‘Scared to Death’
Filed Under Bullshit, Crime, Environment, Lying | Leave a Comment
A small instance of a humongous and worsening situation:
The decline in the chipmunk’s genetic diversity occurred in the relatively short span of 90 years, demonstrating the rapid threat changing climate can represent for a species, a UC Berkeley release said Sunday.
The shift of the living due to a warming environment poses a danger to everything — we and the animals around us can become more vulnerable to the effects of inbreeding, disease and other problems that threaten species survival, and in the sequence of time, can take place very quickly.
(Illustration found here).
And even with our slowest moving living things — trees.
From HuffPost on Saturday:
U.S. Forest Service researchers have confirmed what has long been suspected about a valuable tree in Alaska’s Panhandle: Climate warming is killing off yellow cedar.
Paul Schaberg, a USFS plant pathologist from Burlington, Vt., one of five authors of a paper on the tree that appeared this month in the journal Bioscience:
“As time goes on and climates change even more, other species, other locations, are likely to experience similar kinds of progressions, so you might do well to understand this one so you can address those future things,” Schaberg said.
…
“I’m looking out my window and we have a dusting of snow at best,” Schaberg said from his Vermont office.
“And the soils are frozen all over the place, which is not the norm at all.
So even just this one component of changing climate — reduced snow packs, its influence on soils and the things that are living in soils, like roots — that is not limited to the yellow cedar story and Alaska.
That’s pertinent to many locations.”
Most likely, climate change and its results will be pertinent to all locations.
Especially within the human body, as disease is a silent, ugly partner to a changing environment.
Sherilee Harper, a Vanier Canada Graduate Scholar in Aboriginal People’s Health at the University of Guelph, describes a near-future of not nice: “Under any climate change scenario you consider, this is going to increase,” she says. “Waterborne diseases are not just an Arctic issue; they are global. The World Health Organization projects that most of the climate change disease burden in the 21st century will be due to diarrhea and malnutrition.”
Hungry, but still on the toilet — what a shitty fix.
Even with all these horrors of climate change breathing down humanity’s collective neck, there’s a strong and well-funded dark side to the mirror of environmental concerns in the form of an organized, nasty denial to science and its near-scream-like warnings.
Not only is the fight against a changing natural earth, but also against some back-stabbing tactics: Leaked documents from a prominent United States conservative think tank show how it sought to teach schoolchildren scepticism about global warming and planned other behind-the-scenes tactics using millions of dollars in donations from big corporate names.
Hard to grasp how these people sleep at night, or even look at their children and grandchildren without feeling like nasty assholes.
And speaking of nasty assholes, Rick Santorum has pushed the prick deep into religion and daddy/momma earth; there’s no way we have to watch what we do with the planet because humans have the power.
Santorum claims global warming is all bullshit.
From TPM:
“We were put on this Earth as creatures of God to have dominion over the Earth, to use it wisely and steward it wisely, but for our benefit not for the Earth’s benefit,” Santorum told a Colorado crowd earlier this month.
He went on to call climate change “an absolute travesty of scientific research that was motivated by those who, in my opinion, saw this as an opportunity to create a panic and a crisis for government to be able to step in and even more greatly control your life.”
One wonders at the hearts, minds and souls of people who believe this crap.
And the whole denial/anti-science horror is starting to shake the investigators.
From the UK’s the Guardian:
Most scientists, on achieving high office, keep their public remarks to the bland and reassuring.
Last week Nina Fedoroff, the president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), broke ranks in a spectacular manner.
She confessed that she was now “scared to death” by the anti-science movement that was spreading, uncontrolled, across the US and the rest of the western world.
“We are sliding back into a dark era,” she said.
“And there seems little we can do about it.
I am profoundly depressed at just how difficult it has become merely to get a realistic conversation started on issues such as climate change or genetically modified organisms.”
…
“Those of us who grew up in the sixties, when we put men on the Moon, now have to watch as every Republican candidate for this year’s presidential election denies the science behind climate change and evolution.
That is a staggering state of affairs and it is very worrying,” said Professor Naomi Oreskes, of the University of California, San Diego.
…
“It has taken the scientific community a long time to realise what it is up against,” says Oreskes.
“In the past, it thought the problem was just a matter of education.
All its practitioners had to do was make an effort to reach out and talk to teachers, the public and business leaders.
Then these people would see the issues and understand the need for action.
