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Polar bear with carrot

Monday, November 30, 2015

Our bad.

Seligman closeup, Casey Jones you better watch your speed...
I am going to give myself exactly 26 minutes to write and then I am going to take pictures of birds. Was interesting to see how quickly the pro-lifers disassociated themselves from the Colorado shooter. Wasn't one of us, never heard of him... The reality is that they have been pouring gasoline on the fire for years and ratcheted things up after the heavily edited Planned Parenthood videos were released. A good friend who is pretty thoughtful and considerate said he didn't really shed any tears when an abortion doctor gets capped and I immediately thought about the similarity to recent statements from the French muslims that in reality they shed few tears when the French jews and Charlie Hebdo cartoonists were killed. Let the rhetoric fly and know that some whack job will run with it and you sort of keep your hands clean. I love this pope but he has made a few statements in the past year bemoaning a lowered birth rate, while population puts such a big stress on earth's biology. For a good primer on population and climate change you might want to read this study which will depress the most ardent optimist, since we might already be too late. Or this from the Center for Biological Diversity. We're fucked, kids. Nasa has a nice site illustrating the climate change issue and problems.

"C02 does not cause catastrophic disasters-actually it would be beneficial to our environment and our economy." James Inhofe
Carbon dioxide is at its highest level on Terra in 650,000 years. Global temps, nine out of the top ten warmest years on record since the year 2000. Arctic summer sea ice at the lowest measurement on record. Greenland land ice loss doubled between 1996 and 2005. Sea level has risen 7" in the last 100 years.
“I take my religion seriously.This is what a lot of alarmists forget: God is still up there, and He promised to maintain the seasons and that cold and heat would never cease as long as the earth remains.” James Inhofe
What an embarrassment to have idiots like James Inhofe representing our country overseas and trying to deny the import of this issue. And unfortunately population reduction probably can't put a dent into reducing the problem at this point.
Only the truly ugly and unrealistic scenarios — a rapidly-enforced global one-child policy or the mass die-off of several billion people — altered population trajectories by 2100 enough to have a real impact on carbon emissions and resource use. In short, the morally defensible option for slowing down fertility (plus some of the indefensible ones) just didn’t do much good, still leaving the human population around 10 billion by 2100.
“No matter what levers you pull, we have such a huge demographic momentum, there’s no way we can rein in the human population fast enough to address sustainability issues in the next century,” Corey Bradshaw, the director of ecological modeling at the Environment Institute at the University of Adelaide in Australia
It's not like we didn't know, its just that there was too much money to be made to put the brakes on...



“I consider it to be not a big problem at all, I think it’s weather changes.” Donald Trump
It’s not that I deny science. I’m not going to support policies that would destroy our economy and do nothing to improve our environment.” Marco Rubio
I know there are a lot of people who say ‘overwhelming science’ . . . There is no overwhelming science that the things that are going on are man-caused and not naturally caused.” Ben Carson
Climate change is not science. It’s religion." Ted Cruz

The science is settled. 97% of peer reviewed scientific studies hold that global warming is man made. But certain dinosaurs on the beltway won't listen. Sorry earth. Our bad.

Bizzaro

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Aye matey. If you add the fact that the economic system has to grow to maintain itself you find a huge motivation for worldwide silence on population control. The transition to a low or no growth economy induced by population control might easily create political and economic chaos as severe over the relatively short term as the long term nightmare of climate change. I am at my wits end as to how one changes that outside of extremely disruptive social/economic change. Since no one will vote for a politician who promises morality and poverty there may well be no way out. Of course good old Moma Nature can handle it and she will to our everlasting regret.