Human race 'will be extinct within 100 years'

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Re: Human race 'will be extinct within 100 years'

Postby stillrobertpaulsen » Wed Jul 23, 2014 5:47 pm

American Socrates

Posted on Jun 15, 2014

By Chris Hedges

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Noam Chomsky speaks to the media at a friend’s house in Amman, Jordan, in 2010. AP/Nader Daoud

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.—Noam Chomsky, whom I interviewed last Thursday at his office at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has influenced intellectuals in the United States and abroad in incalculable ways. His explications of empire, mass propaganda, the hypocrisy and pliability of the liberal class and the failings of academics, as well as the way language is used as a mask by the power elite to prevent us from seeing reality, make him the most important intellectual in the country. The force of his intellect, which is combined with a ferocious independence, terrifies the corporate state—which is why the commercial media and much of the academic establishment treat him as a pariah. He is the Socrates of our time.

We live in a bleak moment in human history. And Chomsky begins from this reality. He quoted the late Ernst Mayr, a leading evolutionary biologist of the 20th century who argued that we probably will never encounter intelligent extraterrestrials because higher life forms render themselves extinct in a relatively short time.

“Mayr argued that the adaptive value of what is called ‘higher intelligence’ is very low,” Chomsky said. “Beetles and bacteria are much more adaptive than humans. We will find out if it is better to be smart than stupid. We may be a biological error, using the 100,000 years which Mayr gives [as] the life expectancy of a species to destroy ourselves and many other life forms on the planet.”

Climate change “may doom us all, and not in the distant future,” Chomsky said. “It may overwhelm everything. This is the first time in human history that we have the capacity to destroy the conditions for decent survival. It is already happening. Look at species destruction. It is estimated to be at about the level of 65 million years ago when an asteroid hit the earth, ended the period of the dinosaurs and wiped out a huge number of species. It is the same level today. And we are the asteroid. If anyone could see us from outer space they would be astonished. There are sectors of the global population trying to impede the global catastrophe. There are other sectors trying to accelerate it. Take a look at whom they are. Those who are trying to impede it are the ones we call backward, indigenous populations—the First Nations in Canada, the aboriginals in Australia, the tribal people in India. Who is accelerating it? The most privileged, so-called advanced, educated populations of the world.”

If Mayr was right, we are at the tail end of a binge, accelerated by the Industrial Revolution, that is about to drive us over a cliff environmentally and economically. A looming breakdown, in Chomsky’s eyes, offers us opportunity as well as danger. He has warned repeatedly that if we are to adapt and survive we must overthrow the corporate power elite through mass movements and return power to autonomous collectives that are focused on sustaining communities rather than exploiting them. Appealing to the established institutions and mechanisms of power will not work.

“We can draw many very good lessons from the early period of the Industrial Revolution,” he said. “The Industrial Revolution took off right around here in eastern Massachusetts in the mid-19th century. This was a period when independent farmers were being driven into the industrial system. Men and women—women left the farms to be ‘factory girls’—bitterly resented it. This was also a period of a very free press, the freest in the history of the country. There were a wide variety of journals. When you read them they are pretty fascinating. The people driven into the industrial system regarded it as an attack on their personal dignity, on their rights as human beings. They were free human beings being forced into what they called ‘wage labor,’ which they regarded as not very different from chattel slavery. In fact this was such a popular mood it was a slogan of the Republican Party—‘The only difference between working for a wage and being a slave is that working for the wage is supposed to be temporary.’ ”

Chomsky said this shift, which forced agrarian workers off the land into the factories in urban centers, was accompanied by a destruction of culture. Laborers, he said, had once been part of the “high culture of the day.”

“I remember this as late as the 1930s with my own family,” he said. “This was being taken away from us. We were being forced to become something like slaves. They argued that if you were a journeyman, a craftsman, and you sell a product that you produce, then as a wage earner what you are doing is selling yourself. And this was deeply offensive. They condemned what they called ‘the new spirit of the age,’ ‘gaining wealth and forgetting all but self.’ This sounds familiar.”

It is this radical consciousness, which took root in the mid-19th century among farmers and many factory workers, that Chomsky says we must recover if we are to move forward as a society and a civilization. In the late 19th century farmers, especially in the Midwest, freed themselves from the bankers and capital markets by forming their own banks and co-operatives. They understood the danger of falling victim to a vicious debt peonage run by the capitalist class. The radical farmers made alliances with the Knights of Labor, which believed that those who worked in the mills should own them.

“By the 1890s workers were taking over towns and running them in eastern and western Pennsylvania, such as Homestead,” Chomsky said. “But they were crushed by force. It took some time. The final blow was Woodrow Wilson’s Red Scare.”

“The idea should still be that of the Knights of Labor,” he said. “Those who work in the mills should own them. There is plenty of manufacturing going on. There will be more. Energy prices are going down in the United States because of the massive exploitation of fossil fuels, which is going to destroy our grandchildren. But under the capitalist morality the calculus is profits tomorrow outweigh the existence of your grandchildren. We are getting lower energy prices. They [business leaders] are enthusiastic that we can undercut manufacturing in Europe because we have lower energy prices. And we can undermine European efforts at developing sustainable energy.”

