Tags
Addiction to Fossil Fuels, Antarctic Ice Melt, Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Corporate State, Eco-Apocalypse, Environmental Collapse, Extinction of Man, Gas Flaring, Greenland Ice Sheet Melt, Inverted Totalitarianism, Mass Die Off, Mega-Fires, Methane Clathrate Gun, Runaway Climate Change
In keeping with what I said earlier, I’m taking a break for a couple weeks from in-depth blogging, but until then I will post or reblog articles that happen to catch my eye.
Has mankind triggered the trip switch for his own extinction? Looking at just the headlines below and the comment from the Chemist, I would say the answer is a resounding “Yes!” This conclusion brings me no pleasure, but immeasurable depths of angst and depression. The so-called “doomers” are perhaps the most humanistic amongst the population. They see things as they are, not what people hope them to be or what many idealize industrial civilization to be. Nothing hides under the Sun.
and
and
and finally…
…with the following noteworthy comment:
Collapse of Industrial Civilization 
Pingback: Nothing Hides Under the Sun | OccuWorld
Industrial Civilization and Modern Man – elephants in a china shop…
…The study, Light-driven tipping points in polar ecosystems, will be published in the journal Global Change Biology.
Dr Graeme Clark, of the UNSW School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences, says the team’s research shows that polar ecosystems may be even more sensitive to climate change than previously thought.
“Even a slight shift in the date of the annual sea-ice departure could cause a tipping point, leading to widespread ecosystem shifts. On the Antarctic coast this may cause unique, invertebrate-dominated communities that are adapted to the dark conditions to be replaced by algal beds, which thrive on light, significantly reducing biodiversity,” Dr Clark says.
The invertebrates lost could include sponges, moss animals, sea squirts and worms. These animals perform important functions such as filtering of water and recycling of nutrients and provide a food source for fish and other creatures.
“This is a prime example of the large-scale ecological impacts that humans can impose through global warming – even in places as remote as Antarctica,” says UNSW team member, Associate Professor Emma Johnston…
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There is nowhere to run.
However, ground more than 5 metres above current sea level, away from large cities, in a place that has a temperate climate and evenly distributed rainfall probably offers the best opportunity of getting through the first bottleneck.
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We moved up into the mountains to escape the heat, similar to what all living things are doing. Those organisms whose climate niche was already at high elevations will truly have no place to run.
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More wacky news from our dystopic Alice-in-Wonderland world…
and this gem…
…‘Exterminating People’
John Ashcroft, the former Attorney General who prosecuted the war on terror under the administration of George W. Bush, appeared at Aspen as a board member of Academi. Responding to a question about U.S. over-reliance on the “kinetic” approach of drone strikes and special forces, Ashcroft reminded the audience that the U.S. also likes to torture terror suspects, not just “exterminate” them.
“It’s not true that we have relied solely on the kinetic option,” Ashcroft insisted. “We wouldn’t have so many detainees if we’d relied on the ability to exterminate people…We’ve had a blended and nuanced approach and for the guy who’s on the other end of a Hellfire missile he doesn’t see that as a nuance.”
Hearty laughs erupted from the crowd and fellow panelists. With a broad smile on her face, moderator Catherine Herridge of Fox News joked to Ashcroft, “You have a way with words.”
But Ashcroft was not done. He proceeded to boast about the pain inflicted on detainees during long CIA torture sessions: “And maybe there are people who wish they were on the end of one of those missiles.”…
…NSA Heroes, Saving Lives of Potential Consumers…
…[NSA chief General Keith] Alexander appeared in full military regalia, with colorful decorations and medallions covering his left breast. Casting himself as a stern but caring father who has the best interests of all Americans at heart, even if he can’t fully disclose his methods, he turned to the crowd and explained, “The bad guys…hide amongst us to kill our people. Our job is to stop them without impacting your civil liberties and privacy and these programs are set up to do that.”
“The reason we use secrecy is not to hide it from the American people, but to hide it from the people who walk among you and are trying to kill you,” Alexander insisted.
Corporations like AT&T, Google and Microsoft that had been compelled to hand over customer data to the NSA “know that we’re saving lives,” the general claimed. With a straight face, he continued, “And that’s good for business because there’s more people out there who can buy their products.”
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Mike I’m not sure if you’ve seen this small item. I noticed that Nature Bats Last was down last night. I tried again this morning and when I couldn’t get on even on another computer I sent guy an e-mail. Apparently Guy McPherson, in Amerstaerdam giving a series of presentations, already knew from what he replied to my e-mail.
What I got was “403 forbidden error was encountered” From what I understand a 403 error can block access to a site with “no explanation”
How does it feel living in the Panopticon?
It’s called the Panopticon effect” after the nineteenth century penal relic. The essential elements of Bentham’s design were not only that the custodians should be able to view the prisoners at all times (including times when they were in their cells), but also that the prisoners should be unable to see the custodians, and so could never be sure whether they were under surveillance or not.
What interest could a lot of eggheads and gray hairs discussing Near Term Human Extinction on an obscure web-site (Nature Bats Last) be to our massive security state? Maybe if the idea of Near Term Human Extinction took hold do you think people might be a little more difficult to control? If I know most Americans (consumers) I don’t believe they would actually give a shit*.
*some opinions may differ
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I just tried. Yes this is what I got:
I never told anyone but ulvfugl about what happened when I got locked out of my wordpress account. While locked out, I was corresponding to ulvfugl about the situation via gmail when suddenly a comment I made to him through gmail appeared as a comment on wordpress (I was unable to even log in to wordpress at that time).
Here was the comment:
“LOL. I think I’ve been hit by the cyber censors.”
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What happened to Brad Phillips and NTE ning ?
Psychological auto immune response
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Interesting article here:
Obama Starting to Lose It Over Snowden
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But finally we have it: a study that shows conclusively that global warming has nothing to do with fossil fuel use……
http://www.provedplusprobable.com/study-global-warming-linked-to-sun-not-human-activity/
As long as this crap continues to come from the fossil fuel related groups, most people will be confused enough about the matter to not want to sacrifice to stop using fossil fuels. In other words, WAF.
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The world is still building coal plants, the Arctic is melting, the methane clathrate gun has been triggered, etc… Le’s not have anymore illusions that there will be a sudden awakening. Industrial civilization’s infrastructure was built with fossil fuels and will go out with fossil fuels. What I find even more dystopic is that America’s surveillance state is moving full steam ahead.
50 years from now what will they be trying to protect????!!!???
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Ah, but they will no longer be ‘merely human’, and vulnerable to things like temperature and the need for food, will they. They have a plan.
Transhumanism takes human enhancement even further, by morphing the vision of a perfect man into a human-machine complex properly called “posthuman.” This is an effort to break every human limitation and redefine personhood. Nick Bostrom, Oxford philosophy professor and co-founder of the World Transhumanism Association, writes that posthumans will realize eternal youth and health, gain complete control over their minds and emotions, and “experience novel states of conscious-ness” that present human minds cannot imagine.5
Posthumans may even choose to discard their bodies in favor of life as “information patterns on vast su-per-fast computer networks.”6
and they have allied with ‘God’…
A large contingent of contemporary evangelicals has embraced some aspects of the technocratic ideals of Transhumanism and is drawn by its motivations. They embrace the belief that Christians are Christ’s “on-going incarnation in the world.”
Their new focus is on an earthly inheritance for the church. In concrete terms this means that Christians are called upon to usher humanity into a new stage of its existence. Through individual Christians’ labor, all the evils in society will slowly be conquered until they are no more. Only after the Kingdom of God has been established on earth by human effort, they believe, will the Second Coming of Christ occur.
The evangelicals who pursue these and similar goals are called Dominionists. They belong to a diverse conglomerate of movements, covering the entire theological spectrum of evangelicalism from the charismatic Manifested Sons of God to the neo-Puritan Reconstructionists.
http://www.khouse.org/articles/2011/1002/
See ? Does not matter if they trash nature and the planet, they don’t need it, it’s not important, God has a plan for them….
It doesn’t include us.
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Weather as a Force Multiplier: Owning the Weather in 2025
“…Current technologies that will mature over the next 30 years will offer anyone who has the necessary resources the ability to modify weather patterns and their corresponding effects, at least on the local scale. Current demographic, economic, and environmental trends will create global stresses that provide the impetus necessary for many countries or groups to turn this weather-modification ability into a capability.
In the United States, weather-modification will likely become a part of national security policy with both domestic and international applications…”
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it’s all in the movies
http://www.itsbetterupthere.com/site/
the ruling class just moves off planet, then Earth just becomes one giant prison planet, just like the conspiracy theorists say.
how high can you jump/ how low can you go?
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Right mike – we probably don’t have 50 years the way things are proceeding. It’s a race between which system will trigger the big die-off of humanity first, the clathrate gun or financial collapse of the global Ponzi scheme banking system. Either way we’re going to get BOTH, and then some as pandemics, mega-fires, infrastructure collapse, violence, clean water depletion, broken supply lines for food and necessary commodities, volcanic activity and earthquakes, super storms and hurricanes (and more) all interact, cause and reinforce each other.
I see no way to avoid any of this, especially since we blindly continue business as usual – killing ourselves by destroying our environment. “Brilliant!”
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Yes, Guy says it’s down, doesn’t know why.
I thought maybe the mudhut was hit by lightning.
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This site is becoming known in the blogosphere as the ‘doomest’ of ‘doomer’ sites:
“A small blog listed Nextbigfuture among three optimistic future related blogs (Singularity Hub and KurzweilAI are the two others). He lists six blogs that are pessimistic about the future.
One of the pessimistic blogs is collapse of industrial civilization which has a sample article that proposes that a collapse will be well underway by 2047(collapse of agriculture, collapse of economies and global trade, limited nuclear exchanges from Pakistan bombs getting into the hands of extremists) and virtually complete collapse by 2087 (only pockets of survival at the poles, the rest of the world uninhabitable because of the runaway heating). Collapse of Industrial Civilization looks silly in its doomer extremism. There are affordable technological options such as stratoshield that can be used in the event of climate change becoming a lot more serious. There are many other affordable and simple options to mitigate and reduce temperature changes (white roofs, dealing with soot)…” – link
Techno-optimism abounds!
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…looks silly in its doomer extremism.
Hahahaha. Thing is, when you actually talk to such people, or read their thoughts, you discover they have absolutely no idea about how ANYTHING actually works.
They are the people who think that food comes from shops. They are the majority of people on the internet, around half a billion english speaking computer literate city dwellers, a whole generation who have shared a similar up bringing and education, watched the same movies, and share the same illusions. Science degrees or arts degrees, the same clueless middle class lack of understanding of how natural systems really work prevails.
I have been paying close attention to discussion on various blogs and forums re the methane over the last few days, and I’m staggered by the comments. The percentage of people who have any idea that we are living a rather fragile existence on a planet with constraints, which we exceeded a long time ago, is very small.
Even among the well educated scientists, the arrogance and complacency is quite shocking to me.
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The Precautionary principle actually is meant for anything which might threaten all those myths of mankind’s technological supremacy over nature. The problem is that there is plenty of scientific and empirical evidence to show we are already toast.
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Presenting a counterargument which boils down to “my opponents are all idiots” to someone suggesting various solutions not only stinks of ideological dogma but can also be interpreted as an argument that you are what you claim your opponents are.
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We don’t have the time to spoon-feed you on climate tipping points, energy and EROI, the importance of biological diversity, the depletion of natural resources, the infinite growth paradigm of capitalism, or the sundry other topics you would need to be educated on the subject of industrial civilization’s collapse. If you have a proper argument to make, then make it.
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As you’re not presenting any proper arguments neither will I.
I’m just stopping by to call the bullshit. After that I’ll find someone who are willing to engage in a civilized debate with a mutual goal of reaching some form of conclusion, as opposed to just defending their doctrine or ideology by using argument ad hominem or similar appeals to things that are not related to the subject or topic being debated.
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Useless troll.
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What ‘solutions’ are you suggesting ? There ARE no solutions. The predicament we are in is terminal. We are on the brink of a mass extinction event created by our own reckless behaviour.
The ‘solutions’ that naive people propose will only compound the problems which we already have.
This is not defending a doctrine or an ideology, it’s recognising the brutal harsh reality of the situation.
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Check out this nonsense:
“The planet is warming and here’s one surprisingly easy solution: block the sun. But do we dare to do it?
The cover story in the current issue of Harvard Magazine is about David Keith, an applied physicist at Harvard, who is developing a technique for what’s known as “solar engineering”—placing what amount to shields around the Earth to prevent sunlight from entering the atmosphere and heating the planet.”
Harvard magazine!!!
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See comment here.
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asdf the arguments that you are talking about have all been learned here and most don’t have the time or the interest for relearning the basics; that’s why we’re here. You might find some of these “proper arguments” over at The Oil Drum but you’d better hurry, they’re closing their doors.
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Who looks silly???
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All these people…
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yeah, we need to get one of them there Stratoshields.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fountains_of_Paradise
we must not allow a Stratoshield gap!
