - but only on the part of the European invaders of North America. What are you trying to say, exactly.

The Amerindians (who believe that every rock and tree has a spirirt) never burned forests down to the ground, nor did the Amerindians ever kill buffalo til near extinction. They took only what they needed.

The greedy European settlers are guilty of doing what you've mentioned
.
You have your "known facts" all wrong. You are confused, it seems. Maybe you've been staring at too many clitty, bum and booby pics and videos, for too long.







--Valient Thor? The 464 year old visitor from Venus with six fingers who had an apartment in the Pentagon, met Eisenhower and Ford, and one day flew back to Venus in his flying saucer, lift off from Virginia....please, be realistic: of the two 'known' photos of 'Thor' one has been identified as an army officer who was at the meeting in the Pentagon where he was photographed, the other was a model.

Yes!! That's the "guy"!! However, in your last-minute quest for google knowledge, you forgot to research the part where it says that he speaks EVERY language on Earth and several alien languages, too. He has an I.Q. that is waayyyyy off the scale. He has green hair and, yep, six fingers and six toes. His race is from the interior of Venus. Thor has stated that there are about 30 of his kind on planet Earth living secrety among us.

I suggest you watch a youtube video of a Phil Schneider lecture (with the word "Dulce" in the title) in which he shows that very same B & W photo of Thor.
Schneider said his father snapped the photo back in the 1950s - long before we knew how to edit photos. Schneider showed the photo around, back then, to rooms full of people across the country (or the world ,i'm not sure) at many lectures before he was finally "silenced" and buried for revealing too many Top Secret facts to the public.

I will agree that the handsome dark-haired guy was a model or an actor, BUT, take a look at the one true photo of Thor - the pic of him with his left side of his face facing the camera (circled in red). Look at the size of that neck, and that comical pointy chin. THAT, is no human "soldier". Compare his neck to the man just next to him. Thor's neck is HUGE. He is a big being. That is not a human.







There is no life on Venus. The man who proposed this theory was widely recognised as a Christian Evangelist crank; Presidents meet cranks all the time. Eisenhower met one every day, his name was Dicky. Perhaps he was really from Uranus.

Who's to say that there is no life on Venus or other planets or in outer space? You?
I suppose all the UFO sightings from all over the Earth are fake. I suppose all the ancient carvings in stone depicting flying objects in the sky are all hoaxes.
Everyone knows that the dinosaurs were put on the Earth to test man's loyalty to God, right You do know that, right? Come on, admit it, sweety.

Even the Vatican now has a special section devoted to the study of UFOs and, i think, of alien life. How stupid is the Vatican? I'm sure you can tell me (us). You've stated some mind boggling stuff, already. "Mind boggling" in the sense that someone (you) actually believes what you say...what part of the Bible Belt did you say you are from? No need to answer that lol. I'm just kidding.

Astronauts have even admitted, in so few words, to seeing UFOs while in space, during interviews. Go see on youtube. That's where you'll find them. Oh, i forgot, youtube is all fake, right?
As a matter of fact, we (you and i) are not even communicating. It's all an elaborate governemental hoax. A smoke screen! Smoke and mirrors.
An illusion,







There really are more important issues facing planet Earth to deal with that all have practicable solutions. We don't need visitors from Venus to help us defeat smallpox, polio, TB or any other disease.

Of course not, we have the FDA, the W.H.O, Health Canada, and let's not forget The (mighty) Bill Gates' Foundation which heavily funds the production of vaccines...let's not forget - FOR PROFIT- he is such a fine fellow, just trying to help humanity (reach a low population count) so that he and his rich buddies can pave the way for a New Word Order. You don't belive that's happening either, i suppose.

BigPharma gives away Porches and all-expense-paid trips, and so forth, to doctors as incentives to push untested drugs onto the doctors who, then, convince the patients that the drugs are safe. And, when people start dying from the untested drugs, BigPharma recalls them, sticks a different label on the bottle and ships them right back out again, but to a different country.
No...you are definitly watching too many tits and clittys, my friend. Sowwy to be the one to let you know.

Funny how after all the years of the Cancer Research Centers taking in billions (if not more) dollars and they still can't find a cure. Wait a second. They do not want a cure! All they want is something to sell over and over again as a treatment.
If they could cure cancer, they would bankrupt themselves.

Little do many people know that a cure already exists and has existed since the mid 1920s. Of course, the medical society will call that quackery because they could never make a profit from selling bags of carrots and apples and juice extractors. Of course, it's not as simple as just that, there is a lot more to that treatment. Still, people are cured every day of terminal cancer and many other degenerative disease using that very same, natural teatment.
It's all GREED, stavros. The birds and the bees are not greedy, nor are the squirrels.
You've been, maybe, watching too many squirrels gathering nuts in the park and calling THAT "an education in humanity" - it seems. You are comparing squirrels gathering nuts to human greed. Look, i am not trying to insult you. So, if it seems that i am, i do sincerely apologize.
Insulting people is not how i roll.
But, you are so misguided, loverboy. You're, perhaps, watching way too much TV, with all those advertisments for drugs in between segments of your favorite TV shows. You sound a little braiwashed to me. It's normal, these days. The world is full of brainwashed people. I don't hold any thing against you because...

"The general population doesn't know what's happening, and it doesn't even know that it doesn't know." ~ Noem Chomsky

Stavros sweety, i took a lot of time to write this out. I ,actually, had to write it out TWICE because the first time i tried to preview it when i had it all done, it vanished, tehforum signed me out, and i had to start all over again (sigh).

I don't want to see this thread highjacked by us in a health-care and aliens discussion when the topic is clearly about about something else.

I only mentioned what i said in my previous post,to discuss human greed because it was mentioned that humans are not all that greedy.

I posted something, and you responded to me. Now, i've responded to you. It's done.
I am, respectfully, done with you on this particular topic of Valiant Thor and human greed.
Let's discuss something else on the board. Okay? xoxo

Maybe someone should create an alien thread if one does not already exist on the board.


Babe,
xoxo

[Dahlia Babe Ailhad]

Sorrythespel0lingerrorsthereisnotenoughtimetocorre ctthem. Therealldone.

.

[Stavros]

Hi stavros,
...I posted something, and you responded to me. Now, i've responded to you. It's done.
I am, respectfully, done with you on this particular topic of Valiant Thor and human greed.
Let's discuss something else on the board. Okay? xoxo
Babe,
xoxo

You write with passion, and in our own way I think we both agree that the human element in climate change has been decisive in recent centuries, though I do think isolating greed as the factor cannot explain such a complex phenomenon. We are not going to agree that aliens from Venus have visited Earth, you believe it, I think it is preposterous rubbish, and I can't think of anything else to say about it.

[Ben]

To Avert Climate Chaos, Meat Consumption Must Drop: Study...

http://www.commondreams.org/news/2014/12/03/avert-climate-chaos-meat-consumption-must-drop-study

[trish]

Venus was our first clear example of what a runaway greenhouse effect can do to a planet. The surface is uninhabitable by any anthropoid beings no matter how large their necks. I understand there are very few Venusians now living among us. Because of their neck size, they actually make very excellent linebackers. Someone should ask Paul Posluszny if he can give us the Venusian technology to build the subterranean cities that will shelter us from an atmosphere gone berserk. Get in on the ground floor. Invest now and make huge profits.

[Dahlia Babe Ailhad]

Good morning trish,

Great color pic (of a body-building football player?). Now why isn't he sitting with all those top brass Pentagon people?