Chomsky hopes that those who work in the service industry and in manufacturing can organize to begin to take control of their workplaces. He notes that in the Rust Belt, including in states such as Ohio, there is a growth of worker-owned enterprises.

The rise of powerful populist movements in the early 20th century meant that the business class could no longer keep workers subjugated purely through violence. Business interests had to build systems of mass propaganda to control opinions and attitudes. The rise of the public relations industry, initiated by President Wilson’s Committee on Public Information to instill a pro-war sentiment in the population, ushered in an era of not only permanent war but also permanent propaganda. Consumption was instilled as an inner compulsion. The cult of the self became paramount. And opinions and attitudes, as they are today, were crafted and shaped by the centers of power.

“A pacifist population was driven to become war-mongering fanatics,” Chomsky said. “It was this experience that led the power elite to discover that through effective propaganda they could, as Walter Lippmann wrote, employ “a new art in democracy, manufacturing consent.’ ”

Democracy was eviscerated. Citizens became spectators rather than participants in power. The few intellectuals, including Randolph Bourne, who maintained their independence and who refused to serve the power elite were pushed out of the mainstream, as Chomsky has been.

“Most of the intellectuals on all sides were passionately dedicated to the national cause,” Chomsky said of the First World War. “There were only a few fringe dissenters. Bertrand Russell went to jail. Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg were killed. Randolph Bourne was marginalized. Eugene Debs was in jail. They dared to question the magnificence of the war.”

This war hysteria has never ceased, moving seamlessly from a fear of the German Hun to a fear of communists to a fear of Islamic jihadists and terrorists.

“The public is frightened into believing we have to defend ourselves,” Chomsky said. “This is not entirely false. The military system generates forces that will be harmful to us. Take Obama’s terrorist drone campaign, the biggest terrorist campaign in history. This program generates potential terrorists faster than it destroys suspects. You can see it now in Iraq. Go back to the Nuremburg judgments. Aggression was defined as the supreme international crime. It differed from other war crimes in that it encompasses all the evil that follows. The U.S. and British invasion of Iraq is a textbook case of aggression. By the standards of Nuremberg they [the British and U.S. leaders] would all be hanged. And one of the crimes they committed was to ignite the Sunni and Shiite conflict.”

The conflict, which is now enflaming the region, is “a U.S. crime if we believe the validity of the judgments against the Nazis. Robert Jackson, the chief prosecutor at the [Nuremberg] tribunal, addressed the tribunal. He pointed out that we were giving these defendants a poisoned chalice. He said that if we ever sipped from it we had to be treated the same way or else the whole thing is a farce.”

Today’s elite schools and universities inculcate into their students the worldview endorsed by the power elite. They train students to be deferential to authority. Chomsky calls education at most of these schools, including Harvard, a few blocks away from MIT, “a deep indoctrination system.”

“There is the understanding that there are certain things you do not say and do not think,” Chomsky said. “This is very broad among the educated classes. It is why they overwhelmingly support state power and state violence, with some qualifications. Obama is regarded as a critic of the invasion of Iraq. Why? Because he thought it was a strategic blunder. That puts him on the same moral level as a Nazi general who thought the second front was a strategic blunder. That’s what we call criticism.”

And yet, Chomsky does not discount a resurgent populism.

“In the 1920s the labor movement had been practically destroyed,” he said. “This had been a very militant labor movement. In the 1930s it changed, and it changed because of popular activism. There were circumstances [the Great Depression] that led to the opportunity to do something. We are living with that constantly. Take the last 30 years. For a majority of the population it has been stagnation or worse. It is not the deep Depression, but it is a semi-permanent depression for most of the population. There is plenty of kindling out there that can be lighted.”

Chomsky believes that the propaganda used to manufacture consent, even in the age of digital media, is losing its effectiveness as our reality bears less and less resemblance to the portrayal of reality by the organs of mass media. While state propaganda can still “drive the population into terror and fear and war hysteria, as we saw before the invasion of Iraq,” it is failing to maintain an unquestioned faith in the systems of power. Chomsky credits the Occupy movement, which he describes as a tactic, with “lighting a spark” and, most important, “breaking through the atomization of society.”

“There are all sorts of efforts to separate people from one another,” he said. “The ideal social unit [in the world of state propagandists] is you and your television screen. The Occupy actions brought that down for a large part of the population. People recognized that we could get together and do things for ourselves. We can have a common kitchen. We can have a place for public discourse. We can form our ideas. We can do something. This is an important attack on the core of the means by which the public is controlled. You are not just an individual trying to maximize consumption. You find there are other concerns in life. If those attitudes and associations can be sustained and move in new directions, that will be important.”
"Huey Long once said, “Fascism will come to America in the name of anti-fascism.” I'm afraid, based on my own experience, that fascism will come to America in the name of national security."
-Jim Garrison 1967
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Re: Human race 'will be extinct within 100 years'

Postby Ben D » Wed Jul 23, 2014 7:18 pm

And Chomsky begins from this reality. He quoted the late Ernst Mayr, a leading evolutionary biologist of the 20th century who argued that we probably will never encounter intelligent extraterrestrials because higher life forms render themselves extinct in a relatively short time.