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Videos of Kevin Moore posted here:
and
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Silly doomer extremism – all you have to do is look around to see that life is dying. It’s a trend in the ocean and a trend on the land. It’s visible. There are dead zones in rivers, lakes and seas and they are getting worse all the time. Sea mammals are washing up on beaches. 90% of the large fish in the sea are gone. That is effectively extinct, and the effects will cascade through the ecosystem. The sixth great extinction has begun, that is what scientists tell us. Insects, bats, frogs, tigers, songbirds…with the possible exception of some particularly hardy omnivores (crows come to mind) that are very adaptable, there is an overwhelming march towards extinction in the living world. Why that wouldn’t include us I can’t imagine.
Trees are dying prematurely everywhere. That’s a fact that has been documented by scientists. No trees = no precipitation = desertification = no agriculture = no food. Even primitive tribes that aren’t dependant on modern amenities will have a very hard time feeding themselves in a depauparate world. All that without even considering ocean acidification and climate change with tipping points that have already been crossed such as, oh, melting ice and wildfires. With the albedo effect, there’s no going back. I discussed Hansen’s papers extensively on a blog post today (http://witsendnj.blogspot.com/2013/08/blog-post.html) showing that by his calculations, we’re screwed because not only do we have to STOP all coal emissions within five years from now, we actually have to also draw down CO2 already emitted back to 350 ppm (at least). And all that was calculated before the fracking and tar sands craze.
So why do we conclude we’re doomed? Maybe because we look around and notice what people are actually doing. They are pulling out every bit of fossil fuel they can and burning it. When they are finished with that, they will burn whatever trees didn’t go in the wildfires (look at Greece now and any prior civilization). And even if the trees weren’t dying from pollution, we’re not reforesting as his work says we must, deforestation is increasing everywhere, in the US and in the tropics, for biofuels and palm oil and cattle.
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Glad to see you back.
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I always read your posts xraymike, they are excellent. But for a while my comments kept disappearing and it was discouraging so I stopped.
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Well shit! There is truly a glitch in the system then because I have never censored your comments. Robert Scribbler had a point.
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I didn’t think you were censoring them. The interwebs are full of glitches – look at NBL!
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Jesus. You should read the delusional responses here:
http://nextbigfuture.com/2013/08/what-is-business-as-usual-in-terms-of.html
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I would propose that we all try to keep our eye on the ball. That means the virtual elimination of anthropogenic atmospheric CO2 emissions quickly enough to save our civilization.
To accomplish this – and this may sound very silly – means all we have to do is something very simple: we have to build and deploy enough new renewable energy infrastructure to replace every calorie of fossil fuel being burned for energy, and do this quickly enough. That is, as foolishly simple as it sounds, all we really HAVE to do.
There are lots of other things we COULD do which would be nice. We could insulate our homes and businesses better, have more intelligent policies on a whole slew of topics that effect consumption, population, sustainability,and social justice.
But I would urge that these are secondary issues and that the best use of our intelligent sensibilities is to remain steadfast on our primary goal. It must consume our time, interest and energies.
The good news is that we already have the technology to succeed with our ambitious primary goal. We have the money to accomplish the goal – it will not be all that expensive, even compared only to what we currently spend for fossil fuels every year. It will be ridiculously inexpensive compared to not accomplishing our goal.
In fact, I believe we could accomplish our goal while increasing the money in homeowner’s and business owner’s pockets while simultaneously increasing our quality of life. But we have to change the basic way the world is thinking about renewable energy.
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I’ll go with nearly anything which changes the status quo. I supported Jill Stein.
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“we have to build and deploy enough new renewable energy infrastructure to replace every calorie of fossil fuel being burned for energy, and do this quickly enough”
That is no solution. 1. it isn’t possible to replace the concentrated power of fossil fuels with renewables to the extent that contemporary first-world society can be maintained, let alone add the energy the developing world demands. 2. “renewables” depend on non-renewable resources – minerals and fossil fuels – to be manufactured, transported and maintained. 3. providing renewable power will only increase the total amount of energy used, it will not reduce the use of fossil fuels. 4. even if climate change from CO2 didn’t exist, we are headed for collapse from other factors, all stemmng mainly from overpopulation and overconsumption. 5. some individuals might voluntarilly reduce their consumption or decide not to reproduce, but as a whole, the 7 billion will not (Hardin’s Tragedy of the Commons). 6. It’s too late to save civilization – the tipping points have been crossed, are inexorable, exponential and unstoppable.
If you want to advocate a complete or near-complete cessation of fossil fuel use, you should at least acknowledge that it will only work with a concurrent reduction of everything else. I do. I think it should be rationed and made illegal (internationally) except for absolutely essential purposes. Like Nate said in the video you linked to Mike, people (if there are any) in the future will look back at how we squandered fossil fuel on trips to the cinema and be incredulous at our stupidity.
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Agreed.
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You mean you want to keep the Machine that is destroying life on Earth, going by any means possible, for as long as possible….
You didn’t get the memo that reminded everyone that all of what you are calling ‘renewable energy infrastructure’ depends upon fossil fuels.
Check it out.
And when you have done that, there’s a few more problems to address, like the impossibility of feeding and sustaining 7 plus billion people without fossil fuels, and the fact that the most powerful entities on Earth will not agree to your plan, and that there is no time left to perform this miraculous switch over to renewable energy before the effects of climate chaos disrupt all the global systems.
There’s a few more, but that’s enough to be getting on with.
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I’m in full agreement with you ulvfugl, but as you said another time – we need something to do between now and our final demise.
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‘elimination of anthropogenic atmospheric CO2 emissions quickly enough to save our civilization’
Elimination of CO2 emissions and saving the present civilisation are MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVE concepts.
I went over all this stuff a few days ago;
1) the present civilisation cannot exist without the consumption of fossil fuels: the whole basis of industrial civilisation is the utilisation of fossil fuels. Everything we see and do is the product of fossil fuels.
2) it is physically impossible to maintain anything more than a tiny fraction of present energy-squandering arrangements using so-called renewables.
3) it takes a lot of fossil fuel energy and fossil fuel molecules to construct and maintain so-called renewables.
‘our civilisation’. Whose civilisation might that be? America’s? it certainly is not the civilisation of the vast majority of humans on this planet. America’s civilisation is predicated on the transfer of resources and embedded human labour from the undeveloped and developing world to America in exchange for pieces of paper or computer digits, (plus the added bonus of not being bombed into the Stone Age by the US military).
It is abundantly clear to anyone who has made any kind of proper study of humanity’s predicament that the ONLY way to preserve the human species beyond the middle of this century and have a planet inhabited by a diverse range of species is to abandon practically everything civilisation does and everything industrial civilisation stands for.
And we know that is not going to happen.
And it’s probably too late even for that ‘drastic’ action, even if it were accepted politically as being necessary. Tipping points have already been passed:
Watch the video of Jeremy Jackson speaking at the naval college and get back to me when you have.
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It is difficult to decide which is in the worse state as a consequence of human activity, the land or the oceans.
The following excellent lecture tells it how it really is: the planet I was born on ceased to exist a few years later, and the planet i was born on was a mere shadow of the one that existed a hundred years before.
Now there are ‘flashing red lights and a screaming sirens’ everywhere: And the alarms are being ignored everywhere.
Evening Lecture | Jeremy Jackson: Ocean Apocalypse
For the benefit of those who do not have time to watch the video, it can be summarised as: the annihilation of large organisms and large structures, and the rise of jellyfish, bacteria and slime…….all of it at the hands of humans.
And we know that ‘dead’ oceans = a largely dead planet.
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http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/6599/
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Have to admit, until recently I was there. Put all the money we spend on wars and build solar plants, windmills, wave energy generators, etc etc.
Just more destruction of habitat for our cousins, the critters and plants with whom we share the planet.
Well, we don’t have to worry, really. We will still spend on the wars, and our banking, money problems are growing exponentially. I don’t think we will build so much of these alternative sources anyway….not in time to really stem the collapse that has to come eventually.
Thanks Orion, for publishing that, and thank you Mike for bringing it to your site.
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Companion to Kingsnorth’s essay, here’s Orion’s live web audio discussion featuring Kingsnorth along with David Abram and Lierre Kieth…
http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/audio-video/item/paul_kingsnorth_friends_discuss_confessions_of_a_recovering_environmentalis/
And “Gaia in Turmoil”, a Jan ’12 essay by David Abram…
https://www.adbusters.org/magazine/99/gaia-turmoil.html
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Re Paul’s link to the loonie idea to block out the Sun, and, for that matter all the other lunacy…. and the troll… I remember Guy saying he doesn’t speak to deniers any more. I think it’s a good policy. It just wears you out for no good reason.
People think Napoleon was a brilliant General, but if you read about the battle of Jena, he made a complete mess of everything, and he only won because the Prusssians made an even bigger mess.
That’s how humans conduct their affairs. Going from one fuck up to the next, whilst declaring that it’s all glorious. They are all insane.
Those crazy ‘Christians’ who think that ‘God’ wants them to do this or that, and the Posthumanists, they are all barking mad. Imvho, of course, hahaha.
I’ve been pursuing my study of the mythos logos thing I’ve mentioned on NBL, and am somewhat amazed to find the Gospel of St John, which all Christians know so well, and which they take to be to do with their Jesus, has really nothing to do with that tradition at all.
That intro, ‘In the beginning was the word..’ ( logos ), that’s from the Greek philosophical tradition that Peter Kingsley goes on about, and has absolutely no connection to the Old Testament Jewish tradition that Jesus was supposedly a part of. That’s so crazy. It’s like sneaking a bit from the Viking sagas into the Bible and nobody notices.
You said we need something to do between now and our final demise. xray, yeah, well, that’s a personal matter for each of us to decide, Assange mentions it in the video I posted above, he resists, I think it matters that one retains one’s self-respect, integrity, dignity, principles, in so far as one can, and fights for what one believes to be right.
I don’t think that I can gain any of what I would wish for, in a practical sense, so the only reason to strive is out of moral conviction.
I have 25 acres, where I can help wildlife. That’s about all I can do. I wish someone would help me sometimes, but as everyone understands getting along with people is difficult, hahahaha.
I’m convinced that we get the mass extinction event. I can’t see how it can be avoided. But I also acknowledge that the future is not fixed. The Yellowstone supervolcano or an asteroid or an unknown superbug that causes a pandemic, or something nobody has ever envisaged at all, could change the picture.
But looking at all the standard ways of inferring the future from trends, I don’t see how we get beyond two or three decades. I think we get totalitarian fascist dystopia and wars, as the insane ones strive to maintain power and control, and then they lose it, and we get Mad Max, and a few years of ‘isolated pockets’, and then ten million years of things being pretty quiet.
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For anyone who actually thinks about this stuff, this might be of interest, if you have the time to watch it
Jacques Ellul was a French theologian/sociologist and anarchist. He first became well-known to American readers when his book The Technological Society was published in English in 1964.
This book leveled a broad critique of technique, a term that means more than gadgets and machines – as the English word technology means.
For Ellul, technique represented an entire way of life characterized by life fragmented so that efficiency ultimately rules over all ethical decisions.
Ellul warned that technique was having drastic effects on all aspects of modern life. His books, Anarchy and Christianity, The Politics of God and the Politics of Man are two examples of how his political and religious outlooks mutually reinforced one another.
Many Green Anarchists have cited Ellul’s work on technique as influential on their thought.
http://watchdocumentary.org/watch/the-betrayal-by-technology-a-portrait-of-jacques-ellul-video_1fdd5efd3.html
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Thanks for the book title; we’ll look into it.
Another headline from today…
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And from that same article:
“Diffenbaugh and Field also reviewed results from two-dozen climate models to describe possible climate outcomes from present day to the end of the century. In general, extreme weather events, such as heat waves and heavy rainfall, are expected to become more severe and more frequent.
For example, the researchers note that, with continued emissions of greenhouse gases at the high end of the scenarios, annual temperatures over North America, Europe and East Asia will increase 2-4 degrees C by 2046-2065. With that amount of warming, the hottest summer of the last 20 years is expected to occur every other year, or even more frequently.
By the end of the century, should the current emissions of greenhouse gases remain unchecked, temperatures over the northern hemisphere will tip 5-6 degrees C warmer than today….”
Naturally, no interest in this study by our main stream media. That is the craziest part of all.
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‘That’s how humans conduct their affairs. Going from one fuck up to the next, whilst declaring that it’s all glorious. They are all insane.’
Yes, humans go from one fuck-up to the next. But until recently most humans were not insane, just stupid. And it tended to be those in command who made the stupidest decisions, resulting in dire consequences for those they commanded..
Gettysburg: Lee ordered soldiers to march UPHILL across open ground to attack Union positions.
WWI was one fuck-up after another, e.g. Gallipoli, the Australians took a key position overlooking the beaches and were told not to hold it.
Battle of Britain: Goering ordered German fighters (which at the time were faster and better armed than the British) to fly SLOWLY IN FORMATION with bombers.
General insanity did not start to predominate until ultra-cheap oil arrived on the scene.
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Human caused problems increase exponentially.
Why?
Because each solution to a problem that mankind comes up with causes several new problems.
This has been going on since man put together his first tool kit.
