Comments not related to oil or natural gas production here please.
Thanks.
303 thoughts to “Open Thread Non-Petroleum, May 21, 2018”
Ron,
SCIENTISTS FIND WIDESPREAD OCEAN ANOXIA AS CAUSE FOR PAST MASS EXTINCTION
The research, “Abrupt global-ocean anoxia during Late Ordovician-early Silurian detected using uranium isotopes of marine carbonates,” was published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
“This extinction is the first of the ‘big five’ extinctions that hit the Earth and our research indicates that it was coincident with the abrupt development of widespread ocean anoxia that lasted for at least one million years,”
Studying oxygen, scientists discover clues to recovery from mass extinction
April 17, 2018, Arizona State University
Climate change – then and now
This team’s discovery also calls attention to the possible effects of modern climate change, because global warming was the ultimate driver of marine anoxia in the Early Triassic period.
“One of the most interesting and worrying things about the Permian-Triassic extinction is how similar those events are to what is happening today,” says co-author Stephen Romaniello. “Similar to what happened during the Permian period, the Earth’s modern oceans are facing rapid climate warming and enhanced nutrient fluxes.”
Point in fact, scientists have discovered more than 400 marine dead zones in the modern oceans. These are mostly linked to elevated nutrient fluxes in coastal areas, and global warming is likely to cause these zones to expand dramatically in the future.
So even though it seems we are pretty much up shit’s creek, I guess we can try to look on the bright side too! Who knows maybe a couple of hundred thouand years after a mass extinction event there might again be something like the ‘Cambrian Explosion’…
Look at the photo above. See that road in the center that cuts through the mountain ridge? The history behind that road is one of the most remarkable tales of human perseverance, yet you have probably never heard it.
The story starts in 1960 in the town of Gehlaur in the north-eastern part of India. In order to get supplies or seek medical treatment, the villagers of Gehlaur would have to walk a treacherous 30 mile (50km) path around the mountain ridge pictured above. Phaguni Devi, one such villager, was walking along the ridge one day when she fell and injured herself. Upon hearing of his wifeâs injuries, Dasrath Manjhi decided that the villagers of Gehlaur had walked around that mountain ridge for long enough. Determined to change this, that same night Dasrath told himself that he would carve a path through the mountain.
Starting in 1960 using only a hammer and chisel, Dasrath started cutting away at the ridge. When the local villagers heard about Dasrathâs goal they mocked him saying that it would be impossible. However, this didnât stop him. Over the course of the next 22 years Dasrath chipped away at the mountain to carve a path that was 360 feet long (110m), 30 feet wide (9.1 m), and 25 feet deep (7.6m). In total he moved over 270,000 cubic feet of rock by himself, day by day, night by night, finishing the path in the early 1980s and earning the nickname âMountain Man.â
I tell this story because it illustrates one of the most important things in both investing and in lifeâââgreat things take time.
My goal is to remind you how important long term thinking is in a society that is dominated by instant gratification.
The real question is if bitcoin is more or less energy efficient than traditional banking and wealth distribution systems. It’s a difficult comparison; there are many expensive items bitcoin doesn’t need, such as vaults, brokers, armed guards, information technology and security experts, lawyers, etc…
The more that people are using bitcoin, the lower the energy consumption of existing systems. It will be really interesting to see the emerging statistics over time on these large scale changes.
Even if Bitcoin is less efficient ultimately, the benefit of decentralization is going to be worth the energy consumption to most people. A distributed system of capital that cannot be undermined by any single entity is something that’s never before been accessible to humanity. The value of this to our economy must still be priced in.
Good point, just as the smartphone has replaced many discrete products such as cameras, recorders, etc., the true comparative effect on society and energy use has not made for Bitcoin.
The real question is if bitcoin is more or less energy efficient than traditional banking and wealth distribution systems. Itâs a difficult comparison; there are many expensive items bitcoin doesnât need, such as vaults, brokers, armed guards, information technology and security experts, lawyers, etcâŚ
It might be noteworthy that there are currently 1,857 crypto currencies in use, of which Bitcoin is but one. Bitcoin is also a bit of an outlier in many respects including the massive amounts of energy required for mining it.
Cryptocurrencies are another massively disruptive technology. They are a true peer to peer form of exchange of value and I agree that it is far too soon for any of us to really grasp the repercussions of how it will affect global energy use. I suspect that what is happening in Africa with regards cellphone banking apps when cross pollinated with various cryptocurrencies will make business transactions much more energy efficient in the long term than say back when millions of people had to physically go to a bank to get money, deposit a check, apply for a loan etc… Not to mention that many millions of people could not even get access to any of these services because their incomes were too low to qualify.
I can see this facilitating the penetration of alternative energy in very low income areas of the world.
âPay-As-You-Goâ Solar Could Electrify Rural Africa
New Mobile and Solar Technology Makes Access to Basic Electricity Possible
In a “pay-as-you-go” (PAYG) business model, a company essentially rents consumers a solar home system that comes with a battery, a charge controller, a solar panel, LED bulbs and a mobile charger. Basic systems have enough power to charge phones and lights, and larger ones could power small appliances like radios or TVs. Consumers use basic mobile phones â widespread in East Africa â to make payments on a daily, weekly or monthly basis.
Through this model, companies can minimize the cost of collections by automating the receipt of payments, while remote rural customers get immediate access to basic electricity without having to take out a loan. A grid expansion project, while it may provide power to bigger appliances, can take years and significant investment to reach a rural or low-income community.
SolarCoin Is A Cryptocurrency Earned By Generating Solar Electricity
Solar electricity production + blockchain = a currency based on sunshine
Just as cryptocurrency has become a disruptive technology, so has renewable energy, and although those two distinct sectors havenât really come into their own just yet, an innovative solar incentive program is incorporating both solar electricity production and the blockchain, with the intent of boosting and supporting one with the other.
Instead of a digitally âminedâ product, this cryptocurrencyâs proof of work happens in the physical world, and those who have photovoltaic arrays can earn SolarCoin just for generating solar electricity. Itâs essentially a global solar rewards program, and is designed to help incentivize more solar electricity production, while also serving as a lower-carbon cryptocurrency than Bitcoin and similar alternative currencies.
Bitcoin has a limit and we are near that, I cannot see mining it will be long term. Interest will switch to other cryptocurrencies (CCs) . I would expect future CCs to take energy consumption into their design and be more efficient as that would make mining more efficient. On the whole I expect that politicians will start to put the brakes on CCs as they will fear loss of control, not just of the currency but of the people using it. If you cannot control who has the money and how much you have lost control of the state, no politician will stand for that.
The total biomass of the human race accounts for just 0.01% of the life on Earth.
The transformation of the planet by human activity has led scientists to the brink of declaring a new geological era â the Anthropocene. One suggested marker for this change are the bones of the domestic chicken, now ubiquitous across the globe.
The new work reveals that farmed poultry today makes up 70% of all birds on the planet, with just 30% being wild. The picture is even more stark for mammals â 60% of all mammals on Earth are livestock, mostly cattle and pigs, 36% are human and just 4% are wild animals.
âIt is pretty staggering,â said Milo. âIn wildlife films, we see flocks of birds, of every kind, in vast amounts, and then when we did the analysis we found there are [far] more domesticated birds.â
Since the rise of human civilization, 83% of wild mammals have been lost.
âIt is definitely striking, our disproportionate place on Earth,â said Milo. âWhen I do a puzzle with my daughters, there is usually an elephant next to a giraffe next to a rhino. But if I was trying to give them a more realistic sense of the world, it would be a cow next to a cow next to a cow and then a chicken.â
Despite humanityâs supremacy, in weight terms Homo sapiens is puny. Viruses alone have a combined weight three times that of humans, as do worms. Fish are 12 times greater than people and fungi 200 times as large.
Plants account for 82% of all biomass on the planet â 7,500 times more than humans
83%, that makes this, the sixth extinction, about as great as the great Permian extinction.
The bacteria and fungi win, and we can’t live without them.
Biological “Dark Matter”. How little we know about the small that adds up big.
Estimating the number of bacterial species is tricky, to say the least. Part of the problem is that bacteria donât really have species, at least not in the way that we are accustomed to think of them. Different strains of E. coli may share only 40% of their genes, meaning they are about as closely related to each other as a dog is to a tree. Yet we still consider it to be a single species. By comparison, all humans share >99% of their genes. All animals, taken together, are a barely visible blip when it comes to total diversity of life
Ron, have to be a bit picky here about your conclusions using land mammals as a model of the Permian extinction. Mammals species are but a miniscule amount of the species on Earth. Also to use biomass as a measure of extinction when all extinctions are measured in species or genera loss is inappropriate and non-comparable to scientific knowledge of extinctions.
Most of the knowledge we have about mass extinctions comes from studying ancient sea life fossil records and that is the basic measure of extinction events, not land animals (they are the missing poster children for the public).
âMost of the knowledge we have about mass extinctions comes from studying ancient sea life fossil records and that is the basic measure of extinction events, not land animals (they are the missing poster children for the public).â
I agree. When I was a student we took courses in paleontology which were primarily concerned with studying fossils as a means of dating rock units. The fossils were entirely marine species. Extinction events were something that arose from that work (the great extinctions were defined long before I came on the scene). Fossil dating has, to a large degree, been replaced or augmented by radioactive isotope work of course. Now days scientists have a more holistic view incorporating land based life into the picture but the fact remains, as you say, species extinction ideas came from, and were defined by, marine fossil studies.
Also consider that most of the species of land mammals already were extinct before civilization started. Those that were left (the large ones) were frequently dramatically reduced in population and/or range. Whole continents were depleted of large land mammals in both numbers and species.
Can you see any mechanisms that would not produce a land animal die off of a similar magnitude to the marine die off? I would expect a correlation for any event that caused an effect that large.
NAOM
Sea water deoxygenation ??????????
Well, all the causes I thought about would affect land or be caused by land. What would cause deox? Change of temperature, rise of CO2, runoff from land etc all of which would indicate harm to land species. Algal bloom? Again, what would cause that and, again, I think about land. Hmmmm.
NAOM
Since extinction is measured in number of species or genera lost, large land animals can never approach the numbers of species in the marine environment.
It is not measured in biomass, which is dependent upon population and size for a given species. It is not measured relative to a niche environment or a specific family. it is not measured as percentages.
I am at a loss Fish, to understand what you keep driving at? You keep trying to downplay the importance of this current Amprocene extinction. As if what’s happening now is not all that important. If extinction is measured only in the number of species, then a single species of dung beetle would be on par with a single species of great ape, the chimpanzee for example.
Yes, the depletion of wild biomass is extremely important. And it is a clue as to how long any given species of megafauna has left before we drive that species into extinction.
The BBC Reports that only 350,000 great apes from six species are left in the world. That’s a total of 350,000 of all great apes combined, less our species of course. The human population grows more in just two days than all the great apes left in the world. But that’s okay because when all six are gone, that won’t even be one single genus. The genus will not be extinct because there will be one species of great ape left, Homo sapiens.
But that’s okay because they are only six species. And six species is just not all that important when it comes to measuring extinction. Six is just not that large a number. Just seven species of beetle will be more important because seven is greater than six.
Bullshit! You have a strange way of measuring extinction Fish.
Edit: There are 350,000â400,000 species of beetles. One genus of dung beetle alone, the Scarabaeinae, comprises more than 5,000 species.
Scientists say that dozens of species are now going extinct every day. Which species? I am having a difficult time getting any real information or lists of the current extinctions.
What I do find is more like a dozen per year or less not a dozen per day.
Is this just some mathematical construct with no real basis in the field? I need some actual data not constructed numbers that might just be a guess.
Okay, since you did not reply to my last post explaining that one species of dung beetle is not the same as one species of great ape, I will try again.
No, you are dead wrong, it is not the number of species that count but the type of species that does go extinct is far more important.
What I do find is more like a dozen per year or less not a dozen per day.
And you could not be more wrong on that count. But, then again, it depends on what you want to count. Are you counting all life? All plant and animal life?
Each year as many as 50,000 species of animals and plants become extinct due to deforestation and hunting. This causes the food chain to muddle up, and other animals die out. If one animal or plant becomes extinct, then the prey of the animal becomes overpopulated with nothing to eat them, and the predator dies off because it has nothing to feed on. It has a hge effect on other animals if one animal becomes extinct.
That comes to 137 species per day. But some counts don’t count plants so you get a different answer. And some don’t count insects so you get a totally different answer. But some get an even higher number:
According to the UN Environment Programme, the Earth is in the midst of a mass extinction of life. Scientists estimate that 150-200 species of plant, insect, bird and mammal become extinct every 24 hours. This is nearly 1,000 times the ânaturalâ or âbackgroundâ rate and, say many biologists, is greater than anything the world has experienced since the vanishing of the dinosaurs nearly 65m years ago.
Okay, I focus on larger animals, not insects and plants. Larger animals are the ones under the most stress, the ones we keep in zoos because we have taken over their habitat and are driving them all into extinction. Most of them are not gone yet but almost all are on the very cusp of extinction.
The National Science Foundationâs âTree of Lifeâ project estimates that there could be anywhere from 5 million to 100 million species on the planet, but science has only identified about 2 million.
So your estimate of a dozen per year, that would be about 0.00024% per year or many multiples below normal background rate.
Note: When environmentalists talk of the number of species going extinct each year, they are normally, but not always, talking about the number of wild animals going extinct and not plants or insects.
First it’s cartoons from a newspaper, now it’s garbage answers from Answer.com. Give me a break.
If you don’t want to agree with how paleontologists measure extinction, that is fine. Just don’t expect anyone to take you seriously.
Let me tell you about species importance. A long time ago, far away from here, a cataclysm occurred. Many species died and continued dying, but a small rodent-like creature survived. Some say because of the teeth, but no one knows. From this small, insignificant creature came all the placental mammals for the next 65 million years. From mice to whales and everything in between.
Now you tell me how you can have the ability to tell which species is important and which is not? I can assure you no one has that ability. Not even Ron Patt.
Believe what you want.
The actual knowledge and science is very incomplete and fuzzy on this topic.
Well hell, I post my sources and now you don’t want to believe my sources. You call them cartoons and garbage. The number of total species that Answeres.com gave was the exact figures everyone else is giving. The Guardian got the data for that article from the National Acadamy of Sciences of the United States of America. But if you don’t want to believe them either, then I understand. It’s called Confirmation Bias. That’s when you only believe articles that agree with what you desire to believe.
Oh, just one more thing. That big extinction where the little rodent survived? Well that extinction wiped out all the large animals. That’s what happens in major extinctions like that one and the one we are having right now. All the large animals go first.
And you don’t think that is important because your confirmation bias tells you something else. I completely understand your biases Fish.
Ron,
I’m puzzled by the wording in the following:
“…when all six [species of great ape] are gone, that won’t even be one single genus. The genus will not be extinct because there will be one species of great ape left, Homo sapiens.”
Which genus do you mean will not be extinct? It isn’t the genus of great apes (one possible reading) because they don’t all belong to the same genus. What am I missing?
Sorry, but my wording was a little confusing there. Basically, there are seven species of great apes, that is counting one newly discovered species or orangutan. (I wasn’t aware of that when I said six.) There are two species of orangutan, two species of gorilla, one species of chimpanzee and one species of bonobo. And there is one species of great apes called Homo sapiens. All are endangered of extinction except Homo sapiens.
So six of the seven species of great apes are endangered of extinction. But Homo sapiens are in no danger of extinction. I hope this clears the matter up. And I am sorry for my poor wording that caused you confusion.
But yes, all seven belong to the same genus of Hominidae.
Thanks Ron. It’s clear now.
Hominidae is a family, though, not a genus.
Yeah, my mistake. Thanks
Ron, have to be a bit picky here about your conclusions using land mammals as a model of the Permian extinction. Mammals species are but a miniscule amount of the species on Earth.
I have no idea what the hell you are talking about Fish. I came to no such conclusions. The great Permian Extinction, according to the graph I posted, caused the extinction of 84% of all genera. Genera include all plants and animals. Nowhere did I did I even hint that the Permian Extinction was primarily about mammals. Anyway, there were no mammals at the time of the Permian Extinction. Mammals had not yet evolved. There were lots of mammal like reptiles but no mammals. The first true mammals appeared in the Early Jurassic.
Also to use biomass as a measure of extinction when all extinctions are measured in species or genera loss is inappropriate and non-comparable to scientific knowledge of extinctions.
Nonsense, I never said that biomass was a measure of extinction. I clearly explained my position on this, copied and pasted here:
So even though there has been a huge decline in the number of surviving species, the large animals have suffered far greater than the smaller ones. Also, this chart represents surviving wild terrestrial vertebrate mass, not the number of surviving species.
The very reason I stated that Fish, was to explain very clearly that I was not using biomass as a measure of species extinction. My whole point in posting those two charts was to show how much humans and their domestic animals had taken over the vast majority of the earth’s territory and resources. If you did not get that point, then you missed my point entirely. While it is true that perhaps half of the earth’s tiny species are still left, the animals that require large tracts of land for survival are just shit out of luck. Yes, in 2050 we will still be left with many tiny animals, all the megafauna will be gone.
That was my point. And I think that is a very important point. And I am frankly a little shocked that you seem to be belittling that point.
Humans and their domestic animals had taken over the vast majority of the earthâs territory and resources.
Certainly, humans have eliminated or dramatically reduced large wild animals in the vast majority of the earthâs territory – I wouldnât want to minimize the importance of that – itâs both tragic and very risky for humans.
But…if humans are only .01% of the biomass, does it make sense to say that humans have taken over the vast majority of resources? If we define resources as water, air and light (which is pretty much what 99.9% of the life on earth cares about), then donât humans only use a very small percentage?
Nick, sorry but I completely misunderstood where you were coming from and responded incorrectly. I have now deleted my response and will now try to give a more accurate response.
.01% of all biomass includes everything, trees, fish in the ocean, plankton in the ocean, bacteria, and all life on earth. Of course, we are a tiny fraction of all that, especially if you include all plant life. But that is a silly comparison. Total living biomass, including all plant life, even bacteria, is meaningless.
If we define resources as water, air and light (which is pretty much what 99.9% of the life on earth cares about), then donât humans only use a very small percentage?
Well, resources are not defined as water, air and light. Water for sure but not air and light. That is, these are resources that are available to everyone and everything and does not change dramatically with time. That is, we don’t use them up. Resources are, primarily, territory and the food derived from that territory. Of course, other resources are included but it is the territory that we, humans and our domestic animals, are taking from every other wild animal on the planet. That was my point.
Sorry for the misunderstanding.
Total living biomass, including all plant life, even bacteria, is meaningless.
Now weâre getting into really tough ethical material. Are mammals more important than other living things, like plants? Why?
I personally think that mammals are more important than plants, but…I also think that humans are more important than other mammals. It doesnât seem consistent to me to value non-human mammals, but not other forms of life. Where do we draw the line on whatâs important? Do we only worry about things that have a face? That we can make into pets?
I donât really have easy answers, and I think we should try to not be too harsh on those that disagree with us. I mean…I think humans are doing tragic things to wildlife too. But…I canât quite get into veganism. This isnât easy stuff.
Well, resources are not defined as water, air and light. Water for sure but not air and light. That is, these are resources that are available to everyone and everything and does not change dramatically with time. That is, we donât use them up. Resources are, primarily, territory and the food derived from that territory.
I think what youâre saying is that air and light are real resources, and important, but that territory is the bottleneck, the critical resource that various forms of life have to compete for.
And I agree, except that depends on focusing your analysis on large mammals. Which takes us back to the first question. Plants, fish, fungi, they all are doing better than the large land mammals.
So. Where does that leave us? I dunno. Iâm not sure these are critical points, but…I have a feeling that focusing only on large mammals isnât quite right. Maybe its worth acknowledging that thereâs a lot more to life than that. The stuff youâve written above has done that, of course. And, thatâs been helpful.
I have a feeling that focusing only on large mammals isnât quite right.
Humans are large mammals, right? You are saying that focusing on humans is not quite right. Yes? But humans are the ones that are destroying the earth. Right?
I am not blaming humans, it is just what we do. It is what evolution has conditioned us to do. We are in competition with all other species for territory and resources, and we are winning, big time.
Once you realize that very simple fact Nick, then you will understand what is happening to the world, and why.
I have nothing else to say on this matter.
Well, that brings us back to the question of whether humanity can do better.
I agree that our general approach to our environment is shaped by our genes. And, maybe we have an instinct to acquire territory.
But that doesnât say much about what we do with that territory: we can manage it well or badly, and thatâs not genetic.
Ask yourself: if everyone thought they way you do, would the world work well? And, if you can think that way, why canât everyone? Youâre not significantly different genetically from the rest of the people in the world…
we can manage it well or badly, and thatâs not genetic.
Hey, all we will try to do with the land we took from other animals is try to feed ourselves. How good we are at doing that may be in question. But what is not in question is that the animals will never get it back again. If we fail, some other Homo sapiens will take it from us and feed his family.
Ask yourself: if everyone thought they way you do, would the world work well? And, if you can think that way, why canât everyone? Youâre not significantly different genetically from the rest of the people in the worldâŚ
What the hell are you talking about? People do not think the way I do, they are all looking out for their own welfare. And that is what evolution has conditioned them to do. People look out for their own welfare and the welfare of their offspring. They really don’t care about the welfare of other animals. That is just the way the world works. And I am very sorry if you don’t like it, but that’s just the way it is.
The world is the way it is, not the way some people think it ought to be.
People do not think the way I do
Hmm. So, youâre not âpeopleâ?
Actually, I think if you look youâll find a fair number of people who think the way you do. Some of them are even on this blog…
Nick, don’t be such a nitpicker. You know I meant most people.
However, if everyone thought the way I do they would be trying to save the world, not overpopulate it until we drive every other wild species larger than a prairie dog into extinction.
That is they would have tried that over half a century ago. It’s way too late now.
Ron, I have no idea what you are talking about.
I responded to your post of 05/21/2018 at 6:55 pm where after the article you posted you explicitly stated “83%, that makes this, the sixth extinction, about as great as the great Permian extinction.”
You apparently took a percentage from that article about biomass loss and converted it into an all species loss comparable to the Permian-Triassic extinction. I think not.
Of course, I was assuming that 83% of all mammals would be equivalent to 83% of genera during the Perman Extinction. Of course, on second thought, this is likely way too high.
But you mentioned my chart about terrestrial vertebrate biomass so I naturally assumed you were talking about that post, the only place I had mentioned such a thing. And I think my response was what you would expect. So when you say “I have no idea what you are talking about”…. well, I think you do.
But, if you are implying, and I think that you are, that 83% of all wild mammals being wiped out by humans is not a total catastrophe, not a sign that we are destroying our entire ecosystem, then I have no idea what kind of world you are living in.
Ron, I know you think humans are responsible for the bulk of extinctions but the paper is comparing biomass loss from way before civilization in that 83% number. Maybe you should read the actual paper.
“But, if you are implying, and I think that you are, that 83% of all wild mammals being wiped out by humans is not a total catastrophe”
Not at all Ron, that came from your own head.
Secondly, that 83% being wiped out by humans is a false claim. Not even the paper states that, just a manipulation of figures in the paper to make a headline.
BTW, I live in the same sick and twisted human world as you do. Just a happenstance of birth but I am stuck with it.
Secondly, that 83% being wiped out by humans is a false claim. Not even the paper states that, just a manipulation of figures in the paper to make a headline.
Ahhh but that is exactly what it says:
Since the rise of human civilization 83% of wild mammals have been lost.
83% of all wild mammals,
80% of all marine mammals,
50% of all plants,
15% of all fish.
Oh, okay, I now understand where you are coming from. It is just a coincidence that all this shit has happened since humans come onto the scene. It would likely have happened anyway had not humans arrived to wipe them all out.
Yeah, right!
I agree Ron, the Guardian cartoon graphics do say things like that in the Guardian article.
“But you mentioned my chart about terrestrial vertebrate biomass so I naturally assumed you were talking about that post”
I never mentioned your chart.
We are headed to a whole new biosphere, one that we cannot relate to, due to abrupt climate change. Portions of the earth are already in a new climate regime. Averages don’t mean much when large changes in local radiative forcing are interacting with the dramatic changes in the properties of water.
The perspective of a climate scientist on what is happening and where things are going.
Climate Matters: in conversation with Paul Beckwith https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3gvJMCsMEw Paul speaks with Beyond Crisis in Ottawa on abrupt climate change; the earth’s warming creating dramatic loss of sea ice in the Arctic; and the urgent need to act NOW to reduce emissions, cool the Arctic and slow the warming trend. This piece gives a detailed analysis on the risks we face from Arctic warming to the overall climate system.
“We’re an innovative, intelligent species but we’re total idiots on the climate change issue.”
“I think we’re in trouble NOW… The world will wake up one morning and they’ll be no sea ice in the Arctic – the weather will be unrecognizable. Will that wake people up? Do we have to reach that point?”
Paul is a well-known climate science educator, and part-time Geography professor in climatology, oceanography, and environmental issues at the University of Ottawa.
I would have said: “We are headed to a whole new biosphere, one that we cannot relate to, due to abrupt climate change [and human population overshoot].”
The energy sources and the technology using that energy produced the current abrupt climate change and the population overshoot are one and the same.
Conversely, quickly eliminating the use of those energy sources would reduce the effects of abrupt climate change and also the population.
Of course we all know population is not the major problem, it’s blatant polluting over-consumption by the top third of the population and their desire to continue in that fashion. I know the well off don’t want to hear it, but that is the reality.
The top few billion, those making or using more than $50 a day need to immediately and dramatically cut back on their carbon footprint.
The global fertility rate has fallen from 5.5 per woman to 2.5 and is still falling, so population may be curing itself. Also the bottom few billion have a very small carbon footprint. Until the well off and rich in the world set a strong and global example of how to live well on a low carbon footprint, I can’t blame the bottom half for not really listening to all the finger pointing by the fat cats spewing pollution everywhere and wrecking the world. They will try and model the biggest polluters and over-consumers if the top half does not change it’s ways.
All that said, we have to deal with the world as it is now and with what we know about it now. We are in a climate emergency, the changes that we see now are not even from what we have done so far to the atmosphere/ocean/life. They are from what we did decades ago. When what we did lately catches up to us, that will be bad. When what we do over the next decade or two is added to that, the changes will be orders of magnitude beyond what is happening now. We don’t have to wait for sea level rise to destroy the cities. If we continue on this course much longer, there will be no cities to speak of just remnants of a lost civilization on a toxic and overheated cemetery world.
Turn the wheel of civilization now, it might not be too late. Waiting until next decade will.
Guess that cures the “population problem”, doesn’t it?
THE UNPRECEDENTED EXPANSION OF THE GLOBAL MIDDLE CLASS
âNotwithstanding gloomy forecasts for global growth, middle-class expansion seems set to continue. In fact, the next decade could see a faster expansion of the middle class than at any other time in history. Within a few years, based on current forecasts, a majority of the worldâs population could have middle-class or rich lifestyles for the first time ever. The most dynamic segment of the global middle-class market is at the lower end of the scale, among new entrants with comparatively low per capita spending.â
The Trump Administration is proposing to lift a ban on “extreme” hunting in Alaska. In other words, it could soon be legal to shoot bear cubs and wolf pups in national preserves.
U.S. HOUSE SANCTIONS KILLING HIBERNATING BEARS, WOLF PUPS IN THEIR DENS ON FEDERAL REFUGES IN ALASKA
âWhat the U.S. House of Representatives did today â actually a very narrow majority of the House â was shameful. Cruel. Callous. Venal. The vote in favor of H.J. Resolution 69, authored by Alaskaâs Rep. Don Young, was 225 to 193. Those 225 members voted to overturn a federal rule â years in the works, and crafted by professional wildlife managers at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service â to stop some of the most appalling practices ever imagined in the contemporary era of wildlife management. Denning of wolf pups, killing hibernating bears, spotting grizzly bears from aircraft and then shooting them after landing, and trapping grizzly bears and black bears with steel-jawed leghold traps and snares. The stuff of wildlife snuff films.â
Hey, Pennsylvania has been shooting bear cubs for a long time now. Geese have such large hunting seasons, they might as well just have open hunting on them. Add to that the states that pay to have people and expensive boats go around at night destroying goose nests.
Coy-wolves, other wise known as Eastern Coyote, have an open season on them. Kill on sight.
All states in the U.S.A., with the exception of Hawaii, allow crow hunting. There is no limit on the number of crows that a hunter can kill during the “open seasons” of 124 days per year.
Millions of birds poisoned each year in the name of agriculture.
Beavers in drowning traps set by landowners and state personnel because they make a small dam on a creek and provide living habitat to many other species.
The list can go on and on.
Not much to be proud of. If this is the result of human intelligence, it should be eliminated quickly.
The “House of Reps” and the administration is just like a large portion of the population. The will of some people will be the will of the land and the rest be damned.
So how is the “world saving” going?
“Hey, Pennsylvania has been shooting bear cubs for a long time now.” Shooting bear cubs in wilderness areas is one thing, doing so in “protected” areas (i.e., Arctic National Wildlife Refuge) is another.
Nahh, it’s still killing young bears. It’s shows a general lowering of the mental state of humans, where killing is the desired object of hunting versus obtaining food and practicing survival techniques. Ethical hunting went out the window with my father’s generation, at least around here for many “hunters”.
They should be so proud to kill a baby bear, stuff it and put it in their living room for all to see their shameless ways. They certainly do not need the food.
There is no such thing as a protected area, not in the long run, not even in the short run.