“But now they are beginning to realise what they are really up against: massive organised attempts to undermine scientific data by people for whom that data represents a threat to their status quo.
Given the power of these people, scientists will have their work cut out dealing with them.”
First, however, a lot of bad shit will take place, a lot of people will die and a lot of irreparable damage done.
Everybody should most-indeed be ‘scared to death,’ but maybe not so much the coming heat, but the Joseph-Goebbels-cruelty of other humans.
Twelve Months Later…
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In case you didn’t know already, this is the last evening of 2011.
And if you didn’t have your collective head up your collective ass, you know the past 12 months have been shitsville.
“There are a lot of reasons not to elect me.”
– Mitt Romney, last September
Beyond tomorrow, the Iowa caucus crap-shoot is Tuesday, starting the political version of 2012 — which might be meaningless if other forces, i.e., economics-finance, climate, war, energy, and so forth, don’t blow the lid off before next November — election day seemingly seen from here as way down a patch of real-bad road.
(Illustration found here).
This particular season has been the easiest for me at the liquor store where I work — my fifth New Year, the third as manager — since I have weekends off, missed Christmas, and now New Year’s, and, this is a big, ‘and,’ no long hours, or 13 days in a row — all employees working full shifts, nobody going home for the holidays.
When I left work yesterday afternoon, business was starting to pick up a bit and people had money (checks early for the first of the month).
But a shitload of people still pay for a pack of Marlboro or a Tilt Watermelon with handfuls of coin.
Near shadowing the national picture, decent business comes in binges/holidays/special events with a crater-like effect in between — the store is down near two grand a month compared to 2007.
We’re doing okay at this financial ‘near normal,’ but the owner worries month-to-month.
After this weekend, no blip on the business-traffic radar until Super Bowel Bowl weekend.
Tonight and wee-tomorrow morning, and maybe on into Sunday, a lot of booze will be sucked down, big Times Square crowds, people all over will gushing and hugging and cheering ‘Happy New Year, and then, wake up Monday with a WTF hangover.
And still be just as clueless.
Well beyond any Mayan bullshit, 2012 on its own merits ain’t going to be pretty.
An excitingly long, short year — 2011.
Both it and the year before would have made way-nifty titles for science-fiction novels written in the mid-1970s.
‘Fer instance:
- “2010 AD” — sprawling, multi-character story of the end of energy told via a war between giant international financial consortiums for oil discovered in the now near-iceless Arctic, even as the world is pitched into chaos due to abrupt and bizarre shifts in weather…
or maybe,
- “2011: Rise of the Machines” — guy invents a small device in his parents’ garage, said device spawns a vast cornucopia of machines highly morphoditing all of humanity, and except for just 1 percent of the population, machines rule civilization, forcing an occupying of ceaseless uprising begins…
Unfortunately, we’re not back in the naive, dumb-ass’70s.
Even after a not-so-calm 2010, this year quickly coming to close has been one for the literal record books — in the US alone, 14 billion-dollar weather-related disasters; and although all not directly tied to global warming, the collateral effect takes place.
But there is a systematic influence on all of these weather events now-a-days because of the fact that there is this extra water vapor lurking around in the atmosphere than there used to be say 30 years ago.
It’s about a 4 percent extra amount, it invigorates the storms, it provides plenty of moisture for these storms and it’s unfortunate that the public is not associating these with the fact that this is one manifestation of climate change.
And the prospects are that these kinds of things will only get bigger and worse in the future.
Most-likely climate change is the biggest problem mankind has ever faced — it’s just another Happy New Year.
And to start things off in the right mind, and the real horror of urban life is the reports of a series of arson fires churning up around Los Angeles.
Hollywood Mayor John J. Duran may have coined a ‘new-normal’ phrase, via CNN:
“When you have millions of people living with millions of cars in these very dense neighborhoods, this is becoming a new form of domestic terrorism that really has got our community in a very bad spot.”
Twenty-one of these fires were started in Duran’s town — ‘a new form of domestic terrorism.’
Even as I hear firecrackers popping in the distance, the new year is coming whether I’m ready or not and from all indications, most US peoples will celebrate, but the heart is afraid.
No resolutions will temper the gloom.
‘Bluster’ — Oil and Water Mix
Filed Under Bullshit, Energy, Environment, Madness | 1 Comment
A few days ago, I put another $20 worth of gas in the old Jeep, and this time the pump price had dropped six cents since the last gas-station visit, down to $3.83 a gallon for regular.