Solutions always cause problems, most of them not apparent at the time, but several new problems each time a solution is found to a problem.
A graph of all new problems since the early days would look like all exponential curves, streaming almost vertically upward today, and no end in sight.
And so we are trying to deal with millions of problems, each begging a solution, each solution causing more problems, soon to be numbered in the billions….then in the trillions….and on and on.
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@ kevin
And it tended to be those in command who made the stupidest decisions, resulting in dire consequences for those they commanded…
Puzzling, isn’t it. Cameron was sent by Thatcher to collect the nuclear weapons from S. Africa just prior to the end of white supremacy, lest ‘they fall into the wrong hands’.
He oversaw them being packed into crates and loaded onto the ship and accompanied them back to Britain, where the crates were found to be empty. The weapons arrived in N. Korea. You’d think that anybody that inept would be confined to making tea for the remainder of their career, but instead he gets the top job.
Why is that ? Is it because everybody else is even more incompetent ? Or because he inherited a lot of money and is married into the right families ? He’s obviously just about smart enough to deliver a fridge to the right address on the right day all by himself, but I wouldn’t want him doing anything more demanding than that if he was working for me. Apparently the reason the Tory Party chose him over the other guy who wanted the job, was because Cameron spoke without reading from notes. But that’s something any third rate actor can do, and there’s thousands of them unemployed that would be happy to have the work… It is a puzzle.
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When I was a naval officer I watched as some moved up in rank quickly, and others did not. What I observed was that those who moved up quickly, into the more important jobs, were those who had a certain conceit about them. They simply “knew” the answers to anything and “knew” they were right about the decisions they made. They took no time rechecking their decisions, and pressed on. People generally accepted their decisions because these guys seemed so sure of themselves. They didn’t confuse the issues with better information. They charged ahead, right or wrong, and people felt comfortable with their confidence.
But they were solving problems by creating more problems, but nobody seemed to care.
That’s been going on for a very long time.
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I guess that’s known as ‘showing leadership qualities’, in other words, you charge ahead, even though you have not the slightest idea where you are going… and everyone else follows, because the guy in front seems to know where he’s going…
Thing is, we only have this one planet, which means without any other life-system to compare, we can only make guesses.
To the best of my knowledge, we have Lovelock’s theory, Ward’s theory, and Donella Meadow’s systems theory, and that’s about it. Whichever way you look at it, everything we are doing is wrong, and guarantees our imminent demise.
If I was given supreme power and control over all heads of state who followed my orders to the letter, could the situation be changed ?
I don’t think so, because I think it is already too late, because of the CO2 in the pipeline and the time lag of its effects, a whole lot of reasons, and the consequences that the remedial policies would demand.
For example, what that commenter said, ending fossil fuels. When transport and agriculture, and so much else depend upon fossil fuels, the required rapid ending means crashing life as we know it for a couple of billion people, which means they die. Who is going to make that decision ? In public as a matter of political choice ?
Nobody.
Nobody is even willing to make a decision to limit the increase in population, or to attempt to control corporations or to attempt to control finance and banking or to attempt to control the arms trade, or to police international seaways to stop the destruction of the commons of the oceans.
The people who hold power in the world at the moment, that is the major blocs, the G20, etc, are irresponsible criminals, who are unaccountable for their conduct.
To change the future, we’d have to change that system. I don’t know if that is even possible, I don’t know if there is time, I don’t know if it would be possible to replace it with anything that could be more benign and intelligent. I think it’s good to try.
kevin mentioned very interesting examples from previous wars, etc. Thinking back over the major upheavals of the last two centuries is instructive, but we have to update our models, because now it’s different in so many ways. This is partly a virtual war, it’s not about invading territory with boots on the ground and bayonets, it’s cyberwarfare with ideas, and it’s global as well as being intergenerational.
As Assange said, a million new mobile phones get connected every day…
The USA isn’t about FEMA camps, the whole territory becomes a prison, surveilled by the Panopticon, and that monstrosity is not going to give up or go away, unless or until it is forcibly dismantled or the Machine that sustains it collapses.
Meanwhile, there are the few remaining areas beyond it’s control and reach…
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More news of interest…
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“America’s Dangerous Pipelines”…
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Breaking News
US Study: Global Warming Makes People Violent
August 01, 2013
A group of U.S. scientists says it has found another consequence of global warming — anger.
A study in the journal Science says that as global temperatures get hotter, so does our temper.
The researchers looked at a connection between the Earth’s climate and war dating back to 10,000 BC. They say people become more ill-tempered and violent even during slight rises in temperature or brief rainy periods.
This includes everything from more wars to domestic violence and even baseball pitchers deliberately throwing at batters.
One expert says the world will be a very violent place by the middle of the century if climate change continues.
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Appears Nature Bats Last was hacked. Here’s Guy’s explanation.
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Guy Mc Pherson’s Facebook Comment About Being Hacked: “Nature Bats Last is still inoperative. I received this message from a colleague: “My tech guru took a look at your problem. It looks like someone reset permissions on your site so pages can’t load pages. Easy to do with a script, hard to do by accident. AKA, you were hacked.”
I’m participating in a hacker conference in The Netherlands, and I had the good fortune to have tea with Ray McGovern this morning. I’m preparing tonight’s presentation and working with the website host to get Nature Bats Last back online. This is strictly a first-world problem, though I’m working toward a solution between other brushfires. Thanks for your patience and support.”
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” 1. it isn’t possible to replace the concentrated power of fossil fuels with renewables to the extent that contemporary first-world society can be maintained, let alone add the energy the developing world demands.”
Really? Why not? Let me guess….Are you going to quote the Second Law of Thermodynamics or perhaps the Bible as a proof source? :>D
Impossible is it!?! Good grief! 😀
This concept of yours seems to be the Law of The land around here, but, folks, this is a pretty unusual website. It’s nihilism central around here!
Please explain to me how it is not possible to run our country and/or the world on renewable energy instead of fossil fuels. Spell it out for me – I double dare you – don’t just make another assertion. (You got a hell of a lot of ‘slaining to do, Lucy.)
Besides the fact that your claim doesn’t cut it from a common sense perspective, there is actual peer-reviewed literature with a much different conclusion. For example, here (again) are actual scientists who say the exact opposite of your assertion:
Click to access JDEnPolicyPt1.pdf
Click to access DJEnPolicyPt2.pdf
Please tell me what is wrong with that published analysis.
And then tell me how, with 10,000 times more renewable energy then we could possibly use (even if exponential growth continued unabated for the next ten thousand years) just sitting out there waiting to be harvested, that a first-world society could not be maintained – from an energy perspective.
Because it seems to me that, once the renewable infrastructure is up, -> there are no further fuel costs. Exactly unlike fossil fuels, did you notice? Tell me how an unlimited supply of essentially free energy is incompatible with a first-world society?
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“Because it seems to me that, once the renewable infrastructure is up, -> there are no further fuel costs.”
This is laughable. Do you think the renewable infrastructure is PERMANENT?
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Concerning Gingerbaker,
Jesus. I just posted an article here explaining why renewable energy is a myth. This is elementary stuff.
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FUEL costs. F. U. E. L. Costs.
Way to miss the point completely.
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GB, have you really seen a major push to get off of fossil fuels? I don’t. I see, after 30 years of global warming science being well known and settled, an INCREASE in fossil fuels. I don’t see this turning around anytime soon.
We have no substitutes for oil to drive ocean transport, jets or any planes, or large truck transport. Do you see a real willingness on the part of humanity to do away with these things? I don’t see it at all. In fact the world’s auto fleet, running on oil, is growing in numbers every year. Coal use is increasing. The business community is gung Ho about fracking, tar sands, deep water drilling. All of it will increase for many years.
So when, GB, is your theoretical renewable energy system going to begin its no fossil fuel world? Hundreds of years from now? Do you realize where we are as far as CO2 levels and predicted catastrophic climate change? We don’t have the time to theorize. Believing in that dream world is on a par with the very religious just knowing The Lord will save us.
If you think we are on the cusp of a big change in thinking about fossil fuels, check out the business journals, like Forbes or WSJ. They are barely admitting it is getting warmer, and seem convinced this is a good thing for investors. These people rule the world. They want to mine and drill all they can.
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Exactly what I was going to say!
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“If you think we are on the cusp of a big change in thinking about fossil fuels, check out the business journals, like Forbes or WSJ. ”
That misses the point of the discussion. The discussion is: Is it technically possible to have a first-world society using 100% renewable energy.
I provided a peer-reviewed proof source that demonstrates that the answer is “Yes”, and asked for specific rebuttal.
NO ONE has yet rebutted this on any level yet in this thread (I haven’t read below your post yet. Unfortunately, replies to my posts are not being forwarded to my inbox from this site, for some reason)
I agree with you completely about the near complete failure of the U.S. to actually address the issue, and with the corporate mindset, which, as far as I am concerned, is tantamount – no, correct that – should be deemed literally as a crime against humanity.
I do have some ideas on how to correct these problems.
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I agree with you about two things. This website is not doing what it is supposed to do as far as sending new posts to my email address. I can’t figure Out what is wrong.
Agree also: it IS truly criminal what the corporate media, and all the so called great journalists, are doing as far as avoiding presenting the really dire information about climate change to the general population.
They are not just being sloppy here. There is a concerted effort to censor the frightening information that scientists all over the world are telling us. The stuff is all over the scientific literature, pretty hard to miss. Almost every issue of Science or Nature has stuff that should be headlines in The Economist, WSJ, NYT’s, etc. but it is all completely ignored.
Only The Guardian/Independent put out adequate information. They are independently owned.
I think there may or may not be real technical solutions to the problem of securing enough energy from renewable sources to meet our needs. That could probably be batted around for a long time without clear conclusions. But when we consider the political problems, big fossil fuel propaganda money, the inability of most humans to give a shit, diminishing resources of all kinds, and the problems already being encountered from changes in climate, which soon will be much worse, it hardly matters what is theoretically possible.
If it isn’t going to happen, it hardly matters what is possible.
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In the real world…
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I guess on ‘your’ planet there is no such thing as corrosion, no such thing as storm damage, no such thing as bearings wearing out, no such thing as lightning strikes, and no such thing as thin film diffusion.
I guess on ‘your’ planet people find huge limps of copper ore lying around and convert them into cables using wood fires.
,
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Woodfires?
You do realize that *before* we move to 100% renewable energy, we must, of course, produce our energy with its present mix of carbon and non carbon fuels.
But, for heaven’s sake – the point is that once we have our 100% renewable infrastructure up and running, that is all we need to use. Huge amounts of electricity for the taking, ,none of it adding to atmospheric CO2. We can use as much of this as we want, all day, every day – guilt-free.
FFS – yours is now about the third such posting I have read with the same theme (that the only alternative to a fossil-fuel society is a stone age society!?!)
does nobody here have the imagination to envision a clean energy future?
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‘But, for heaven’s sake – the point is that once we have our 100% renewable infrastructure up and running, that is all we need to use.’
Dreams are free.
In the real world it takes continuous inputs or energy and materials derived from fossil fuels to keep renewable energy systems functioning. Corrosion, burn-outs, storm damage, lightning strikes, declining efficiency of systems etc. Gaia pulverises everything in the long term. and converts it all into sediment (except certain partially degraded plastics, which seem destined to drift in the oceans for eternity).
Anyway, the theoretical argument has no value. The construction of a worldwide ‘renewable’ system would require more resources than are available, and the embedded CO2 would be more than enough to push the atmospheric CO2 level way beyond habitability; level and push the oceans into such severe acidification most extant species would vanish..
On the other hand, if you are talking about population collapse down to less than 1% of current population, there could be some possibility of establishing a ‘renewables’ society for a brief period, depending on the rate at which the various metrics of survivability decline.
The really interesting thing is that if there had been no Industrial Revolution, humanity would have hit the population wall long ago, and death from war and disease may have permitted continuation of the human species, along with all the others already wiped out or in the process of being wiped out in the Sixth Great Extinction Event.
Converting as much of the Earth as possible into human biomass is not a smart plan. That is what ‘our leaders’ continue to propose.
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“And then tell me how, with 10,000 times more renewable energy then we could possibly use (even if exponential growth continued unabated for the next ten thousand years) just sitting out there waiting to be harvested, that a first-world society could not be maintained – from an energy perspective.” –
thats just plain wrong. see an exellent post here for instance: http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/07/galactic-scale-energy/
where r ur ten thousand years of exponential growth? it seems u just do not understand what exponential means…
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Obviously, unabated growth can not continue unabated for ten thousand years. But thanks for trying to derail the conversation.
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oh good then, thanks I won’t have to. For people with irrational hope that we can grow forever on a finite planet, it’s basically a faith or belief, and just about impossible to argue with based on facts. It’s the same as with people who have any sort of religious conviction. It’s not based on evidence so it can’t be dispelled with by using evidence. Chris Clugston has probably made the most comprehensive list of non-renewable resources that are running out fast that are essential to manufacture so-renewable energy infrastructure, to say nothing of all the mining and transport and construction that requires fossil fuels. There’s no green fuel for air travel for instance, so if anybody is going to make a case for renewables, they’d have to propose grounding almost all of the planes if not all. (notice – they never do that.) Ditto for shipping – they’d probably have to be as big as Hawaii to collect enough solar power to continue international shipping trade, which is currently run on the most filty fuels available that are illegal on land. see: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1229857/How-16-ships-create-pollution-cars-world.html) Mark Jacobson is a nice person but he’s a little desperate, like a lot of young climate scientists who don’t want to follow their own work to it’s logical conclusion.
