Climate change could mean the extinction of our species

[Stavros]

Christopher Monckton is the son of the 2nd Viscount of Brenchley which means he can claim to be the 3rd, but at the time of his father's death Parliament had passed a law abolishing hereditary peerages so he is not entitled to sit in the House of Lords, he cannot vote, and the Lords have protested at Monckton's claims which he in turn says are granted by the Queen as a personal favour. In fact, there is nothing in English law to prevent anyone from claiming an honorific title, with the exception that if say, Russtafa wants to call himself Dr Russtafa Sydney, he should make it clear that he is not a medical doctor and that he has no legal right to practice as a doctor. He might not have a PhD either, but if he changes his name by deed poll, he could be Doctor, Professor, or Lord Russtafa of King's Cross.

Moncton read classics at Cambridge, and became associated in the 1970s with the nucleus of the Centre Policy Studies which Keith Joseph ('the Mad Monk') set up as a direct challenge to the Conservative Party Research Department, and which developed the anti-Keynesian, pro-monetarist-Hayeki-Miseresian slash and burn ideology that was the foundation of Margaret Thatcher's success -he was in her Downing St poliy unit by 1982.

He is politically to the right but certainly at the start did not deny the human element in global warming, but has consistently claimed the consequences will not be as dire and that any new taxes are anathema. He has moved further to the right by becoming a prominent member of the United Kingdom Independence Party. UKIP argue that all of Britain's woes are caused by multiculturalism, immigration, and our memberhsip of Europe even though its leader Nigel Farage is married to a German and is the only elected UKIP member, sitting in, you guessed it, the European Parliament.

I once had a ridiculous exchange of views with a UKIP die hard on the usual issues and eventually got him to admit Britain had really started to go downhill as a consequence of the Roman invasion, even though Julius Caesar is not normally cited as the villain. I have little time for Budicaa of the Iceni, and much as I like forests and the colour blue, I don't intend to spend my sunset years running around Sherwood Forest wearing nothing but blue paint in search of a wild pig or some berries for my supper -luckily most of the British electorate doesn't want to either.

The point being that a lot of this so-called debate isn't actually about the climate, or the causes and effects of global warming: its about taxes, government, and who makes policy -by the time that governments come to a universal agreement, we could all be toast.

[russtafa]

And your area of scientific expertise is...?

i have a brain and can think for myself same as you i presume

[muh_muh]

And your area of scientific expertise is...?

he saw a universtity from the inside... once

[Faldur]

he saw a universtity from the inside... once

He knew someone who paid taxes.. once

[russtafa]

he saw a universtity from the inside... once

same as most people on this site with an opinion

[trish]

Don't make fun of russtafa, he had actually had a thought...once; but it turned out to be somebody else's thought, and it was wrong.

[russtafa]

Don't make fun of russtafa, he had actually had a thought...once; but it turned out to be somebody else's thought, and it was wrong.

so say's miss know it all

[Ben]

Watching the Arctic melt, I realise apathy must be frozen out

by Laurie Penny - 24 September 2011

We can choose abject complicity, or we can decide that it's not too late to build a better world.
The Fjord of Ilulissat in Greenland, which has lost 1,500 billion tonnes of ice since 2000, Photograph: Getty Images

There's nothing like a glacier crumbling into the sea in front of your eyes to remind you that climate change is more than an abstract reason to recycle egg boxes and wine bottles.
Right now, I'm writing from a small ship's cabin in one of the most isolated, desolate places on earth: the northern tip of Svalbard in the high Arctic, where I have come on an expedition, part of the point of which was to see what I've just seen. Which was a shelf of translucent blue ice the height of a house falling into the water like wet cake.
It's not that I didn't believe in climate change before this. On the contrary: I am of the background and generation that grew up in the mid-1990s with the notion of environmental destruction as an inevitability.
I was raised on the animation FernGully: the Last Rainforest and traumatic colouring books full of sad baby seals and herons choking on plastic bags. This gentle indoctrination was supposed to motivate us to grow up and save the planet, but by the time we were old enough to object, the forests were disappearing and the oilfields burning fast enough for it all to seem too late.
I now realise that, even before the Copenhagen Summit 2009 put paid to the prospect of a green international deal, I had decided that there was nothing I could do. At some point, I decided that my special fight was simply to make sure, to the best of my limited ability, that whatever society is left after the floodwaters settle is as fair and free as possible. I have this luxury, of course, because I grew up in a hilly place in England and my house is not going to be underwater for a while yet.
This, for the generation that grew up after the collapse of communism, is the way the world ends: not with a bang, but a bonfire. When I tried to explain the sense of finality to a friend who is old enough to have collected vinyl records before they were niche, he laughed at me. "Don't talk to me about Armageddon," he said, "when I was your age, we had the bomb to worry about."
The bomb, however, was a very different apocalypse from the inevitable, collective entropy of climate change and it demands an entirely different sort of complicity.
The greatest threat to the future of humanity is now not political brinkmanship, but paranoid indifference: the certainty that the future is both finite and short and that all we can do is burn what little of the remaining money we have and hope civilisation outlasts us.
This is a terribly foolish way to live. The anarchist thinker David Graeber writes in Debt: the First 5,000 Years that in response to the blinding obviousness of economic and ecological world buggeration, "the most common reaction - even from those who call themselves 'progressives' - is simply fear. We can no longer imagine an alternative that wouldn't be even worse." Graeber adds: "About the only thing we can imagine is catastrophe."
There is a bitter paradox to this apathetic fatalism that somehow incorporates its own denial. The abstract enormity of climate change and economic meltdown encourages a sort of helpless liberal Calvinism, complete with little rituals of composting orange peel and purchasing sustainable lingerie, as if such devotions might somehow spare us . Which, in a way, they will - if we are lucky enough to live in the cosseted bourgeois west, where you have to be flown out to witness a melting glacier to appreciate the cold reality.
Of course, many millions of people don't need to be told that burning half a trillion tonnes of fossil fuels has had some dodgy consequences for humanity.
At the same time as I'm on a boat watching the Arctic ice-shelf contribute theatrically to rising global sea-levels, hundreds have died in flooding in Pakistan, and over five million have been affected.
There comes a point when you have to make a choice. When a colossal wall of thousand-year-old-ice explodes right in front of you, with a noise like a very large bomb falling very far away, and you feel the chill sting of spray on your face as the ice is eaten away by human greed, you realise that a choice is still possible.
We can choose abject complicity, or we can decide that it's not too late to build a better world. My boots are still wet, so I'm for the latter.

[Stavros]

The Arctic is going to be the focus of intense political battles over the next 10 years, although I suspect the protagonists will not be the Arctic states, but those states and environmental activists in Greenpeace and similar bodies. The Arctic region's first nations have already had their lives turned upside down and inside out, the region is amongst the dirtiest per sq km in the world because for decades it was used as a global rubbish dump, a nuclear weapons testing site, and those vanity projects when some jaded sportsman or out of work comedian take a dog sled to the North Pole along with a camcorder. As for Pakistan, if they had a superior water management system than they have today, they could harness the power of water and control it, instead of being at its mercy -there are solutions to everything, there is no need for this cultural despair in the face of crumbling icebergs.

[russtafa]

fuck i will have to tell my ex to sell her waterfront property to me extra cheap lol