Wow...he hasn't watched Noah yet...even the Gods couldn't end the evolutionary drive and unfoldment of mankind...and then there is Heaven.

But seriously, he seems to ignore the possibility of there being a purpose to cosmic evolution....which is ok for those who are believe this as individuals, but ironical to see it promoted as propaganda.
There is That which was not born, nor created, nor evolved. If it were not so, there would never be any refuge from being born, or created, or evolving. That is the end of suffering. That is God**.

** or Nirvana, Allah, Brahman, Tao, etc...
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Re: Human race 'will be extinct within 100 years'

Postby stillrobertpaulsen » Thu Jul 24, 2014 8:22 pm

barracuda » Tue Jun 29, 2010 6:18 pm wrote:
Nordic wrote:The point being, that we now have a system in the Western world where, what, 1 farmer is able to feed 52 people? Well, THAT, my friends, is based upon a massive consumption of fossil fuels. Not only for the fertilizer, but for the machines to plant and harvest and distribute that food.

When that falls apart, and we suddenly go back to where 1 farmer is able to feed only, what, 10 people? 42 people are gonna go without food. If these people are in the Western world, what they gonna do? They're gonna steal it, and they're gonna kill anyone they have to to get it.


Sorry, but I have to nitpick some of the assumptions here. I'll use wheat as my example, for it is among the most widely consumed foodstuff on the planet.

The average size of a small farm is about 100 acres. The average yield of wheat per acre is about 42 bushels. You can make 90 loaves of whole wheat bread from a bushel of wheat. So one family farm can produce 100 x 42 x 90 loaves of whole wheat bread, or 378,000 loaves of bread. I think we can both agree that fifty-two people can't eat nearly that much bread in a year.

So let's approach the issue from the other end. Let's give each person two loaves of bread per week to eat. Each individual would eat 2 x 52 = 104 loaves per year. 378,000 loaves divided by 104 = 3,635 persons fed per small farm.

You could even halve the production number here and you could still feed a small town. This fact right here is the basis of civilisation, pure and simple. The combination of the farmers' labor and the seed of the grain and the soil have the ability to make a vast surplus of food, so vast that, when this was fully realised around ten thousand years ago, huge groups of individuals no longer had to work the land in order to eat at all. And thus was born the standing army. But just to be clear, that end result - armies at the beck of the strongest claimant to the land - is not a necessary requirement of life on this planet. At all.

Hammer of Los » Wed Jun 30, 2010 5:07 am wrote:Agriculture! That's where we all went wrong! And then the development of pottery! You could store the grain! Things went from bad to worse!

I'm not being ironic. I came to this conclusion years ago.

But Barracuda is such a smart fish. I find myself agreeing with everything he has said in this thread.

I think I need to go and have a lie down.


I was re-reading this thread yesterday and this exchange stood out today in synchronization with a concept I just discovered: totalitarian agriculture.



This clip is the raw footage of an interview inside a great documentary that belongs on this thread, What A Way To Go: Life at the end of Empire



Which, of course, on a spiritual and philosophical level, ties back to the Ruppert quote I posted earlier:

"There is going to be a die-off. That is a balancing. That cannot be averted. I cannot offer some happy Pollyanna solution to that. Love is the only vibration that's a higher vibration than fear. Our physical reality is a product of our consciousness which is a product of what we carry in our hearts. And if we carry fear in our hearts, to the point where the consciousness is one of fear, then all we would manifest would be more destruction. The means to save, to resurrect, to make amends with, to reconcile with, to heal ourselves with Mother Earth and everything that lives here, will only become available to us once we realize that cooperation rather than competition, that love rather than fear is the only state of consciousness in which we can successfully live, and lo and behold, those are the ways our ancestors lived 40,000 years ago."
"Huey Long once said, “Fascism will come to America in the name of anti-fascism.” I'm afraid, based on my own experience, that fascism will come to America in the name of national security."
-Jim Garrison 1967
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Re: Human race 'will be extinct within 100 years'

Postby DrEvil » Thu Jul 24, 2014 8:43 pm

http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/sc ... uperstorm/

Near Miss: The Solar Superstorm of July 2012

July 23, 2014: If an asteroid big enough to knock modern civilization back to the 18th century appeared out of deep space and buzzed the Earth-Moon system, the near-miss would be instant worldwide headline news.

Two years ago, Earth experienced a close shave just as perilous, but most newspapers didn't mention it. The "impactor" was an extreme solar storm, the most powerful in as much as 150+ years.

"If it had hit, we would still be picking up the pieces," says Daniel Baker of the University of Colorado.