Although prices here in northern California have dipped a bit, it’s still freakin’ high compared nationwide — the national average for regular this week is $3.258 a gallon, still more than 20 cents higher than the same time last year.
Meanwhile, in California the statewide average hit $3.576, up 2 cents since Dec. 19, according to the Energy Department’s weekly survey of service stations. That shattered — by 28.9 cents — the old record of $3.287 a gallon set in December 2007 and was tied in December 2010.
(Illustration found here).
The price of oil — beyond the natural-technical problems — has been influenced by more swinging bullshit centered around Iran, which, in the face of new efforts by the US and the European Union to halt Iran’s nuclear program, has threatened to close the most-vital Strait of Hormuz if the shit gets too deep.
Some experts Iran is bullshitting.
Maybe not — the two-mile-wide strait is much closer to Iran than just the physical: After boasting yesterday: “Shutting the strait for Iran’s armed forces is … easier than drinking a glass of water,” Iran’s navy chief Admiral Habibollah Sayari said: “Today, we don’t need [to shut] the strait because … it is completely under the control of the Islamic Republic of Iran.”
A nasty set of circumstances, though, it doesn’t seem to ruffle many feathers.
The US, however, will not be intimidated, and pooh poohed the possible action as an empty gesture:
However, playing down the threat, State Department spokesman Mark Toner called it as nothing more than mere “bluster.”
According to Toner, this was just another attempt by Iran to draw attention away from the key issue, that of their habitual “non-compliance with international nuclear obligations,” he added.
A lot of drama is being played out with this Iranian deal — the US claims it has certain “red lines” (kind of like those famous, ‘line in the sand’ routines) that if crossed would justify a preemptive strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities, and then, the shit would really hit the fan.
Israel is the most concerned.
Jason Ditz at antiwar.com:
Officially, of course, both sides would insist such an attack was about Iran’s nuclear program.
But since both nations have been claiming Iran is within striking distance of acquiring nuclear weapons since the mid-1980s, the excuse isn’t going to really fly internationally, so both nations are hoping to settle on something which could be the “trigger” for the attack.
This ‘trigger’ ain’t no horse on some happy trail.
Bluster or not…
From liveoilprices: In London, Brent crude oil futures for February 2012 delivery was trading at $107.90 a barrel, 08.03 GMT this morning on the ICE Futures Exchange.
And WTI: US Light crude oil futures for February 2012 delivery was trading at $99.53 a barrel, 07.42 GMT this morning in electronic trading on the NYMEX.
The quickly approaching new year signals even higher prices to come.
Humanity is fatally blind.
Seeking oil for energy is akin to eating poison — it tastes good and makes us feel good all over, but will kill us in a horrible, twitching death.
Talk about bat-shit crazy — the intake of this crude is making an environment already stunned near-beyond recovery even worse and apparently the glutton forces are stronger than self-preservation.
Even the so-called ‘saving grace’ of the Canadian tar sands oil creates a horrible future:
Extraction of Alberta’s energy-intensive tar sands has expanded steadily in recent years, with about 232 square miles now exposed by mining operations.
That expansion is expected to double over the next decade, which could mean the destruction of 740,000 acres of boreal forest and a 30 percent increase in carbon emissions from Canada’s oil and gas sector.
And in perspective (via DeSmogBlog): The latest tally (2008) puts Canada’s GHG emissions at “only” 1.8 per cent, which is swell as long as you don’t think about Canada’s population amounting to just 0.004 per cent of the world’s total. That makes Canada the fourth worst polluter per capita. It also makes our 34 million inhabitants the seventh largest source of CO2 among all the countries in the world – that’s seventh from a list of 216 countries and jurisdictions.
And the end result?
From TreeHugger:
A new study in the Journal of Glaciology shows that the glaciers in Peru’s Cordillera Blanca mountain range are melting so quickly that the water they supply to the arid region is being threatened 20-30 years earlier than expected.
Lead researcher Michel Baraer, from McGill University, told IPS News that the time needed for the region to adapt to the coming water shortages, previously thought to be decades off, “those years don’t exist.”
Baraer said that the glaciers feeding the Rio Santo watershed are now too small to maintain past flows of water.
During the dry season water availability is expected to be 30 percent lower than historic levels.