Great B & W pic (of an alien). I find Thor's ear, also, looks very strange.
Valiant Thor is nothing new. It just hasn't been talked about a whole lot.
He is well documented to be who is he is. I am not making this stuff up, nor am i wearing a tin foil hat (just yet, that is. It's still too early. lol)


Babe,
xoxo

[Dahlia Babe Ailhad]

youtube.com/watch?v=UFmhCD8lOMc

" Creepin' "

Hey, everybody won't you lend me your ear,
There's something to fear, it's here, and that's clear.
Men gettin' rich off rapin' the land,
I can't understand, why we don't take them in hand.

Woah, oh ... Lord, I don't want to be their fool no more.
I don't want to be their fool no more.
Open eyes, but you're sleepin',
You best wake up 'fore tomorrow comes creepin' in.
'Fore tomorrow comes creepin' in.

Feel that our lives are in the hands of fools,
Loosin' their cool, it's us that they rule.
Too many people sittin' dead on their ass,
They ain't got no class, people, this time must pass.

Woah, oh ... Lord, I don't want to be their fool no more.
Hey ... I don't want to be their fool no more.
Open eyes, but you're sleepin',
You best wake up 'fore tomorrow comes creepin' in.
'Fore tomorrow comes creepin' in.

Woah, oh ... yeah, tomorrow comes creepin'.

Oh ... hear me cryin' 'cause the people like me,
That long to be free, are not actually.
Please everybody won't you hear this song,
Help a country that's wrong, to someday be strong.

Woah, oh ... Lord, I don't want to be their fool no more.
No! Lord, I don't want to be their fool no more.
Open eyes, but you're sleepin',
You best wake up 'fore tomorrow comes creepin'.
Creepin' ...
Creepin' ...
Creepin' ...

Creepin' ...
Creepin' ...
Creepin' ...
Creepin' ...
Creepin' ...
Creepin' ...

Tomorrow comes creepin'.
Tomorrow comes creepin'.
Tomorrow comes creepin'.
Tomorrow comes creepin'.
Tomorrow comes creepin'.
Tomorrow comes creepin'.
Tomorrow comes creepin'.
Tomorrow comes creepin'.

[Dahlia Babe Ailhad]

Hi trish,

I just want to, respectfully, clear up your mistakenly posted misinformation about any species living on the surface of Venus.

I've never said nor has anyone said that Valiant Thor's race lives on the surface of Venus. He has told the USA government that they live in the core of the planet.

Heck, there is talk of our own moon and even planet Earth being inhabited by aliens living under the surface.

Confusion is the beginning of wisdom.


Babe,
xoxo

[Dahlia Babe Ailhad]

youtube.com/watch?v=l2dlP5aL0Qk

[trish]

Hi trish,

I just want to, respectfully, clear up your mistakenly posted misinformation about any species living on the surface of Venus.

I've never said nor has anyone said that Valiant Thor's race lives on the surface of Venus. He has told the USA government that they live in the core of the planet.

Heck, there is talk of our own moon and even planet Earth being inhabited by aliens living under the surface.

Confusion is the beginning of wisdom.


Babe,
xoxo'tis why I alluded to subterranean cities.

[Dahlia Babe Ailhad]

Hi trish,

Aha! I see. Thanks.

I am still not quite sure if you are just laughing at the whole Valiant Thor issue.
Stavros surely is having a great big chuckle about the whole matter.

I believe this Thor being exists.
There are many things we, the common people, have NO frikken idea about because NASA and the government are not telling us anything that's really "real".
They want to keep us in complete darkness as we sit there watching, Family Guy, Honey Boo Boo, American Idol, and all the rest of the smoke screen.

Na-noo na-noo!
Babe,
xoxo

[Dahlia Babe Ailhad]

Hi all,

I am completely flabbergasted about how the governments blame global warming on cow poop and cow farts before attacking the combustion engine, industry, and chemical companies that dump into the oceans and into the land. Keep reading - there's more lol!

I suppose they will genetically modify cows so that they fart something else, instead. We will be eating THOSE cows while the grass fed cows, and pure food will be kept for the elite.

They tell us that there are too many people and that the population must be decreased because we are ruining the Earth.

youtube.com/watch?v=EKIl34rV-3o
How and why did this computer geek ever get to be so powerful, anyway? Oh yea, he sold us all cheap computers that break. All for his profit. Now he's in charge of population control? Like father like son, i guess, eh? Read about who his dad was.

What are the people doing to create all of this climate change?...well, they are using all the garbage that is being sold to them.

They make things that break so we have to keep on replacing our gadgets and gizmos. Then they blame us for getting used to the comforts and technology that they provide and allow us to use - them knowing full well that it's all temporary and will need to be replaced.

Would people prefer to be assassinated in order to decrease the population if they were given a choice to live a more hmm..."natural" life-style, say, with horse and buggy instead of the combustion engine, and natural remedies instead of Big Pharma drugs, genetically modified Frankenfood instead of truly organic PURE food.

If you were given a choice to live FREE as we did say 200 years ago BUT with our 2014 human rights, would you rather be shot in the head at 4am by the New World Order police because you had a red sticker on your mailbox, what would YOU prefer?
Still want your TV and The Simpsons, Coca Cola, and plastic toys whose production poisons the air and water?
Still want airplanes and the chemtrails?
Still want to see oil carries carelessly spilling oil into the oceans because some dope was probably checking his FB status when he should have been doing proper maintenance on the ship carrying the oil?

Man, i say take it all away. I'd rather live like a Quaker if i had THAT kind of choice.

Kind of like the choice when the doctor tells you, "Well, if you don't quit smoking RIGHT now, within the next five years you will surely die of lung cancer." What would you people do? Keep smoking?
I know many who have said "Damned right i would keep smoking. We're all gonna die one day. Might as well enjoy myself while i'm living."
Me? I quit smoking six years ago, and i LOVE it!

I am not even sure if electric cars are the way to go, these days. There are too many greedy fingers in the pie, making sure they will get their cut of the profits.

Tesla had electricity all figured out, years ago, but somebody wanted profit, for what he invented and wanted to GIVE to the world for FREE.
Big business didn't allow Tesla's inventions to be used because they wanted profits. They shut him down, and then stole his work so they could figure out a way to make money from his technology. GREED, again. It all comes down to GREEDY MAN, not cow farts.
Did you know that whoever built the Egyptian Pyramids used electric lights made of natural things. Check it out in youtube. It's easy to find.

Next they will say to us, over and over again, that the oceans are being destroyed by the fish poop and fish burps. So let's create new fish?
I look at some of the posts in this thread where people are posting this and that but it all discusses the symptoms, not the real causes.
Kind of like saying (and this is probably a bad example),
Guy 1: "Geez, the cars are really polluting the air."
Guy 2: "Yea, we have to redesign the engine so that it's cleaner."
See? NOTHING is being said about the production and disposal of the rubber tires, the paints used, and all the chemicals used to make all the other components, like all the plastic, anti freeze, oils, special tinted glass, special this, special that, etc etc AND etc. It's more special that we are. It makes the elites MONEY.

Scrap the automobile and all the other things like it, before THEY scrap US. The elites are already discussing HOW to eliminate us and most people are thinking it's all just NWO jibber jabber while they keep on walking towards the slaughter house air-gun pointed at their heads.
And, we all mindlessly join in with the big IMPORTANT discussions about controlling this and that to sound like we are informed.
The big wigs all tell us what to talk about, and we all talk about the false issues they present to us about the problem.
Al Gore and his movie for profit. Get real. I bought into it, i thought yea he's right!
But no, BIG BUSINESS is wrong!