Baker, along with colleagues from NASA and other universities, published a seminal study of the storm in the December 2013 issue of the journal Space Weather. Their paper, entitled "A major solar eruptive event in July 2012," describes how a powerful coronal mass ejection (CME) tore through Earth orbit on July 23, 2012. Fortunately Earth wasn't there. Instead, the storm cloud hit the STEREO-A spacecraft.

"I have come away from our recent studies more convinced than ever that Earth and its inhabitants were incredibly fortunate that the 2012 eruption happened when it did," says Baker. "If the eruption had occurred only one week earlier, Earth would have been in the line of fire.

Extreme solar storms pose a threat to all forms of high-technology. They begin with an explosion--a "solar flare"—in the magnetic canopy of a sunspot. X-rays and extreme UV radiation reach Earth at light speed, ionizing the upper layers of our atmosphere; side-effects of this "solar EMP" include radio blackouts and GPS navigation errors. Minutes to hours later, the energetic particles arrive. Moving only slightly slower than light itself, electrons and protons accelerated by the blast can electrify satellites and damage their electronics. Then come the CMEs, billion-ton clouds of magnetized plasma that take a day or more to cross the Sun-Earth divide. Analysts believe that a direct hit by an extreme CME such as the one that missed Earth in July 2012 could cause widespread power blackouts, disabling everything that plugs into a wall socket. Most people wouldn't even be able to flush their toilet because urban water supplies largely rely on electric pumps.

Before July 2012, when researchers talked about extreme solar storms their touchstone was the iconic Carrington Event of Sept. 1859, named after English astronomer Richard Carrington who actually saw the instigating flare with his own eyes. In the days that followed his observation, a series of powerful CMEs hit Earth head-on with a potency not felt before or since. Intense geomagnetic storms ignited Northern Lights as far south as Cuba and caused global telegraph lines to spark, setting fire to some telegraph offices and thus disabling the 'Victorian Internet."

A similar storm today could have a catastrophic effect. According to a study by the National Academy of Sciences, the total economic impact could exceed $2 trillion or 20 times greater than the costs of a Hurricane Katrina. Multi-ton transformers damaged by such a storm might take years to repair.

"In my view the July 2012 storm was in all respects at least as strong as the 1859 Carrington event," says Baker. "The only difference is, it missed."

In February 2014, physicist Pete Riley of Predictive Science Inc. published a paper in Space Weather entitled "On the probability of occurrence of extreme space weather events." In it, he analyzed records of solar storms going back 50+ years. By extrapolating the frequency of ordinary storms to the extreme, he calculated the odds that a Carrington-class storm would hit Earth in the next ten years.

The answer: 12%.


"Initially, I was quite surprised that the odds were so high, but the statistics appear to be correct," says Riley. "It is a sobering figure."

In his study, Riley looked carefully at a parameter called Dst, short for "disturbance – storm time." This is a number calculated from magnetometer readings around the equator. Essentially, it measures how hard Earth's magnetic field shakes when a CME hits. The more negative Dst becomes, the worse the storm. Ordinary geomagnetic storms, which produce Northern Lights around the Arctic Circle, but otherwise do no harm, register Dst=-50 nT (nanoTesla). The worst geomagnetic storm of the Space Age, which knocked out power across Quebec in March 1989, registered Dst=-600 nT. Modern estimates of Dst for the Carrington Event itself range from -800 nT to a staggering -1750 nT.

In their Dec. 2013 paper, Baker et al. estimated Dst for the July 2012 storm. "If that CME had hit Earth, the resulting geomagnetic storm would have registered a Dst of -1200, comparable to the Carrington Event and twice as bad as the March 1989 Quebec blackout."

The reason researchers know so much about the July 2012 storm is because, out of all the spacecraft in the solar system it could have hit, it did hit a solar observatory. STEREO-A is almost ideally equipped to measure the parameters of such an event.

"The rich data set obtained by STEREO far exceeded the relatively meagre observations that Carrington was able to make in the 19th century," notes Riley. "Thanks to STEREO-A we know a lot of about the magnetic structure of the CME, the kind of shock waves and energetic particles it produced, and perhaps most importantly of all, the number of CMEs that preceded it."

It turns out that the active region responsible for producing the July 2012 storm didn't launch just one CME into space, but many. Some of those CMEs "plowed the road" for the superstorm.

A paperin the March 2014 edition of Nature Communications by UC Berkeley space physicist Janet G. Luhmann and former postdoc Ying D. Liu describes the process: The July 23rd CME was actually two CMEs separated by only 10 to 15 minutes. This double-CME traveled through a region of space that had been cleared out by yet another CME four days earlier. As a result, the storm clouds were not decelerated as much as usual by their transit through the interplanetary medium.

"It's likely that the Carrington event was also associated with multiple eruptions, and this may turn out to be a key requirement for extreme events," notes Riley. "In fact, it seems that extreme events may require an ideal combination of a number of key features to produce the 'perfect solar storm.'"

"Pre-conditioning by multiple CMEs appears to be very important," agrees Baker.

A common question about this event is, how did the STEREO-A probe survive? After all, Carrington-class storms are supposed to be mortally dangerous to spacecraft and satellites. Yet STEREO-A not only rode out the storm, but also continued taking high-quality data throughout.