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Mark Jacobson’s plan is to run shipping and flight on liquid hydrogen.
Pertaining to this discussion on renewable energy, Alice Friedemann discussed a recent paper by Professor Charles Hall…
[What is global EROI now? A Review of 2012 EROI of Global Energy Resources]
“Most alternative renewable energy sources appear, at this time, to have a considerably lower EROI values than any of the nonrenewable fossil fuels. But wind and photovoltaic energy are touted as having environmental benefits which may be substantial. These benefits may in fact have larger initial carbon footprints than originally suggested. Factors such as the oil, natural gas and coal employed in the creation, transport and implementation of wind turbine and PV panels may not be adequately represented in some cost-benefit analysis nor have the energy costs pertaining to intermittency.”
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And for the EROI(or EROEI) illiterate…
EROI downward spiral
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‘Mark Jacobson’s plan is to run shipping and flight on liquid hydrogen’
Good luck with that.
It takes more energy to make hydrogen than is released when it is utilised, i.e. it is an energy black hole.
Hydrogen needs to be cooled to about MINUS 250oC to liquefy it. And be maintained at that incredibly low temperature. Good luck with that.
Hydrogen has the smallest molecular size of any substance, an incredibly low energy density, and a great tendency to become gaseous and escape, so massive tanks of great thickness, covered with a huge thickness of insulation and sealed with the most superb seals available would be required. You’d need an airship to get the thing off the ground. And we all know how well airships performed in the 1930s. Good luck with that.
It’s all delusional nonsense, churned out by the scientifically illiterate (or engineers, who know how to design stuff but not much else).
By the way, if America cannot even maintain the infrastructure it has at the moment (bridges falling down, roads cracking up, sink holes, municipalities going bankrupt etc.), how does anyone imagine there will be money and resources to replace EVRERYTHING with new technology that is far more expensive and difficult to maintain than existing technology?
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Aside from the other NNR’s that preclude endless growth…is this alchemy or legit?
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/08/130801142331.htm
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Hi Gail,
I guess it’s legit, but there’s already hundreds of other legit inventions over the last few decades that can produce small scale greenish energy for local requirements, that are hailed as eureka moments and then nothing much happens.
I noticed in the study GB posted, the authors mentioned ‘social and political’. Well, that’s the thing, isn’t it.
If you live in a soceity with batshit crazy people who insist that ‘free market capitalism’ and Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand ( which our friend Orlov memorably attached to an Invisible Idiot ), then you don’t get the ‘sensible intelligent least harmful best long term’ solution, you get the solution that makes most money for Koch Industries, and you can’t regulate against pollution and environmental damage and poisoning people, because the rich powerful corporations are ‘people too’ and they can buy the regulators and make the rules.
So, even if this invention was the perfect solution, by the time the system gets changed ( how ? By a revolution ? ) and then the old technology gets replaced when it’s life is over – typically 15, 25 or 50 year designed life spans – and investors look at putting money into some new way to power their industrial gear…
Well, you see where I’m going… 🙂
But okay, there’s people who want hope. Take the idea, take it to the World Bank, to the UN, to the leaders of China, India, Brazil, and give them a super slick ten minute presentation, showing how this will solve their energy and pollution problems….
They’ll all give you a round of applause and smiles and slap you on the back…
And then what ? What they really want to know, where’s the money ? What’s in it for them ?
As far as I can see, it’s a dead duck.
The guy from the oil company and the guy from the coal company and the guy from the nuclear company, they’ve all been there already with their presentations, and they made sure that they oiled the wheels with a lot of cash….
The ‘social and political’….
Nobody in power gives a f8ck about the Arctic or the future or other people’s children, they want to know how it’s going to effect their bank account….
To get financial backing to roll it out on a big scale, it needs to provide a 20% return on investment, then those greedy finance people get interested and start to pay attention and wonder whether they can steal the patent or something….
But I think hydrogen is pie in the sky, mostly. It’s good for a few things, not for replacing oil.
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Here’s the reality of the scheme…..this paragraph at the end of the article, but most important:
“Despite the discovery, the commercialization of such a solar-thermal reactor is likely years away. “With the price of natural gas so low, there is no incentive to burn clean energy,” said Weimer, also the executive director of the Colorado Center for Biorefining and Biofuels, or C2B2. “There would have to be a substantial monetary penalty for putting carbon into the atmosphere, or the price of fossil fuels would have to go way up.”””
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Thanks for the answers. I’m highly dubious of any technofix myself obviously (although I can’t help but think the Elf is cute!). And I do think we’re out of time for a bunch of reasons. That said, if it’s true that the natgas is largely hype and fracking has a much shorter lifespan than the optimists (investor/promoters) predict, then maybe it will get way more expensive. Also that last paragraph could just be a plug for a carbon tax to spur more investment in his C2B2 by encouraging legislation. Which is ridiculous since it ain’t gonna happen, certainly not any time soon. The world is run by lunatics. Sigh.
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I could drive a car halfway up the nearest mountain, urinate, and then I could claim to be able to generate hydro-electricity from urination.
How many thousands of barrels of oil go into the construction of the mirrors, support systems, concrete etc?
And once the hydrogen is made, what use is it? It cannot be liquefied above MINUS 250oC; it cannot be efficiently transported. Even keeping it contained for more than a few weeks at high pressure poses considerable challenges..
Such ‘could’ articles are the standard fare of MSM.
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@Kevin
I think Obummer has concocted some screwy plan to lower (nominal) corporate taxes even further in order to get the Republicrats on board with a repatriation of offshore corporate bank accounts. The taxes from these newly found monies would then be used for a one-time infrastructure fix. OK, never mind the lunacy of lowering corporate taxes even more, but I doubt the money generated will go where it’s really needed. Bridges to nowhere indeed.
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$3.6 trillion needed by 2020 to maintain infrastructure. In the article above, Obummer talks of $50 billion – a drop in the bucket.
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” For people with irrational hope that we can grow forever on a finite planet, it’s basically a faith or belief, and just about impossible to argue with based on facts.”
Dear God – please start talking about facts, then, instead of avoiding the salient issues. Please tell me, for the second time now I am asking, how renewable energy is incompatible in a first-world society???
‘Cause you know what I see? I see renewable energy replacing fossil fuel use. I see PV panels being used to run electric cars. I see wind power heating and cooling homes. I see 100% green electricity running industrial heating and manufacturing processes.
Seems to me that looks like something that very much resembles a first-world society happily clicking along on renewable energy. But that can’t be – because you assert that such a thing is IMPOSSIBLE.
So tell me – which of us is basing their position on a “faith or belief”??
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The reasons so-called renewables can never sustain even a tiny fraction of current arrangements in the long term have been posted a dozen times.
You choose to ignore all the evidence and blab on like a troll.
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Just got a follower to this site named…. SATAN’S GENERAL(Alternative but not stupid.)
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“No scraps for this bear: he wants the whole damn dumpster! And he gets it.” – link
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The animation part threw me for a loop which is pretty much what the human species is doing to itself…
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Hey Gail – good find! I see this latest in techno-energy approach and put it on the same shelf as cold fusion and thorium reactors: nice but too late, and the usual “so where and how did they make all the equipment” circle we always go through (and conclude “oh yeah, fossil fuels”). It’s enjoyable reading, nonetheless.
So glad NBL is back up (but my latest comments haven’t been posted and I suspect there might be a delay before they’re checked for suspicious content then posted).
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@Gail,
Would a “green” techno-fix for the liquid fuel crisis solve problems such as…
– overpopulation
– biodiversity loss
– plasticization of the planet
– dead oceans
– depleted soils
– chemical pollution
No. A so-called magic bullet would only allow humans to continue their ravenous stampede over all other organisms of Earth. There are no politically viable solutions for overpopulation. Even China’s one child policy has failed.
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Xraymike, it is was just a purely tangential issue out of curiousity. Of course I don’t think any “green” fuel will solve any of the other problems, it will only exacerbate them. See Tim Garrett’s work…more energy production = more energy use = more overpopulation = more and faster overshoot.
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Ha, that video has had six whole views! As usual, the calculation of how much human population can be supported by NPP leaves out all the vegetation that’s just dying off from pollution and is leaving bare dirt behind. Oops.
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The important point was that it said numbers of people are as important as consumption. The biosphere does not care whether there are a few people consuming a lot or a lot of people consuming a little.
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Climate change, a shrinking job pool, the blood-sucking Wall Street financiers and a growing totalitarian State are not enough.
Now for the jaded Americans, we will have bull runs to excite them.
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Amazing. You guys can not keep your eye on the ball for more than thirty seconds before lapsing into your weird nihilistic death cult riffs! Wowza!
Ok, Mike – I am about to read your essay in which you purport to prove that renewable energy is impossible.
In the meantime, would you care to tell me how the two pdf links I provided to a peer-reviewed analysis of how renewable energy can indeed work are flawed? No – didn’t think you could.
Would it be possible for you to even acknowledge that these reports exist? 😀
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GingerBaker, you’re not going to get a sympathetic response from anyone here by ad hom idiocy about death cults, for a start.
There’s very smart people here who have debated the issue you want to discuss IN DEPTH for months and months, years ago and constantly ever since with people like you, so it’s got kinda boring to keep going over the same ground.
Just because you say so, or some guys in a peer reviewed paper from Stanford say so, doesn’t mean a thing, unless you look at the whole context.
By that I mean, the climate, the resources, the overpopulation, the geopolitical situation, the financial situation, etc, etc, etc.
I’m really not inclined to get into this, it’s elementary stuff, but just to be polite to you…
I see renewable energy replacing fossil fuel use. I see PV panels being used to run electric cars. I see wind power heating and cooling homes. I see 100% green electricity running industrial heating and manufacturing processes.
This is pipe dream nonsense. I live in UK. The Shotton Steel Works uses more electricity than the whole of Greater Manchester.
It is simply impossible to provide that amount of electrical power from windmills, solar panels, or any other sort of alternative or renewable source. It requires either coal, or gas or nuclear.
If you don’t want to use those energy sources, where do you get the steel for you windmills and cars and buildings and everything else ?
You need copper, that means you need copper mines and steel ships and steel containers and steel cranes and steel lorries and on and on it goes…
Granted, you could have a simple low level economy, permaculture gardens, like an African village, with some solar electricity and batteries, for a few basic technical gadgets. But that’s not ‘First World’, that’s nothing like the way people are living now.
Nobody wants to change to that anyway, so they’ll continue until the whole system crashes and most of them die, which will happen quite soon.
We have NO TIME left to develop all these fancy technological changes, and even if they were all ready, on the shelf, the ‘political and social’ is THE problem. There is huge investment in present infrastructure and technology. You have to persuade the wealthiest and most powerful people on the planet to give up their wealth and power.
Do you really think Australians will forego digging up their coal and selling it to China ? Or that Russia will forego selling its natural gas to Europe ? Or that Venezuala or Saudi Arabia will not pump every last drop of their oil ?
That’s the reality.
Watch Kevin Anderson’s video on climate and see how much we have to cut emissions. We have NO TIME LEFT.
You’re just another dreamer who thinks there’s a magic Fairy Godmother who is going to rescue you.
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“The Shotton Steel Works uses more electricity than the whole of Greater Manchester. It is simply impossible to provide that amount of electrical power from windmills, solar panels, or any other sort of alternative or renewable source. It requires either coal, or gas or nuclear.”
LOL! Impossible! Good grief. Back in May 1/3 of all the electrical power in Germany – the whole country worth – came from renewable energy.
You are talking nonsense.
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Strike one.
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‘Back in May 1/3 of all the electrical power in Germany – the whole country worth – came from renewable energy.’
You don’t quote any figures for individual sectors, but what’s the betting that most of that electrical energy came via hydro?
Now the interesting thing about hydro is that is fairly reliable compared to wind turbines, which for much of the time produce/convert no energy because the wind strength is too low. Another interesting thing about hydro is that it requires a huge sacrifice of land that could be put to other use -such as growing food. And another interesting thing about hydro is the monstrous level of embedded fossil fuel and monstrous CO2 debt. Perhaps the most interesting thing about hydro is that in most parts of the world there are no sites left. Even New Zealand, with a relatively low population, lots of mountains and valleys, and high rainfall has almost run out of hydro sites. And when the droughts come, as they do every so often, NZ resorts to burning more gas to maintain the supply.
What few people realise is that there are helicopters flying up and down NZ every day, checking on the grid and shifting men and materials needed to maintain the grid, or directing diesel-powered trucks to the required locations. Last year Robert Atack (of oilcrash fame) had some conflict with maintenance teams who wanted to shower everything with garnet in order to sandblast pylons, prior to regalvanising-repainting. Maintenance of the grid is BIG business.. ,
PV systems have been around for over 40 years. And all of that time there has been miniscule uptake. Think about it! Could it be an abysmally low energy return on energy invested in combination with system failure after a few years?