Your Guide to Hunting on National Wildlife Refuges
Hunting on national wildlife refuges is a tradition that dates to the early 1900s. Today, more than 370 refuges are open to the public for hunting â seasonally and in accordance with state regulations.
The teenagers in rural Kentucky decided they were fed up after a 15-year-old with a handgun turned their high school into another killing ground, murdering two classmates. Like so many other students, they wrote speeches and op-ed essays calling for gun control, they painted posters and they marched on their State Capitol. The blush of activism made them feel empowered, even a little invincible.
Then came the backlash.
It started with sideways looks and laughter from other students in the hallways, they said. Friends deleted them from group chats and stopped inviting them over. On social media, people called the teenage activists âretardsâ and âspoiled brats,â and said they should have been the ones to die during a shooting in Marshall County High Schoolâs student commons four months ago.
The gulf between liberal and conservative Americaâs responses to mass shootings was on display again in Santa Fe, Tex., population 13,000, after 10 people were killed at the high school there on Friday. Republican leaders expressed no desire to pass gun restrictions. Many residents and students agreed with them, saying that gun control would not stop the bloodshed at Americaâs schools.
âIf we had more guns on campus with more teachers armed, weâd be a lot safer,â said Layton Kelly, 17, a student who hid in a night-black classroom next to the scene of the shooting in Santa Fe.
No social change has ever come about without lots of pain and suffering, people putting themselves in harms way. It all seems so nice later, but it takes real courage and strong commitment to make a change. Sometimes it takes a long time too.
Social media is the wrong place to attempt change, the internet is rife with bullies, trolls and sociopaths as well as the mentally disturbed. They will overwhelm any positive discourse and bring it to a very negative place.
âIf we had more guns on campus with more teachers armed, weâd be a lot safer,â said Layton Kelly, 17, a student who hid in a night-black classroom next to the scene of the shooting in Santa Fe.
Another brainwashed idiot! I’m going to venture out on a limb here and guess that Layton was brought up in a conservative religious home. No amount of data will ever change such a person’s mind. The Third Reich was built with the support of such good people!
Religion and delusion determine fake news belief
US study finds reduced modes of thinking underpin how people accept absurd explanations
What do you think of the video in this article then? Are these high schoolers also some brainwashed idiots? Obviously there is much debate and controversy over the gun issue even among young Americans. That’s not surprising since the very basic fundamental values defining conservative and liberal America are fought over when discussing guns.
Local students organize event in support of Second Amendment
By Khloe Keeler
âWe have had a movement to spark the nation and to let them know that we are not open to a gun ban and we support our Second Amendment all day, every day,â said 11th-grader Garrett Niles.
Junior student Emily Arseneau thinks a cultural shift needs to happen.
âI believe that needs to start with a conversation about mental health. My generation specifically is facing things that have never been seen before in this nation and we need to open the door for conversation before we can truly find a solution to this problem,â Arseneau said.
Nearby residents also stopped by the school.
âItâs wonderful to see the strong support from the students who come and support the people who started this,” said Florissant resident Michael Jordan. “To show their support in terms of our constitution and the Second Amendment and just listening to the students and how they feel in terms of their country.â
He continued, âItâs a travesty and it actually alarms me. We have grandkids and kids, adult children now. The direction we are heading, itâs just clearly wrong and the Second Amendment is one of the bedrocks of our country.â
Instead of a ban on guns, students called for more of them to serve as protection.
âSolutions that I personally believe in is arming better people in our schools with more guns. Thatâll easily scare away a shooter any way you look at it,â Niles said.
Obviously there is much debate and controversy over the gun issue even among young Americans. Thatâs not surprising since the very basic fundamental values defining conservative and liberal America are fought over when discussing guns.
Debate? What is there to fucking debate?! Look at the damn data. The problem is real simple it’s the guns, stupid! Letting every Tom, Dick and Harry buy guns may be good for the gun manufacturers business and the NRA but it is devastating to the fabric of civil society. The average Joe does not need, nor is he fit to own a firearm.
Case in point Japan, population 127 million deaths by firearms about 10 per year! Any questions?!
Japan puts citizens through a rigorous set of tests.
Japan, which has strict laws for obtaining firearms, seldom has more than 10 shooting deaths a year in a population of 127 million people.
If Japanese people want to own a gun, they must attend an all-day class, pass a written test, and achieve at least 95% accuracy during a shooting-range test.
Then they have to pass a mental-health evaluation at a hospital, as well as a background check, in which the government digs into any criminal records or ties and interviews friends and family members.
Finally, they can buy only shotguns and air rifles â no handguns â and must retake the class and the initial exam every three years.
Unlike in the US, Japanese law has long outlawed guns. Still, the wisdom from Japan seems to be that tighter regulations keep guns confined only to those fit to use them.
And BTW: The 2nd Amendment says:
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
Fine, if anyone happens to already be a member of a well regulated Militia, or they can prove they depend on hunting to put food on their table, then they might have a case. Otherwise get in line at the local shrink to have your head examined.
There is NO FUCKING DEBATE to be had on this issue!
I’d like to see our troops brought home from fighting foreign wars and stationed at schools across the country. If these copycat school shooters know there are people ready and willing to blow them into a million bits the moment they step on school property with a gun, they won’t bring a gun to school in the first place.
Iâd like to see our troops brought home from fighting foreign wars and stationed at schools across the country.
Oh, Yeah, that will solve the problem. Bring on the Police State!
How does the US compare with other countries?
About 40% of Americans say they own a gun or live in a household with one, according to a 2017 survey, and the rate of murder or manslaughter by firearm is the highest in the developed world. There were more than 11,000 deaths as a result of murder or manslaughter involving a firearm in 2016.
Seriously we need to stop blaming inanimate objects like guns and put the blame where it really lies and that’s within the schools. They spend all sorts of money on sports, highly paid administration and unnecessary things. Let’s fund metal detectors in all schools, bring in more police officers, more K-9’s, maybe bring back morality teachings. I don’t care how small the school is or how big it is it is time we stop this without taking away any lawful guns.
Most of all though I think the main thing, we should be dealing with the bullying. Make laws against it as bad as intimidation, character assassination, assault & so on. As an angel mom and Godparent my heart goes out to all the families of these tragedies. Even to the family with the child who does the shooting since I would think they had no idea at all how serious their child’s condition was.
Lastly make sure to know when pointing that finger that you got three pointing right back at you. It only takes a second to change the rest of your life and the schools absolutely could have prevented this.
Seriously we need to stop blaming inanimate objects like guns and put the blame where it really lies and thatâs within the schools. They spend all sorts of money on sports, highly paid administration and unnecessary things.
Yeah, especially unnecessary things like actually educating kids and teaching them critical thinking skills so they realize what a bunch of bollocks statements like that, really are!
We need to bring back prayer while we are at it… that always makes everything all right again!
Wait, if guns are the problem because they are inanimate, how can inanimate metal detectors be the solution?
In both of the recent shootings, there were armed and trained security personnel there.
You may have noticed it didn’t stop people from being killed.
And this last shooting: did the father store the guns in a gun safe or secure them with trigger locks? With the ammo locked separately? Because that might actually have helped.
The problem is the gun manufacturers who campaign to let crazy people with criminal records and histories of threatening people… buy guns instantly.
No other country in the world allows this, and it’s not protected by the Second Amendment, which is about militia members like the Black Panther Party, not about deranged ranting loners.
Schools can’t prevent lunatics from buying arsenals and going to shoot up schools, or playgrounds, or street corners, or anywhere else. Regulations restricting who is allowed to buy arsenals, however, can prevent lunatics from buying arsenals. It’s worked worldwide.
The NRA demands that lunatics be allowed to buy arsenals for two reasons:
(1) Gun manufacturers want more sales, and lunatics buy a lot of guns (way more than any sane person)
(2) Wayne LaPierre is personally a lunatic. There is documentation of him randomly threatening people with guns — committing assault. He is the epitome of the irresponsible lunatic who should not be allowed to have guns.
Criminal groups like the NRA make responsible gun owners look bad. In Australia and Canada, responsible gun owners are respected. Here in the US, they are suspected of being lunatics, because of the lunatic NRA.
In the original UK Bill of Rights (1689) the right was limited to protestants, mainly so they could kill catholics if they ever tried to take over the monarchy again, current arguments in USA are not much better.
While not always right, Mao did often have a bit of insight:
“Religion is Poison”
Ignorance of the English Civil War and the Glorious Revolution that followed it are the mainstay of modern American discussions of church and state. The people who started the American Revolution were very well aware of it, but it’s ancient history now.
None of the things Japan does would stand up to legal challenges in the US because of the clear “shall not be infringed” in the 2nd Amendment. Besides one the biggest purposes of the 2nd Amendment is providing a last line of defense against out of control tyrannical government. So what do you suppose the reaction would be among US gun owning citizens, if the US government attempts to implement Japan’s methods?
The “well regulated” part seems to be unclear for a lot of folks.
+1
Heh, someone in my facebook feed informed me recently that a well-armed militia is enshrined in the first amendment.
You can’t make this stuff up.
Besides one the biggest purposes of the 2nd Amendment is providing a last line of defense against out of control tyrannical government.
ROFLMAO!
Yep, I can see it now, millions of peace loving Americans arming themselves with assault rifles, assembled as a well regulated militia, marching on Washington to depose the current out of control tyrannical government.
You trolls are just too fucking funny!
They are funny—-
And the only defense would be asymmetrical.
” …defense would be asymmetrical”.
While you folks may be ignorant of Solzhenitzen’s unequivocal statements in these matters, a great many of us are most keenly aware.
That great good man offered jarring observations that he and his fellow prisoners deserved their incarceration in the gulags by not fighting strenuously enough for their freedom.
Rather than cowering upstairs in apartments, hearing the security operatives clambering towards them, had enough citizens attacked with whatever utensils available, one fourth Leningrad’s population would not have disappeared.
His description.
Pol Pot’s 2 million victims?
How many would be alive if they could have shot back?
You folks who continuously display the most ruthless, authoritarian views directed against those with whom you disagree ensure that tens of millions of Americans will NEVER willingly surrender to a defenseless life and death authority that you – collectively on this site – unabashedly strive for.
coffeeguyzz,
Do you seriously believe that any Americans either leaning right or left, with guns, are in a position to overthrow the US government even if they feel it has become an authoritarian tyranny?!
Sorry Bro! You are completely delusional!
The US government massively out guns the people. The people wouldn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell!
Hint, this isn’t 1776! Have you checked what kind of fire power the US government in the 21st century has, compared to your fantasy of a well organized and armed militia?
Strawman arguments, Mr. Magyar, have always been a major bane of discussions/debates.
Along with ad hominems, they are said to display the deficiencies of the positions of the speaker.
I do not believe any group of Americans can overthrow the US government with armed insurrection.
I have no fantasies whatsoever regarding a well armed and regulated militia, but your comments lead me to believe I have far more familiarity with the events, people, and – most crucially – the MOTIVES that surrounded those springtime events centuries ago at Lexington and Concord.
Like all fundamentals, those experiences resonate not only today in the US, but in all areas of the globe where struggle is barely contained below the surface.
How’s Bahrain been doing lately?
Right this day, this moment, actions recently taken by individuals named Priestap, Page, Bruce and Nellie Ohr, and
several others in the employ of government are alleged to have committed the most egregious offenses against the democratic processes.
Within days, much of these allegations will see the light of day.
Main point being, Mr. Magyar, that your different view on things from mine should not only be heard, they should be parsed with as much diligence and concern we all, US citizens, can provide so as to offer a better world for our progeny.
When you have, on THIS site, an individual such as Wimbi, openly calling for the execution of my children, of my grandchildren, for the high egregiousness of holding a different position on a current controversial topic, we have crossed a line.
Several, in fact.
When the time arrives – and, historically, it ALWAYS arrives – that we are no longer a people, a nation willing to send their sons and daughters to fight and die for their neighbors perceived welfare, those of us who are willing and prepared to identify enemies – near and far – stand the best chance for survival.
I, and tens of millions of others, will primarily rely upon our own devices, our own resources, till our last breaths.
When you have, on THIS site, an individual such as Wimbi, openly calling for the execution of my children, of my grandchildren, for the high egregiousness of holding a different position on a current controversial topic, we have crossed a line.
I had many a fruitful conversation with Wimbi and I highly doubt he ever made any comments to that effect, if you have proof I’d like to see it. Also, if you do, please provide the context within which such a conversation might have occurred.
Main point being, Mr. Magyar, that your different view on things from mine should not only be heard, they should be parsed with as much diligence and concern we all, US citizens, can provide so as to offer a better world for our progeny.
I think we can mutually agree on that much at least.
To be frank, as a son if immigrants who brought me to this country as a two year old. And having had the opportunity to live and work in other countries, including having experienced first hand living under an authoritarian military dictatorship, I probably see a so called ‘Better World’ through a slightly different prism than you do.
In his report on the Challenger Accident, Richard Feynman said:
“For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.”
I think the same general idea also applies to successful societies, and IMHO the United States and other countries that are trying to go backward in time to the mythical ‘Good Old Days’, while sticking their heads in the sand and attempting to ignore the physical limits imposed by nature are doomed to failure. For Nature always bats last!
About 5 months before he died, a day or so before the thread was ended, Wimbi wrote a somewhat short post where he mused that he and some like minded individuals determined that global warming was an immanent, existential threat to the human race.
They also felt anyone who disagreed was – in effect – responsible for mass killing and thus deserved to be, themselves, terminated pre-emptorily.
That there is a thread of logic is what can make this especially chilling.
The vast majority of people on this board seem to be like many of my friends and family, altruistic, compassionate individuals who yearn for a more just, equitable world.
What decent individual can argue against that?
However, this view, as epitomized by the Mensheviks in early 1900s Russia, is somewhat constrained in implementing real world, sharp elbowed politics.
Enter the Bolsheviks – and there are clearly some on this site – who historically show no qualms in slaughtering millions to get their way.
The comment by Wimbi shows how close a line between the two exists below the surface when collectivists feel rising urgency to achieve their goals.
Bill Ayers, an individual with close association to several current politicians, is said to have called for the elimination of 25 million Americans.
This, Fred, is why we will never – voluntarily – forego our means of self defense.
(For an instructive flip side to individuals voluntarily coalescing into a 100% commited collective, check out the Overmountain Men in the Battle of Kings Mountain in the American Revolution.
There, a group of the most individualistic people around, joined together and were prepared to fight and die for a collective purpose).
Varying views on things is the normal course of events.
When the Ayers type take control, or the Wimbi types become frustrated, they can quickly become mortal enemies.
The scenario regarding defense from the government, or night-time death squads, is about to change. Swat teams won’t be arriving, autonomous gatling guns will (or some such equivalent).
It is likely far too late to step back to a simple time of self-defense.
This, Fred, is why we will never â voluntarily â forego our means of self defense.
Sigh! My point is, that it is not a real means of self defense in face of the existing opposing forces. There is no way to beat them through any such show of force.
You have to be smarter than they are.
They hold all the force cards, you need to learn jiu jitsu. Guns are too primitive in an age of drones, AI, social media manipulation, etc… you need advanced cyber skills to fight the existing system.
If Cheetohead’s minions come kicking down the door, you guys can retaliate with an app from your smart phones.
Should Kamala Harris’ jacboots come bursting through the entrance, many will blow their heads off.
(Just kidding … mostly).
coffeeguyzz,
I looked through all of Wimbi’s Comments from Feb 1, 2016 until July, 2016 when he passed.
I call bullshit on your claim that he,
When you have, on THIS site, an individual such as Wimbi, openly calling for the execution of my children, of my grandchildren, for the high egregiousness of holding a different position on a current controversial topic, we have crossed a line.
If you want to be believed, then speak the truth.
You will need to reproduce the comment where he suggested as much.
Yair
“Besides one the biggest purposes of the 2nd Amendment is providing a last line of defense against out of control tyrannical government”
When does it kick in then?
Cheers.
Yeah, we need them right now, goddammit! đ
scrub puller,
Oh, good one! You win the internet today.
Everything Japan does would be legal in the US, and in fact restrictions like the Japanese restrictions *were in place in many states in 1789 when the Bill of Rights was passed* and *remained in place*.
@ Fred
In two studies, 5- and 6-year-old children were questioned about the status of the protagonist embedded in three different types of stories. In realistic stories that only included ordinary events, all children, irrespective of family background and schooling, claimed that the protagonist was a real person. In religious stories that included ordinarily impossible events brought about by divine intervention, claims about the status of the protagonist varied sharply with exposure to religion. Children who went to church or were enrolled in a parochial school, or both, judged the protagonist in religious stories to be a real person, whereas secular children with no such exposure to religion judged the protagonist in religious stories to be fictional. Children’s upbringing was also related to their judgment about the protagonist in fantastical stories that included ordinarily impossible events whether brought about by magic (Study 1) or without reference to magic (Study 2). Secular children were more likely than religious children to judge the protagonist in such fantastical stories to be fictional. The results suggest that exposure to religious ideas has a powerful impact on children’s differentiation between reality and fiction, not just for religious stories but also for fantastical stories.
Arm teachers, the shooters are doing it without the intention of surviving so it will not deter them. What happens when police turn up and a man is pointing a gun at a child? What are the chances that man will get shot on sight? Black man, white kid, no chance.
Will more be caught in crossfire and stray rounds? Will 2 teachers think the other is the shooter? I cannot see it ending well.
NAOM
Black man, white kid, no chance.
Not the profile– if you are paying attention the shooter is a young white christian male.
The point is that the armed teacher might be black.
If I were a black teacher, the last thing I want is to be holding a gun during a SWAT team action.
Well, that hasn’t been the conditions.
This is a young white christian male problem.
You seem to miss the point. There has been a police officer shooting black male problem for a century. Even if the black male is unarmed.
I understand (I was born in South Central LA)– but the school shootings have universally been young white male christian.
Just dealing with reality.
We are not talking about a Watts street scene–
Reality is the cop will most likely shoot the black teacher and ask questions never
Black teacher holding white kid shooter at gunpoint, to make it clearer. See LLoyd’s comment for what I mean.
NAOM
PS By the way, they have started running the new buses here, at last, only about 2 years late! CNG powered!!!
“Black teacher holding white kid shooter at gunpoint, to make it clearer. See LLoydâs comment for what I mean.”
And where has this happened to our young white christian male shooters?
Inquiring minds want to know—-
You are making this difficult – rolls eyes. đ
Follow back up and see that I was referring to the suggestion of arming teachers so this is a future scenario not a past happening.
NAOM
Ah, something that hasn’t happened—-
Now I know what we are talking about.
I was referring to actual reality.
And where has this happened to our young white christian male shooters?
There are very few armed teachers, so it hasn’t come up. It’s what you call a hypothetical. It is an obvious problem for any teacher with a gun, just worse for a black teacher.
Arming teachers is a bad, bad idea, and the last two mass shootings have proved that even professional security cannot control this problem. What you need is fewer guns, 5 round magazines, and strict storage laws: trigger locks, gun safes, and ammo in a separate locked container.
Letting Americans play with a killing machine is a bad idea
Don’t schools typically have high pressure fire suppression systems?
Arm the teachers with water cannons.
Non-lethal defenses seem sensible. But I donât think you understand whatâs important here – how does that provide income for gun makers?
Maybe the NRA could support Tasers – theyâre expensive…
On second thought, that wonât work. Non-lethal defenses donât spread fear, and therefore donât generate more gun sales and donât create more support for demagogues.
Youâve got to keep your eye on the top priorities…
Yes, it’s curious that after Jon Meis successfully halted the rampage of the Seattle Pacific University shooter with pepper spray, and then disarmed him, that the NRA didn’t call for providing pepper spray to the nations educators to ensure student safety.
“Wipeout?
Original was The Surfarisâ they went to my High School (Glendora).
Went from playing in the gym, to the number one hit on Earth.
Didnât do much beyond that.” ~ Hightrekker
Maybe so-called civilization, (where in one corner, Trump is supposedly in charge and, in another corner, another shmuck is and so on– all of whom and related, the sheeple ruminate about incessantly) won’t do much either after wiping out.
Pseudogovernment-mandated (coerced) ‘school’ is a prison of a sort, too, incidentally. Maybe if we all didn’t allow ourselves and our kids to get coerced and kidnapped into going to some ‘schools’, our lives might amount to more than ‘one-hit-wonders’ so to speak and the Fred Magyars of the world, for example, would be more capable of critical thinking and doing so for themselves.
How about a mass revolt of parents taking their children out of school at once? Unlikely in today’s reality. Better to risk subjecting them to the ideological wall and the relatively-small risk of getting murdered. Their own and their aiding and abetting of a multitude of facets of it will happen later after their run through the ideological mills.
“What the fuck does that even mean? So what do suggest?! Just keep the status quo, subsidizing and selling more kerosene in places like Africa and India?…
If you were on my boat and all you could do is criticize the people using the buckets, youâd be the first one Iâd throw overboard! With apologies to the sharks for the lousy quality of the bait.” ~ Fred Magyar
That bit above makes me wonder if you read my previous edit of my comment-in-question, since in it, I mentioned in part something along the lines of some 3D animation of your head going so far up our ass, that it came out your mouth, and that made navel-gazing look like a Sunday picnic.
In any case, of course I am criticizing the system, which doesn’t give a flying fuck about Africans, never mind their lighting needs, or much of anyone or anything else for that matter, despite the blissfully and wilfully-ignorant pretenses to the contrary.
And there’s a big difference between a system and an individual (even if some indivuals really like to suck up to and identify with it), but explaining that, among other things, to people like Fred Magyar– especially if he’s hopelessly sycophantic to the system– after doing too much of that already hereon anyway would, alas, be pissing into the wind.
We’ll let someone else do the honor for the Esteemed-in-question.
“When we grew up and went to school
There were certain teachers who would
Hurt the children in any way they could…
By pouring their derision
Upon anything we did
And exposing every weakness
However carefully hidden by the kids
But in the town, it was well known
When they got home at night, their fat and
Psychopathic wives would thrash them
Within inches of their lives…”
In any case, of course I am criticizing the system, which doesnât give a flying fuck about Africans, never mind their lighting needs, or much of anyone or anything else for that matter,
Whatever, Caelan, just go back to making your little mud pies or whatever it is that you do to amuse yourself. While you are wallowing in your self importance and wasting your time criticizing the system, Those Africans have their sleeves rolled up and are building micro grids and developing their own alternative systems for you to find fault with.
Systems come and go, some work for a while but generally they end up outliving their usefulness.
Then a new system has to be developed. The only thing that is for certain is change.
Yeah, I’ve been watching videos on youtube about paying very poor Africans to work on anti-desertification projects, and you always hear women saying things like “With the money I’ll be able to buy school books for my kids so the don’t grow up illiterate like me”. Meanwhile several generations of Americans are being brainwashed to believe that schools is slavery, or satanic. Let’s see how that works out for you America.
Mandatory ‘Education’ & Legal ‘Kidnapping’
Define ‘rich’, ‘poor’ or ‘school/education’. Just because some (‘factory-prison-schooled’) people might have (self-)limited critical thinking skills doesn’t mean there aren’t better definitions.
As a related aside:
“Native American boarding schools, also known as Indian Residential Schools were established in the United States during the late 19th and mid 20th centuries with a primary objective of assimilating Native American children and youth into Euro-American culture, while at the same time providing a basic education in Euro-American subject matters. These boarding schools were first established by Christian missionaries of various denominations, who often started schools on reservations, especially in the lightly populated areas of the West. The government paid religious orders to provide basic education to Native American children on reservations. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) founded additional boarding schools based on the assimilation model of the off-reservation Carlisle Indian Industrial School.
Children were typically immersed in European-American culture through forced changes that removed indigenous cultural signifiers. These methods included being forced to have European-American style haircuts, being forbidden to speak their Indigenous languages, and having their real names replaced by European names to both ‘civilize’ and ‘Christianize’ them.” ~ Wikipedia
That mill is still alive of course and still cranking them out like at an industrial mass-production factory; factory kids, factory education for a factory planet. Our kids.
If they can’t get slowly ‘killed/tortured’ with school, maybe they can get quickly killed in school.
“Gotta help/educate/school those ‘poor’ indigenous people and save them from themselves and their ‘poor’ cultures.” ~ Frederick Madyear/Aunty Quated
“Light-emitting diodes (LEDs) are advertised as environmentally friendly because they are energy efficient and mercury free. However, the material content of the LEDs, which generally include group III-V semiconductors, presents its own set of potential environmental impacts. The rapid growth in the LED industry implies that, ultimately, LEDs will contribute to the solid waste stream, and could impact resource availability, human health, and ecosystems in much the same way as generic electronic waste (e-waste) from computers and cell phones has generated concern in recent years.”
“You could call it fatal attraction. Drawn by artificial lights in our brightening night-time world, animals find their lives in peril.
Fledgling birds disorientated by lights can collide with human structures on the ground and then get hit by cars, or become more vulnerable to predation, starvation or dehydration. Or newly hatched turtles may set out in the opposite direction to the sea, exposing themselves to similar dangers.
“The researchers use the term ‘rebound effect’ to describe how a savings in energy leaves us with more money that we simply pour back into the product.
We can see the same effect in our approach to buying cars â better fuel efficiency leads to more fuel to drive longer distances, rather than a reduction in overall power consumption.
Light pollution isn’t a new concern, especially among astronomers, ecologists, and insomniacs…
This end of the visible light spectrum more closely resembles daylight, so even if we were to assume the overall luminosity didn’t increase in countries that were replacing old bulbs with LED technology, we’d still perceive night to feel more like day.
It’s well established that this flood of blue light has a serious impact on our health and wellbeing.
It also messes with wildlife â you might not care much about a few moths getting dazed by the lights, but research shows LED lighting could have profound impacts on a range of plant and animal species.”
Gee Caelan, where were you Edison came out with the first commercially successful incandescent light bulb? You could have warned all of humanity about the inherent dangers of all that light pollution, and we would all have gone back to our dark caves and the world would be perfectly fine today…
But then again, you ain’t exactly the brightest LED in the chandelier are you?! You never seem to think critically about the stuff you copy and paste and if it really stands up to scrutiny. Case in point:
The rapid growth in the LED industry implies that, ultimately, LEDs will contribute to the solid waste stream, and could impact resource availability, human health, and ecosystems in much the same way as generic electronic waste (e-waste) from computers and cell phones has generated concern in recent years.â
Well, you have a point, that might actually come to pass. However, here’s the logical problem, Where is it written in stone that it absolutely WILL?!
That assumes the our future behavior will be exactly the same as it has been in the the past. It assumes that we can and will continue with an infinite growth based linear economic model. Extracting resources, making products and then throwing them away.
It totally ignores any and all alternative economic models such as those in a non personal ownership based shared circular economic model where products are designed from the get go not to end up in any waste stream and after ending their useful lifespans end up as feed stock for other industrial processes. Now while I won’t be holding my breath waiting for such a paradigm shift to occur anytime soon, there is nothing that says that it can’t happen.
As they say past performance is not necessarily indicative of future behavior. And if you think you are going to convince the 9 billion or so humans who are going to be living on this planet in the near future not to use lights you need to watch this first:
Africa, like the rest of the planet, is being/has been plundered and pillaged in the name of colonization, industrialization and the crony-capitalist plutarchy, greenwashed/token philanthropic corporate guerilla marketing aside.
Go pull your head out of your ass for a second if you can stop the looping and worry about your own backyard, such as, for one, those of African ancestry disproportionately-locked-up in the American prison industrial complex… For all we know, they might even be doing the kind of slave labor that helps manufacture LED’s for export to Africa. You already know that they do slave labor for all kinds of products, right?
Technology is fundamentally worthless without its proper control, which includes by those affected by it. And there is no point in it if it undermines a planet on which it is suppose to exist and make lives better not worse.
“It totally ignores any and all alternative economic models such as those in a non personal ownership based shared circular economic model where products are designed from the get go not to end up in any waste stream and after ending their useful lifespans end up as feed stock for other industrial processes.” ~ Fred Magyar
âThe circular economy is a generic term for an industrial economyâŚâ ~ Wikipedia
“Northern workers in the American Civil War fought under that banner; that wage slavery is like chattel slavery. In fact it was even the position of the Republican Party. It was a fairly mainstream position. You’ve even got editorials in the NY Times about it, believe it or not. And they also took for granted that the industrial system is totally illegitimate. It’s just a form of feudalism to which people are driven by essentially violence or starvation, and has to be overcome. Those who work in the mills should own them is taken for granted. The feudalistic industrial system was destroying their culture… These are understandings about the nature of freedom and domination that have been lost. So it’s not pure progress. How far they’ve been lost is an interesting question. My suspicion is that they’re right below the surface…” ~ Noam Chomsky
Caelan is a goofball. The light pollution problem has been serious for a long time, but LEDs actually *help*, as they produce *less* light pollution outdoors than the incandescants or flourescents do.
Snips from the articles above:
“…because they emit light across a broad part of the visible spectrum, LEDs can affect a wider range of photosensitive cells in different organisms…” ~ Phys.org
——
“Thanks partially to solid-state lighting’s bigger bang for your buck, the growing problem of light pollution is showing no sign of slowing…
Physicist Chris Kyba from the German Research Centre for Geosciences has led a study using satellite data to investigate how brighter our nights are becoming.
And while he doesn’t point the finger solely at LEDs, they do represent the problem.
‘We’ll light something that we didn’t light before, like a bicycle path through a park or a section of highway leading outside of town that in the past wasn’t lit‘, says Kyba.