"Spacecraft such as the STEREO twins and the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (a joint ESA/NASA mission) were designed to operate in the environment outside the Earth's magnetosphere, and that includes even quite intense, CME-related shocks," says Joe Gurman, the STEREO project scientist at the Goddard Space Flight Center. "To my knowledge, nothing serious happened to the spacecraft."

The story might have been different, he says, if STEREO-A were orbiting Earth instead of traveling through interplanetary space.

"Inside Earth's magnetosphere, strong electric currents can be generated by a CME strike," he explains. "Out in interplanetary space, however, the ambient magnetic field is much weaker and so those dangerous currents are missing." In short, STEREO-A was in a good place to ride out the storm.

"Without the kind of coverage afforded by the STEREO mission, we as a society might have been blissfully ignorant of this remarkable solar storm," notes Baker. "How many others of this scale have just happened to miss Earth and our space detection systems? This is a pressing question that needs answers."

If Riley's work holds true, there is a 12% chance we will learn a lot more about extreme solar storms in the next 10 years—when one actually strikes Earth.

Says Baker, "we need to be prepared."
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Re: Human race 'will be extinct within 100 years'

Postby NeonLX » Fri Jul 25, 2014 11:50 am

We've been warned...
America is a fucked society because there is no room for essential human dignity. Its all about what you have, not who you are.--Joe Hillshoist
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Re: Human race 'will be extinct within 100 years'

Postby stillrobertpaulsen » Mon Aug 04, 2014 6:10 pm

Thanks to bardobailey for finding this link. I won't paste it all, looks like Guy McPherson updates it regularly as the evidence piles up.

Climate-change summary and update
http://guymcpherson.com/2013/01/climate ... nd-update/
"Huey Long once said, “Fascism will come to America in the name of anti-fascism.” I'm afraid, based on my own experience, that fascism will come to America in the name of national security."
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Re: Human race 'will be extinct within 100 years'

Postby Col. Quisp » Mon Aug 04, 2014 8:45 pm

One word. Ebola.
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Re: Human race 'will be extinct within 100 years'

Postby zangtang » Thu Aug 14, 2014 11:28 am

until we get even a suspicion of refutation of the 'methane clathrate gun' hypothesis (or has that been debunked yet?)
i 'umbly submit that this belongs on the 1st page..........

still, market forces an that - supply and demand.......

HAS anyone refuted the methane clathrate gun hypothesis?......and its seemingly imminent firing round about.........now
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Re: Human race 'will be extinct within 100 years'

Postby Ben D » Thu Aug 14, 2014 7:04 pm

zangtang » Fri Aug 15, 2014 1:28 am wrote:until we get even a suspicion of refutation of the 'methane clathrate gun' hypothesis (or has that been debunked yet?)
i 'umbly submit that this belongs on the 1st page..........

still, market forces an that - supply and demand.......

HAS anyone refuted the methane clathrate gun hypothesis?......and its seemingly imminent firing round about.........now

Is this a suitable refutation....http://www.methanenet.org/node/259?

This also may be of interest to you....no combustion involved in the Siberian crator phenomena ..just sudden methane pressure release....a result of normal ongoing permafrost melt effects during interglacial periods....http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/07/25/fresh-focus-on-siberian-permafrost-as-second-hole-is-reported/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0
There is That which was not born, nor created, nor evolved. If it were not so, there would never be any refuge from being born, or created, or evolving. That is the end of suffering. That is God**.

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Re: Human race 'will be extinct within 100 years'

Postby Col. Quisp » Tue Aug 19, 2014 1:51 pm

Not sure if this blog has been noted - sorry if it's a repeat:
http://jumpingjackflashhypothesis.blogspot.com/

he gathers info on spontaneous car explosions, fires, people going insane, suspicious deaths in coastal areas...and lots more!
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Re: Human race 'will be extinct within 100 years'

Postby stillrobertpaulsen » Tue Aug 19, 2014 8:49 pm

zangtang » Thu Aug 14, 2014 10:28 am wrote:until we get even a suspicion of refutation of the 'methane clathrate gun' hypothesis (or has that been debunked yet?)
i 'umbly submit that this belongs on the 1st page..........

still, market forces an that - supply and demand.......

HAS anyone refuted the methane clathrate gun hypothesis?......and its seemingly imminent firing round about.........now


Just to clarify regarding the validity of the hypothesis itself, a cursory glance at wikipedia shows there is some validity in the possibility that this has happened in the past.

