Bingo, its what we let happen. The distance the average dinner travels in France is about 5 miles. In the United States that not so happy meal logs thousands of miles. Beef grown in South America... on and on, there is no reason we need to transport food as far as we do, it just happens to feed an insane machine that has nothing to do with human values and everything to do with commodities, and retail groceries, and a hundred other crazy things. The French are so much healthier than us, its really shocking. Their food is so much more delicious and healthier than ours, also shocking.
The way of life is the problem. Why are we even having this conversation. Why aren't 80% of the office people telecommuting? A single act, improve human life, reduce a meaningless waste on the global infrastructure, How many hundreds of billions of gallons of fossil fuel would that save? That's what I'm talking about. Just having an open mind and looking for even the low hanging fruit. We could begin to transform life, people could walk and ride bicycles, get out and play with their kids. Do that life thing. Instead of spinning on their thumbs waiting for the iPhone 2431. Get a life. Borrow a life. Rent one if you have to. Get over the craziness infecting this society. Look at where people are really healthy, happy and productive and rob them blind of their good habits. Stop actively working against life. We built this life to suck, We can rebuild it not to suck. It simply a matter of will and appropriate action. Who's in?
Yeah and there's the lean healthy guy over there eating from his organic garden, looking down the barrel of 8 decades of active interesting life, and the fat body over there fed and bred on fast food who'll be lucky to see 45. Same bodies. It depends on how you feed them, about taking responsibility for not doing what that nasty little black box in your living room tells you to do endless hours a day.
Nobody said stop metabolizing. We do say take what you need, what serves your best interest, be a responsible global citizen. Or you can be a pig. Your ball.
I'm sorry but there are people bred and lead into a corporate mentality that think nirvana is the subjugation of the planet or that we can and must for reasons of profit consume then entire planet at least until they get their nut. That my friend is evil. Rationalize it all you want. People are greedy, self obsessed nasty primates, and unless we teach them from an early age that we are all responsible for ourselves and our relationship to one another and life on this planet, we get precisely this me first screw all y'all world that we now live in. Or haven't you been paying attention to the economy for the last 10 years?
The economy, the global climate, war in the middle east, if you can't see the same threads at play, you need to look a lot harder... no, no , don't help him, he needs to see it for himself. We don't need to pillage the planet to live well. A person doesn't need to generate 50 tons of garbage or burn the equivalent of 20 swimming pools full of fossil fuel a year to have a rich a rewarding life. We don't need to eat food made half way around the world. We don't need to dump millions of gallons of fresh water to make deserts into golf courses. We live a nonsubtle insanity in the US and its caught up with us. We've been living on the credit card in every possible way including environmentally and the bill is coming due, and they won't let us work it off by washing dishes. Why is this so hard to get. The dream was corrupt from the get. It was based on killing indigenous people and stealing their stuff. It was based on tearing down the world to feed our egos. All it cost was everything. We've left our children a smoking hole. Yes, the common man is as guilty as anyone. But the men in power, the men with wealth spent every penny they made perpetuating the madness, removing the checks and the balances. They cut the breaks and locked it in high gear while we were in motion. Because they were getting off on the speed. Now the rides scary and all we see are curves up ahead. Talk fault if you want. That's a waste. Responsibility, now that conversation has some teeth. Taking a little responsibility, that makes a difference. Creating new technologies, that both gives us rich and fulfilling lives while allowing us to become increasingly responsible for the mess we make. That would be a worthy conversation. Or you can keep howling about how your shit doesn't smell all that bad. Good luck with that.
As well, the growing disparity between temperatures increases the chance that serious storms can occur. Storms are heat engines. Drive low level heat up you get bigger, wetter, stronger storms. If a really huge storm should punch a hole through the thermal division you now have a monster because you've now increase the temperature differential a hundred or more degrees. Read about hypercanes, or superstorms. The ultimate return to equilibrium could put world climate in a very different place and by definition, sudden global changes are bad for life as we know it. We're playing Russian Roulette and the gun has an 8,000 mile diameter.
No he's saying that its time for men (and women) of good will to speak to one another in a civil manner and open their minds (on both sides of the conversation) such that enlightened discourse might lead to real and productive action upon which all sides might come to consensus. Rather than scream and shout and call each other all sorts of horrible names, certain in our tiny warm and cozy ideologies that we are right and justified and that the only answer is ideological jihad (a sad affair without even the benefit of virgins when you get to paradise.)
So rather than leading with a poke to the eye and a kick to the groin, mayhaps you could take that simmering rage off the stove for a wee bit, and discuss this topic like a higher primate. Perhaps we could all do this. You know use the frontal lobes instead of the adrenal glands. Try it, you might even finding it enjoyable.
And its either ignorant or disingenuous of you not to mention that the rise of carbonic acid in the world's oceans is at this very moment threatening the collapse of zooplankton (because a growing number of larval forms that need to make carbonate shells are unable to do so in too low a ph.) So the largest carbon sink on the planet (the oceans) is now showing real signs of failing, and failing catastrophically. Check here for details on Ocean acidification.
Also wrong on the rain forest, recent research suggests that heat stress is reducing the rain forest's ability to function and therefore sequester carbon, add to that the massive human burning of the rain forests and the carbon output is a huge net positive.
Finally add to the growing areas along the southern arctic in Russia and Canada/Alaska where huge areas of permafrost are beginning to melt, and once melted decompose releasing simply mind boggling amounts of CO2 and Methane (an even more potent greenhouse gas) and your carbon sink is sadly itself sinking.
