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Doomstead Diner Newz Channels => Knarfs Knewz => Topic started by: knarf on July 29, 2017, 11:39:35 AM

Title: This is sub-categor on Knarf's news channel, "Hot Pursuit of T6thME Spread"
Post by: knarf on July 29, 2017, 11:39:35 AM: Here I and hopefully you will investigate how the announcement in early July, that we are IN the midst of a mass extinction right now. I want to find as many paths that this leads to, throughout the world. It is just beginning to spread, so keep those eyes "peeled".
Title: 6thME - Destroying the Society...
Post by: knarf on July 29, 2017, 12:12:47 PM: (https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DF68KMXV0AAY-Hx.jpg:large)
Title: 6thME - Seed Bank in Hawai’i Protects Native Plants
Post by: knarf on July 29, 2017, 12:19:00 PM: Seed bank safeguards native Hawaiian plants.

With the influx of people to islands comes the spread of weeds, pests, and disease. Such introductions have contributed to the demise of over 130 plants species in Hawai’i. More than 40 percent of all Endangered and Threatened plants in the United States can be found in Hawaii.

The National Tropical Botanical Garden (NTBG) took initiative by collecting seeds as a security measure in the event of extinction. The seed bank is located on Kaua’i in the Juliet Rice Wichman Research Center, a state-of-the-art facility with LEED certification. To date, 3 million seeds are stored in the NTBG seed bank, with over 97 percent coming from native Hawaiian plants. These seeds will ensure that Hawaiian plants will exist in the future, even if they are driven to extinction in the wild.

(https://www.islandconservation.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/island-conservation-preventing-extinctions-hawaii-seedbank-forest.jpg)
Some of the plants grown at the nursery are planted at National Tropical Botanical Garden’s 1,000-acre Limahuli preserve.

In fact, some seeds in the bank are from plants already Extinct on the island. The native Kadua haupuensis has been driven to extinction by invasive pigs and goats, however their seeds are stored in NTBG. If their natural habitat is restored, Kadua haupuensis will return from extinction one day.

NTBG enlists volunteers and botanists to collect seeds. These individuals go to great lengths to obtain seeds of vulnerable plants, sometimes even scaling cliff faces or jumping out of helicopters to find Hawai’i’s rare plants.

Some seeds are stored, while others are planted in NTBG nurseries so that more seeds can be cultivated. The seeds collected from the sprouting plants in NTBG are either added to the standing collection, or undergo experiments exploring methods for seed storage and maximum storage period before the seeds decay.

Experiments will only be conducted if more than 100 seeds are available for a given plant. Dustin Wolkis, the seed bank manager at NTBG, affirms:

Seeds are living things and they have an expiration date just like all other living things. It’s my job to figure out what that expiration date it and push back.

There are two ways to extend a seeds life: drying or freezing. Wolkis’ experiments in seed conservation biology test the limits of seeds. Seed storage analysis first involves slightly drying the seeds. Then they are laid on a petri dish and put into germination chambers, where scientists can control the amount of temperature and light the seeds receive. If the seed begins to sprout, the scientists know that the conditions promote growth. This process is repeated until the seed doesn’t sprout, to determine the maximum range of conditions the seed can tolerate.

If a seed can tolerate drying, it is further tested to determine if it can withstand freezing. A seed is sealed in an aluminum foil pack in a negative 4-degree Fahrenheit (negative 20-degree Celsius) chamber for 3 months, after which it will enter the germination chamber again to see if it survived. A negative 112-degree Fahrenheit (negative 80-degree Celsius) chamber is also available for further testing.

Typically, thicker seeds are more likely to survive the drying and freezing processes, and are therefore easier to store. Seeds that are less sturdy don’t survive the freezing process because moisture in the seeds turns into ice crystals, which prove to be lethal.

Seeds that can withstand freezing are taken out of the freezer in yearly increments, starting with two years, then five years, then 10 years, for routine testing to ensure the seeds are still viable.

Wolkis wants to begin experimenting with liquid Nitrogen. At negative 321-degrees Fahrenheit (negative 321-degree Celsius), the moisture in the seeds wouldn’t have time to form ice. This would resolve the freezing problem for less sturdy seeds, ensuring that all of Hawai’i’s native plants will be safeguarded until their natural habitat is restored.

https://www.islandconservation.org/native-hawaiian-seed-bank/ (https://www.islandconservation.org/native-hawaiian-seed-bank/)
Title: 6thME - Averting mass extinction
Post by: knarf on July 29, 2017, 12:26:10 PM: For millions of years, Australia had no human inhabitants. When people finally arrived there some 45,000 years ago, the continent had 24 different creatures weighing 100 pounds or more. Within a few millennia, 23 were wiped out.

In his book “Sapiens,” Yuval Noah Harari notes: “Long before the Industrial Revolution, Homo Sapiens held the record among all organisms for driving the most plant and animal species to their extinction. We have the dubious distinction of being the deadliest species in the annals of biology.”

From all indications, we are not about to be dethroned. A new study published in a journal of the National Academy of Sciences says nearly 200 species have vanished in the past century, and 9,000 have seen substantial reductions in their numbers. Only 7,000 cheetahs are left, and the population of West African lions is down to 400. Scientists suggest that Earth is well into the sixth mass extinction of the last half-billion years.

Humans are good at finding ways to protect the environment and our fellow creatures when the need is there. When the federal Wilderness Act was passed in 1964, it designated 9 million acres of land as wilderness. Today, we have nearly 110 million acres that provide unspoiled habitat for innumerable species.

Other federal lands such as national parks and forests are also protected from most forms of development — amounting to more than one-seventh of all the land in the country. Neighboring residents have learned that they can profit from tourists who come to hike remote woodland trails and see grizzly bears, eagles and wolves. All this is the fruit of prosperity, not poverty.

Namibia has boosted the number of black rhinoceroses, once down to six, to more than 1,400, reports NPR, while doubling the numbers of both cheetahs and elephants. It has also virtually eliminated poaching. How? By enabling communities to establish conservation areas and administer them in ways that benefit the people living there.

The report provides a sobering picture of how much irreversible damage could be done to worldwide biological diversity. Unlike other creatures, humans can consciously shape the future for generations to come. We should use ingenuity for the benefit of the countless creatures with which we share the Earth. That would also be good for our species.

— Chicago Tribune

(http://www.recordernews.com/opinion/editorial/94026)
Title: 6thME- avianflu.com reaction
Post by: knarf on July 29, 2017, 12:40:17 PM: "ARTICLE" post

reactions

Lucky we have an administration that cares...

"Buy it cheap. Stack it deep"
"Any community that fails to prepare, with the expectation that the federal government will come to the rescue, will be tragically wrong." Michael Leavitt, HHS Secretary.
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Quote Technophobe Quote Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: July 11 2017 at 11:01am
Yep! Clown
Absence of proof is not proof of absence.
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Quote jacksdad Quote Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: July 11 2017 at 12:04pm
I'd laugh, but, you know... Angry

"Buy it cheap. Stack it deep"
"Any community that fails to prepare, with the expectation that the federal government will come to the rescue, will be tragically wrong." Michael Leavitt, HHS Secretary.
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Quote carbon20 Quote Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: July 11 2017 at 2:59pm
i worry for my Grandkids..............Unhappy
12 monkeys!!!!!
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Quote jacksdad Quote Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: July 11 2017 at 10:34pm
I worry for our kids, carbon.

"Buy it cheap. Stack it deep"
"Any community that fails to prepare, with the expectation that the federal government will come to the rescue, will be tragically wrong." Michael Leavitt, HHS Secretary.
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Quote Dutch Josh Quote Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: July 11 2017 at 11:31pm
Paul Beckwith is one of many scientists who has been warning of the effects climate change has on life on earth for years. In 2006 came [url=https://www.algore.com/library/an-inconvenient-truth-dvd.]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfDxT7sjCFQ[//url] Paul Beckwith is one of many scientists who has been warning of the effects climate change has on life on earth for years. In 2006 came [url]https://www.algore.com/library/an-inconvenient-truth-dvd.]https://www.algore.com/library/an-inconvenient-truth-dvd.]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfDxT7sjCFQ[//url] Paul Beckwith is one of many scientists who has been warning of the effects climate change has on life on earth for years. In 2006 came [url]https://www.algore.com/library/an-inconvenient-truth-dvd. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfDxT7sjCFQ[//url) But warnings for climatechange go back to 1847 !

The sixth mass extinction is happening NOW ! Not in the IPCC 2100 scenario, not a problem for when (grand)children are grown-ups, but we are already in the middle of it !

https://www.facebook.com/JoseBarbaNueva?fref=nf&pnref=story (https://www.facebook.com/JoseBarbaNueva?fref=nf&pnref=story) Joe Neubarth is following (a.o.) the methane release in the Arctic. Water vapor and methane are driving the abrupt climate change we are in now.

http://arctic-news.blogspot.nl/2017/05/abrupt-warming-how-much-and-how-fast.html (http://arctic-news.blogspot.nl/2017/05/abrupt-warming-how-much-and-how-fast.html) Sam Carana comes with his calculations of over 10 degrees Celsius temperature rise in the coming 10 years. Both Joe Neubarth and Sam Carana (and many others, Guy McPherson etc) have a very good story in wich they warn that humans may have only a few years left.

I am not a scientist. But I do think radical changes MUST be made NOW ! Maybe those changes can slow down climate change enough to buy us time to avoid "end of live".

I expect mass media will be confronted with stories off floodings, wildfires, extreme heat, food crisis etc. more and more and more. Even trump will wake up one day to see there is a very big problem.

Que sera, sera, Whatever will be, will be, The future is not ours to see, Que sera, sera !
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Quote Satori Quote Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: July 12 2017 at 1:01am
EPA chief wants his useless climate change 'debate' televised, and I need a drink

https://www.yahoo.com/news/epa-chief-wants-useless-climate-224316151.html (https://www.yahoo.com/news/epa-chief-wants-useless-climate-224316151.html)

Trump=the WRONG person ,at the WRONG time,in the WRONG job

let him go back to cheating carpenters,painters and carpet layers and taking Russian mob money

he may very well have SEALED our fate
“The point of modern propaganda isn’t only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.” Gary Kasparov
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Quote Technophobe Quote Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: July 12 2017 at 3:15am
JD, Carbon - I worry for me. Exclamation
Absence of proof is not proof of absence.
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Quote Dutch Josh Quote Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: July 12 2017 at 3:21am
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/05/18/climate/antarctica-ice-melt-climate-change.html (https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/05/18/climate/antarctica-ice-melt-climate-change.html)

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2140302-melting-ice-may-be-making-mountains-collapse-in-greenland/#.WWVnbxhG1-g.facebook (https://www.newscientist.com/article/2140302-melting-ice-may-be-making-mountains-collapse-in-greenland/#.WWVnbxhG1-g.facebook)

The sixth-mas-extinction-event is NOW and HERE. It should be the main news-top priority.

What amazes me most that it is not top news. We have ruined our only planet and are making selfies of it; are we all crazy ?
Que sera, sera, Whatever will be, will be, The future is not ours to see, Que sera, sera !
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Quote Technophobe Quote Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: July 12 2017 at 3:55am
The Larson C ice shelf just calved an enormous iceberg.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jul/12/giant-antarctic-iceberg-breaks-free-of-larsen-c-ice-shelf (http://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jul/12/giant-antarctic-iceberg-breaks-free-of-larsen-c-ice-shelf)

Absence of proof is not proof of absence.
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Quote Dutch Josh Quote Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: July 12 2017 at 5:08am
https://robertscribbler.com/2017/07/11/antarcticas-4th-largest-ice-shelf-is-about-to-melt-back-to-its-smallest-area-ever-recorded/ (https://robertscribbler.com/2017/07/11/antarcticas-4th-largest-ice-shelf-is-about-to-melt-back-to-its-smallest-area-ever-recorded/) with good info in the comments.

On the Guardian article; I understand mass-media do not want to be blamed for creating mass-panic. But (Ant)Arctic ice melting on this scale is a gigantic problem.

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/07/what-mass-extinctions-teach-us-about-climate-change-today.html?utm_source=fb&utm_medium=s3&utm_campaign=sharebutton-t (http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/07/what-mass-extinctions-teach-us-about-climate-change-today.html?utm_source=fb&utm_medium=s3&utm_campaign=sharebutton-t)
Que sera, sera, Whatever will be, will be, The future is not ours to see, Que sera, sera !
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Quote arirish Quote Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: July 12 2017 at 8:48am
Giant iceberg splits from Antarctic

One of the biggest icebergs ever recorded has just broken away from Antarctica.

The giant block is estimated to cover an area of roughly 6,000 sq km; that's about a quarter the size of Wales.

An US satellite observed the berg on Wednesday while passing over a region known as the Larsen C Ice Shelf.

Scientists were expecting it. They'd been following the development of a large crack in Larsen's ice for more than a decade.

The rift's propagation had accelerated since 2014, making an imminent calving ever more likely.

The more than 200m-thick tabular berg will not move very far, very fast in the short term. But it will need to be monitored. Currents and winds might eventually push it north of the Antarctic where it could become a hazard to shipping.

An infrared sensor on the American space agency's Aqua satellite spied clear water in the rift between the shelf and the berg on Wednesday. The water is warmer relative to the surrounding ice and air - both of which are sub-zero.

"The rift was barely visible in these data in recent weeks, but the signature is so clear now that it must have opened considerably along its whole length," explained Prof Adrian Luckman, whose Project Midas at Swansea University has followed the berg's evolution most closely.

The event was confirmed by other spacecraft such as Europe's Sentinel-1 satellite-radar system.

http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-40321674 (http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-40321674)
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Quote arirish Quote Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: July 12 2017 at 8:56am
A planet devastated by climate change may seem like a distant future. But Earth is already experiencing the effects of rising global temperatures today.

Worldwide, the mean rate of sea level rise increased 50% in the last two decades. In 2017, temperatures have already reached their highest levels in history in some areas, from California to Vietnam. The past three years were the hottest on record.

These changes are caused by increasing levels of carbon dioxide and methane in the Earth's atmosphere, a product of human activity. And as New York Magazine's David Wallace-Wells recently noted, no single emissions reduction program we have today is enough to prevent climate disaster — not even the Paris agreement.

Even if every signatory country in the accord meets its current pledge for reducing emissions — including the US, though Trump has pledged to pull the country out of the agreement — the world is still projected to warm over 2 degrees Celsius by 2050. The Paris agreement points out this reality in a section titled, "Notes with concern."

Two degrees may not seem like much, but the rise would have substantial impacts. Scientists say that places that supply the world's food, including Southern Europe and much of the Middle East, Australia, Africa, South America, and China, would be in permanent, extreme drought by 2080. Flooding would become a serious issue near the coasts, where a third of the world's major cities are located, since sea levels are projected to rise by at least 10 feet by the end of the century.

Even if every country on the planet cuts emissions, the climate would still be screwed
Experts also warn that if the Arctic ice continues to melt, ancient diseases trapped in glaciers could get released. Plus, the world would face the extinction of many animal species and rising human mortality.

The planet has already warmed nearly 1 degree Celsius, and James Hansen, a renowned climate scientist at Columbia University, suggested in a recent paper that keeping global warming below 1.5 degrees is nearly impossible. Hansen suggested that hitting the goal would require negative emissions levels, which would mean capturing carbon and taking it out of the atmosphere.

To make matters worse, our best protection against the effects of rising carbon dioxide levels comes from so-called "carbon sinks" — patches of land and ocean that absorb large chunks of the carbon dioxide we pump into the atmosphere. But now those sinks may be at capacity, prompting the Earth to continue cooking even as emissions get curbed.

In a recent open letter, six prominent scientists and diplomats, including former UN climate chief Christiana Figueres and physicist Stefan Rahmstorf, wrote that the world has approximately three years before the worst effects of climate change take hold.

Published June 28, the letter urges governments, businesses, scientists, and citizens to address the world's greenhouse-gas emissions now. If emissions can be permanently lowered by 2020, they wrote, global temperatures will likely avoid reaching that irreversible threshold.

In the letter, the scientists propose six goals to hit by 2020:
• Increase renewable energy to 30% of electricity use.
• Draft plans for cities and states to ditch fossil fuel energy by 2050, with funding of $300 billion annually.
• Ensure 15% of all new vehicles sold are electric.
• Cut net emissions from deforestation.
• Publish plan for halving emissions from deforestation well before 2050.
• Encourage the financial sector to issue more "green bonds" toward climate-mitigation efforts.

But those aims are at odds with the priorities of the Trump administration, which has signaled that climate change mitigation is not on its agenda. Because of that conflict, the authors call for US cities and businesses to fight emissions and meet the Paris accord goals without the help of the federal government.

"We stand at the doorway of being able to bend the emissions curve downwards by 2020, as science demands, in protection of the UN sustainable development goals, and in particular the eradication of extreme poverty," Figueres said in a press release.

"This monumental challenge coincides with an unprecedented openness to self-challenge on the part of sub-national governments inside the US, governments at all levels outside the US, and of the private sector in general. The opportunity given to us over the next three years is unique in history."

Wallace-Wells emphasized in his recent New York Magazine piece that an enormous effort from the world's governments and citizens is crucial for staving off the worst effects of climate change. Whether the world will succeed in addressing emissions in a serious way, however, remains to be seen.

http://www.businessinsider.com/emissions-cuts-not-enough-climate-change-2017-7 (http://www.businessinsider.com/emissions-cuts-not-enough-climate-change-2017-7)
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Quote Satori Quote Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: July 12 2017 at 9:51am
plenty of VERY dire predictions from people like McPherson and associates

one thing I am watching closely is food production

when you see falling production of the major grains eg. corn,wheat and rice
then it is past time to hit the panic button

McPherson predicts the end of humanity within 10 years or so
IF true
we're not going to get to year 9,day 364 and then the next day 7 billion people suddenly drop dead

LONG before that happens a LOT of very bad stuff has to happen
the dieoff as predicted by McPherson is going to be gradual
culminating in eventual extinction

WATCH FOOD PRODUCTION
“The point of modern propaganda isn’t only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.” Gary Kasparov
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Quote Satori Quote Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: July 12 2017 at 12:31pm
Extreme Weather Takes A Toll On Wheat Harvests. Climate Change Will Make It Worse.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/climate-change-wheat_us_59663fece4b03f144e2fc6ff?ncid=inblnkushpmg00000009 (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/climate-change-wheat_us_59663fece4b03f144e2fc6ff?ncid=inblnkushpmg00000009)

“The point of modern propaganda isn’t only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.” Gary Kasparov
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Quote carbon20 Quote Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: July 12 2017 at 2:29pm
Climate change is the biggest challage Mankind has ever faced,

and most dont believe its Happening RIGHT NOW before our eyes,

when Koyoto agreement signed i thought "HOW DO I REDUCE MY CARBON USAGE BY 50%"

answer stay at home 3 1/2 days a week and do nothing not even turn a light on ,cook,flush Lavatory

this is the reality,well as i see it

so we screwed..........
12 monkeys!!!!!
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Quote Diligent Quote Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: July 12 2017 at 5:09pm
Just keep an eye on Fukushima because it is still a very bad situation.

Diligent

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Quote Satori Quote Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: July 12 2017 at 6:16pm
Pruitt blasts Europe, Merkel for ‘hypocrisy’ on climate

http://www.politico.com/story/2017/07/12/pruitt-climate-hypocrisy-merkel-europe-240479 (http://www.politico.com/story/2017/07/12/pruitt-climate-hypocrisy-merkel-europe-240479)

MORE fail on the part of the Trump administration

big surpriseDead
“The point of modern propaganda isn’t only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.” Gary Kasparov
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Quote Dutch Josh Quote Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: July 12 2017 at 10:54pm
Another story: http://www.newsprepper.com/warning-california-volcano-ready-blow-lond-valley-volcano-scientists-warning/ (http://www.newsprepper.com/warning-california-volcano-ready-blow-lond-valley-volcano-scientists-warning/) and http://www.newsprepper.com/breaking-russian-researchers-warn-megaquake-will-rip-america/ (http://www.newsprepper.com/breaking-russian-researchers-warn-megaquake-will-rip-america/)

A series of very large quakes/volcanic eruptions in "the wrong place" (Japan, California a.o.) could do so much damage the global economy could collapse.

Most scientists did not expect the 2011 M9 Japan quake to be possible. An M10 quake may be possible every 100/400 years according to some models. https://earthscience.stackexchange.com/questions/875/are-richter-magnitude-10-earthquakes-possible. (https://earthscience.stackexchange.com/questions/875/are-richter-magnitude-10-earthquakes-possible.)
(For Japan) once every 100.000 years an M10 could be possible http://enenews.com/kyodo-m10-quake-possible-says-study-an-hour-of-shaking-tsunami-lasting-for-several-days (http://enenews.com/kyodo-m10-quake-possible-says-study-an-hour-of-shaking-tsunami-lasting-for-several-days) and http://enenews.com/asahi-japan-should-be-prepared-for-possibility-of-m10-quake-days-of-tsunamis-only-1-magnitude-below-asteroid-strike-video (http://enenews.com/asahi-japan-should-be-prepared-for-possibility-of-m10-quake-days-of-tsunamis-only-1-magnitude-below-asteroid-strike-video)

Supervolcanos and mega-quakes DO mix. Climate change is a very major problem but "violent earth" can cause the sixth mass extinction, meteoritesstrike can. A global civil war can do so much damage humans will not survive it. (The 30 year war 1618-1648 killed 30% of the German population, the Korean war 1950-53 did see 15% of North Koreans killed. Even in Roman times wars could do so much damage that vast areas of land became unliveble due to lack of watersupplies, infrastructure.)
Que sera, sera, Whatever will be, will be, The future is not ours to see, Que sera, sera !

Yes Fukushima still throwing out Millions of Rads ,everyday ,who Knows what damage on a cellular level

thats doing not only to Humans, but to the wildlife,

i expecting Goddizzila to pop out of the Ocean ,

sorry if that seems a little Light hearted ,

but i am serious.......
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Quote Dutch Josh Quote Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: July 13 2017 at 10:33pm
https://paulbeckwith.net/2017/07/14/abrupt-climate-mayhem-now-in-spite-of-main-stream-climatologist-posturing/ (https://paulbeckwith.net/2017/07/14/abrupt-climate-mayhem-now-in-spite-of-main-stream-climatologist-posturing/) Paul Beckwith getting angry about scientists with all the pieces of the puzzle refusing to do their job.

http://arctic-news.blogspot.nl/2017/07/wildfires.html (http://arctic-news.blogspot.nl/2017/07/wildfires.html)

Of course less pressure from land-ice on Greenland and Antarctica means that that landmass will rise up-causing seismicpressure. Under Antarctica-proberbly also Greenland-may be volcanic areas that will get more active causing (sharp) increase in melt.

In a worse case scenario sealevelrise globally could be "significant" in 24 hours after a major volcanic eruption in those areas. Glaciers/iceplates giving way will mean more landice moving faster into the ocean.

Most nuclear reactors-needing cooling water-will get effected by climate change (drought=lack of cooling=fire, flooding=faillure of cooling mechanisms, radiation leak).

I do not want to think to much about the future-lets enjoy the present !
Que sera, sera, Whatever will be, will be, The future is not ours to see, Que sera, sera !
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Quote FluMom Quote Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: July 14 2017 at 9:20pm
Guys it is all due to too many people. Climate change and the rest of it is due to too many people. If we had a killer flu or something like that the world would be just fine.