I can honestly say, and many of you will probably think i am just being dramatic and over-the-top, but when i was in my early teens, i went for a walk...i even forget where it but it was in a large field. I came across this horrible place full of stinking polluted waste and it looked really bad.
It was the first time i had ever seen anything like that. Before that, i thought everything was perfect.
I, literally, started to cry tears.
Then i went home and was served frozen food heated up in the microwave and watched TV and forgot all about it.

It's all gone too far, anyone can see it. Just look at. REALLY look at it.
That's why we have two eyes and two ears - because we have to look and listen TWICE as hard to see and hear the truth.

(Sighs!)
Babe
xoxo

[trish]

I'm especially a fan of Tesla's directed energy ray which he said would fry armies in the field and burn a fleet of planes as they flew in the sky. Unfortunately nobody ever got it to work, though he did make a lot of money from some of his other patents. But none of them ever surpassed what the ancient Egyptians could do with indoor electrical illumination.

[Ben]

Extinction Rate Rivals That of Dinosaurs, 2014 Likely Hottest Year Ever:
http://truth-out.org/news/item/27869-extinction-rate-rivals-that-of-dinosaurs-2014-likely-hottest-year-ever

[Dahlia Babe Ailhad]

That polar bear photo almost made me cry, Ben.




youtube.com/watch?v=KjIalZ_uwsY

"Loneliness"

Loneliness cries deep from my soul
Keeps trying to tell me about the world growing so cold
Too many people trying to take from my earth
But we can't live without controlling our birth

Deep inside a voice cries out for you
It's not alone 'cause people, I been cryin' too
If we don't stop what we all see is wrong
I guarantee you mankind won't live long

There's a land, a glorious land
It's right here on earth
Understand what you can from the land
Your life is its worth

Woah-oh, woah-oh, woah-oh-oh
Woah-oh, woah-oh, woah-oh-oh
Woah-oh, woah-oh, woah-oh-oh

To face the problems that everyone's found
We must replace what we took out of the ground
Pray for your brother, let your soul find a way
Help one another, oh, please listen to what I say

There's a land, a glorious land
It's right here on earth
Understand what you can from the land
Your life is its worth

Woah-oh, woah-oh, woah-oh-oh
Woah-oh, woah-oh, woah-oh-oh
Woah-oh, woah-oh, woah-oh-oh

Loneliness
Oh, I can't get away from loneliness
Yeah, loneliness
Loneliness

Yeah, lonely, lone, loneliness
I just can't get away from lonely, loneliness
Yeah, yeah

Loneliness
Can't get away from loneliness
Can't get away from loneliness
Can't get away from loneliness
Can't get away from loneliness

Can't get away from loneliness
Can't get away from loneliness
Can't get away from loneliness
Can't get away from loneliness
Can't get away from loneliness




Babe,
xoxo

[Ben]

Climate Disruption:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_Prc_UrNw0 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_Prc_UrNw0)

[Ben]

That polar bear photo almost made me cry, Ben.

Sorry about that. But, sadly, the overall news on the environmental front is fairly grim.
I mean, just go down the list: deforestation, snow caps in the arctic melting, ocean acidification etc., etc.
So, we, along with other species, are in deep trouble.
I don't see any techno fixes either.
There are climate scientists (97 percent of climate scientists say that climate change is real and dangerous) that are actually saying it's too late. The carbon in the atmosphere will be there for another one thousand years.
And, too, there's the danger of: runaway climate change.
Anyway, we should try and do something. I mean, something is better than nothing.

[Ben]

President Carter:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUNKVvd19C4 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUNKVvd19C4)

[Ben]

Climate scientist Guy McPherson on the bleak future of our species:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKiILgYnFnM (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKiILgYnFnM)

[Ben]

Earth faces sixth ‘great extinction’ with 41% of amphibians set to go the way of the dodo:

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/dec/14/earth-faces-sixth-great-extinction-with-41-of-amphibians-set-to-go-the-way-of-the-dodo

[Dahlia Babe Ailhad]

youtube.com/watch?v=NL8HP1WzbDk

[trish]

The planet will be here and there will probably still be a biosphere, albeit scared and mutated by an "artificially" wrought climate catastrophe; but the polar bears are fucked as well as humans and all the other species on there way out with the sixth mass extinction...unless we stop subscribing to political, economic and ideological fairy tales and cooperate to curtail our self-destructive behaviors.

[Dahlia Babe Ailhad]

Good morning trish,

I agree with you (and George Carlin).
In my opinion, however, i really think we humans can reverse the damage we've done by eliminating pollutants of every kind, including and especially industry. It could take many generations but it will correct the damage.

And that will never happen because GREEDY (it all comes back to GREED) mankind would rather poison himself and all those around him for the accumulation of money and power until there's nobody left to it show off to.

We're doomed!

Ah but let's not forget about what the elite have in store for humanity - reduce population to a minimum, which would reduce pollution.

I watched Hunger Games, and later heard on the media controlled radio only a few weeks ago how that book will become a Broadway musical (GASP!).
They really want us accepting the whole idea of districts way out in remote areas of the world while the elite live in the cities.
I've read that the story is based in North America some time in the not too distant future.
It's all intertwined. It's all part of the MASTER plan.


youtube.com/watch?v=wP_uGaNHIyw


Here is the audio book in chapters where the location and approximate time is revealed within other chapters.
The author must have ties with the elite if they want this to be a smash-hit Broadway musical.
youtube.com/watch?v=aVhC_GBdatk

Babe,
xoxo

[trish]

Please keep the nonsense for the Conspiracy Theory thread. You're not helping.

[Dahlia Babe Ailhad]

http://www.hungangels.com/vboard/showpost.php?p=771052&postcount=1

[trish]

Yes, these two clips (http://www.hungangels.com/vboard/sho...52&postcount=1 (http://www.hungangels.com/vboard/showpost.php?p=771052&postcount=1)) succinctly describe the problem of deniers and media. I don't see anything in them that supports your contention that "THEY" want "US" accepting the hunger games "idea of districts way out in remote areas of the world while the elite live in the cities.
I've read that the story is based in North America some time in the not too distant future.
It's all intertwined. It's all part of the MASTER plan."

What we need most, in fact, is a master plan signed by all the world's nation-states that will end atmospheric carbon dumping and address the other myriad issues concerning the responsible use of energy, population growth and climate change.

There is no master plan and no clandestine master organization controlling it all. Frankly, that kind of nonsense is just candy to the climate change deniers who point, laugh and proceed to pass legislation allowing industry to dump another ten billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere. Thank you for your support!

[Dahlia Babe Ailhad]

Oh hi trish,

You're mistaken.
The link i've posted and you've quoted me posting is of Ben's very first post in THIS thread, here. The one Ben started.

See ya, later, alligator.
Babe,
xoxo

[trish]

No mistake. Check the links, and listen. No Hunger-Games. No Master Plan.
http://www.hungangels.com/vboard/showpost.php?p=771052&postcount=1

[Dahlia Babe Ailhad]

No mistake. Check the links, and listen. No Hunger-Games. No Master Plan.
http://www.hungangels.com/vboard/showpost.php?p=771052&postcount=1....

[Ben]

How to talk to a climate change denier.