There are some places where plant life is increasing, but what is increasing even faster are deserts and my friend deserts are lousy for sequestering carbon. So, looking at this whole thing, using THE LATEST SCIENTIFIC information available. What becomes shockingly obvious to anyone even taking the smallest opportunity to do the research, is that we live on a planet in deep thermal stress due to the unwholesome practices of its one industrial species, and that real remedies exist, but those in wealth and power refuse to give up what they know and want. Say what you will, believe what you want. The research is in, the facts are laid bare and even the skeptics are now convinced. Human beings are at the root of a changing global climate. Now do something about it (and no I'm not suggesting we start eating African babies... jeeze!) We have big brains, let's use them puhleeze!!!
Depends on what you attribute to human activity. For instance beside burning fossil fuels there's the burning down of the global rain forests. There's the methane produced by agriculture (a gas 20x stronger than CO2 in its greenhouse effect), and then there's all the secondary effects, warming is uneven, it strikes the poles hardest melting permafrost all over the planet and liberating unprecedented amounts of both CO2 and methane (potentially more than caused be the initial burning of fossil fuels.) There are even strong indications that temperature and chemical changes in the oceans are beginning to liberate methane ices at the bottom of the ocean. All of these things are a result of the initial human activity, resulting in shifting critical natural tipping points. You can't talk about this without looking at the big picture which is why when scientists talk about this, it isn't just climatologists. Its biologists, chemists, atmospheric scientists, oceanographers, climatic paleontologists, geologists... hundreds of different diverse fields and tens of thousands of individual researchers.
Really, I'm sorry all that science has gotten in the way of your "Atlas Shrugged" belief system. It put a smack down on the Flat Earthers too and they never recovered. Rather than ignoring the simple fact that the process of living produces excrement, and that the cost of living BIG produces a lot of excrement, which must be dealt with sooner of later. Perhaps you would all be better advised to figure out a clever way to use that excrement, there must be very bright children who can make silk purses from these sows ears (that's a hint son, there are geniuses working on turning industrial waste and effluents into the next gold mine.) That would acknowledge to growingly obvious while also applying your penchant for human enterprise. By all means, have at it.
The real problem isn't and has never been burning fossil fuel. The problem is the wealth and power that burning fossil fuel has awarded a vanishing few, and they've gone to extraordinary lengths to ensure that we will continue burn fossil fuels until they can come up with a decent model for charging us for sunlight. The rest is FUD, smoke and mirrors to ensure that we debate this topic endlessly defending ideologies and political frameworks.
We now have solar cells printed on GLASS, dirt cheap, with 33+% efficiency. Its time to combine technologies, make the first run of cheap efficient solar power for global consumption, then use future solar power to manufacture more. We can then use new energy technology to sequester carbon from the atmosphere as methanol and synthetic petroleum products for use in energy storage (burn methanol at night) and the production of plastics, drugs and fertilizers. Ta Da... sanity. But no, we will continue to argue about safe nuclear and renewable sources until these old greedy bastards have sucked every last drop from the crust and our planet is no longer fit for human existence. Shame on you all.
So first off all, y'all are making some pretty big presumptions about my politics, beliefs and position on news in general. Those other news outlets you mentioned only have a liberal bent compared to your conservatism, most are pretty middle of the road with a handful of liberal editors off screen shaping content. By the way, I'm not talking about the NEWS part of the news. Anyone can read a feed from AP or Reuters without adding much of an editorial bent one way or the other. No, I'm not letting the other NEWS programs off the hook either. They are owned by the same conglomerates who are lapdogs of the government and the fact they've been easy on Obama only matches the fact they were just as easy on Dubyah, as they've been just as easy on the top officials running Wallstreet. I haven't heard a single hard hitting expose' on any of these criminals (and I include Obama on that list.) So don't put words in my mouth or presume you know anything about how I feel regarding the disaster that is the media today. There is almost no free press, and I distinguish that from the tsunami of crap pouring out of the internet. I'm less interested in opinions (even mine) than I am in facts.
I read the Wallstreet Journal, The Economist, NY Times including the likes of Charles Krauthammer. I used to love listening to William F. Buckley and as time has gone on, I've come to believe that Barry Goldwater was a genuine patriot. Do I sound like some PC Peta escapee to you now? Have you ever voted Libertarian? I'm upset at FOX because we as a Nation allowed an evil wart of a man to build a bully pulpit on our air waves and spew venom on TV as he has in the rest of his tabloid empire. And worse, a generation of ignorant, frightened click-heads are soaking up that toxic Kool-aid and its poisoning the entire nation. The fact that the Republican and Democratic parties have devolved into some twilight zone version of the Greek Comedy and Tragedy Masks... why can't you guys get its all just an act, smoke and mirrors, a passion play to distract you from the real business of America cannibalizing its middle class.
Go to PBS, and BBC for news. There are plenty of sources still available with journalistic integrity. You might not always agree with their politics or their opinions, but at least they put the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, ahead of personal agenda.
Gawd I hate putting those two words next to each other... if FOX News had a director resign after every piece of bad journalism, you could watch the line of new directors walking continuously through the building without ever stopping. Of course this would require journalistic integrity... so FOX will never have to worry abut this problem.
Here you goacceleration of Greenland's melting is unprecedented with some of the fastest melting ever seen in history happen just this last July. Large discharges of fresh water are already impacting the north Atlantic currents and folks are watching the haline cycle closely. As you say average temperature rising doesn't translate into a smooth increase and n fact a more energetic system tend to have wider variation with some places being colder than ever.