The researchers use the term ‘rebound effect’ to describe how a savings in energy leaves us with more money that we simply pour back into the product…” ~ Science Alert
“In economics… Jevons paradox… occurs when technological progress increases the efficiency with which a resource is used (reducing the amount necessary for any one use), but the rate of consumption of that resource rises because of increasing demand.” ~ Wikipedia
The new LED street lights they put up here spill a LOT of light sideways. The previous, and modern, HPS lights did not. Bad design.
FLORIDIANS COULD FAR FAR MORE FREQUENT, INTENSE HEATWAVES
“Because temperatures are increasing faster at night, heatwaves are already becoming more frequent and intense at night, versus during the day. Soaring nighttime temperatures could be particularly troublesome for Floridians in large cities such as Miami, Tampa and Orlando, where the urban heat island phenomenon could amplify heatwaves, given that paved surfaces and concrete trap heat.”
“The use of air conditioners and electric fans already accounts for about a fifth of the total electricity in buildings around the world â or 10% of all global electricity consumption. Over the next three decades, the use of ACs is set to soar, becoming one of the top drivers of global electricity demand.”
So, are air conditioners another climate change feedback phenomena?
Cities have a particular problem. Filled with lots of glass faced buildings, dark roofs and streets the air conditioning problem is amplified by poor building design plus the heat island effect. Daytime temps by 12F and evening temps up to 22F above nearby rural regions.
Since most people will be living in cities soon, proper building design could go a long way to reducing both cooling and heating demand.
Donât forget roads and parking lots. Asphalt happens to be black and it has an extremely high âabsorbtivityâ (and “emissivity”) of solar energy, generally described as being around 95%. There are over 100,000 square miles of black asphalt pavement and roofs in the US. BTW what is “proper building design” and are we going to remove improper buildings and replace them with “proper ones” ?
Yes, the asphalt roads and roofs are designed perfectly to absorb sunlight. Then they release heat in the evening to keep the area from cooling off as it normally would with trees and natural terrain.
Urban Heat Islands
“Heat islands form as vegetation is replaced by asphalt and concrete for roads, buildings, and other structures necessary to accommodate growing populations. These surfaces absorbârather than reflectâthe sun’s heat, causing surface temperatures and overall ambient temperatures to rise. Displacing trees and vegetation minimizes the natural cooling effects of shading and evaporation of water from soil and leaves (evapotranspiration). Tall buildings and narrow streets can heat air trapped between them and reduce air flow. Waste heat from vehicles, factories, and air ”
Even in winter, lots of energy is wasted due to poor building design.
“The release of heat from the burning of fossil fuels can also raise urban temperatures. On a typical winter day, Manhattan releases four times more energy from burning fossil fuels than the amount of energy that comes into the urban area from the Sun.”
The good news, asphalt parking lots absorb the sun’s heat quickly and provide excellent sources of lift for sailplane pilots.
You haven’t really flown until you have flown a cloud street.
You don’t know how thoroughly I’ve examined that—
Paint them all reflective white. That’s what Steven Chu wanted to do.
Los Angeles paints streets white to stay cool | Science | AAAS
Sep 7, 2017 – Part of the plan, Popular Science reports, is to paint over many of the city’s black roads with a reflective white coating called CoolSeal
I remember you from the Fillmore West, 7th row stage left. May 1972. Good stuff…
Don’t worry future civilizations will be either living underground or building giant earthen mounds like termites which have figured out how to cool their mounds. đ
Stay cool!
Does living in nuclear bomb shelters count?
Well, I don’t think termite mounds are totally impervious to nuclear attack but they are still quite cool. (pun intended)
Aside from revealing how termite mounds work, the study may also offer lessons for architects.
âCould you drive large-scale flows through a building ⌠by cleverly opening and closing doors and windows?â Mahadevan asked. âRather than spending a great deal of energy for a fan and air conditioning in every room, with the end result being that some people are too hot and some people are too cold ⌠perhaps we should think of the entire thing as a system, and these new measurements suggest that if the architecture is appropriate, ventilation can occur by using environmental t:ransients â something for us to think about.â
Link to paper: http://www.pnas.org/content/112/37/11589
Termite mounds harness diurnal temperature oscillations for ventilation
Hunter King, Samuel Ocko, and L. Mahadevan
PNAS September 15, 2015. 112 (37) 11589-11593; published ahead of print August 27, 2015.
Significance Termite mounds are meter-sized structures built by millimeter-sized insects. These structures provide climate-controlled microhabitats that buffer the organisms from strong environmental fluctuations and allow them to exchange energy, information, and matter with the outside world. By directly measuring the flow inside a mound, we show that diurnal ambient temperature oscillations drive cyclic flows that flush out CO2 from the nest and ventilate the mound. This swarm-built architecture demonstrates how work can be derived from the fluctuations of an intensive environmental parameter, and might serve as an inspiration and model for the design of passive, sustainable human architecture.
Abstract Many species of millimetric fungus-harvesting termites collectively build uninhabited, massive mound structures enclosing a network of broad tunnels that protrude from the ground meters above their subterranean nests. It is widely accepted that the purpose of these mounds is to give the colony a controlled microclimate in which to raise fungus and brood by managing heat, humidity, and respiratory gas exchange. Although different hypotheses such as steady and fluctuating external wind and internal metabolic heating have been proposed for ventilating the mound, the absence of direct in situ measurement of internal air flows has precluded a definitive mechanism for this critical physiological function. By measuring diurnal variations in flow through the surface conduits of the mounds of the species Odontotermes obesus, we show that a simple combination of geometry, heterogeneous thermal mass, and porosity allows the mounds to use diurnal ambient temperature oscillations for ventilation. In particular, the thin outer flutelike conduits heat up rapidly during the day relative to the deeper chimneys, pushing air up the flutes and down the chimney in a closed convection cell, with the converse situation at night. These cyclic flows in the mound flush out CO2 from the nest and ventilate the colony, in an unusual example of deriving useful work from thermal oscillations.
Humans still have a lot to learn from nature.
I’ll probably have to consider installing new units in a few years time (existing are BER) due to rising heat and humidity. If I do I will look at some solar panels to offset energy use, they are not economic with my current usage.
Did a quick check with an IR thermometer. Cement roof 50C, white waterproofing 40C, white waterproofing under Spanish tile 30C. More waterproofing going on at the moment.
NAOM
The changes in heat waves and high temperatures. Hot days, hotter nights.
ASTRONOMERS OBSERVE UNPRECEDENTED DETAIL IN PULSAR 6,500 LIGHT-YEARS FROM EARTH
“A team of astronomers has performed one of the highest resolution observations in astronomical history by observing two intense regions of radiation, 20 kilometres apart, around a star 6500 light-years away. This is equivalent to using a telescope on Earth to see a flea on the surface of Pluto.
The pulsar is designated PSR B1957+20. Previous work led by Main’s co-author, Prof. Marten van Kerkwijk, from the University of Toronto, suggests that it is likely one of the most massive pulsars known, and further work to accurately measure its mass will help in understanding how matter behaves at the highest known densities, and equivalently, how massive a neutron star can be before collapsing into a black hole.”
BTW, B1957+20 (The Black Widow Pulsar) is an eclipsing binary millisecond pulsar. It orbits with a brown dwarf companion with an eclipse duration of 20 minutes. When discovered it was the first such pulsar known. The prevailing explanation for the system is that the companion is being destroyed by the gravitational environment (Roche lobe overflow) caused by the neutron star, and so the sobriquet Black Widow was applied to the object.
” ‘Choosing to Homeschool Isnât âRunning from Reality‘
Instead of overreacting, parents who decide to remove their children from school to homeschool them may be acknowledging the disconnect between the inherent coercion of compulsory mass schooling and the freedom to live in the genuine world around us. Rather than sheltering their children, parents who select the homeschooling option may be endeavoring to widen their childâs community, broaden their experiences, and restore their emotional well-being.
Former New York State Teacher of the Year, John Taylor Gatto, writes in his book Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling about his growing disillusionment with mass schooling:
‘I began to realize that the bells and the confinement, the crazy sequences, the age-segregation, the lack of privacy, the constant surveillance, and all the rest of the national curriculum of schooling were designed exactly as if someone had set out to prevent children from learning how to think and act, to coax them into addiction and dependent behavior.’
Wild results from computer models. Extreme extrapolations from very narrow samples. Estimates ranging by two orders of magnitude. Double and multiple overcounts of species. That about describes the state of determining the number of species and extinction rates on the planet, published claims unsupported by actual field data. When claims of a rate diverge greatly from field data and known populations, they are generally unreliable to just being plain wrong.
Global Extinction Rates: Why Do Estimates Vary So Wildly?
Is it 150 species a day or 24 a day or far less than that? Prominent scientists cite dramatically different numbers when estimating the rate at which species are going extinct. Why is that?
But nobody knows whether such estimates are anywhere close to reality. They are based on computer modeling, and documented losses are tiny by comparison. Only about 800 extinctions have been documented in the past 400 years, according to data held by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN). Out of some 1.9 million recorded current or recent species on the planet, that represents less than a tenth of one percent.
Nor is there much documented evidence of accelerating loss. In its latest update, released in June, the IUCN reported âno new extinctions,â although last year it reported the loss of an earwig on the island of St. Helena and a Malaysian snail. And some species once thought extinct have turned out to be still around, like the Guadalupe fur seal, which âdied outâ a century ago, but now numbers over 20,000.
Moreover, the majority of documented extinctions have been on small islands, where species with small gene pools have usually succumbed to human hunters. That may be an ecological tragedy for the islands concerned, but most species live in continental areas and, ecologists agree, are unlikely to prove so vulnerable.
The media has grabbed on to the extreme numbers and produced a whole culture of doom and gloom. Action now can really make a difference because things are not as bad as advertised. Use that time wisely and make a difference.
Fish, thanks for the great link. I loved it. Copied and pasted from your link:
But the documented losses may be only the tip of the iceberg. Thatâs because the criteria adopted by the IUCN and others for declaring species extinct are very stringent, requiring targeted research. Itâs also because we often simply donât know what is happening beyond the world of vertebrate animals that make up perhaps 1 percent of known species.
One way to fill the gap is by extrapolating from the known to the unknown. In June, Gerardo Ceballos at the National Autonomous University of Mexico â in collaboration with luminaries such as Paul Ehrlich of Stanford and Anthony Barnosky of the University of California, Berkeley â got headlines around the world when he used this approach to estimate that current global extinctions were âup to 100 times higher than the background rate.â
Ceballos looked at the recorded loss since 1900 of 477 species of vertebrates. That represented a loss since the start of the 20th century of around 1 percent of the 45,000 known vertebrate species. He compared this loss rate with the likely long-term natural âbackgroundâ extinction rate of vertebrates in nature, which one of his co-authors, Anthony Barnosky of UC Berkeley recently put at two per 10,000 species per 100 years. This background rate would predict around nine extinctions of vertebrates in the past century, when the actual total was between one and two orders of magnitude higher.
Ceballos went on to assume that this accelerated loss of vertebrate species would apply across the whole of nature, leading him to conclude that extinction rates today are âup to a hundred times higherâ than background.
And understand he is talking only about vertebrate species here, not plants and insects or invertebrate animals. If vertebrates are going extinct at 100 times the normal background rate, then that is something to get excited over.
Then you wrote: The media has grabbed on to the extreme numbers and produced a whole culture of doom and gloom. Action now can really make a difference because things are not as bad as advertised. Use that time wisely and make a difference.
Yes, yes goddammit, the media should stop concentrating on plants and bugs and concentrate on vertebrate animals, then they will realize that things are a lot worse than they realize.
10,000 years ago the total terrestrial vertebrate mass of humans and their animals were about .1% of the total. Wild terrestrial vertebrates made up 99.9% of the total. Today they make up less than 3% of the total and by 2050 they will make up less than 1% of the total. I am not referring to plants, insects, worms or bacteria here. I have no idea what their mass is or what it will be in 2050.
But in 2050 some of the large animals will still be found in zoos, as long as the zookeepers can keep them alive.
Fantastic, I predicted your cherry picking the article and taking it out of context. You have given a prime example of the fantastic extrapolation that is going on in the world of bio-doomers like Paul Ehrlich. Why not bring up Guy McPherson too?
I am merely trying to find some reality in this mess that is the so called extinction/biodiversity crisis. Unlike you I have no doomer agenda to fulfill. Our first major objective should be to determine reality, not run with the biggest numbers that head in a personally desired direction.
Projecting the doom of all invertebrates from snails? Hogwash.
Anyone who actually reads and researches that article will see my point. You however ignore the article and run 180 degrees the other way using an example of the pseudo-science that the article questions to bolster your agenda.
Fantastic, I predicted your cherry picking the article and taking it out of context.
Okay, quoting four paragraphs from the article is not cherry picking. Cherry picking would be quoting one sentence or part of one sentence. Also, nothing was taken out of context. The context before those four paragraphs was entirely different, it was about small islands, and the context after those four paragraphs was entirely different, it was about invertebrates.
Really Fish, I donât think you understand what the word âcontextâ means.
Why not bring up Guy McPherson too?
I have mentioned Guy McPherson many times in past comments. I have always called him a nutcase. He thinks humanity, and just about everything else will go extinct within a few years because of global warming. It was disingenuous of you to say that. It’s called “poisoning of the well”. If you don’t know what that means, look it up. And I mentioned no one in my post, I just copied and pasted from your article.
Projecting the doom of all invertebrates from snails? Hogwash.
Now you are just getting fucking ridiculous. I never thought you would stoop to such nonsense Fish. I have never projected any such thing and you goddamn well know it. I have written nothing, absolutely nothing, about the demise of invertebrates. I have always concentrated on vertebrates and you know that.
To insinuate that I am projecting the doom of invertebrates, which is exactly what that sentence does, is… is… Well, you know what it is. But I refuse to use the same verbiage that I would use if I were referring to Trump.
You have personally attacked me in just about every response so don’t start moaning when I direct my disdain at your cherry picking and misrepresentations.
Yep, understanding and reading comprehension is low here. You have no real desire to understand the science, the lack of data, the actual data or anything that does not fit your view.
Here is the data. Only about 800 extinctions have been documented in the past 400 years, according to data held by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN). Out of some 1.9 million recorded current or recent species on the planet, that represents less than a tenth of one percent.
Now according to some that same 800 species loss is happening every few days. Of course some people believe in flying saucers, aliens and don’t believe in man made climate change.
That is what we know now. 800 in 400 years, sounds like two a year to me. That is the bottom of the “background” extinction rate.
Yet people suck up to the 150 species lost a day or several species lost per minute myth that the media publishes.
I guess we missed those more than 50,000 species lost per year. Which by now would have eliminated most of the known species by now. Do you think we would not have noticed?
As they say, show me the evidence. Not just some cockimamy extrapolation, I want names and dates.
Guess what, you can’t even give me the first 150 out of a million or more, can you. It’s all logistical inference of the worst kind.
I am not talking population change or biomass, I am talking extinction.
Back up your claims with some actual data.
BTW, according to Erlich (the population doomer) we should already all be dead almost two decades ago. Guess that didn’t happen. But I notice a tendency to believe people who are dramatically wrong as long as their predictions fit their psychological needs. Maybe most people just like bad news, trained by the media.
More recently, scientists at the U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity concluded that: âEvery day, up to 150 species are lost.â That could be as much as 10 percent a decade.
But nobody knows whether such estimates are anywhere close to reality. They are based on computer modeling, and documented losses are tiny by comparison.
I am not saying that lots of species are not currently under threat, I am simply saying that thousands of species disappearing for every recorded loss is simply not believable nor is it in any way supported by fact. That is what the article said, that is what I say.
It’s a myth, a concoction and it makes science lose credibility.
Google: The number of species in the world
The total number of non-bacterial and non-archaeal species in the world has been estimated at 8.7 million, with previous estimates ranging from two million to 100 million.
You are hung up on species Fish. If it is impossible to document the total number of species in the world, it is sure as hell impossible to document how many of them go extinct each day or how many have gone extinct in the last 400 years. So all the figures you quote are totally meaningless.
We can, however, document what is happening right now. We can document how much the deserts are spreading each year. We can document how fast the water tables are dropping each year. We can document how many rivers do not reach the sea for most of the year. We can document how many acres of forest we are clearing each year. We can document how fast the world’s megafauna is disappearing. And we can document how fast the world’s coral reefs are dying, which means all the sea life who’s only niche is the coral will die also.
Fish, you don’t seem to have a clue as to what the hell is going on, hanging everything on the species count, which because of the vast uncertainty in that count, has become totally meaningless.
I have nothing more to say to you on this subject. You can have the last rant. I will not respond.
“Fish, you donât seem to have a clue as to what the hell is going on”
I know.
Good point Ron, cram a few apes into cages at zoos, feed them popcorn, send a photo on your cel phone to your âfriendsâ and donât spoil your day arguing about extinction. Even one critter in a cage means heâs not extinct doesnât it?
Meanwhile the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere increased at record speed last year to hit a level not seen for more than three million years. Obvious result, more days at the beach. Just enjoy the heat before the next ice age, as Xavier would say.
What in Hell do these guys know?
‘WE’RE SLEEPWALKING INTO A MASS EXTINCTION’ SAY SCIENTISTS
“Species that live in symbiosis with others, which often occur in the most delicately balanced and threatened marine ecosystems such as coral reefs, are the slowest to recover their diversity if damaged, according to a team of scientists.
Diversity takes millions of years to evolve, but can be damaged in the blink of an eye. We are already losing diversity that has never even been documented, so it’s vitally important to understand the mechanisms that drive evolution into new species.”
I don’t know how many species there are, or how many go extinct each day, or how much of that we are responsible for.
But it is clear that we have sequestered the vast majority of the biosphere for our own purpose, that being the placement of its products into our mouths, and to a lesser extent for purposes such as producing fiber, fuel or fodder for ‘our’ animals of burden/entertainment.
What we have left unplowed or ungrazed is generally small scrubby, dry or rocky remnants. Places with poor soil, windswept, steep or otherwise of low potential, and a few parks. These are the places that wild species have to hide. For many it is a tenuous existence.
Even if they don’t go extinct, overall it is a tragedy on the scale of previous mass extinctions. In a geologic timeframe, the ramifications may not be as severe, but in the timeframe of human existence it is as severe. It is shameful how little we value this earth, and life.
“It is shameful how little we value this earth, and life.”
Well cattle ranchers certainly value the land. The cattle sector of the Brazilian Amazon, incentivized by the international beef and leather trades, has been responsible for about 70% of all deforestation in the region, or about 14% of the world’s total annual deforestation, making it the world’s largest single driver of deforestation. By 1995, 70% of formerly forested land in the Amazon had been deforested, and 90% of that been converted to cattle ranching. Much of the remaining deforestation within the Amazon has resulted from farmers clearing land for small-scale subsistence agriculture or mechanized cropland producing soy, palm, and other crops.
Thanks, Doug, and Hickory, for the support. What is happening right now could not be more serious. To downplay the destruction we are causing our planet is almost criminal. I am always astonished at the “Don’t worry, Be happy” crowd that accuse us of spreading doom and gloom. I am at a total loss to understand their worldview. But I am not a psychologist, so I guess I will just have to live with that mystery.
But goddammit we are at 7.6 billion people and are deep, deep into overshoot. We are systematically wiping out all the wild megafauna on this earth. And anyone who cannot see that is just stone blind in my opinion.
But goddammit we are at 7.6 billion people and are deep, deep into overshoot. We are systematically wiping out all the wild megafauna on this earth. And anyone who cannot see that is just stone blind in my opinion.
As I believe I have often mentioned, it is not so much the loss of specific species of megafauna that upsets me the most. It is more the loss of entire ecosystems as characterized by the fact that just about every single coral reef on the planet is in very very deep trouble right now. If you want to talk about everyone being stone blind to an extremely alarming fact, that one definitely tops my list.
While understanding exactly how everything is linked may be beyond the general comprehension of most people, I can guarantee, that if all the tropical coral reefs die off and they are doing just that, you will lose plenty of marine megafauna such as whales, sharks and large pelagic, top of the food chain predators, such as tuna.
Then there are plenty of others. Next on my list is another canary in the coal mine, the also very alarming sign, that every major group of insects are disappearing world wide. Which will have a cascading domino ripple effect throughout multiple ecosystems and food webs leading to, you guessed it, more megafauna extinctions… And just to repeat Ron’s comment once again: “Anyone who cannot see that is just stone blind in my opinion”.
The disappearance of common species
Insect die-off: Even common species are becoming rare
Together with their colleagues from the Senckenberg Nature Research Society, scientists of the Technical University of Munich (TUM) were able to show that currently widespread insects are threatened with a serious decline in species diversity in the near future. The research team lists the fragmentation of habitats and the intensification of agriculture as reasons for the decline of these “generalists.” According to the study, published today in the scientific journal Biological Conservation, the genetic diversity among the examined butterfly species is also expected to decline sharply in the future — as a result, the insects will become more sensitive to environmental changes.
It is the highly complex and interconnected webs of life that are being imperiled and we simply cannot continue to keep pulling thread after thread from those tapestries and expect not to suffer major consequences in the form of mass extinctions at some time in the not too distant future.
“Anyone who cannot see that is just stone blind in my opinion!”
Cheers!
Fred — Think I posted this already somewhere. One pct not under threat, why get excited?
ONLY ONE PCT OF JAPAN’S BIGGEST CORAL REEF HEALTHY
âJapan’s biggest coral reef has not recovered from bleaching due to rising sea temperatures, with only one percent of the reef in a healthy condition, according to a government study. The overall volume of coral in Sekisei Lagoon in southwestern Japan near Okinawa had already plunged by 80 percent since the late 1980s due to rising water temperatures and damage caused by coral-eating starfish.â
Yeahsss my precioussses! I’m quite sure that we can all rest assured that by the end of the next warm season, the remaining 1%, will all be pretty much toast as well!
To be frank, one really can not discuss mass extinction without a grasp of ecosystem functioning and connectivity.
When I look at coral bleaching and die off of an entire reef system such as The Great Barrier Reef in Australia I think of it being akin to a massive power grid failure affecting a large metropolitan area say New York City.
It affects everything! Electricity, communications, the subway system, internet access, the underlying economic impacts of ATMs being down, the stock market, banking, gas stations without fuel, no food being brought into the supermarkets, healthcare and hospital systems down, total economic and social chaos! Not to mention the ripple effects of all the Interstate and international commerce which are disrupted as well!
The city might survive that for a few days but if it goes on for months and then happens repeatedly year after year, it’s basically game over! Same with the coral reef ecosystems. They are getting hit over and over again.
It is basically game over and I don’t think we yet have a clue as to the repercussions.
The Great Barrier Reef experienced a catastrophic die-off following marine heat wave, study shows
A three-year marine heat wave extended from June 2014 to May 2017, with warm ocean waters wreaking havoc on some of the worldâs most valuable ecosystems: the coral reefs.
For the Great Barrier Reef, located off the coast of Australia, the marine heat wave resulted in severe bleaching events in 2016 and 2017. It was the first time consecutive events have been observed at the Great Barrier Reef. More than two-thirds of the reef was reported to be damaged.
A study published online on Nature, the International Journal of Science, on Thursday, April 19, shows that corals on the northern Great Barrier Reef experienced a catastrophic die-off following the 2016 marine heat wave.
Abstract Global warming is rapidly emerging as a universal threat to ecological integrity and function, highlighting the urgent need for a better understanding of the impact of heat exposure on the resilience of ecosystems and the people who depend on them1. Here we show that in the aftermath of the record-breaking marine heatwave on the Great Barrier Reef in 20162, corals began to die immediately on reefs where the accumulated heat exposure exceeded a critical threshold of degree heating weeks, which was 3â4â°C-weeks. After eight months, an exposure of 6â°C-weeks or more drove an unprecedented, regional-scale shift in the composition of coral assemblages, reflecting markedly divergent responses to heat stress by different taxa. Fast-growing staghorn and tabular corals suffered a catastrophic die-off, transforming the three-dimensionality and ecological functioning of 29% of the 3,863 reefs comprising the worldâs largest coral reef system. Our study bridges the gap between the theory and practice of assessing the risk of ecosystem collapse, under the emerging framework for the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Ecosystems3, by rigorously defining both the initial and collapsed states, identifying the major driver of change, and establishing quantitative collapse thresholds. The increasing prevalence of post-bleaching mass mortality of corals represents a radical shift in the disturbance regimes of tropical reefs, both adding to and far exceeding the influence of recurrent cyclones and other local pulse events, presenting a fundamental challenge to the long-term future of these iconic ecosystems.
Good Luck!
. I am always astonished at the âDonât worry, Be happyâ crowd that accuse us of spreading doom and gloom.
Oddly enough, you and Gonefishing are in pretty close agreement, from different directions. Youâre saying things are dire, we need to recognize that. And, heâs saying that things are very serious, and we need to recognize that and take action before it becomes dire.
“….before it becomes dire.” Are you saying things haven’t become dire yet? What levels of CO2 (and methane) = dire. What is a dire level of human population? 10 billion? 12 billion?
Focus, everyone, focus. Iâm talking about Ron and GF, and what theyâre saying. Donât worry about the exact wording, like the word âdireâ. Just look at their overall arguments.
My point: theyâre disagreeing about the exact state of things, but both are saying that thereâs no room for complacency.
Stating that thereâs no hope is the best way to protect the status quo of FF, pollution and environmental decline. After all, if thereâs no hope, why do anything?
Yep, to take those false numbers to heart would quench efforts to action. We see this in some major environmental groups.
I am just trying to get an actual assessment of the current extinction rate. It appears way over inflated by many and high rates are very questionable.
Now threats and population reductions are rampant. If those threats continue much longer we could enter an actual large extinction event. But we are not there yet, so action is still valid and strongly needed. Playing the gloom and doom card is very harmful to those actions, especially when it is wrong.
I am just trying to get an actual assessment of the current extinction rate. It appears way over inflated by many and high rates are very questionable.
I agree that it is extremely difficult to get actual numbers. This site might be a helpful starting point:
In the past 500 years, we know of approximately 1,000 species that have gone extinct, from the woodland bison of West Virginia and Arizona’s Merriam’s elk to the Rocky Mountain grasshopper, passenger pigeon and Puerto Rico’s Culebra parrot â but this doesn’t account for thousands of species that disappeared before scientists had a chance to describe them [4]. Nobody really knows how many species are in danger of becoming extinct. Noted conservation scientist David Wilcove estimates that there are 14,000 to 35,000 endangered species in the United States, which is 7 to 18 percent of U.S. flora and fauna. The IUCN has assessed roughly 3 percent of described species and identified 16,928 species worldwide as being threatened with extinction, or roughly 38 percent of those assessed. In its latest four-year endangered species assessment, the IUCN reports that the world won’t meet a goal of reversing the extinction trend toward species depletion by 2010 [5].
What’s clear is that many thousands of species are at risk of disappearing forever in the coming decades.
But to be honest you really almost have to be a biologist with a thorough knowledge of all plant and animal kingdoms to really get useful information out of it. It is definitely not a site that is very user friendly to the average lay person.
Support The IUCN Red List
Experts across the globe have assessed over 79,800 species on the IUCN Red List – but more needs to be done. Our goal is to assess 160,000 species by 2020 to guide vital conservation.
We live in a time of extinction. As some charismatic creatures are being saved in zoos, captive breeding facilities, and cryogenic banks, a multitude of others are disappearing as they are disregarded or actively targeted for destruction. Who should we love in a time of extinction? What practices of care can keep those who we love in the world? Can ongoing ecological catastrophes be stemmed â or reversed â with technological or scientific interventions? If it is technically possible, should woolly mammoths and passenger pigeons be reanimated? Should unloved animals, like ticks and mosquitoes, be edited out of ecosystems?
Panel discussion: Kevin Esvelt (MIT), Beth Shapiro (UC Santa Cruz), James Hatley (Salisbury), Genese Sodikoff (Rutgers), Ashley Dawson (City University of New York), Maria Whiteman (Rice), Rafi Youatt (New School), David Wilcove (Princeton), and Graham Burnett (Princeton).
I’ve thought that there is a serious gap in the knowledge and data on species and extinction rates myself.
However, it’s impossible to know this with any certainty until we know a few things.
1. Roughly how many species are there in the world based on an actual attempt to count them all (which has, to my knowledge, never been done).
2. What is the extinction status of all species over a span of years, so as to determine the rate of extinction. Again, never been done to my knowledge.
However, since we’re talking about millions of species (many or perhaps most of which are unknown), and enormous amount of work it would be to check regularly (if not annual) to determine whether they’ve gone extinct vs. being locally extirpated, well, it seems to me that we’ll never really know the answers to items 1 and 2 in any rigourous fashion.
The end result will be a continual nagging skepticism of any numbers that come out on the topic.
However, it’s clearly and obvious to anyone who bothers to look with brains intact and an open mind that massive changes are occurring planetwide and that the space for lifeforms to exist in is dramatically shrinking. Human influence is everywhere on Earth and we tend not to encourage the well being of other life forms (except cows, chickens, pigs, wheat, rice and corn along with a few others), so the future of the rest of nature is pretty dim.
But we are an unthinking, uncontrollable force of nature. Something was going to a change agent on planet Earth. Why not us? The first self regarding force of nature in the universe (of which we’re aware). Don’t you feel special? I do. It’s pretty neato, wouldn’t you say?
If were lucky we will go back to our historical population of 1-10 million.
Of course we had a basically intact planet, with huge resources, and great biodiversity.
That is obviously not the case now.
Like the passenger pigeon, we will go from a huge population to extinction in a small number of years possibly.