Communications expert George Marshall offers six strategies for talking to people who don't accept that climate change is happening:


www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qp-nJKBwQR4 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qp-nJKBwQR4)

[Ben]

Pope Francis’s edict on climate change will anger deniers and US churches:

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/dec/27/pope-francis-edict-climate-change-us-rightwing


E.O. Wilson talks about the threat to Earth’s biodiversity:

http://warincontext.org/2014/12/25/e-o-wilson-talks-about-the-threat-to-earths-biodiversity/


Comedian Lewis Black on climate change:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYwSGiowEzs (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYwSGiowEzs)

[Dahlia Babe Ailhad]

Hi Ben,

On the island of Montréal where i live in Québec, Canada, we normally have brutal winters with temperatures dipping close to -25 C (-13 F).
With the wind-chill factor, it very rarely goes lower than -40 C (-40 F). Also, we normally have LOTS of snow. It's not very often when we have a black Christmas.

This winter, so far, so we've only had one major snowfall, and the temperature on December 25 was up to 10 C (50 F) and it rained. We had a black Christmas, this year.

Right now, it's about -4 C (24.8 F) with no snow on the streets. It's all melted.

This is, kind of, nice because we have no snow to shovel around, BUT, these high temperatures we are experiencing are not normal, and it fit right into this thread about global warming.

I would say a normal temperature for my area around this time would be about around -10 C (14 F) to -15 C (5 F) with the wind-chill factor making it feel around -25 C (-13 F).
It's a little scary.

I just wanted to add this information to illustrate this "warm" Montréal winter, so far.


Babe,
xoxo

[Ben]

Hi Ben,

On the island of Montréal where i live in Québec, Canada, we normally have brutal winters with temperatures dipping close to -25 C (-13 F).
With the wind-chill factor, it very rarely goes lower than -40 C (-40 F). Also, we normally have LOTS of snow. It's not very often when we have a black Christmas.

This winter, so far, so we've only had one major snowfall, and the temperature on December 25 was up to 10 C (50 F) and it rained. We had a black Christmas, this year.

Right now, it's about -4 C (24.8 F) with no snow on the streets. It's all melted.

This is, kind of, nice because we have no snow to shovel around, BUT, these high temperatures we are experiencing are not normal, and it fit right into this thread about global warming.

I would say a normal temperature for my area around this time would be about around -10 C (14 F) to -15 C (5 F) with the wind-chill factor making it feel around -25 C (-13 F).
It's a little scary.

I just wanted to add this information to illustrate this "warm" Montréal winter, so far.


Babe,
xoxo

The author and activist Naomi Klein described it as: climate chaos. Or, too, climate weirding.
We are, around the globe, experiencing weird weather.
And, too, global temperatures continue to rise.
Now we've the Pope getting involved.... Now if climate change deniers don't trust the scientists, um, should or do they trust the Pope?
Or is the Pope conspiring with the scientists???
I mean, even heavyweights of the business class, Rex Tillerson, CEO of ExxonMobil, admit that climate change is real. Is he, too, conspiring with the Pope and the scientists???

Pope Francis: Climate Change Is Real and Humans Are Causing It:
http://www.motherjones.com/blue-marble/2015/01/pope-francis-climate-change


http://www.motherjones.com/files/imagecache/top-of-content-main/francis.jpg

[trish]

2014 was the hottest year on record.
http://nyti.ms/1DKssLK


Extinction and the climate change bottleneck
http://nyti.ms/1Cl47bb

[Dahlia Babe Ailhad]

...Or is the Pope conspiring with the scientists???
I mean, even heavyweights of the business class, Rex Tillerson, CEO of ExxonMobil, admit that climate change is real. Is he, too, conspiring with the Pope and the scientists???

Hi Ben,

First, i am not sure why you are bringing up a conspiracy after quoting my post.
Are you suggesting that i am so much of a conspiracy theorist that EVERYTHING is a conspiracy, to me?
Hmm, i must admit that i DO think there are many, many conspiracies taking place and that most people have no idea about it all. They seem to think, "Well, the world is functioning, so everything must be alright."

Second, i am not a "world business" minded person. So, whether or not Mr Tillerson is conspiring with scientists and the Holy poop, i have no idea.
I do think that "heavyweights of the business class", hardly consists of one man, Rex Tillerson, CEO of ExxonMobil.
If many more heavyweights on the world-stage of industry believe that world industry is causing all the climate troubles, who are these people?
Seems to me one man does not make up a plural usage of the word heavyweight. Maybe there are more CEOs admitting that they are to blame, i have no idea. I can't keep up with all those liars.

The only people i can view as the real conspirators (in world-stage climate discussions) are the (as you called) "heavyweights" who deny that industry is the cause. They want to continue to ruin the environment for huge profits, which, eventually causes climate problems. They really don't care. It seems to me that all these executives care about is making lots of money to have power.
I really doubt they care to consider how things will be after they've died. During their lives, they want filet mignon, Don Perignon and the overall, expensive lifestyle. They don't care about anything else - if they did, they would be speaking-up in larger numbers. That will never happen.

Maybe things could change if humans lived to be a few hundred years old. Then and only then would they be more willing to put their greed aside for the preservation of their "home" planet. That's my take on this topic.

I agree with the poop 100%, but i think he was not as direct as he should have been in his statement.
I blame only man's careless stupidity and greed when it comes down to industry and the planet's climate trouble. Too many engines and huge oil spills and all kinds of human stupidity taking place. Who ELSE can be blamed? What?!...cow farts, again, are the cause?! I doubt that.

So, to answer the question that (i think) you've asked of me - are the scientists and the poop involved in a global conspiracy designed to make us all think that industry causes climate issues? Well, no. They are telling the truth.
BUT!!...let's ask the poop about all the Bibles that are made (paper, dyes, glues, leather, etc, all transported around the world in planes and trucks), not to mention all the plastic Holy trinkets, such as, crucifixes, prayer beads and all the other JUNK that the Vatican makes money from are, ALSO, part of the industry problem.
I wonder if his Holy-greedy-self will admit that Vatican GREED is ALSO partly responsible. Yes, it's maybe a small part of the problem that contributes to it. But, just like small, singular bricks make up a huge building - it's all part of it (it = the huge building).

The poop knows about all of the factories making Bibles and all of the stuff i've mentioned which all contribute to the problem. But it's cute how he, sort of, leaves that part out. eh?...as if to imply that the making of all that useless, Holy JUNK helps the issue, somehow. Kind of like saying, "As long as the Vatican makes MORE money than it needs, it's okay. Let's blame 'people', instead", because if there's one thing God needs, it's His money.
Isn't it so amazing how even "God" needs a pay cheque, these days. Tithing is one thing, but big business is not part of God's plan - never was.

Too many people are talking about keeping everything (industry) just the way it is, BUT they want to end the climate issue. Stuffed shirts all preaching their hot air while standing on soapboxes!
You know, many people want to lose weight, but those friggen pizza pies and all that ice cream and soda pop tastes so GOOD. What to do!
I know!...the overweight people should blame the actual television appliance sitting in the living room for advertising the junk food they eat.
Or, maybe the overweight people should just start exercising more and eating the right foods. Same deal with industry and climate issues.
Ah, but money and the economy are much more important than saving the planet and mankind.
After all, just like the old Cabaret songs goes...(Here's where you listen to the video and read the lyrics)

youtube.com/watch?v=rkRIbUT6u7Q

" Money "

[EMCEE]
Money makes the world go around
The world go around
The world go around
Money makes the world go around
It makes the world go 'round.

A mark, a yen, a buck, or a pound
A buck or a pound
A buck or a pound
Is all that makes the world go around,
That clinking clanking sound
Can make the world go 'round.