I'm sorry, would you be so good as to point out the half truths. Changing climate has ALREADY impacted the growing conditions of Coffee Beans, this is not some distant someday effect. Just as it is not a someday effect that plants in the United Stated bloom weeks earlier for spring than they used to in 1960. Its a well known phenomenon, every gardener older than 10 is familiar with it. The problem is with the wild beans. They have the majority of the genetic diversity and are essential to breed new strains of coffee resistant to pests and will be needed for migration. We will lose the wild coffee before the end of the century, and with that the cultivated bean soon after. Whats left will be hothouse coffee and it will be a beverage for the wealthy.
As for the problem with the alarmists and the denialists, both people defending ideological turf instead of just getting ahead of the facts to get an idea of what is actually happening. The world is changing and we have a growing arsenal of responses to assure a happy and healthy future, we just need to act now.
Yes, but even wild natural swings still take centuries. More than enough time plants and animals to migrate naturally. Human induced change is happening 10 to 20 times faster, leaving insufficient time for natural solutions to the problem.
The fact that regions north or south of existing regions may open up as viable climates doesn't mean that they will become home to new coffee plantations. Differences in soil, and a wide host of conditions, not to mention a likely lose of growing skill could seriously jeopardize crop migration. Face it, a lot of things are going to go extinct this century. Show your kids elephants, and lions, tigers, giraffes, hippos, cheetahs, polar bears, in fact all the big mammals. So they can tell their kids what they used to look like. We're up to about 2,000 species a year going extinct every year but that number will climb sharply after mid century.
America will cease to be the bread basket, which will move to Canada. Scotland will either have lovely wine or if the North Atlantic current shuts off nobody in western Europe will grow wine, it'll be too cold. That's why nobody calls it global warming, the system is far too complex, you can't easily predict the impacts some of which are synergistic and others which will be completely counter intuitive.
Part of the problem is that coffee needs heavy rain along with warmer climate is coming drier climate which will impinge on both arabica and robustus. Arabica is the most sensitive, and will therefore be the most endangered. In any case the price of coffee will soar.
We are dangerously close to a chicken or egg conversation here. Clearly a number of these companies are monopolies or virtual monopolies because the bought the government power necessary to get the laws in their favor. So you point at the beast and say bad government, and I look at the exact same beast and say evil corporation, and it occurs to me that it is perhaps the inherent dangers of large corporation in collaboration with a corruptible government that grows these nasty beasties.
Do corporations exist in your free market? Patents protecting first comers to a given technology or business space? Mergers? Hostile takeovers? Sorry but that monopolies won't happen because the business fairy won't let happen sounds a wee bit like a superstition. Have you built real world game models and tested this hope against real human behavior? There is nothing morally superior about a free market. Free markets have no problem with slavery, or secretly pouring toxic waste into a stream that ends up in someone else's drinking water. How do you prevent the collapse of the middle class in a race to the bottom of the free market? In fact how do you protect the human rights of workers at all in your free market, and we have some pretty bloody examples of free market employers in the 1800s working children to death and putting hundreds of people in life threatening work conditions leading in a number instances to terrible tragedies, In your free market how are you actually going to prevent collusion, price fixing, banking havoc and general lawlessness? The international black market is the closest thing we have to free market, and how do you stop people from trading in atomic bombs and weapons of mass destruction? Human trafficking? Trafficking in products from highly endangered animals? Dangerous, tainted or poisoned products. The Chinese market is in some ways much freer than the American markets and disasters perpetrated against consumers is common place. We got here by greedy people doing bad things to society in the name of free market. I guess I'm saying, in a truly free market, how do you avoid the most reprehensible, wicked, despicable behavior humans can muster from becoming common place in your market?
I hate political speak, its designed to obfuscate and mislead. That said, Obama has radically reduced the burn rate from the Bush Administration. We are still going into debt but at a significantly slower rate than during the Bush fiasco. Save for one important exception. The Fed is printing money like its going out of style and its buying up all the bad mortgages. To fake an economy and prevent the fan and the shit from dancing, but they are oh so close. So even if everything else is sweet, this one thing has all the necessary ingredients to blow the whole damn thing clean up. Its going to be fascinating to see if he can sustain the suspension of belief long enough to cross the valley of the shadow of death and get to the other side.
Worse compared to what cannibalism and living in caves... jeeze, let's separate the things he had to do (to prevent a live remake of Mad Max), from the things did because he wanted to. Arguable the wrong time for a comprehensive health plan I concur. Now there's a whole raft of issues surrounding the further erosion of the Constitution, Human Rights, America as a leader of the free world, and the continuation of the Banking Industry perpetrating exactly the same behavior after the meltdown as before and nobody including Obama saying "WHOA!!!" or pursuing any kind of justice.
All of this presumes Obama has any say whatsoever. What if the reason he looked so scared at the first debate was that he recently did several things that didn't please his handlers and they let him know in no uncertain terms that we're over due for a Presidential Assassination. I don't think it was Romney that had him that flustered thanks.I'm beginning to think its all just smoke and mirrors to distract us from the fact that someone somewhere is bleeding us all dry.