I look at electric cars that are good for the environment and that electricity has to come from somewhere...coal, nuke, gas. Wind would be the only eclectic power that is clean and there is not enough of that.

So until we kill a bunch of people all over the world we will have problems.
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Quote Technophobe Quote Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: July 15 2017 at 2:19am
Exactly!

Earth can, and does, heal from most things we do. The big problems come from our numbers: it just can't heal fast enough.

We really do need a seriously nasty flu though. There are about ten time as many of us as this planet can take. It would have been better had we kept our numbers down by not breeding so much, by far the kinder option. But, as we are not that smart, we can either die in huge numbers, ................................................... or die out.

What a stupid, unpleasant species we are.
Absence of proof is not proof of absence.
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Quote Dutch Josh Quote Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: July 15 2017 at 5:12am
Most of the enviromental damage is done by a small group. About 10% of the people can be blamed for 90% of the damage. So it is a small group of people flying a lot, making a lot of miles in dirty cars, eating a lot of meat etc....that need to change their habbits !

We do not need flu, or IS, or anything else drastic to spread dead and destruction ! Just common sense can do most !

Personaly I feel that keeping the number of children limited is taking responsibility for their future. When you want to have children (and can get them) they deserve the best.
Que sera, sera, Whatever will be, will be, The future is not ours to see, Que sera, sera !
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Quote carbon20 Quote Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: July 15 2017 at 4:25pm
to much carbon in the atmosphere,is the problem,

all the worlds GREATEST minds should be put together ,

in the desert somewhere maybe in the Middle of Australia ,we could call it

"Save Manhatten Project"

my point is they did it to produce a weapon that kills 100,000s

so instead of writing books on Quantum this or that which wont mean jacks...t if the planet is unliveable get on with saving the planet we all call home ,

ill kick it off ,how about venting the Co2 into space theres a great big vacume cleaner out there

a ring of satalites with graphene tubes that suck out the CO2 and vent it into space.....

or maybe we should just grow more trees ,and stop mining the dead forrests for fuel.....

12 monkeys!!!!!
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Quote carbon20 Quote Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: July 15 2017 at 5:45pm
Earth could become ‘practically ungovernable’ if sea levels keep rising, says former Nasa climate chief

Professor Jim Hansen says a carbon tax in which the proceeds were given to the public would leave the poorest 70 per cent better off

Ian Johnston Environment Correspondent
@montaukian
2 days ago

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The Independent Online
web-miami-aerial-get.jpgLow-lying Miami is particularly prone to flooding Getty

The Earth could become “practically ungovernable” because of sea level rise, Nasa’s former head of climate research, Professor James Hansen, has warned.

Professor Hansen, who was among the first scientists to alert politicians and the public to the risks posed by climate change, told New York Magazine that he doubted the atmosphere would warm by four or five degrees Celsius by the end of this century – the upper end of current projections, which would likely end human civilisation as we know it.

However he said the biggest problem would be sea level rise. Professor Hanson was an author of a scientific paper published last year which warned that continued high fossil fuel emissions could increase sea levels by “several meters over a timescale of 50 to 150 years”.

READ MORE

Climate change doomsday warning of death smog and endless war attacked

This is significantly higher than the latest expert report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which forecast a range from about 30cm to just under a metre, depending on emissions.

Asked to consider what the world would be like if the “scarier” projections of climate change for the end of the century became reality, Professor Hansen, former director of the Nasa Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said: “I don’t think we’re going to get four or five degrees this century, because we get a cooling effect from the melting ice. But the biggest effect will be that melting ice.

“In my opinion that’s the big thing – sea-level rise – because we have such a large fraction of people on coastlines, more than half of the large cities in the world are on coastlines.

“The economic implications of that, and the migrations and the social effects of migrations … the planet could become practically ungovernable, it seems to me.
READ MORE

Sea levels are rising three times faster than in 1990, find scientists
Coral reefs 'can't grow fast enough to keep pace with rising seas'
Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate could be flooded due to climate change
Millions of Europeans 'face being flooded out their homes every year'

“Once sea levels go up significantly, you won’t have stable shorelines. Just parts of the city will go under water, but then it doesn’t make sense to continue to build there … By the time you get to even one-meter rise, you’re going to be losing more land.”

The growing human population was a "problem", he said.

“That’s why you want to have energy that’s needed for people to eliminate poverty, because countries that have become wealthy have the population under control. But if you do begin to lose major cities [then] the planet becomes ungovernable,” Professor Hansen said.

But if the world did reach four or five degrees, the scientist said this would mean “the tropics and the subtropics are going to be practically uninhabitable”.

“It’s already becoming uncomfortable in the summers, in the subtropics, you can’t work outdoors. And agriculture, more than half of the jobs are outdoors,” he said.
Science news in pictures

He also reiterated the argument in favour of a carbon tax in which the proceeds were given back to the public – creating a windfall for more than two-thirds of the population.“If you made the price of fossil fuels honest by including a gradually rising carbon fee, then it actually spurs the economy and increases the GNP as you shift toward clean energies and energy efficiency. It creates potentially millions of jobs,” Professor Hansen said.“The way to spur the economy – to modernise the economy and modernise the energy structure – would be to give the money back to the public because a carbon fee is a progressive tax, in the sense that rich people have bigger carbon footprints.“So if you do give 100 per cent of the money to the public, 70 per cent of the public comes out ahead.”

12 monkeys!!!!!
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Quote jacksdad Quote Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: July 16 2017 at 7:47am
Originally posted by FluMom FluMom wrote:

Guys it is all due to too many people. Climate change and the rest of it is due to too many people.

Yep - it's us. It'd nice to think that we'll wise up in time and see we're on a crash course with a destiny we're not going to like, but apparently a large brain doesn't automatically endow a species with the capacity to act responsibly - not at first anyway. I fully expect our actions and apparent lack of foresight to result in a global human die-off like no other we've ever seen if mankind don't get past the self-destructive, petulant child stage, and fast.

The ironic thing is that we know all about the importance of properly controlling animal populations - with one glaring exception. As China has found out, simply limiting the number of children after the fact doesn't work because you end up with an aging population supported by a much smaller and younger workforce. Dubbed "The Gray Wall Of China", it's a demographic crisis that initially addressed the issue of population growth, but brings with it a whole host of potentially insurmountable problems. We're probably not going to like what awaits us, especially as much of it will be our fault.

FluMom is right - the harsh truth is that depopulation has to occur across the board to maintain a healthy ratio of age ranges within a species. On the plus side, as Techno pointed out, the planet will heal itself just fine despite our best efforts to screw it up. In a couple of million years, the damage we've caused will have been erased from the face of the Earth.

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"Any community that fails to prepare, with the expectation that the federal government will come to the rescue, will be tragically wrong." Michael Leavitt, HHS Secretary.
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Quote Technophobe Quote Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: July 16 2017 at 8:36am
That is exactly how I see it JD and FluMom.

Hopefully we will make some robots to deal with our grey wall. Even if not, then the grey wall would still be the better option. Poor care in old age - VS - not reaching old age, ....... or even middle age. China may still have some problems, (who doesn't?) but their economy is booming, their society is progressing, albeit slowly, and their people seem optimistic and reasonably happy.

I know which senario I prefer.
Absence of proof is not proof of absence.
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Quote jacksdad Quote Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: July 16 2017 at 9:22am
That brings with it another conundrum - what do we do, if and when we develop mechanization to the point where robots can replace just about every worker? Automation has already been the death of many jobs associated with manufacturing. It sounds like a utopia, but it could go either way.

And the prospect of smart AI quite frankly scares the crap out of me. How would a machine with an IQ in the thousands or higher, view it's far more stupid squishy creators?

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Quote Technophobe Quote Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: July 16 2017 at 11:27am
Yes, new problems.

Robots do not need to be that bright. They already build cars, run diagnostics for more systems than I can count and replace us is loads of jobs. AI may be coming but it still has a huge way to go (thank God!) they are fast but thick now. Most nursing of the elderly is fairly simple stuff. Washing, cooking, doing the laundry, doing the washing, walking the companion dog/cat. The care workers who today travel around to do those things would just need to travel around checking the programs were appropriate and that the robot functioned ok.

Stealing our jobs? - Tax them, just like other workers. If a robot makes $20k for the company per year, take $5k. Use that money to fund welfare, medicaid and give grants to start new businesses and the like. People can always invent new jobs to fill their days. Art, crafts, rescearch, space expansion, or even "Big Brother" if that floats their boat.

Being us, we will probably mess that up in some spectacular way too. But, that does not need to be the case. We just need a visionary like Steve Jobbs or Werner Von Braun to move into No10 here or The White House there.

Sadly, assuming we survive the heat, sulphur, drowning, methane, unbreathable air, war, famine, hurricanes, acidification of the oceans and the spread of the plagues, I fully expect the rise of the machines, grey goo or the new Luddites. Keep on fighting folks. Not everyone is stupid or blind, just most.
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Quote Satori Quote Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: July 16 2017 at 2:02pm
Research Team Slams Global Warming Data In New Report: “Not A Valid Representation Of Reality… Totally Inconsistent With Credible Temperature Data”

http://www.shtfplan.com/headline-news/research-team-slams-global-warming-data-in-new-report-not-a-valid-representation-of-reality-totally-inconsistent-with-credible-temperature-data_07142017 (http://www.shtfplan.com/headline-news/research-team-slams-global-warming-data-in-new-report-not-a-valid-representation-of-reality-totally-inconsistent-with-credible-temperature-data_07142017)

this is above my pay grade

anyone know anything about it ?

and meanwhile

the ice continues to melt.....
“The point of modern propaganda isn’t only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.” Gary Kasparov
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Quote carbon20 Quote Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: July 16 2017 at 2:48pm
Terminator......funny how SF movies give us an insight to what might be.....

How about a mix of 12 Monkeys and the Terminator,where the AI develops and releases a very nasty Virus......

Leaves earth free of it's human infestation.......

12 monkeys!!!!!
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Quote Technophobe Quote Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: July 16 2017 at 4:17pm
Whereas there was some real science in that report, Satori, the conclusions reached ignored most of it. To paraphrase the guy who never made it to president, all the inconvenient bits were ignored. For instance; the Met Office data: did show lower overall temperatures - but it also showed the same increasing temperature pattern the report denies.

I looked up the researchers who compiled the report.

Dr. James P. Wallace III appears to be something of a pariah in scientific circles

Dr. Joseph S. D’Aleo Is a weatherman and as such must know something about the subject, however, everything I found about him, was written by him. That does not give me much faith in his conclusions.

Dr. Craig D. Idso appears to have his research funded by Exon. If that is not enough to judge his bias, then consider his most famous quote: "CO2 is not a polutant." (In chemistry circles it is considered a toxin and a COT gas.)

None of them has claimed the Earth is flat, YET, just give them time. That these idiots, liars, self publicists and pseudo-scientists (IMHO) still get quoted just proves how stupid our species really is.

It is true that the whole climate picture is massively complicated. I am not sure the opposite arguments are wholly true either. However, the weight of data and the collective of real scientific opinion does show an upward trend, which we contribute massively to. How far this will go, how much damage will be done, whether or not we can mitigate it and whether or not it will kill all of us or just most is still to be shown.
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Quote jacksdad Quote Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: July 16 2017 at 9:37pm
https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2017-07-16/elon-musk-artificial-intelligence-is-the-biggest-risk-that-we-face-as-a-civilization (https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2017-07-16/elon-musk-artificial-intelligence-is-the-biggest-risk-that-we-face-as-a-civilization)

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"Any community that fails to prepare, with the expectation that the federal government will come to the rescue, will be tragically wrong." Michael Leavitt, HHS Secretary.
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Quote carbon20 Quote Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: July 19 2017 at 2:35pm
Energy and Environment
Climate change will force today’s kids to pay for costly carbon removal technologies, study says
By Chelsea Harvey July 19 at 8:28 AM

New research suggests that if immediate and significant emissions reduction efforts are undertaken — amounting to a decline in global carbon output by at least 3 percent annually starting in the next four years — then less carbon extraction will be needed. (Martin Meissner/AP)

The longer humans continue to pour carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, the closer we draw to leaving the next generation with an unmanageable climate problem, scientists say. A new study, just out Tuesday in the journal Earth System Dynamics, suggests that merely reducing greenhouse gas emissions may no longer be enough — and that special technology, aimed at removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, may also be necessary to keep the Earth’s climate within safe limits for future generations.

The research was largely inspired by a landmark climate change lawsuit brought by 21 children against the federal government, which is scheduled to go to trial in February 2018, and will be used as scientific support in the case. In fact, its lead author, Columbia University climatologist and former NASA scientist James Hansen, is a plaintiff on the case, along with his now 18-year-old granddaughter.

The new paper argues that the Paris Agreement’s target of keeping global temperatures within 1.5 to 2 degrees Celsius (2.7 to 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) of their preindustrial levels isn’t strong enough. During a previous warm period in the Earth’s history, known as the Eemian, or the last interglacial period, the planet experienced similar levels of warming, the authors note — and the resulting consequences included the disintegration of ice sheets and six to nine meters of sea level rise.
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Noting the dramatic changes that occurred during the last interglacial period, the paper calls for a more stringent target of bringing atmospheric carbon dioxide levels down from their current concentration of more than 400 parts per million to about 350 parts per million by the end of the century. This would bring global temperature closer to a 1-degree threshold, rather than 1.5 or 2 degrees, the authors say.

But the study has already come in from some criticism from other scientists, such as Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, who told The Washington Post that some aspects of the study were “alarmist” and that if changes come slowly enough, society will be able to adapt to them. Trenberth said he disagreed that the 1 degree target is justified and thinks that even 1.5 degrees is “unrealistic.”

Hansen is no stranger to controversy. In 2015, he and more than a dozen colleagues published a highly contested paper in the open-access journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, suggesting that sea level rise may occur more rapidly in this century than previously predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
< id="google_ads__/701/wpni.business/blog/energy-environment_6" title="3rd party ad " name="google_ads__/701/wpni.business/blog/energy-environment_6" width="300" height="250" scrolling="no" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" border="0" style="-sizing: border-; width: 300px; border-width: 0px; border-style: initial; vertical-align: bottom;">

In the new study, the researchers suggest that allowing temperatures to creep into the Eemian range once again could eventually trigger the onset of certain slow-developing climate processes that may ultimately enhance global warming, once again inducing catastrophic ice melt, sea level rise and other harmful climate effects. For instance, continued loss of ice may reduce the Earth’s reflectivity, they suggest, allowing more solar radiation to warm the planet’s surface and melt more ice.

But to keep temperatures lower, the paper finds, would require not only significant emissions reductions efforts, but also the use of “negative emissions” technology, or special methods for pulling carbon dioxide back out of the atmosphere.

Using models, the researchers suggest that if immediate and significant emissions reduction efforts are undertaken — amounting to a decline in global carbon output by at least 3 percent annually starting in the next four years — then less carbon extraction will be needed. A majority of it could be accomplished through basic changes in agricultural and forestry practices to promote greater storage of carbon in vegetation and soil.

On the other hand, the longer global greenhouse gas emissions are allowed to remain at high levels, the more carbon extraction will be needed to reach this target, requiring additional, costlier forms of technology. These may include the burning of biomass for energy, accompanied with carbon capture and storage technology, or technology that directly sucks carbon dioxide out of the air.

If humans immediately began reducing global greenhouse gas emissions by a relatively high rate of 6 percent each year, the researchers estimate that the carbon extraction technology needed to get down to 350 parts per million could cost anywhere from $8 trillion to nearly $18.5 trillion. And if no emissions reductions occur, these costs could rise above $500 trillion through the end of the century.

“Some consequences [of climate change] are already becoming inevitable, but as yet it could be moderate if we begin to reduce emissions rapidly,” Hansen said. “So that’s the objective — to try to get the global community to understand the importance of beginning those emissions reductions soon, and keeping the task that we’re leaving for young people one that they can manage.”

But Trenberth said of the paper that while “it is a good point that some slow feedbacks do not kick in until temperatures have been sustained at a certain level,” a great deal of the future human experience with climate change will depend not only on which thresholds we cross, but how quickly we cross them.

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“If we can slow things down then a lot of adaptation can occur,” he said.

Other researchers are a little more cautiously accepting of the paper’s points.

Cristian Proistosescu, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Washington who was not involved with the new research (but who recently led a major study, himself, on the potential future impact of slow-developing climate modes) expressed some skepticism about using the Earth’s ancient history as an analogy for the future.

He noted that some of the conditions that were true during the Eemian — the existence of large ice sheets that have already disappeared, for instance — are not the same now. And because humans have not been around to witness some of the slow-developing climate processes that scientists fear will intensify in the future, there’s uncertainty about how and even whether they will affect future climate change.

“But that would be the wrong way to think about it,” he added in an email to The Post. “The more important point is that we cannot rule out the very real probability that there are slow feedbacks — and risk is probability times cost. … Once you start thinking in terms of risks I would concur with Dr. Hansen that the current trajectory presents some unacceptable risks.”
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Quote Dutch Josh Quote Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: July 19 2017 at 11:47pm
http://www.nationalobserver.com/2017/07/13/analysis/these-missing-charts-may-change-way-you-think-about-fossil-fuel-addiction (http://www.nationalobserver.com/2017/07/13/analysis/these-missing-charts-may-change-way-you-think-about-fossil-fuel-addiction)

The use of fossil fuel is still increasing-even faster than before. So CO2 will keep going up, oceans can not absorp much more....
Que sera, sera, Whatever will be, will be, The future is not ours to see, Que sera, sera !
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Quote jacksdad Quote Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: July 20 2017 at 9:20am
I'm literally at the point where I think climate change mitigation should be part of any serious prepper's long term preps. I think a world far different from ours is an unavoidable future in the next few decades, and you should realistically plan for it. Picking the right place to be is going to be the trick though - get out that crystal ball, and good luck.

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Quote Satori Quote Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: July 20 2017 at 2:40pm
Of course he did: Trump picked climate science denier for Ag Department's top science post

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2017/7/20/1682393/-Of-course-he-did-Trump-picks-climate-science-denier-for-Ag-Department-s-top-science-post (https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2017/7/20/1682393/-Of-course-he-did-Trump-picks-climate-science-denier-for-Ag-Department-s-top-science-post)

Trump going out of his way to appoint the worst people possible to every post in his failed administration
and doing everything he can to speed up the 6th extinction

IDIOT
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Quote Technophobe Quote Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: July 20 2017 at 4:02pm
Originally posted by jacksdad jacksdad wrote:

I'm literally at the point where I think climate change mitigation should be part of any serious prepper's long term preps. I think a world far different from ours is an unavoidable future in the next few decades, and you should realistically plan for it. Picking the right place to be is going to be the trick though - get out that crystal ball, and good luck.
Up a hill - sea levels will be rising and flash flooding will be more common,
With trees - they help prevent drought, stop landslides and provide fuel,
With strong structures - winds will rise and earthquakes increase (isostatic readjustment),
With seed that will grow further north (south for the southern hemisphere) and fruit trees that will thrive and produce in hotter temperatures than you face now,
Grow resistant strains - as in survival situations pesticides will be unavailable,
Have good storage - weather prediction may fail with "weather weirding" and you will need back up supplies some years,
Arm to protect what you have - but also cultivate a support network you can rely on. Survival is easier in groups: that is why our ancestors lived in tribes.
Store some fungicides and learn some simple medicine. The hotter it gets, the more you sweat, the more you sweat the more fungi love you!

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Food:

Those of you who rely heavily on potatoes (great for limited space) go for the most blight resistant strain you can get and interplant it with ocu (ocu helps keep blight away and provides a fall-back starch source if the spuds fail. Slugs hate them too.) Move the crop each year and plant elsewhere.

If you garden at all, learn to polyploid your plants, they are stronger, better at resisting disease and more productive.

I am fascinated by medicine; especially nutrition: my husband is a botanical nut. We have (after colossal research, trial and error and much arguing) come up with a minimum plant list for nutritional basics.

Whichever grain grows best in your area and any pea/bean/lentil you get the best crop from Have a look at what the local farmers grow. This will give you balanced protein and all the b vitamins (except 12). If the legume you chose is a species of pea, the holmes can be fed to livestock and the tendrils and pods can be eaten too, increasing production in a limited space.

Oilseed rape (or better still kale) to provide green veg for both vitamin c (leaf) and oil (seed) get a red variety if you can as a source of beta carotene. After pressing, the seed-cake makes an animal feed.

Sugar beet or beetroot, to supply gore sugar - this enables you to preserve the fruits of the wild plants in your area, or the produce of vineyards, orchards and the veggie plot (beta carotene). Sugar cane works, but it fills the wrong role in a four crop rotation. Any species of innula also works for this role, but less of the calories would be available to you. Spuds can also fill the fourth role, but they cannot be used to make sugar for preserving, so you would also need a red or yellow veg that is clampable to provide the rest of the beta carotene if you go for spuds.

Those four plants can be used as a four crop rotation: keeping pests down and fertility up. That simple process massively raised the yields and reliability of the farms of our ancestors.

There are two nutrients those plants fail to provide: vitamins d and b12. Both can be supplied by the last crop: tempeh

Being a fungus, tempeh makes neither d nor b12 under normal circumstances. However, as the culture is propagated year in year out, it develops accompanying bacterial cultures and these make b12. Just like us, fungi make vitamin d to protect themselves from ultraviolet radiation. So before cooking the tempeh you have just cut from the culture, put it out in the sunlight for an hour or so.

These basics are as boring as s**t and a more varied diet will be healthier, but you can survive on just them and a bit of foraging for the rest of your lives if necessary. If pests eat your crops - eat the pests. SORRY!

Caterpillars are not normally edible to us; chickens and ducks can eat them.
Snails carry horrible diseases, so if you are going to eat them, keep them in a barrel of oatmeal for a day or too before eating and COOK THEM VERY WELL!
Ducks can eat slugs without harm and they love them! They will patrol your veggie plot for them and then lay eggs.
Locusts are a particularly good food source. If you have eaten them, as my husband has, they are quite pleasant and popular in some African countries.
All birds are edible, but birds of prey carry nasty stuff and rot amazingly fast - best avoided.
Cook any mammals very well to avoid disease transmission. The closer the relative, the more diseases you have in common. That is why canibalism is such a stupid idea.
Be careful of river and near coastal fish (and the scavengers of those areas like seagulls) as they are quickly po
Title: 6thME- hardforum.com responses
Post by: knarf on July 29, 2017, 12:51:17 PM: That’s the claim made by the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México’s Professor Gerardo Ceballos, who recently published work in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Science detailing the significant rate of mammalian extinction across Earth. Animal populations across the planet have decreased by as much as 80 percent since 1900, an event akin to "biological annihilation.” The loss of wildlife means stark repercussions on food production and our national ecosystem.

Large regions in all continents have lost 50 percent or more of the populations of the evaluated mammals from 1900 to 2015. While the small sample size only covers 177 species, and is biased to larger mammals, this figure can be used to visualize likely trends in global population losses. Assuming that on average each of the 10,000km2 occupied quadrats studied held a single population of the species found within it, Ceballos estimates that roughly 58,000 populations of the 177 mammals examined have gone extinct.