(we just about went extinct about 70,000 years ago– 10,000 or less, possibly less than 2000– our genetic record is for all to see)
1. Roughly how many species are there in the world based on an actual attempt to count them all (which has, to my knowledge, never been done).
While the first part of my highlighted text may indeed be true, the second part is a patently false statement!
Biologists have been at this task for quite some time and are constantly updating the techniques and tools at their disposal to refine the state of the art, and accuracy of their numbers.
Inordinate Fondness Multiplied and Redistributed: the Number of Species on Earth and the New Pie of Life
Abstract: The number of species on Earth is one of the most fundamental numbers in science, but one that remains highly uncertain. Clearly, more species exist than the present number of formally described species (approximately 1.5 million), but projected species numbers differ dramatically among studies. Recent estimates range from about 2 million species to approximately 1 trillion, but most project around 11 million species or fewer. Numerous studies have focused on insects as a major component of overall richness, and many have excluded other groups, especially non-eukaryotes. Here, we re-estimate global biodiversity. We also estimate the relative richness of the major clades of living organisms, summarized as a âPie of Life.â Unlike many previous estimates, we incorporate morphologically cryptic arthropod species from molecular-based species delimitation. We also include numerous groups of organisms that have not been simultaneously included in previous estimates, especially those often associated with particular insect host species (including mites, nematodes, apicomplexan protists, microsporidian fungi, and bacteria). Our estimates suggest that there are likely to be at least 1 to 6 billion species on Earth. Furthermore, in contrast to previous estimates, the new Pie of Life is dominated by bacteria (approximately 70â90% of species) and insects are only one of many hyperdiverse groups.
Near where some of my family live there’s a pretty piece of rough shoreline which has some sort of fennel and a couple of moth species that live off of it. It’s only a few hundred yards I think, but that’s it, they haven’t been found anywhere else. There are probably places like that all over, many not recognised. This weekends cyclone in Oman hit an island with many unique species, I’d bet not all identified, and some may have been rendered extinct by the destruction there.
There are probably places like that all over, many not recognised.
Good point!
I don’t have a link handy but have seen studies that show completely different ecosystems on identical species of trees a few hundred yards apart in a tropical rain forest.
We are talking all the epiphytes, orchids, mosses, lichens, ferns, bromeliads, fungi, tree frogs, lizards, spiders, insects species, entire ant colonies all different and uniquely adapted to one single tree’s environment.
So when you cut down that one tree you take out an entire ecosystem consisting of thousands of unique organisms, some of which may not even live on an identical tree a hundred yards away.
What the majority of people value the most is being able to earn a decent enough living to raise their families and buy the necessities they need. If these aren’t noble enough values, what else could be?
You also want to protect your family from pollution: to keep your children from getting asthma, your wife from getting cancer, and your parents from getting COPD.
You want to protect your children from going to war to protect our oil supply, and losing life, limbs and sanity. You also want to reduce your household taxes by $5,000 per year, by not having to provide military security for oil.
Well said. Protect the environment means protecting the family.
Which you can’t do if you don’t have functioning healthy ecosystems. So the most noble value of all, is first and foremost, making sure we have those healthy ecosystems. That is the ultimate basic need.
Nothing wrong with those goals Dan.
Except when billions of people are working on it, there is a catastrophe in the making.
A very painful chapter is going to be very hard to avoid.
More alarmist blather, who needs coral anyway? What we really need is lower gas prices.
GREAT BARRIER REEF CORAL BLEACHING HAS STARTED EARLY
âIf coral bleaching isnât on your radar yet, it will be soon. According to Stephanie Wear, The Nature Conservancyâs director of coral reef conservation, recent steamy temperatures indicate a rough year ahead for the worldâs coral reefs. The worldâs coral reefs are reeling from the worst recorded global coral bleaching event, in which the Great Barrier Reef was hit in both 2016 and 2017. Between the two events, half the reefâs coral is thought to have been killed.â
Oh, I was just in the process of saying pretty much the same above!
Fools seldom differ. đ
Nick — is this a dire problem yet? Even if you don’t think so dolphins, whales and birds might not agree. Or, is it only humans that matter?
THE OCEANS ARE DROWNING IN PLASTIC — AND NO ONE’S PAYING ATTENTION
âImagine an area 34 times the size of Manhattan. Now imagine it covered ankle-deep in plastic waste â piles of soda bottles and plastic bags, takeout containers by the mile, drinking straws as far as the eye can see. Thatâs a total of about 19 billion pounds of garbage. And according to one of the best estimates available, thatâs how much plastic waste ends up in our oceans every year. âWeâre being overwhelmed by our waste,â said Jenna Jambeck, an environmental engineer who led the 2015 study that determined this staggering number. According to Jambeckâs research, this figure is on track to double by 2025 unless something is done, swiftly and at a global scale, to stem the tide of garbage.â
Yes, this is a serious and urgent problem with a simple solution.
Just stop dumping it in rivers and oceans.
NY city did.
Where Does New York City’s Trash Go? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6LzB6rMDtA
“simple solution?” Then I’d hate to see what happens when the solution isn’t simple.
Researchers report that about 4 million to 12 million metric tons of plastic washed offshore in 2010 alone, or about 1.5% to 4.5% of the worldâs total plastic productionâenough to cover every foot of coastline on the planet. And, thatâs just the beginning of the problems, the team says, as scientists still donât know where more than 99% of ocean plastic debris ends upâand what impact itâs having on marine life and the human food supply. Whatâs more, the authors predict that the annual amount of plastic waste tumbling out to sea will more than double in the next 10 years.
âWitnesses have watched in horror seabirds choosing plastic pieces, red, pink, brown and blue, because of their similarity to their own food. It is estimated that of the 1.5 million Laysan Albatrosses which inhabit Midway, all of them have plastic in their digestive system; for one third of the chicks, the plastic blockage is deadly, coining Midway Atoll as âalbatross graveyardsâ by five media artists, led by photographer Chris Jordan, who recently filmed and photographed the catastrophic effects of the plastic pollution there.â
Mass production of plastics, which began just six decades ago, has accelerated so rapidly that it has created 8.3 billion metric tonsâmost of it in disposable products that end up as trash. If that seems like an incomprehensible quantity, it is. Even the scientists who set out to conduct the worldâs first tally of how much plastic has been produced, discarded, burned or put in landfills, were horrified by the sheer size of the numbers.
Gyre, 2009 8×11 feet, in three vertical panels Depicts 2.4 million pieces of plastic, equal to the estimated number of pounds of plastic pollution that enter the world’s oceans every hour. All of the plastic in this image was collected from the Pacific Ocean.
Click the image to zoom.
OK, I give up, it’s an impossible problem and will never be solved.
Florida brewery unveils six-pack rings that spare sea turtles, not snare them
By Thomas Leavy
The threat of plastic waste to marine wildlife is well known; the most ubiquitous image of its impact is that of seafaring turtles and gulls ensnared in the net-like rings that yoke six-packs of canned beverages together. Now one Florida brewery is rolling out a solution for making them safer.
Saltwater Brewery, based in Delray Beach, is working with the startup E6PR (short for Eco Six Pack Rings) on a “sustainable way of handling cans.” The project is a collaborative effort between New York ad agency We Believers, Mexican biodegradable supplier Entelequia, and private investors from the beverage packing industry.
Manufactured with “by-product waste and other materials,” the reimagined rings will be compostable when disposed of properly, and biodegradable if they end up being littered.
Sure but………
ARCTIC SEA ICE JAMMED WITH PLASTICS FROM PACIFIC GARBAGE PATCH
Sea ice from the remote Arctic Ocean may look clear and pristine, but up to 12,000 tiny pieces of plastic may be embedded in a single chunk small enough to sit on your hand, researchers have found.
GREAT PACIFIC GARBAGE PATCH IS 16 TIMES BIGGER THAN PREVIOUSLY ESTIMATED
âA new study involving scientists from around the world suggests there are more than 79,000 tonnes of ocean plastic in a 1.6 million square kilometre area of the North Pacific Ocean, often referred to as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. That’s 16 times more than previous estimates.â
Hmm, maybe we can cover the Arctic Ocean with Styrofoam, and restore some of the lost albedo /sarc
Don’t give the oil heads ideas.
Styrofoam, brilliant. Geoengineering solutions are everywhere. How long will it take for people to stop moaning about climate change and doing something?
Get the contract and make yourself a bundle Fred. Letâs see, arctic sea area 14,056,000 square km timesâŚâŚ
7 million kilograms of plastic in the Arctic ocean. Shame shame.
How long will it take for people to stop moaning about climate change and doing something?
LMAO at the irony and hypocrisy of you asking that question. đ đ
It’s even funnier that you’re too stupid to recognize sarcasm, even when it is blatantly staring you in the face! Do all you trolls have severe brain damage or are you just a particularly extreme outlier on the left side of the IQ bell curve?!
I like it, about time too. It is not just turtles but land animals too. If I nave a 6 pack I always cut open the rings before it goes in the rubbish. My big regret, here, is there is no glass recycling – and I have bottles to throw out.
NAOM
Longstanding and serious problem. It’s mostly originating from countries which have no waste disposal laws where everything gets dumped, though also from littering in countries like the US. The underlying problem, however, is plastics: they’re not biodegradable, with the exception of the nylons where bacteria have evolved to eat them. If it were only long-use hard plastics being littered the volume would be low, so single-use plastics really should be outlawed.
Plus I hope some mad scientists engineer bacteria which digest polyester, acrylic, styrofoam, etc…
EU is looking at banning single use plastics (hope that doesn’t include syringes). Biodegradeables can go too far like the reusable shopping bag, that I used to have, that was made of them. Turned to powder in my hand!
NAOM
How academics and the media can build a nationwide and harmful myth. Now we know that it was the enactment of legal abortions that stopped the adolescent crime wave in its tracks.
There’s substantial evidence at this point, though, suggesting a link between leaded gasoline and the adolescent crime wave, not abortion. Actually, islandboy might be interested to know Jamaica is now the most recent country on the very long list of countries showing the connection. Unsurprisingly, that country was relatively late to ban leaded gasoline and so the link to violence took longer to show up.
Keep in mind lead from batteries can NOT be econonically recycled into storage batteries. It’s over for lead use for energy storage… At least sourced in the New World North. Other chems are fractional cost.
Leaded gasoline? BS, I didn’t see those characteristics in my classmates, the older kids, the young adults and they all grew up in the lead plume. It’s a case of being raised unwanted, in poor bad homes and often being dumped into the system. Abortions stopped most of that, as shown by data. If you have a totally dysfunctional and horrible life as a child, odds are that that person will be dysfunctional also.
That same generation you say was lead addled brought you the modern world of internet, space travel, computers, cell phones, and many other tech, medical and science advances. So if they were all addled by lead, why are the following generations not supersmart instead of being riddled with ADHD and other learning disabilities?
My point is, tetraethyl lead was everywhere and should have effected everyone, it didn’t. On the other side of the coin, abortions are done by those in bad circumstances and unable to or do not want to raise a child, focusing the problem to a narrow set of the population.
They both had an effect. Lead’s is about twice that for abortion by the wiki article report on one study, and more for violent crime and murder (I think the big murder countries in Central America were very late in getting rid of lead).
Colombia was the most edgy place in the 70’s, but El Salvador and Guatemala were not for the casual vacationer– in fact vacationers were a liability.
If you actually had a return date, you were a vacationer.
George, maybe you can explain why Great Britain has such a high rate of violent crime. I was surprised when I found this graph.
Fish, why does the US have the most prisoners of any developed country in the worldââand the largest total prison population of any nation? Private prisons for profit?
Doug, you know exactly why and this has been discussed on this site before.
I was actually looking for information, nothing to do with nation bashing.
Yes, the US legal system sucks bigtime, is way behind many Euro nations and is being used politically.
Not sure what the people publishing the violent crime graph did.
I just checked Austria.
Population 2009: 8.343 Million (says Google)
divided by 100,000 = 83.43
eurostat says (1) 47,600 violent crimes recorded by Police in 2009.
Good call. The internet is full of undefined information.
Gerry, Looking up âCrime Index for Country 2018â Austria, on one list, was 110th. Japan came out on “top” at 115th. I’ve spent a lot of time in Austria, love the place, NEVER felt unsafe. Too busy enjoying the beer maybe. Vienna is to die for, because of the music, but usually end up in Innsbruck đ
I’m not much for sweets, but have indulged in a slice or two of Sachertorte topped with whipped cream, while stopping for coffee en route from Munich to Budapest. đ
I doubt if all those countries report crime the same way. UK changed its method sometime around 2000 and rates went up by a factor of 3 or 4 if I remember correctly. The most reliable and usually quoted numbers are from an annual survey – i.e. they just ask a sample of people if they have been subject to actual or threatened violence in the last year. This is a lot higher than police reports, though the difference is narrowing. Slapping, poking, racial slurs if they feel threatening, “I’ll rip yer effing ‘ead off”, etc. all count – I think it’s defined a lot narrower elsewhere. Numbers had been falling since 1990s, especially for alcohol related issues, but I think that changed in the recent couple of years, mainly because of internecine drug gang violence , which is especially noticeable in knife assault and murder. The gangs are postcode related, I think there’s a google map for London gang areas. There are huge amounts of data on the government statistical web site if you want to investigate further.
Yeah, probably just how violent crimes are defined and reported.
” Eight in 10 adults had not experienced any of the crimes asked about in our survey in the latest year”
I would second George’s point that it is the recording, British bureaucracy. Also crimes are rated differently in different countries, take USA with misdemeanor and felony whereas UK it is just a crime. Mexico might count high overall but much of the violence is within small groups of the population, the general level is much lower than that within gangs (gang on gang) and in the drug business (client punished for debt). I feel safer here than in the UK! There are US cities with higher rates than Mexico but it is funny to see gringos panicking about crime, here, when they come from certain US cities!
NAOM
Did you know that the UK banned leaded gasoline *over a decade* after the US? It did. For the UK, the end of leaded gasoline started in 1999, with phaseout only *started* in 1982.
The US started the phaseout in the 1970s and had reduced it by 91% by the end of 1986, so that it was insignificant by 1995.
So the UK had leaded gasoline later than the US. We should expect the UK crime rate to start to drop sharlply starting in 2017, about 18 years after the UK leaded gasoline ban.
By the way, Rick Nevin *predicted the Venezuela crime waves* based on the leaded gasoline situation in Venezuela. *In advance*. And he was *correct*. This is proven.
Geoff, I see the correlation but don’t agree with the causation. If lead was the problem then everyone born before 1975 would have been of lower intelligence and super-violent. Only a small portion of the population was (and is ) that way.
It appears much more likely that the effects of lead are small for the general population, but may be just enough to push an already dysfunctional person further over the edge.
Since the introduction of legal abortion and the reduction of many pollutants were essentially simultaneous there is no way to fully separate them. My view is that a horrible upbringing is the major factor since the general population was not much affected by lead.
At the same time society had changed to a much more sexually free mode (lots of unwanted pregnancies) and the rise of drug use occurred, creating a complex set of conditions that did not exist in the 1940’s and 1950’s.
If lead was the problem then everyone born before 1975 would have been of lower intelligence and super-violent.
That’s not how this kind of contamination works. People who work with the products, live near a factory or mine, live near roadways, work in gas stations, all get higher doses. Also, some people are more resistant to the effects of chemicals. There are a lot of factors that can affect outcomes.
Please back up your claims on that with some research showing how “this kind of contamination works”.
From Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_epidemiology) and only because I don’t have time to fill you in on an established branch of science. It branches off into Occupational Epidemiology, which I was introduced to as part of my training to be a Health and Safety rep some 30 years ago. Environmental epidemiology is a branch of epidemiology concerned with the discovery of the environmental exposures that contribute to or protect against injuries, illnesses, developmental conditions, disabilities, and deaths; and identification of public health and health care actions to manage the risks associated with harmful exposures. Environmental epidemiology studies external factors that affect the incidence, prevalence, and geographic range of health conditions. These factors may be naturally occurring or may be introduced into environments where people live, work, and play. Environmental exposures are involuntary and thus generally exclude occupational exposures (covered by occupational epidemiology) and voluntary exposures such as active smoking, medications, and diet.
I also have at hand the textbook “Occupational Health and Safety: A Training Manual”. Page 34 shows a pretty common map to explain how Environmental Epidemiology works: it shows lung cancer occurrences in areas adjacent to a steel mill in Hamilton, Ontario (the rates are 15% higher than comparable areas). I’m not going to teach you a course in this: take my word that there are people who study this stuff.
I don’t necessarily agree with the conclusions of the lead studies (haven’t read ’em, so I can’t comment) but your argument is absolutely baseless and shows complete ignorance of the field.
Please produce nominal exposure levels to tetraethyl lead during the period in question, LD 50, TLV and TWA, mutagenic effects and developmental toxicity.
Do you even know the reaction products from using tetraethyl lead in gasoline/
To which I say:
Bite me.
You can’t follow the basic science, and I said I wasn’t teaching a course.
You want to test his theories, be my guest.
Look it up yourself.
One factor is the increase in traffic. Go back to the 40s, 50s there were far fewer cars about so less pollution. Also ISTR researchers found a direct correlation with proximity to roads.
NAOM
Wait, the problem started in the 40’s and 50’s. That means the violent actors were born in the Depression times, WWII the Korean War, Vietnam War era, and radiation from multiple nuclear bomb tests. Can’t have anything to do with hard times, broken homes, missing fathers, drugs, increasing population or anything else, nahhh, no way. It was also during the height of the pollution plume. Wow, we can correlate all kinds of things.
Oh no, I grew up right near a road and so did all my classmates and friends. In fact we spent a lot of time on and near roads. Everyone had one or two cars per family. No one that I know of did any violent crime.
Of course we had large chemical factories in the area, maybe that counteracted the effects of the toxic lead. đ
Shark attacks and ice cream sales trend together also.
Correlation is not causation. Repeat that one hundred times.
Many occurrences have multiple causes. Repeat that one thousand times.
You’re using so many fallacies I won’t go through them individually.
I’ll just ask you to look at the work of Rick Nevin, which shows astoundingly good correlations, *with the correct time lag*, between childhood lead exposure and crime rates.
Then I’ll ask you to look at the neurobiology evidence: we literally know the mechanism by which lead causes crime, by making people dumb and causing them to have poor impulse control.
We have a known neurobiology causation, supported by hundreds of correlations across countries, across neighborhoods; enough to remove nearly all other confounding variables, including time, because leaded gasoline was introduced and removed at different times in different places.
This is PROVEN. Read *all* of Rick Nevin’s work and *all* of Kevin Drum’s articles on the topic; you’ll figure it out. The prime cause of the crime waves was lead.
Also, you can track separate crime spikes linked to lead
(1) by each country, by each city, by each neighborhood
(2) for lead paint, lead pipes, and leaded gasoline separately (gasoline is the biggest due to more bioavailability and higher quantities)
Oh, and people in prison for violent crimes (but not for crimes like fraud!) have higher lead levels recorded in their bones and teeth than the average population.
There is nothing else like this in the social sciences.
Overwhelming piles of correlations plus a known neurobiological mechanism is causation. Repeat that one thousance times.
Learn to use spellchecker.
Apparently you are saying that upbringing has no effect on development or social behavior.
You are also saying that the general population was not affected by the products of burning tetraethyl lead since there was no recorded effects for the bulk of the population.
You do know that lead is still a major exposure hazard through much of the US. Yet have not explained how this is not correlated in the studies.
Confirmation bias.
GoneFishing, the lead-crime correlation has been proven in other countries which did not introduce legal abortion at the same time (abortion is still illegal in Ireland, and THEY have a solid lead-crime correlation).
Yes, other things affect intelligence and impulse control. Lead exposure in early childhood makes both worse for everyone, but some people started with more intelligence (genetically) or more impulse control (genetically) and some people learned more or practiced more impulse control. So it increases the percentage of violent crimes, but doesn’t “make everyone a criminal”.
Though the men who worked in the tetraethyl lead factories, who got extremely high exposures, went from being perfectly nice family men to ax-murdering their wives, as documented in the 1920s… so there’s that.
“Lead exposure in early childhood makes both worse for everyone, but some people started with more intelligence (genetically) or more impulse control (genetically) and some people learned more or practiced more impulse control. So it increases the percentage of violent crimes, but doesnât âmake everyone a criminalâ.”
So you have proof that IQ fell for the general population during that time and recovered afterward. I would like to see that. Do you also have data on an increase in kidney failures and subsequent recovery?
“Yes, other things affect intelligence and impulse control”
Glad you agree there were simultaneous multiple factors at work.
Yeah, Rick Nevin and several other researchers (well-documented by Kevin Drum, who’s linked to most of the studies) have done massive work on the lead-crime link.
It is the strongest result I have ever seen in the social sciences. It’s proven at this point.
As Population Growth Slows, Populism Surges
By Philip Auerswald and Joon Yun
The last time that populism â what we broadly define as political movements that ostensibly set the interests of âordinary peopleâ against elites as well as an âotherâ â swept across Europe and the United States was marked by the same combination of slow economic and fertility growth that today prevails in advanced industrialized countries in the West and Asia.
Economies have recently picked up some steam, but not before nearly a decade of sluggish economic growth â and, in most of the world, declining fertility rates. The United States is no exception: The fertility rate among Americans has hit a 30-year low.
The shift from global population growth toward population decline is emerging as one of the least appreciated forces that is, along with urbanization and digital disruption, upending the political and economic status quo.
In the worldâs largest cities, where populations are densely concentrated and growing, economies are generally thriving and cosmopolitanism is embraced. Where populations are sparse or shrinking, usually in rural places and small cities, economies are often stagnant, and populism sells.
Why does it hold such appeal in these places? Nativist, nationalist rhetoric â âMake America (or Whatever Other Country) Great Againâ â appeals because it promises to restore the rightful economic and cultural stature of âcommon peopleâ in relation to a decadent urban intelligentsia. In Hungary, Austria, the Czech Republic, Poland, Thailand and Turkey, populism has been fed by the juxtaposition of rural population and economic decline against the growth and increasing prosperity of the largest cities.
I don’t think these two guys have ever lived in any big cities. As a native of Sao Paulo, population 12 million, and a long time resident of The Big Apple, population 8.5 million, I can tell you there is plenty of extreme poverty in both of those places.
Regardless this is all still based on the myths of the possibility of perpetual growth and neoliberal economics, clashing with the limits of growth and physical reality. We are already in deep population overshoot and there will probably be some economic contraction and possibly population die off before too long. Populism or nativism sure as hell won’t fix any of the underlying problems.
Growth, both of the economy and the population can not continue forever.
CANADA’S DIRTY SECRET: CANADA LEADS THE DEVELOPED WORLD IN PER CAPITA PRODUCTION OF GARBAGE.
Asked if there is an ultimate solution to proliferating waste, Hoornweg pauses and says quietly, âPeople have to buy less.â The problem, he adds, is that âour economy is based on endless growth, endless production of what our landfills tell us is basically junk. The stuff wouldn’t be in them if it wasn’t junk! I mean, nobody wants our economy to fail; we can’t tell the companies that employ Canadians to just stop producing stuff, or the stores to stop selling it. Then again, our economy is already failing us in the way it messes up the planet in the service of all this crap. The cycle just keeps going: manufacture, consume, discard.â
Meanwhile back in Toronto, it is six in the morning. Eight hundred waste collection vehicles are already on the streets â emptying green bins, gathering garbage, collecting bottles, cans and newspapers. At Green Lane, the first 18-wheeler has arrived with its 37 tonnes of rubbish. On the landfill’s sea of rotting garbage, the Caterpillars are roaring, the methane is spinning into the wells. By 7, the Canada Fibers plant on Arrow Road is rumbling with beer cans and ketchup bottles. The transfer stations are all but bursting.
By 9:30, the malls are open. The first wave of shoppers moves purposefully toward the televisions and yoga pants and electronic gadgetry. And lawn ornaments and fleece blankets and revolutionary new kitchenware.
Because advertising is powerful.
Because consumerism is intoxicating.
Because retail therapy is easier and less costly than planetary therapy.
Well old chap, just don’t forget to pack a picnic basket with crumpets and orange marmalade and a thermos with piping hot tea. Then you’re off to do some ‘proper’ off roading, through the soggy bogs of the Wilds of Wales, chasing sheep up the hills in your Electric Range Rover conversion, Cheerio! đ
Flexible concrete, what will they think of next? Mother nature helped with this one, modeling abalone shells. It’s also adaptive, with increased thermal capacity, heals itself, and neutralize pollutants. Smart concrete for smart building.
We call the resulting ductile concrete engineered cementitious composite (ECC) or strain-hardening cementitious composite. It can deform up to 3 to 5 percent in tension before it fails, which gives it 300 to 500 times more tensile strain capacity than normal concrete. This allows a slab of it to undergo a lot of bending without fracturing into pieces, earning it the nickname of flexible or bendable concrete.
ECC was invented at the University of Michigan, and it has now acquired a following of hundreds of universities and industrial entities conducting further engineering research and technology development.
We call the resulting ductile concrete engineered cementitious composite (ECC) or strain-hardening cementitious composite. It can deform up to 3 to 5 percent in tension before it fails, which gives it 300 to 500 times more tensile strain capacity than normal concrete. This allows a slab of it to undergo a lot of bending without fracturing into pieces, earning it the nickname of flexible or bendable concrete.
Yep! Absolutely. I’ve posted this a few times already but what the hell, I’ll post it once again.
Dr. Alysia Garmulewicz specifically talks about the structure of abalone shells. She also talks about 3D printing of concrete poles of variable density from the base to its tip based on how palm trees grow.
The Biggest Revolution in 3D Printing is Yet to Come https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_wHT-FsCJjM
I know we talk a lot about depressing topics such as mass biological extinctions and I admit I have my own serious doubts about the the chances that human civilization will stick around even another century, given the paths we are currently on. But, and it is a big but, there are multiple converging disruptive technologies that could be real game changers in the near future. So it ain’t really over till the fat lady sings.
The global environmental sustainability problem is so large, complex, novel, urgent, and its solution so difficult that solving the problem entails creation of a new paradigm. Just conceiving of the problem requires a fundamentally new way of thinking. Before The Limits to Growth defined the problem in 1972, there was little realization that human system growth could not be infinite. So called “progress” cannot go on forever. The environment cannot be tamed and subjugated, as mankind has done before to everything else that stood in the way of “progress.”
Kuhn Cycle diagramEnvironmentalism finds itself in the Pre-science step of the Kuhn Cycle. It lacks a valid paradigm for solving its central problem of sustainability. Yet the field’s members are assuming they are in the Normal Science step, where a field has a paradigm that works well enough for that field to be called a bona fide science. This is a grave error.
Civilization as a whole is in the Model Crisis step. The model it uses to run itself, mostly free market democracy, a collection of national governments, and some central coordination like the UN and the World Bank, is no longer capable of solving the world’s top problems.
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While totally into abalone shells ( and yum! and fun to harvest)— 3d printing? Not so much– it is actually very mature, but with little application.
I had hopes, and even did some real time applications with it, but I’m still waiting.
Material seems the big issue.
While Tesla is very mature (10 years and still majorly bleeding), 3d printing has been around even longer.
Best of luck to both.
3d printing? Not so muchâ it is actually very mature, but with little application.
I had hopes, and even did some real time applications with it, but Iâm still waiting.
Material seems the big issue.
Um, did you even watch the youtube video I linked to? It’s all about materials science and developing a materials palette appropriate for 3D printing applications.
But you are right about it being quite mature. I was working with it in prototyping for the toy industry back in the mid to late 90’s and the available materials palette was pretty much limited to plastics. Things have changed quite dramatically since those early days…
We shall see– I was a early adapter, and did a bit of work with them last year.
They still have not adapted well.
But we shall see– I hope for the best.
The next solution has always been right around the corner, but it doesn’t seem to capture needed market share.
The next solution has always been right around the corner, but it doesnât seem to capture needed market share.
Blame the ‘Market’! đ
But seriously, if you go back to the video, Dr. Alysia Garmulewicz is very careful to make clear that she is not interested in creating the next ‘SOLUTION’. It is more about the convergence of 3D technology with advances in materials science based on an engineering of natural materials, which is bound to reach a tipping point and a consequent adoption following an S curve.
It is a disruption waiting to happen. Pretty much akin to what Tony Seba has talked about, for example why a 600 dollar smart phone was simultaneously released by both Apple and Google in 2007 and not in 2005 or 2009.
Biomimicry: Harmonizing Product and Nature With Advanced Modeling and Simulation
Thu, 01/18/2018 – 4:12pm
by Sean McGee, Product Marketing Manager for BIOVIA Dassault Systèmes
The challenges that todayâs scientists and engineers face have evolved beyond answering a single question. Everything from improving materials performance to uncovering new drugs to designing new technologies must not only succeed technologically – it must also minimize its impact on the environment. Creating a sustainable world is both a noble and necessary goal, yet we do not need to reinvent the wheel to achieve it. It has already been done. Nature has created a vast toolbox of context-responsive, self-repairing, life-friendly and environmentally sustainable materials with an equally vast collection of uses.
Rotational 3D printing of damage-tolerant composites with programmable mechanics
Significance Natural composites exhibit hierarchical and spatially varying structural features that give rise to high stiffness and strength as well as damage tolerance. Here, we report a rotational 3D printing method that enables exquisite control of fiber orientation within engineered composites. Our approach broadens their design, microstructural complexity, and performance space by enabling site-specific optimization of fiber arrangements within short carbon fiberâepoxy composites. Using this approach, we have created composites with programmable strain distribution and failure as well as enhanced damage tolerance.