The Dotcom boom didn't fall mysteriously out of a parallel dimension. It was Clinton's capaign promise and me made good on it. You seem to have forgotten he made a conscious choice to pursue the Dotcom boom, he greased all the wheels, he met the players and he pushed the funding through to create thousands of new businesses and new business models in the hopes of turning the US into the global leader of all things digital and it worked brilliantly. Then when Dubyah became President, a man flown to his campaign stops on an ENRON jet, he gutted all of Bill's infrastructure and pointed the economy at oil, then war, then housing, and we now know how that all turned out... starting with Texas energy providers screwing over the state of California in 2001 with fake rolling blackouts and extorting California to the tune of 18 billion dollars, and worse, the White House running interference for their energy buddies in Texas. That was the beginning of the Dotcom bust. But it was just the start of a decade of rapid fire economic disasters, caused by gross mismanagement, no management at all, and too many foxes living in the hen house.
I call bullshit even on this. The evidential link to yellow cake was discovered to be a clown put up by the Brits, upon the request of the Bush White House, and then they (The Bush White House) turned around and said the evidence for WMDs came from reliable British sources. It was fabricated from whole cloth. It was Cheney and Rove and Rumsfield desperate to score a hat trick. They wanted a friendly Democracy (read puppet nation) in the middle east. They wanted an American air base on the Iranian border. They wanted to occupy a nation with rich oil deposits. Cheney needed a prolonged military engagement to pump hundreds of billions into Halliburton. All of this inside a three ring circus duplicating Daddy Bush's triumph over Hussein, only this time they'd bring him to justice... Ta Da!
I'm sorry but there are now dozens of books by former cabinet staff, pentagon insiders protesting the atrocities they witnessed, even close third parties who were present for much of this running disaster. There is no lack of information about the lying, and cheating and stealing that went on. Here's the telling part. Nobody held to account. Nobody investigated. Nobody even asking why. Notice the repeat of this exact behavior regarding the banking melt down. The process is already in place. Commit any crime against America and Humanity and walk away scott free as long are you're on the inside.
It was and is an ongoing cynical, greedy, manipulation of our government and honestly heads should have rolled. With the addition of Scalea to the Supreme Court, now the court is complicit in these crimes against the Constitution and the vital need to separate business and state. We are now left with a blossoming Fascist state, and it would behoove us all to yank this big dog up short now while we still can. The window of opportunity is closing quickly.
1. Clinton warned the Bush cabinet of Bin Laden in no uncertain terms including he was up to something big from day 1
2. The Bush cabinet pissed the first 8 month of the Presidency clearing brush on the ranch, and trying to rejump-start the star wars missile defense initiative, in the fervent hopes of pumping billions into Cheney's company Halliburton.
3. After the attack, instead of chasing Bin Laden into Afghanistan, we went on a snipe hunt so Cheney could play a hat trick, nail an oil country, put a U.S base next to Iran, and pump billions into Halliburton
4. Gore was fully briefed on Bin Laden, there would have been no 9/11, no stand down of the automatic air defense that should have had fighters scrambled within 7 minutes to dog those birds. No cause for a CIA, FBI cabinet intelligence snafu. No duplicity, dirty deeds done behind closed doors and certainly no suspension of the Geneva Conventions or gutting of the Bill of Rights and Habeas Corpus.
5. Clinton is a very good friend of the Bush Family. He has worked hard to protect Dubyah's reputation and has said that he agrees on George's foreign policies for the most part publically. Honestly, this is not consistent with a number of reports that came out early after 9/11 but I will respect Bill's friendship.
figure Gore would have expanded investment in technology a la Clinton, no Dotcom crash. Gore would have pushed renewables and by now we might have been competitive with the Chinese in solar. So you're right, Gore would have had the same information, but because he wasn't humping big energy's leg (you do remember Bush flying to his campaign locations on an ENRON jet don't you?), looking to shove half a trillion dollars into Halliburton, or trying to show up his Father regarding Iraq or piss away the largest Presidential vacation in history (clearing brush at the ranch), its a fair argument that things would have gone a wee bit different. There would most likely not been a 9/11, a Dotcom crash, War in Iraq, or subsequent housing bubble and crash (the money in play would have remained in high tech) , though that part is speculative on whether Gore would have had any success in reigning in the banks and forcing greater trade balance with our trade partners (a key issue that Clinton has been hammering since NAFTA passed, it only works if Congress forces trade balance to prevent our economy from becoming a national wealth purge.) Face the facts, there is absolutely NOTHING redeemable from the Bush term, he was a figurehead, and the real men in charge (Karl Rove aka Turd Blossom and friends) were evil bastards in every sense of the word.
Alex the famous African Grey Parrot would help tutor other Grey Parrots. A chimp can be shown a model of an adjoining room, with a locker containing a nice piece of fruit. When the door opens, it goes straight to the fruit, it groks symbolic reference. Koko the signing gorilla was capable of artwork, word play, and conversations with remarkable sensitivity and insight, all of these traits we take for granted as strictly human, and they are not. These are not anecdotal musings. These are cold hard facts gleaned from test animals in research facilities. The harder we look, the more we see, the more we see how close they are to us and that they deserve to be treated with the respect that sentience or the spark of sentience deserves. Human beings haven't even stopped dehumanizing one another, it is perhaps time that as we protect the human dignity of our own species, that we include all highly intelligent species as well as an expression of that dignity.
Slashdot Mirror
Bingo, its what we let happen. The distance the average dinner travels in France is about 5 miles. In the United States that not so happy meal logs thousands of miles. Beef grown in South America... on and on, there is no reason we need to transport food as far as we do, it just happens to feed an insane machine that has nothing to do with human values and everything to do with commodities, and retail groceries, and a hundred other crazy things. The French are so much healthier than us, its really shocking. Their food is so much more delicious and healthier than ours, also shocking.