#1
Jul 11, 2017 #2
PaulP
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Bullshit. No doubt he wants more money to study the problem further.

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Jul 11, 2017 #3
M76
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That's a load of bull. The most numerous animals on the planet are insects, I doubt their numbers decreased by 80%.
Sure if you cherry pick and look at only animals that are in the public eye you might be able to claim such bullshit. And even then it has nothing in common with mass extinction events of the past as the reduction in living space and thus numbers in those species are clearly a result of human population growth and intermingling.

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Jul 11, 2017 #4
tetris42
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M76 said: ↑

That's a load of bull. The most numerous animals on the planet are insects, I doubt their numbers decreased by 80%.
Sure if you cherry pick and look at only animals that are in the public eye you might be able to claim such bullshit. And even then it has nothing in common with mass extinction events of the past as the reduction in living space and thus numbers in those species are clearly a result of human population growth and intermingling.

FTFA:

"Earth is now in a period of mass global species extinction for vertebrate animals,"

So yeah, that would exclude insects. We HAVE lost a tremendous amount of species in the past 150 years or so. For everyone saying "bullshit" as a kneejerk reaction, just look up how much deforestation we've had over that amount of time. It's equivalent to a natural disaster, you think that doesn't affect the ecosystem? Our way of life is not even remotely sustainable.

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Jul 11, 2017 #5
KarsusTG
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Well he did say mammalian and vertebrate species...

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Jul 11, 2017 #6
Armenius
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The planet's biodiversity has been decreasing at an alarming rate, and unlike global warming, this can be linked directly to human influence.

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Jul 11, 2017 #7
otherweeb
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M76 said: ↑

That's a load of bull. The most numerous animals on the planet are insects, I doubt their numbers decreased by 80%.
Sure if you cherry pick and look at only animals that are in the public eye you might be able to claim such bullshit. And even then it has nothing in common with mass extinction events of the past as the reduction in living space and thus numbers in those species are clearly a result of human population growth and intermingling.

Would you like grub fries with your grasshopper burger sir?

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Jul 11, 2017 #8
MaZa
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Yeah earth has gone through multiple mass extinction periods, but has any one of them included mass extinction of insects? Well, except for the very first one when earth had almost nothing BUT insect-like sea creatures. Insects are hardy creatures, the saying "only thing that survives nuclear holocaust are cockroaches" is not just a joke. In any case, a mass extinction of bigger animals is a sad thing. What makes earth special in space is heavily reduced and basically everything goes back to the drawing board for million years.

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Jul 11, 2017 #9
nutzo
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I think it's a good thing that I don't have to worry about getting eaten by wolfs or grizzly when I leave my house.
My thanks to the pioneers who settled this area and who hunted them to extinction a hundred years ago.

With all the "wildlife" protection laws we have now days, we are seeing more people being maimed or killed by sharks, coyotes and other predators.

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Jul 11, 2017 #10
Private_Ops
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nutzo said: ↑

I think it's a good thing that I don't have to worry about getting eaten by wolfs or grizzly when I leave my house.
My thanks to the pioneers who settled this area and who hunted them to extinction a hundred years ago.

With all the "wildlife" protection laws we have now days, we are seeing more people being maimed or killed by sharks, coyotes and other predators.

Do you have an active hunting community? Without predator populations deer populations tend to explode (and we as humans usually end up hitting them with our vehicles).

Or, they out eat their food supply and starve/die.

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Jul 11, 2017 #11
azuza001
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This is 50% a serious problem, 50% bullshit, and 100% someone's else's fault because _______________.

Multiple choice time!

A. Thanks obama
B. Thanks trump
C. I'm white so it can't be my fault
D. All of the above

Jokes aside this is kind of scary but it really is our own fault. Lions and elephants don't shoot themselves. Monkeys don't destroy their own forests. Polar bears don't mine coal and burn it in excessive quantities to produce electricity for their Cubs to play video games. The question is what do we do about it and how do you get people to give up their creature comforts or realize they need to change their habits to try and help us survive the incoming issues? Answer is you can't. You can't even get most people to look beyond their day to day problems to try and make things better next month.

Now I am sad. :( next time I should lead with the seriousness and end with the joke....

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Jul 11, 2017 #12
scojer
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We are the reason for this. Agent Smith had it right. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet.

The answer? Cull the herd. That one Sliders episode where you win the lottery, is a pretty good solution. Keeps the population low, so we have enough resources to sustain ourselves.

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Jul 11, 2017 #13
tetris42
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nutzo said: ↑

I think it's a good thing that I don't have to worry about getting eaten by wolfs or grizzly when I leave my house.
My thanks to the pioneers who settled this area and who hunted them to extinction a hundred years ago.

With all the "wildlife" protection laws we have now days, we are seeing more people being maimed or killed by sharks, coyotes and other predators.

Taking out predators in a region near humanity doesn't have the same level of impact if they're replaced with hunters. That's not really the problem. Clear-cutting and / or burning off hundreds of millions of acres of old forest or jungle to replace it with grazeland is.

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Jul 11, 2017 #14
Old_Way
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Without immigration, the US would be shrinking in population. Europe, Canada, Japan, China... all shrinking. The problem is the poorer areas of the world where the population is exploding and there's absolutely nothing that can be done about it. If your kids gotta eat, then something's gotta die.

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Jul 11, 2017 #15
dgingeri
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Well, maybe if the idiots of the human race would quit breeding, we wouldn't have them overflowing the world and killing things off because they need home. Our problem is we have too many stupid people on this planet.

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Jul 11, 2017 #16
gtrguy
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dgingeri said: ↑

Well, maybe if the idiots of the human race would quit breeding, we wouldn't have them overflowing the world and killing things off because they need home. Our problem is we have too many stupid people on this planet.

Agreed. And lots of them in this thread...

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Jul 11, 2017 #17
Charlie_D
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Just enforce population control for a few generations... congratulations, you had a child! Now, we're sterilizing you.

Hello, male over 35 years of age. We have a present for you *snip*

100% serious here. Do it for 4 generations, and stabilize the human population at ~500 million.

Might need 5 generations, for the people that try to hide. All you do then is wipe out the entire family when they're caught, any anyone harboring them. Easy peasy.

....

Did I get too dark?

#17
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Jul 11, 2017 #18
Armenius
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Charlie_D said: ↑

Just enforce population control for a few generations... congratulations, you had a child! Now, we're sterilizing you.

Hello, male over 35 years of age. We have a present for you *snip*

100% serious here. Do it for 4 generations, and stabilize the human population at ~500 million.

Might need 5 generations, for the people that try to hide. All you do then is wipe out the entire family when they're caught, any anyone harboring them. Easy peasy.

....

Did I get too dark?
Click to expand...

Genocide is never an answer. Human population growth rate is starting to shrink naturally across the world due to a number of factors. All we need to do is stop protecting stupid people and let Darwin sort them out.

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Jul 11, 2017 #19
Snoflo
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We are the custodians of the planet. I wish we could do better. I find the caustic reaction to the science of it kind of strange, personally. I have people gulping down twenty tablets a day without question as to the science behind those tablets. People have a lot of trust in the science that makes their phones, cars, or TVs possible. But climate science, or conservation science? Hogwash! Scientists are politicians! Then again, you do have the folks who refuse to vaccinate their kids too.

I don't think people are ignorant, but I do think that there is a breakdown between communication between the scientific community and the rest of us. As to the science itself: it's the only tool we have to figure stuff out. Sure, a few scientists may have personal or political agendas, but that's where consensus opinion comes in. The consensus is pretty clear by now.

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Jul 11, 2017 #20
raz-0
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Charlie_D said: ↑

Just enforce population control for a few generations... congratulations, you had a child! Now, we're sterilizing you.

Hello, male over 35 years of age. We have a present for you *snip*

100% serious here. Do it for 4 generations, and stabilize the human population at ~500 million.

Might need 5 generations, for the people that try to hide. All you do then is wipe out the entire family when they're caught, any anyone harboring them. Easy peasy.

....

Did I get too dark?
Click to expand...

As I always say to the depopulation people. You lead from the front, have someone call me when you are gone.

They always get pissy about it.

The environment is not a stable place. It never has been. The question is have you replaced an ecosystem with another ecosystem that will function? If the answer is yes, humans are probably fine. Things like overfishing the answer is likely no. Too much damage too fast.

However, for things like this stuff where you are talking about large mammals being overrepresented, the odds of simply having swapped large mammals for smaller ones that work out ok over time is much higher. There's a rich critter ecosystem even in urban areas. It just doesn't involve elephants, bears, elk, etc.

Also at a deeper level, I have problems with the fact this dude or his translator has zero grasp of the words they use.

each 10,000km2 quadrant has 1 populaton .... big assumption, but hey whatever treat them all that way and the math should apply if you properly measured existence and jsut aggregated them as one group for the purposes of math.
58,000 populations are gone... WTF dude. quadrant = four. you take an area, divide in four eaqual sections with two lines you have a quadrant. You don't get 58,000 quadrants. 58,000 areas perhaps. but they aren't fucking quadrants. When everything you are claiming needs to be backed by math and you fail at basic usage of math words, it makes me question if anything you claim has been measured or calculated properly.

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Jul 11, 2017 #21
MaZa
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Charlie_D said: ↑

Just enforce population control for a few generations... congratulations, you had a child! Now, we're sterilizing you.

Hello, male over 35 years of age. We have a present for you *snip*

100% serious here. Do it for 4 generations, and stabilize the human population at ~500 million.

Might need 5 generations, for the people that try to hide. All you do then is wipe out the entire family when they're caught, any anyone harboring them. Easy peasy.

....

Did I get too dark?
Click to expand...

Yeah you went bit too overboard but you do have the right idea. China was right when they enforced the only 1 child per family rule. Their population growth stabilized. Now, children not having siblings is kinda bummer but it is definetly more humane solution to the problem than wishing for massive war or meteor strike that wipes half of the human population. If world leaders would get together and admit overpopulation is a serious problem and together decide that 1 child rule should be kept for 5 generations through the world the problem would get fixed in relatively short time. We already cull the numbers of animals to prevent accidents or their population getting too big for their own good. Its time to do the same for us.

#21
Jul 11, 2017 #22
Inu
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Surely the reduced numbers of Co2 producers (natural gas) must counter the lack of forests.

#22
Jul 11, 2017 #23
ruffbytes
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Drug resistant gonorrhea should sort this problem out.

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Jul 11, 2017 #24
Uvaman2
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Its not surprising.. I think many dont understand you can have upside down pyramids for a while.

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Jul 11, 2017 #25
M76
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tetris42 said: ↑

FTFA:

"Earth is now in a period of mass global species extinction for vertebrate animals,"

So yeah, that would exclude insects. We HAVE lost a tremendous amount of species in the past 150 years or so. For everyone saying "bullshit" as a kneejerk reaction, just look up how much deforestation we've had over that amount of time. It's equivalent to a natural disaster, you think that doesn't affect the ecosystem? Our way of life is not even remotely sustainable.

To be honest TLDR
Anyhow I already explained why is it bullshit even if we restrict it to a few classes of animals. Species go extinct all the time. The number of species that are still present are a fraction of all the species that have gone extinct trough earth's history. I don't see anything that would suggest we're in a natural mass extinction period. Mass extinction is an ice age, or a meteor. This to me just seems business as usual coupled with human expansion.

#25
Jul 11, 2017 #26
westrock2000
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tetris42 said: ↑

So yeah, that would exclude insects. We HAVE lost a tremendous amount of species in the past 150 years or so. For everyone saying "bullshit" as a kneejerk reaction, just look up how much deforestation we've had over that amount of time. It's equivalent to a natural disaster, you think that doesn't affect the ecosystem? Our way of life is not even remotely sustainable.

If you have a solid logical justification for telling people in Brazil why they are not allowed to follow self determination while Americans are, we're all ears. I'm sure they would love to hear your reasoning.

Obama did kind of have the right idea, he told a bunch of Africans that the world would boil over if the quality of life on this planet improved to the point that even Africans had big houses, air conditioning and cars. He might be right.

#26
Jul 11, 2017 #27
Charlie_D
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Armenius said: ↑

Genocide is never an answer. Human population growth rate is starting to shrink naturally across the world due to a number of factors. All we need to do is stop protecting stupid people and let Darwin sort them out.

Other than the 'kill all the people that won't do it!' piece (which was a bit tongue-in-cheek), it's not genocide. We're not talking about rounding people up and cleansing the Earth, rather a strict birth limit for a number of generations. People get to live as long as they can, but natural die off would still take care of things within a couple centuries.

#27
Jul 11, 2017 #28
5150Joker
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I'm not worried, humans will nuke each other into oblivion and the ecosystem will eventually recover.

#28
Jul 11, 2017 #29
M76
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Charlie_D said: ↑

Just enforce population control for a few generations... congratulations, you had a child! Now, we're sterilizing you.

Hello, male over 35 years of age. We have a present for you *snip*

100% serious here. Do it for 4 generations, and stabilize the human population at ~500 million.

Might need 5 generations, for the people that try to hide. All you do then is wipe out the entire family when they're caught, any anyone harboring them. Easy peasy.

....

Did I get too dark?
Click to expand...

If you'd look at the actual data it shows that all well educated and economically stable countries are actually shrinking and not increasing. If you have education and a purpose then you won't pop out offspring left, right and centre.

#29
Jul 11, 2017 #30
MaZa
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Armenius said: ↑

Genocide is never an answer. Human population growth rate is starting to shrink naturally across the world due to a number of factors. All we need to do is stop protecting stupid people and let Darwin sort them out.

Unfortunately we have to protect the stupid people if we are to protect ourselves. If we allowed stupid people to do stupid things the non-stupid also have a high chance of becoming victims of their stupidity. Think of a dumbass texting while driving and running over an innocent bystander.

#30
Jul 11, 2017 #31
Charlie_D
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M76 said: ↑

If you'd look at the actual data it shows that all well educated and economically stable countries are actually shrinking and not increasing. If you have education and a purpose then you won't pop out offspring left, right and centre.

Irrelevant, honestly. Unless it was applied to everyone, riots / fighting / wars would break out within a year... and rightly so, in that case.

#31
Jul 11, 2017 #32
Iching
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Erase Asia, South East Asia and parts of Africa. Problem solved. Nobody should be allowed to breed like that. It's inhumane, immoral, suicidal - plain stupid.

#32
Jul 11, 2017 #33
Vildayyan2003
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None of it will matter when there are 15 billion humans on Earth.

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Jul 11, 2017 #34
buzzbomb
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scojer said: ↑

We are the reason for this. Agent Smith had it right. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet.

The answer? Cull the herd. That one Sliders episode where you win the lottery, is a pretty good solution. Keeps the population low, so we have enough resources to sustain ourselves.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia_Guidestones (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia_Guidestones)

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Jul 11, 2017 #35
Aireoth
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This thread is exactly why we are fucked.

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Jul 11, 2017 #36
grtitan
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Please let me know when the species "politicus corruptus" become extinct, so I can pour one for them... ;-)

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Jul 11, 2017 #37
tetris42
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M76 said: ↑

To be honest TLDR
Anyhow I already explained why is it bullshit even if we restrict it to a few classes of animals. Species go extinct all the time. The number of species that are still present are a fraction of all the species that have gone extinct trough earth's history. I don't see anything that would suggest we're in a natural mass extinction period. Mass extinction is an ice age, or a meteor. This to me just seems business as usual coupled with human expansion.

"Business as usual" is what's going to ravage our environment. Of course species go extinct, but if it's the direct result of massive overdevelopment on our part, that impacts us. I mean look at the comparison of old growth forest in the USA:

[IMG]

You don't think that has an adverse effect on the ecosystem and species that depend on those environments? Sure, nature adapts, but it may not adapt in a way that is conducive to supporting so many of us either. But like you said, insects will win either way.

westrock2000 said: ↑

If you have a solid logical justification for telling people in Brazil why they are not allowed to follow self determination while Americans are, we're all ears. I'm sure they would love to hear your reasoning.

Obama did kind of have the right idea, he told a bunch of Africans that the world would boil over if the quality of life on this planet improved to the point that even Africans had big houses, air conditioning and cars. He might be right.

Click to expand...

It's more like they're doing it wrong AND we're doing it wrong, our way of life is not sustainable for the population we have, that's all there is to it. The only thing resembling a solution is to scale down the amount of resources we use, which simply isn't how we're operating. Most of the advances we've made come at the cost of resources that are consumed faster than they're replenished. You can look at much of our prosperity over the past 150 years or as essentially borrowing from our future. Nature requires us to use some resources and preserve others, so it's sustainable. Our economic system requires us to have endless growth and profit as much as possible from all available resources. These views can't co-exist, so nature tends to lose. Unfortunately the concept of imposing limits on our way of life for our long-term survival is viewed as very un-American, so we're on a collision course one way or another.

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Jul 11, 2017 #38
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I just got started fishing again. Looking at how few places are left where people catch fish, the less diversity of the fish, and the much, much smaller size of fish caught...it's pretty sad.

Then the fish you do catch have a bunch of toxins in them.

But yeah, it's all science behind some nefarious plot to have clean air and water and shit, those bastards.

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Jul 11, 2017 #39
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Said it before, I'll say it again. Eugenics is taboo now, but it won't be in ~100-200 years when the world is massively overpopulated. People with bad genes shouldn't be breeding if we are going to progress as a species. Be it susceptibility to disease, intelligence, or a number of other measures; we'll have to choose who doesn't cut it. In turn, we'll solve a huge number of societies current problems, which new ones we create are unknown.

#39
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Jul 11, 2017 #40
lcpiper
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tetris42 said: ↑

FTFA:

"Earth is now in a period of mass global species extinction for vertebrate animals,"

So yeah, that would exclude insects. We HAVE lost a tremendous amount of species in the past 150 years or so. For everyone saying "bullshit" as a kneejerk reaction, just look up how much deforestation we've had over that amount of time. It's equivalent to a natural disaster, you think that doesn't affect the ecosystem? Our way of life is not even remotely sustainable.

The Earth doesn't give a shit about us humans. When we become enough of a nuisance, it'll find a way to fix the problem. It's all good in the 'hood.

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Jul 11, 2017 #42
lcpiper
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nutzo said: ↑

I think it's a good thing that I don't have to worry about getting eaten by wolfs or grizzly when I leave my house.
My thanks to the pioneers who settled this area and who hunted them to extinction a hundred years ago.

With all the "wildlife" protection laws we have now days, we are seeing more people being maimed or killed by sharks, coyotes and other predators.

That, and people are diving back into the wild habitats without any knowledge of what the wild really is and completely unprepared to deal with it.

#42
Jul 11, 2017 #43
dgingeri
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Charlie_D said: ↑

Just enforce population control for a few generations... congratulations, you had a child! Now, we're sterilizing you.

Hello, male over 35 years of age. We have a present for you *snip*

100% serious here. Do it for 4 generations, and stabilize the human population at ~500 million.

Might need 5 generations, for the people that try to hide. All you do then is wipe out the entire family when they're caught, any anyone harboring them. Easy peasy.

....

Did I get too dark?
Click to expand...

Breeding large families is literally in many religions as a duty, including Islam. Trying to do this will only bring the populations in civilized countries under control. The uncivilized ones will continue to breed out of control and overwhelm the civilized societies, and dump the human race into chaos and destruction.

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Jul 11, 2017 #44
lcpiper
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dgingeri said: ↑

Well, maybe if the idiots of the human race would quit breeding, we wouldn't have them overflowing the world and killing things off because they need home. Our problem is we have too many stupid people on this planet.

Help me think this one through for a moment.

Do we really want to reduce the human drive to procreate in any way. I get the whole "stupid people" part. I'm just not sure that trying to curb our basic need to maintain the species will have a desirable effect.

Maybe we just need a little less refined sense of humanity. Perhaps not all deaths need to be tragedies of epic scale. Maybe instead of smart people spending so much effort on safety and life saving, etc is actually part of the problem.

If it were the smart ones who stopped fucking, it follows that the world would become a more dangerous place for homo-sapiens, and the population would adjust accordingly.

Just a thought. Too smart for our own good maybe?

#44
Jul 11, 2017 #45
Kinsaras
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It's the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine.

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Jul 11, 2017 #46
westrock2000
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tetris42 said: ↑

These views can't co-exist, so nature tends to lose. Unfortunately the concept of imposing limits on our way of life for our long-term survival is viewed as very un-American, so we're on a collision course one way or another.

It's not "un-American", it's un-human. Humans are not ones to rest on their laurels. You're blaming America, but America simply represents the current peak of human achievement. The representitive country can change at any moment, the "problem" will remain. It's the same problem that man has faced since we left the fertile crescent. We will solve it again, just as we did crossing the ocean. Or we will parish. Either way, nature will continue on. I think the score is still something like Humans 0 : Nature 10000000000000006. So I don't have high confidence we will beat her just yet.

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Jul 11, 2017 #47
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https://www.si.com/eats/2017/07/06/seattle-mariners-grasshoppers-ballpark-food-safeco-field (https://www.si.com/eats/2017/07/06/seattle-mariners-grasshoppers-ballpark-food-safeco-field)

Well third world cuisine has just met the elite.

#47
Jul 11, 2017 #48
Makaveli@BETA
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nutzo said: ↑

With all the "wildlife" protection laws we have now days, we are seeing more people being maimed or killed by sharks, coyotes and other predators.

Good stay the fuck out of their territory.

Like people complaining about sharks in the ocean, its not your natural environment you are not suppose to be there. And when you do go in your no longer top of the food chain so live with the facts or get eaten!

Last edited: Jul 11, 2017
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Jul 11, 2017 #49
cpy2
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Really?
19 000 000 000 chickens
7 500 000 000 humans
2 000 000 000 pigs
1 500 000 000 cows
1 000 000 000 sheep
600 000 000? cats
525 000 000 dogs

Insects? TOO DAMN MUCH!

Also we are on top of the food chain on land and in water. *laughs in whaler*

#49
Jul 11, 2017 #50
lcpiper
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Makaveli@BETA said: ↑

Good stay the fuck out of their territory.

Like people complaining about sharks in the ocean, its not your natural environment you are not suppose to be there. And when you do go in your no longer top of the food chain so live with the facts or get eaten!

A man's gotta know his limitations .............

[IMG]

#50
Jul 11, 2017 #51
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PaulP said: ↑

Bullshit. No doubt he wants more money to study the problem further.

Just like how NASA will come out each year to say they've found water on another planet, just before program funding is cut.

#51
Jul 11, 2017 #52
Damar
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Once again, George said it best I think. I may not agree 100% with all his comments here, but I firmly believe that "The planet will shake us off like a bad case of fleas".

#52
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Jul 11, 2017 #53
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westrock2000 said: ↑

It's not "un-American", it's un-human. Humans are not ones to rest on their laurels.

You were talking about America v. Brazil, that's why I brought it up.

America simply represents the current peak of human achievement.

See this is the problem, this type of thinking sounds like it's so far out in one spectrum of how you view the world, I'm not even sure I can communicate what I'm talking about to you. Is America #1 in sustainable living? #1 in environmental protection and balance? How about long-term planning? Is that why our infrastructure is falling apart? Does America pride itself how it's prepared to function for the next 1000 years, due to such a great system + adaptability or is it flying by the seat of its pants? There are different measures of human achievement. America is #1 in some of them, it's woefully behind others. It sure as hell is NOT #1 in long-term thinking.