The clathrate gun hypothesis is the popular name given to the hypothesis that rises in sea temperatures (and/or falls in sea level) can trigger the sudden release of methane from methane clathrate compounds buried in seabeds and permafrost which, because the methane itself is a powerful greenhouse gas, leads to further temperature rise and further methane clathrate destabilization – in effect initiating a runaway process as irreversible, once started, as the firing of a gun.[1]

In its original form, the hypothesis proposed that the "clathrate gun" could cause abrupt runaway warming on a timescale less than a human lifetime,[1] and was responsible for warming events in and at the end of the last glacial maximum.[2] This is now thought unlikely.[3][4]

However, there is stronger evidence that runaway methane clathrate breakdown may have caused drastic alteration of the ocean environment (such as ocean acidification and ocean stratification) and the atmosphere of earth on a number of occasions in the past, over timescales of tens of thousands of years; these events include the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum 56 million years ago, and most notably the Permian–Triassic extinction event, when up to 96% of all marine species became extinct, 252 million years ago.


So, geologically speaking, methane clathrate destabilization is no hypothesis. It has and can happen. So to your real question - are we firing that gun now? That has neither been proven or disproven. We're entering an unknown realm because we really don't know what effect human forcings on the ecosystem have on this process. But the latest news indicates we might be about to find out.

Siberian Holes Could Be 'Visible Effect' of Global Warming, Experts Say
By Julianne Pepitone
Image
There's a scary answer for why Siberia is turning into Swiss cheese: Mother Nature has gas, so to speak, and we gave it to her.

That's the preliminary conclusion of scientists who have explored the mysterious holes that began popping up in Siberia beginning last month, some of whom have postulated that climate change may be a cause.

And given the right conditions, some scientists are concerned that something similar could happen in other places around the globe, although not likely in Times Square, Hollywood and Vine or your backyard.

The first Siberian crater appeared in mid-July, fascinating and terrifying locals who found the massive hole in the Earth. Mere days later, people discovered a second one. And then a third.

Russian researchers who have explored the crater sites now believe the long-frozen Siberian permafrost thawed due to increased temperatures, collapsed and let free methane gas trapped beneath, the team told the science journal Nature. The team tested the air near the bottom of the holes and discovered an unusually high concentration of methane.

"Global warming is happening, and it's exacerbated in the Arctic," Carolyn Ruppel, chief of the U.S. Geological Survey's Gas Hydrates Project, told NBC News. "And if this [the Siberian crater phenomenon] is what we think, that it's related to permafrost thaw, It's a very visible effect of what's happening to the Earth."

Ruppel has spent the past five years working on methane in the Arctic, though she has not visited the Siberian crater sites. She has never seen anything like the craters, she said -- a sentiment echoed by other top experts in the field.

The holes are likely the direct result of unusually warm 2012 and 2013 summers in the area of the craters, said the Russian crater research team that spoke to Nature.The team, led by Alexei Plekhanov of the Scientific Centre of Arctic Studies, said the past two summers were warmer than usual by about five degrees Celsius, thawing the long frozen earth -- but one or two hot summers aren't necessarily the result of global warming.

Other researchers went a step further, Nature reported, attributing the holes to a long-term thaw that's a result of global warming. The craters are physical manifestation of the damage we are doing to the Earth, they say.

"It’s a clear indication that something is happening to the Earth," Ed Dlugokencky, a top federal federal scientist who researches methane in the atmosphere at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, told NBC News.

Two-thirds of climate change is caused by human activity, Dlugokencky said, and "we don't see that changing. So we’ll see if these sorts of changes become a widespread phenomenon. It's certainly possible. I'm concerned about it."

In the Arctic, at least, where global warming is felt acutely, Ruppel of the U.S. Geological Survey is especially concerned: "Instead of a solid block of permafrost, you now have a hole where warm summer air can get in."

If holes develop below buildings and bridges in the Arctic, or near the abundant natural gas lines in the area, Dlugokencky noted, "that could have a devastating effect."

Of course, not all areas mirror the Arctic's permafrost- and natural-gas-heavy geology -- so the physical effect on other parts of the Earth may not be holes but something else entirely.

"What we may find a few years down the line is that these holes are a harbinger of things to come," Ruppel said.

In the meantime, Dlugokencky said, increased methane emissions at the crater sites are concerning enough. The scariest part about methane -- which has 20 times the effect on global warming as carbon dioxide does over a 100-year period -- is its cyclical damage, Dlugokencky said.

When methane is released into the atmosphere, it warms up the planet. And that warming, in turn, thaws permafrost and releases more methane -- starting the cycle anew.
First published August 7th 2014, 8:51 am
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Re: Human race 'will be extinct within 100 years'

Postby Morty » Mon Aug 25, 2014 7:40 am

Don't know if this has been posted before. It criticises Guy McPherson's climate summary, point by point. I personally am of the opinion that we're probably toast before very long, but McPherson gets a bit fast and loose with the doom at times, which doesn't sit well with me.

How Guy McPherson gets it wrong
02/17/2014 by SJ

Recently, a few Ars Technica commenters have been posting references to the work of Guy McPherson on climate articles. McPherson is a retired professor of ecology at the University of Arizona, and he runs a blog called Nature Bats Last. In recent years, he has turned his energies to dire warnings of impending climate catastrophe. Those warnings go far beyond what you’ll find anywhere else: McPherson believes humans will go extinct in as little as two decades.