The way of life is the problem. Why are we even having this conversation. Why aren't 80% of the office people telecommuting? A single act, improve human life, reduce a meaningless waste on the global infrastructure, How many hundreds of billions of gallons of fossil fuel would that save? That's what I'm talking about. Just having an open mind and looking for even the low hanging fruit. We could begin to transform life, people could walk and ride bicycles, get out and play with their kids. Do that life thing. Instead of spinning on their thumbs waiting for the iPhone 2431. Get a life. Borrow a life. Rent one if you have to. Get over the craziness infecting this society. Look at where people are really healthy, happy and productive and rob them blind of their good habits. Stop actively working against life. We built this life to suck, We can rebuild it not to suck. It simply a matter of will and appropriate action. Who's in?
Yeah and there's the lean healthy guy over there eating from his organic garden, looking down the barrel of 8 decades of active interesting life, and the fat body over there fed and bred on fast food who'll be lucky to see 45. Same bodies. It depends on how you feed them, about taking responsibility for not doing what that nasty little black box in your living room tells you to do endless hours a day.
Nobody said stop metabolizing. We do say take what you need, what serves your best interest, be a responsible global citizen. Or you can be a pig. Your ball.
I'm sorry but there are people bred and lead into a corporate mentality that think nirvana is the subjugation of the planet or that we can and must for reasons of profit consume then entire planet at least until they get their nut. That my friend is evil. Rationalize it all you want. People are greedy, self obsessed nasty primates, and unless we teach them from an early age that we are all responsible for ourselves and our relationship to one another and life on this planet, we get precisely this me first screw all y'all world that we now live in. Or haven't you been paying attention to the economy for the last 10 years?
The economy, the global climate, war in the middle east, if you can't see the same threads at play, you need to look a lot harder... no, no , don't help him, he needs to see it for himself. We don't need to pillage the planet to live well. A person doesn't need to generate 50 tons of garbage or burn the equivalent of 20 swimming pools full of fossil fuel a year to have a rich a rewarding life. We don't need to eat food made half way around the world. We don't need to dump millions of gallons of fresh water to make deserts into golf courses. We live a nonsubtle insanity in the US and its caught up with us. We've been living on the credit card in every possible way including environmentally and the bill is coming due, and they won't let us work it off by washing dishes. Why is this so hard to get. The dream was corrupt from the get. It was based on killing indigenous people and stealing their stuff. It was based on tearing down the world to feed our egos. All it cost was everything. We've left our children a smoking hole. Yes, the common man is as guilty as anyone. But the men in power, the men with wealth spent every penny they made perpetuating the madness, removing the checks and the balances. They cut the breaks and locked it in high gear while we were in motion. Because they were getting off on the speed. Now the rides scary and all we see are curves up ahead. Talk fault if you want. That's a waste. Responsibility, now that conversation has some teeth. Taking a little responsibility, that makes a difference. Creating new technologies, that both gives us rich and fulfilling lives while allowing us to become increasingly responsible for the mess we make. That would be a worthy conversation. Or you can keep howling about how your shit doesn't smell all that bad. Good luck with that.
As well, the growing disparity between temperatures increases the chance that serious storms can occur. Storms are heat engines. Drive low level heat up you get bigger, wetter, stronger storms. If a really huge storm should punch a hole through the thermal division you now have a monster because you've now increase the temperature differential a hundred or more degrees. Read about hypercanes, or superstorms. The ultimate return to equilibrium could put world climate in a very different place and by definition, sudden global changes are bad for life as we know it. We're playing Russian Roulette and the gun has an 8,000 mile diameter.
No he's saying that its time for men (and women) of good will to speak to one another in a civil manner and open their minds (on both sides of the conversation) such that enlightened discourse might lead to real and productive action upon which all sides might come to consensus. Rather than scream and shout and call each other all sorts of horrible names, certain in our tiny warm and cozy ideologies that we are right and justified and that the only answer is ideological jihad (a sad affair without even the benefit of virgins when you get to paradise.)
So rather than leading with a poke to the eye and a kick to the groin, mayhaps you could take that simmering rage off the stove for a wee bit, and discuss this topic like a higher primate. Perhaps we could all do this. You know use the frontal lobes instead of the adrenal glands. Try it, you might even finding it enjoyable.
And its either ignorant or disingenuous of you not to mention that the rise of carbonic acid in the world's oceans is at this very moment threatening the collapse of zooplankton (because a growing number of larval forms that need to make carbonate shells are unable to do so in too low a ph.) So the largest carbon sink on the planet (the oceans) is now showing real signs of failing, and failing catastrophically. Check here for details on Ocean acidification.
Also wrong on the rain forest, recent research suggests that heat stress is reducing the rain forest's ability to function and therefore sequester carbon, add to that the massive human burning of the rain forests and the carbon output is a huge net positive.
Finally add to the growing areas along the southern arctic in Russia and Canada/Alaska where huge areas of permafrost are beginning to melt, and once melted decompose releasing simply mind boggling amounts of CO2 and Methane (an even more potent greenhouse gas) and your carbon sink is sadly itself sinking.