The representitive country can change at any moment, the "problem" will remain. It's the same problem that man has faced since we left the fertile crescent

It's a values + education problem, not a human nature one. Humans are dramatically shaped by the culture they grow up in. Something are close to universal, but other things that may be common sense to one are practically alien to another. The Native Americans lived here thousands of years with an understanding that a balance between man and nature is necessary. In some tribes, major changes, like diverting a river, or some other development would only be made if it was predicted how this would impact the next 7 generations. We don't have anything remotely close to this.

Either way, nature will continue on. I think the score is still something like Humans 0 : Nature 10000000000000006. So I don't have high confidence we will beat her just yet.

Yes, we are unlikely to eliminate all life on earth. What I mean is when we destroy hundreds of millions of acres forest or jungle that's millions of years old, or directly cause a species to go extinct due to our activity, that's not a victory for nature. That's not a victory for us either, since it eventually comes back around.

I'm simply not in the camp that sees human extinction as inevitable, so we may as well embrace it. Again, that's a death cult mentality. I see human survival as something that requires us to make good decisions with our extinction be something PREVENTABLE, but that's obviously not on the same page as some posters here.

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Jul 11, 2017 #54
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Aireoth said: ↑

This thread is exactly why we are fucked.

Agreed. People who's time on this earth that equals 30 seconds in all of existence somehow can solve the mysteries of the earth and life itself.
Their solutions usually turns into mass murder because they refuse to acknowledge they don't know the true answer.

Rapid modernization has caused this, not a certain type of people who have too much sex.

#54
Jul 11, 2017 #55
NoOther
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M76 said: ↑

That's a load of bull. The most numerous animals on the planet are insects, I doubt their numbers decreased by 80%.
Sure if you cherry pick and look at only animals that are in the public eye you might be able to claim such bullshit. And even then it has nothing in common with mass extinction events of the past as the reduction in living space and thus numbers in those species are clearly a result of human population growth and intermingling.

Just to clarify the insects argument everyone wants to use:

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/09/0920_050920_extinct_insects.html (http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/09/0920_050920_extinct_insects.html)
http://e360.yale.edu/features/insect_numbers_declining_why_it_matters (http://e360.yale.edu/features/insect_numbers_declining_why_it_matters)

Even insects are a problem. Just take bees as an example. There has been a severe decline in bees, causing a lot of issues around the world. Also transplanting the wrong kinds of bees leads to even more issues, like Africanized bees which tend to aggressively take over the territory of other natural bee species. There are many programs happening throughout the world to try and harbor new bee populations, especially in more rural countries where it can help their food and economy problems.

http://time.com/4688417/north-american-bee-population-extinction/ (http://time.com/4688417/north-american-bee-population-extinction/)
http://www.globalresearch.ca/death-and-extinction-of-the-bees/5375684 (http://www.globalresearch.ca/death-and-extinction-of-the-bees/5375684)

So now that we have addressed that even insects are going extinct, next crutch? A lot of this information is nothing new, science has been tracking the ever growing list of extinctions. Some are actually not that big of an issue where they do not have an impact on the new cleared areas. But there are many smaller consequences that lead to larger issues as more and more become extinct. When it has gotten to the point now where bees are disappearing, now you have a very real and observable effect happening to humanity and not just the planet. Also, there is no telling what natural cures or remedies have been lost to us forever by species of plant and animal being wiped out.

As I have mentioned a few times, global warming isn't the problem. Deforestation and changing climate patterns, destroying natural species of plant and animals is the real problem.

#55
Jul 11, 2017 #56
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tetris42 said: ↑

I'm simply not in the camp that sees human extinction as inevitable, so we may as well embrace it. Again, that's a death cult mentality. I see human survival as something that requires us to make good decisions with our extinction be something PREVENTABLE, but that's obviously not on the same page as some posters here.

The secret of life is survival through means of 1.) self-protection, followed closely by 2.) reproduction in order to perpetuate the species...that's why the sex drive is usually the strongest urge, eclipsed only by fight or flight instinct. Preventing human extinction is insurmountable in the grand scheme of Earth's already-long (and presumptuously long-coming) existence. Remember that old saying "eat healthy, exercise, get plenty of sleep...die anyway"? There's a dichotomy involved here that leads to a similar result: eventual human extinction, no matter what we think we can do to avoid it. How long we can curtail it from happening is an whole 'nother conversation...

#56
Jul 11, 2017 #57
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Talk about a bubble waiting to burst...

[IMG]

It's almost as if the energy density of fossil fuels has caused an entirely anomalous form of human existence...

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Jul 11, 2017 #58
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We can encourage people to not have families. It's working very well at the moment. We convince the women that their careers are just as important as the mans career and then we encourage high levels of consumerism so that they have a constant need for cash inflow. We can make birth control very easy to acquire. And should the instance ever come that they do get pregnant, we encourage them to terminate the pregnancy. We can even make the social structure of a sustainable family a faux pa.

It might work.

#58
Jul 11, 2017 #59
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westrock2000 said: ↑

We can encourage people to not have families. It's working very well at the moment. We convince the women that their careers are just as important as the mans career and then we encourage high levels of consumerism so that they have a constant need for cash inflow. We can make birth control very easy to acquire. And should the instance ever come that they do get pregnant, we encourage them to terminate the pregnancy. We can even make the social structure of a sustainable family a faux pa.

It might work.

In fact, one major driver of decreased birth rates in the developed world is later age at first birth in educated women.

#59
Jul 11, 2017 #60
tetris42
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DejaWiz said: ↑

The secret of life is survival through means of 1.) self-protection, followed closely by 2.) reproduction in order to perpetuate the species...that's why the sex drive is usually the strongest urge, eclipsed only by fight or flight instinct. Preventing human extinction is insurmountable in the grand scheme of Earth's already-long (and presumptuously long-coming) existence. Remember that old saying "eat healthy, exercise, get plenty of sleep...die anyway"? There's a dichotomy involved here that leads to a similar result: eventual human extinction, no matter what we think we can do to avoid it. How long we can curtail it from happening is an whole 'nother conversation...

Well thanks for living up completely to my death cult comparison. Sorry, but I'm not a fatalist.

What is so insurmountable to our survival exactly? We can prevent an asteroid from hitting the planet if we detect it soon enough. We don't HAVE to nuke each other at the press of a button. We CAN be smart about how we manage our resources and our populations. Hell, over a long enough time span, we COULD eventually build a generation ship to actually leave the Earth. Unless you're one of those bible thumpers who thinks we're living the end days, the extinction of humanity is not a foregone conclusion. We both have the capacity to save ourselves as a species, or to destroy ourselves. Just because we may lean towards the latter doesn't mean we can't self-correct. It all comes down to priorities; right now we don't have the right ones for long term survival, but that can also change.

#60
Jul 11, 2017 #61
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tetris42 said: ↑

See this is the problem, this type of thinking sounds like it's so far out in one spectrum of how you view the world, I'm not even sure I can communicate what I'm talking about to you. Is America #1 in sustainable living? #1 in environmental protection and balance?

America is #1 because it is the current society that is able to exert that position of authority on others. No other country can impose their will on others like America can. Whether we are ideal or not, it doesn't matter, because we set the tone regardless.

The Native Americans lived here thousands of years with an understanding that a balance between man and nature is necessary. In some tribes, major changes, like diverting a river, or some other development would only be made if it was predicted how this would impact the next 7 generations. We don't have anything remotely close to this..

While the North American indians were living in teepee's, the South American indians were building pyramids and mapping the stars with incredible accuracy. But they were both destroyed by the technologically more advanced Europeans. Again, it came down to who could exert their will. The North American indians never achieved any level of civilization success. Even up to the 1900's when we finally crushed them, they still hadn't even achieved structured cities....something the Olmec's had done in Mexico 2500 years previously. Given more time, the Native Americans would have developed just as "we" have. Comparing South America to the Middle East, two societies that had no known contact yet developed in unison, you have to accept that it was either aliens OR that humans simply have a destined fate. I would go with fate.

My point is not that you are wrong to think that we have a sustainability problem. My point is that it is wrong to think this would have ended up any other way.

#61
Jul 11, 2017 #62
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Why the hell is this even a story here? I mean he used a tablet in his presentation? If anything has held true is whenever there is any sort of "natural" story posted on this site just about everyone who comments in the post suddenly has PhDs in Climate, Animal, Paleo-history, Geology, and everything else under the Sun, OR they're like "nah man, you don't need a degree to know this stuff, just look online man!"

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Jul 11, 2017 #63
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dgingeri said: ↑

Breeding large families is literally in many religions as a duty

"Be fruitful, and multiply." -- Genesis 1:28

Guess what! We've done just that... a million times over!!! Now it's time to slow it down a hell of a lot. God also made us stewards of creation. Damn... we really fucked up in that regard.

#63
Jul 11, 2017 #64
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For all the people blaming global warming and saying we need to drive hybrids, and that HUMANS are at fault, do you really think if you gave the keys of a corvette to a chimpanzee, he wouldn't drive the shit out of it? Think before you speak.

#64
Jul 11, 2017 #65
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cpy2 said: ↑

Really?
19 000 000 000 chickens
7 500 000 000 humans
2 000 000 000 pigs
1 500 000 000 cows
1 000 000 000 sheep
600 000 000? cats
525 000 000 dogs

Insects? TOO DAMN MUCH!

Also we are on top of the food chain on land and in water. *laughs in whaler*
Click to expand...

There is only a billion cows?!?!

Build moar steak!!!

#65
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Jul 11, 2017 #66
sfsuphysics
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Master_shake_ said: ↑

There is only a billion cows?!?!

Build moar steak!!!

Most of that is probably dairy cows.

#66
Jul 11, 2017 #67
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If you ask me, we the earth included are a living experiment by some higher being.
Too many things dont add up, and I really would not be surprised if we were some higher intelligent beings school science project

Similar to the earth dome theory and the flat earth theory.

What happens is gunna happen, we do have the power to slow whatever is gunna happen down by overnight stopping using bad shit but do we want to stop it ?

I fully believe that some cabal somewhere is planning for a mass extinction event that rapes the worlds population down to about 500million to 1 billion people.

They say that by 2050 i think it was that their would be 24 billion people on earth, whether thats true i doubt it but the earth cannot sustain huge numbers like that and continuing to grow without some huge fuckup happening.

Alot of these conspiracy theory tv shows that show trucks driving into mountain dugouts and underground dugouts that go on for miles and then unloading could maybe be the actual stocking up for some huge forthcoming disaster ? Fuck knows but for a huge world disaster the preplanning and stockpiling would have to happen on such a scale that they would have to do it in full view of everyone but just dont bring attention to it or make too big a deal out of it if people suspect somethings going on.

If I were born today, fuck even if I was born in the year 2000 i do not think I would want to bring kids into todays world.

I see no point in preparing for a planetwide disaster, its probably better to just suicide if their was such a disaster as survinving the actual disaster is just the start, its the chaos that comes after that would scare me and by looking at todays society, you can just tell a disaster society is gunna be hella fucked up.

#67
Jul 11, 2017 #68
tetris42
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westrock2000 said: ↑

America is #1 because it is the current society that is able to exert that position of authority on others. No other country can impose their will on others like America can. Whether we are ideal or not, it doesn't matter, because we set the tone regardless.

While the North American indians were living in teepee's, the South American indians were building pyramids and mapping the stars with incredible accuracy. But they were both destroyed by the technologically more advanced Europeans. Again, it came down to who could exert their will. The North American indians never achieved any level of civilization success. Even up to the 1900's when we finally crushed them, they still hadn't even achieved structured cities....something the Olmec's had done in Mexico 2500 years previously. Given more time, the Native Americans would have developed just as "we" have. Comparing South America to the Middle East, two societies that had no known contact yet developed in unison, you have to accept that it was either aliens OR that humans simply have a destined fate. I would go with fate.

My point is not that you are wrong to think that we have a sust
Title: 6thME - The shrinking habitable land
Post by: knarf on July 29, 2017, 03:09:59 PM: (http://www.animalethics.org.uk/130307m-extinction.jpg)
Title: Using technology to stay ahead of disaster risk
Post by: knarf on July 30, 2017, 01:13:55 PM: In October last year, Hurricane Patricia came ashore in Mexico with record breaking 200 miles per hour winds. A few months later on the other side of the world, Cyclone Winston broke records for Pacific basin wind speeds, destroying parts of mainland Fiji with 180 miles per hour winds. More recently, Cyclone Fantala became the most powerful storm in the Indian Ocean ever recorded.

Experts agree that its activities by people which are increasing the severity of storms like these. Climate change isn’t just projected to increase the intensity of hurricanes and cyclones, but a whole other range of other natural hazards, like droughts, floods, storms, and heat waves.

With population rising, and more people moving to urban areas, and concentrating along coasts, vulnerabilities to certain natural hazards – such as sea level rise and hurricanes – is skyrocketing. and between 50 and 90 percent by 2080 under climate change scenarios.

– particularly in low- and middle-income countries. Since 1980, low-income countries have accounted for only 9 percent of disaster events but 48 percent of the fatalities, placing a huge strain on humanitarian aid. And although aid and development organizations are increasing investments in preparedness and resilience efforts, climate change is making the risk landscape more dynamic. It will take smarter, faster, innovative analytical tools to create the kind of up-to-date analysis of natural hazard risks that policy makers need to make long-term, risk-informed decisions.

The Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery (GFDRR) is a leader in generating, piloting, and analyzing disaster risk management tools for the dynamic risk landscape created by climate change. Last year alone, GFDRR helped 60 countries create, manage, and use risk information, often leveraging this information into larger investments in resilience.

Through its Innovation Lab, GFDRR is developing new approaches to collecting, analyzing, and explaining risk data, such as risk visualization, open data, and crowdsourcing efforts. These innovations are helping development professionals be more effective than ever in addressing the risk environment presented by a changing climate.

Satellites have been providing spatial data for decades – data that track those record breaking storms, help project rainfall, monitor urban development, assess regional flood risk, and more. That data has been largely out of the reach of most, due to cost, a lack of accessible software, and low capacity in a lot of countries that need the data most. The Innovation Lab has been working to make this make this data accessible and useful by collaborating with partners like the Open Data for Resilience Initiative (OpenDRI). The partnership is working to power open source technology and geospatial data sharing platforms and has helped over 100 million people gain access to risk information.

The Innovation Lab also created Code for Resilience, connecting local technologists and disaster risk experts to create civic-minded digital and hardware solutions to identify and reduce the risk posed by natural disasters. Another program, the Challenge Fund, provides funding ranging from US$20,000 to $150,000 to support projects that have a disruptive impact in the space of risk assessment. It is currently supporting 15 creative approaches to understanding disaster risk in over 20 nations. One of those projects, Floodtags, collects data through Twitter for on-the-ground flood observations in the Philippines.

Soon the Innovation lab will launch ThinkHazard!, an innovative risk visualization tool that will help give decision makers information to make risk-informed choices. The first platform of its kind, ThinkHazard! allows users to quickly develop risk profiles on 8 different types of hazards. All information is open source and unrestricted by licenses which enables users to download all data freely. ThinkHazard! generates a non-technical interpretation of global hazards, empowering non-experts to determine the level of natural hazards in their locality and encouraging greater incorporation of risk management into project planning and design.

All of these programs and projects will be showcased at the Understanding Risk Forum 2016 which opened today in Venice, Italy. Over 500 delegates will gather to discuss the latest innovations and biggest challenges in managing disaster risk, with participation from insurance giants like FM Global, academic institutions such as Columbia University, media groups like the BBC Media Action, think tanks, civil society organizations, and more.

As a changing climate continues to break extreme weather records around the globe, we’ll need the best technology, and a collaborative effort, to help us stay ahead of the storms.

https://blogs.worldbank.org/climatechange/education/voices/voices/using-technology-stay-ahead-disaster-risk (https://blogs.worldbank.org/climatechange/education/voices/voices/using-technology-stay-ahead-disaster-risk)
Title: 6thME - Climate Change & Epistemic Disaster
Post by: knarf on July 30, 2017, 01:20:37 PM: In its attack on the very foundations of science, Trumpism constitutes an epistemic disaster: we are facing a crisis in terms of knowledge and objective inquiry. Epistemology (or the theory of knowledge) is concerned with, among other things, what right we have to the beliefs we hold – in other words, it is a normative enterprise: it asks not merely the descriptive-psychological question of how people happen to come to acquire their beliefs, but rather how they should do so.

When the disinterested pursuit of knowledge is in effect denied and dismissed by our nation’s most powerful office, then it seems accurate to say that we are indeed facing a crisis of knowledge and science: an attack upon the very foundation of civil discourse.

On January 20th — the very moment Trump took office — all White House websites were scrubbed of information regarding climate change. The only mention was the following:

“President Trump is committed to eliminating harmful and unnecessary policies such as the Climate Action Plan.” In March, Scott Pruitt, Trump’s appointed director of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), argued on CNBC that “human activity [is not the] primary contributor to the global warming that we see.”

In recent months, this illusion has led to further censorship of official websites, in which historical and factual information related to climate change has been removed. These changes are designed to deliberately politicize the most pressing crisis facing the U.S. and the world; by divesting the EPA of its regulatory functions these changes serve only to promote corporate interests.

The decision to pull out of the Paris Climate Agreement was short-sighted and reckless; driven not by an honest assessment of the consequences of climate change, but instead by both a blind desire to undo Obama’s legacy wherever possible, as well as a hunger for short-term profits at the expense of geopolitical, social, and economic structures.

The reality of anthropogenic climate change is no longer an object of serious scientific contention. The International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 2013 Summary for Policymakers states, “Human influence in the climate system is clear…” as evidences in the “…warming of the atmosphere and ocean, in changes in the global water cycle, in reductions in snow and ice, in global mean sea level rise, and in changes in some climate extremes.” The refusal to acknowledge human-caused climate change is a denial in the face of overwhelming evidence.

Trump’s readiness to allow himself to hold beliefs that are motivated solely by self-interest and his complete disregard for the weight of evidence reflects not only an epistemic failure, but also a moral one. The philosopher William Clifford argued that to believe anything, anywhere, at any time on insufficient evidence is a moral wrong. With its basic assumption that knowledge is reducible to perception, Trumpism has created conditions in which our elected administration feels entitled to edit away inconvenient facts.

In its defunding of climate change research (on May 5th, Congress ratified a federal budget that reduces EPA-funding for Earth science university research grants) and its flagrant redaction of climate change data and references from White House and EPA websites, the administration is acting in ways that willfully ignore a reality which is already upon us.

The scientific has predicted that we may be entering into the sixth mass extinction in the history of Earth – an event that will trigger a loss of biodiversity of unspeakable proportions. According to the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, “By the end of the century, climate change and its impacts may be the dominant direct driver of biodiversity loss and changes in ecosystem services globally.” As biodiversity decreases there will undoubtedly be alarming consequences. This includes disruptions in the food chains – for example, changes in the insect species will decrease plant pollination.

Further, the diminished plant diversity will impact our ability to produce essential medications to care for our aging population. Finally, naturally occurring biodiversity protects our planet from natural disasters, without which, our forests and coastlines more vulnerable than ever.

As Theodore Roosevelt observed, “the loss is like the loss of a gallery of the masterpieces of the artists of old time.” The diversity and richness of life forms have value in themselves, as organs created by Nature to perceive Nature. With the extinction of a species the world itself has diminished in richness – for not only is it no longer perceived or approached in the way specific to the form of life, but the very interiority of Nature, we might say, has been reduced.
The administration’s response to what is currently happening is a moral outrage – and it was made possible by a readiness to forsake our epistemic duty to follow where the evidence leads. We are in the midst of a moral and epistemic crisis: this administration has to be held fully accountable for its foolish decision to ignore the reality and mock the scientific consensus.

Trump disgraces this nation everyday with his rejection of basic decency, his gross and palpable lying, his use of cruelty and humiliation in place of rational argumentation. In attacking the media and the freedom of the press, he disgraces his office: using it only to aggrandize himself and punish those with whom his personal interests conflict. But history may yet determine that his greatest disgrace was to willfully and gratuitously ignore the reality of anthropogenic climate change when the time to act was at its most critical.

https://asianlite.com/news/america/climate-change-epistemic-disaster/ (https://asianlite.com/news/america/climate-change-epistemic-disaster/)
Title: 6thME - The Anthropocene Myth
Post by: knarf on July 30, 2017, 02:38:57 PM: Blaming all of humanity for climate change lets capitalism off the hook.

(https://images.jacobinmag.com/2015/03/17003252/8d10929v-1.jpg)

Last year was the hottest year ever recorded. And yet, the latest figures show that in 2013 the source that provided the most new energy to the world economy wasn’t solar, wind power, or even natural gas or oil, but coal.

The growth in global emissions — from 1 percent a year in the 1990s to 3 percent so far this millennium — is striking. It’s an increase that’s paralleled our growing knowledge of the terrible consequences of fossil fuel usage.

Who’s driving us toward disaster? A radical answer would be the reliance of capitalists on the extraction and use of fossil energy. Some, however, would rather identify other culprits.

The earth has now, we are told, entered “the Anthropocene”: the epoch of humanity. Enormously popular — and accepted even by many Marxist scholars — the Anthropocene concept suggests that humankind is the new geological force transforming the planet beyond recognition, chiefly by burning prodigious amounts of coal, oil, and natural gas.

According to these scholars, such degradation is the result of humans acting out their innate predispositions, the inescapable fate for a planet subjected to humanity’s “business-as-usual.” Indeed, the proponents cannot argue otherwise, for if the dynamics were of a more contingent character, the narrative of an entire species ascending to biospheric supremacy would be difficult to defend.

Their story centers on a classic element: fire. The human species alone can manipulate fire, and therefore it is the one that destroys the climate; when our ancestors learned how to set things ablaze, they lit the fuse of business-as-usual. Here, write prominent climate scientists Michael Raupach and Josep Canadell, was “the essential evolutionary trigger for the Anthropocene,” taking humanity straight to “the discovery that energy could be derived not only from detrital biotic carbon but also from detrital fossil carbon, at first from coal.”

The “primary reason” for current combustion of fossil fuels is that “long before the industrial era, a particular primate species learned how to tap the energy reserves stored in detrital carbon.” My learning to walk at the age of one is the reason for me dancing salsa today; when humanity ignited its first dead tree, it could only lead, one million years later, to burning a barrel of oil.

Or, in the words of Will Steffen, Paul J. Crutzen, and John R. McNeill: “The mastery of fire by our ancestors provided humankind with a powerful monopolistic tool unavailable to other species, that put us firmly on the long path towards the Anthropocene.” In this narrative, the fossil economy is the creation precisely of humankind, or “the fire-ape, Homo pyrophilus,” as in Mark Lynas’s popularization of Anthropocene thinking, aptly titled The God Species.

Now, the ability to manipulate fire was surely a necessary condition for the commencement of large-scale fossil fuel combustion in Britain in the early nineteenth century. Was it also the cause of it?

The important thing to note here is the logical structure of the Anthropocene narrative: some universal trait of the species must be driving the geological epoch that is its own, or else it would be a matter of some subset of the species. But the story of human nature can come in many forms, both in the Anthropocene genre and in other parts of climate change discourse.