In the 1930s glaciers in the Cordillera Blanca covered 850 square kilometers.
Today they cover less than 600 sq km.
In a global context, the World Glacier Monitoring Service recently has said that 90 percent of the glaciers studied in its latest Glacier Mass Balance Bulletin are losing mass.
In the Himalaya, 75 percent of the glaciers there are melting; the USGS fully puts the blame on this on global warming and not other factors.
My underline for some way-emphasis — and that, my friends, ain’t bluster.
Gloom Before the Doom
Filed Under Cloud gazing, Everything | Leave a Comment
Last night on CBS News, an interview with US Defense head Leon Panetta took place on what’s called “the doomsday plane,” a modified Boeing 747, termed an E-4B by the miltary, and tricked out with a shitload of science-fiction-sounding gear to aid in evading a Judgment-Day scenario.
Panetta’s blubberings as usual were nonsensical, but the aircraft was what peaked an interest.
When bad shit hits the fan — even a zombie apocalypse — the president, military types and other important folks will be saved to carry on while the rest of us run for the burning hills: The $223 million aircraft is outfitted with an electromagnetic pulse shield to protect its 165,000 pounds of advanced electronics. Thermo-radiation shields also protect the plane in the event of a nuclear strike.
Nice ride in an era of gloomy doom-speak.
(Illustration found here).
Scary is the events unfolding now in North Korea — even as everybody on the planet have their panties in a bind over Iran’s so-called nuclear ambitions, another way-more serious situation lies via Pyongyang — and the fright is the secrecy.
Kim Jong-il kicked the bucket without anybody outside a few North Koreans knowing about it, and all despite billions of dollars worth of all kinds of high-tech gear.
From the New York Times:
For South Korean and American intelligence services to have failed to pick up any clues to this momentous development — panicked phone calls between government officials, say, or soldiers massing around Mr. Kim’s train — attests to the secretive nature of North Korea, a country not only at odds with most of the world but also sealed off from it in a way that defies spies or satellites.
Asian and American intelligence services have failed before to pick up significant developments in North Korea.
Pyongyang built a sprawling plant to enrich uranium that went undetected for about a year and a half until North Korean officials showed it off in late 2010 to an American nuclear scientist.
The North also helped build a complete nuclear reactor in Syria without tipping off Western intelligence.
…
“ ‘Oh, my God!’ was the first word that came to my mind when I saw the North Korean anchorwoman’s black dress and mournful look,” said a government official who monitored the North Korean announcement.
What bullshit — the Korean peninsula is a tender box waiting for a match while the rest of the world sits in the dark.
The Washington Post: “It is scary how little we really know,” said one administration official who closely follows the region and who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive intelligence. “I don’t think you can overstate the concern.”
When one takes a truthful view of the world nowadays, there’s much to be alarmed about and gloomy, but it’s only a respite before the doom arrives, and it will.
According to all the data, we (the planet) can’t avoid a coming horror — between climate change, energy depletion, worldwide financial collapse, and just plain old war, amongst a host of lesser calamities — although apparently the world sits willingly in the dark.
Last weekend, the UK’s The Guardian ran a detailed piece on this age of destruction — titled, “The news is terrible. Is the world really doomed?” — and presented all the gloomy evidence to support a coming implosion/explosion of civilization.
A few key points:
“The apocalypse,” wrote the German poet and essayist Hans Magnus Enzensberger in 1978, “is aphrodisiac, nightmare, a commodity like any other … warning finger and scientific forecast … rallying cry … superstition … a joke … an incessant production of our fantasy … one of the oldest ideas of the human species.
Its periodic ebb and flow … has accompanied utopian thought like a shadow.”
…
This autumn, as the estimated world population passed seven billion, an earlier prophet of doom, Paul Ehrlich, co-author of the 60s and 70s bestseller The Population Bomb and professor of population studies at Stanford University in California, resurfaced in the British press to warn that demand for the planet’s resources would soon decisively exceed supply.
“Civilisations,” he reminded this newspaper, “have collapsed before.”
…
In July, the word “apocalypse” appeared 60 times in British national newspapers.
In August, 70 times.
In September, 92 times.
In November, 100 times.
Usually calm Guardian columnists have started to ponder armageddon.
After the chancellor George Osborne’s bleak autumn statement on the economy, Zoe Williams discussed the pros and cons of food hoarding.