Abstract Natural composites exhibit exceptional mechanical performance that often arises from complex fiber arrangements within continuous matrices. Inspired by these natural systems, we developed a rotational 3D printing method that enables spatially controlled orientation of short fibers in polymer matrices solely by varying the nozzle rotation speed relative to the printing speed. Using this method, we fabricated carbon fiberâepoxy composites composed of volume elements (voxels) with programmably defined fiber arrangements, including adjacent regions with orthogonally and helically oriented fibers that lead to nonuniform strain and failure as well as those with purely helical fiber orientations akin to natural composites that exhibit enhanced damage tolerance. Our approach broadens the design, microstructural complexity, and performance space for fiber-reinforced composites through site-specific optimization of their fiber orientation, strain, failure, and damage tolerance.
We shall see– lets hope for the best.
Just think, if we can make concrete durable enough and civilization does crash it will be around for hundreds of years or longer as reminder of our endeavors.
On the other hand if we change the paradigm of civilization concrete structures will merely be eyesores and problems to work around since they are very difficult to remove.
The problem with reinforced concrete While repair may be justified to preserve the architectural legacy of iconic 20th-century buildings, such as those designed by reinforced concrete users like Frank Lloyd Wright, it is questionable whether this will be affordable or desirable for the vast majority of structures. The writer Robert Courland, in his book Concrete Planet, estimates that repair and rebuilding costs of concrete infrastructure, just in the United States, will be in the trillions of dollars â to be paid by future generations
Just think, if we can make concrete durable enough and civilization does crash it will be around for hundreds of years or longer as reminder of our endeavors. On the other hand if we change the paradigm of civilization concrete structures will merely be eyesores and problems to work around since they are very difficult to remove.
Why modern mortar crumbles, but Roman concrete lasts millennia
By Zahra AhmadJul. 3, 2017 , 1:00 PM
History contains many references to the durability of Roman concrete, including this cryptic note written in 79 B.C.E., describing concrete exposed to seawater as: âa single stone mass, impregnable to the waves and everyday stronger.â What did it mean? To find out, the researchers studied drilled cores of a Roman harbor from Pozzuoli Bay near Naples, Italy. When they analyzed it, they found that the seawater had dissolved components of the volcanic ash, allowing new binding minerals to grow. Within a decade, a very rare hydrothermal mineral called aluminum tobermorite (Al-tobermorite) had formed in the concrete. Al-tobermorite, long known to give Roman concrete its strength, can be made in the lab, but itâs very difficult to incorporate it in concrete. But the researchers found that when seawater percolates through a cement matrix, it reacts with volcanic ash and crystals to form Al-tobermorite and a porous mineral called phillipsite, they write today in American Mineralogist.
Talk about adaptive material design. That Roman concrete uses the very problem for most materials, seawater, to make it more durable.
The Arizona Department of Education hopes to make changes to science standards, which will affect K-12 districts and charter schools. The changes include removing the word “evolution” in some areas and describing it as a “theory” in others.
At a public community meeting in April, Associate Superintendent of High Academic Standards Carol Lippert said the department is trying to connect science practices with content to show how it is practiced in the real world.
Ed Reitz, 92, testified in support of the changes at the community meeting.
“The teaching of evolution is something that concerns me because it is a theory and it is not science,” stated Reitz.
The great-grandfather read part of a book he wrote on the issue.
“Over 70 years now we have been teaching our youth that we have came from pre-existing vertebrates and God, the creator, is not allowed to be taught in most of our public schools,” read Reitz. “The result is now what we are observing in colleges and universities throughout the land.”
It’s part of natural selection, some of them don’t quite reach the top floor.
Well if I must thank this God of yours for anything it will be that I never had to go to school in Arizona.
Nothing ever seems to die. The Enlightenment is still in contention. The Crusades still continue to this day. The Civil War is still in the minds and hearts of many.
Humans sure carry a lot of mental baggage around with them, thousands of years worth.
I am sure when later this century fossil fuels are mostly replaced that there will still be contention over their demise and it will keep raising it’s ugly head along with nuclear power for many long centuries to come.
Sometimes I think âcivilizationâ is currently in reverse gear. This is especially true when I sit in a restaurant and watch people staring at cel phones rather than engaging in conversation. As a student, proficiency in two languages besides English was a requirement, even in the faculty of science (most of my mates chose Spanish and something like Latin or French). Foreign travel, especially immersion in different cultures, which goes hand-in-hand with geology and geophysics has probably contributed more to my personal education than anything learned in school apart from the math and a few of the geology courses that was required for my work. Nowadays I come close to despair when I hear about people being hassled by police, border guards, etc. for not speaking English. Shouldnât people be encouraged to embrace âforeignâ cultures and learn from them?
immersion in different cultures, which goes hand-in-hand with geology and geophysics
Don't worry Doug, then you will feel perfectly at home as we all head back to the 'Nouveau Stone Age'! đ
For the record, there is nothing that makes me more depressed, than seeing a resurgence of populism, nativism, ultra nationalism and xenophobia around the world today. We have apparently learned nothing from history.
Or is it the New Plastic age. Wonder how volume of plastic compares with that of stone (flint) tooling scattered around the world?
From the 3D revolution video we produce about 300 million metrics tons of plastics annually. I’m not sure how much stone we used during the stone age. It mostly seems to have blended back into the ground. đ
Hey, things have to break down and get bad for the new paradigm to come to fruition. It certainly is not gong to happen without a major push and a vacuum to fill. Fasten your seat belts, turbulence ahead.
Absolutely, the US could learn a lot from European countries.
The best model I can come up for much of the world now is a war footing and cold war scenario, even within countries. It’s not really a happy cooperative place even though we have a global economy. Some of the paranoia is justified and some is not, but we now live in a world where separating fact from fiction is a full time job.
but we now live in a world where separating fact from fiction is a full time job.
Ya think?! I think some of us should be getting time and a half for overtime and a hefty hazard pay bonus too.
Each year the government asks 10 simple questions to test the public’s knowledge of science. Can you correctly answer them all?
I’m still sort of hoping that the charts depicting the % of correct answers by country is totally fake.
Though I do wonder how many Trump would get right vs. say, Angela Merkel, Emmanuel Macron, Xi Jinping or Vladimir Putin?
I’ll bet he scores lower than Turkey’s ErdoÄan where fewer people accept the ‘Theory’ of Evolution than in the US.
As Hans Rosling found out, knowledge is often the power to get things wrong. He showed that chimpanzees would do better than students or college professors on his tests.
Since the random score would be 50%, a score of 60% is just plain pathetic, but expected. Most people do not understand or remember science, even if they have had courses in it.
Most people do not understand or remember science, even if they have had courses in it.
Especially because most people never understood how science is supposed to work, so at best they vaguely remember some facts they were forced to memorize for some test.
Of course there are some brighter spots in the universe at large:
“The IllustrisTNG project is a suite of state-of-the-art cosmological galaxy formation simulations. Each simulation in IllustrisTNG evolves a large swath of a mock Universe from soon after the Big-Bang until the present day while taking into account a wide range of physical processes that drive galaxy formation. The simulations can be used to study a broad range of topics surrounding how the Universe â and the galaxies within it â evolved over time.”
Having been an operator of a large telescope at an observatory and one of the educators to the visiting public, I found them curious about and open to knowledge across a wide variety of ages.
Maybe we do not know how to teach science to the general public or even to most children. I always found the reality of actually being at a large and complex instrument or even a small one made it much easier to show both the capabilities and the difficulties of observing nature.
I don’t think one has to make it grand and exciting, just real. Show people how to look at the world and see it in a wider view.
A fair analog, except there is no winning and the player would be surrounded by moles. đ
And you posted this drivel because?
Anyways, who cares?!
Bet you’ll still need to understand the scientific meaning of the word ‘Theory’ to get into any of these programs.
ASU School of Life Sciences https://sols.asu.edu/admissions
Robots fight weeds in challenge to agrochemical giants
Dominated by companies such as Bayer, DowDuPont, BASF and Syngenta, the industry is bracing for the impact of digital agricultural technology and some firms are already adapting their business models.
The stakes are high. Herbicide sales are worth $26 billion a year and account for 46 percent of pesticides revenue overall while 90 percent of GM seeds have some herbicide tolerance built in, according to market researcher Phillips McDougall.
That’s just one more potentially disruptive technological application for AI enhanced autonomous rolling robots that probably wasn’t even on Tony Seba’s radar yet.
DISCOVER OUR WEEDING ROBOT
The first ever completely autonomous machine for the ecological and economical weeding of row crops, meadows and intercropping cultures.
20X LESS HERBICIDE
Thanks to the precise detection and discriminating spraying of weeds.
100% AUTONOMOUS
Works up to 12 hours a day without a human operator â solar powered, no rechargeable batteries.
130 KG OF SIMPLICITY
Lightweight design minimises soil compaction â reliable, robust and non-hazardous.
I like it.
Want!
Fred â from a report in Nautilus (canât get the link to work)
DOLPHINS ARE HELPING US HUNT FOR ALIENS
It was John Lillyâs research that inspired the groupâs name: If humans couldnât even communicate with animals that shared most of our evolutionary history, he believed, they were a bit daft to think they could recognize signals from a distant planet. With that in mind, the Order of the Dolphin set out to determine what our ocean-going compatriots here on Earth might be able to teach us about talking to extraterrestrials. Lillyâs work on interspecies communication has since gone in and out of vogue several times within the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) community. Today, itâs back in fashion, thanks to new applications of information theory and to technological advancements, such as the Cetacean Hearing and Telemetry (CHAT) device, a submersible computer interface that establishes basic communication with dolphins. The return to dolphins as a model for alien intelligence came in 1999, when SETI Institute astronomer Laurance Doyle proposed using information theory to analyze animal communication systems, particularly the whistle repertoire of bottlenose dolphinsâŚDoyle confirmed that dolphin signals werenât random noise by turning to the work of Harvard linguist George Zipf who, in the 1930s, had found a striking pattern common to human languages.
Assuming interstellar communication exists.
Odds are we will be finding alien machine communication rather than biological. Also, even biological communication through space would probably be machine coded.
Since EM communication between star systems would not work due to low speed, we probably have no clue how to “tune in” on interstellar messaging and will never hear anything.
Which means that we could only hear local communications, transmitted over millions of miles at most, which would be of infinitesimal power by the time they reach us. Even those communications might be focused and use even lower power.
SWEEPING GENE SURVEY REVEALS NEW FACETS OF EVOLUTION
The study’s most startling result, perhaps, is that nine out of 10 species on Earth today, including humans, came into being 100,000 to 200,000 years ago. “This conclusion is very surprising, and I fought against it as hard as I could,” Thaler told AFP. That reaction is understandable: How does one explain the fact that 90 percent of animal life, genetically speaking, is roughly the same age? Was there some catastrophic event 200,000 years ago that nearly wiped the slate clean?
Environmental trauma is one possibility, explained Jesse Ausubel, director of the Program for the Human Environment at The Rockefeller University. “Viruses, ice ages, successful new competitors, loss of preyâall these may cause periods when the population of an animal drops sharply,” he told AFP, commenting on the study. “In these periods, it is easier for a genetic innovation to sweep the population and contribute to the emergence of a new species.”
But the last true mass extinction event was 65.5 million years ago when a likely asteroid strike wiped out land-bound dinosaurs and half of all species on Earth. This means a population “bottleneck” is only a partial explanation at best. “The simplest interpretation is that life is always evolving,” said Stoeckle.
Thanks Doug.
For one thing, an Ice Age is a repetitive severe climate change roller coaster. More than enough change for genetic forcing. To see how fast natural selection and evolution can work, read “Darwin Comes to Town: How the Urban Jungle Drives Evolution “.
The studyâs most startling result, perhaps, is that nine out of 10 species on Earth today, including humans, came into being 100,000 to 200,000 years ago.
Yep! I actually was going to comment on that when GF, posted a link about the ‘Extinction That Never Was’, the other day. In the linked video there was an example cited of the living Coelecanth, long thought extinct only to have been supposedly found alive and often mistakenly called a ‘living Fossil’!
Coelecanth is a Devonian lobed fin fish that thrived in the oceans 450-500 million years ago. Its importance lies in the fact that it is considered the âmissing link
As we know, evolution and natural selection have not stopped. Only if they did, could we have real living fossils so the fact that most organisms alive today have come into existance within the last 200,000 years is exactly what we should expect. What that means is, that there are no closely related living genetic relatives of 450-500 million year old coelacanths. So, even though we find morphologically very similar looking fishes alive today, they are just as genetically modern as are you and I.
The term âliving fossilâ is often misleadingly used in the popular press to describe species which have, supposedly, stopped evolving. Commonly cited examples include horseshoe crabs, Ginkgo trees, hagfish and, perhaps the most famous of all, the coelacanths, a group of lobe finned fish with a very long evolutionary history of which two species still survive in the deep waters of the West Indian Ocean…
…Thatâs how the story goes at least, and ever since itâs discovery journalists have talked about the fish that has been âleft behind by evolutionâ. But is this really true? Can a species really exist for a span of time so great that it will have seen ice ages come and go, mountain ranges form and the great super-continent of Gondwana break apart, and through all this not change at all? Over recent years a mountain of evidence has been steadily growing showing that this is in fact not the case, coelacanths, like any other species, are constantly evolving to adapt to changing conditions…
…It is sometimes claimed that there is a low rate of change in coelacanth DNA and that this leads slow evolution. However, this idea is now being challenged by systematic studies of the coelacanth genome which do not detect slow rates of genetic change. In one study forty-four genes were analysed and no dramatic decrease in the rate of change compared to other species was detected. Furthermore, there is no known reason why coelacanths should have slowly evolving genomes. Their environment in the deep ocean, while relatively stable, is not particularly unusual and is inhabited by other species which are not considered living fossils.
Cheers!
Now hold on, during a mass extinction whole groups can come to an end and would have no descendant line (trilobites, most dinosaurs, etc.). When apparent descendants show up in modern times for those lost long ago in the fossil record, it is likely that the fossil record is incomplete rather than extinction occurring , which was the point of the article.
The fossil record we have is extremely incomplete and geologically conditional.
Agreed!
However the video you linked made an incorrect reference to the Coelacanths being ‘Living Fossils’, a popular and common misconception, which would imply that they have stopped evolving. That was my quibble.
There is no doubt about the fossil record being incomplete. And my comment was more in reply to Doug, regarding his surprise that most living organisms alive today, are genetically modern versions of rather distantly related organisms that are, for all intents and purposes, already truly extinct. And not at all intended as a criticism of your main point.
A comparison of the living coelacanths (genus Latimeria) with some of its extinct relatives. The morphological differences are striking. Image from Casane and Laurenti..
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I don’t take it as criticism Fred, I just like to be clear (meaning I can be pedantic as the next science guy at times) đ
I don’t think that anyone believes species have stopped evolving or radiating. Nor does anyone say that this a species from the past that did not change. The term living fossil is merely being used to indicate that a long “extinct” line still actually exists despite our inability to find fossil records of the continuation. Sort of a living ghost, which indicates our lack of evidence and incomplete knowledge due to the fossil selection process combined with our fossil finding process.
Direct from the Department of Vertebrate Zoology, Division of Fishes “Coelacanths (seel-a-canths) were once known only from fossils and were thought to have gone extinct approximately 65 million years ago (mya), during the great extinction in which the dinosaurs disappeared. The most recent fossil record dates from about 80 mya but the earliest records date back as far as approximately 360 mya. At one time coelacanths were a large group comprising about 90 valid species that were distributed worldwide in both marine and freshwaters. Today, there are two known living species.”
The first living coelacanth was discovered in 1938 and bears the scientific name Latimeria chalumnae. The species was described by Professor J.L.B. Smith in 1939 and was named after its discoverer, Miss Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer. Although Latimeria is a genus distinct from the fossil forms, all coelacanths share numerous features and are easily recognized by their distinctive shape and lobed fins.
bold mine
The current modern species “Latimeria chalumnae” is recognized as a different species from ancient fossil species.
BTW, fossil relatives are often determined by internal morphology as well as external. The use of external appearance of fossils to determine species came back to bite paleontologists and many museums when they improperly identified young and immature dinosaurs as being different species from each other and adults of that same species.
Don’t you love fuzzy science? Always room for more discovery.
From the site above to give insight into how relationships are determined.
WHAT MAKES COELACANTHS UNIQUE? Numerous characteristics are unique to the coelacanth among living fishes. Among them is the presence of a “rostral organ” in the snout that is part of the electrosensory system, and an intracranial joint or “hinge” in the skull that allows the anterior portion of the cranium to swing upwards, greatly enlarging the gape of the mouth. Neither character exists in any other living vertebrate. Other unique anatomical features include a hollow fluid-filled “notochord” (a primitive feature in vertebrates) underlying the spinal cord and extending the length of the body, vertebrae that are incompletely formed or totally lacking bony centra, an oil-filled gas bladder, fleshy “lobed” or limb-like fins that are internally supported by bone, and paired fins that move in a synchronized tetrapod-like pattern.
…Other unique anatomical features include a hollow fluid-filled ânotochordâ (a primitive feature in vertebrates) underlying the spinal cord and extending the length of the body, vertebrae that are incompletely formed or totally lacking bony centra, an oil-filled gas bladder, fleshy âlobedâ or limb-like fins that are internally supported by bone, and paired fins that move in a synchronized tetrapod-like pattern.
LOL! Funny you should chose to specifically mention that đ
Probably the most widely held belief about coelacanths is that, even if they are genetically different, they look exactly the same now as they did millions of years ago. This belief is mistaken. No fossils are known for either species of surviving coelacanth or even for members of its genus, Latimeria. This suggests that the scientists responsible for classifying the fossil and living species consider the morphological differences so great the they should be placed in widely separated groups. In fact, there are significant differences in the body shape and structure of modern and extinct coelacanth species. These include changes in the number of vertebral arches and substantial differences in skull morphology. The swim bladder of coelacanths has also changed from being filled with oil in the extinct genus Macropoma, to being ossified in modern species, suggesting that the two groups lived in very different environments. Lastly, there are substantial differences in size, with modern coelacanths being three and a half times larger than their closest extinct relative (one and a half vs half a metre).
And yes, while I do indeed love fuzzy science! There is still plenty of room for being a bit pedantic now and then.
There is a good reason why science is so depleted and misunderstood by the general public.
On YouTube I performed two simple searches. One was “climate news” and the other “gaps in the fossil record”.
The “climate news” search revealed a list rife with denier “news” and commentary.
The “gaps in the fossil record” showed a lot of creationist videos.
With that type of propaganda filling the media and overwhelming the time to sort it out, it’s no wonder people think much actual science is really in question and that there are actual debates or that science is just wrong.
Unfortunately that is no accident, it is by deliberate design! (pun intended)
Not too sure how to fight those forces.
Cheers!
You may be more correct than you believe. They were designed to be more controlled by their hippocampus and less so by their frontal cortex.
Possibly a core larger distribution of hippocampus operators and a smaller distribution core of prefrontal cortex operators was a positive evolutionary development up until lately.
The key is for the prefrontal cortex operators to work on the distribution of hybrid Hc-PC operators to achieve their desired results. Don’t waste time and energy on the pure Hc operators.
The reason why so many alternative theory videos proliferate on YouTube is because mainstream American academics, in concert with mainstream American media, have spent the last half-century perfecting a highly sophisticated complex web of rhetorical word constructs, institutionalized mass self-deceit and intellectual denial, guilt, poverty, and forgery.
Their work is perpetuated and legitimized not by the soundness of their arguments, not by any lessons and evidence of history, but purely by the weight of intimidation by the numbers, by purging anyone who dissents through labeling them “right-wing” and by immense psychological pressure to conform with mainstream leftist aggression and tyranny.
American universities, colleges, and schools, have become sites of mass indoctrination and conformism, where entire generations of our future leaders and makers are being taught what to think, rather than how to think. This has resulted in America’s threat recognition mechanisms of self-correction and self-preservation becoming unilaterally disarmed, much like a ship without a compass.
Troll alert
Oh, yeah!
When does the book burning and imprisoning of the educated start?
Dunno, I dropped out of third grade, don’t even know what a book looks like…
Books are like Playboy magazine with more pages and no pictures.
Gene, I disagree with your analysis. It smells strongly of some twisted form of propaganda. In fact, I’m pretty certain you are severely brainwashed. Or perhaps, you were just trying to make a big joke, and failed at it?
Speaking of climate change, from realclimate, further evidence that AMOC has indeed run amok!
If you doubt that the AMOC has weakened, read this
Filed under: Climate modelling Climate Science Instrumental Record IPCC Oceans Paleoclimate â stefan @ 28 May 2018 A few weeks ago, weâve argued in a paper in Nature that the Atlantic overturning circulation (sometimes popularly dubbed the Gulf Stream System) has weakened significantly since the late 19th Century, with most of the decline happening since the mid-20th Century.
BTW, They have shared the paper in Nature as open access.
The AMOC terminus depends upon overturning. Overturning is due to density changes. There are two primary drivers of density change in sea water, temperature and salinity. Since cold fresh water melt from Greenland and Arctic Ice melt intrusion does both then the response would be to disrupt the overturning of the AMOC, as well as shift and redistribute it’s overturning area.
This slow down in overturning would produce a small rise in sea level at that OT area and slow the current.
Next question is: With a slower current did the actual heat transport rate change?
All that aside, with an assumed reduction in heat transport into the sub-Arctic regions due to AMOC slowing over the last 70 years, does anyone find it counterintuitive that the Arctic sea ice melt has increased over that same period?
All that aside, with an assumed reduction in heat transport into the sub-Arctic regions due to AMOC slowing over the last 70 years, does anyone find it counterintuitive that the Arctic sea ice melt has increased over that same period?
Well, I have yet to read the full paper in Nature but it seems that one of the consequences of the AMOC slowdown is the formation of a sub-polar Atlantic ‘Cold Blob’ that only Bob Frisky could love… đ
Exhibit #1, and the prime observational finding, is a long-term cooling trend in the subpolar Atlantic â the only region in the world which has cooled while the rest of the planet has warmed. This âcold blobâ or âwarming holeâ has been shown in IPCC reports since the 3rd assessment of 2001; it is shown in Fig. 1 in a version from the last (5th) IPCC report. In fact it is Figure 1 of the Summary for Policy Makers there â you canât get more prominent than that.
Most of the Arctic is showing 420 ppm CO2.
Meanwhile Brazil is getting a little taste of what peak oil will look like for those countries that don’t prepare and invest in the transition to a non fossil fuel based transportation and energy system.
Brazil’s Temer makes concessions to lure truckers back to work
After seven days of protests, shortages of basic goods around the country had become increasingly critical. Hospitals reported a lack of medical supplies, while many farm animals are dying or being culled because of a lack of feed.
Brazil is a global leader in commodities exports and industry groups said they expected delays in shipments from everything from soybeans to meats and sugar.
Major cities such as Rio de Janeiro have sharply reduced public transportation, while many schools and universities said they would not open on Monday.
With gas stations low on fuel across most of the country, police and military forces have been escorting fuel convoys to supply ambulances, police vehicles and buses for public transportation in most large cities in Brazil.
One of the presidential decrees signed by Temer cuts diesel prices by 46 centavos per liter, or about 12 percent of its retail price, for a period of 60 days. The government will compensate state-led oil company Petroleo Brasileiro SA for the price cut.
Lot of stress and social strife in Brazil right now. Imagine what might happen if there are real permanent shortages of fuel that can’t be resolved through price concessions.
Those truckers should be working as much as possible. Their jobs might not exist in 10 years.
Ron,
SCIENTISTS FIND WIDESPREAD OCEAN ANOXIA AS CAUSE FOR PAST MASS EXTINCTION
The research, “Abrupt global-ocean anoxia during Late Ordovician-early Silurian detected using uranium isotopes of marine carbonates,” was published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
“This extinction is the first of the ‘big five’ extinctions that hit the Earth and our research indicates that it was coincident with the abrupt development of widespread ocean anoxia that lasted for at least one million years,”
Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2018-05-scientists-widespread-ocean-anoxia-mass.html#jCp
There is also this link to be found at the bottom of the page Doug linked to, discussing the recovery from mass extinction:
https://phys.org/news/2018-04-oxygen-scientists-clues-recovery-mass.html#nRlv
Studying oxygen, scientists discover clues to recovery from mass extinction
April 17, 2018, Arizona State University
Climate change – then and now
This team’s discovery also calls attention to the possible effects of modern climate change, because global warming was the ultimate driver of marine anoxia in the Early Triassic period.
“One of the most interesting and worrying things about the Permian-Triassic extinction is how similar those events are to what is happening today,” says co-author Stephen Romaniello. “Similar to what happened during the Permian period, the Earth’s modern oceans are facing rapid climate warming and enhanced nutrient fluxes.”
Point in fact, scientists have discovered more than 400 marine dead zones in the modern oceans. These are mostly linked to elevated nutrient fluxes in coastal areas, and global warming is likely to cause these zones to expand dramatically in the future.
So even though it seems we are pretty much up shit’s creek, I guess we can try to look on the bright side too! Who knows maybe a couple of hundred thouand years after a mass extinction event there might again be something like the ‘Cambrian Explosion’…
Here’s a cheerful song about that đ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EMwxwRA9Xr8
Hmmm, oxygen levels are falling right now, is it an omen?
Or should that be ‘yet another omen’?
NAOM
Why Focusing on the Long Term is More Important Than Ever
Nick Maggiulli
https://ofdollarsanddata.com/great-things-take-time-7b509f4d5e03
Look at the photo above. See that road in the center that cuts through the mountain ridge? The history behind that road is one of the most remarkable tales of human perseverance, yet you have probably never heard it.
The story starts in 1960 in the town of Gehlaur in the north-eastern part of India. In order to get supplies or seek medical treatment, the villagers of Gehlaur would have to walk a treacherous 30 mile (50km) path around the mountain ridge pictured above. Phaguni Devi, one such villager, was walking along the ridge one day when she fell and injured herself. Upon hearing of his wifeâs injuries, Dasrath Manjhi decided that the villagers of Gehlaur had walked around that mountain ridge for long enough. Determined to change this, that same night Dasrath told himself that he would carve a path through the mountain.
Starting in 1960 using only a hammer and chisel, Dasrath started cutting away at the ridge. When the local villagers heard about Dasrathâs goal they mocked him saying that it would be impossible. However, this didnât stop him. Over the course of the next 22 years Dasrath chipped away at the mountain to carve a path that was 360 feet long (110m), 30 feet wide (9.1 m), and 25 feet deep (7.6m). In total he moved over 270,000 cubic feet of rock by himself, day by day, night by night, finishing the path in the early 1980s and earning the nickname âMountain Man.â
I tell this story because it illustrates one of the most important things in both investing and in lifeâââgreat things take time.
My goal is to remind you how important long term thinking is in a society that is dominated by instant gratification.
Ireland?
http://www.desdemonadespair.net/2018/05/bitcoin-mining-consumes-as-much-energy.html
The real question is if bitcoin is more or less energy efficient than traditional banking and wealth distribution systems. It’s a difficult comparison; there are many expensive items bitcoin doesn’t need, such as vaults, brokers, armed guards, information technology and security experts, lawyers, etc…
The more that people are using bitcoin, the lower the energy consumption of existing systems. It will be really interesting to see the emerging statistics over time on these large scale changes.
Even if Bitcoin is less efficient ultimately, the benefit of decentralization is going to be worth the energy consumption to most people. A distributed system of capital that cannot be undermined by any single entity is something that’s never before been accessible to humanity. The value of this to our economy must still be priced in.
Good point, just as the smartphone has replaced many discrete products such as cameras, recorders, etc., the true comparative effect on society and energy use has not made for Bitcoin.
The real question is if bitcoin is more or less energy efficient than traditional banking and wealth distribution systems. Itâs a difficult comparison; there are many expensive items bitcoin doesnât need, such as vaults, brokers, armed guards, information technology and security experts, lawyers, etcâŚ
It might be noteworthy that there are currently 1,857 crypto currencies in use, of which Bitcoin is but one. Bitcoin is also a bit of an outlier in many respects including the massive amounts of energy required for mining it.
https://www.investing.com/crypto/currencies
All Cryptocurrencies
Number of Currencies: 1,857 Total Market Cap: $368,689,314,947 Vol (24H): $15,285,529,083
Cryptocurrencies are another massively disruptive technology. They are a true peer to peer form of exchange of value and I agree that it is far too soon for any of us to really grasp the repercussions of how it will affect global energy use. I suspect that what is happening in Africa with regards cellphone banking apps when cross pollinated with various cryptocurrencies will make business transactions much more energy efficient in the long term than say back when millions of people had to physically go to a bank to get money, deposit a check, apply for a loan etc… Not to mention that many millions of people could not even get access to any of these services because their incomes were too low to qualify.
I can see this facilitating the penetration of alternative energy in very low income areas of the world.
http://www.wri.org/blog/2017/02/pay-you-go-solar-could-electrify-rural-africa
âPay-As-You-Goâ Solar Could Electrify Rural Africa
New Mobile and Solar Technology Makes Access to Basic Electricity Possible
In a “pay-as-you-go” (PAYG) business model, a company essentially rents consumers a solar home system that comes with a battery, a charge controller, a solar panel, LED bulbs and a mobile charger. Basic systems have enough power to charge phones and lights, and larger ones could power small appliances like radios or TVs. Consumers use basic mobile phones â widespread in East Africa â to make payments on a daily, weekly or monthly basis.