Now, lots of people run blogs that make wild claims, so why am I spending time on this one? McPherson claims to simply be passing along scientific data to the public— data that most scientists are unwilling to talk about and governments are trying to keep secret. As a result, his followers (I mean to use that term more in the Twitter sense than a religious one) seem confident that they have the weight of science behind them. It takes careful examination of McPherson’s references, and a familiarity with the present state of climate science, to uncover that his claims aren’t scientific at all. I also get the feeling that his internet following might not be insignificant (as noted by climate scientist Michael Tobis) and could be growing, yet I couldn’t find any direct challenges with a web search. This makes one.
Bizarro denial

First, I want to go over general problems with McPherson’s claims and talk about what climate science is really telling us. For those wanting specifics, I’ll post a list of point-by-point corrections of McPherson’s main “Climate Change Summary and Update” post in the third section.

In many ways, McPherson is a photo-negative of the self-proclaimed “climate skeptics” who reject the conclusions of climate science. He may be advocating the opposite conclusion, but he argues his case in the same way. The skeptics often quote snippets of science that, on full examination, doesn’t actually support their claims, and this is McPherson’s modus operandi. The skeptics dismiss science they don’t like by saying that climate researchers lie to keep the grant money coming; McPherson dismisses inconvenient science by claiming that scientists are downplaying risks because they’re too cowardly to speak the truth and flout our corporate overlords. Both malign the IPCC as “political” and therefore not objective. And both will cite nearly any claim that supports their views, regardless of source— putting evidence-free opinions on par with scientific research. (In one example I can’t help but highlight, McPherson cites a survivalist blog warning that Earth’s atmosphere is running out of oxygen.)

McPherson bills himself as a scientist simply passing along the science (even as he dismisses climate scientists and their work), but he cites nearly as many blog posts and newspaper columns as published studies. When he does cite a study, it’s often clear that he hasn’t taken the time to actually read it, depending instead on a news story about it. He frequently gets the information from the study completely wrong, which is a difficult thing for most readers to check given that most papers are behind paywalls (not to mention that scientific papers aren’t easy to understand).

McPherson leans heavily on claims from people associated with the “Arctic News” blog about a catastrophic, runaway release of methane that supposedly is already underway in the Arctic. Unfortunately (or, rather, fortunately), the data don’t match their assertions. The latest IPCC and NAS assessment reports, in fact, deemed such a release “very unlikely” this century. One reason for that is that the Arctic has been this warm or warmer a couple times in the last 200,000 years, yet that methane stayed in the ground. Another reason is that scientists actually bother to study and model the processes involved. One thing McPherson and others like to point to is the recent work by Natalia Shakhova’s group observing bubbling plumes of methane coming up from the seafloor on the Siberian Shelf. Since we’ve only been sampling these plumes for a few years, we have no idea whether that release of methane is increasing or if these are long-term features. Similar plumes off Svalbard, for example, appear to be thousands of years old. (More to put this methane in context here.)

That’s exactly the kind of detail and nuance that’s absent from McPherson’s claims. Instead, he’s content to link to YouTube videos or blog posts (some ludicrously unscientific— see below) and run with the idea that catastrophic warming is guaranteed as a result. He just latches onto anything that sounds scary. McPherson is especially fast and loose with timeframes. He likes to point to the magnitude of past climate changes (which took thousands of years or more) as proof that we are about to undergo similar changes in the next couple decades. That’s quite clearly a fallacious argument, but McPherson never concerns himself with the details. All the casual reader learns it that there was a huge change in the past analogous to the present that shows just how screwed we really are.

And that’s McPherson’s thing— despair. We’re absolutely doomed, he tells us, and there’s nothing we can do about it. Everything is lost. He derides any sort of optimism or action as “hopium”. He notes in one recent post that “With an eye to improving my ‘bedside manner’ when I deliver presentations, I’ve recently become a certified grief-recovery counselor.” With such an extraordinary view, you would expect him to make the scientific case for extinction very clearly. But he does not. His argument fundamentally reduces to “positive feedbacks exist, ergo extinction”. That is, he lists examples of positive feedbacks (things that amplify change, like the added sunlight absorption of ocean water that has lost its sea ice cover) for a while, intending to overwhelm you with the number of processes that could add to global warming. And that’s it. There are no numbers explaining how big an effect each could have, no analysis of likely warming impacts, nothing. The fact is that climate scientists know about all these processes. But instead of throwing their hands up and saying “Oh, shit”, they actually do science.

Again, specific examples of these things are given in the last section of this post. If you take a look at some of his mistakes and demonstrably false claims, you’ll have a hard time thinking of him as a credible source of information.

[Update 3-13-14: Michael Tobis has covered some of the points I skipped over—namely, McPherson's discussion of feedbacks— in a new post.]
Just the facts

So let’s briefly lay out the central claims of McPherson’s position, and review what the science really says. I think those are 1) positive feedbacks imply runaway global warming, 2) we will experience at least 3 to 4 degrees C warming in the next couple decades, and 3) on a 4C warmer planet, humans are dead.