I noticed that Siemens decided to get out of solar last year. Couldn’t compete. Part of the reason is China of course, which is busy converting coal into stuff to sell the West….. completely destroying the local environment and the global environment in an attempt to bring the standard of living up to the ‘first world’ level you keep harping on about.
Another interesting thing about Germany is that, like Britain, it peaked in coal extraction long ago and is dependent on gas to maintain current arrangements. Russian gas. And massive imports of oil and fertilisers, of course, without which a large portion of the population would quickly starve.
Back in 1800 almost 100% of Germany’s energy came from renewables. And close to 100% of the housing materials, food, clothing etc. came from renewables.
The transition from dependence on genuinely renewable low energy systems to dependence on unsustainable high energy systems is described as progress by technophiles. .
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“Watch Kevin Anderson’s video on climate and see how much we have to cut emissions. We have NO TIME LEFT. “
We have no time left – so your answer is to do nothing. Brilliant.
Meanwhile, in the real world, we have the technology to virtually eliminate fossil fuel use. And ALL WE HAVE TO DO to avoid AGW – is build it.
I would bet that – if we really had the will – the world could accomplish the goal in seven years.
And Kevin Anderson is a nihilistic nut, who wants to crash the world-wide economy in to save the world from catastrophe. Small wonder people here would find him a hero! 😦
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The world doesn’t have the will. And the world doesn’t have the money. And we don’t have the time. And to maintain even a bit of the economy we have, we don’t have the other resources necessary to keep it going for our kids and grand kids.
But back to the most important: the world doesn’t have the will.
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Strike two.
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“Ok, Mike – I am about to read your essay in which you purport to prove that renewable energy is impossible.”
Ok, Mike. I read your post, which was a mere cut and paste from another article in some obscure blog. Contrary to your assertions, it does NOT prove, indicate, give evidence for the conclusion that renewable energy is a pipe dream.
Indeed, it quotes numbers from the very paper I suggested you might read, but makes assertions that show that the author evidently did not bother to read it very carefully. Because the concerns he raised were actually addressed in the paper!
Of course, some of the concerns were idiotic, out dated, or plain mistakes. An example of an idiotic concern – his argument against concentrated solar plants was that they needed water to wash off components! A whole six hundred acres, covered a whole one foot deep, evidently!! What a convincing argument that concentrated solar is impossible.
Pathetic.
Again:
Providing all global energy with wind,water,and solar power,Part I:
Technologies, energy resources, quantities and areas of infrastructure,
and materials
by
Mark Z.Jacobson and Mark A.Delucchi
Energy Policy39(2011)1154–1169
Part II: Energy Policy39(2011)1170–1190
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Strike three. Get back to us when you have found your brain. You’re obviously speaking without thinking.
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1/3 is not 3/3 is it. That’s the problem. The heavy industry. Why does Germany import gas from Russia and electricity from France ?
None of the so called ‘renewable’ energy is sustainable, it all has to be replaced, the off shore wind farms have 15 or 25 year lifetimes, then all that steel and cable and equipment has to be deployed all over again. The energy involved is enormous.
You are still missing the point. It does not matter if Germany managed to go completely carbon neutral and have an absolutely perfect green economy.
You have to see the WHOLE CONTEXT. To remain below emissions levels that make civilisation impossible, i.e. c. global 4 deg C, ALL the industrialised countries have to peak their emissions NOW, 2013 -14, -15, and keep cutting at rates of something like 10% pa thereafter, rates which have never ever been achieved.
This is already totally insane, because 2 deg C is already a global catastrophe, but the lunatics who decide these things thought that money was more important than a viable planet, so we got this disaster. You are one of the people who thinks that we can keep the disaster going for longer if we switch to cleaner technology. I’m telling you that it will not work.
No countries have shown any sign of peaking their emissions and cutting them. Even with the economic recession, emissions are rising faster than ever. Even if they said they intended to, and meant it in good faith, there is no practical possibility of achieving it, without causing immense death and suffering and hardship, and so it’s politically impossible.
The calculations that avoid 4 deg C, which the international organisations are using, assume that India and China will peak their emissions around 2015, and then reduce them.
Neither country has any intention of doing so. The Chinese say they will peak around 2030, by which time they will be producing as much CO2 as the rest of the world combined.
Look, it’s all very well drawing up a paper that says, in theory we could get all our energy in clean ways and live happily ever after. People have done that years ago. That’s not the problem. The problem is the REAL WORLD.
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Just the fact that the weather is changing, and will change a lot over the next decade, means that feeding the world will be problematic. That means that people all over the world will be terribly stressed. More and more money will go to trying to grow crops that eventually fail more and more often, and people will be stressed financially to try to feed their families. The last thing they will put up with is taxes being raised to build a massive renewable energy infrastructure that will not realize any benefit for them for many years, if ever.
As economies tank, people will simply not support anything that could damage the frail economies they have. We have already seen that in the US.
And the most powerful people on earth, those who profit from our fossil fuel based economy, will not allow any propaganda that proposes any serious change to the status quo. And we are also already seeing this.
These powerful people will turn the angst of the people, suffering from degenerating financial situations and hungry kids, against the dreamers who propose we damage the economic system we have, bad as it becomes, for some vision far in the future.
And this we have also seen already.
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I would bet that – if we really had the will – the world could accomplish the goal in seven years.
And Kevin Anderson is a nihilistic nut, who wants to crash the world-wide economy in to save the world from catastrophe. Small wonder people here would find him a hero!
We don’t HAVE seven years !
Who is this ‘we’ that you’re talking about ? There isn’t any ‘we’ except in your fanciful dreamscape.
Kevin Anderson is a hard headed engineer who goes by the numbers.
I defy you to find any fault in any of his arithmetic or his logic, or to find anybody of repute who can.
He never says anything about ‘crashing the world-wide economy’ as far as I recall. What he does say is that we inevitably hit 4 deg C which makes most of the planet unliveable, which inevitably will crash civilisation and the worldwide economy.
Now, if you are one of the people who does not accept climate change and that we are going headlong toward 4 deg C, well, I think this exchange is over, because I don’t have time to waste on such people any more.
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I’m sure it’s been put up here before, but, if you don’t mind, could you put up a link for something from Kevin Anderson that will give a gist of his message? Thanks.
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Try this, Paul
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more here: http://environmentalresearchweb.org/cws/article/opinion/52289
Feb 6, 2013
Are we heading for 6° temperature rise?
Climate scientist Kevin Anderson believes scientists at the interface of climate and policy may have used naive assumptions when modelling for a 2°C target.
“An outside chance of exceeding 2° requires emission cuts of at least 10% per annum, said Anderson – basically about a 40% reduction in energy consumption in the next three years, 70% by 2020 and complete decarbonization by 2030 – at least for the wealthier nations.”
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Voluntary reductions in standard/mode of living? Never will happen. Voluntary refusal of the American way of life by China, India, and the other BRIC countries? Never will happen. Self-delusion and grasping at every straw for maintaining and growing the current mode of living? Yes – on full throttle.
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Exactly: “Anderson reckons about 40–60% of the world’s energy emissions come from 1–5% of the population. This includes “climate scientists, every journalist, pontificator and sceptic, every other OECD academic, everyone who gets on a plane once a year” and anyone earning more than £30 k a year. “So we’re the major emitters – we know who they are. Are we prepared to make changes to our lives now or have them forced upon us?” Anderson believes there is a lot we can do. “We don’t require the whole world to do something, we require a small proportion of the world to change what they do today for the next 10 or 20 years while we put low-carbon supply in place.”
There’s no way in hell the top 1-5% is going to willingly reduce emissions 40% in the next 3 years, what a joke…
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We’re asking for sacrifice in material wealth, a change in the mode of living. This translates into a change in the hierarchical power structure of capitalism. This means corporations and their externalization of environmental costs will have to be fully accounted for. Not gonna happen willingly. This means we can’t produce trillions of plastic doohickeys which end up in the ocean after being discarded. This means our throwaway culture cannot continue and that the cheap products we buy at Walmart shipped from China are no longer cheap when their environmental footprint is fully calculated. Never gonna happen. This basically means a radical overhaul in the way the “developed world lives”. As I said before, industrial civilization was built with fossil fuels and will go out with fossil fuels. Unfortunately, it will take everything else with it.
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Thanks.
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@ GB
…so your answer is to do nothing. Brilliant.
The basic problem I see is that your presumptions are so shallow. You assume that there’s something that you want – an answer, a solution – and that you have found it – yet another technofix.
But you have not analysed what the fundamental problem is, why and how we got into this mess, what the nature of the mess is, and what the result of your ‘solution’ will be.
And when you come at me with such trite and silly retorts, why should I bother with you at all ?
We are dealing with an extremely complex system. If you intervene, without understanding what you are doing, you just make matters worse. It’s akin to hitting your computer with a hammer, or mediaeval quack medicine bleeding a sick patient with leeches.
The worship of technology is part of the disease, it’s a mythology, a religious faith, that somehow, if we throw more money and gadgetry into a new configuration, that’ll make all those nasty things go away.
Your premise, that windmills and solar powered cars somehow make for a happy future, is really no different to the idea that building a new bypass around the town gets rid of all the noisy traffic and fumes from the town centre, or building taller chimneys takes the smog away and lets us breath clean air.
That’s what people have been doing for two hundred years, and you’re repeating the same mantra.
I’ve heard it already a thousand times. It will not work. There’s something far bigger, far deeper, going on, and fiddling with technofixes isn’t relevant, it’s just a distraction.
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‘There’s something far bigger, far deeper, going on, and fiddling with technofixes isn’t relevant, it’s just a distraction.’.
I totally agree.
Once a basic level of provision of needs has been achieved, happiness is often inversely proportional to consumption, though the crucial factor in overall happiness and cohesion in society is the equitable distribution of resources.
As most of us here know, the present system is geared to transferring an ever greater portion of ‘the cake’ (which is clearly shrinking) to the tiny group at the top. This results in greater discontent for almost everyone..
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Published on Saturday, August 3, 2013 by Common Dreams
Offshore…Fracking: Far More Common Than Previously Known
AP FOIA request shows oil companies use toxic method off California coast
– Jacob Chamberlain, staff writer
Dead fish stuck in oil in Bay Jimmy near Port Sulpher, Louisiana June 20, 2010 (Reuters/Sean Gardner)
Hundreds of pages of federal documents released by the U.S. government to the Associated Press this week show that the controversial and toxic practice of hydraulic fracturing has moved offshore to an extent far greater than previously known.
The documents, obtained by the AP through a Freedom of Information Act request, show that the EPA has permitted fracking in the Pacific Ocean at least 12 times since the late 1990s, and has recently approved a new project in “the vast oil fields in the Santa Barbara Channel,” which is also the site of a major 1969 spill of over 3 million gallons of crude oil into the ocean.
“While debate has raged over fracking on land, prompting efforts to ban or severely restrict it,” AP writes, “offshore fracking has occurred with little attention in sensitive coastal waters where for decades new oil leases have been prohibited.”
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How do we stop this shit when most of it goes on without the public really being aware?
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Sorry for Gingerbaker’s inflammatory and thoughtless comments. The only name coming out of GB’s mouth is “Mark Jacobson”, yet no particulars of his study are mentioned to counter the issues we have brought up. I have put GB’s comments on permanent moderation.
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No need for an apology, xray, Now I’ll never get to hear who he thinks the ‘we’ are.
I wish there was a ‘we’ that mattered. There’s around about 10,000, I’d guess, that actually understand something about what’s happening in the Arctic, etc, and who care, and they have no real influence or power…
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An interesting link which appears to be updated as new information comes in:
“…I think the case is now very strong that the world can’t provide high “living standards” for all on renewables. Some countries might be able to do it, and Australia might be one of them given that it is more favourably situated than almost all others. However I do not think Australia can do it. (For the detailed case see Trainer 2012b.)
It is important to stress that I have always argued that we must move to full dependence on renewable energy as soon as possible. This can only be done if we move to lifestyles and systems that require only a small fraction of the present rich world per capita energy consumption. The document ”How cheaply could we live well?” details how this could easily be done in The Simpler Way. (This theme is also dealt with in the book, The Transition… Trainer 2010b.)…”
https://socialsciences.arts.unsw.edu.au/tsw/RECANT.htm
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Maybe, like my sister once said, like “Pig-“Pen I bring my own special cloud of the dust of ancient lost civilizations with me wherever I go…but it seems like this contentious conversation about doom, with varying degrees of animosity, is being carried out on several venues – sometimes with overlapping constiuencies and sometimes not. I cannot recall the expectation of NTE being this explicit anywhere other than NBL until recently, with the exception of some commenters at Climate Progress, but not JR himself. Now it’s becoming commonplace, on Jay Hansen’s 2.0 and on facebook – with outbreaks at the Global Warming Fact of the Day, and a new one, here, that has a background I haven’t followed all the way back yet: https://www.facebook.com/groups/DoomerParty2016/permalink/598860320137449/
Meanwhile of course 99.99% – now perhaps 99.98% – remain oblivious.