[GIRLS]
Money money money money money money
Money money money money money money
Money money money money money money
Money money

[EMCEE]
If you happen
To be rich,
[GIRLS]
.......Ooooh
[EMCEE]
And you feel like a
Night's enetertainment,
[GIRLS]
...Money
[EMCEE]
You can pay for a
Gay escapade.
[GIRLS]
Money money
Money money
Money money
Money money
[EMCEE]
If you happen to
To be rich,
[GIRLS]
.......Ooooh
[EMCEE]
And alone, and you
Need a companion
[GIRLS]
...Money
[EMCEE]
You can ring-ting-
A-ling for the maid.
[EMCEE]
If you happen
To be rich
[GIRLS]
.....Ooooh
[EMCEE]
And you find you are
Left by your lover,
[GIRLS]
...Money
[EMCEE]
Though you moan
And you groan
Quite a lot,
[GIRLS]
Money money
Money money
Money money
Money money
[EMCEE]
You can take it
On the chin,
[GIRLS]
.....Ooooh
[EMCEE]
Call a cab,
And begin
[GIRLS]
...Money
[EMCEE]
To recover
On your fourteen-
Carat yacht.

[EMCEE]
Money makes the world go around,
The world go around,
The world go around,
Money makes the world go around,
Of that we can be sure.
(....) on being poor.

[ALL]
Money money money-
money money money
Money money money-
money money money
Money money money money money money
Money money money money money money
Money money money money money money

[DANCE BREAK]

[EMCEE AND GIRLS (In Canon)]
If you haven't any coal in the stove
And you freeze in the winter
And you curse on the wind
At your fate
When you haven't any shoes
On your feet
And your coat's thin as paper
And you look thirty pounds
Underweight.
When you go to get a word of advice
From the fat little pastor
He will tell you to love evermore.
But when hunger comes a rap,
Rat-a-tat, rat-a-tat at the window...

[GIRL]
At the window...

[EMCEE (spoken)]
Who's there?

[GIRLS (spoken)]
Hunger!

[EMCEE (Spoken)]
Ooh, hunger!

See how love flies out the door...
For

[EMCEE]
Money makes
The world...
[GIRLS]
...Go around
[EMCEE]
The world...
[GIRLS]
...Go around
[EMCEE]
The world...
[GIRLS]
...Go around
[EMCEE]
Money makes the
.... Go around
[GIRLS]
...Go around

That clinking
Clanking sound of
Money money money money money money
Money money money money money money

[EMCEE]
Get a little,
[GIRLS]
Money money
[EMCEE]
Get a little,
[GIRLS]
Money money
[EMCEE]
Money money
[GIRLS]
Money money
[EMCEE]
Money money
[GIRLS]
Money money

[EMCEE]
Mark, a yen, a buck
[GIRLS]
Get a little
[EMCEE]
Or a pound
[GIRLS]
Get a little
[EMCEE]
That clinking clanking
[GIRLS]
Get a little
Get a little

[EMCEE]
Clinking sound

[GIRLS]
Money money
Money money...

[EMCEE]
Is all that makes
The world go 'round

[GIRLS]
Money money
Money money

It makes the world go round!



Anyway, i hope i like my response.



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http://www.livepencil.com/mambers/imagesmem/youremail/abc/snow/snow_b.gifhttp://www.livepencil.com/mambers/imagesmem/youremail/abc/snow/snow_a.gifhttp://www.livepencil.com/mambers/imagesmem/youremail/abc/snow/snow_b.gif http://www.livepencil.com/mambers/imagesmem/youremail/abc/snow/snow_e.gif
https://encrypted-tbn1.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcT0rUdogGoYBJ5hF5mrPEoUUsSjyTNo6 x-zeqQ4XtgEJ2_HUZNrvw
xoxo
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P.S.
Ben, could you consider that Nibiru's approach may be the cause of climate change to some degree.

[trish]

There are several kinds of green house gases that can be found in the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide and methane are two that are produced by some forms of life here on Earth.

Currently humans dump 40 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere yearly, mostly through the burning of fossil fuels. Since the industrial revolution the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere increased from 280 parts per million to about 400 ppm. This 43% rise in concentration in a significant, atmospheric, green house gas decreases the rate at which Earth can re-radiate back into space the energy it daily receives from the Sun. To re-establish the balance, the Earth's surface, ocean and atmospheric temperatures have risen and continue to rise. Glaciers and ice shelves are melting to nothing, exposing dark surfaces significantly increasing the Earth's albedo (i.e. from space the Earth is darker, reflecting away less sunlight than it used too). The additional absorptions of sunlight heats the surface systems even more. This process is not reversible. You can raise the temperature by a degree and melt away a millennium's worth of ice in less than a decade, lowering the temperature by a degree may or may not replace the ice-shelf by millennium's end. Warm air pour down the temperature gradient toward the poles forcing the cold polar air masses toward the tropics.

Methane is one of the best greenhouse gasses, in the sense that it's very efficient at trapping heat; i.e. it's one of the worst greenhouse offenders. Fortunately it rather difficult for nature to produce methane. It's production almost always requires a living factory. The presence of methane on Mars would be regarded as evidence that life at one time existed there. Most methane on Earth is produced by living systems in the process of hydrogenating carbon dioxide. It is estimated that 20% of the methane currently in the atmosphere was produced by ruminants. Vast amounts of methane was produced in the past by bacteria in the ground and sequestered over the eons in the frozen tundra. As the tundra thaws, methane is released into the atmosphere: another positive feedback that contributes to the runaway effect of global warming.

We all contribute to anthropogenic climate change, every single human being that breathes, eats cows, wears wool, drives a car, uses electricity, takes warm showers, heats their house in the winter and air conditions it in the summer. I'm one. I don't want the advantages of modern civilization. I cannot be the woman I am without those advantages. I want the libraries, the coffee shops, the music the ability to travel the availability of all kinds of food from anywhere in the world in almost any season. Like everybody else, I want it all. I'm part of the problem.

[trish]

Edit
I don't want [to live without] the advantages of modern civilization. I cannot be the woman i am without those advantages. I want the libraries, the coffee shops, the music the ability to travel the availability of all kinds of food from anywhere in the world in almost any season. Like everybody else, i want it all. I'm part of the problem.

[Ben]

[QUOTE=Dahlia Babe Ailhad;1569618][SIZE="4"][FONT="Comic Sans MS"]Hi Ben,

First, i am not sure why you are bringing up a conspiracy after quoting my post.
Are you suggesting that i am so much of a conspiracy theorist that EVERYTHING is a conspiracy, to me?
Hmm, i must admit that i DO think there are many, many conspiracies taking place and that most people have no idea about it all. They seem to think, "Well, the world is functioning, so everything must be alright." /QUOTE]

Oh, sorry about that. It actually wasn't related to you. It was directed at others on this board. I shouldn't have quoted you -- and then made my comment. Sorry about that.

[Ben]

How concerned are CEOs about climate change? Not at all:

http://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2015/jan/20/global-warming-business-risks-government-regulation-taxes?CMP=share_btn_tw

[Dahlia Babe Ailhad]

Hi Ben and everyone else, too,

Thanks for clearing that up for me, Ben. I was wondering what the heck you meant.
I feel better.

As for the post with the link about CEO climate change deniers, great article. VERY true!
There are far too many climate deniers in HIGH places making the big decisions that make them lots of dirty money for dirtying our once pristine environment.
So greedy. It's disgusting how they can actually deny everything and simply point the finger at something else as a cause.