There are some places where plant life is increasing, but what is increasing even faster are deserts and my friend deserts are lousy for sequestering carbon. So, looking at this whole thing, using THE LATEST SCIENTIFIC information available. What becomes shockingly obvious to anyone even taking the smallest opportunity to do the research, is that we live on a planet in deep thermal stress due to the unwholesome practices of its one industrial species, and that real remedies exist, but those in wealth and power refuse to give up what they know and want. Say what you will, believe what you want. The research is in, the facts are laid bare and even the skeptics are now convinced. Human beings are at the root of a changing global climate. Now do something about it (and no I'm not suggesting we start eating African babies... jeeze!) We have big brains, let's use them puhleeze!!!
Depends on what you attribute to human activity. For instance beside burning fossil fuels there's the burning down of the global rain forests. There's the methane produced by agriculture (a gas 20x stronger than CO2 in its greenhouse effect), and then there's all the secondary effects, warming is uneven, it strikes the poles hardest melting permafrost all over the planet and liberating unprecedented amounts of both CO2 and methane (potentially more than caused be the initial burning of fossil fuels.) There are even strong indications that temperature and chemical changes in the oceans are beginning to liberate methane ices at the bottom of the ocean. All of these things are a result of the initial human activity, resulting in shifting critical natural tipping points. You can't talk about this without looking at the big picture which is why when scientists talk about this, it isn't just climatologists. Its biologists, chemists, atmospheric scientists, oceanographers, climatic paleontologists, geologists... hundreds of different diverse fields and tens of thousands of individual researchers.
Really, I'm sorry all that science has gotten in the way of your "Atlas Shrugged" belief system. It put a smack down on the Flat Earthers too and they never recovered. Rather than ignoring the simple fact that the process of living produces excrement, and that the cost of living BIG produces a lot of excrement, which must be dealt with sooner of later. Perhaps you would all be better advised to figure out a clever way to use that excrement, there must be very bright children who can make silk purses from these sows ears (that's a hint son, there are geniuses working on turning industrial waste and effluents into the next gold mine.) That would acknowledge to growingly obvious while also applying your penchant for human enterprise. By all means, have at it.
The real problem isn't and has never been burning fossil fuel. The problem is the wealth and power that burning fossil fuel has awarded a vanishing few, and they've gone to extraordinary lengths to ensure that we will continue burn fossil fuels until they can come up with a decent model for charging us for sunlight. The rest is FUD, smoke and mirrors to ensure that we debate this topic endlessly defending ideologies and political frameworks.
We now have solar cells printed on GLASS, dirt cheap, with 33+% efficiency. Its time to combine technologies, make the first run of cheap efficient solar power for global consumption, then use future solar power to manufacture more. We can then use new energy technology to sequester carbon from the atmosphere as methanol and synthetic petroleum products for use in energy storage (burn methanol at night) and the production of plastics, drugs and fertilizers. Ta Da... sanity. But no, we will continue to argue about safe nuclear and renewable sources until these old greedy bastards have sucked every last drop from the crust and our planet is no longer fit for human existence. Shame on you all.
How about just the vast majority... i.e. >99%
That doesn't make them right, but it does make for a much stronger case than "Nuh Uh... that doesn't fit into my world view!
So first off all, y'all are making some pretty big presumptions about my politics, beliefs and position on news in general. Those other news outlets you mentioned only have a liberal bent compared to your conservatism, most are pretty middle of the road with a handful of liberal editors off screen shaping content. By the way, I'm not talking about the NEWS part of the news. Anyone can read a feed from AP or Reuters without adding much of an editorial bent one way or the other. No, I'm not letting the other NEWS programs off the hook either. They are owned by the same conglomerates who are lapdogs of the government and the fact they've been easy on Obama only matches the fact they were just as easy on Dubyah, as they've been just as easy on the top officials running Wallstreet. I haven't heard a single hard hitting expose' on any of these criminals (and I include Obama on that list.) So don't put words in my mouth or presume you know anything about how I feel regarding the disaster that is the media today. There is almost no free press, and I distinguish that from the tsunami of crap pouring out of the internet. I'm less interested in opinions (even mine) than I am in facts.
I read the Wallstreet Journal, The Economist, NY Times including the likes of Charles Krauthammer. I used to love listening to William F. Buckley and as time has gone on, I've come to believe that Barry Goldwater was a genuine patriot. Do I sound like some PC Peta escapee to you now? Have you ever voted Libertarian? I'm upset at FOX because we as a Nation allowed an evil wart of a man to build a bully pulpit on our air waves and spew venom on TV as he has in the rest of his tabloid empire. And worse, a generation of ignorant, frightened click-heads are soaking up that toxic Kool-aid and its poisoning the entire nation. The fact that the Republican and Democratic parties have devolved into some twilight zone version of the Greek Comedy and Tragedy Masks... why can't you guys get its all just an act, smoke and mirrors, a passion play to distract you from the real business of America cannibalizing its middle class.
Go to PBS, and BBC for news. There are plenty of sources still available with journalistic integrity. You might not always agree with their politics or their opinions, but at least they put the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, ahead of personal agenda.
I know for a fact the BBC provides much better news about the US, than you're likely to get in the US.
Didn't you read the articles? Gynoids and replicants were involved...
...Why not start that trend at the Huffington Post? Or Fox News?
Because in those organizations we'd be down to janitors providing the news in about a week?
Gawd I hate putting those two words next to each other... if FOX News had a director resign after every piece of bad journalism, you could watch the line of new directors walking continuously through the building without ever stopping. Of course this would require journalistic integrity... so FOX will never have to worry abut this problem.