Through this model, companies can minimize the cost of collections by automating the receipt of payments, while remote rural customers get immediate access to basic electricity without having to take out a loan. A grid expansion project, while it may provide power to bigger appliances, can take years and significant investment to reach a rural or low-income community.
https://cleantechnica.com/2017/06/29/solarcoin-cryptocurrency-earned-generating-solar-electricity/
SolarCoin Is A Cryptocurrency Earned By Generating Solar Electricity
Solar electricity production + blockchain = a currency based on sunshine
Just as cryptocurrency has become a disruptive technology, so has renewable energy, and although those two distinct sectors havenât really come into their own just yet, an innovative solar incentive program is incorporating both solar electricity production and the blockchain, with the intent of boosting and supporting one with the other.
Instead of a digitally âminedâ product, this cryptocurrencyâs proof of work happens in the physical world, and those who have photovoltaic arrays can earn SolarCoin just for generating solar electricity. Itâs essentially a global solar rewards program, and is designed to help incentivize more solar electricity production, while also serving as a lower-carbon cryptocurrency than Bitcoin and similar alternative currencies.
Bitcoin has a limit and we are near that, I cannot see mining it will be long term. Interest will switch to other cryptocurrencies (CCs) . I would expect future CCs to take energy consumption into their design and be more efficient as that would make mining more efficient. On the whole I expect that politicians will start to put the brakes on CCs as they will fear loss of control, not just of the currency but of the people using it. If you cannot control who has the money and how much you have lost control of the state, no politician will stand for that.
NAOM
Human race just 0.01% of all life but has eradicated most other living things
The total biomass of the human race accounts for just 0.01% of the life on Earth.
The transformation of the planet by human activity has led scientists to the brink of declaring a new geological era â the Anthropocene. One suggested marker for this change are the bones of the domestic chicken, now ubiquitous across the globe.
The new work reveals that farmed poultry today makes up 70% of all birds on the planet, with just 30% being wild. The picture is even more stark for mammals â 60% of all mammals on Earth are livestock, mostly cattle and pigs, 36% are human and just 4% are wild animals.
âIt is pretty staggering,â said Milo. âIn wildlife films, we see flocks of birds, of every kind, in vast amounts, and then when we did the analysis we found there are [far] more domesticated birds.â
Since the rise of human civilization, 83% of wild mammals have been lost.
âIt is definitely striking, our disproportionate place on Earth,â said Milo. âWhen I do a puzzle with my daughters, there is usually an elephant next to a giraffe next to a rhino. But if I was trying to give them a more realistic sense of the world, it would be a cow next to a cow next to a cow and then a chicken.â
Despite humanityâs supremacy, in weight terms Homo sapiens is puny. Viruses alone have a combined weight three times that of humans, as do worms. Fish are 12 times greater than people and fungi 200 times as large.
Plants account for 82% of all biomass on the planet â 7,500 times more than humans
83%, that makes this, the sixth extinction, about as great as the great Permian extinction.
The bacteria and fungi win, and we can’t live without them.
Biological “Dark Matter”. How little we know about the small that adds up big.
Estimating the number of bacterial species is tricky, to say the least. Part of the problem is that bacteria donât really have species, at least not in the way that we are accustomed to think of them. Different strains of E. coli may share only 40% of their genes, meaning they are about as closely related to each other as a dog is to a tree. Yet we still consider it to be a single species. By comparison, all humans share >99% of their genes. All animals, taken together, are a barely visible blip when it comes to total diversity of life
https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-biomass-of-bacteria-What-is-the-estimated-percentage-of-bacteria-species-that-have-been-identified
Ron, have to be a bit picky here about your conclusions using land mammals as a model of the Permian extinction. Mammals species are but a miniscule amount of the species on Earth. Also to use biomass as a measure of extinction when all extinctions are measured in species or genera loss is inappropriate and non-comparable to scientific knowledge of extinctions.
Most of the knowledge we have about mass extinctions comes from studying ancient sea life fossil records and that is the basic measure of extinction events, not land animals (they are the missing poster children for the public).
âMost of the knowledge we have about mass extinctions comes from studying ancient sea life fossil records and that is the basic measure of extinction events, not land animals (they are the missing poster children for the public).â
I agree. When I was a student we took courses in paleontology which were primarily concerned with studying fossils as a means of dating rock units. The fossils were entirely marine species. Extinction events were something that arose from that work (the great extinctions were defined long before I came on the scene). Fossil dating has, to a large degree, been replaced or augmented by radioactive isotope work of course. Now days scientists have a more holistic view incorporating land based life into the picture but the fact remains, as you say, species extinction ideas came from, and were defined by, marine fossil studies.
Also consider that most of the species of land mammals already were extinct before civilization started. Those that were left (the large ones) were frequently dramatically reduced in population and/or range. Whole continents were depleted of large land mammals in both numbers and species.
Can you see any mechanisms that would not produce a land animal die off of a similar magnitude to the marine die off? I would expect a correlation for any event that caused an effect that large.
NAOM
Sea water deoxygenation ??????????
Well, all the causes I thought about would affect land or be caused by land. What would cause deox? Change of temperature, rise of CO2, runoff from land etc all of which would indicate harm to land species. Algal bloom? Again, what would cause that and, again, I think about land. Hmmmm.
NAOM
Since extinction is measured in number of species or genera lost, large land animals can never approach the numbers of species in the marine environment.
It is not measured in biomass, which is dependent upon population and size for a given species. It is not measured relative to a niche environment or a specific family. it is not measured as percentages.
I am at a loss Fish, to understand what you keep driving at? You keep trying to downplay the importance of this current Amprocene extinction. As if what’s happening now is not all that important. If extinction is measured only in the number of species, then a single species of dung beetle would be on par with a single species of great ape, the chimpanzee for example.
Yes, the depletion of wild biomass is extremely important. And it is a clue as to how long any given species of megafauna has left before we drive that species into extinction.
The BBC Reports that only 350,000 great apes from six species are left in the world. That’s a total of 350,000 of all great apes combined, less our species of course. The human population grows more in just two days than all the great apes left in the world. But that’s okay because when all six are gone, that won’t even be one single genus. The genus will not be extinct because there will be one species of great ape left, Homo sapiens.
But that’s okay because they are only six species. And six species is just not all that important when it comes to measuring extinction. Six is just not that large a number. Just seven species of beetle will be more important because seven is greater than six.
Bullshit! You have a strange way of measuring extinction Fish.
Edit: There are 350,000â400,000 species of beetles. One genus of dung beetle alone, the Scarabaeinae, comprises more than 5,000 species.
Scientists say that dozens of species are now going extinct every day. Which species? I am having a difficult time getting any real information or lists of the current extinctions.
What I do find is more like a dozen per year or less not a dozen per day.
Is this just some mathematical construct with no real basis in the field? I need some actual data not constructed numbers that might just be a guess.
Okay, since you did not reply to my last post explaining that one species of dung beetle is not the same as one species of great ape, I will try again.
No, you are dead wrong, it is not the number of species that count but the type of species that does go extinct is far more important.
What I do find is more like a dozen per year or less not a dozen per day.
And you could not be more wrong on that count. But, then again, it depends on what you want to count. Are you counting all life? All plant and animal life?
How many species go extinct each year?
Each year as many as 50,000 species of animals and plants become extinct due to deforestation and hunting. This causes the food chain to muddle up, and other animals die out. If one animal or plant becomes extinct, then the prey of the animal becomes overpopulated with nothing to eat them, and the predator dies off because it has nothing to feed on. It has a hge effect on other animals if one animal becomes extinct.
That comes to 137 species per day. But some counts don’t count plants so you get a different answer. And some don’t count insects so you get a totally different answer. But some get an even higher number:
UN Environment Programme: 200 Species Extinct Every Day, Unlike Anything Since Dinosaurs Disappeared 65 Million Years Ago
According to the UN Environment Programme, the Earth is in the midst of a mass extinction of life. Scientists estimate that 150-200 species of plant, insect, bird and mammal become extinct every 24 hours. This is nearly 1,000 times the ânaturalâ or âbackgroundâ rate and, say many biologists, is greater than anything the world has experienced since the vanishing of the dinosaurs nearly 65m years ago.
Okay, I focus on larger animals, not insects and plants. Larger animals are the ones under the most stress, the ones we keep in zoos because we have taken over their habitat and are driving them all into extinction. Most of them are not gone yet but almost all are on the very cusp of extinction.
But of your count of a dozen per year:
How Many Species Exist
The National Science Foundationâs âTree of Lifeâ project estimates that there could be anywhere from 5 million to 100 million species on the planet, but science has only identified about 2 million.
So your estimate of a dozen per year, that would be about 0.00024% per year or many multiples below normal background rate.
Note: When environmentalists talk of the number of species going extinct each year, they are normally, but not always, talking about the number of wild animals going extinct and not plants or insects.
First it’s cartoons from a newspaper, now it’s garbage answers from Answer.com. Give me a break.
If you don’t want to agree with how paleontologists measure extinction, that is fine. Just don’t expect anyone to take you seriously.
Let me tell you about species importance. A long time ago, far away from here, a cataclysm occurred. Many species died and continued dying, but a small rodent-like creature survived. Some say because of the teeth, but no one knows. From this small, insignificant creature came all the placental mammals for the next 65 million years. From mice to whales and everything in between.
Now you tell me how you can have the ability to tell which species is important and which is not? I can assure you no one has that ability. Not even Ron Patt.
Believe what you want.
The actual knowledge and science is very incomplete and fuzzy on this topic.
Well hell, I post my sources and now you don’t want to believe my sources. You call them cartoons and garbage. The number of total species that Answeres.com gave was the exact figures everyone else is giving. The Guardian got the data for that article from the National Acadamy of Sciences of the United States of America. But if you don’t want to believe them either, then I understand. It’s called Confirmation Bias. That’s when you only believe articles that agree with what you desire to believe.
Oh, just one more thing. That big extinction where the little rodent survived? Well that extinction wiped out all the large animals. That’s what happens in major extinctions like that one and the one we are having right now. All the large animals go first.
And you don’t think that is important because your confirmation bias tells you something else. I completely understand your biases Fish.
Ron,
I’m puzzled by the wording in the following:
“…when all six [species of great ape] are gone, that won’t even be one single genus. The genus will not be extinct because there will be one species of great ape left, Homo sapiens.”
Which genus do you mean will not be extinct? It isn’t the genus of great apes (one possible reading) because they don’t all belong to the same genus. What am I missing?
Sorry, but my wording was a little confusing there. Basically, there are seven species of great apes, that is counting one newly discovered species or orangutan. (I wasn’t aware of that when I said six.) There are two species of orangutan, two species of gorilla, one species of chimpanzee and one species of bonobo. And there is one species of great apes called Homo sapiens. All are endangered of extinction except Homo sapiens.
So six of the seven species of great apes are endangered of extinction. But Homo sapiens are in no danger of extinction. I hope this clears the matter up. And I am sorry for my poor wording that caused you confusion.
But yes, all seven belong to the same genus of Hominidae.
Thanks Ron. It’s clear now.
Hominidae is a family, though, not a genus.
Yeah, my mistake. Thanks
Ron, have to be a bit picky here about your conclusions using land mammals as a model of the Permian extinction. Mammals species are but a miniscule amount of the species on Earth.
I have no idea what the hell you are talking about Fish. I came to no such conclusions. The great Permian Extinction, according to the graph I posted, caused the extinction of 84% of all genera. Genera include all plants and animals. Nowhere did I did I even hint that the Permian Extinction was primarily about mammals. Anyway, there were no mammals at the time of the Permian Extinction. Mammals had not yet evolved. There were lots of mammal like reptiles but no mammals. The first true mammals appeared in the Early Jurassic.
Also to use biomass as a measure of extinction when all extinctions are measured in species or genera loss is inappropriate and non-comparable to scientific knowledge of extinctions.
Nonsense, I never said that biomass was a measure of extinction. I clearly explained my position on this, copied and pasted here:
So even though there has been a huge decline in the number of surviving species, the large animals have suffered far greater than the smaller ones. Also, this chart represents surviving wild terrestrial vertebrate mass, not the number of surviving species.
The very reason I stated that Fish, was to explain very clearly that I was not using biomass as a measure of species extinction. My whole point in posting those two charts was to show how much humans and their domestic animals had taken over the vast majority of the earth’s territory and resources. If you did not get that point, then you missed my point entirely. While it is true that perhaps half of the earth’s tiny species are still left, the animals that require large tracts of land for survival are just shit out of luck. Yes, in 2050 we will still be left with many tiny animals, all the megafauna will be gone.
That was my point. And I think that is a very important point. And I am frankly a little shocked that you seem to be belittling that point.
Humans and their domestic animals had taken over the vast majority of the earthâs territory and resources.
Certainly, humans have eliminated or dramatically reduced large wild animals in the vast majority of the earthâs territory – I wouldnât want to minimize the importance of that – itâs both tragic and very risky for humans.
But…if humans are only .01% of the biomass, does it make sense to say that humans have taken over the vast majority of resources? If we define resources as water, air and light (which is pretty much what 99.9% of the life on earth cares about), then donât humans only use a very small percentage?
Nick, sorry but I completely misunderstood where you were coming from and responded incorrectly. I have now deleted my response and will now try to give a more accurate response.
.01% of all biomass includes everything, trees, fish in the ocean, plankton in the ocean, bacteria, and all life on earth. Of course, we are a tiny fraction of all that, especially if you include all plant life. But that is a silly comparison. Total living biomass, including all plant life, even bacteria, is meaningless.
If we define resources as water, air and light (which is pretty much what 99.9% of the life on earth cares about), then donât humans only use a very small percentage?
Well, resources are not defined as water, air and light. Water for sure but not air and light. That is, these are resources that are available to everyone and everything and does not change dramatically with time. That is, we don’t use them up. Resources are, primarily, territory and the food derived from that territory. Of course, other resources are included but it is the territory that we, humans and our domestic animals, are taking from every other wild animal on the planet. That was my point.
Sorry for the misunderstanding.
Total living biomass, including all plant life, even bacteria, is meaningless.
Now weâre getting into really tough ethical material. Are mammals more important than other living things, like plants? Why?
I personally think that mammals are more important than plants, but…I also think that humans are more important than other mammals. It doesnât seem consistent to me to value non-human mammals, but not other forms of life. Where do we draw the line on whatâs important? Do we only worry about things that have a face? That we can make into pets?
I donât really have easy answers, and I think we should try to not be too harsh on those that disagree with us. I mean…I think humans are doing tragic things to wildlife too. But…I canât quite get into veganism. This isnât easy stuff.
Well, resources are not defined as water, air and light. Water for sure but not air and light. That is, these are resources that are available to everyone and everything and does not change dramatically with time. That is, we donât use them up. Resources are, primarily, territory and the food derived from that territory.
I think what youâre saying is that air and light are real resources, and important, but that territory is the bottleneck, the critical resource that various forms of life have to compete for.
And I agree, except that depends on focusing your analysis on large mammals. Which takes us back to the first question. Plants, fish, fungi, they all are doing better than the large land mammals.
So. Where does that leave us? I dunno. Iâm not sure these are critical points, but…I have a feeling that focusing only on large mammals isnât quite right. Maybe its worth acknowledging that thereâs a lot more to life than that. The stuff youâve written above has done that, of course. And, thatâs been helpful.
I have a feeling that focusing only on large mammals isnât quite right.
Humans are large mammals, right? You are saying that focusing on humans is not quite right. Yes? But humans are the ones that are destroying the earth. Right?
I am not blaming humans, it is just what we do. It is what evolution has conditioned us to do. We are in competition with all other species for territory and resources, and we are winning, big time.
Once you realize that very simple fact Nick, then you will understand what is happening to the world, and why.
I have nothing else to say on this matter.
Well, that brings us back to the question of whether humanity can do better.
I agree that our general approach to our environment is shaped by our genes. And, maybe we have an instinct to acquire territory.
But that doesnât say much about what we do with that territory: we can manage it well or badly, and thatâs not genetic.
Ask yourself: if everyone thought they way you do, would the world work well? And, if you can think that way, why canât everyone? Youâre not significantly different genetically from the rest of the people in the world…
we can manage it well or badly, and thatâs not genetic.
Hey, all we will try to do with the land we took from other animals is try to feed ourselves. How good we are at doing that may be in question. But what is not in question is that the animals will never get it back again. If we fail, some other Homo sapiens will take it from us and feed his family.
Ask yourself: if everyone thought they way you do, would the world work well? And, if you can think that way, why canât everyone? Youâre not significantly different genetically from the rest of the people in the worldâŚ
What the hell are you talking about? People do not think the way I do, they are all looking out for their own welfare. And that is what evolution has conditioned them to do. People look out for their own welfare and the welfare of their offspring. They really don’t care about the welfare of other animals. That is just the way the world works. And I am very sorry if you don’t like it, but that’s just the way it is.
The world is the way it is, not the way some people think it ought to be.
People do not think the way I do
Hmm. So, youâre not âpeopleâ?
Actually, I think if you look youâll find a fair number of people who think the way you do. Some of them are even on this blog…
Nick, don’t be such a nitpicker. You know I meant most people.
However, if everyone thought the way I do they would be trying to save the world, not overpopulate it until we drive every other wild species larger than a prairie dog into extinction.
That is they would have tried that over half a century ago. It’s way too late now.
Ron, I have no idea what you are talking about.
I responded to your post of 05/21/2018 at 6:55 pm where after the article you posted you explicitly stated “83%, that makes this, the sixth extinction, about as great as the great Permian extinction.”
You apparently took a percentage from that article about biomass loss and converted it into an all species loss comparable to the Permian-Triassic extinction. I think not.
Of course, I was assuming that 83% of all mammals would be equivalent to 83% of genera during the Perman Extinction. Of course, on second thought, this is likely way too high.
But you mentioned my chart about terrestrial vertebrate biomass so I naturally assumed you were talking about that post, the only place I had mentioned such a thing. And I think my response was what you would expect. So when you say “I have no idea what you are talking about”…. well, I think you do.
But, if you are implying, and I think that you are, that 83% of all wild mammals being wiped out by humans is not a total catastrophe, not a sign that we are destroying our entire ecosystem, then I have no idea what kind of world you are living in.
Ron, I know you think humans are responsible for the bulk of extinctions but the paper is comparing biomass loss from way before civilization in that 83% number. Maybe you should read the actual paper.
“But, if you are implying, and I think that you are, that 83% of all wild mammals being wiped out by humans is not a total catastrophe”
Not at all Ron, that came from your own head.
Secondly, that 83% being wiped out by humans is a false claim. Not even the paper states that, just a manipulation of figures in the paper to make a headline.
BTW, I live in the same sick and twisted human world as you do. Just a happenstance of birth but I am stuck with it.
Secondly, that 83% being wiped out by humans is a false claim. Not even the paper states that, just a manipulation of figures in the paper to make a headline.
Ahhh but that is exactly what it says:
Since the rise of human civilization 83% of wild mammals have been lost.
83% of all wild mammals,
80% of all marine mammals,
50% of all plants,
15% of all fish.
Oh, okay, I now understand where you are coming from. It is just a coincidence that all this shit has happened since humans come onto the scene. It would likely have happened anyway had not humans arrived to wipe them all out.
Yeah, right!
I agree Ron, the Guardian cartoon graphics do say things like that in the Guardian article.
“But you mentioned my chart about terrestrial vertebrate biomass so I naturally assumed you were talking about that post”
I never mentioned your chart.
We are headed to a whole new biosphere, one that we cannot relate to, due to abrupt climate change. Portions of the earth are already in a new climate regime. Averages don’t mean much when large changes in local radiative forcing are interacting with the dramatic changes in the properties of water.
The perspective of a climate scientist on what is happening and where things are going.
Climate Matters: in conversation with Paul Beckwith
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3gvJMCsMEw
Paul speaks with Beyond Crisis in Ottawa on abrupt climate change; the earth’s warming creating dramatic loss of sea ice in the Arctic; and the urgent need to act NOW to reduce emissions, cool the Arctic and slow the warming trend. This piece gives a detailed analysis on the risks we face from Arctic warming to the overall climate system.
“We’re an innovative, intelligent species but we’re total idiots on the climate change issue.”
“I think we’re in trouble NOW… The world will wake up one morning and they’ll be no sea ice in the Arctic – the weather will be unrecognizable. Will that wake people up? Do we have to reach that point?”
Paul is a well-known climate science educator, and part-time Geography professor in climatology, oceanography, and environmental issues at the University of Ottawa.
I would have said: “We are headed to a whole new biosphere, one that we cannot relate to, due to abrupt climate change [and human population overshoot].”
The energy sources and the technology using that energy produced the current abrupt climate change and the population overshoot are one and the same.
Conversely, quickly eliminating the use of those energy sources would reduce the effects of abrupt climate change and also the population.
Of course we all know population is not the major problem, it’s blatant polluting over-consumption by the top third of the population and their desire to continue in that fashion. I know the well off don’t want to hear it, but that is the reality.
The top few billion, those making or using more than $50 a day need to immediately and dramatically cut back on their carbon footprint.
The global fertility rate has fallen from 5.5 per woman to 2.5 and is still falling, so population may be curing itself. Also the bottom few billion have a very small carbon footprint. Until the well off and rich in the world set a strong and global example of how to live well on a low carbon footprint, I can’t blame the bottom half for not really listening to all the finger pointing by the fat cats spewing pollution everywhere and wrecking the world. They will try and model the biggest polluters and over-consumers if the top half does not change it’s ways.
All that said, we have to deal with the world as it is now and with what we know about it now. We are in a climate emergency, the changes that we see now are not even from what we have done so far to the atmosphere/ocean/life. They are from what we did decades ago. When what we did lately catches up to us, that will be bad. When what we do over the next decade or two is added to that, the changes will be orders of magnitude beyond what is happening now. We don’t have to wait for sea level rise to destroy the cities. If we continue on this course much longer, there will be no cities to speak of just remnants of a lost civilization on a toxic and overheated cemetery world.
Turn the wheel of civilization now, it might not be too late. Waiting until next decade will.
Guess that cures the “population problem”, doesn’t it?
Otherwise learn to live with this: https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate
Meanwhile,
THE UNPRECEDENTED EXPANSION OF THE GLOBAL MIDDLE CLASS
âNotwithstanding gloomy forecasts for global growth, middle-class expansion seems set to continue. In fact, the next decade could see a faster expansion of the middle class than at any other time in history. Within a few years, based on current forecasts, a majority of the worldâs population could have middle-class or rich lifestyles for the first time ever. The most dynamic segment of the global middle-class market is at the lower end of the scale, among new entrants with comparatively low per capita spending.â
https://www.brookings.edu/research/the-unprecedented-expansion-of-the-global-middle-class-2/
Yep, for now anyway. Stay tuned.
The Trump Administration is proposing to lift a ban on “extreme” hunting in Alaska. In other words, it could soon be legal to shoot bear cubs and wolf pups in national preserves.
U.S. HOUSE SANCTIONS KILLING HIBERNATING BEARS, WOLF PUPS IN THEIR DENS ON FEDERAL REFUGES IN ALASKA
âWhat the U.S. House of Representatives did today â actually a very narrow majority of the House â was shameful. Cruel. Callous. Venal. The vote in favor of H.J. Resolution 69, authored by Alaskaâs Rep. Don Young, was 225 to 193. Those 225 members voted to overturn a federal rule â years in the works, and crafted by professional wildlife managers at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service â to stop some of the most appalling practices ever imagined in the contemporary era of wildlife management. Denning of wolf pups, killing hibernating bears, spotting grizzly bears from aircraft and then shooting them after landing, and trapping grizzly bears and black bears with steel-jawed leghold traps and snares. The stuff of wildlife snuff films.â
https://blog.humanesociety.org/2017/02/u-s-house-sanctions-killing-hibernating-bears-wolf-pups-dens-federal-refuges-alaska.html
Hey, Pennsylvania has been shooting bear cubs for a long time now. Geese have such large hunting seasons, they might as well just have open hunting on them. Add to that the states that pay to have people and expensive boats go around at night destroying goose nests.
Coy-wolves, other wise known as Eastern Coyote, have an open season on them. Kill on sight.
All states in the U.S.A., with the exception of Hawaii, allow crow hunting. There is no limit on the number of crows that a hunter can kill during the “open seasons” of 124 days per year.
Millions of birds poisoned each year in the name of agriculture.
Beavers in drowning traps set by landowners and state personnel because they make a small dam on a creek and provide living habitat to many other species.
The list can go on and on.
Not much to be proud of. If this is the result of human intelligence, it should be eliminated quickly.
The “House of Reps” and the administration is just like a large portion of the population. The will of some people will be the will of the land and the rest be damned.
So how is the “world saving” going?
“Hey, Pennsylvania has been shooting bear cubs for a long time now.” Shooting bear cubs in wilderness areas is one thing, doing so in “protected” areas (i.e., Arctic National Wildlife Refuge) is another.
Nahh, it’s still killing young bears. It’s shows a general lowering of the mental state of humans, where killing is the desired object of hunting versus obtaining food and practicing survival techniques. Ethical hunting went out the window with my father’s generation, at least around here for many “hunters”.
They should be so proud to kill a baby bear, stuff it and put it in their living room for all to see their shameless ways. They certainly do not need the food.
There is no such thing as a protected area, not in the long run, not even in the short run.
Your Guide to Hunting on National Wildlife Refuges
Hunting on national wildlife refuges is a tradition that dates to the early 1900s. Today, more than 370 refuges are open to the public for hunting â seasonally and in accordance with state regulations.
https://www.fws.gov/Refuges/hunting/
Fish, barrel, elephant gun!
NAOM
Jack Alpert has some interesting videos on overpopulation.
https://www.youtube.com/user/RapidPopDecline
âAlmost No One Agrees With Usâ: For Rural Students, Gun Control Can Be a Lonely Cause
By Jack Healy
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/22/us/marshall-county-kentucky-student-gun-protests.html
The teenagers in rural Kentucky decided they were fed up after a 15-year-old with a handgun turned their high school into another killing ground, murdering two classmates. Like so many other students, they wrote speeches and op-ed essays calling for gun control, they painted posters and they marched on their State Capitol. The blush of activism made them feel empowered, even a little invincible.
Then came the backlash.
It started with sideways looks and laughter from other students in the hallways, they said. Friends deleted them from group chats and stopped inviting them over. On social media, people called the teenage activists âretardsâ and âspoiled brats,â and said they should have been the ones to die during a shooting in Marshall County High Schoolâs student commons four months ago.
The gulf between liberal and conservative Americaâs responses to mass shootings was on display again in Santa Fe, Tex., population 13,000, after 10 people were killed at the high school there on Friday. Republican leaders expressed no desire to pass gun restrictions. Many residents and students agreed with them, saying that gun control would not stop the bloodshed at Americaâs schools.
âIf we had more guns on campus with more teachers armed, weâd be a lot safer,â said Layton Kelly, 17, a student who hid in a night-black classroom next to the scene of the shooting in Santa Fe.
No social change has ever come about without lots of pain and suffering, people putting themselves in harms way. It all seems so nice later, but it takes real courage and strong commitment to make a change. Sometimes it takes a long time too.
Social media is the wrong place to attempt change, the internet is rife with bullies, trolls and sociopaths as well as the mentally disturbed. They will overwhelm any positive discourse and bring it to a very negative place.
âIf we had more guns on campus with more teachers armed, weâd be a lot safer,â said Layton Kelly, 17, a student who hid in a night-black classroom next to the scene of the shooting in Santa Fe.
Another brainwashed idiot! I’m going to venture out on a limb here and guess that Layton was brought up in a conservative religious home. No amount of data will ever change such a person’s mind. The Third Reich was built with the support of such good people!
https://cosmosmagazine.com/society/religion-and-delusion-determine-fake-news-belief
Religion and delusion determine fake news belief
US study finds reduced modes of thinking underpin how people accept absurd explanations
What do you think of the video in this article then? Are these high schoolers also some brainwashed idiots? Obviously there is much debate and controversy over the gun issue even among young Americans. That’s not surprising since the very basic fundamental values defining conservative and liberal America are fought over when discussing guns.
Local students organize event in support of Second Amendment
By Khloe Keeler
http://www.kktv.com/content/news/Local-students-organize-event-in-support-of-Second-Amendment-478819103.html
âWe have had a movement to spark the nation and to let them know that we are not open to a gun ban and we support our Second Amendment all day, every day,â said 11th-grader Garrett Niles.
Junior student Emily Arseneau thinks a cultural shift needs to happen.
âI believe that needs to start with a conversation about mental health. My generation specifically is facing things that have never been seen before in this nation and we need to open the door for conversation before we can truly find a solution to this problem,â Arseneau said.
Nearby residents also stopped by the school.
âItâs wonderful to see the strong support from the students who come and support the people who started this,” said Florissant resident Michael Jordan. “To show their support in terms of our constitution and the Second Amendment and just listening to the students and how they feel in terms of their country.â
He continued, âItâs a travesty and it actually alarms me. We have grandkids and kids, adult children now. The direction we are heading, itâs just clearly wrong and the Second Amendment is one of the bedrocks of our country.â
Instead of a ban on guns, students called for more of them to serve as protection.
âSolutions that I personally believe in is arming better people in our schools with more guns. Thatâll easily scare away a shooter any way you look at it,â Niles said.
Obviously there is much debate and controversy over the gun issue even among young Americans. Thatâs not surprising since the very basic fundamental values defining conservative and liberal America are fought over when discussing guns.