As trish mentioned, she wants all the goodies! Many people do. Many all want to enjoy the easy way of living, all comfy in front of the propaganda brain washer (TV) as glaciers break apart and fall into the water.
Aye, but there won't be much left to enjoy once the water rises up to our necks and we're all shipped off to higher ground. Problem with that "rescue plan" is, they can't bring everybody. So who will be brought?...not me, trish, not Ben, and not anybody we have in our real lives.
Those seats are reserved only for the elite polluters - not for the sheeple consumers.
Like trish, we all are mindless consumers to some degree. So please, don't think i am insulting trish, somehow, because i am not. As a matter of fact, as much as i detest industry, i still buy plastic crap BUT only because there are no cleaner substitutes for the items i need to live life.
Even how Mr Al Gore, still uses airplanes to get from one lecture to the next, it's only because not many other methods of international travel have been invented yet, that matches the speed of planes.
And that's another part of the problem: the world moves too fast for it's own good. Just look at all of us using our computers to discuss things. They (computers) break and we throw them way and buy other ones, and then they break, and the evil, money-greedy cycle of BUSINESS continues.
Too much emphasis is placed on making money, being rich, having power, having more overpriced junk which all breaks.
More emphasis should be placed on making QUALITY junk that doesn't break. Of course many people will complain that the economy will fail if companies make crap that lasts a lifetime.
Those people never think to ask themselves what is fundamentally more important, stuff that breaks and ends up in landfills, or keeping the landfills as they are, so the planet can recover. It will take years and years for the planet to recover, sure, but it will last for years and years longer and, as a result, allow mankind to continue.
I am not saying do away with every modern thing or medical treatment.
But face it, just to list a few things: automobile exhaust; household chemical cleaners that get dumped into the waters (fabric softeners, detergents, Windex-type window cleaners, de-greasers etc, etc); and many, many other completely useless crap that we have been brainwashed to think we NEED to survive., and this list can go on and on until the farting cows come home, all have nothing to do with transitioning.

This is a suggestion from me to EVERYONE reading these words.
Just try, as an experiment, washing your clothes WITHOUT detergent and fabric softeners and see if your clothes come out of the washing machine clean or not. Hang your clothes to dry on a clothesline or a clothes drying rack instead of the using the dyer.
I've stopped using laundry detergent and softeners and my clothes are clean.
Okay, granted, if your garments have stains,they might need a stain remover. I use a product called, PreSpot from... http://www.melaleuca.com/ProductStore/ProductStore.aspx ...to remove tough stains.
They sell clean, natural products which DON'T pollute.

It's crazy how this evil thing called, business, works.

I want to repeat everything i've already said in my previous posts in this thread, at this point, but i won't because they are already there to be read.

I say, screw the frigging economy! We can manage, somehow! Some brain, somewhere, will figure out a way for us to survive in a much simpler, cleaner, smarter lifestyle so the planet can recover and cleanse itself of man's utter stupidity and self destructive greed. Let's just hope and pray the money makers don't put a bullet in that person's head, eh? Like they did to JFK.
Yes, it's a major lifestyle switch, but i, myself, would rather switch my lifestyle, somewhat, for a greater cause, rather than to be FORCED to switch to live a substandard way of living because greedy corporations have paid off the politicians to pass filthy laws ONLY so those corporations can continue doing what they are doing to ALL OF US so they can line their pockets with dirty money.

Ben in my last post to you, i had left you a post script which was not acknowledged by you.
Would you care to comment on the topic of Nibiru and the scientific fact that it has some impact on our planet's climate? And as it gets closer, things will get worse? Of course it's a little off the topic of CEOs and carbon pollution and so forth and so on, but scientists are saying it's coming and it's already affecting our planet's climate changes.

Wait a second, please, i just need to re-adjust my tin foil hat, here.
Go get your tin foil hats, too, everybody!
Okay, y'all set?
Here we gooooooo! Into outer spaaaaaace!


http://www.animationplayhouse.com/globeanm1.gif "To beyond and infinity!" Wheeeeeeee! http://www.nibiruupdate.com/

Do you, Ben, deny, that Nibiru exists?

Many people, in here, maybe even you, Ben, might jump on this "Nibiru topic" as another Dahlia Babe Airhead comment, but those folks are watching far too much TV and believing all the crap that gets shitted out of the TV tube in my opinion, and many other informed-peoples' opinions.
Brainwashed sheeple can't see the truth right in front of their eyes because they've been hopelessly conditioned to disagree with any comments which differ from what the "master brain Borg collective" (the elite-controlled media-program-directors) say about the differing topics on the (controlled) media news.
Just notice, the next time you watch TV, just how many Big Pharma and banking/life insurance/automobile/junk food related ads are in the advertisements.
(Greedy) Big Pharma is linked with the (lying) Food and Drug Administrations, which is linked to the (misleading) Council on Foreign Relations which is linked to the (deceiving) Rockefeller Corporation and which is tied into the (nasty) Bill Gates Foundation and connected to the (evil) Bilderberg Group, which are linked to the (powerfully sneaky) Monsanto and and the three-headed-dragon political party governments which are all connected to the United Nations - BECAUSE it's all about making MONEY, money, money, money, money, and more money!! They all work together! There are simply too many dots to connect to illustrate how vast the connections are.
It's so sad to see the news, controlled like that.

The news shows always waste our time with some stupid, meaningless stories about how, for example, some lost cat traveled across the country to get back home, to try to brighten up our thoughts after all the lies that they've just said. WHO CARES about a lost cat on the evening news?! Heck, that's what youtube is for. As a matter of fact, have you ever noticed how the news shows are, actually, using youtube videos to bring us a lot of the news?
That's why i am tuned into www.prn.fm (www.prn.fm) and www.wbai.org. I like hearing the truth. The TV news, for me, is like watching a TV reality show. The only thing believable are the sports segments (which i really have NO INTEREST in, whatsoever), and the weather reports and reports on accidents and other local stuff.The global news stories have all been controlled. Ever notice how headlines of major events are all very, very similar to other TV stations? That's because one group of people writes the news and tells the newscasters what the news is.
And to think in these days of information, there are still sheeple who think that building 7, in the 9-1-1 attacks, went down "because a plane hit it",

http://www.merc.ca/vbulletin/images/smilies/mondieu.gif lol.
And how the twin towers came down because airplanes hit them. My gosh!! The engineers all said the tower buildings were designed and constructed to withstand something like that happening - this last comment is just to illustrate how the media brainwashes people to believe media LIES.
Tune in to those two radio stations i've placed into this thread, and get your heads out of the sand. You have sand in your eyes.

That's it, that's all! For now.

I hope you've all enjoyed this post. If not, pull your pants down and i'll suck ya dry in ssssllloooooow mmmmooootionnnn.
Oh, and by the way, i much PREFER the married, slightly pot-bellied, balding, top men. Yummmm-ME!


http://www.merc.ca/vbulletin/images/smilies/drool5.gif
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http://www.merc.ca/vbulletin/images/smilies/lips.gifxoxo

http://www.merc.ca/vbulletin/images/smilies/lollipop.gif

[Dahlia Babe Ailhad]

[SIZE="4"][FONT="Comic Sans MS"]
...Tune in to those two radio stations i've placed into this thread, and get your heads out of the sand. You have sand in your eyes...

Hi Ben and to anyone who IS informed.

The above excerpt from my previous post is addressed to the people who believe the 9-1-1 myth.

Sorry for any confusion.

Babe,
xoxo

[BBaggins06]

Hi Ben and to anyone who IS informed.

The above excerpt from my previous post is addressed to the people who believe the 9-1-1 myth.

Sorry for any confusion.

Babe,
xoxo


Goodbye troll

[trish]

Wonder what would happen if each annual downtrend in global temperature were treated as a "dash" and each up turn as a "dot"?