Here you goacceleration of Greenland's melting is unprecedented with some of the fastest melting ever seen in history happen just this last July. Large discharges of fresh water are already impacting the north Atlantic currents and folks are watching the haline cycle closely. As you say average temperature rising doesn't translate into a smooth increase and n fact a more energetic system tend to have wider variation with some places being colder than ever.
I'm sorry, would you be so good as to point out the half truths. Changing climate has ALREADY impacted the growing conditions of Coffee Beans, this is not some distant someday effect. Just as it is not a someday effect that plants in the United Stated bloom weeks earlier for spring than they used to in 1960. Its a well known phenomenon, every gardener older than 10 is familiar with it. The problem is with the wild beans. They have the majority of the genetic diversity and are essential to breed new strains of coffee resistant to pests and will be needed for migration. We will lose the wild coffee before the end of the century, and with that the cultivated bean soon after. Whats left will be hothouse coffee and it will be a beverage for the wealthy.
As for the problem with the alarmists and the denialists, both people defending ideological turf instead of just getting ahead of the facts to get an idea of what is actually happening. The world is changing and we have a growing arsenal of responses to assure a happy and healthy future, we just need to act now.
Yes, but even wild natural swings still take centuries. More than enough time plants and animals to migrate naturally. Human induced change is happening 10 to 20 times faster, leaving insufficient time for natural solutions to the problem.
The fact that regions north or south of existing regions may open up as viable climates doesn't mean that they will become home to new coffee plantations. Differences in soil, and a wide host of conditions, not to mention a likely lose of growing skill could seriously jeopardize crop migration. Face it, a lot of things are going to go extinct this century. Show your kids elephants, and lions, tigers, giraffes, hippos, cheetahs, polar bears, in fact all the big mammals. So they can tell their kids what they used to look like. We're up to about 2,000 species a year going extinct every year but that number will climb sharply after mid century.
America will cease to be the bread basket, which will move to Canada. Scotland will either have lovely wine or if the North Atlantic current shuts off nobody in western Europe will grow wine, it'll be too cold. That's why nobody calls it global warming, the system is far too complex, you can't easily predict the impacts some of which are synergistic and others which will be completely counter intuitive.
Part of the problem is that coffee needs heavy rain along with warmer climate is coming drier climate which will impinge on both arabica and robustus. Arabica is the most sensitive, and will therefore be the most endangered. In any case the price of coffee will soar.
We are dangerously close to a chicken or egg conversation here. Clearly a number of these companies are monopolies or virtual monopolies because the bought the government power necessary to get the laws in their favor. So you point at the beast and say bad government, and I look at the exact same beast and say evil corporation, and it occurs to me that it is perhaps the inherent dangers of large corporation in collaboration with a corruptible government that grows these nasty beasties.
Do corporations exist in your free market? Patents protecting first comers to a given technology or business space? Mergers? Hostile takeovers? Sorry but that monopolies won't happen because the business fairy won't let happen sounds a wee bit like a superstition. Have you built real world game models and tested this hope against real human behavior? There is nothing morally superior about a free market. Free markets have no problem with slavery, or secretly pouring toxic waste into a stream that ends up in someone else's drinking water. How do you prevent the collapse of the middle class in a race to the bottom of the free market? In fact how do you protect the human rights of workers at all in your free market, and we have some pretty bloody examples of free market employers in the 1800s working children to death and putting hundreds of people in life threatening work conditions leading in a number instances to terrible tragedies, In your free market how are you actually going to prevent collusion, price fixing, banking havoc and general lawlessness? The international black market is the closest thing we have to free market, and how do you stop people from trading in atomic bombs and weapons of mass destruction? Human trafficking? Trafficking in products from highly endangered animals? Dangerous, tainted or poisoned products. The Chinese market is in some ways much freer than the American markets and disasters perpetrated against consumers is common place. We got here by greedy people doing bad things to society in the name of free market. I guess I'm saying, in a truly free market, how do you avoid the most reprehensible, wicked, despicable behavior humans can muster from becoming common place in your market?
I hate political speak, its designed to obfuscate and mislead. That said, Obama has radically reduced the burn rate from the Bush Administration. We are still going into debt but at a significantly slower rate than during the Bush fiasco. Save for one important exception. The Fed is printing money like its going out of style and its buying up all the bad mortgages. To fake an economy and prevent the fan and the shit from dancing, but they are oh so close. So even if everything else is sweet, this one thing has all the necessary ingredients to blow the whole damn thing clean up. Its going to be fascinating to see if he can sustain the suspension of belief long enough to cross the valley of the shadow of death and get to the other side.
Worse compared to what cannibalism and living in caves... jeeze, let's separate the things he had to do (to prevent a live remake of Mad Max), from the things did because he wanted to. Arguable the wrong time for a comprehensive health plan I concur. Now there's a whole raft of issues surrounding the further erosion of the Constitution, Human Rights, America as a leader of the free world, and the continuation of the Banking Industry perpetrating exactly the same behavior after the meltdown as before and nobody including Obama saying "WHOA!!!" or pursuing any kind of justice.
All of this presumes Obama has any say whatsoever. What if the reason he looked so scared at the first debate was that he recently did several things that didn't please his handlers and they let him know in no uncertain terms that we're over due for a Presidential Assassination. I don't think it was Romney that had him that flustered thanks.I'm beginning to think its all just smoke and mirrors to distract us from the fact that someone somewhere is bleeding us all dry.
