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Countries Plan Land Rush in Warming Arctic
Noel Bourke sent in a pointer to this story about northern nations maneuvering to claim land in the Arctic. Fossil fuels, shipping lanes, and fishing are among the economic interests at stake, in an opportunity opened up by the melting Arctic ice.
There are waaaay bigger problems than that. Sorry, but environmentalism aside, we will have some serious human issues if the ice packs that are currently *not* floating begin to melt. Sea levels rising more than a bit will cause some pretty nasty issues.
-WS
An operating system should be like a light switch... simple, effective, easy to use, and designed for everyone.
...says a newspaper based in New Zealand. :-)
The world is melting and all we wanna do is milk it for some bucks. Whoever designed the human brain was obviously using windows, cuz smething is seriously screwed up there. One step closer to Capitalism eating itself, friends.
Should have been posted in Politics anyway. It might be international politics, but it's certainly politics when Denmark sends a oceangoing geographic team north from Greenland in the dead of winter to plant flags on every little rock they find sticking up from the ice.
A question though- why the heck is global warming still contraversial? After all, it doesn't matter if it's man or nature caused- dealing with it is going to be everybody's concern very soon, and there's very little doubt left that it is happening.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
So you give away sovereign Canadian soil to compensate for global polution? Yeah that's fair. How about we give away land masses based on C02 emissions? That way 25% of the US will be up for auction.
just = (My)Opinion.toCents();
Greenland looks pretty damn big on my globe. And it's only a mile or so deep in ice.
Melting that would cause a sea-level rise.
Maybe if you had read the parents post you would have realized he was talking about icepacks that AREN'T floating.
You're right though, most of the ice in the arctic is already floating. The antarctic glaciers are the ones we should worry about as far as sea level is concerned.
AccountKiller
Many people today only understand these nebulous dual concepts of negative and positive. You can imagine a little scorechart in their heads, and them tallying whatever people say to them, whatever they read, into either one of those lists.
If you were to say to an American nationalist example of one of these people that "America is a great nation!" their positive side lights up. If you were to say "America" has issues with their large prison population. Their negative side lights up and a tick goes into the negative column for you.
Depending on how strongly they feel, going above a threshold ratio of negative ticks to positive ticks will make them hate you. And depending on how energetic they are, they will lash out with just whatever negative comments come to mind. Doesn't matter what, because, hey, who cares what people are actually saying, it just matters that you give negativity back to counter "negativity." All that matters are these general concepts of negative and positive. Love and hate. Good and evil if you will. Always easy symbolism, always the most banal ideas. Thought of anything in between these two concepts is just "self-defeating," "moral relativism," "nihilism," whatever word they latched onto that some "really smart and witty" Coulter-type character said. Criticism is always interpreted as hate, and so emotionally abusive attacks are always returned. Support is always interpreted as love, and so the most fellatio-like praises are always given back.
This almost definitely scores me a negative tick on their scorechart. And if this is all they know of me, they now hate me.
"Watch for the US military to grab a role in "policing the sealanes" across the new arctic circle routes."
Nevermind the fact that the US has one of the longest Arctic shorelines in the world (behind Russia, Canada and Denmark/Greenland).
Nevermind that the US has been one of the most active in the Arctic Ocean in recent decades (thanks to nuclear submarines and the various ice stations they support).
Nevermind that nobody else seems to have any interest in taking over the US' role in "policing the sealanes" in the other four oceans, even though I'm sure there are members of Congress that would like to cut funding from, say, far-off Diego Garcia and move it to their own pork barrel projects (neither India nor Australia seem all that keen on picking up any slack).
Oh no, this is a brand new evil Yankee imperialist power-grab..
"Watch for the Russian military to challenge that role, backed by nuclear weapons. "
How is that a change? That's what the Russian/Soviet Navy has been since they started building their own nuclear submarines. In order to try to save some of their resources, Soviet policy had been to abandon the surface fleet to throw that money at submarines and land and air forces.
"Canada, Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland to form a competing coalition"
Why would Canada and Norway want to invite Sweden and Finland? Other than the occasional small rock with a flag flying over it, neither of those two countries actually have any Arctic shoreline. Baltic Sea != Arctic Ocean.