[Dahlia Babe Ailhad]

Hi everybody on the northeast coast
of North America,

My local, radio-station triple w.cjad.com has just announced that a MAJOR
snow storm is coming to get us. They do weather forecasts every hour and
every half hour.

New York City and Boston could expect 3 feet (1 meter) of snow in one snow
fall.
I only caught the tail-end of the weather report, but i'll be tuning in to get the
full details.

Is this amount of snow normal for those cities?
Five USA states have declared of state emergency, as i type.

It's amazing that my city, Montréal, will only get about 5 cm of snow amazing.
However, it's really cold here, today. -16 C and feelng like -26 C

6600+ USA flights were cancelled already

Wow!



http://www.livepencil.com/mambers/imagesmem/youremail/abc/snow/snow_b.gifhttp://www.livepencil.com/mambers/imagesmem/youremail/abc/snow/snow_a.gifhttp://www.livepencil.com/mambers/imagesmem/youremail/abc/snow/snow_b.gif http://www.livepencil.com/mambers/imagesmem/youremail/abc/snow/snow_e.gif
xoxo

[Ben]

Hi everybody on the northeast coast
of North America,

My local, radio-station triple w.cjad.com has just announced that a MAJOR
snow storm is coming to get us. They do weather forecasts every hour and
every half hour.


Snowstorm Barrels Into Northeast; City’s Subways and Buses Are Halted:

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/27/nyregion/new-york-blizzard.html?_r=0

[Ben]

Climate-Denial Buffoon Inhofe takes Big $$ from Big Oil, Says Scientists Corrupt:

http://www.juancole.com/2015/01/buffoon-accuses-scientists.html

[trish]

Meteorologists (not climatologists) have been warning this storm may bring a record amount of snowfall. Fox News is saying “potentially historic.” So this may not be your “normal” snow storm; but we won’t know until its over.

This is not a climatic event nor is it an event that is being caused by climate change. Every weather event has its own individual cause. The climate system only determines the distribution of storm types over time and geography. A change in the pattern might be attributable to a changing climate. Indeed a change in pattern is predicted my current climate models (due to the anthropogenic warming of our planet).

The warming of the Earth’s atmosphere creates a steeper temperature gradient. The warmer air masses in the tropics roll down the gradient (hot to cold) displacing the colder masses at the poles, and pushes the cold air towards the tropics. This doesn’t happen in a uniform flow. The arctic Rossby wave system (for example) is forced into higher amplitude modes until some waves separate from the system and drip huge masses of cold air into localized regions in the tropics. These locals have colder weather than usual and sometimes more snow than usual.

[Ben]

Canadian writer, essayist and historian John R. Saul...

www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6Zo2bAQAoU (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6Zo2bAQAoU)

[martin48]

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/big-gap-between-what-scientists-say-and-americans-think-about-climate-change/?WT.mc_id=SA_WR_20150204

"In 2014, the vast majority (87 percent) of scientists said that human activity is driving global warming, and yet only half the American public ascribed to that view. And 77 percent of scientists said climate change is a very serious problem. In comparison, only 33 percent of the general public said it was a very serious problem in a 2013 poll."

"The increased belief in climate change was reflected last week in the Senate, when 98 senators from both parties voted that climate change is real and not a hoax. Only one, Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), voted otherwise. Going on the record on their beliefs was a historic step for Republicans who have otherwise insisted that "they are not scientists" when questioned on climate change. But about half the senators still maintained that climate change is not driven by human activity (E&ENews PM (http://www.eenews.net/eenewspm/2015/01/21/stories/1060012048), Jan. 21). That vote was along partisan lines.
Among the public, too, climate beliefs correlate with ideology, the Pew pollsters noted. People who vote Republican are less likely to believe in climate change than people who vote Democratic."

[Dahlia Babe Ailhad]

Hi all,

I am "happy" (BRRRRR!!) to report that my city is as freezing as it should be for this time of year. Actually, a bit colder than normal, now.



http://www.livepencil.com/mambers/imagesmem/youremail/abc/snow/snow_b.gifhttp://www.livepencil.com/mambers/imagesmem/youremail/abc/snow/snow_a.gifhttp://www.livepencil.com/mambers/imagesmem/youremail/abc/snow/snow_b.gif http://www.livepencil.com/mambers/imagesmem/youremail/abc/snow/snow_e.gif

http://www.merc.ca/vbulletin/images/smilies/lips.gifxoxo

[Ben]

Fox News Host: Climate Change Hoax Costs Us Our Freedom!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=PIdyPdRrgKo (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PIdyPdRrgKo)

[trish]

Just googled "number died shoveling snow and picked the first two links reporting separate instances.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/chi-cook-county-snow-shovelling-deaths-20150203-story.html

http://www.boston.com/news/weather/2015/01/28/mayor-new-bedford-man-dies-after-shoveling-snow/0AYEnsssOQSnVhjHVJn4EO/story.html

As explained in post#1213 ( http://www.hungangels.com/vboard/showpost.php?p=1572434&postcount=1213 ) weather is distinct from climate, and that global warming does mean some places in the U.S. and Europe will have colder, wetter winters and some places will have hotter, dryer summers. The change in the pattern of Earth's climate may already be reflected in the rates of death due to snow shoveling and and forest fires.

[Dahlia Babe Ailhad]

Hi everyone,

It was -27 degrees Celsius (-16.6 F) earlier today.

Right now, it says -21 Celsius (-5.8 F) with a wind-chill-factor making it feel like -32 C (-25.6 F).

I am certain it will drop more later on, tonight.


http://www.livepencil.com/mambers/imagesmem/youremail/abc/snow/snow_b.gifhttp://www.livepencil.com/mambers/imagesmem/youremail/abc/snow/snow_a.gifhttp://www.livepencil.com/mambers/imagesmem/youremail/abc/snow/snow_b.gif http://www.livepencil.com/mambers/imagesmem/youremail/abc/snow/snow_e.gif
xoxo
http://www.merc.ca/vbulletin/images/smilies/lips.gif

[sukumvit boy]

Leading climate change denier was paid 1.2 million by energy companies.
http://www.theverge.com/2015/2/22/8085303/climate-change-denier-paid-wei-hock-soon

[Ben]

Leading climate change denier was paid 1.2 million by energy companies.
http://www.theverge.com/2015/2/22/8085303/climate-change-denier-paid-wei-hock-soon

Whether or not you believe in CC hinges on your politics & values... no matter what evidence/stories are presented, as it were.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=81SQJ6tf7-U (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=81SQJ6tf7-U)

[trish]

Keystone XL delayed by veto, perhaps permanently.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/02/24/us-usa-keystone-idUSKBN0LS2FH20150224

[trish]

Hey, dreamon, I'm just reporting the fucking news!

[trish]

Aw, now little dreamon on is going to punish me for complaining about his itchy trigger finger.

[dreamon]

Aw, now little dreamon on is going to punish me for complaining about his itchy trigger finger.

I just get a kick out of how incredibly offended you get by something as trivial as a thumb down.

[trish]

I know, it makes you so predictable.

[Ben]

Martin Rees: Can we prevent the end of the world?

www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMSU6k5-WXg (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMSU6k5-WXg)

Martin Rees:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Rees,_Baron_Rees_of_Ludlow

[Ben]

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse rebuts Sen. Inhofe on climate change:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTdpdFUTyqs (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTdpdFUTyqs)

[Ben]

Syrian Conflict Has Underlying Links to Climate Change:

http://www.ipsnews.net/2015/03/syrian-conflict-has-underlying-links-to-climate-change-says-study/

[trish]

A bit of weather weirding

http://www.cnn.com/2015/03/07/travel/warm-winter-iditarod-feat/

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/snow-joke-iditarod-dog-sled-race-disrupted-by-alaskas-warm-winter/

[Stavros]

California, Texas, Sau Paulo, Lima, Jordan...