Debate? What is there to fucking debate?! Look at the damn data. The problem is real simple it’s the guns, stupid! Letting every Tom, Dick and Harry buy guns may be good for the gun manufacturers business and the NRA but it is devastating to the fabric of civil society. The average Joe does not need, nor is he fit to own a firearm.
Case in point Japan, population 127 million deaths by firearms about 10 per year! Any questions?!
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/gun-deaths-eliminated-america-learn-japan-australia-uk-norway-florida-shooting-latest-news-a8216301.html
Japan puts citizens through a rigorous set of tests.
Japan, which has strict laws for obtaining firearms, seldom has more than 10 shooting deaths a year in a population of 127 million people.
If Japanese people want to own a gun, they must attend an all-day class, pass a written test, and achieve at least 95% accuracy during a shooting-range test.
Then they have to pass a mental-health evaluation at a hospital, as well as a background check, in which the government digs into any criminal records or ties and interviews friends and family members.
Finally, they can buy only shotguns and air rifles â no handguns â and must retake the class and the initial exam every three years.
Unlike in the US, Japanese law has long outlawed guns. Still, the wisdom from Japan seems to be that tighter regulations keep guns confined only to those fit to use them.
And BTW: The 2nd Amendment says:
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
Fine, if anyone happens to already be a member of a well regulated Militia, or they can prove they depend on hunting to put food on their table, then they might have a case. Otherwise get in line at the local shrink to have your head examined.
There is NO FUCKING DEBATE to be had on this issue!
I’d like to see our troops brought home from fighting foreign wars and stationed at schools across the country. If these copycat school shooters know there are people ready and willing to blow them into a million bits the moment they step on school property with a gun, they won’t bring a gun to school in the first place.
Iâd like to see our troops brought home from fighting foreign wars and stationed at schools across the country.
Oh, Yeah, that will solve the problem. Bring on the Police State!
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-41488081
How does the US compare with other countries?
About 40% of Americans say they own a gun or live in a household with one, according to a 2017 survey, and the rate of murder or manslaughter by firearm is the highest in the developed world. There were more than 11,000 deaths as a result of murder or manslaughter involving a firearm in 2016.
Seriously we need to stop blaming inanimate objects like guns and put the blame where it really lies and that’s within the schools. They spend all sorts of money on sports, highly paid administration and unnecessary things. Let’s fund metal detectors in all schools, bring in more police officers, more K-9’s, maybe bring back morality teachings. I don’t care how small the school is or how big it is it is time we stop this without taking away any lawful guns.
Most of all though I think the main thing, we should be dealing with the bullying. Make laws against it as bad as intimidation, character assassination, assault & so on. As an angel mom and Godparent my heart goes out to all the families of these tragedies. Even to the family with the child who does the shooting since I would think they had no idea at all how serious their child’s condition was.
Lastly make sure to know when pointing that finger that you got three pointing right back at you. It only takes a second to change the rest of your life and the schools absolutely could have prevented this.
Seriously we need to stop blaming inanimate objects like guns and put the blame where it really lies and thatâs within the schools. They spend all sorts of money on sports, highly paid administration and unnecessary things.
Yeah, especially unnecessary things like actually educating kids and teaching them critical thinking skills so they realize what a bunch of bollocks statements like that, really are!
We need to bring back prayer while we are at it… that always makes everything all right again!
Wait, if guns are the problem because they are inanimate, how can inanimate metal detectors be the solution?
In both of the recent shootings, there were armed and trained security personnel there.
You may have noticed it didn’t stop people from being killed.
And this last shooting: did the father store the guns in a gun safe or secure them with trigger locks? With the ammo locked separately? Because that might actually have helped.
The problem is the gun manufacturers who campaign to let crazy people with criminal records and histories of threatening people… buy guns instantly.
No other country in the world allows this, and it’s not protected by the Second Amendment, which is about militia members like the Black Panther Party, not about deranged ranting loners.
Schools can’t prevent lunatics from buying arsenals and going to shoot up schools, or playgrounds, or street corners, or anywhere else. Regulations restricting who is allowed to buy arsenals, however, can prevent lunatics from buying arsenals. It’s worked worldwide.
The NRA demands that lunatics be allowed to buy arsenals for two reasons:
(1) Gun manufacturers want more sales, and lunatics buy a lot of guns (way more than any sane person)
(2) Wayne LaPierre is personally a lunatic. There is documentation of him randomly threatening people with guns — committing assault. He is the epitome of the irresponsible lunatic who should not be allowed to have guns.
Criminal groups like the NRA make responsible gun owners look bad. In Australia and Canada, responsible gun owners are respected. Here in the US, they are suspected of being lunatics, because of the lunatic NRA.
In the original UK Bill of Rights (1689) the right was limited to protestants, mainly so they could kill catholics if they ever tried to take over the monarchy again, current arguments in USA are not much better.
While not always right, Mao did often have a bit of insight:
“Religion is Poison”
Ignorance of the English Civil War and the Glorious Revolution that followed it are the mainstay of modern American discussions of church and state. The people who started the American Revolution were very well aware of it, but it’s ancient history now.
None of the things Japan does would stand up to legal challenges in the US because of the clear “shall not be infringed” in the 2nd Amendment. Besides one the biggest purposes of the 2nd Amendment is providing a last line of defense against out of control tyrannical government. So what do you suppose the reaction would be among US gun owning citizens, if the US government attempts to implement Japan’s methods?
The “well regulated” part seems to be unclear for a lot of folks.
+1
Heh, someone in my facebook feed informed me recently that a well-armed militia is enshrined in the first amendment.
You can’t make this stuff up.
Besides one the biggest purposes of the 2nd Amendment is providing a last line of defense against out of control tyrannical government.
ROFLMAO!
Yep, I can see it now, millions of peace loving Americans arming themselves with assault rifles, assembled as a well regulated militia, marching on Washington to depose the current out of control tyrannical government.
You trolls are just too fucking funny!
They are funny—-
And the only defense would be asymmetrical.
” …defense would be asymmetrical”.
While you folks may be ignorant of Solzhenitzen’s unequivocal statements in these matters, a great many of us are most keenly aware.
That great good man offered jarring observations that he and his fellow prisoners deserved their incarceration in the gulags by not fighting strenuously enough for their freedom.
Rather than cowering upstairs in apartments, hearing the security operatives clambering towards them, had enough citizens attacked with whatever utensils available, one fourth Leningrad’s population would not have disappeared.
His description.
Pol Pot’s 2 million victims?
How many would be alive if they could have shot back?
You folks who continuously display the most ruthless, authoritarian views directed against those with whom you disagree ensure that tens of millions of Americans will NEVER willingly surrender to a defenseless life and death authority that you – collectively on this site – unabashedly strive for.
coffeeguyzz,
Do you seriously believe that any Americans either leaning right or left, with guns, are in a position to overthrow the US government even if they feel it has become an authoritarian tyranny?!
Sorry Bro! You are completely delusional!
The US government massively out guns the people. The people wouldn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell!
Hint, this isn’t 1776! Have you checked what kind of fire power the US government in the 21st century has, compared to your fantasy of a well organized and armed militia?
Strawman arguments, Mr. Magyar, have always been a major bane of discussions/debates.
Along with ad hominems, they are said to display the deficiencies of the positions of the speaker.
I do not believe any group of Americans can overthrow the US government with armed insurrection.
I have no fantasies whatsoever regarding a well armed and regulated militia, but your comments lead me to believe I have far more familiarity with the events, people, and – most crucially – the MOTIVES that surrounded those springtime events centuries ago at Lexington and Concord.
Like all fundamentals, those experiences resonate not only today in the US, but in all areas of the globe where struggle is barely contained below the surface.
How’s Bahrain been doing lately?
Right this day, this moment, actions recently taken by individuals named Priestap, Page, Bruce and Nellie Ohr, and
several others in the employ of government are alleged to have committed the most egregious offenses against the democratic processes.
Within days, much of these allegations will see the light of day.
Main point being, Mr. Magyar, that your different view on things from mine should not only be heard, they should be parsed with as much diligence and concern we all, US citizens, can provide so as to offer a better world for our progeny.
When you have, on THIS site, an individual such as Wimbi, openly calling for the execution of my children, of my grandchildren, for the high egregiousness of holding a different position on a current controversial topic, we have crossed a line.
Several, in fact.
When the time arrives – and, historically, it ALWAYS arrives – that we are no longer a people, a nation willing to send their sons and daughters to fight and die for their neighbors perceived welfare, those of us who are willing and prepared to identify enemies – near and far – stand the best chance for survival.
I, and tens of millions of others, will primarily rely upon our own devices, our own resources, till our last breaths.
When you have, on THIS site, an individual such as Wimbi, openly calling for the execution of my children, of my grandchildren, for the high egregiousness of holding a different position on a current controversial topic, we have crossed a line.
I had many a fruitful conversation with Wimbi and I highly doubt he ever made any comments to that effect, if you have proof I’d like to see it. Also, if you do, please provide the context within which such a conversation might have occurred.
Main point being, Mr. Magyar, that your different view on things from mine should not only be heard, they should be parsed with as much diligence and concern we all, US citizens, can provide so as to offer a better world for our progeny.
I think we can mutually agree on that much at least.
To be frank, as a son if immigrants who brought me to this country as a two year old. And having had the opportunity to live and work in other countries, including having experienced first hand living under an authoritarian military dictatorship, I probably see a so called ‘Better World’ through a slightly different prism than you do.
In his report on the Challenger Accident, Richard Feynman said:
“For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.”
I think the same general idea also applies to successful societies, and IMHO the United States and other countries that are trying to go backward in time to the mythical ‘Good Old Days’, while sticking their heads in the sand and attempting to ignore the physical limits imposed by nature are doomed to failure. For Nature always bats last!
About 5 months before he died, a day or so before the thread was ended, Wimbi wrote a somewhat short post where he mused that he and some like minded individuals determined that global warming was an immanent, existential threat to the human race.
They also felt anyone who disagreed was – in effect – responsible for mass killing and thus deserved to be, themselves, terminated pre-emptorily.
That there is a thread of logic is what can make this especially chilling.
The vast majority of people on this board seem to be like many of my friends and family, altruistic, compassionate individuals who yearn for a more just, equitable world.
What decent individual can argue against that?
However, this view, as epitomized by the Mensheviks in early 1900s Russia, is somewhat constrained in implementing real world, sharp elbowed politics.
Enter the Bolsheviks – and there are clearly some on this site – who historically show no qualms in slaughtering millions to get their way.
The comment by Wimbi shows how close a line between the two exists below the surface when collectivists feel rising urgency to achieve their goals.
Bill Ayers, an individual with close association to several current politicians, is said to have called for the elimination of 25 million Americans.
This, Fred, is why we will never – voluntarily – forego our means of self defense.
(For an instructive flip side to individuals voluntarily coalescing into a 100% commited collective, check out the Overmountain Men in the Battle of Kings Mountain in the American Revolution.
There, a group of the most individualistic people around, joined together and were prepared to fight and die for a collective purpose).
Varying views on things is the normal course of events.
When the Ayers type take control, or the Wimbi types become frustrated, they can quickly become mortal enemies.
The scenario regarding defense from the government, or night-time death squads, is about to change. Swat teams won’t be arriving, autonomous gatling guns will (or some such equivalent).
It is likely far too late to step back to a simple time of self-defense.
This, Fred, is why we will never â voluntarily â forego our means of self defense.
Sigh! My point is, that it is not a real means of self defense in face of the existing opposing forces. There is no way to beat them through any such show of force.
You have to be smarter than they are.
They hold all the force cards, you need to learn jiu jitsu. Guns are too primitive in an age of drones, AI, social media manipulation, etc… you need advanced cyber skills to fight the existing system.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7P3rDXrVQ0
The Future of Humanity: Yuval Noah Harari in Conversation with Thomas L. Friedman
Well …
If Cheetohead’s minions come kicking down the door, you guys can retaliate with an app from your smart phones.
Should Kamala Harris’ jacboots come bursting through the entrance, many will blow their heads off.
(Just kidding … mostly).
coffeeguyzz,
I looked through all of Wimbi’s Comments from Feb 1, 2016 until July, 2016 when he passed.
I call bullshit on your claim that he,
When you have, on THIS site, an individual such as Wimbi, openly calling for the execution of my children, of my grandchildren, for the high egregiousness of holding a different position on a current controversial topic, we have crossed a line.
If you want to be believed, then speak the truth.
You will need to reproduce the comment where he suggested as much.
Yair
“Besides one the biggest purposes of the 2nd Amendment is providing a last line of defense against out of control tyrannical government”
When does it kick in then?
Cheers.
Yeah, we need them right now, goddammit! đ
scrub puller,
Oh, good one! You win the internet today.
Everything Japan does would be legal in the US, and in fact restrictions like the Japanese restrictions *were in place in many states in 1789 when the Bill of Rights was passed* and *remained in place*.
@ Fred
In two studies, 5- and 6-year-old children were questioned about the status of the protagonist embedded in three different types of stories. In realistic stories that only included ordinary events, all children, irrespective of family background and schooling, claimed that the protagonist was a real person. In religious stories that included ordinarily impossible events brought about by divine intervention, claims about the status of the protagonist varied sharply with exposure to religion. Children who went to church or were enrolled in a parochial school, or both, judged the protagonist in religious stories to be a real person, whereas secular children with no such exposure to religion judged the protagonist in religious stories to be fictional. Children’s upbringing was also related to their judgment about the protagonist in fantastical stories that included ordinarily impossible events whether brought about by magic (Study 1) or without reference to magic (Study 2). Secular children were more likely than religious children to judge the protagonist in such fantastical stories to be fictional. The results suggest that exposure to religious ideas has a powerful impact on children’s differentiation between reality and fiction, not just for religious stories but also for fantastical stories.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24995520
Arm teachers, the shooters are doing it without the intention of surviving so it will not deter them. What happens when police turn up and a man is pointing a gun at a child? What are the chances that man will get shot on sight? Black man, white kid, no chance.
Will more be caught in crossfire and stray rounds? Will 2 teachers think the other is the shooter? I cannot see it ending well.
NAOM
Black man, white kid, no chance.
Not the profile– if you are paying attention the shooter is a young white christian male.
The point is that the armed teacher might be black.
If I were a black teacher, the last thing I want is to be holding a gun during a SWAT team action.
Well, that hasn’t been the conditions.
This is a young white christian male problem.
You seem to miss the point. There has been a police officer shooting black male problem for a century. Even if the black male is unarmed.
I understand (I was born in South Central LA)– but the school shootings have universally been young white male christian.
Just dealing with reality.
We are not talking about a Watts street scene–
Reality is the cop will most likely shoot the black teacher and ask questions never
Black teacher holding white kid shooter at gunpoint, to make it clearer. See LLoyd’s comment for what I mean.
NAOM
PS By the way, they have started running the new buses here, at last, only about 2 years late! CNG powered!!!
“Black teacher holding white kid shooter at gunpoint, to make it clearer. See LLoydâs comment for what I mean.”
And where has this happened to our young white christian male shooters?
Inquiring minds want to know—-
You are making this difficult – rolls eyes. đ
Follow back up and see that I was referring to the suggestion of arming teachers so this is a future scenario not a past happening.
NAOM
Ah, something that hasn’t happened—-
Now I know what we are talking about.
I was referring to actual reality.
And where has this happened to our young white christian male shooters?
There are very few armed teachers, so it hasn’t come up. It’s what you call a hypothetical. It is an obvious problem for any teacher with a gun, just worse for a black teacher.
Arming teachers is a bad, bad idea, and the last two mass shootings have proved that even professional security cannot control this problem. What you need is fewer guns, 5 round magazines, and strict storage laws: trigger locks, gun safes, and ammo in a separate locked container.
Letting Americans play with a killing machine is a bad idea
Always:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Op7agdIFOGY
And I own one.
(but just one)
Don’t schools typically have high pressure fire suppression systems?
Arm the teachers with water cannons.
Non-lethal defenses seem sensible. But I donât think you understand whatâs important here – how does that provide income for gun makers?
Maybe the NRA could support Tasers – theyâre expensive…
On second thought, that wonât work. Non-lethal defenses donât spread fear, and therefore donât generate more gun sales and donât create more support for demagogues.
Youâve got to keep your eye on the top priorities…
Yes, it’s curious that after Jon Meis successfully halted the rampage of the Seattle Pacific University shooter with pepper spray, and then disarmed him, that the NRA didn’t call for providing pepper spray to the nations educators to ensure student safety.
Guns are more profitable.
NAOM
Schools For Walls
From the previous…
Maybe so-called civilization, (where in one corner, Trump is supposedly in charge and, in another corner, another shmuck is and so on– all of whom and related, the sheeple ruminate about incessantly) won’t do much either after wiping out.
Pseudogovernment-mandated (coerced) ‘school’ is a prison of a sort, too, incidentally. Maybe if we all didn’t allow ourselves and our kids to get coerced and kidnapped into going to some ‘schools’, our lives might amount to more than ‘one-hit-wonders’ so to speak and the Fred Magyars of the world, for example, would be more capable of critical thinking and doing so for themselves.
How about a mass revolt of parents taking their children out of school at once? Unlikely in today’s reality. Better to risk subjecting them to the ideological wall and the relatively-small risk of getting murdered. Their own and their aiding and abetting of a multitude of facets of it will happen later after their run through the ideological mills.
That bit above makes me wonder if you read my previous edit of my comment-in-question, since in it, I mentioned in part something along the lines of some 3D animation of your head going so far up our ass, that it came out your mouth, and that made navel-gazing look like a Sunday picnic.
In any case, of course I am criticizing the system, which doesn’t give a flying fuck about Africans, never mind their lighting needs, or much of anyone or anything else for that matter, despite the blissfully and wilfully-ignorant pretenses to the contrary.
And there’s a big difference between a system and an individual (even if some indivuals really like to suck up to and identify with it), but explaining that, among other things, to people like Fred Magyar– especially if he’s hopelessly sycophantic to the system– after doing too much of that already hereon anyway would, alas, be pissing into the wind.
We’ll let someone else do the honor for the Esteemed-in-question.
The Happiest Days of Our Lives | Another Brick In The Wall
“When we grew up and went to school
There were certain teachers who would
Hurt the children in any way they could…
By pouring their derision
Upon anything we did
And exposing every weakness
However carefully hidden by the kids
But in the town, it was well known
When they got home at night, their fat and
Psychopathic wives would thrash them
Within inches of their lives…”
In any case, of course I am criticizing the system, which doesnât give a flying fuck about Africans, never mind their lighting needs, or much of anyone or anything else for that matter,
Whatever, Caelan, just go back to making your little mud pies or whatever it is that you do to amuse yourself. While you are wallowing in your self importance and wasting your time criticizing the system, Those Africans have their sleeves rolled up and are building micro grids and developing their own alternative systems for you to find fault with.
Systems come and go, some work for a while but generally they end up outliving their usefulness.
Then a new system has to be developed. The only thing that is for certain is change.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQlNMqVdyKo
Bob Dylan The Times They Are A Changin’ 1964
Yeah, I’ve been watching videos on youtube about paying very poor Africans to work on anti-desertification projects, and you always hear women saying things like “With the money I’ll be able to buy school books for my kids so the don’t grow up illiterate like me”. Meanwhile several generations of Americans are being brainwashed to believe that schools is slavery, or satanic. Let’s see how that works out for you America.
Mandatory ‘Education’ & Legal ‘Kidnapping’
Define ‘rich’, ‘poor’ or ‘school/education’. Just because some (‘factory-prison-schooled’) people might have (self-)limited critical thinking skills doesn’t mean there aren’t better definitions.
As a related aside:
That mill is still alive of course and still cranking them out like at an industrial mass-production factory; factory kids, factory education for a factory planet.
Our kids.
If they can’t get slowly ‘killed/tortured’ with school, maybe they can get quickly killed in school.
Environmental Impacts of Light-Emitting Diodes (LEDs)
Light pollution is altering plant and animal behaviour
Energy-Saving LED Lighting Has Backfired in a Spectacular Way
More light pollution than ever.
Gee Caelan, where were you Edison came out with the first commercially successful incandescent light bulb? You could have warned all of humanity about the inherent dangers of all that light pollution, and we would all have gone back to our dark caves and the world would be perfectly fine today…
But then again, you ain’t exactly the brightest LED in the chandelier are you?! You never seem to think critically about the stuff you copy and paste and if it really stands up to scrutiny. Case in point:
The rapid growth in the LED industry implies that, ultimately, LEDs will contribute to the solid waste stream, and could impact resource availability, human health, and ecosystems in much the same way as generic electronic waste (e-waste) from computers and cell phones has generated concern in recent years.â
Well, you have a point, that might actually come to pass. However, here’s the logical problem, Where is it written in stone that it absolutely WILL?!
That assumes the our future behavior will be exactly the same as it has been in the the past. It assumes that we can and will continue with an infinite growth based linear economic model. Extracting resources, making products and then throwing them away.
It totally ignores any and all alternative economic models such as those in a non personal ownership based shared circular economic model where products are designed from the get go not to end up in any waste stream and after ending their useful lifespans end up as feed stock for other industrial processes. Now while I won’t be holding my breath waiting for such a paradigm shift to occur anytime soon, there is nothing that says that it can’t happen.
As they say past performance is not necessarily indicative of future behavior. And if you think you are going to convince the 9 billion or so humans who are going to be living on this planet in the near future not to use lights you need to watch this first:
Lights of Human Activity Shine in NASA’s Image of Earth at Night
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8dc58ZrOuck
More Fred Peddling Industry
Africa, like the rest of the planet, is being/has been plundered and pillaged in the name of colonization, industrialization and the crony-capitalist plutarchy, greenwashed/token philanthropic corporate guerilla marketing aside.
Go pull your head out of your ass for a second if you can stop the looping and worry about your own backyard, such as, for one, those of African ancestry disproportionately-locked-up in the American prison industrial complex… For all we know, they might even be doing the kind of slave labor that helps manufacture LED’s for export to Africa. You already know that they do slave labor for all kinds of products, right?
Technology is fundamentally worthless without its proper control, which includes by those affected by it. And there is no point in it if it undermines a planet on which it is suppose to exist and make lives better not worse.
âThe circular economy is a generic term for an industrial economyâŚâ ~ Wikipedia
See also here.
Caelan is a goofball. The light pollution problem has been serious for a long time, but LEDs actually *help*, as they produce *less* light pollution outdoors than the incandescants or flourescents do.
Snips from the articles above:
“In economics… Jevons paradox… occurs when technological progress increases the efficiency with which a resource is used (reducing the amount necessary for any one use), but the rate of consumption of that resource rises because of increasing demand.” ~ Wikipedia
The new LED street lights they put up here spill a LOT of light sideways. The previous, and modern, HPS lights did not. Bad design.
NAOM
Zoo animal noms:
https://news.mongabay.com/2018/05/venezuelas-hungry-hunt-wildlife-zoo-animals-as-economic-crisis-grows/
Fred, stock up on beer —
FLORIDIANS COULD FAR FAR MORE FREQUENT, INTENSE HEATWAVES
“Because temperatures are increasing faster at night, heatwaves are already becoming more frequent and intense at night, versus during the day. Soaring nighttime temperatures could be particularly troublesome for Floridians in large cities such as Miami, Tampa and Orlando, where the urban heat island phenomenon could amplify heatwaves, given that paved surfaces and concrete trap heat.”
https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2018-05/eau-fcf052218.php
Interesting report on air conditioning trends/energy use- Future of Cooling
https://www.iea.org/cooling/
Hickory, from your link:
“The use of air conditioners and electric fans already accounts for about a fifth of the total electricity in buildings around the world â or 10% of all global electricity consumption. Over the next three decades, the use of ACs is set to soar, becoming one of the top drivers of global electricity demand.”
So, are air conditioners another climate change feedback phenomena?
Cities have a particular problem. Filled with lots of glass faced buildings, dark roofs and streets the air conditioning problem is amplified by poor building design plus the heat island effect. Daytime temps by 12F and evening temps up to 22F above nearby rural regions.
Since most people will be living in cities soon, proper building design could go a long way to reducing both cooling and heating demand.
Donât forget roads and parking lots. Asphalt happens to be black and it has an extremely high âabsorbtivityâ (and “emissivity”) of solar energy, generally described as being around 95%. There are over 100,000 square miles of black asphalt pavement and roofs in the US. BTW what is “proper building design” and are we going to remove improper buildings and replace them with “proper ones” ?
Yes, the asphalt roads and roofs are designed perfectly to absorb sunlight. Then they release heat in the evening to keep the area from cooling off as it normally would with trees and natural terrain.
Urban Heat Islands
“Heat islands form as vegetation is replaced by asphalt and concrete for roads, buildings, and other structures necessary to accommodate growing populations. These surfaces absorbârather than reflectâthe sun’s heat, causing surface temperatures and overall ambient temperatures to rise. Displacing trees and vegetation minimizes the natural cooling effects of shading and evaporation of water from soil and leaves (evapotranspiration). Tall buildings and narrow streets can heat air trapped between them and reduce air flow. Waste heat from vehicles, factories, and air ”
Even in winter, lots of energy is wasted due to poor building design.
“The release of heat from the burning of fossil fuels can also raise urban temperatures. On a typical winter day, Manhattan releases four times more energy from burning fossil fuels than the amount of energy that comes into the urban area from the Sun.”
https://scied.ucar.edu/longcontent/urban-heat-islands
The good news, asphalt parking lots absorb the sun’s heat quickly and provide excellent sources of lift for sailplane pilots.
You haven’t really flown until you have flown a cloud street.
You don’t know how thoroughly I’ve examined that—
Paint them all reflective white. That’s what Steven Chu wanted to do.
Los Angeles paints streets white to stay cool | Science | AAAS
Sep 7, 2017 – Part of the plan, Popular Science reports, is to paint over many of the city’s black roads with a reflective white coating called CoolSeal
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/09/los-angeles-paints-streets-white-stay-cool
Not fade away.
Good idea…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibERHLsafak
I remember you from the Fillmore West, 7th row stage left. May 1972. Good stuff…
Don’t worry future civilizations will be either living underground or building giant earthen mounds like termites which have figured out how to cool their mounds. đ
Stay cool!
Does living in nuclear bomb shelters count?
Well, I don’t think termite mounds are totally impervious to nuclear attack but they are still quite cool. (pun intended)
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2015/09/how-termites-ventilate/
How termites ventilate
Aside from revealing how termite mounds work, the study may also offer lessons for architects.
âCould you drive large-scale flows through a building ⌠by cleverly opening and closing doors and windows?â Mahadevan asked. âRather than spending a great deal of energy for a fan and air conditioning in every room, with the end result being that some people are too hot and some people are too cold ⌠perhaps we should think of the entire thing as a system, and these new measurements suggest that if the architecture is appropriate, ventilation can occur by using environmental t:ransients â something for us to think about.â
Link to paper: http://www.pnas.org/content/112/37/11589
Termite mounds harness diurnal temperature oscillations for ventilation
Hunter King, Samuel Ocko, and L. Mahadevan
PNAS September 15, 2015. 112 (37) 11589-11593; published ahead of print August 27, 2015.
Significance
Termite mounds are meter-sized structures built by millimeter-sized insects. These structures provide climate-controlled microhabitats that buffer the organisms from strong environmental fluctuations and allow them to exchange energy, information, and matter with the outside world. By directly measuring the flow inside a mound, we show that diurnal ambient temperature oscillations drive cyclic flows that flush out CO2 from the nest and ventilate the mound. This swarm-built architecture demonstrates how work can be derived from the fluctuations of an intensive environmental parameter, and might serve as an inspiration and model for the design of passive, sustainable human architecture.
Abstract
Many species of millimetric fungus-harvesting termites collectively build uninhabited, massive mound structures enclosing a network of broad tunnels that protrude from the ground meters above their subterranean nests. It is widely accepted that the purpose of these mounds is to give the colony a controlled microclimate in which to raise fungus and brood by managing heat, humidity, and respiratory gas exchange. Although different hypotheses such as steady and fluctuating external wind and internal metabolic heating have been proposed for ventilating the mound, the absence of direct in situ measurement of internal air flows has precluded a definitive mechanism for this critical physiological function. By measuring diurnal variations in flow through the surface conduits of the mounds of the species Odontotermes obesus, we show that a simple combination of geometry, heterogeneous thermal mass, and porosity allows the mounds to use diurnal ambient temperature oscillations for ventilation. In particular, the thin outer flutelike conduits heat up rapidly during the day relative to the deeper chimneys, pushing air up the flutes and down the chimney in a closed convection cell, with the converse situation at night. These cyclic flows in the mound flush out CO2 from the nest and ventilate the colony, in an unusual example of deriving useful work from thermal oscillations.
Humans still have a lot to learn from nature.
I’ll probably have to consider installing new units in a few years time (existing are BER) due to rising heat and humidity. If I do I will look at some solar panels to offset energy use, they are not economic with my current usage.
Did a quick check with an IR thermometer. Cement roof 50C, white waterproofing 40C, white waterproofing under Spanish tile 30C. More waterproofing going on at the moment.
NAOM
The changes in heat waves and high temperatures. Hot days, hotter nights.
http://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/The-312/June-2012/The-Hottest-Day-in-Chicago-Then-and-Now/
ASTRONOMERS OBSERVE UNPRECEDENTED DETAIL IN PULSAR 6,500 LIGHT-YEARS FROM EARTH
“A team of astronomers has performed one of the highest resolution observations in astronomical history by observing two intense regions of radiation, 20 kilometres apart, around a star 6500 light-years away. This is equivalent to using a telescope on Earth to see a flea on the surface of Pluto.