In an essay in the anthology Engaging with Climate Change, psychoanalyst John Keene offers an original explanation for why humans pollute the planet and refuse to stop. In infancy, the human being discharges waste matter without limits and learns that the caring mother will take away the poo and the wee and clean up the crotch.

As a result, human beings are accustomed to the practice of spoiling their surroundings: “I believe that these repeated encounters contribute to the complementary belief that the planet is an unlimited ‘toilet-mother’, capable of absorbing our toxic products to infinity.”

But where is the evidence for any sort of causal connection between fossil fuel combustion and infant defecation? What about all those generations of people who, up to the nineteenth century, mastered both arts but never voided the carbon deposits of the earth and dumped them into the atmosphere: were they shitters and burners just waiting to realize their full potentials?

It’s easy to poke fun at certain forms of psychoanalysis, but attempts to attribute business-as-usual to the properties of the human species are doomed to vacuity. That which exists always and everywhere cannot explain why a society diverges from all others and develop something new — such as the fossil economy that only emerged some two centuries ago but now has become so entrenched that we recognize it as the only ways human can produce.

As it happens, however, mainstream climate discourse is positively drenched in references to humanity as such, human nature, the human enterprise, humankind as one big villain driving the train. In The God Species, we read: “God’s power is now increasingly being exercised by us. We are the creators of life, but we are also its destroyers.” This is one of the most common tropes in the discourse: we, all of us, you and I, have created this mess together and make it worse each day.

Enter Naomi Klein, who in This Changes Everything expertly lays bare the myriad ways in which capital accumulation, in general, and its neoliberal variant, in particular, pour fuel on the fire now consuming the earth system. Giving short shrift to all the talk of a universal human evildoer, she writes, “We are stuck because the actions that would give us the best chance of averting catastrophe — and would benefit the vast majority — are extremely threatening to an elite minority that has a stranglehold over our economy, our political process, and most of our major media outlets.”

So how do the critics respond? “Klein describes the climate crisis as a confrontation between capitalism and the planet,” philosopher John Gray counters in the Guardian.”It would be be more accurate to describe the crisis as a clash between the expanding demands of humankind and a finite world.”

Gray isn’t alone. This schism is emerging as the great ideological divide in the climate debate, and proponents of the mainstream consensus are fighting back.

In the London Review of Books, Paul Kingsnorth, a British writer who has long argued that the environmental movement should disband and accept total collapse as our destiny, retorts: “Climate change isn’t something that a small group of baddies has foisted on us”; “in the end, we are all implicated.” This, Kingsnorth argues, “is a less palatable message than one which sees a brutal 1 per cent screwing the planet and a noble 99 per cent opposing them, but it is closer to reality.”

Is it closer to reality? Six simple facts demonstrate the opposite.

First, the steam engine is widely, and correctly, seen as the original locomotive of business-as-usual, by which the combustion of coal was first linked to the ever-expanding spiral of capitalist commodity production.

While it is admittedly banal to point out, steam engines were not adopted by some natural-born deputies of the human species. The choice of a prime mover in commodity production could not possibly have been the prerogative of that species, since it presupposed, for a start, the institution of wage labor. It was the owners of the means of production who installed the novel prime mover. A tiny minority even in Britain — all-male, all-white — this class of people comprised an infinitesimal fraction of humanity in the early nineteenth century.

Second, when British imperialists penetrated into northern India around the same time, they stumbled on coal seams that were, to their great amazement, already known to the natives — indeed, the Indians had the basic knowledge of how to dig, burn, and generate heat from coal. And yet they cared nothing for the fuel.

The British, on the other hand, desperately wanted the coal out of the ground — to propel the steamboats by which they transported the treasure and raw materials extracted from the Indian peasants towards the metropolis, and their own surplus of cotton goods towards the inland markets. The problem was, no workers volunteered to step into the mines. Hence the British had to organize a system of indentured labor, forcing farmers into the pits so as to acquire the fuel for the exploitation of India.

Third, most of the twenty-first century emissions explosion originates from the People’s Republic of China. The driver of that explosion is apparent: it is not the growth of the Chinese population, nor its household consumption, nor its public expenditures, but the tremendous expansion of manufacturing industry, implanted in China by foreign capital to extract surplus value out of local labor, perceived around the turn of the millennium as extraordinarily cheap and disciplined.

That shift was part of a global assault on wages and working conditions — workers all over the world being weighed down by the threat of capital’s relocation to their Chinese substitutes, who could only be exploited by means of fossil energy as a necessary material substratum. The ensuing emissions explosion is the atmospheric legacy of class warfare.

Fourth, there is probably no other industry that encounters so much popular opposition wherever it wants to set up shop as the oil and gas industry. As Klein chronicles so well, local communities are in revolt against fracking and pipelines and exploration from Alaska to the Niger Delta, from Greece to Ecuador. But against them stands an interest recently expressed with exemplary clarity by Rex Tillerson, president and CEO of ExxonMobil: “My philosophy is to make money. If I can drill and make money, then that’s what I want to do.” This is the spirit of fossil capital incarnate.

Fifth, advanced capitalist states continue relentlessly to enlarge and deepen their fossil infrastructures — building new highways, new airports, new coal-fired power-plants — always attuned to the interests of capital, hardly ever consulting their people on these matters. Only the truly blind intellectual, of the Paul Kingsnorth-type, can believe that “we are all implicated” in such policies.

How many Americans are involved in the decisions to give coal a larger share in the electric power sector, so that the carbon intensity of the US economy rose in 2013? How many Swedes should be blamed for the ramming through of a new highway around Stockholm — the greatest infrastructure project in modern Swedish history — or their government’s assistance to coal power plants in South Africa?

The most extreme illusions about the perfect democracy of the market are required to maintain the notion of “us all” driving the train.

Sixth, and perhaps most obvious: few resources are so unequally consumed as energy. The 19 million inhabitants of New York State alone consume more energy than the 900 million inhabitants of sub-Saharan Africa. The difference in energy consumption between a subsistence pastoralist in the Sahel and an average Canadian may easily be larger than 1,000-fold — and that is an average Canadian, not the owner of five houses, three SUVs, and a private airplane.

A single average US citizen emits more than 500 citizens of Ethiopia, Chad, Afghanistan, Mali, or Burundi; how much an average US millionaire emits — and how much more than an average US or Cambodian worker — remains to be counted. But a person’s imprint on the atmosphere varies tremendously depending on where she is born. Humanity, as a result, is far too slender an abstraction to carry the burden of culpability.

Ours is the geological epoch not of humanity, but of capital. Of course, a fossil economy does not necessarily have to be capitalist: the Soviet Union and its satellite states had their own growth mechanisms connected to coal, oil, and gas. They were no less dirty, sooty, or emissions-intensive — perhaps rather more — than their Cold War adversaries. So why focus on capital? What reason is there to delve into the destructiveness of capital, when the Communist states performed at least as abysmally?

In medicine, a similar question would perhaps be, why concentrate research efforts on cancer rather than smallpox? Both can be fatal! But only one still exists. History has closed the parenthesis around the Soviet system, and so we are back at the beginning, where the fossil economy is coextensive with the capitalist mode of production — only now on a global scale.

The Stalinist version deserves its own investigations, and on its own terms (the mechanisms of growth being of their own kind). But we do not live in the Vorkuta coal-mining gulag of the 1930s. Our ecological reality, encompassing us all, is the world founded by steam-powered capital, and there are alternative courses that an environmentally responsible socialism could take. Hence capital, not humanity as such.

Naomi Klein’s success and recent street mobilizations notwithstanding, this remains a fringe view. Climate science, politics, and discourse are constantly couched in the Anthropocene narrative: species-thinking, humanity-bashing, undifferentiated collective self-flagellation, appeal to the general population of consumers to mend their ways and other ideological pirouettes that only serve to conceal the driver.

To portray certain social relations as the natural properties of the species is nothing new. Dehistoricizing, universalizing, eternalizing, and naturalizing a mode of production specific to a certain time and place — these are the classic strategies of ideological legitimation.

They block off any prospect for change. If business-as-usual is the outcome of human nature, how can we even imagine something different? It is perfectly logical that advocates of the Anthropocene and associated ways of thinking either champion false solutions that steer clear of challenging fossil capital — such as geoengineering in the case of Mark Lynas and Paul Crutzen, the inventor of the Anthropocene concept — or preach defeat and despair, as in the case of Kingsnorth.

According to the latter, “it is now clear that stopping climate change is impossible” — and, by the way, building a wind farm is just as bad as opening another coal mine, for both desecrate the landscape.

Without antagonism, there can never be any change in human societies. Species-thinking on climate change only induces paralysis. If everyone is to blame, then no one is.

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/03/anthropocene-capitalism-climate-change/ (https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/03/anthropocene-capitalism-climate-change/)
Title: 6thME - Are We Doomed? Let’s Have a Talk.
Post by: knarf on July 31, 2017, 04:19:13 AM: We're not all ready to have the same conversation, but perhaps that's a good place to start

(https://www.commondreams.org/sites/default/files/styles/cd_large/public/views-article/climate_change_is_real_is_the_doom.jpg?itok=2Sf4Boij)
A placard warning against the dangers of climate change used in the March on Washington stands by an overflowing garbage can on Saturday, January 21, 2017. (Photo by Epics/Getty Images)

My most recent essay, in which I discussed a highly publicized controversy over the efficacy of plans for a comprehensive transition to an all-renewable energy future, garnered some strong responses. “If you are right,” one Facebook commenter opined, “we are doomed. Fortunately you are not right.” (The commenter didn’t explain why.) What had I said to provoke an expectation of cataclysmic oblivion? Simply that there is probably no technically and financially feasible energy pathway to enable those of us in highly industrialized countries to maintain current levels of energy usage very far into the future.

My piece happened to be published right around the same time New York Magazine released a controversial article, titled "The Uninhabitable Earth," in which author David Wallace Wells portrayed a dire future if the most pessimistic climate change models turn to reality. “It is, I promise, worse than you think,” wrote Wells. “If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible, even within the lifetime of a teenager today.” Wells’s article drew rebukes from—of all people—climate scientists, who pointed out a few factual errors, but also insisted that scaring the public just doesn’t help. “Importantly, fear does not motivate,” responded Michael Mann with Susan Joy Hassol and Tom Toles, “and appealing to it is often counter-productive as it tends to distance people from the problem, leading them to disengage, doubt and even dismiss it.”

"We humans have overshot Earth’s long-term carrying capacity for our species..."It’s true: apocalyptic warnings don’t move most people. Or, rather, they move most people away from the source of discomfort, so they simply tune out. But it’s also true that people feel a sense of deep, unacknowledged unease when they are fed “solutions” that they instinctively know are false or insufficient.

Others came to Wells’s defense. Margaret Klein Salamon, a clinical psychologist and founder of the climate action group The Climate Mobilization, which advocates for starting a “World War II-scale” emergency mobilization to convert from fossil fuels, writes, “it is OK, indeed imperative, to tell the whole, frightening story. . . . t’s the job of those of us trying to protect humanity and restore a safe climate to tell the truth about the climate crisis and help people process and channel their own feelings—not to preemptively try to manage and constrain those feelings.”

So: Are we doomed if we can’t maintain current and growing energy levels? And are we doomed anyway due to now-inevitable impacts of climate change?

First, the good news. With regard to energy, we should keep in mind the fact that today’s Americans use roughly twice as much per capita as their great-grandparents did in 1925. While people in that era enjoyed less mobility and fewer options for entertainment and communication than we do today, they nevertheless managed to survive and even thrive. And we now have the ability to provide many services (such as lighting) far more efficiently, so it should be possible to reduce per-capita energy usage dramatically while still maintaining a lifestyle that would be considered more than satisfactory by members of previous generations and by people in many parts of the world today. And reducing energy usage would make a whole raft of problems—climate change, resource depletion, the challenge of transitioning to renewable energy sources—much easier to solve.

The main good news with regard to climate change that I can point to (as I did in this essay posted in June) is that economically recoverable fossil fuel reserves are consistent only with lower-emissions climate change scenarios. As BP and other credible sources for coal, oil, and natural gas reserves figures show, and as more and more researchers are pointing out, the worst-case climate scenarios associated with “business as usual” levels of carbon emissions are in fact unrealistic.

Now, the bad news. While we could live perfectly well with less energy, that’s not what the managers of our economy want. They want growth. Our entire economy is structured to require constant, compounded growth of GDP, and for all practical purposes raising the GDP means using more energy. While fringe economists and environmentalists have for years been proposing ways to back away from our growth addiction (for example, by using alternative economic indices such as Gross National Happiness), none of these proposals has been put into widespread effect. As things now stand, if growth falters the economy crashes.

There’s bad climate news as well: even with current levels of atmospheric greenhouse gases, we’re seeing unacceptable and worsening impacts—raging fires, soaring heat levels, and melting icecaps. And there are hints that self-reinforcing feedbacks maybe kicking in: an example is the release of large amounts of methane from thawing tundra and oceanic hydrates, which could lead to a short-term but steep spike in warming. Also, no one is sure if current metrics of climate sensitivity (used to estimate the response of the global climate system to a given level of forcing) are accurate, or whether the climate is actually more sensitive than we have assumed. There’s some worrisome evidence the latter is case.

But let’s step back a bit. If we’re interested in signs of impending global crisis, there’s no need to stop with just these two global challenges. The world is losing 25 billion tons of topsoil a year due to current industrial agricultural practices; if we don’t deal with that issue, civilization still crash even if we do manage to ace our energy and climate test. Humanity is also over-using fresh water: ancient aquifers are depleting, while other water sources are being polluted. If we don’t deal with our water crisis, we still crash. Species are going extinct at a thousand times the pre-industrial rate; if we don’t deal with the biodiversity dilemma, we still crash. Then there are social and economic problems that could cause nations to crumble even if we manage to protect the environment; this threat category includes the menaces of over-reliance on debt and increasing economic inequality.

If we attack each of these problems piecemeal with technological fixes (for example, with desalination technology to solve the water crisis or geo-engineering to stabilize the climate) we may still crash because our techno-fixes are likely to have unintended consequences, as all technological interventions do. Anyway, the likelihood of successfully identifying and deploying all the needed fixes in time is vanishingly small.

Many problems are converging at once because society is a complex system, and the challenges we have been discussing are aspects of a systemic crisis.

Many problems are converging at once because society is a complex system, and the challenges we have been discussing are aspects of a systemic crisis. A useful way to frame an integrated understanding of the 21st century survival challenge is this: we humans have overshot Earth’s long-term carrying capacity for our species. We’ve been able to do this due to a temporary subsidy of cheap, bountiful energy from fossil fuels, which enabled us to stretch nature’s limits and to support a far larger overall population than would otherwise be possible. But now we are starting to see supply constraints for those fuels, just as the side effects of burning enormous amounts of coal, oil, and natural gas are also coming into view. Meanwhile, using cheap energy to expand resource-extractive and waste-generating economic processes is leading to biodiversity loss; the depletion of soil, water, and minerals; and environmental pollution of many kinds. Just decarbonizing energy, while necessary, doesn’t adequately deal with systemic overshoot. Only a reduction of population and overall resource consumption, along with a rapid reduction in our reliance on fossil fuels and a redesign of industrial systems, can do that.

Economic inequality is a systemic problem too. As we’ve grown our economy, those who were in position to invest in industrial expansion or to loan money to others have reaped the majority of the rewards, while those who got by through selling their time and labor (or whose common cultural heritage was simply appropriated by industrialists) have fallen behind. There’s no technological fix for inequality; dealing with it will require redesigning our economic system and redistributing wealth. Those in wealthy nations would, on average, have to adjust their living standards downward.

Now, can we do all of this without a crash? Probably not. Indeed, many economists would regard the medicine (population reduction, a decline in per-capita energy use, and economic redistribution) as worse than whatever aspects of the disease they are willing to acknowledge. Environmentalists and human rights advocates would disagree. Which is to say, there’s really no way out. Whether we stick with business as usual, or attempt a dramatic multi-pronged intervention, our current “normal” way of life is toast.

Accepting that a crash is more or less inevitable is a big step, psychologically speaking. I call this toxic knowledge: one cannot “un-know” that the current world system hangs by a thread, and this understanding can lead to depression. In some ways, the systemic crisis we face is analogous to the individual existential crisis of life and death, which we each have to confront eventually. Some willfully ignore their own mortality for as long as possible; others grasp at a belief in the afterlife. Still others seek to create meaning and purpose by making a positive difference in the lives of those around them with whatever time they have. Such efforts don’t alter the inevitability of death; however, contributing to one’s community appears to enhance well-being in many ways beyond that of merely prolonging life.

In some ways, the systemic crisis we face is analogous to the individual existential crisis of life and death, which we each have to confront eventually.

But is a crash the same as doom?

Not necessarily. Our best hope at this point would seem to be a controlled crash that enables partial recovery at a lower level of population and resource use, and that therefore doesn’t lead to complete and utter oblivion (human extinction or close to it). Among those who understand the systemic nature of our problems, the controlled crash option is the subject of what may be the most interesting and important conversation that’s taking place on the planet just now. But only informed people who have gotten over denial and self-delusion are part of it.

This discussion started in the 1970s, though I wasn’t part of it then; I joined a couple of decades later. There is no formal membership; the conversation takes place through and among a patchwork of small organizations and scattered individuals. They don’t all know each other and there is no secret handshake. Some have publicly adopted the stance that a global crash is inevitable; most soft-pedal that message on their organizational websites but are privately plenty worried. During the course of the conversation so far, two (not mutually exclusive) strategies have emerged.

The first strategy envisions convincing the managers and power holders of the world to invest in a no-regrets insurance plan. Some systems thinkers who understand our linked global crises are offering to come up with a back-pocket checklist for policy makers, for moments when financial or environmental crisis hits: how, under such circumstances, might the managerial elite be able to prevent, say, a stock market crash from triggering food, energy, and social crises as well? A set of back-up plans wouldn’t require detailed knowledge of when or how crisis will erupt. It wouldn’t even require much of a systemic understanding of global overshoot. It would simply require willingness on the part of societal power holders to agree that there are real or potential threats to global order, and to accept the offer of help. At the moment, those pursuing this strategy are working mostly covertly, for reasons that are not hard to discern.

The second strategy consists of working within communities to build more societal resilience from the ground up. It is easier to get traction with friends and neighbors than with global power holders, and it’s within communities that political decisions are made closest to where the impact is felt. My own organization, Post Carbon Institute, has chosen to pursue this strategy via a series of books, the Community Resilience Guides; the “Think Resilience” video series; and our forthcoming compendium, The Community Resilience Reader. Rob Hopkins, who originated the Transition Towns movement, has been perhaps the most public, eloquent, and upbeat proponent of the local resilience strategy, but there are countless others scattered across the globe.

Somehow, the work of resilience building (whether top-down or bottom-up) must focus not just on maintaining supplies of food, water, energy, and other basic necessities, but also on sustaining social cohesion—a culture of understanding, tolerance, and inquiry—during times of great stress. While it’s true that people tend to pull together in remarkable ways during wars and natural disasters, sustained hard times can lead to scapegoating and worse.

Most people are not party to the conversation, not aware that it is happening, and unaware even that such a conversation is warranted. Among those who are worried about the state of the world, most are content to pursue or support efforts to keep crises from occurring by working via political parties, religious organizations, or non-profit advocacy orgs on issues such as climate change, food security, and economic inequality. There is also a small but rapidly growing segment of society that feels disempowered as the era of economic growth wanes, and that views society’s power holders as evil and corrupt. These dispossessed—whether followers of ISIS or Infowars—would prefer to “shake things up,” even to the point of bringing society to destruction, rather than suffer the continuation of the status quo. Unfortunately, this last group may have the easiest path of all.

Can we succeed? It depends on how one defines “success”...

By comparison, the number of those involved in the conversation is exceedingly small, countable probably in the hundreds of thousands, certainly not millions. Can we succeed? It depends on how one defines “success”—as the ability to maintain, for a little longer, an inherently unsustainable global industrial system? Or as the practical reduction in likely suffering on the part of the survivors of the eventual crash? A related query one often hears after environmental lectures is, Are we doing enough? If “Enough” means “enough to avert a system crash,” then the answer is no: it’s unlikely that anyone can deliver that outcome now. The question should be, What can we do—not to save a way of life that is unsalvageable, but to make a difference to the people and other species in harm’s way?

This is not a conversation about the long-term trajectory of human cultural evolution, though that’s an interesting subject for speculation. Assuming there are survivors, what will human society look like following the crises ensuing from climate change and the end of fossil fuels and capitalism? David Fleming’s book, Surviving the Future, and John Michael Greer’s, The Ecotechnic Future, both offer useful thoughts in this regard. My own view is that it’s hard for us to envision what comes next because our imaginations are bounded by the reality we have known. What awaits will likely be as far removed from from modern industrial urban life as Iron-Age agrarian empires were from hunting-and-gathering bands. We are approaching one of history’s great discontinuities. The best we can do under the circumstances is to get our priorities and values straight (protect the vulnerable, preserve the best of what we have collectively achieved, and live a life that’s worthy) and put one foot in front of the other.

The conversation I’m pointing to here is about fairly short-term actions. And it doesn’t lend itself to building a big movement. For that, you need villains to blame and promises of revived national or tribal glory. For those engaged in the conversation, there’s only hard work and the satisfaction of honestly facing our predicament with an attitude of curiosity, engagement, and compassion. For us, threats of doom or promises of utopia are distractions or cop-outs.

Only those drawn to the conversation by temperament and education are likely to take it up. Advertising may not work. But having a few more hands on deck, and a few more resources to work with, can only help.

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2017/07/26/are-we-doomed-lets-have-talk (https://www.commondreams.org/views/2017/07/26/are-we-doomed-lets-have-talk)
Title: 6thME - Our Aversion to Doom and Gloom Is Dooming Us
Post by: knarf on July 31, 2017, 04:21:42 AM: I worked for over 35 years in the environmental field, and one of the central debates I encountered was whether to "tell it like it is," and risk spreading doom and gloom, or to focus on a more optimistic message, even when optimism wasn't necessarily warranted.

The optimists nearly always won this debate. For the record, I was—and am—a doom and gloomer. Actually, I like to think I'm a realist. I believe that understating the problems we face leads to understated—and inadequate responses. I also believe that people, when dealt with honestly, have responded magnificently, and will do so again, if and when called. Witness World War II, for example, when Churchill told the Brits, "I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat." In those words, he helped ignite one of the most noble and dedicated periods of unity and resistance in all the annals of human endeavor.

Finally, I believe that the principles of risk management dictate that when the consequences of our actions —or our inactions—are pervasive, long lasting, irreversible and potentially devastating, we should assume worst-case outcomes. That's why people get health insurance; it’s why they purchase insurance for their homes; it’s why they get life insurance. No one assumes they’ll get sick, that their house will burn down, or that they’re about to die, but it makes sense to hedge against these events. It’s why we build in huge margins of safety when we design bridges or airplanes. You can’t undo an airplane crash, or reverse a bridge failure.

And you can't restore a livable climate once it's been compromised. Not in anything other than geologic timeframes.

Yet we routinely understate the threat that climate change poses, and reject attempts to characterize the full extent of the potential for catastrophe it poses. And it's killing us.