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NBL seems to have ‘seized up’ again. There are so few islands of sanity.
I continue to be staggered that they system can continue to operate by:
printing money
manipulating interest rates
drilling, fracking, blowing up mountains, scraping up rock and crushing it to get to traces of minerals
clearing forests and jungles
stripping oceans
lying continuously to the general populace.
,
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I think I’ll send Gingerbaker the VHEMT link. That should get GB’s blood boiling for sure.
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I keep trying to understand George Mobus’s point of view that humanity will (or should) become eusapient via evolutionary selection through the bottleneck (as opposed to the extinction event we here & on NBL think is going on). I keep pointing out that there won’t be an “environment” for any version of humanity to even exist in, let alone thrive, but he counters with “it’s always been the case” through all the other extinction events that evolution “improved” life (creating humanity – or allowed us to exist at all).
I pointed out, in my remark today, how different it is this time with nuke plants surrounding the globe, erratic and unpredictable weather (which is becoming worse each year) preventing the agriculture we depend on, and the lack of any action by humanity in the face of clear evidence that it’s all unraveling.
I left out vegetation and tree death due to climate change, the relatively quick increase in temperature (caused by our continuing CO2 forcing) that no species of plant or animal I’ve seen will be able to rapidly adapt to, and species die-off, like the pollinators and others, but pointed out that we’re at 16 – 18 positive feedbacks already triggered (including the clathrate gun), any one of which will cause at least human extinction.
I await his response.
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Did you ever get one? Also his entire “eusapient via evolutionary selection” strikes me as simply not understanding how evolution works and besides, the WORST NASTIEST humans are the most likely to survive, like Mad Max, jeesh.
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Gingerbaker, please watch this FOX news discussion about Obama’s plan to cut carbon emissions. There is so much here telling us that any move to regulate or get off of fossil fuels even a little bit will destroy jobs and our economy. And we haven’t even begun yet to really move to cut carbon emissions yet. Wait until we begin to really move into that agenda. The backlash will be incredible, especially if the economy suffers, and it will.
We are decades away from moving toward a a renewable energy based economy in any real sense. I think there will not be a will to do this until global warming severely impacts most people’s lives in a negative way, and by this time it will be too late. Too much carbon will have already been emitted, and too much damage will have occurred to oceans and farmland and coastal cities, so that just struggling to try to keep the masses fed and housed will be difficult to impossible…….no money for pie in the sky alternative energy infrastructure.
http://video.foxnews.com/v/2581982172001/epa-chief-global-warming-agenda-will-grow-economy-/
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I watched as much of that video as I could stand (I normally avoid all mainstream drivel these days)..
The loot-and-pollute economy is as dominant as ever, with no thought whatsoever for the future.
Unfortunately shale gas, shale oil, tar sands oil etc. will probably prop up present arrangements in the us for another 3 years.
On the other hand, Japan, Spain, Italy, Greece, Portugal, and dozens of other nations that hardly get a mention are sliding down the energy cliff at an ever faster pace.
Maybe it will be the bond market that will bring the madness to a halt. ZIRP is generating numerous consequences that will eventually be impossible to contain..
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You think only 3 years? I’m thinking ten…20 at most.
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Paul,
you said just above: ” … Too much carbon will have already been emitted”. I know what you mean, but perhaps this particular phraze is still an understatement. Thing is, too much carbon have already been emitted. Some ~3 millions years ago, if i remember correctly, CO2 content in the athmosphere was some 340…400ppm (various stadies produced results which are roughly within this interval). We have 400ppm today. Thing is, 3 millions years ago, global average temperature was 6 degrees higher than Holocene (i.e. than pre-industrial 18th century, so to speak). Which is, roughly, +5 in compare to nowadays.
And, extra CO2 stays in the athmosphere for many centuries. How much mankind emitted by bruning fossils, deforestation, cement production, etc, up to date? I guess something like 2 teratons (that is, 2000 gigatons). How long we had more than half of that in the athmosphere? For a few decades, only (since 1970s, i guess, as it’s since 1970s till now when we emit carbon most inensively; some ~35Gt every year, now, and growing further).
Knowing this, i really can’t see how we can’t yet be at not “too much carbon” in the athmosphere. We are well past safe mark. Leading scientists say that anything above 350 is catastrophic; 350.org exists and is quite straight; now at 400ppm CO2, it’s ALREADY too late.
The rest of your message, i quite agree with… Sad, but true.
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Tad Patzek is worth listening to
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I decided to take a closer look at Tad Patzek. He’s a realist and his views on technology and nature fall in alignment with mine. I checked out his personal blog ‘LifeItself‘ and I love the sub-headline:
“In this blog, I continue to write about the environment, ecology, energy, complexity, and humans. Of particular interest to me are human self-delusions and mad stampedes to nowhere.”
Read what he says about technology and the future in his last post…
“…Technology is a standing reserve of energy for humans to order and consume nature. In turn, warns Heidegger, humans are ordered and consumed by the technology they have created and naively think can control. Can you see how agriculture and agrofuels are embedded into this metaphor?
When we think about machines, most people envision the fossil-fuel-driven motors, cars, and such. These machines are quite efficient. So when agriculture is thought about as a machine, by extension we endow it with a similar efficiency. Because of many complex factors, this notion of efficient agriculture ordering nature to give us energy is false. In truth, agriculture is a pitifully inefficient means of converting solar energy, carbon dioxide, inorganic nutrients, and water into biomass. What agriculture lacks in efficiency it makes up by taking over the giant swaths of the formerly most nutritious Earth.
To make things worse, for anyone who has seen an agricultural crop being harvested from a field, it is difficult to accept that to be sustained this field needs to be completely renewed each year. This was true for a few thousand years on the rice paddies of China. They were continuously renewed by hand-carrying the washed out soil and shells and dead fish back to the fields. Women carried this soil in baskets on their backs. Natural fertilizers, ash from the stoves, even old clothing, were all recycled back to the fields. Not anymore. Today we pour mineral fertilizers and chemical poisons on the huge fields that are impossible to manage with human labor alone. The once fertile soil resembles sterile dirt, a substrate for the artificially fed plants, easy to wash away by rain and blow to dust by wind.
Is it possible to switch to a more sustainable agriculture? Yes. And that agriculture would have to span much smaller scales and have people, animals, and small infrastructure intermixed with it. For the time being, as you watch your favorite TV distraction, or focus on the Royal Baby, this life-giving planet of yours is being trashed in front of your eyes wide-shut.
If you want to see what is in store for our children, observe the Middle East and North Africa, the harbingers of things to come for most of us. Also, parts of north and northeast China are becoming hellish polluted deserts, where no one lives too long.
Are you still sure you know where you are going?”
…Great writing!
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have you seen this? terrifying!
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/georgemonbiot/2013/aug/05/neonicotinoids-ddt-pesticides-nature
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And into the abyss man will go, hand in hand with the money-driven corporations killing us all.
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You think only 3 years? I’m thinking ten…20 at most.
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F. Trinoli….. I agree with you all the way.
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And this, in response to the ‘move along, nothing to see here, go back to sleep’ from Gavin Schmidt and other shills
Seven facts you need to know about the Arctic methane timebomb
Dismissals of catastrophic methane danger ignore robust science in favour of outdated mythology of climate safety
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2013/aug/05/7-facts-need-to-know-arctic-methane-time-bomb
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Just reading through the comments on the methane article. My favorite thus far:
“The most sickening aspect of this entire debate is the terms in which it is couched. It’s not the human misery that this catastrophe will cause; not the displacement of millions of families caused by desertification; not the homes lost to rise in sea levels; not the unprecedented refugee crisis that this will precipitate; not the wars and conflicts that will ensue as an inevitable consequence. No, none of these things are deemed to be important. The most important thing is only ever money.”
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Yes, if Wadhams et al had written a report saying we’ll be at 6 deg C and all will die and the biosphere will cook, nobody would have taken any notice, but when there’s a 6 trillion dollar sign, suddenly all the heads poke out of their offices in the ivory towers and insist it’s impossible, quoting David Archer, who co-authors papers with the chief scientist of ExxonMobil, so must be the world’s greatest authority on methane clathrates and know much more than the scientists, like Natalia Shakhova who’ve actually been going to the ES arctic sea for years and years and watching what happens with their own eyes.
The Archer report on RC says nothing to worry about because all the clathrates are in very deep cold water on the bottom of the ocean which will take thousands of years to warm up, EXCEPT that the biggest deposit is probably the ESAS on the world’s biggest continental shelf where the water is really shallow, and warming up fast, and everything that Archer and Schmidt said to dismiss the work turns out to be either straight wrong or extremely dubious and questionable.
But those guys are insane. They are worried about their reputation as scientists. If they say there’s a great risk, and then nothing happens, then the climate change deniers will laugh and scoff at them and use it as ammunition…
But what if they are wrong ? We all go extinct. We should have cut CO2 30 years ago, then the Arctic would not have melted. Too late now.
Anyway. It doesn’t matter. If/when that methane starts coming out, there is no way to stop it. One percent of it coming out slowly equals 10 China’s worth of CO2 or so I read.
You probably know, the methane is already at record levels.
http://arctic-news.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/methane-as-high-as-2349-ppb.html
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I always point to Katrina and New Orleans as a prime example of how the power structure responds to catastrophe. This methane/co2 bomb is being handled the same way. Perhaps they have already calculated that there is no solution and have readied their spaceships for a oneway flight to ____???
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Another “mad stampede to nowhere,” I’d say. Tad Patzek speaks calmly and knowledgeably about our dilemma. Two things I want to bring out: (1) it’s already too late to launch an awareness campaign (aimed at solution-finding, I suppose), and (2) it’s unclear just how much of the climate transition is anthropogenic in origin, though we here expect it’s quite a lot. The first point means that even mitigation is beyond us, so we’ll hit the wall at full speed. The second means that whatever culpability we have for this mess is likely to be spun and dismissed and forgotten. We’ll adopt the victim’s pose yet again, despite all the glorious evidence of our exploitative, polluting, destroying, and self-deceiving behaviors.
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Hi Brutus,
I suspect he’s very aware of his audience. He side steps the stupid ‘it’s all the sun, denialist bullshit stuff v. the science’ by taking that middle ground route. I mean, he’s working in the heart of the oil industry, and in academia, and he’s a very smart responsible guy who obviously cares about the future and gauges his words with a lot of thought, so that they will have some impact, he hopes.
Me, I’m beyond that stage. I don’t think any attempt to persuade anyone is going to make any difference any more.
You know, there’s the lawyer who presents the case, to move the jurors that half an inch, so that they convict or dismiss. For years, I used to try to argue with people that there was a need to change to avoid this catastrophe. It rarely made any difference. Now we have the catastrophe. I don’t care any more about what the jury think.
I’m not in the lawyering business any more. I’m more like telling people this building is on fire and it’s going to fall down on your heads, whether you like it or not, and there isn’t much, if anything, that you can do about it…
So then they begin to argue, because they don’t like that news…
There’s really no point in doing what I’m doing at all. It only pisses people off. But I think somebody needs to be HONEST and say it.
You know, in WW1 in UK, the whole fucking nation lied to themselves, for years, about what they were doing and what was happening. And eventually a couple of poets broke ranks, and spoke up, and were declared insane, and called traitors.
But in retrospect, it’s plain to everyone, that it was the generals and the politicians and the royalty and aristocrats, the establishment, who were completely insane.
I think it’s the same sort of situation now. Only much worse.
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He also talks about how people should stop wasting fossil fuels for frivolous purposes to leave some for their children and grandchildren, which is ridiculous. The grandchildren for sure are going to be boiled before we run out of fossil fuels, especially considering global collapses from severe breakdowns due to one climate disaster piling on top of another, and that’s IF todays generation even gets a chance to procreate. He definitely retains hope. Either that he is a liar.
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My take is that he is being pragmatic. He’s not talking about his own private personal inner estimation, he’s speaking to an audience in the hope that they will hear what he says and change their behaviour.
You don’t do that, Guy doesn’t do that, I don’t do that, but there’s no reason why others shouldn’t, if they do it with integrity. I don’t think he lies. He’s very well informed and highly educated regarding climate and the oil industry. I see him as one of the good guys trying his best. He’s more moderate and ‘respectable’ than I am, but I don’t mind that.
So is Kevin Anderson, so is Paul Kingsnorth, so is George Monbiot. They are all too ‘tame’ for my taste, but a lot more people listen to them than listen to me 🙂
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I certainly wasn’t trying to impugn his integrity. I was just saying, it’s one or the other. Either he has hope or he is lying…keeping in mind that, as Jay Hanson’s 2.0 group is now discussing, there are lies that we tell others and lies that we tell ourselves.
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It’s easy for me, I’m done with this soceity, in UK,
I’m on the outside. There’s nobody on the inside that I hear who isn’t telling lies to themselves or, much worse, knowingly lying to others.