In November, Simon Jenkins declared: “Today’s [economic and political] predicament is unquestionably worse than the 1970s.”
The same month, Ian Jack wrote: “Build a bunker with a vegetable plot on some high ground and leave it to your grandchildren: dangerous levels of climate change now look all but inevitable.”
…
Meanwhile, for westerners who instinctively look to other countries or big political ideas for inspiration, the possibilities seem to be withering.
The US appears economically declining and politically dysfunctional.
The EU is damaged and possibly disintegrating.
The social democracy of Europe’s postwar golden decades seems unable to modernise itself.
The ability of Thatcherism and its international variants and descendants to rescue countries from national decline — if that ability ever truly existed — seems to have run its course.
Žižek argues that over the past five years the west has suffered a form of bereavement.
To describe the resulting mindset, he uses the famous “five stages of grief” model devised in 1969 by the Swiss-American psychologist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.
The current combination of public doominess and desperate-looking political summits certainly seems to feature the middle three.
Gray sums up the prevailing mood more succinctly: “People are afraid – for good, practical, experientially based reasons.”
The entire post covers all the ugly angles.
A nagging truth, however, is there’s not much the average-guy-on-the-street can do about it.
As I sit here in the comfort of my apartment on a clear, pre-dawn morning, the world outside is quiet and still — I can hear the slight roar of the Pacific Ocean — and the coming horror seems so far remote and so Horn of Africa.
Time is a much flexible measure, although time never changes, slows or changes direction.
A downer indeed if one doesn’t have the ears to hear.
‘Day of Infamy’ — Climate Change Calling Card
Filed Under Cloud gazing, Environment, history | Leave a Comment
Today 70 years ago one of the landmark events of world history — the Japanese attack on the US naval base at Pearl Harbor — a horror-hole episode leading to a massive worldwide war which killed 2.5 percent of the planet’s inhabitants or about 60 million people.
Europe had been at war for a couple of years, but after Pearl Harbor, the shit really hit the fan.
If one is interested, the best read on the attack is John Toland’s old masterpiece, The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire, 1936-1945, although told from the Japanese perspective.
Pearl Harbor also displayed an astonishing blowback (to the Japanese): How the US way-quickly booted itself up to wage war, from sitting on our ass to full-blown, break-neck-running in a matter of seconds to tackle the problem.
A similar situation nowadays required for a foe that will make all of WWII look like a walk in a springtime park — climate change, which if not acted upon, the world’s causalities won’t be just 2.5, but 100 percent.
(Illustration found here).
The approaching climate calamity is so humongous, so overwhelming and so quickly-coming that pussy-footing around won’t work anymore — no more small talk at chaotic conferences.
David Roberts at Grist:
This cannot work.
At least it cannot work if we hope to avoid terrible consequences.
Why not?
It’s simple: If there is to be any hope of avoiding civilization-threatening climate disruption, the U.S. and other nations must act immediately and aggressively on an unprecedented scale.
That means moving to emergency footing.
War footing.
“Hitler is on the march and our survival is at stake” footing.
That simply won’t be possible unless a critical mass of people are on board. It’s not the kind of thing you can sneak in incrementally.
It is unpleasant to talk like this.
People don’t want to hear it.
They don’t want to believe it.
They bring to bear an enormous range of psychological and behavioral defense mechanisms to avoid it.
It sounds “extreme” and our instinctive heuristics conflate “extreme” with “wrong.”
People display the same kind of avoidance when they find out that they or a loved one are seriously ill.
But no doctor would counsel withholding a diagnosis from a patient because it might upset them.
If we’re in this much trouble, surely we must begin by telling the truth about it.
The awful truth is it might be too late already, but maybe not.
Five years — the amount of time reportedly left to take hard-core action before all the bad shit locks in and there will be no escape, leading to irreversible climate change.
Last month, the most thorough analysis yet of world energy infrastructure revealed the clock is indeed ticking down.
Via The Guardian:
“The door is closing,” Fatih Birol, chief economist at the International Energy Agency, said.
“I am very worried — if we don’t change direction now on how we use energy, we will end up beyond what scientists tell us is the minimum [for safety].
The door will be closed forever.”
And there ain’t getting out of that windowless room except through that door.
And we’re not joking — if we were joking, it’d go something like this: ‘Horse walks into a bar, bartender asks, Why the long face?‘