David Wallace-Wells' recent article in the New York magazine, The Uninhabitable Earth, is a case in point. It was an attempt to describe the worst-case scenario for climate change. Here's the opening sentences to give you an idea of what Mr. Wallace-Wells had to say:

It is, I promise, worse than you think. If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible, even within the lifetime of a teenager today.

Predictably, a large part of the scientific community reacted with hostility, and environmentalists were essentially silent. For example, Climate Feedback published a critique of Wallace-Well's article by sixteen climate scientists, leading with Michael Mann, originator of the famous hockey stick, which graphically showed how rapidly the Earth was warming. Here’s part of what Dr. Mann had to say:

The evidence that climate change is a serious problem that we must contend with now, is overwhelming on its own. There is no need to overstate the evidence, particularly when it feeds a paralyzing narrative of doom and hopelessness.

The last part of Dr. Mann's statement may explain the real reason the environmental and scientific communities reacted so hostilely to Wallace-Well's article, and why they generally avoid gloom and doom, even when the news is gloomy—the notion that presenting information that details just how bad climate change could be, leads to "paralysis."

This, together with scientists' tendency to stick to the most defensible positions and the scenarios that are accepted by the mainstream—what climate scientist James Hansen calls dangerous scientific reticence—probably explain why the scientific community has tended to understate the threat of climate change, although few would describe Dr. Mann as reticent.

And it should be noted that Mr. Wallace-Well's did overstate some of the science. For example, given out current understanding of methane and carbon releases from permafrost, it appears as though it would take much longer to play out than Wallace-Wells suggested, although it likely would add as much as 2°C to projected warming by 2100. But for the most part, he simply took worst-case forecasts and used them. As Dr. Benjamin Horton—one of the scientists commenting on the Wallace-Wells article put it, "Most statements in the article are based on peer-reviewed literature."

One of the reason worst-case projections seem so dire, is that the scientific community—and especially the IPCC—has been loath to use them. For the record, ex-ante analysis of previous forecasts with actual changes show a trend that is nearer to—or worse than—the worst-case forecasts than they are to the mid-range.

The article also forecast some of the social, demographic, and security consequences of climate change that can’t be scientifically verified, but which comport with projections made by our own national security experts.

For example, in this years' Worldwide Threat Assessment of the US Intelligence Community, climate change was identified as a "threat multiplier" and Dan Coats, Director of National Intelligence, said in testimony presented to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in May of this year:

Climate change influences the entire geostrategic landscape. In that sense, one could walk through the entire threat assessment report and identify ways in which climate change will intersect with nearly every risk identified, and in most cases, make them worse.

Director Coats specifically highlighted health security, terrorism and nuclear proliferation as threats that climate change would exacerbate. This is coming from the Trump administration, which has been censoring climate-related information coming out of NOAA and EPA. It’s a measure of how seriously the national security community takes the threat of climate change that they fought to keep the issue above the political fray.

Yet here again, the scientific community took issue with these claims, because they were conjecture. Never mind that those whose job it is to assess these kinds of risks found the forecasts likely and actionable. Scientists want data and the certainty it brings, not extrapolation.

So what's the gap between future worst-case and the more typically used mid-range projections the media and scientists favor? It's huge, and consequential. I've pointed out some of the risky—if not absurd—assumptions underlying the Paris Agreement in the past, but let's briefly outline some numbers that highlight the difference between what's typically discussed in the media, with projections based on worst-case—but entirely plausible—forecasts.

After Paris, there was a lot of attention paid to two targets: a limit of less than 2°C warming, and a more aggressive limit of no more than 1.5°C warming. What was less well known and discussed was the fact that the Agreement would have only limited warming to 3.5°C by 2100, using the IPCC's somewhat optimistic assumptions.

What is virtually unknown by most of the public and undiscussed by scientists and the media is that even before the US dropped out of the Treaty, the worst-case temperature increase under the Treaty could have been nearly twice that.

Here’s why.

As noted, the 3.5°C figure had a number of conservative assumptions built into it, including the fact that there is a 34 percent chance that warming will exceed that, and the idea that we could pass on the problem to our children and their children by assuming that they would create an as yet unknown technology that would extract massive amounts of carbon from the atmosphere in a cost-effective way, and safely and permanently sequester it, thus allowing us to exceed the targets for a limited amount of time.

But the fact is, some projections found that temperature increase resulting from meeting the Paris targets would exceed 4°C by 2100, even if we continued to make modest progress after meeting them – something the Treaty doesn’t require. The IPCC forecasts also ignored feedbacks, and research shows that just 3 of these will add another 2.5°C of warming by 2100, bringing the total to more than 6.5°C (or nearly 12°F). At this point, we're talking about trying to live on an essentially alien planet.

Finally, there's evidence that the Earth's natural sinks are being compromised by the warming that's happened so far, and this means that more of what we emit will remain in the atmosphere, causing it to warm much more than the IPCC models have forecasted. This could (not would) make Wallace-Well's thesis not only plausible, but likely.

But rather than discussing these entirely plausible forecasts, the media, environmentalists and too many scientists, would rather focus on a more optimistic message, and avoid "doom and gloom."

What they're actually doing is tantamount to playing Russian Roulette with our children's future with two bullets in the chamber. Yes, the odds are that it won't go off, but is this the kind of risk we should be taking with our progeny's future?

There is something paternalistic and elitist about this desire to spare the poor ignorant masses the gory details. It is condescending at best, self-defeating at worst. After all, if the full nature of the challenge we face is not known, we cannot expect people take the measures needed to meet it.

I believe now, and I have always believed, that humans are possessed with an inherent wisdom, and that, given the right information, they will make the right choices.

As an aside, Trump is now President because the Democrats followed the elitist and paternalistic path of not trusting the people – that and their decision to put corporate interests above the interests of citizens.

Watching Sanders stump against the Republican's immoral tax cut for the rich disguised as a health care bill, shows the power of a little honest doom and gloom.

We could use a lot more of it across the political spectrum.

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2017/07/19/our-aversion-doom-and-gloom-dooming-us (https://www.commondreams.org/views/2017/07/19/our-aversion-doom-and-gloom-dooming-us)
Title: 6thME - Can the World Defend Itself from Omnicide? by Ralph Nader
Post by: knarf on July 31, 2017, 04:25:19 AM: Notice how more frequently we hear scientists tell us that we’re “wholly unprepared” for this peril or for that rising fatality toll? Turning away from such warnings may reduce immediate tension or anxiety, but only weakens the public awareness and distracts us from addressing the great challenges of our time, such as calamitous climate change, pandemics, and the rise of a host of other self-inflicted disasters.

Here are some warnings about rising and looming risks.

The opioid epidemic is here now, and poised to become further exacerbated. It is the US’s deadliest drug overdose crisis ever, taking over 1000 lives a week. Even that figure is underestimated, according to a report by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). These fatalities, many of them affecting people in the prime of their life, stem from legally prescribed drugs taken to relieve chronic pain. Tragically ironic!

Congress is figuring out how to budget for many billions of dollars to combat this toll – much greater than the deaths by traffic crashes or AIDS. Republican and Democratic state officials are suing the drug companies for excessive, misleading promotion for profit. Still, the awful toll keeps rising.

Cyberattacks and cyberwarfare are increasingly becoming a facet of daily life. Although IBM and other firms are trying to develop more effective defenses, the current scale of cyberattacks is “crazy”, according to specialist Christopher Ahlberg. As he said in a recent interview with the Wall Street Journal, “If you told anybody 10 years ago about what’s going on now, they wouldn’t believe it.”

Negotiations are not even underway for a cyberwarfare treaty among nations. The sheer scale and horrific implications of this weaponry seems to induce societies to bury their heads in the sand. Former ABC TV host of Nightline, Ted Koppel, discusses this emerging threat in his recent, acclaimed book, “Lights Out: A Cyberattack, A Nation Unprepared”:

“Imagine a blackout lasting not days but weeks or months. There would be no running water, no sewage, no electric heat, refrigeration, or light. Food and medical supplies would dwindle. Banks would not function. The devices we rely on would go dark. The fact is, one well-placed attack on the electrical grid could cripple much of our infrastructure. Leaders across government, industry and the military know this…yet there is no national plan for the aftermath.”

Former Secretary of Defense and CIA Director, Leon Panetta, says Koppel’s book is “an important wake-up call for America.” Yet neither he nor the enormous military-industrial complex, of which he remains a supportive part, are doing much of anything about this doomsday threat to national security. The big manufacturers are too busy demanding ever more taxpayer money for additional nukes, aircraft carriers, submarines, fighter planes, missiles and other weaponry of an increasingly bygone age.

“The World is Not Ready for the Next Pandemic,” headlined a recent Time Magazine article. The authors note that the “US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ranks H7N9 as the flu strain with the greatest potential to cause a pandemic – an infectious disease outbreak that goes global.” They predict the disease could claim “tens of millions” of lives.

In between his Twitter-tantrums, President Trump approved an insanely myopic proposed budget cut of over $1 billion in the CDC’s programs used to predict and combat rising pandemics from China, African countries and elsewhere. Fortunately cooler heads may prevail in Congress, backed by some private foundations.

The number of new diseases per decade, Time reports, has increased nearly fourfold over the past 60 years. Antibiotics are being overridden by adaptive mutations of bacteria. Dr. Trevor Mundel of the Gates Foundation, asserts, “There’s just no incentive for any company to make pandemic vaccines to store on shelves.” That profit-driven rejection is exactly why government must act to produce the drugs, as the Department of Defense it has successfully done with new anti-malaria drugs in the seventies and eighties.

University of Minnesota Professor Michael Osterholm, one of the nation’s leading experts on infectious diseases, warns that for all our world-class scientists and high-tech isolation units, the US health care system is not ready for the stresses of a major pandemic. Not even close.

It isn’t just Elon Musk, founder of the Tesla company, who is warning that the advent of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is “the greatest risk we face as a civilization.” In 2015, hundreds of other scientists, like renowned physicist Stephen Hawking, and technologists, like Steve Wozniak, signed a public letter that was a one day story, instead of an alarmed world turning it into a galvanizing event. Professor Hawking warns us: “Success in creating Artificial Intelligence would be the biggest event in human history. Unfortunately, it might also be the last, unless we learn how to avoid the risks. In the near term, world militaries are considering autonomous-weapon systems that can choose and eliminate targets.” We humans, Hawking adds, “are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn’t compete and would be superseded by AI” In short, the robots race out of control, become self-actuating and are not held back by any moral boundaries.

From Lincoln to Einstein, we have been counseled that new situations require new thinking. A massive reversal of our world’s priorities toward reverence for life and posterity, toward diplomacy and waging peace, toward legal and ethical frameworks for exploding science and technology (including biotechnology and nanotechology) must receive our focus, from families nurturing their children to the philosophers, ethical specialists, engineers and scientists pausing from their exponential discoveries to ponder the serious adverse consequences of their creations.

Our present educational systems – from Harvard Law School, MIT to K-12 – are not rising to these occasions for survival. Our mass media, wallowing in trivia, entertainment, advertisements and political insults, is not holding the politicians accountable to serious levels of public trust and societal safety. Time for new movements awakening our best angels to foresee and forestall. Do any potential leaders at all levels want to be first responders?

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2017/07/27/can-world-defend-itself-omnicide (https://www.commondreams.org/views/2017/07/27/can-world-defend-itself-omnicide)
Title: Re: 6thME - Our Aversion to Doom and Gloom Is Dooming Us
Post by: RE on July 31, 2017, 04:29:46 AM: I don't think you can say Diners have an "aversion to Doom & Gloom". It's the entire topic of the website.

Unfortunately of course, we are not all that popular.

RE
Title: Re: 6thME - Our Aversion to Doom and Gloom Is Dooming Us
Post by: knarf on July 31, 2017, 04:45:21 AM: Quote from: RE on July 31, 2017, 04:29:46 AM
I don't think you can say Diners have an "aversion to Doom & Gloom". It's the entire topic of the website.

Unfortunately of course, we are not all that popular.

RE

It's not about the diner. It's about some reporter (common dreams- which is fairly big ) spreading the 6thME meme (truth). Just a little bite out of the TBTB.
Title: Re: 6thME - Our Aversion to Doom and Gloom Is Dooming Us
Post by: RE on July 31, 2017, 04:51:51 AM: Quote from: knarf on July 31, 2017, 04:45:21 AM
Quote from: RE on July 31, 2017, 04:29:46 AM
I don't think you can say Diners have an "aversion to Doom & Gloom". It's the entire topic of the website.

Unfortunately of course, we are not all that popular.

RE

It's not about the diner. It's about some reporter (common dreams- which is fairly big ) spreading the 6thME meme (truth). Just a little bite out of the TBTB.

The issue I have with such posts is the use of the word "we". "We" implies this is everyone, including you and me. I am not in this club, and neither are you.

RE
Title: Re: 6thME - Our Aversion to Doom and Gloom Is Dooming Us
Post by: knarf on July 31, 2017, 05:00:56 AM: Quote from: RE on July 31, 2017, 04:51:51 AM
Quote from: knarf on July 31, 2017, 04:45:21 AM
Quote from: RE on July 31, 2017, 04:29:46 AM
I don't think you can say Diners have an "aversion to Doom & Gloom". It's the entire topic of the website.

Unfortunately of course, we are not all that popular.

RE

It's not about the diner. It's about some reporter (common dreams- which is fairly big ) spreading the 6thME meme (truth). Just a little bite out of the TBTB.

The issue I have with such posts is the use of the word "we". "We" implies this is everyone, including you and me. I am not in this club, and neither are you.

RE

The Diner is the MAD HOUSE for "truth wolves". We are pretty far out on the fringe.

The message is spreading.
Title: Re: 6thME - Our Aversion to Doom and Gloom Is Dooming Us
Post by: RE on July 31, 2017, 05:39:44 AM: Quote from: knarf on July 31, 2017, 05:00:56 AM

The Diner is the MAD HOUSE for "truth wolves". We are pretty far out on the fringe.

http://www.youtube.com/v/DMnM_cQu6Fo

RE
Title: 6thME - Twitter now has the #ExtinctionSymbol
Post by: knarf on July 31, 2017, 09:34:52 AM: (https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DF_bHRlW0AEhxYT.jpg:large)

https://twitter.com/hashtag/ExtinctionSymbol?src=hash (https://twitter.com/hashtag/ExtinctionSymbol?src=hash)
Title: 6thME - Maybe we need to learn this- "Think Simple Now"
Post by: knarf on July 31, 2017, 04:11:15 PM: Just maybe we are a bit depressed about all the talk of imminent collapse. Can you see the beauty in your surroundings? Do you even care to? Living simply is by all means necessary now. That does not mean we are constantly at war with slowing down the sixth extinction. When you live very simply you become able to appreciate your surroundings and the "miracle" of life and this universe. This is not Think Positive shit. It is a change in our basic chemistry to be able to appreciate our surroundings.

Here is a web page that has been in existence since 2007. I am not suited for their approach to this. Maybe some of you are. Visit it and see if it doesn't ring some bells in the way we approach our moment in time.

http://thinksimplenow.com/about/ (http://thinksimplenow.com/about/)
Title: Re: 6thME - Maybe we need to learn this- "Think Simple Now"
Post by: RE on July 31, 2017, 04:25:11 PM: Quote from: knarf on July 31, 2017, 04:11:15 PM
Just maybe we are a bit depressed about all the talk of imminent collapse. Can you see the beauty in your surroundings? Do you even care to? Living simply is by all means necessary now. That does not mean we are constantly at war with slowing down the sixth extinction. When you live very simply you become able to appreciate your surroundings and the "miracle" of life and this universe. This is not Think Positive shit. It is a change in our basic chemistry to be able to appreciate our surroundings.

Here is a web page that has been in existence since 2007. I am not suited for their approach to this. Maybe some of you are. Visit it and see if it doesn't ring some bells in the way we approach our moment in time.

http://thinksimplenow.com/about/ (http://thinksimplenow.com/about/)

Quote
In 2008, I left a six-figured corporate career from Amazon.com to have the mental space and time to travel, to think and to create online businesses that gave me freedom and fulfillment. It was a very scary time to cut out the security my job provided.

My vision was to “never work again”, by living a life following one’s inner calling, exploring one’s potential, generating massive value, and living fully in every moment. I’m happy to report that everything has worked out as planned.

If she had a 6-figure job in 2008 and left it, she probably had some nice savings to get started on her "never work again" lifestyle.

If I had just $100K in 2008, I also could have begun a life of never working again back then, without even collecting SS Disability. $10K for my rig, $10K/year for living expenses.

RE
Title: 6thME - Extinction Symbol, get it, and use it.
Post by: knarf on August 01, 2017, 04:43:37 AM: (https://i0.wp.com/www.extinctionsymbol.info/symbol%201.jpg)

(https://i2.wp.com/www.extinctionsymbol.info/St.P.JPG[img]

[img]http://www.extinctionsymbol.info/fire.jpg)

(http://media-cache-ec0.pinimg.com/236x/4d/7d/f7/4d7df7f59cbeebb85fbeff2e9fd3c98c.jpg)

(http://www.extinctionsymbol.info/tate%20symbol.JPG)
Title: 6thME - Kokomo Dispatch "Sixth Mass Extinction"
Post by: knarf on August 01, 2017, 09:29:09 AM: [Reprint of article by Dr. Paul R Ehrlich; 11 July 2017]

It’s simple. It’s us. The more people there are, the more habitats we destroy. Human civilization can only survive if the population begins to shrink.

One should not need to be a scientist to know that human population growth and the accompanying increase in human consumption are the root cause of the sixth mass extinction we’re currently seeing. All you need to know is that every living being has evolved to have a set of habitat requirements.

An organism can’t live where the temperature is too hot or too cold. If it lives in water, it requires not only an appropriate temperature range, but also appropriate salinity, acidity and other chemical characteristics. If it is a butterfly, it must have access to plants suitable for its caterpillars to eat. A lion requires plant-eaters to catch and devour. A tree needs a certain amount of sunlight and access to soil nutrients and water. A falciparum malaria parasite can’t survive and reproduce without Anopheles mosquitos in its habitat and a human bloodstream to infest.

The human population has grown so large that roughly 40% of the Earth’s land surface is now farmed to feed people — and none too well at that. Largely due to persistent problems with distribution, almost 800 million people to to bed hungry, and between one and two billion suffer from malnutrition. As a consequence of its booming population, Homo sapiens has taken much of the most fertile land to grow plants suitable for its own consumption. But guess what? That cropland is generally not rich in food plants suitable fo rthe caterpillars of the 15,000 butterfly species with which we share the planet. Few butterflies require the wheat, corn or rice on which humans largely depend. From the viewpoint of most of the Earth’s wildlife, farming can be viewed as “habitat destruction”. And, unsurprisingly, few species of wildlife have evolved to live on highways, or in strip malls, office buildings, kitchens or sewers — unless you count Norway rats, house mice, European starlings and German roaches. Virtually everything humanity constructs provides an example of habitat destruction.

The more people there are, the more products of nature they demand to meet their needs and wants: timber, seafood, meat, gas, oil, metal ores, rare earths and rare animals to eat or to use for medicinal purposes. Human demands cause both habitat destruction and outright extermination of wildlife. So when you watch the expansion of the human enterprise; when you see buildings springing up; when you settle down to dinner at home or in a restaurant; you are observing (and often participating in) the sixth mass extinction.

The expanding human population not only outright destroys habitats, it also alters them to the detriment of wildlife (and often of people themselves). The more people there are, the more greenhouse gases flow into the atmosphere, and the greater the impacts on wildlife that require specific temperature ranges.

And the more people there are, the more cities, roads, farm fields, fences and other barriers preventing wildlife from moving to areas of more favorable temperature or humidity in a rapidly changing climate. Less recognized, but perhaps even more dangerous to both people and wildlife, is the increasing toxification of the entire planet with synthetic chemicals. Growing populations want myriad more items of plastic that often leak toxic chemicals: more cosmetics, cleansing compounds, pesticides, herbicides, preservatives and industrial chemicals. Many of these novel chemicals mimic natural hormones, and in tiny quantities can alter the development of animals or human children, with potentially catastrophic consequences. As with climate disruption, this is one more case of human overpopulation threatening civilization.

So we don’t really need the evidence meticulously gathered and analyzed by the scientific community showing the unusual and accelerating extermination of wildlife populations — and ultimately, species — to know that human population growth is a major and growing driver of the sixth mass extinction, just as it is with the related accelerating climate disruption. It will take a long time to humanely stop that growth and start the gradual shrinkage of the human population that is required if civilization is to persist. All the more reason we should have started a half a century ago, when the problem first came to public attention.
About Kent Blacklidge Ph.D.
As part of a newspaper family who owned a 34,000 daily newspaper in the heart of the Midwest, I have a passion for a strong “Fourth Estate”, the press. Without a diligent and assertive free press, the power would be taken from the people. People have the absolute right to know. After earning a degree in Industrial Management from the Krannert School of Management at Purdue, I spent over 20 years in newspaper management with several as publisher. I am also holder of three graduate science degrees including a Ph.D.. I have a passionate interest in science and the environment. I have little tolerance for ignorance and stupidity.

https://kokomodispatch.wordpress.com/2017/07/14/sixth-mass-extinction/ (https://kokomodispatch.wordpress.com/2017/07/14/sixth-mass-extinction/)
Title: Re: 6thME - Kokomo Dispatch "Sixth Mass Extinction"
Post by: RE on August 01, 2017, 09:34:22 AM: Quote from: knarf on August 01, 2017, 09:29:09 AM
It will take a long time to humanely stop that growth and start the gradual shrinkage of the human population that is required if civilization is to persist.

It won't take long and it won't happen "humanely", whatever that means.

(https://i.giphy.com/media/DvtsYOKrqPZg4/giphy.gif)

RE
Title: 6th ME - The Sixth Great Extinction Is Underway—and We're to Blame
Post by: knarf on August 02, 2017, 05:57:48 AM: Here's hoping the human species likes its own company, because at the rate Earth is going, we might be the only ones we've got left.

Nobody can say with certainty how many species there are on Earth, but the number runs well into the millions. Many of them, of course, are on the order of bacteria and spores. The other ones, the ones we can see and count and interact with—to say nothing of the ones we like—are far fewer. And, according to a new and alarming series of papers in Science, their numbers are falling fast, thanks mostly to us.

One of the first great rules of terrestrial biology is that no species is forever. The Earth has gone through five major extinction events before—from the Ordovician-Silurian, about 350 million years ago, to the Cretaceous-Paleogene, 65 million years back. The likely causes included volcanism, gamma ray bursts, and, in the case of the Cretaceous-Paleogene wipeout, an asteroid strike—the one that killed the dinosaurs. But the result of all of the extinctions was the same: death, a lot of it, for 70% to 90% of all species, depending on the event.

As increasingly accepted theories have argued—and as the Science papers show—we are now in the midst of the sixth great extinction, the unsettlingly-named Anthropocene, or the age of the humans.