But even green people I know, who know the same stuff that I read, they still have the same fantasy that somehow, somebody, with some magic, is going to fix this mess for them… forest gardens, or windmills, or space shields, or thorium reactors, or electric cars, or artificial leaves that eat CO2, or biochar, or whatever it is, yes, everybody wants a straw to clutch to, because it’s too hard to say to someone’s face that the future is impossible…
It’s not what anybody wants to hear.
But what if that is the truth ?
Then what ?
I think that’s a tremendous place to be.
Re-evaluate everything
Scary as hell.
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Yeah. America’s first climate refugees
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/interactive/2013/may/13/newtok-alaska-climate-change-refugees?guni=Article:promo-related-article%20US%20Alaska%20climate%20refugees:microapp%20guardiannews-interactives-static:Alaska:%20climate%20refugees
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Definitely a case to be made for the “they already know” view. You probably already saw this: http://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2013/jun/14/climate-change-energy-shocks-nsa-prism
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Oh yeah. And this recent militarization of the Mexican/American border could be in preparation for a flood of climate refugees from the South.
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And you have this as well…
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What can you say ?
Two young children in Pennsylvania were banned from talking about fracking for the rest of their lives under a gag order imposed under a settlement reached by their parents with a leading oil and gas company.
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/aug/05/children-ban-talking-about-fracking
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http://www.yesmagazine.org/planet/confessions-of-a-climate-change-denier?utm_source=ytw20130802&utm_medium=email
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ulvfugl sez, referring to Tad Patzek:
… he’s a very smart responsible guy who obviously cares about the future and gauges his words with a lot of thought, so that they will have some impact, he hopes. Me, I’m beyond that stage. I don’t think any attempt to persuade anyone is going to make any difference any more
I can’t guess his motivations, but considering how the truth is so completely spun and corrupted, his directness is appreciated. We all face decisions once we admit the horrible truth to ourselves just how much truth-telling we can stomach. His quotient is pretty high, so I’m comfortable with his lack of purity, which would be doctrinaire to insist upon. Your approach — 100% truth 100% of the time — is something I respect and even appreciate, but you’re no doubt aware the world doesn’t forgive its truth-tellers their impertinence. Like you, I’m not so inclined to sugar-coat or leaven the truth with hope (which is false to my mind), but getting in someone’s face about it is, as you’ve already admitted, pointless. Makes no difference and makes me a nuisance or worse.
In a comment to another post, someone mentioned that spoiling the innocence of youth, telling them that they literally have no future, is not something to admire, but then where in the large gray area between believing in Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny, etc. and reaching adulthood (somewhere between 6 and 18 one might would say) does the truth win out? I sure don’t know. As for adults, I’d say be honest with them all, sometimes even to a fault, not that anything is accomplished. There will be a lot of questions I suspect that will need answering by someone better equipped than, say, the clergy. The rude awakening that everything is dying will need some explaining.
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In earlier times the works of the Devil or God’s will (punishment) provided a neat explanation for anything that went wrong.
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I mention some of this to my kids, 19 and 24, but I don’t dwell on it. I want them to aspire to goals and stay somewhat entranced by the world, at least while they can.
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I think my difficulty, and my responsibility, is to try to maintain the most accurate possible understanding of the situation. That is, I think there is ‘the world’ and there is my ‘mental model of the world’, which two are never the same but I try to bring them to match as closely as I can, constantly updating.
I then spit out my opinions, and people make of them whatever they will. That’s not really my responsibility, because I have no control over how people interpret or misinterpret. It all depends upon their own personal worldviews.
I’m in a very tiny obscure minority. The majority will regard my position as cranky, crackpot, extreme, whatever. But I regard the majority as totally insane, deranged.
So much so, that i want nothing to do with them.
I mean, those post humanists, and, for example, these people, I find thoroughly sinister and scary
http://www.talk2action.org/story/2010/1/20/131544/037
They very likely see me as some sort of devilish individual, and I don’t suppose there’s common ground to be found, although, with reference to the recent remarks on nbl, re privilege, race, sex, etc, my solution has always been not to generalise but to deal with the person in front of me as an individual. I’ve known people of every kind who were absolutely disgusting and of every kind who were surprisingly great.
You know, I’m just as powerless, helpless, as everyone else… all I can do Is say what i think… like this guy…
There’s no need to further explain any of this stuff. If you require further explanation, you’re far too dense to be reading DOTE. The oceans “should” be a source of hope and solutions for a brighter future, but they are not, and the reason they are not is as plain as the nose on your face.
Personal Note
I started by asking you to savor the irony of Cousteau’s Obligatory Hope as the oceans face eventual catastrophic collapse in the 21st century. Now I want to consider another irony, one which affects me personally in a profound way.
It is not lost on me that my target audience is made up of the very same humans who are fucking up the oceans, the climate, other animal species, and just about everything else, including their self-created economy. Thus, in all but a few cases, my warnings, my insights about human behavior, my descriptions of the science and evidence, and all the rest will fall on deaf ears. The essential craziness and hopelessness my “mission” on DOTE is not lost on me. But then again, how are we to spend our precious time on Earth? Writing this blog was my choice.
Now, for the relatively few people who read this blog, there are two ways to go—you can make my job easier, or you can make it harder. If the former, I am grateful. If the latter, congratulations! — you are part of the human mess I go to great lengths to describe.
The comments you make, the donations you do or do not send, the links to DOTE you put up on other web sites, the recommendations of DOTE you make to others—all these things make a difference to me. All I can do is write this blog, which is unique on the internet in many ways. And once this blog is gone, it is very likely that nothing will replace it.
The rest is up to you.
http://www.declineoftheempire.com/2013/04/philippe-cousteau-environmental-advocate.html
Perhaps if more people took trips they’d change faster ?
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Global warming causing changes in ocean life
http://zeenews.india.com/news/eco-news/global-warming-causing-huge-changes-in-ocean-life_866913.html
And this is only the beginning….
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Over at Morris Berman’s site I find evidence that even very intelligent people who discuss the malaise and degeneration of American society still don’t get the bigger picture…
Well yes fracking is very bad, but you don’t think climate change will cause extinction? Good grief. The self-delusion of the great “monkey clan” is an insurmountable wall.
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More than anyone else, Morris Berman is the author whose books and scholarship inspired me to write my own blog. I really like his books, but I gave up on his blog earlier this year out of frustration. Tone and content are quite different from his books, and he mostly ignores ecological problems, preferring to stay within his area of expertise as a historian and cultural critic.
Commentators at his blog range from being quite aware and engaged in the real world to being the same blithering buffoons about whom he complains so often. But what galls me most is that Prof. Berman has eschewed paths that would reward him with renown yet still seeks to burnish his reputation and already high self-regard. (Reminds me a lot of Nassim Nicolas Taleb.) That makes him a fame whore. Plus, the jokiness on his site is discomfitting. Gallows humor is not beyond me, but he veers into territory typical of jeering elitism and trolling. Ack.
I’ve noticed that on many blogs, a coterie of commentators almost inevitable form into a loose group who may believe they possess special knowledge and singular perspective. Well, it’s a wide world, and lots of folks still have a few synapses firing (and lots don’t). What’s available in the public sphere is more than adequate to formulate a mental model sufficient to see that our collective trajectory is not a good one. Special enclaves insulated or above the rabble don’t exist within industrial civilization, especially those prone to posting on the Internet somewhere. We’re all interdependent, which is to say, we’re all now bailing the same boat.
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@Brutus…
Just an additional example of how unpopular is the stark message coming from those lone voices who have looked at the bigger picture…
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Of particular interest is this question and the answer that follows.
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Can’t speak for USA, although my impression is the standard is very much lower, but in UK, the standard of education is fairly dismal. I’ve no real idea, but I’d guess that only 20% would have any concept that there has ever been an extinction event, or any concept of deep time and geological history. And of those 20% it’d be a pretty vague and woolly notion.
Reading the comments after articles in the Guardian, etc, or on blogs and on forum discussions, it’s not surprising we’re in such a mess.
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Just for fun read the comments following this newsbusters article:
http://newsbusters.org/blogs/matthew-vadum/2013/08/03/enviromentalists-attack-reuters-journalist-crime-doubting-global-warm#comment-990306372
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We have local elections soon. I have been pondering for months whether I can be bothered to stand for election again, having tried several times and got nowhere..
There is the Edmund Burke aspect that all it takes for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.
On the other hand, how doe one communicate with a people who are constantly lied to by those in power and believe the lies?
How does one communicate with people who are scientifically illiterate and financially illiterate,, people who have no idea whatsoever that anything is wrong?
Over the past 6 years I have had detailed discussion with numerous ‘high-ranking’ staff of my local council. I have discovered that the vast majority of them has any understanding of finance, and none at all have any understanding of energy and the environment.
I have had numerous opportunities to ‘nail’ council officials with questions they could not answer: the most common response I have elicited is: “I don’t know.” These are the people who formulate and implement policy that determines the day-to-day running of the district and its long term direction.
On Monday I encountered the ‘climate change officer’ as I was leaving the council building. In out brief discussion I discovered that he had never heard of methane clathrates. I had previously discovered that he knows almost nothing about sources of carbon dioxide and what needs to be done to control them. I will meet with him again and yet again point out (as I did 3 months ago) that the policies he promotes are actively destroying his own children’s futures. I know it will make no difference because destroying his own children’s futures is what he is paid to do. And like the vast majority of people, he is spineless.
Whereas a decade ago I frantically attempted to raise public awareness and attempted to get policies based on sanity implemented, I now am resigned to the district, the nation and the entire planet being driven off the cliff financially, environmentally and socially by the maniacs who are in control. That does not mean I agreed with anything that is being done by the maniacs; it is simply a recognition that people will do nothing to prevent it.
I liken it to people having a picnic on a railway track and refusing to accept there are such things as trains.
Despite all I have written, if I offer the truth (well some of it, few people are ready for discussion of the near certainty of NTE, though we can still reduce the suffering that is to come) and people reject it, they cannot later say they didn’t know or didn’t have choice.
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July was warmer, drier and sunnier than usual in Taranaki.
The National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research’s monthly climate summary released yesterday showed mean temperatures in south Taranaki were well above average and 0.5 to 1 degrees Celsius above the July average for the rest of the region.’
New Plymouth and Hawera both recorded the second highest wind gusts on record on July 14, with 128kmh and 104kmh respectively.’
I know one month is not statistically significant but it does follow on from the summer drought, which was longest and most widespread drought NZ has suffered.
We normally get a few frosts: this year none.
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Just noticed the WSJ advertising itself on the Climate Progress website.
Do you think we’ll see any more articles on Climate Progress about the ridiculous global warming denial articles in the WSJ?
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Thich Nhat Hanh’s prophecy
Thich Nhat Hanh: in 100 years there may be no more humans on planet earth
The acclaimed buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh talks to the Ecologist about the loss of biodiversity and why human vulnerability is not something we should despair about
the Ecologist,
22 March, 2012
Do you believe humans can avoid a global ecological collapse, or are we driving ourselves towards one?
The National Wildlife Federation tells us everyday that 100 plants and animal species are lost to deforestation. Extinction of species is taking place everyday. In one year there may be 200,000 species going into extinction. That is what is happening; that is not the problem of the future. We know that 251 million years ago there was already global warming caused by gigantic volcanic eruptions. They caused the worst mass extinction in the history of the planet. The 6C increase in global temperature was enough to wipe out 95 per cent of the species that were alive. Global warming already happened 251 million years ago because of volcanic eruptions and 95 per cent of species on earth disappeared.
Now a second global warming is taking place. This time because of deforestation and industrialisation; man-made, maybe in 100 years there will be no more humans on the planet, in just 100 years. After the disappearance of 95 per cent of species on the earth by the mass extinction the earth took 100 million years to restore life on earth. If our civilisation disappears it will take some time like that for another civilisation to reappear. When volcanic eruptions happened the carbon dioxide built up and created the greenhouse effect. That was 251 million years ago. Now the building up of carbon dioxide is coming from our own lifestyle and our industrial activities.
If 6C degrees take place, another 95 per cent of species will die out, including Homo sapiens. That is why we have to learn to touch eternity with our in breath and out breath. Extinction of species has happened several times. Mass extinction has already happened five times and this one is the sixth. According to the Buddhist tradition there is no birth and no death. After extinction things will reappear in other forms, so you have to breathe very deeply in order to acknowledge the fact that we humans may disappear in just 100 years on earth.
You have to learn how to accept that hard fact. You should not be overwhelmed by despair. The solution is to learn how to touch eternity in the present moment. We have been talking about the environment as if it is something different from us, but we are the environment. The non-human elements are our environment, but we are the environment of non-human elements, so we are one with the environment. We are the environment. We are the earth and the earth has the capacity to restore balance and sometimes many species have to disappear for the balance restored. Maybe the flood, maybe the heat, maybe the air.
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“Human societies are as intoxicated and blinded by their own headlong rush toward death and destruction as they are by the search for erotic fulfillment.” ~ Chris Hedges quoting Sigmund Freud
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sadiqalquddus says:
“The big stink about Gaia’s flatulence is because it may make a sauna.”