Numero uno. While the concept of a positive feedback (a little change triggers an addition that makes the change bigger, triggering another addition that…) sounds like snowballing without end, that’s not actually the case here. These positive climate feedbacks (and there are negative feedbacks, by the way) amplify warming, but only to a certain extent. After all, these same processes were in play when the Earth warmed out of the last glaciation (over the last ~18,000 years), which obviously didn’t scorch the planet. Without any of these feedbacks, the glacial/interglacial differences would be much smaller, but they do not cause runaway warming.

There is such a thing as a runaway greenhouse effect– just ask the planet Venus. However, a recent study looking at what it would take to trigger such an event on Earth ballparked the requirements at around 75 times the amount of CO2 currently in the atmosphere, 5.5 times the methane, and some other greenhouse gases. The “business-as-usual” scenario in the latest IPCC report, where we do nothing to curtail greenhouse gas emissions, ends the century at about 2.3 times today’s CO2 and 2 times the methane. We have a lot of things to worry about, but a runaway greenhouse isn’t one of them. (McPherson, by the way, cites this same paper as if it shows that we’re about to trigger a runaway greenhouse.)

So what are we facing if Arctic methane releases increase? Climate scientist David Archer shows some back-of-the-envelope math here. If the release increased by a factor of 100 and lasted for a century, it would be the equivalent of increasing today’s CO2 by 25-90%. Bad? Yes. Extinction? No.

Nummer zwei. The latest IPCC report projects roughly 0.3 to 0.7C of warming by 2035. (The exact numbers are a little complicated, but I explained it here.) Farther into the future, the different emissions scenarios diverge. The “business-as-usual” scenario results in about 2.6 to 4.8C warming by 2100. Rosier scenarios involving moderate efforts to stabilize greenhouse gases yield warming of about 1.1 to 3.1C by 2100. There are precisely zero scientific studies projecting several degrees of warming by 2035, as McPherson predicts. (In fact, he cites one blogger’s childish prediction of a whopping 20C increase by 2050.)

Numéro trois. So what are the impacts of 4C warming? Here’s a handy summary of the many impacts described in the 2007 IPCC report (this section of the newest report isn’t out yet). They include increased droughts, more extreme rainfall, rising sea levels, serious problems for many ocean organisms, real problems for many terrestrial species, lowered agricultural yields… It’s not pretty, and we very much want to avoid it, but it’s not human extinction.

If you think the IPCC reports are lying about the state of the science, feel free to do a Google Scholar search for “climate change projections” in published studies.

Errata

Okay. These corrections and notes apply to...


Continues at link
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Re: Human race 'will be extinct within 100 years'

Postby Sounder » Mon Aug 25, 2014 8:16 am

From Iam's contribution on the first page of this thread.

Ah yes, Empire as the solution. How so very far thinking and creative.



The book adds, however, that global governance can only occur if there is an accompanying change in the philosophy that underpins international relations. Professor Boyle describes sovereign nation-states as a "20th century experiment that failed" but warns that they are also in many ways an American invention which the US needs to accept as out-dated and no longer fit for purpose.

With the exception of the 20th century, Boyle contends that the model which has guided world progress throughout history has been that of Empire. Similarly, the book argues that in the 21st century, it is a network of global organisations - from multinationals to the still only partly-acknowledged "Empire" of America - that determine many aspects of our lives.

"It is a profoundly hopeful sign that we begin the 21st century with very many more international and intergovernmental organisations than we had at the start of the 20th," Boyle says. What longer history suggests, he adds, is the need for a system of "imperial of global regulation, if the 21st century is to be one of relative peace.

"The only conceivably peaceful route to that goal is through a continuation of the pax Americana," he writes. "But both the world's understanding of America, and America's understanding of itself, will have to change fundamentally for that goal to be achieved."
All these things will continue as long as coercion remains a central element of our mentality.
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Re: Human race 'will be extinct within 100 years'

Postby stillrobertpaulsen » Tue Aug 26, 2014 4:20 pm

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Thanks for bringing that back, Sounder. Boyle comes off like the kind of stuffy elitist prick who read The Prince and 1984 and mused, "Couldn't we just combine the two into one effective instruction manual?"

With the scenario he lays out for the future, there are no good options. Unfortunately, reality seems to be making him look prescient.

Meanwhile, the effects of a prolonged economic downturn could restore an aggressive, Bush-like figure to the US Presidency.


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Are any of these people non-aggressive or non-Bush like?!
"Huey Long once said, “Fascism will come to America in the name of anti-fascism.” I'm afraid, based on my own experience, that fascism will come to America in the name of national security."
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Re: Human race 'will be extinct within 100 years'

Postby Sounder » Tue Aug 26, 2014 6:05 pm

Oh shit, first off, maybe you should post a trigger warning before inflicting us with pictures like that.

I guess the hurt serves a purpose at least.

With the scenario he lays out for the future, there are no good options. Unfortunately, reality seems to be making him look prescient.


Well sure, in a Cass Sunstein sort of way, but huh, maybe we could do better and at least try to write some alternate scenarios.
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