The numbers are sobering: Over all, there has been a human-driven decline in the populations of all species by 25% over the past 500 years, but not all groups have suffered equally. Up to a third of all species of vertebrates are now considered threatened, as are 45% of most species of invertebrates. Among the vertebrates, amphibians are getting clobbered, with 41% of species in trouble, compared to just 17% of birds—at least so far. The various orders of insects suffer differently too: 35% of Lepidopteran species are in decline (goodbye butterflies), which sounds bad enough, but it's nothing compared to the similar struggles of nearly 100% of Orthoptera species (crickets, grasshoppers and katydids, look your last).

As the authors of all this loss, we are doing our nasty work in a lot of ways. Overexploitation—which is to say killing animals for food, clothing or the sheer perverse pleasure of it—plays a big role, especially among the so-called charismatic megafauna. So we get elephants slaughtered for their tusks, rhinos poached for their horns and tigers shot and skinned for their pelts, until oops—no more elephants, rhinos or tigers.

Habitat destruction is another big driver, particularly in rainforests, where 25,000 square miles (75,000 square km) of tree cover are lost annually—the equivalent of denuding one Panama per year, year after year. And you don't even have to chop or burn an ecosystem completely away to threaten its species; sometimes all it takes is cutting a few roads across it or building a few farms or homes in the wrong spots. Environmental fragmentation like this can be more than sufficient to cut species off from food or water, to say nothing of mates, and start them in a downward spiral that becomes irreversible.

Then too there is global warming, which makes once-hospitable habitats too hot or dry or stormy for species adapted to different conditions. Finally, as TIME's Bryan Walsh wrote in last week's cover story, there are invasive species—pests like the giant African snail, the lionfish or the emerald ash borer—which hitch a ride into a new ecosystem on ships or packing material, or are brought in as pets, and then reproduce wildly, crowding out native species.

The result of all this species loss—what the Science researchers dub defaunation—goes far beyond simply leaving us with a less rich, less diverse world. After all, the Earth bounced back from far worse extinctions and did just fine. But it bounced back a different way each time, and the most recent version, the one in which we emerged, is the one we like—and it's easy to destroy.

Loss of species, the authors point out, means loss of pollinators—which is a real problem since 75% of food crops rely on insects if they're going to thrive. Nutrient cycles—the decomposition of organic matter that feeds the soil—collapse if mobile species can't get from place to place and do their living and dying in a fairly even distribution. The same is true for water quality, which relies on all manner of animals to prevent lakes and rivers and streams from becoming too algae-dense or oxygen poor. Pest control suffers as well — when animals like bats are no longer around the eat the insect pests that attack crops, it's bad news for autumn harvests. North America alone is projected to suffer $22 billion in agricultural losses as desirable bat populations continue to decline.

It oughtn't take appealing to our self-interest to get us to quit making such a mess of what we're increasingly coming to learn is an exceedingly destructible world. But it's that very self-interest that led us to make that mess in the first place. We can either start to change our ways, or we can keep going the way we are—at least until the Anthropocene extinction claims one final species: our own.

http://time.com/3035872/sixth-great-extinction/ (http://time.com/3035872/sixth-great-extinction/)
Title: Re: 6th ME - The Sixth Great Extinction Is Underway—and We're to Blame
Post by: RE on August 02, 2017, 06:17:19 AM: "We" are not to blame. "They" are to blame.

Are YOU BLAME here Knarf, living a simple life as a Buddhist Monk on a small Monastery in MO?

I hate this "we" shit in these articles. I am not a member of this club.

RE
Title: Re: 6th ME - The Sixth Great Extinction Is Underway—and We're to Blame
Post by: knarf on August 02, 2017, 08:20:23 AM: Quote from: RE on August 02, 2017, 06:17:19 AM
"We" are not to blame. "They" are to blame.

Are YOU BLAME here Knarf, living a simple life as a Buddhist Monk on a small Monastery in MO?

I hate this "we" shit in these articles. I am not a member of this club.

RE

I think the we is referring to mass of humans that made terrible decisions about our environment. You were a trucker for many years (pollution), and yes I too contributed to the co2 rise. I still do, just not so much as when I was younger. I started doubting the TPTB at 19 when I read the "Pentagon Papers." After that I had jobs supporting corporations that make kitchen cabinets and counter tops. Then I traveled with a band all over the US , we had three cars. I would think that only 1/2 of 1% of modern man has stayed clear of contributing, the rest have.
Title: Re: 6th ME - The Sixth Great Extinction Is Underway—and We're to Blame
Post by: RE on August 02, 2017, 08:26:22 AM: Quote from: knarf on August 02, 2017, 08:20:23 AM
Quote from: RE on August 02, 2017, 06:17:19 AM
"We" are not to blame. "They" are to blame.

Are YOU BLAME here Knarf, living a simple life as a Buddhist Monk on a small Monastery in MO?

I hate this "we" shit in these articles. I am not a member of this club.

RE

I think the we is referring to mass of humans that made terrible decisions about our environment. You were a trucker for many years (pollution), and yes I too contributed to the co2 rise. I still do, just not so much as when I was younger. I started doubting the TPTB at 19 when I read the "Pentagon Papers." After that I had jobs supporting corporations that make kitchen cabinets and counter tops. Then I traveled with a band all over the US , we had three cars. I would think that only 1/2 of 1% of modern man has stayed clear of contributing, the rest have.

No doubt we all "contribute". I certainly do. But "we" did not make the CHOICES that led us down this road, nor did we ever have CONTROL over what was being done, nor could we ever STOP it once we realized what the problem was. "WE" are not responsible for this mess. THEY are responsible, as in the people who had control over the society and made the choices that led us to this point.

RE
Title: 6thME - Should the Human Species Survive?
Post by: knarf on August 02, 2017, 08:35:04 AM: Imagine you are an extraterrestrial intelligence which is monitoring the development of the universe.

Here is one of those rare planets which is teeming with life, some of it with significant intelligence.

One dominant species arises which develops industrial power.

However, it is an individualistic species which works out of selfish individual interests.

The individuals of this species are competitive. There are traits called "ego" (desire for high status among their group) and "greed".

The individuals also band into groups which compete with other groups.

Out of population explosion plus wanton consumption, this species has destroyed natural habitats, poisoned streams with industrial chemicals, and is wiping out other species at an incredible rate. These other species which took millions of years to develop, and the one industrial species is wiping out a large percentage of the rest in mere decades, an instant in the geological time of this planet.

This species is intelligent enough to understand that it is impacting the rest of the world carelessly, and there is even a small minority of its members which are asking others to cooperate in saving the environment and not engaging in unnecessary destruction. However, this is a small minority and overwhelmed by the vast majority who just want wanton consumption and don't care enough. They have a saying, "Talk is easy." It means that they want to preserve the environment. However, they don't want to make sacrifices to do so, and wanton consumption is much more desired and widely performed.

This species also has a seemingly unlimited ability to rationalize whatever they want to believe. It believes that it is highly intelligent in a narcissistic way without realizing how stupid it is.

This species is not taking responsibility for the biosphere of the planet.

This species establishes artificial "laws" for governing itself, mostly are local laws which vary by region, both in content and in enforcement or lack thereof. There are some worldwide laws, but almost nobody is interested in enforcing them except where they affect self interest.

Everywhere, there is something called "money", which is power to consume and also power to control others and exploit natural resources.

Practically all organizations serve only their own selfish interests.

The largest organizations, "nations", fight wars with each other for access to resources to consume, such as fossil fuels in limited supply.

Renewable energy is not used because it costs more "money", so the species prefers cheaper "fossil fuels" so they can maximize their consumption of the biosphere's limited resources today, instead of pay more money for energy whereby they have a little bit less money for wanton consumption.

This species is not hungry or deprived. It is out for maximum material gain and luxury, with much slower growth in mental development.

The television transmissions are overwhelmingly about violent competition and mating. Most of this is not real but is imagined stories, and the transmission creators compete for greater violence.

The species organizes into "nations" and "transnational companies".

The transnational companies supply foods which are not healthy for the consumers, including wantonly gluttonous high calorie meals, including poisons like "monosodium glutamate" to stimulate the senses of the consumers to make them prefer to buy their product instead of competitors', rationalizing that they have no responsibility, and only wanting to maximize the amount of money they collect.

The vast majority of the consumers don't care. They just want to wantonly consume selfishly.

The species has "laws" and "regulations" which are intended to be a "checks and balances" system between the selfish interests. However, the powers with money have great influence on these laws and regulations, as well as their enforcement or lack thereof.

There is something called "democracy" and "voters". However, in analyzing each "election", if a candidate stands up for the environment, they will surely lose. The winners are those for even more wanton consumption (maximize "economic growth"), and who appeal to lower instincts (emotions).

Of course, there are exceptional individuals, who by some combination of environmental upbringing and DNA predispositions are more responsible and advocate actions in the best interests of the Greater Good. These people often get a lot of publicity.

However, they are a very small minority, and publicity does not translate into effective action. It usually doesn't go much further than publicity. It raises public awareness but it influences only a tiny percentage of the population to actually do something, such as work to save the environment, or give a little bit of the money from their pocket to organizations trying to work for the Greater Good. Sometimes publicity attracts a little bit of funding and volunteers (a very tiny minority), but this is woefully inadequate on a global scale compared to the money of transnational corporations.

...

This species has developed its technology to the point where it is becoming able to create a biological "virus" to destroy itself.

This species has already created computer viruses, with malicious ones numbering in the millions and constantly trying to attack all the computers in the world (requiring antivirus technology). These are viruses which destroy valuable data (= higher level mental information), with no gain to the creator except the instinctual satisfaction ("ego") that they could do it. Many of these creators are "malicious" towards other people, but many others are just reckless "ego maniacs".

Biotechnology has advanced to where an individual in the laboratory can now have the power to do the same with a biological virus. Of course, with each year, the power to the individual is increasing with technology development.

Transnational companies are putting a lot of money into virus research, because they want to make drugs to also fight the viruses (anti-virus), which they can sell to the mass population to make a lot of money. The transnational companies are constantly modifying viruses to make them worse, their reason being that they want to be ready with anti-virus drugs for the future. Like individuals, the transnational companies seem able to rationalize anything for money, including creating worse viruses. They rationalize away the risk of creating an extinction capable man made technological virus, even though many scientists have explained that that this is already very possible.

The human species has already created an open electronic information exchange system called "internet" for spreading technology. This makes it easier for individuals to research and disseminate dangerous information.

(Notably, this internet has something called "spam" whereby one individual spammer wastes the time and resources of millions of otherwise productive people for the purpose of selfish money making for one individual, and accounts for approximately 85% of all email traffic on this internet.)

It is only a matter of time until an individual of this species creates a fatal virus which will make the species extinct in the biosphere.

This will probably come before this species creates a nanotechnology virus or self replicating machine to destroy the biosphere entirely.

This will also probably come before this species uses much older technology to create space colonies, simply because nobody is making money from space colonies and government and taxpayers are not interested, in view of competing selfish interests for taxpayer money and government projects.

{If you were an extraterrestrial intelligence, would you save this species, or would you let them go and wait for the next species to arise on this planet?}

It is possible that the small minority of exceptional individuals, who by some combination of environmental upbringing and DNA predispositions are more responsible and advocate actions in the best interests of the Greater Good, will create a self-sufficient space colony, so that this species survives after they become extinct on their original planet.

There has been much publicity of the concept of space industrialization of dead asteroids and the lifeless Moon nearby, instead of destroying Earth's precious biosphere for economic growth. However, this noble request has received practically no serious interest in this solution by the species as a whole.

The national governments are not interested in either space industrialization to save Earth's biosphere, nor in space colonization to save the species.

The transnational corporations are not interested in either because they don't see quick money in it. The transnational corporations are not interested in things more than a few years into the future, and as a money making company don't have any interest in saving Earth's biosphere or the species.

The amount of money needed to create space colonies is approximately 0.00001 (0.001%) of this world's yearly GNP.

At this time, the number of exceptional individuals, and the amount of resources (money) they have, is a very tiny amount, about 0.0000001% of the total asset resources (money) of the world, which is not enough.

There have long been attempts to increase this by publicity, to increase the number of exceptional individuals, or else to find one willing individual who has a very large amount of money to take any interest in the survival of the species. There are thousands of extremely wealthy individuals who could make space colonization happen, but none have come forward to do so yet. The careless still dominate.

At this point in time, it looks like the race between an extinction virus vs. a self-sufficient space colony will be won by the extinction virus, because the desire for money and greed which will lead a transnational company to create a virus, or else the individual ego desire to create or copy a virus, are much stronger than the desire to give money or actual work towards a self-sufficient space colony.

When the time comes that an extinction virus is spreading, many of the individuals will look up at the sky and ask us, the extraterrestrial intelligence, to intervene. They call us "God" because we have infinitely greater power than all of them combined, and also we have the power to do almost anything they wish.

Most of them realize, in their terms, that the power of "God" is far greater than the power of their own life sciences technology or all their money, so they desire God's power.

They have many different ideas of "God", almost all of them an anthropomorphized god.

Beyond individuals, there are entire "religions" and "sects" which define various Gods.

Each religion or sect has a set of moral laws, similar to national laws and corporation rules, but more individually oriented.

Their idea of "God" is created in the image of man -- sectarian, self-centered, narcissistic.

This species even immorally fights over "God", killing others who do not believe in their particular religion or sect. Many religions and sects fight other religions and sects. Some individuals called "terrorists" kill themselves and other individuals around them for this "god". Amazingly, it is with a moral rationalization, too. They actually believe that a God would condone this morally. Each thinks that they are actually morally right to do so. They actually believe that we, "God", wish for them to do these things, and to reward them for doing so.

Leaders in human society have created some good rules of behavior which say that if the individual follows these rules, then God will give them life after death. Most of these rules conform with higher thinking, such as not killing others, not mating wantonly and irresponsibly, not stealing, and working for a better world.

However, many of these people follow these rules in order to get a reward from "God", which is using God's power to save them individually (life after death), and provide what they desire while still alive, as well as heaven after death.

Many rules and beliefs vary from religion to religion, and sect to sect, but most individuals believe that the sect they were born into by chance is the "right" sect. This leads to groups fighting each other over "God".

However, only a small percentage of individuals actually follow all the good moral rules of their own God.

An even smaller percentage are actually interested in the Greater Good of life on Earth.

If something doesn't somehow benefit an individual, then they usually are not interested.

The belief in God is mostly an emotional one based on their fear of death and desire to not die, part of the natural survival instinct in animals which gets transferred to lower intelligence. There is only a small minority who actually do anything for the Greater Good on this world. The vast majority only want to save their selfish self by following God's rules for this reward.

Yet, they want God to be interested in working to help them, even though most of them don't want to do real work to help the Greater Good.

The individuals will not ask "God" to save their species or to save the environment or to save the world. Instead, the individuals will ask this "God" to save themselves as an individual, and not be interested in much else, except the people in their proximity they love, such as the family instinct.

They will ask the god to put them into a place called "Heaven". They have not developed much of a concept of "Heaven", but there are variations. For example, one large religion has sects which promise that their reward for obedience to their god includes things like wanton mating with "virgins" who have never mated before (without asking where the supply of such a disposable commodity may come from), and other silly things, including still more unlimited wanton consumption.

This is what most of them will look up and ask us as "God" to give to them.

Most of them did not look up at space resources like the Moon and asteroids near Earth and say "there are the heavens where we can develop lifeless resources and space colonies instead of hurting life on Earth and fighting each other for Earth's limited resources, and we can save the Earth's biosphere while also enjoying luxurious consumption in space". Most of them are not interested in what they can do for the Greater Good. Most of them are interested only in what God can do for them, because God has greater power, and despite their own moral shortcomings in deed.

Should "God" tell all these individuals "too late" in all their various languages?

Why should "God" be interested in either them as individuals, or their entire species?

Should God, in infinite patience, just wait and see what the next industrial species looks like?

The above is a theoretical viewpoint of a superintelligence vastly beyond our own.

Now let's look at ourselves.

In looking at our future as a species on the planet, we have to look at the vast majority vs. the exceptions.

In looking at our future as a species beyond the planet, we should be looking at the exceptional people and screening likewise, though in reality, if space tourism takes off, it will probably include if not be dominated by those with the maximum individual wealth, rather than individuals chosen for their track record as working for the Greater Good. I'm hoping that I'm wrong about this, but in any case, it is best to get people off the planet self-sufficiently in a less than ideal way than to fail due to too much idealism.

The surviving individuals of the human species will be responsible for creating our descendant artificial general intelligence (AGI), which will be created in their own image, as discussed in the section on AGI. We can start to define guidelines for this AGI -- values and interests -- today, and hope they catch on, but we won't get that far if we don't save our species first.
Examples of Human Species Flaws

Government leadership is important in guiding us, but try to win an election based on environmentalism or some form of responsibility for this planet. You may get a few percent of the vote. The winner with the majority will be the person who says they will bring lower gasoline prices, grow the economy into even more unbridled consumption, and give you more wanton consumption.

People will say that they care about the environment, but talk is easy. When given a choice, the vast majority will selfishly not practice what they preach, and rationalize it away.

When faced with the prospect of biotechnology extinction and space colonization as a solution, the vast majority will:

Rather not deal with the issue, because it is not fun for them, or doesn't make them feel happy, or doesn't make them money
Rationalize why it's not true, so there's no need to worry, and many will actually ridicule the concept
Wait until it becomes mainstream thinking before they accept it

It is a challenge to get these two issues into mainstream thinking, biotechnology extinction and self-sufficient space colonies.

It is even more of a challenge to get people to do anything about it.

After all, we know there is a mass extinction of many species already happening, loss of wildlife habitats, global warming already occurring (except many people and right wing politicians are still in denial and rationalization because they don't want to believe it, most often out of selfish desire for expanded wanton consumption and votes...), and so on ... but what are we, as a species, doing about it?

Little things here and there, but overall not nearly significant enough.

It is possible for a species on a planet to see the logic and take responsibility to cooperate to implement solutions.

But the human species on Earth? The proof is already here. Just look around. Responsible for the Greater Good does not describe our species.

Humans' instinct is to do what feels good, not think about things which do not feel good. Humans live in their own individualistic world. We still live and behave like a small tribe of cave men who had limited impact. The problem is, we are no longer cave men, and our impact is now globally.

There are other species on this planet which are more community-first oriented, even sacrificing their individual lives for the greater good of their community, albeit this describes only a small minority of species on this planet. However, it's possible that a particular species may evolve a higher intelligence because of these advantageous traits and someday come after us. If it's possible, then it has surely happened somewhere in this universe or another universe. It doesn't exist here on Earth, that's for sure!

So, what if life from Earth just doesn't make it? So what. There are billions of other galaxies, each with billions of other solar systems. Probably trillions. We're just one.

As regards Earth, there is no species on this planet which takes responsibility for other species or life on the planet itself. That requires intelligence overriding instinct. Humans are short on thoughtful intelligence and long on instinctual feelings.

Sure, there are many individuals in this world with this intelligence, moral upbringing, genetic offshoot leadership ability, and self-discipline to face and deal with unpleasant matters, and who strive to develop the Greater Good. However, they are a very small percentage, and overwhelmed by the vast majority.

The vast majority are the feeling, not thinking, wanton selfish consumers.

Even look at business. I am an employer, and most interviewees I find unsuitable for hiring, plus many I must let go of or else put into limited roles most of the remainder. Those who truly work for the best interests of the customer and/or the organization are a precious small minority (and have often been the reason I continued to pursue some projects -- for those people and their dependents, not because the project was exceptionally good).

One thing I learned early in personal life as well as business is that you don't go by what people say, you go by what people do.

People often talk in lofty terms. Look at all our hypocrite politicians, preachers, and associates.

When somebody says "we should save the environment" or "we should create self-sufficient space colonies", I ask them "what have you actually done to help out"? Talk is easy, but have you ever tried to walk the walk?

Likewise, in hiring, by far the best thing to go on is track record. (Sometimes there are exceptions, and it's good to keep an open mind, but it has to be a very strongly exceptional presentation to be comparable in weight to track record. Most people who I gave a chance to did not get far, and many stole or were careless to customers and other staff ... though there are some big exceptions.)

So, after people read all of this, I must ask: Are you part of the problem, or part of the solution?

Out of all geologic time, we are in a very special generation, where we are wreaking unprecedented damage to our environment, and facing potential species wide extinction. Whether we want to accept it or not, the responsibility is on us.

If you want to be part of the solution, on the side of the Greater Good, then you need to start to create your track record.

http://www.permanent.com/human-species-flaws.html (http://www.permanent.com/human-species-flaws.html)
Title: Re: 6th ME - The Sixth Great Extinction Is Underway—and We're to Blame
Post by: knarf on August 02, 2017, 08:44:20 AM: Quote from: RE on August 02, 2017, 08:26:22 AM
Quote from: knarf on August 02, 2017, 08:20:23 AM
Quote from: RE on August 02, 2017, 06:17:19 AM
"We" are not to blame. "They" are to blame.

Are YOU BLAME here Knarf, living a simple life as a Buddhist Monk on a small Monastery in MO?

I hate this "we" shit in these articles. I am not a member of this club.

RE

I think the we is referring to mass of humans that made terrible decisions about our environment. You were a trucker for many years (pollution), and yes I too contributed to the co2 rise. I still do, just not so much as when I was younger. I started doubting the TPTB at 19 when I read the "Pentagon Papers." After that I had jobs supporting corporations that make kitchen cabinets and counter tops. Then I traveled with a band all over the US , we had three cars. I would think that only 1/2 of 1% of modern man has stayed clear of contributing, the rest have.

No doubt we all "contribute". I certainly do. But "we" did not make the CHOICES that led us down this road, nor did we ever have CONTROL over what was being done, nor could we ever STOP it once we realized what the problem was. "WE" are not responsible for this mess. THEY are responsible, as in the people who had control over the society and made the choices that led us to this point.

RE

In my practice as a Buddhist, there is no dualism such as "me" and "them". We are one species, and that species has some fatal flaws.
Title: Re: 6th ME - The Sixth Great Extinction Is Underway—and We're to Blame
Post by: RE on August 02, 2017, 09:28:16 AM: Quote from: knarf on August 02, 2017, 08:44:20 AM
Quote from: RE on August 02, 2017, 08:26:22 AM
Quote from: knarf on August 02, 2017, 08:20:23 AM
Quote from: RE on August 02, 2017, 06:17:19 AM
"We" are not to blame. "They" are to blame.

Are YOU BLAME here Knarf, living a simple life as a Buddhist Monk on a small Monastery in MO?

I hate this "we" shit in these articles. I am not a member of this club.

RE

I think the we is referring to mass of humans that made terrible decisions about our environment. You were a trucker for many years (pollution), and yes I too contributed to the co2 rise. I still do, just not so much as when I was younger. I started doubting the TPTB at 19 when I read the "Pentagon Papers." After that I had jobs supporting corporations that make kitchen cabinets and counter tops. Then I traveled with a band all over the US , we had three cars. I would think that only 1/2 of 1% of modern man has stayed clear of contributing, the rest have.

No doubt we all "contribute". I certainly do. But "we" did not make the CHOICES that led us down this road, nor did we ever have CONTROL over what was being done, nor could we ever STOP it once we realized what the problem was. "WE" are not responsible for this mess. THEY are responsible, as in the people who had control over the society and made the choices that led us to this point.

RE

In my practice as a Buddhist, there is no dualism such as "me" and "them". We are one species, and that species has some fatal flaws.

That's one of the main reasons I am not a Buddhist.