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The WSJ won’t mention this. It has fooled the American public that we have decreased our portion of the burden of CO2 on the atmosphere. We have not. But the WSJ people, owners and readers, only care about maintaining a fossil fuel burning economy, because it makes them money.
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Looks like we have been wrong all along. Over 31,000 scientists say global warming is not caused by fossil fuel use, and that rising CO2 is good for us:
http://www.petitionproject.org/
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There’s always the possibility that some extraterrestrial event, like a massive EMP from a solar flare (like the one that just missed us a few weeks ago) will end it all relatively quickly and with little to no warning before all the feedback loops kick in.
There’s a lot of weird stuff going on with the sun and our solar system at this point, with more meteroroids passing close to us that anyone was expecting, an enormous abnormality on the sun’s surface recently, and the possibility of the sun reversing poles with whatever that will entail, for example.
It’s becoming so bizarre living in this dream-state of denial of what’s clearly imminent.
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Until then, Homo Economicus Rules…
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And this is what happens when Homo Economicus is crossed…
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My faith in humanity is renewed(heavy sarcasm)…
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The festering cancer that is Fukushima:
Tons of water welling-up under Fukushima power plant, VIDEO:
Rupert Wingfield-Hayes, BBC News, Tokyo: […]
Engineers are now facing a new emergency.
The Fukushima plant sits smack in the middle of an underground aquifer.
Deep beneath the ground, the site is rapidly being overwhelmed by water. […]
It’s now so high, the water will soon reach the surface. Then it will start flowing over-ground into the sea. […]
Even if the government does step in, it’s not clear what it could do. The only other solution is to pump out the
contaminated groundwater and put it in storage tanks. […]
Most of them are already filled up. At least 400 tons of new water pours into the site every day.
It’s going to continue for years and years.
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read more
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Thanks for the rhubarb thief video. I feel it was an avoidable incident. I’ve been around a lot of lunatics like her. It’s easy to avoid the aggro with a little skilful means, like asking how she’s going to cook it, or if she’d like some sugar to go with it, or whatever, I mean, calling cops about rhubarb is insane… I had a beautiful bed of strawberries and when I went there to pick them a badger had been before me and eaten them ALL, do I call the cops ? but then America IS insane, here’s another example…
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No hope for Homo Stupidicus…
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He’ll need the doctor to sign his death certificate before he’ll believe that he’s really dead. Still, there must be enough morons to vote for him or he wouldn’t get elected at all.
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I believe he is from the same state as the Rhubard Troll.
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Published on Wednesday, August 7, 2013 by Common Dreams
State of Climate Report Reveals ‘Unprecedented’ Arctic Melting
Climbing greenhouse gases, rising seas, record-breaking temperatures: all signs of a ‘changing and varying climate’
– Lauren McCauley, staff writer
Arctic sea-ice, Nunavut, Canada. (Photo: subarcticmike/ cc/ Flickr)
“Our planet as a whole is becoming a warmer place,” said Kathryn D. Sullivan, Acting Administrator at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
(Credit: NOAA)
Citing climbing greenhouse gases, rising seas, record-breaking temperatures and a rapidly melting Arctic, the American Meteorological Society’s (AMS) annual “State of the Climate in 2012,” released Tuesday by NOAA, revealed a planet undergoing dramatic environmental change.
“Many of the events that made 2012 such an interesting year are part of the long-term trends we see in a changing and varying climate,” added Sullivan. “The findings are striking.”
Examining such climate indicators as greenhouse gas concentrations, temperature of the lower and upper atmosphere, cloud cover, sea surface temperature, sea-level rise, ocean salinity, sea ice extent and snow cover, the report was compiled by 384 scientists from 52 countries.
Most notably, the scientists found that the “unprecedented change” occurring in the Arctic was the “major story of 2012.”
According to the report, the Arctic continued to warm “at about twice the rate compared with lower latitudes,” with the amount of sea ice shrinking to its smallest “summer minimum.” At 1.32 million square miles on September 16, it marked the least amount of ice since satellite records began 34 years ago.
Further, more than 97 percent of the Greenland ice sheet showed “some form of melt” during the 2012 summer—four times greater than the 1981–2010 average melt extent.
“The record or near-records being reported from year to year in the Arctic are no longer anomalies or exceptions,” said Jackie Richter-Menge, a civil engineer with the US army corps of engineers. “Really they have become the rule for us, or the norm that we see in the Arctic and that we expect to see for the foreseeable future.”
Some of NOAA’s other highlights from the report include:
Warm temperature trends continue near Earth’s surface: Four major independent datasets show 2012 was among the 10 warmest years on record, ranking either 8th or 9th, depending upon the dataset used. The United States and Argentina had their warmest year on record.
Sea level reaches record high: Following sharp decreases in global sea level in the first half of 2011 that were linked to the effects of La Niña, sea levels rebounded to reach record highs in 2012. Globally, sea level has been increasing at an average rate of 3.2 ± 0.4 mm per year over the past two decades.
Greenhouse gases climb: Major greenhouse gas concentrations, including carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide, continued to rise during 2012. […] Atmospheric CO2 concentrations increased by 2.1 ppm in 2012, reaching a global average of 392.6 ppm for the year. In spring 2012, for the first time, the atmospheric CO2concentration exceeded 400 ppm at several Arctic observational sites.
Ocean heat content remains near record levels: Heat content in the upper 2,300 feet, or a little less than one-half mile, of the ocean remained near record high levels in 2012.
_____________________
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My picks for the most important news stories in the last 12 hours. I hope you enjoy them. Goodnight.
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I have been watching the Japanese markets for over a decade, waiting for the implosion.
It very much looks as though the BoJ has no more bullets left to fire. ZIRP and stimulus haven’t worked. At 13,600, the Nikkei is about 1/3 of the historic peak, and is down nearly 2000 from the recent funny-munny peak.
That said, major market collapses are normally timed for October, so we have a few weeks.
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I’m sure you’ve heard of Kunstler’s idea that Japan will be the first country to “go Medieval.”
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http://blog.seattlepi.com/seattlepolitics/2013/08/07/is-global-warming-good-for-us-asks-republican-lawmaker/
In decrying the “religion” of global warming science, King suggested benefits of climate change, adding:
“Everything that might result from a warmer planet is always bad in (environmentalists’) analysis. There will be more photosynthesis going on if the Earth gets warmer . . . and if sea levels go up 4 to 6 inches. I don’t know if we’d know that.”
King argued that the United States must allow construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, which would carry oil from Alberta’s tar sands project across North America to refineries on the U.S. Gulf Coast.
Read more: link above
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Give humans a lemon and they will make lemonade. Give humans an apocalypse and they’ll buy guns, gold, and a doomstead.
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More indication that we are decades away from ever having the political will to get off fossil fuels…
http://www.ravallirepublic.com/news/opinion/viewpoint/article_00bf0714-ffc3-11e2-8703-001a4bcf887a.html
Excerpt:
“Believers in Global Warming sincerely believe that the legitimacy of their belief is based in scientific fact. Time after time I have heard them refer to those who do not share their view on the subject in disparaging terms. Some of these obviously angry people reject the idea that while they believe in it totally, Global Warming is not scientifically proven. It is a theory that has been challenged by thousands of climate scientists.
According to the Wall Street Journal that a Saudi billionaire, Prince Awaleed bin Tali warned in a letter to Saudi Oil Minister Ali al-Naimi and others that the U.S. boom of shale oil and gas will reduce its thirst for Saudi crude oil.
The following is part of that letter;
“I was hoping that your Highness would also shed light and focus on the danger of this matter in the ‘not-so-distant future,’ especially that America and some Asian countries made big discoveries in shale gas extraction which will affect the oil industry around the world in general and Saudi Arabia in particular…”
Where this leaves American consumers is a choice between the adherents of the theory, Global Warming, that is not scientifically proven and the reality of the observations of this billionaire Saudi Prince. What is frustrating is that America can become independent from Middle Eastern oil simply by utilizing the resources under our feet, but is prevented from doing so because of the power of those who are advocating green energy. It should be noted that the claim that man caused greenhouse gases is a scientifically proven fact was addressed here in Montana. The Montana Supreme Court rejected the “science is settled” claim on June 15, 2011.”
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Another so-called ‘Christian’ who appears never to have read the New Testament.
Or the Constitution, for that matter.
I expect there’ll be hordes of ’em running about naked in the next few days. I’ll look forward to the youtube clips.
A disgraced former Navy chaplain this week told his viewers that Jesus would want them to “sell your clothes and buy a gun.”
During his Pray In Jesus Name Internet show, Chaplain Gordon James “Chaps” Klingenschmitt suggested that the Department of Homeland Security was trying to enslave citizens by hoarding all of the ammunition.
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/08/07/former-navy-chaplain-jesus-wants-you-to-sell-your-clothes-and-buy-a-gun/
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/on-faith/wp/2013/08/07/dispelling-the-myth-of-a-christian-nation/
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“The Devil made me do it.”
“It’s all bullshit, and it’s bad for you.” -George Carlin.
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Here is a good article that gives a good rundown about energy and the choices facing us.
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175734/tomgram%3A_michael_klare%2C_how_to_fry_a_planet/
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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-zuesse/global-warming-is-greatly_b_3696529.html
Global Warming Is Greatly Increasing Crime and Other Conflict
Posted: 08/02/2013 1:06 pm
Excerpt:
A rigorously peer-reviewed study published in the latest issue of the world’s leading science journal, Science, finds “remarkable consistency of available quantitative evidence linking climate and conflict.” This article’s summary says that, “we assemble and analyze the 60 most rigorous quantitative studies, and document, for the first time, a remarkable convergence of results. We find strong causal evidence linking climatic events to human conflict across a range of spatial and temporal scales and across all major regions of the world. The magnitude of climate’s influence is substantial: for each 1 standard deviation (1σ) change in climate toward warmer temperatures or more extreme rainfall, median estimates indicate that the frequency of interpersonal violence rises 4% and the frequency of intergroup conflict rises 14%. Because locations throughout the inhabited world are expected to warm 2-4σ by 2050, amplified rates of human conflict [rising respectively 8% and 28% at the low end of the estimations, and 16% and 56% at the high end, by 2050] could represent a large and critical impact of anthropogenic [or ‘Man-made’] climate change.” To make that even simpler: “intergroup conflict,” or wars, will increase somewhere in the range of 28% to 56% by 2050.
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Still skeptical about climate change impact? Rising sea level, spreading wildfires, decline in animal population… A new report by California scientists shows dramatic effects of global warming on environment more clearly than ever.
http://voiceofrussia.com/news/2013_08_08/Global-warming-takes-toll-on-California-9328/
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U.S. Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Costa Mesa) referred to President Eisenhower’s farewell address Thursday evening in his explanation for why he believes global warming is a “total fraud.”
In the 1961 speech — famously known for its admonition of an emerging military-industrial complex — the former five-star general also warned of a similarly captive grip on U.S. public policy wielded by scientists and the government that funds them.
“There’s so much money that has gone into science research projects,” Rohrabacher said, “and they have used it to intimidate people who disagree with their attempt to frighten all of us into changing our lives and giving up our freedoms to make choices.”
The “strategy in spades” at hand, he said, are the locally elected liberals who want the state government to “do the work and let them make the decisions, then at the state level they want the federal government to do it, and at the federal government they want to create global government to control all of our lives.”
The 48th Congressional District congressman, who lives in Eastside Costa Mesa, spoke to a largely supportive crowd from the Newport Mesa Tea Party. About 130 packed the Halecrest Park Swim and Tennis Club to hear the 13-term politician speak for nearly an hour.
http://www.dailypilot.com/news/tn-dpt-me-0810-rohrabacher-speech-20130809,0,754223.story
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Good article about the dangerous events taking place at Fukushima:
http://www.fromthetrenchesworldreport.com/news-you-dont-want-to-read-about-fukushima/53570
Excerpt:
“This has to be the worst picture I have ever seen. For all of us who thought we were safer down here in South America, a hemisphere removed from the jet streams blowing radiation directly from Fukushima over the United States, we can now see how false that belief is. In this video and a graph from NOAA (at the bottom of the newsletter) we see that La Nina is splitting the jet stream sending radiation increasingly over Hawaii and then on to South America.
In a petition to United States Senators we read, “Although the initial meltdown of three reactors, from the earthquake/tsunami of March 11, 2011, occurred over 2 years ago, the complex is still highly unstable, and leaking radiation constantly into the air and water. The Pacific Ocean is more and more contaminated. West Coast marine mammals are dying by the thousands, and West Coast babies are sick. The FDA is not testing food for radiation, although many fish are contaminated, and there have been reports of milk, mushrooms, seaweed being radioactive. Nor is the air along the coast being checked by official agencies.”
Radiation levels are rising! The situation is getting worse, not better, but we are not hearing about that in the news until today’s headlines, Japan nuclear body says radioactive water at Fukushima an ‘emergency’. Tepco confirms radioactive contamination flowing out into the sea. The head of Japan’s new Nuclear Regulation Authority, created since the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami wrecked Fukushima, said this month he believed contamination of the sea had been continuing since the accident.”
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If that’s the graph I think it is, it’s fake. It’s the tsunami wave not radiation and its all over the Internet…
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