The Dotcom boom didn't fall mysteriously out of a parallel dimension. It was Clinton's capaign promise and me made good on it. You seem to have forgotten he made a conscious choice to pursue the Dotcom boom, he greased all the wheels, he met the players and he pushed the funding through to create thousands of new businesses and new business models in the hopes of turning the US into the global leader of all things digital and it worked brilliantly. Then when Dubyah became President, a man flown to his campaign stops on an ENRON jet, he gutted all of Bill's infrastructure and pointed the economy at oil, then war, then housing, and we now know how that all turned out... starting with Texas energy providers screwing over the state of California in 2001 with fake rolling blackouts and extorting California to the tune of 18 billion dollars, and worse, the White House running interference for their energy buddies in Texas. That was the beginning of the Dotcom bust. But it was just the start of a decade of rapid fire economic disasters, caused by gross mismanagement, no management at all, and too many foxes living in the hen house.
I call bullshit even on this. The evidential link to yellow cake was discovered to be a clown put up by the Brits, upon the request of the Bush White House, and then they (The Bush White House) turned around and said the evidence for WMDs came from reliable British sources. It was fabricated from whole cloth. It was Cheney and Rove and Rumsfield desperate to score a hat trick. They wanted a friendly Democracy (read puppet nation) in the middle east. They wanted an American air base on the Iranian border. They wanted to occupy a nation with rich oil deposits. Cheney needed a prolonged military engagement to pump hundreds of billions into Halliburton. All of this inside a three ring circus duplicating Daddy Bush's triumph over Hussein, only this time they'd bring him to justice... Ta Da!
I'm sorry but there are now dozens of books by former cabinet staff, pentagon insiders protesting the atrocities they witnessed, even close third parties who were present for much of this running disaster. There is no lack of information about the lying, and cheating and stealing that went on. Here's the telling part. Nobody held to account. Nobody investigated. Nobody even asking why. Notice the repeat of this exact behavior regarding the banking melt down. The process is already in place. Commit any crime against America and Humanity and walk away scott free as long are you're on the inside.
It was and is an ongoing cynical, greedy, manipulation of our government and honestly heads should have rolled. With the addition of Scalea to the Supreme Court, now the court is complicit in these crimes against the Constitution and the vital need to separate business and state. We are now left with a blossoming Fascist state, and it would behoove us all to yank this big dog up short now while we still can. The window of opportunity is closing quickly.
Okay let's just deal in solid 24 carat facts;
1. Clinton warned the Bush cabinet of Bin Laden in no uncertain terms including he was up to something big from day 1
2. The Bush cabinet pissed the first 8 month of the Presidency clearing brush on the ranch, and trying to rejump-start the star wars missile defense initiative, in the fervent hopes of pumping billions into Cheney's company Halliburton.
3. After the attack, instead of chasing Bin Laden into Afghanistan, we went on a snipe hunt so Cheney could play a hat trick, nail an oil country, put a U.S base next to Iran, and pump billions into Halliburton
4. Gore was fully briefed on Bin Laden, there would have been no 9/11, no stand down of the automatic air defense that should have had fighters scrambled within 7 minutes to dog those birds. No cause for a CIA, FBI cabinet intelligence snafu. No duplicity, dirty deeds done behind closed doors and certainly no suspension of the Geneva Conventions or gutting of the Bill of Rights and Habeas Corpus.
5. Clinton is a very good friend of the Bush Family. He has worked hard to protect Dubyah's reputation and has said that he agrees on George's foreign policies for the most part publically. Honestly, this is not consistent with a number of reports that came out early after 9/11 but I will respect Bill's friendship.
figure Gore would have expanded investment in technology a la Clinton, no Dotcom crash. Gore would have pushed renewables and by now we might have been competitive with the Chinese in solar. So you're right, Gore would have had the same information, but because he wasn't humping big energy's leg (you do remember Bush flying to his campaign locations on an ENRON jet don't you?), looking to shove half a trillion dollars into Halliburton, or trying to show up his Father regarding Iraq or piss away the largest Presidential vacation in history (clearing brush at the ranch), its a fair argument that things would have gone a wee bit different. There would most likely not been a 9/11, a Dotcom crash, War in Iraq, or subsequent housing bubble and crash (the money in play would have remained in high tech) , though that part is speculative on whether Gore would have had any success in reigning in the banks and forcing greater trade balance with our trade partners (a key issue that Clinton has been hammering since NAFTA passed, it only works if Congress forces trade balance to prevent our economy from becoming a national wealth purge.) Face the facts, there is absolutely NOTHING redeemable from the Bush term, he was a figurehead, and the real men in charge (Karl Rove aka Turd Blossom and friends) were evil bastards in every sense of the word.
Alex the famous African Grey Parrot would help tutor other Grey Parrots. A chimp can be shown a model of an adjoining room, with a locker containing a nice piece of fruit. When the door opens, it goes straight to the fruit, it groks symbolic reference. Koko the signing gorilla was capable of artwork, word play, and conversations with remarkable sensitivity and insight, all of these traits we take for granted as strictly human, and they are not. These are not anecdotal musings. These are cold hard facts gleaned from test animals in research facilities. The harder we look, the more we see, the more we see how close they are to us and that they deserve to be treated with the respect that sentience or the spark of sentience deserves. Human beings haven't even stopped dehumanizing one another, it is perhaps time that as we protect the human dignity of our own species, that we include all highly intelligent species as well as an expression of that dignity.