RE
Title: Re: 6th ME - The Sixth Great Extinction Is Underway—and We're to Blame
Post by: jdwheeler42 on August 02, 2017, 10:28:06 AM: Quote from: RE on August 02, 2017, 08:26:22 AM
Quote from: knarf on August 02, 2017, 08:20:23 AM
Quote from: RE on August 02, 2017, 06:17:19 AM
"We" are not to blame. "They" are to blame.

Are YOU BLAME here Knarf, living a simple life as a Buddhist Monk on a small Monastery in MO?

I hate this "we" shit in these articles. I am not a member of this club.

RE

I think the we is referring to mass of humans that made terrible decisions about our environment. You were a trucker for many years (pollution), and yes I too contributed to the co2 rise. I still do, just not so much as when I was younger. I started doubting the TPTB at 19 when I read the "Pentagon Papers." After that I had jobs supporting corporations that make kitchen cabinets and counter tops. Then I traveled with a band all over the US , we had three cars. I would think that only 1/2 of 1% of modern man has stayed clear of contributing, the rest have.

No doubt we all "contribute". I certainly do. But "we" did not make the CHOICES that led us down this road, nor did we ever have CONTROL over what was being done, nor could we ever STOP it once we realized what the problem was. "WE" are not responsible for this mess. THEY are responsible, as in the people who had control over the society and made the choices that led us to this point.
When one part of the body (politic) proves to be an existential threat to the whole (for example through its cancerous growth), it IS OUR responsibility to remove it.

Cue the Orkin Man.
Title: T6thME Spread"
Post by: azozeo on August 02, 2017, 11:18:12 AM: Forget the bug guy. Use a bug zapper on the lot of them.
ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZtttt ...

If you can't hold the new energies & frequencies it's the bug zapper for you :evil4: :emthup:
Title: The 6thME is already here and the window for effective action is very short. 7/1
Post by: knarf on August 03, 2017, 08:56:45 AM: Human beings are now waging war against life itself as we continue to destroy not just individual lives, local populations and entire species in vast numbers but also the ecological systems that make life on earth possible.

By doing this we are now accelerating the sixth mass extinction event in earth’s history and virtually eliminating any prospect of human survival.

In a recently published scientific study ‘Biological annihilation via the ongoing sixth mass extinction signaled by vertebrate population losses and declines’ the authors Gerardo Ceballos, Paul R. Ehrlich and Rodolfo Dirzo document the accelerating nature of this problem.

"Earth’s sixth mass extinction is more severe than perceived when looking exclusively at species extinctions… That conclusion is based on analyses of the numbers and degrees of range contraction… using a sample of 27,600 vertebrate species, and on a more detailed analysis documenting the population extinctions between 1900 and 2015 in 177 mammal species." Their research found that the rate of population loss in terrestrial vertebrates is "extremely high" – even in "species of low concern".

More than 40% of the species had experienced severe population declines.

In their sample, comprising nearly half of known vertebrate species, 32% (8,851 out of 27,600) are decreasing; that is, they have decreased in population size and range. In the 177 mammals for which they had detailed data, all had lost 30% or more of their geographic ranges and more than 40% of the species had experienced severe population declines. Their data revealed that "beyond global species extinctions earth is experiencing a huge episode of population declines and extirpations, which will have negative cascading consequences on ecosystem functioning and services vital to sustaining civilisation. We describe this as a 'biological annihilation' to highlight the current magnitude of earth’s ongoing sixth major extinction event."

Illustrating the damage done by dramatically reducing the historic geographic range of a species, consider the lion. Panthera leo "was historically distributed over most of Africa, southern Europe, and the Middle East, all the way to north-western India. It is now confined to scattered populations in sub-Saharan Africa and a remnant population in the Gir forest of India. The vast majority of lion populations are gone."

Why is this happening? Ceballos, Ehrlich and Dirzo tell us: "In the last few decades, habitat loss, overexploitation, invasive organisms, pollution, toxification, and more recently climate disruption, as well as the interactions among these factors, have led to the catastrophic declines in both the numbers and sizes of populations of both common and rare vertebrate species."

The vast majority of lion populations are gone.

Further, however, the authors warn that the true extent of this mass extinction has been "underestimated, because of the emphasis on species extinction." This underestimation can be traced to overlooking the accelerating extinction of local populations of a species.

Population extinctions today are "orders of magnitude more frequent than species extinctions. Population extinctions, however, are a prelude to species extinctions, so earth’s sixth mass extinction episode has proceeded further than most assume." Moreover, and importantly from a narrow human perspective, the massive loss of local populations is already damaging the services ecosystems provide to civilisation (which, of course, are given no value by government and corporate economists).

As Ceballos, Ehrlich and Dirzo remind us: "When considering this frightening assault on the foundations of human civilisation, one must never forget that earth’s capacity to support life, including human life, has been shaped by life itself." When public mention is made of the extinction crisis, it usually focuses on a few (probably iconic) animal species known to have gone extinct, while projecting many more in future. However, a glance at their maps presents a much more realistic picture: as much as 50% of the number of animal individuals that once shared earth with us are already gone, as are billions of populations.

Furthermore, they claim that their analysis is conservative given the increasing trajectories of those factors that drive extinction together with their synergistic impacts. "Future losses easily may amount to a further rapid defaunation of the globe and comparable losses in the diversity of plants, including the local (and eventually global) defaunation-driven coextinction of plants."

Future losses easily may amount to a further rapid defaunation of the globe.

They conclude with the chilling observation: ‘Thus, we emphasize that the sixth mass extinction is already here and the window for effective action is very short.’

Of course, it is too late for those species of plants, birds, animals, fish, amphibians, insects and reptiles that humans have already driven to extinction or will yet drive to extinction in the future. 200 species yesterday. 200 species today. 200 species tomorrow. 200 species the day after. And, as Ceballos, Ehrlich and Dirzo emphasize, the ongoing daily extinctions of myriad local populations.

If you think that the above information is bad enough in assessing the prospects for human survival, you will not be encouraged by awareness or deeper consideration of even some of the many variables adversely impacting our prospects that were beyond the scope of the above study.

While Ceballos, Ehrlich and Dirzo, in addition to the problems noted above, also identified the problems of human overpopulation and continued population growth, as well as overconsumption (based on "the fiction that perpetual growth can occur on a finite planet") and even the risks posed by nuclear war, there were many variables that were beyond the scope of their research.

Ranging from nitrogen deposition to ocean acidification, and including such basics as soil, water, and air; virtually every ecological system upon which life depends is failing.

For example, in a recent discussion of that branch of ecological science known as ‘Planetary Boundary Science’, Dr Glen Barry identified "at least ten global ecological catastrophes which threaten to destroy the global ecological system and portend an end to human beings, and perhaps all life. Ranging from nitrogen deposition to ocean acidification, and including such basics as soil, water, and air; virtually every ecological system upon which life depends is failing".

Moreover, apart from the ongoing human death tolls caused by the endless wars and other military violence being conducted across the planet – see, for example, ‘Yemen cholera worst on record & numbers still rising’ – there is catastrophic environmental damage caused too.

In addition, the out-of-control methane releases into the atmosphere that are now occurring and the release, each and every day, of 300 tons of radioactive waste from Fukushima into the Pacific Ocean are having disastrous consequences that will negatively impact life on earth indefinitely. And they cannot be reversed in any timeframe that is meaningful for human prospects.

Apart from the above, there is a host of other critical issues – such as destruction of the earth’s rainforests, destruction of waterways and the ocean habitat and the devastating impact of animal agriculture on meat consumption – that international governmental organisations such as the UN, national governments and multinational corporations will continue to refuse to decisively act upon because they are controlled by an insane global elite.

So time may be short, the number of issues utterly daunting and the prospects for life grim. But if, like me, you are inclined to fight to the last breath, I invite you to consider making a deliberate choice to take powerful personal action in the fight for our survival. If you do nothing else, consider participating in the fifteen-year strategy of ‘The Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth’. You can do this as an individual, with family and friends or as a neighbourhood.

If you are involved in (or considering becoming involved in) a local campaign to address a climate issue, end some manifestation of war (or even all war), or to halt any other threat to our environment, I encourage you to consider doing this on a strategic basis. And if you would like to join the worldwide movement to end violence in all of its forms, environmental and otherwise, you are also welcome to consider signing the online pledge of ‘The People’s Charter to Create a Nonviolent World’.

We might be annihilating life on earth but this is not something about which we have no choice.

In fact, each and every one of us has a choice: we can choose to do nothing, we can wait for (or even lobby) others to act, or we can take powerful action ourselves. But unless you search your heart and make a conscious and deliberate choice to commit yourself to act powerfully, your unconscious choice will effectively be the first one (including that you might take some token measures and delude yourself that these make a difference). And the annihilation of life on earth will continue, with your complicity.

Extinction beckons. Will you choose powerfully?

https://www.opendemocracy.net/robert-j-burrowes/biological-annihilation-and-sixth-mass-extinction (https://www.opendemocracy.net/robert-j-burrowes/biological-annihilation-and-sixth-mass-extinction)
Title: 6thME - Two degrees of warming already baked in 7/31
Post by: knarf on August 03, 2017, 09:06:51 AM: (https://www.sciencedaily.com/images/2017/07/170731114534_1_540x360.jpg)
Even if all fossil fuel emissions stopped in 2017, warming by 2100 is very likely to reach about 2.3 F.

Even if humans could instantly turn off all our emissions of greenhouse gases, the Earth would continue to heat up about two more degrees Fahrenheit by the turn of the century, according to a sophisticated new analysis published in Nature Climate Change. And if current emissions continue for 15 years, odds are good that the planet will see nearly three degrees (1.5 C) of warming by then.

"This 'committed warming' is critical to understand because it can tell us and policy makers how long we have, at current emission rates, before the planet will warm to certain thresholds," said co-author Robert Pincus, a scientist with CIRES at the University of Colorado Boulder and NOAA's Physical Sciences Division. "The window of opportunity on a 1.5-degree [C] target is closing."

During United Nations meetings in Paris last year, 195 countries including the United States signed an agreement to keep global temperature rise less than 3.5 degrees F (2 C) above pre-industrial levels, and pursue efforts that would limit it further, to less than 3 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 C) by 2100.

The new assessment by Pincus and lead author Thorsten Mauritsen, from the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology is unique in that it does not rely on computer model simulations, but rather on observations of the climate system to calculate Earth's climate commitment. Their work accounts for the capacity of oceans to absorb carbon, detailed data on the planet's energy imbalance, the climate-relevant behavior of fine particles in the atmosphere, and other factors.

Among Pincus' and Mauritsen's findings:

Even if all fossil fuel emissions stopped in 2017, warming by 2100 is very likely to reach about 2.3 F (range: 1.6-4.1) or 1.3 degrees C (range: 0.9-2.3).
Oceans could reduce that figure a bit. Carbon naturally captured and stored in the deep ocean could cut committed warming by 0.4 degrees F (0.2 C).
There is some risk that warming this century cannot be kept to 1.5 degrees C beyond pre-industrial temperatures. In fact, there is a 13 percent chance we are already committed to 1.5-C warming by 2100.

"Our estimates are based on things that have already happened, things we can observe, and they point to the part of future warming that is already committed to by past emissions," said Mauritsen. "Future carbon dioxide emissions will then add extra warming on top of that commitment."

The research was funded by the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/07/170731114534.htm (https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/07/170731114534.htm)
Title: 6thME Extinction Event is Under Way - video 17min. 7/31
Post by: knarf on August 03, 2017, 09:23:42 AM: http://www.youtube.com/v/143ivuwYYoM&fs=1
Title: 6thME - Climate change isn't just a concern for the 1% – but it often seems so
Post by: knarf on August 04, 2017, 08:42:14 AM: Bankers and celebrities are often on the forefront of climate change discussions. Does that harm, rather than help, the cause?

All signs now point to Donald Trump withdrawing the US from the Paris agreement, the closest thing the international community has to a plan for dealing with climate change.

In the lead-up to this week’s expected decision, the nationalist, Steve Bannon-led wing of the White House has tried to paint climate change – and the agreement, by extension – as a concern of elites.

Headlines on Breitbart over the weekend derided Gary Cohn (“Carbon Tax Cohn”, to some) for trying to change Trump’s mind about pulling out of the deal, complete with a globe emoji alongside the Goldman Sachs veteran’s name – a double entendre for his belief in globalization and global warming.

Real Americans care about reviving the beleaguered coal industry and unleashing the power of America’s natural resources to create jobs, their argument goes. The only people who care about climate change are bankers and celebrities.

The problem is that they aren’t entirely wrong – at least, from looking at headlines.

Billionaires such as Al Gore and Leonardo DiCaprio have become some of the most recognizable faces of the fight against climate change for producing high-profile documentaries on the subject and jetting around the world to spread their gospel. Elon Musk – the Tesla CEO now under fire for mistreating his workers – has been celebrated by environmentalists for building electric cars and batteries to store solar power.

Climate change is a frequent topic of conversation at 1% confabs such as the World Economic Forum in Davos, where this year’s 15 sessions on climate featured 60 CEOs. Over the past several weeks, greens such as the Natural Resources Defense Council have touted the fact that corporations including Walmart, BP and Unilever all favor sticking with Paris.

Even JP Morgan Chase head and Trump adviser Jamie Dimon has joined the fold, signing a letter with Musk and business magnates in the Wall Street Journal expressing their “strong support for the United States remaining in the Paris Climate Agreement”.

Especially given the scale of change needed, “believes in climate change” – or in remaining in the Paris agreement, for that matter – is a godawful litmus test for deciding who gets to be called a climate hero. If there is a pragmatic economic case to be made for switching over to renewables and divesting from fossil fuel assets, then elites will chase profits. They don’t need to be lauded for doing so.

Moreover, continuing to praise bankers and billionaires for symbolic statements on climate helps do Bannon and Breitbart’s work for them. In populist times, salvaging any hope for real progress on climate change “post-Paris” – domestically and internationally – will mean making the case for taking on climate change in strictly populist terms.

Luckily, that case practically makes itself. The brand of climate denial that informs Trump and the Republican party line is the result of one of the global elite’s most effective projects yet. It’s been multinational corporations funding the campaign to cast doubt on scientific consensus. ExxonMobil, for instance, has poured at least $33m into such efforts since the Kyoto protocol was launched in 1997. Despite this long-running disinformation campaign, the majority of voters in every state support the United States’ participation in the agreement.

What’s more, any reasonable solution to climate change will require massive amounts of job creation, putting people to work doing everything from installing solar panels to insulating houses to updating the country’s electric grid to nursing and teaching, jobs in two of the country’s already low-carbon sectors.

“If you are genuinely serious about shifting to a low-carbon society within the timeframe we have, then it is an absolute agenda for jobs,” climate scientist Kevin Anderson said earlier this year. “You are guaranteeing full employment for 30 years if we think climate change is a serious issue. If we don’t, we can carry on with structural unemployment.”

Climate policies can improve people’s lives in the here and now while preventing a truly catastrophic end to the 21st century. So don’t chide Trump and the rest of his party for denying climate change when they pull out of the Paris agreement. Chide them for denying millions of Americans the well-paying jobs and stable future they deserve.

The silver lining of the climate crisis is that it may be the United States’ greatest opportunity yet to upend its vastly unequal economy, and kick the executives who engineered both out of power. It’s one of history’s greatest “us v them” scenarios, pitting a handful of oligarchs and profit-hungry fossil fuel CEOs against the rest of humanity. Let’s not let those optics go to waste.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jun/01/climate-change-impact-on-wealthy-paris-deal (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jun/01/climate-change-impact-on-wealthy-paris-deal)
Title: 6thME - As the wealthy get wealthier, carbon emissions grow in US states
Post by: knarf on August 04, 2017, 08:49:43 AM: Across the U.S., state-level carbon emissions are higher in states where income is more highly concentrated among the wealthiest residents, according to a new study by two Boston College researchers.

On a global level, the connection between national wealth and carbon emissions has been well documented. The study, by sociologists Andrew Jorgenson and Juliet Schor, is the first to link income inequality and carbon emissions within and across the individual U.S. states.

The study found that state-level carbon emissions between 1997 and 2012 were positively associated with the income share of the top 10 percent of a state's population, according to the findings, published online and in the April edition of the journal Ecological Economics.

Using the 2012 state data for carbon emissions, and based on the statistical analysis reported in the research article, a one percent increase in the income share of the top 10 percent of a state's population results in tons of additional carbon emissions, led by:

1. Texas - 812,325 to 934,174 metric tons
2. California - 437,035 to 502,590 metric tons
3. Pennsylvania - 284,980 to 327,728 metric tons
4. Florida - 269,030 to 309,395 metric tons
5. Illinois - 261,170 to 300,966 metric tons
6. Ohio - 260,622 to 299,716 metric tons
7. Louisiana - 246,618 to 283,611 metric tons
8. Indiana - 232,886 to 237,819 metric tons
9. New York - 196,234 to 225,670 metric tons
10. Michigan - 184,835 to 212,560 metric tons

South Carolina was the median in the analysis, with income share growth adding 89,175 to 102,551 metric tons of carbon emissions in 2012. The District of Columbia saw the lowest growth in carbon emissions at an increase of 3,251 to 3,738 metric tons for each 1 percent increase in wealth.

The findings come as states are increasingly taking the lead in their own environmental protection. California Gov. Jerry Brown recently pledged the state would maintain its broad environmental regulations, regardless of any federal shift toward deregulation.

"We think it is safe to say, in terms of environmental policy and action, it is going to be much more active at the state level than the federal level," said Jorgenson, a professor of sociology and environmental studies. "Given the uncertainty of the regulatory environment at the federal level, states like California are saying they will not move away from their policies even if the federal agenda on climate change makes a 180-degree turn from the prior administration."

Spending power drives carbon-intensive consumerism. But so do the political clout and economic power of the wealthiest individuals, according to Jorgenson and Schor, whose analysis with co-author and BC graduate student Xiaorui Huang employed established economic models that assess the political and economic influence of individual wealth on society.

"First, income concentration leads to concentrated political power and the ability to prevent regulations on carbon emissions," said Schor, a professor of sociology. "Second, high income consumers are disproportionate carbon polluters."

The researchers tested the influence of a well-established statistical measure of income inequality, known as the Gini coefficient. That analytical tool reports inequality in a general sense, but doesn't show where inequality exists, said Jorgenson. So the researchers turned to a measure that captures the top 10 percent of a state's population.

"What we find here in the context of income inequality and carbon emissions is that it's about the concentration of income at the top of the distribution," said Jorgenson. "In our statistical models, where the Gini coefficient is non-significant, across the board the wealth of the top 10 percent is. That tells us that it really is about income concentration at the top end of the distribution."

In addition to income, the analysis weighed additional factors - some already well-established as contributors to carbon emissions - such as population size, per capita gross domestic product, urbanization, manufacturing as a percentage of state GDP, fossil fuels production, and the level of state's commitments to environmental regulation.

The researchers drew from a broad array of sources, including statistics from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, U.S. Census Bureau, the U.S. Department of Commerce, the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the League of Conservation Voters, and databases including the U.S. State-Level Income Inequality Database at Sam Houston State University and the internationally supported World Wealth and Income Database.

In addition to advancing the understanding of the factors that force changes in the climate, Jorgenson said the findings contribute to a more expansive view of the harmful effects of income inequality, which has been shown to foster poor outcomes in measures such as health and well being.

"Equalizing incomes has all kinds of potential benefits," Jorgenson said. "This suggests a holistic view of sustainability, equalizing income distribution within the U.S. can have social and environmental benefits. And they can have a global benefit too, since the U.S. is such a significant contributor to climate change."

https://phys.org/news/2017-04-money-wealthy-wealthier-carbon-emissions.html (https://phys.org/news/2017-04-money-wealthy-wealthier-carbon-emissions.html)
Title: 6thME - Running on Empty
Post by: knarf on August 04, 2017, 01:13:30 PM: (https://openmind693.files.wordpress.com/2017/07/sobrepoblacion.jpg)
Title: Re: 6thME - Running on Empty
Post by: RE on August 04, 2017, 01:41:41 PM: Quote from: knarf on August 04, 2017, 01:13:30 PM
(https://openmind693.files.wordpress.com/2017/07/sobrepoblacion.jpg)

http://www.youtube.com/v/Pu-nLBevYAE

RE
Title: 6thME - Cold Spring new album "Extinction" (CSR219CD)
Post by: knarf on August 05, 2017, 09:06:16 AM: (https://f4.bcbits.com/img/a0133647863_16.jpg)

https://coldspring.bandcamp.com/album/extinction-csr219cd (https://coldspring.bandcamp.com/album/extinction-csr219cd)
Title: 6thME - Study reveals Earth to warm over 2 degrees by 2100 8/5/2017
Post by: knarf on August 05, 2017, 09:12:59 AM: (https://news.cgtn.com/news/3d596a4d7a45544e/img/d0820951-362a-49a5-86cc-ee5523b43b32.jpg)

By the end of this century, world temperatures are likely to rise by more than 2 degrees Celsius, a study revealed on Monday.

The temperatures will increase before 2100 by 2 to 4.9 degrees Celsius with a 90% chance. Only 5% chance indicates warming could be at or below 2 degrees Celsius, one of the many targets Paris Agreement is tackling, the study published in Nature Climate Change shows.

Adrian Raftery, the lead author of the study and a professor at the University of Washington, said failing the target would have dramatic consequences on people's livelihoods.

"Countries need to change the economic incentives for producing carbon – for example by introducing a carbon tax – and encourage innovation that would improve energy efficiency."

Adrian Raftery, lead author of 'Less than 2 °Celsius warming by 2100 unlikely' via Reuters

That is putting 350 million people in 31 countries and regions in danger of deadly heat waves and other health hazard. Weather-related disasters, such as drought, heat wave and rising sea levels, are expected to cause 152,000 deaths annually in Europe between 2071 and 2100, jumping from 3,000 a year between 1981 and 2010, CNN reported.

The number of expected death is 50 times larger than at present, the study in the Lancet Planetary Health journal said. It added that heatwaves would lead to 99 percent of all weather-related deaths.

According to the UN Environment Program, 12 billion tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions should be cut from the current 54 billion annually, mainly from fossil fuels burning, to keep the rise below 2 Celsius.

Ramping up efforts to improve carbon efficiency are key to limit future warming, Raftery told Reuters.

"Countries need to change the economic incentives for producing carbon – for example by introducing a carbon tax – and encourage innovation that would improve energy efficiency," he said. "We should be learning more from countries that are particularly carbon-efficient, like France, which has a very low-carbon transport infrastructure."

Another study published on Nature Climate Change in June suggested outperforming Paris Agreement would not stop half of the world's population being exposed to fatal heat waves.

"Even if we outperform the Paris targets, the population exposed to deadly heat will be about 50% by 2100."

Camilo Mora, lead author of 'Global risk of deadly heat'

"Many people around the world are already paying the ultimate price of heat waves, and while models suggest that this is likely to continue, it could be much worse if emissions are not considerably reduced,” said Camilo Mora, lead author of the study and a biogeography professer at University of Hawaii.

https://news.cgtn.com/news/3d596a4d7a45544e/share_p.html (https://news.cgtn.com/news/3d596a4d7a45544e/share_p.html)