Water, water, every where,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink.

Why fresh water shortages will cause the next great global crisis
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/mar/08/how-water-shortages-lead-food-crises-conflicts

[trish]

http://www.toledoblade.com/local/2013/07/14/Great-Lakes-ground-zero-for-water-needs.html

[Ben]

Professor Richard Seager, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory-Columbia University....
Four years of bloody civil war has claimed more than 200,000 lives in Syria. The experts say Syria's turmoil is all about sectarian politics - but could climate change be the real culprit?

www.youtube.com/watch?v=2rEpnXd6xqM (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2rEpnXd6xqM)

[broncofan]

The experts say Syria's turmoil is all about sectarian politics - but could climate change be the real culprit?

Climate change could cause a change in the balance of resources. It could never be a sufficient (or necessary) cause for the use of poisonous gas on people, the beheadings of Christians and Shiite Muslims, or the wanton destruction of antiquities in Iraq. Just my view....climate change is a real issue and there's real science supporting it. It can explain changing circumstances and create new exigencies...but how does it explain human agency?

[trish]

2015 is warmest year on record so far.
http://blogs.mprnews.org/updraft/2015/03/2015-already-warmest-year-globally-so-far/

[Ben]

Gates Foundation's $1.4bn in fossil fuel investments:

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/mar/19/gates-foundation-has-14bn-in-fossil-fuels-investments-guardian-analysis

[Ben]

2015 is warmest year on record so far.
http://blogs.mprnews.org/updraft/2015/03/2015-already-warmest-year-globally-so-far/

An addendum...

Estimated cumulative emissions from fossil fuel use, cement production and land-use change since industrialization began are:
http://trillionthtonne.org/

[trish]

Phil Platt Rebutts Ted Cruz on Global Climate Change:

http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2015/03/19/ted_cruz_stream_of_global_warming_denial_on_seth_m eyers_show.html

[Stavros]

Some positive news from Costa Rica-

"Costa Rica has achieved a clean energy milestone by using 100 per cent renewable energy for a record 75 days in a row. The feat was achieved thanks to heavy rainfall, which powered four hydroelectric plants in the first three months of the year, the state-run Costa Rican Electricity Institute said.
No fossil fuels have been burnt to generate electricity since December 2014, in the state which is renowned for its clean energy policies."


Full story is here:


http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/costa-rica-goes-75-days-powering-itself-using-only-renewable-energy-10126127.html

[Laphroaig]

Some positive news from Costa Rica-

"Costa Rica has achieved a clean energy milestone by using 100 per cent renewable energy for a record 75 days in a row. The feat was achieved thanks to heavy rainfall, which powered four hydroelectric plants in the first three months of the year, the state-run Costa Rican Electricity Institute said.
No fossil fuels have been burnt to generate electricity since December 2014, in the state which is renowned for its clean energy policies."


Full story is here:


http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/costa-rica-goes-75-days-powering-itself-using-only-renewable-energy-10126127.html


Nice to see a renewable energy policy that is actually working. Scotland produces about 12% of it's electricity through hydro schemes and could potentially generate more but the Govenment insists instead on investing in windfarms and then has to pay them NOT to generate electricity... Madness!

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/energy/windpower/11218297/Wind-farms-paid-43m-to-switch-off.html

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/energy/windpower/11323685/Wind-farms-paid-1m-a-week-to-switch-off.html

[Ben]

Independent journalist Abby Martin on climate change:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bhe1FA4RvEM (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bhe1FA4RvEM)

[ohioguy13]

Weill im sure if I see it on a hung angels post it has to be true because I believe most scientists start their search for knowledge here! Seriously if you want to change our footprint aka climate change get rid of every big city over 2 million that puts a stress on the planet meaning get rid of half of NYC Los Angeles Chicago Boston etc to move to Iowa Idaho s Dakota etc but you wont you know why? People in big cities wont they don't give a shit. Instead me wanting a spray deodorant instead of on a roll on is every fuckers business. That's why I laugh at climate change its political. And in serious science , scientists don't get caught making shit up. Its all about politics and money. Our coal is dirty lets not use it here instead sell it to the Chinese to burn and throw in the atmosphere at half of what we pay here!

[broncofan]

Weill im sure if I see it on a hung angels post it has to be true because I believe most scientists start their search for knowledge here! Seriously if you want to change our footprint aka climate change get rid of every big city over 2 million that puts a stress on the planet meaning get rid of half of NYC Los Angeles Chicago Boston etc to move to Iowa Idaho s Dakota etc but you wont you know why? People in big cities wont they don't give a shit. Instead me wanting a spray deodorant instead of on a roll on is every fuckers business. That's why I laugh at climate change its political. And in serious science , scientists don't get caught making shit up. Its all about politics and money. Our coal is dirty lets not use it here instead sell it to the Chinese to burn and throw in the atmosphere at half of what we pay here!
Without any environmental standards streams would be polluted, drinking water would be toxic, and more greenhouse gases would be released into the atmosphere. The reason there is concern about using a deodorant with an aerosol delivery system is that many of these used to release cfcs into the atmosphere. CFCs are strong greenhouse gases, and the accumulation of them in our atmosphere increases global temperatures.

The point of good regulation is not to shutdown all commerce, but to avoid negative externalities. It is a negative externality when an individual enjoys the benefits of their consumption but does not bear the full costs. Nobody is suggesting that all urban centers be destroyed in order to avoid these negative externalities, only that incentive systems are in place to reduce the consumption of goods that are destructive to the environment.

Also, everyone knows the politics section is for discussion and not to create policy. There are several people on this board who are actually scientists (I am not among them). They are not taking their cues from what is written on this site, but expressing their views here. Be grateful and try to learn something.

[ohioguy13]

lol so your saying I was right scientists do start here!!!

[broncofan]

lol so your saying I was right scientists do start here!!!
I think I said pretty clearly their views on climate change were not informed by this site. In other words, they do not believe greenhouse gases cause climate change simply because they read it here. However, several people with scientific backgrounds post on this site about subjects they already know a great deal about.

You are the prototypical example of the type of proud ignorance and obscurantism the modern day GOP thrives on.

[Ben]

Overpopulation, overconsumption – in pictures:

http://www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals-network/gallery/2015/apr/01/over-population-over-consumption-in-pictures

[Ben]

"Unchained Goddess" by Frank Capra from 1958...

www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lgzz-L7GFg (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lgzz-L7GFg)

[Ben]

Would you become a vegan to save the world?

www.youtube.com/watch?v=CzmUzSEcwyU (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CzmUzSEcwyU)

[Ben]

Meat Production Wastes Natural Resources:

http://www.peta.org/issues/animals-used-for-food/meat-wastes-natural-resources/

[Stavros]

The Independent today publishes an article which cites research that comes close to establishing the role played by the acidification of the oceans in the obliteration of species, particularly marine animals, in past eras such as 'The Great Dying' at the end of the Permian and the onset of the Triassic periods. Steep rises in carbon emissions probably caused by volcanic eruptions are considered the primary cause, with the carbon element being the contemporary issue that raises questions as our own oceans record increases in acidification.
The article is here:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/ocean-acidification-killed-off-more-than-90-per-cent-of-marine-life-252-million-years-ago-scientists-believe-10165989.html