The pulsar is designated PSR B1957+20. Previous work led by Main’s co-author, Prof. Marten van Kerkwijk, from the University of Toronto, suggests that it is likely one of the most massive pulsars known, and further work to accurately measure its mass will help in understanding how matter behaves at the highest known densities, and equivalently, how massive a neutron star can be before collapsing into a black hole.”
Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2018-05-astronomers-unprecedented-pulsar-light-years-earth.html#jCp
BTW, B1957+20 (The Black Widow Pulsar) is an eclipsing binary millisecond pulsar. It orbits with a brown dwarf companion with an eclipse duration of 20 minutes. When discovered it was the first such pulsar known. The prevailing explanation for the system is that the companion is being destroyed by the gravitational environment (Roche lobe overflow) caused by the neutron star, and so the sobriquet Black Widow was applied to the object.
Doug’s theme song:
Time And Space
^u^
RE: Goldfish by SĂŠbastien Marchal. Not bad Puffalar but Iâm more into Johann Sebastian Bach. đ
DougL,
I believe all proper pulsar nuts–ah, sorry, heh heh: enthusiasts–would prefer Johann Sebastian B.
We Quaternary types certainly do.
A Mozart Concerto ain’t half bad either, eh?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWNYq-cCXRU
It’s not for you to listen to, you silly goose, it’s your theme song! ^u^
That said, let’s gander a listen to Johann Sebastian Bach! ^u^ (Give us a favourite!)
In the Wake of Mass Shootings, Parents Reconsider Mass Schooling
Parents who remove their children from the confines of the conventional classroom are not running away from reality. They are running towards it.
Wild results from computer models. Extreme extrapolations from very narrow samples. Estimates ranging by two orders of magnitude. Double and multiple overcounts of species. That about describes the state of determining the number of species and extinction rates on the planet, published claims unsupported by actual field data. When claims of a rate diverge greatly from field data and known populations, they are generally unreliable to just being plain wrong.
Global Extinction Rates: Why Do Estimates Vary So Wildly?
Is it 150 species a day or 24 a day or far less than that? Prominent scientists cite dramatically different numbers when estimating the rate at which species are going extinct. Why is that?
But nobody knows whether such estimates are anywhere close to reality. They are based on computer modeling, and documented losses are tiny by comparison. Only about 800 extinctions have been documented in the past 400 years, according to data held by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN). Out of some 1.9 million recorded current or recent species on the planet, that represents less than a tenth of one percent.
Nor is there much documented evidence of accelerating loss. In its latest update, released in June, the IUCN reported âno new extinctions,â although last year it reported the loss of an earwig on the island of St. Helena and a Malaysian snail. And some species once thought extinct have turned out to be still around, like the Guadalupe fur seal, which âdied outâ a century ago, but now numbers over 20,000.
Moreover, the majority of documented extinctions have been on small islands, where species with small gene pools have usually succumbed to human hunters. That may be an ecological tragedy for the islands concerned, but most species live in continental areas and, ecologists agree, are unlikely to prove so vulnerable.
https://e360.yale.edu/features/global_extinction_rates_why_do_estimates_vary_so_wildly
The media has grabbed on to the extreme numbers and produced a whole culture of doom and gloom. Action now can really make a difference because things are not as bad as advertised. Use that time wisely and make a difference.
Fish, thanks for the great link. I loved it. Copied and pasted from your link:
But the documented losses may be only the tip of the iceberg. Thatâs because the criteria adopted by the IUCN and others for declaring species extinct are very stringent, requiring targeted research. Itâs also because we often simply donât know what is happening beyond the world of vertebrate animals that make up perhaps 1 percent of known species.
One way to fill the gap is by extrapolating from the known to the unknown. In June, Gerardo Ceballos at the National Autonomous University of Mexico â in collaboration with luminaries such as Paul Ehrlich of Stanford and Anthony Barnosky of the University of California, Berkeley â got headlines around the world when he used this approach to estimate that current global extinctions were âup to 100 times higher than the background rate.â
Ceballos looked at the recorded loss since 1900 of 477 species of vertebrates. That represented a loss since the start of the 20th century of around 1 percent of the 45,000 known vertebrate species. He compared this loss rate with the likely long-term natural âbackgroundâ extinction rate of vertebrates in nature, which one of his co-authors, Anthony Barnosky of UC Berkeley recently put at two per 10,000 species per 100 years. This background rate would predict around nine extinctions of vertebrates in the past century, when the actual total was between one and two orders of magnitude higher.
Ceballos went on to assume that this accelerated loss of vertebrate species would apply across the whole of nature, leading him to conclude that extinction rates today are âup to a hundred times higherâ than background.
And understand he is talking only about vertebrate species here, not plants and insects or invertebrate animals. If vertebrates are going extinct at 100 times the normal background rate, then that is something to get excited over.
Then you wrote: The media has grabbed on to the extreme numbers and produced a whole culture of doom and gloom. Action now can really make a difference because things are not as bad as advertised. Use that time wisely and make a difference.
Yes, yes goddammit, the media should stop concentrating on plants and bugs and concentrate on vertebrate animals, then they will realize that things are a lot worse than they realize.
10,000 years ago the total terrestrial vertebrate mass of humans and their animals were about .1% of the total. Wild terrestrial vertebrates made up 99.9% of the total. Today they make up less than 3% of the total and by 2050 they will make up less than 1% of the total. I am not referring to plants, insects, worms or bacteria here. I have no idea what their mass is or what it will be in 2050.
But in 2050 some of the large animals will still be found in zoos, as long as the zookeepers can keep them alive.
Fantastic, I predicted your cherry picking the article and taking it out of context. You have given a prime example of the fantastic extrapolation that is going on in the world of bio-doomers like Paul Ehrlich. Why not bring up Guy McPherson too?
I am merely trying to find some reality in this mess that is the so called extinction/biodiversity crisis. Unlike you I have no doomer agenda to fulfill. Our first major objective should be to determine reality, not run with the biggest numbers that head in a personally desired direction.
Projecting the doom of all invertebrates from snails? Hogwash.
Anyone who actually reads and researches that article will see my point. You however ignore the article and run 180 degrees the other way using an example of the pseudo-science that the article questions to bolster your agenda.
Fantastic, I predicted your cherry picking the article and taking it out of context.
Okay, quoting four paragraphs from the article is not cherry picking. Cherry picking would be quoting one sentence or part of one sentence. Also, nothing was taken out of context. The context before those four paragraphs was entirely different, it was about small islands, and the context after those four paragraphs was entirely different, it was about invertebrates.
Really Fish, I donât think you understand what the word âcontextâ means.
Why not bring up Guy McPherson too?
I have mentioned Guy McPherson many times in past comments. I have always called him a nutcase. He thinks humanity, and just about everything else will go extinct within a few years because of global warming. It was disingenuous of you to say that. It’s called “poisoning of the well”. If you don’t know what that means, look it up. And I mentioned no one in my post, I just copied and pasted from your article.
Projecting the doom of all invertebrates from snails? Hogwash.
Now you are just getting fucking ridiculous. I never thought you would stoop to such nonsense Fish. I have never projected any such thing and you goddamn well know it. I have written nothing, absolutely nothing, about the demise of invertebrates. I have always concentrated on vertebrates and you know that.
To insinuate that I am projecting the doom of invertebrates, which is exactly what that sentence does, is… is… Well, you know what it is. But I refuse to use the same verbiage that I would use if I were referring to Trump.
You have personally attacked me in just about every response so don’t start moaning when I direct my disdain at your cherry picking and misrepresentations.
Yep, understanding and reading comprehension is low here. You have no real desire to understand the science, the lack of data, the actual data or anything that does not fit your view.
Here is the data.
Only about 800 extinctions have been documented in the past 400 years, according to data held by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN). Out of some 1.9 million recorded current or recent species on the planet, that represents less than a tenth of one percent.
Now according to some that same 800 species loss is happening every few days. Of course some people believe in flying saucers, aliens and don’t believe in man made climate change.
That is what we know now. 800 in 400 years, sounds like two a year to me. That is the bottom of the “background” extinction rate.
Yet people suck up to the 150 species lost a day or several species lost per minute myth that the media publishes.
I guess we missed those more than 50,000 species lost per year. Which by now would have eliminated most of the known species by now. Do you think we would not have noticed?
As they say, show me the evidence. Not just some cockimamy extrapolation, I want names and dates.
Guess what, you can’t even give me the first 150 out of a million or more, can you. It’s all logistical inference of the worst kind.
I am not talking population change or biomass, I am talking extinction.
Back up your claims with some actual data.
BTW, according to Erlich (the population doomer) we should already all be dead almost two decades ago. Guess that didn’t happen. But I notice a tendency to believe people who are dramatically wrong as long as their predictions fit their psychological needs. Maybe most people just like bad news, trained by the media.
More recently, scientists at the U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity concluded that: âEvery day, up to 150 species are lost.â That could be as much as 10 percent a decade.
But nobody knows whether such estimates are anywhere close to reality. They are based on computer modeling, and documented losses are tiny by comparison.
I am not saying that lots of species are not currently under threat, I am simply saying that thousands of species disappearing for every recorded loss is simply not believable nor is it in any way supported by fact. That is what the article said, that is what I say.
It’s a myth, a concoction and it makes science lose credibility.
Google: The number of species in the world
The total number of non-bacterial and non-archaeal species in the world has been estimated at 8.7 million, with previous estimates ranging from two million to 100 million.
You are hung up on species Fish. If it is impossible to document the total number of species in the world, it is sure as hell impossible to document how many of them go extinct each day or how many have gone extinct in the last 400 years. So all the figures you quote are totally meaningless.
We can, however, document what is happening right now. We can document how much the deserts are spreading each year. We can document how fast the water tables are dropping each year. We can document how many rivers do not reach the sea for most of the year. We can document how many acres of forest we are clearing each year. We can document how fast the world’s megafauna is disappearing. And we can document how fast the world’s coral reefs are dying, which means all the sea life who’s only niche is the coral will die also.
Fish, you don’t seem to have a clue as to what the hell is going on, hanging everything on the species count, which because of the vast uncertainty in that count, has become totally meaningless.
I have nothing more to say to you on this subject. You can have the last rant. I will not respond.
“Fish, you donât seem to have a clue as to what the hell is going on”
I know.
Good point Ron, cram a few apes into cages at zoos, feed them popcorn, send a photo on your cel phone to your âfriendsâ and donât spoil your day arguing about extinction. Even one critter in a cage means heâs not extinct doesnât it?
Meanwhile the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere increased at record speed last year to hit a level not seen for more than three million years. Obvious result, more days at the beach. Just enjoy the heat before the next ice age, as Xavier would say.
What in Hell do these guys know?
‘WE’RE SLEEPWALKING INTO A MASS EXTINCTION’ SAY SCIENTISTS
“Species that live in symbiosis with others, which often occur in the most delicately balanced and threatened marine ecosystems such as coral reefs, are the slowest to recover their diversity if damaged, according to a team of scientists.
Diversity takes millions of years to evolve, but can be damaged in the blink of an eye. We are already losing diversity that has never even been documented, so it’s vitally important to understand the mechanisms that drive evolution into new species.”
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/03/180321121558.htm
I don’t know how many species there are, or how many go extinct each day, or how much of that we are responsible for.
But it is clear that we have sequestered the vast majority of the biosphere for our own purpose, that being the placement of its products into our mouths, and to a lesser extent for purposes such as producing fiber, fuel or fodder for ‘our’ animals of burden/entertainment.
What we have left unplowed or ungrazed is generally small scrubby, dry or rocky remnants. Places with poor soil, windswept, steep or otherwise of low potential, and a few parks. These are the places that wild species have to hide. For many it is a tenuous existence.
Even if they don’t go extinct, overall it is a tragedy on the scale of previous mass extinctions. In a geologic timeframe, the ramifications may not be as severe, but in the timeframe of human existence it is as severe. It is shameful how little we value this earth, and life.
“It is shameful how little we value this earth, and life.”
Well cattle ranchers certainly value the land. The cattle sector of the Brazilian Amazon, incentivized by the international beef and leather trades, has been responsible for about 70% of all deforestation in the region, or about 14% of the world’s total annual deforestation, making it the world’s largest single driver of deforestation. By 1995, 70% of formerly forested land in the Amazon had been deforested, and 90% of that been converted to cattle ranching. Much of the remaining deforestation within the Amazon has resulted from farmers clearing land for small-scale subsistence agriculture or mechanized cropland producing soy, palm, and other crops.
Thanks, Doug, and Hickory, for the support. What is happening right now could not be more serious. To downplay the destruction we are causing our planet is almost criminal. I am always astonished at the “Don’t worry, Be happy” crowd that accuse us of spreading doom and gloom. I am at a total loss to understand their worldview. But I am not a psychologist, so I guess I will just have to live with that mystery.
But goddammit we are at 7.6 billion people and are deep, deep into overshoot. We are systematically wiping out all the wild megafauna on this earth. And anyone who cannot see that is just stone blind in my opinion.
But goddammit we are at 7.6 billion people and are deep, deep into overshoot. We are systematically wiping out all the wild megafauna on this earth. And anyone who cannot see that is just stone blind in my opinion.
As I believe I have often mentioned, it is not so much the loss of specific species of megafauna that upsets me the most. It is more the loss of entire ecosystems as characterized by the fact that just about every single coral reef on the planet is in very very deep trouble right now. If you want to talk about everyone being stone blind to an extremely alarming fact, that one definitely tops my list.
While understanding exactly how everything is linked may be beyond the general comprehension of most people, I can guarantee, that if all the tropical coral reefs die off and they are doing just that, you will lose plenty of marine megafauna such as whales, sharks and large pelagic, top of the food chain predators, such as tuna.
Then there are plenty of others. Next on my list is another canary in the coal mine, the also very alarming sign, that every major group of insects are disappearing world wide. Which will have a cascading domino ripple effect throughout multiple ecosystems and food webs leading to, you guessed it, more megafauna extinctions… And just to repeat Ron’s comment once again: “Anyone who cannot see that is just stone blind in my opinion”.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/02/180201085800.htm
The disappearance of common species
Insect die-off: Even common species are becoming rare
Together with their colleagues from the Senckenberg Nature Research Society, scientists of the Technical University of Munich (TUM) were able to show that currently widespread insects are threatened with a serious decline in species diversity in the near future. The research team lists the fragmentation of habitats and the intensification of agriculture as reasons for the decline of these “generalists.” According to the study, published today in the scientific journal Biological Conservation, the genetic diversity among the examined butterfly species is also expected to decline sharply in the future — as a result, the insects will become more sensitive to environmental changes.
It is the highly complex and interconnected webs of life that are being imperiled and we simply cannot continue to keep pulling thread after thread from those tapestries and expect not to suffer major consequences in the form of mass extinctions at some time in the not too distant future.
“Anyone who cannot see that is just stone blind in my opinion!”
Cheers!
Fred — Think I posted this already somewhere. One pct not under threat, why get excited?
ONLY ONE PCT OF JAPAN’S BIGGEST CORAL REEF HEALTHY
âJapan’s biggest coral reef has not recovered from bleaching due to rising sea temperatures, with only one percent of the reef in a healthy condition, according to a government study. The overall volume of coral in Sekisei Lagoon in southwestern Japan near Okinawa had already plunged by 80 percent since the late 1980s due to rising water temperatures and damage caused by coral-eating starfish.â
Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2018-05-pct-japan-biggest-coral-reef.html#jCp
One pct not under threat, why get excited?
Yeahsss my precioussses! I’m quite sure that we can all rest assured that by the end of the next warm season, the remaining 1%, will all be pretty much toast as well!
To be frank, one really can not discuss mass extinction without a grasp of ecosystem functioning and connectivity.
When I look at coral bleaching and die off of an entire reef system such as The Great Barrier Reef in Australia I think of it being akin to a massive power grid failure affecting a large metropolitan area say New York City.
It affects everything! Electricity, communications, the subway system, internet access, the underlying economic impacts of ATMs being down, the stock market, banking, gas stations without fuel, no food being brought into the supermarkets, healthcare and hospital systems down, total economic and social chaos! Not to mention the ripple effects of all the Interstate and international commerce which are disrupted as well!
The city might survive that for a few days but if it goes on for months and then happens repeatedly year after year, it’s basically game over! Same with the coral reef ecosystems. They are getting hit over and over again.
It is basically game over and I don’t think we yet have a clue as to the repercussions.
https://www.accuweather.com/en/weather-news/the-great-barrier-reef-experienced-a-catastrophic-die-off-following-marine-heatwave-study-shows/70004767
The Great Barrier Reef experienced a catastrophic die-off following marine heat wave, study shows
A three-year marine heat wave extended from June 2014 to May 2017, with warm ocean waters wreaking havoc on some of the worldâs most valuable ecosystems: the coral reefs.
For the Great Barrier Reef, located off the coast of Australia, the marine heat wave resulted in severe bleaching events in 2016 and 2017. It was the first time consecutive events have been observed at the Great Barrier Reef. More than two-thirds of the reef was reported to be damaged.
A study published online on Nature, the International Journal of Science, on Thursday, April 19, shows that corals on the northern Great Barrier Reef experienced a catastrophic die-off following the 2016 marine heat wave.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0041-2
Global warming transforms coral reef assemblages
Abstract
Global warming is rapidly emerging as a universal threat to ecological integrity and function, highlighting the urgent need for a better understanding of the impact of heat exposure on the resilience of ecosystems and the people who depend on them1. Here we show that in the aftermath of the record-breaking marine heatwave on the Great Barrier Reef in 20162, corals began to die immediately on reefs where the accumulated heat exposure exceeded a critical threshold of degree heating weeks, which was 3â4â°C-weeks. After eight months, an exposure of 6â°C-weeks or more drove an unprecedented, regional-scale shift in the composition of coral assemblages, reflecting markedly divergent responses to heat stress by different taxa. Fast-growing staghorn and tabular corals suffered a catastrophic die-off, transforming the three-dimensionality and ecological functioning of 29% of the 3,863 reefs comprising the worldâs largest coral reef system. Our study bridges the gap between the theory and practice of assessing the risk of ecosystem collapse, under the emerging framework for the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Ecosystems3, by rigorously defining both the initial and collapsed states, identifying the major driver of change, and establishing quantitative collapse thresholds. The increasing prevalence of post-bleaching mass mortality of corals represents a radical shift in the disturbance regimes of tropical reefs, both adding to and far exceeding the influence of recurrent cyclones and other local pulse events, presenting a fundamental challenge to the long-term future of these iconic ecosystems.
Good Luck!
. I am always astonished at the âDonât worry, Be happyâ crowd that accuse us of spreading doom and gloom.
Oddly enough, you and Gonefishing are in pretty close agreement, from different directions. Youâre saying things are dire, we need to recognize that. And, heâs saying that things are very serious, and we need to recognize that and take action before it becomes dire.
“….before it becomes dire.” Are you saying things haven’t become dire yet? What levels of CO2 (and methane) = dire. What is a dire level of human population? 10 billion? 12 billion?
Focus, everyone, focus. Iâm talking about Ron and GF, and what theyâre saying. Donât worry about the exact wording, like the word âdireâ. Just look at their overall arguments.
My point: theyâre disagreeing about the exact state of things, but both are saying that thereâs no room for complacency.
Stating that thereâs no hope is the best way to protect the status quo of FF, pollution and environmental decline. After all, if thereâs no hope, why do anything?
Yep, to take those false numbers to heart would quench efforts to action. We see this in some major environmental groups.
I am just trying to get an actual assessment of the current extinction rate. It appears way over inflated by many and high rates are very questionable.
Now threats and population reductions are rampant. If those threats continue much longer we could enter an actual large extinction event. But we are not there yet, so action is still valid and strongly needed. Playing the gloom and doom card is very harmful to those actions, especially when it is wrong.
I am just trying to get an actual assessment of the current extinction rate. It appears way over inflated by many and high rates are very questionable.
I agree that it is extremely difficult to get actual numbers. This site might be a helpful starting point:
http://www.biologicaldiversity.org/programs/biodiversity/elements_of_biodiversity/extinction_crisis/
In the past 500 years, we know of approximately 1,000 species that have gone extinct, from the woodland bison of West Virginia and Arizona’s Merriam’s elk to the Rocky Mountain grasshopper, passenger pigeon and Puerto Rico’s Culebra parrot â but this doesn’t account for thousands of species that disappeared before scientists had a chance to describe them [4]. Nobody really knows how many species are in danger of becoming extinct. Noted conservation scientist David Wilcove estimates that there are 14,000 to 35,000 endangered species in the United States, which is 7 to 18 percent of U.S. flora and fauna. The IUCN has assessed roughly 3 percent of described species and identified 16,928 species worldwide as being threatened with extinction, or roughly 38 percent of those assessed. In its latest four-year endangered species assessment, the IUCN reports that the world won’t meet a goal of reversing the extinction trend toward species depletion by 2010 [5].
What’s clear is that many thousands of species are at risk of disappearing forever in the coming decades.
IUCN website links:
Current:
http://www.iucnredlist.org/about/summary-statistics
But to be honest you really almost have to be a biologist with a thorough knowledge of all plant and animal kingdoms to really get useful information out of it. It is definitely not a site that is very user friendly to the average lay person.
They do have a TAKE ACTION link: đ
http://support.iucnredlist.org/
Support The IUCN Red List
Experts across the globe have assessed over 79,800 species on the IUCN Red List – but more needs to be done. Our goal is to assess 160,000 species by 2020 to guide vital conservation.
Edit: Excellent talk and panel discussion
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rlJvLS66xqg
Multispecies Salon: Hope In An Era of Extinction
We live in a time of extinction. As some charismatic creatures are being saved in zoos, captive breeding facilities, and cryogenic banks, a multitude of others are disappearing as they are disregarded or actively targeted for destruction. Who should we love in a time of extinction? What practices of care can keep those who we love in the world? Can ongoing ecological catastrophes be stemmed â or reversed â with technological or scientific interventions? If it is technically possible, should woolly mammoths and passenger pigeons be reanimated? Should unloved animals, like ticks and mosquitoes, be edited out of ecosystems?
Panel discussion: Kevin Esvelt (MIT), Beth Shapiro (UC Santa Cruz), James Hatley (Salisbury), Genese Sodikoff (Rutgers), Ashley Dawson (City University of New York), Maria Whiteman (Rice), Rafi Youatt (New School), David Wilcove (Princeton), and Graham Burnett (Princeton).
I’ve thought that there is a serious gap in the knowledge and data on species and extinction rates myself.
However, it’s impossible to know this with any certainty until we know a few things.
1. Roughly how many species are there in the world based on an actual attempt to count them all (which has, to my knowledge, never been done).
2. What is the extinction status of all species over a span of years, so as to determine the rate of extinction. Again, never been done to my knowledge.
However, since we’re talking about millions of species (many or perhaps most of which are unknown), and enormous amount of work it would be to check regularly (if not annual) to determine whether they’ve gone extinct vs. being locally extirpated, well, it seems to me that we’ll never really know the answers to items 1 and 2 in any rigourous fashion.
The end result will be a continual nagging skepticism of any numbers that come out on the topic.
However, it’s clearly and obvious to anyone who bothers to look with brains intact and an open mind that massive changes are occurring planetwide and that the space for lifeforms to exist in is dramatically shrinking. Human influence is everywhere on Earth and we tend not to encourage the well being of other life forms (except cows, chickens, pigs, wheat, rice and corn along with a few others), so the future of the rest of nature is pretty dim.
But we are an unthinking, uncontrollable force of nature. Something was going to a change agent on planet Earth. Why not us? The first self regarding force of nature in the universe (of which we’re aware). Don’t you feel special? I do. It’s pretty neato, wouldn’t you say?
If were lucky we will go back to our historical population of 1-10 million.
Of course we had a basically intact planet, with huge resources, and great biodiversity.
That is obviously not the case now.
Like the passenger pigeon, we will go from a huge population to extinction in a small number of years possibly.
(we just about went extinct about 70,000 years ago– 10,000 or less, possibly less than 2000– our genetic record is for all to see)
1. Roughly how many species are there in the world based on an actual attempt to count them all (which has, to my knowledge, never been done).
While the first part of my highlighted text may indeed be true, the second part is a patently false statement!
Biologists have been at this task for quite some time and are constantly updating the techniques and tools at their disposal to refine the state of the art, and accuracy of their numbers.
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/693564
Inordinate Fondness Multiplied and Redistributed: the Number of Species on Earth and the New Pie of Life
Abstract:
The number of species on Earth is one of the most fundamental numbers in science, but one that remains highly uncertain. Clearly, more species exist than the present number of formally described species (approximately 1.5 million), but projected species numbers differ dramatically among studies. Recent estimates range from about 2 million species to approximately 1 trillion, but most project around 11 million species or fewer. Numerous studies have focused on insects as a major component of overall richness, and many have excluded other groups, especially non-eukaryotes. Here, we re-estimate global biodiversity. We also estimate the relative richness of the major clades of living organisms, summarized as a âPie of Life.â Unlike many previous estimates, we incorporate morphologically cryptic arthropod species from molecular-based species delimitation. We also include numerous groups of organisms that have not been simultaneously included in previous estimates, especially those often associated with particular insect host species (including mites, nematodes, apicomplexan protists, microsporidian fungi, and bacteria). Our estimates suggest that there are likely to be at least 1 to 6 billion species on Earth. Furthermore, in contrast to previous estimates, the new Pie of Life is dominated by bacteria (approximately 70â90% of species) and insects are only one of many hyperdiverse groups.
Near where some of my family live there’s a pretty piece of rough shoreline which has some sort of fennel and a couple of moth species that live off of it. It’s only a few hundred yards I think, but that’s it, they haven’t been found anywhere else. There are probably places like that all over, many not recognised. This weekends cyclone in Oman hit an island with many unique species, I’d bet not all identified, and some may have been rendered extinct by the destruction there.
There are probably places like that all over, many not recognised.
Good point!
I don’t have a link handy but have seen studies that show completely different ecosystems on identical species of trees a few hundred yards apart in a tropical rain forest.
We are talking all the epiphytes, orchids, mosses, lichens, ferns, bromeliads, fungi, tree frogs, lizards, spiders, insects species, entire ant colonies all different and uniquely adapted to one single tree’s environment.
So when you cut down that one tree you take out an entire ecosystem consisting of thousands of unique organisms, some of which may not even live on an identical tree a hundred yards away.
What the majority of people value the most is being able to earn a decent enough living to raise their families and buy the necessities they need. If these aren’t noble enough values, what else could be?
You also want to protect your family from pollution: to keep your children from getting asthma, your wife from getting cancer, and your parents from getting COPD.
You want to protect your children from going to war to protect our oil supply, and losing life, limbs and sanity. You also want to reduce your household taxes by $5,000 per year, by not having to provide military security for oil.
Well said. Protect the environment means protecting the family.
Which you can’t do if you don’t have functioning healthy ecosystems. So the most noble value of all, is first and foremost, making sure we have those healthy ecosystems. That is the ultimate basic need.
Nothing wrong with those goals Dan.
Except when billions of people are working on it, there is a catastrophe in the making.
A very painful chapter is going to be very hard to avoid.
What about insolvent does one not understand?
https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/Why-Southern-Company-Just-Sold-Billions-In-Prime-AssetsWhy-Southern-Company-Just.html
More alarmist blather, who needs coral anyway? What we really need is lower gas prices.
GREAT BARRIER REEF CORAL BLEACHING HAS STARTED EARLY
âIf coral bleaching isnât on your radar yet, it will be soon. According to Stephanie Wear, The Nature Conservancyâs director of coral reef conservation, recent steamy temperatures indicate a rough year ahead for the worldâs coral reefs. The worldâs coral reefs are reeling from the worst recorded global coral bleaching event, in which the Great Barrier Reef was hit in both 2016 and 2017. Between the two events, half the reefâs coral is thought to have been killed.â
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/jan/20/great-barrier-reef-coral-bleaching-has-started-early-biologist-says
Oh, I was just in the process of saying pretty much the same above!
Fools seldom differ. đ
Nick — is this a dire problem yet? Even if you don’t think so dolphins, whales and birds might not agree. Or, is it only humans that matter?
THE OCEANS ARE DROWNING IN PLASTIC — AND NO ONE’S PAYING ATTENTION
âImagine an area 34 times the size of Manhattan. Now imagine it covered ankle-deep in plastic waste â piles of soda bottles and plastic bags, takeout containers by the mile, drinking straws as far as the eye can see. Thatâs a total of about 19 billion pounds of garbage. And according to one of the best estimates available, thatâs how much plastic waste ends up in our oceans every year. âWeâre being overwhelmed by our waste,â said Jenna Jambeck, an environmental engineer who led the 2015 study that determined this staggering number. According to Jambeckâs research, this figure is on track to double by 2025 unless something is done, swiftly and at a global scale, to stem the tide of garbage.â
https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/entry/plastic-waste-oceans_us_58fed37be4b0c46f0781d426
Ah, jeez. Try substituting the word âhopelessâ for âdireâ.
See my comment above:
http://peakoilbarrel.com/open-thread-non-petroleum-may-21-2018/#comment-640317
Yes, this is a serious and urgent problem with a simple solution.
Just stop dumping it in rivers and oceans.
NY city did.
Where Does New York City’s Trash Go?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6LzB6rMDtA
How some garbage gets around and landfill problems.
Voyage of the Mobro 4000
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WrugoT8N5cE
Don’t let this go to waste.
“simple solution?” Then I’d hate to see what happens when the solution isn’t simple.
Researchers report that about 4 million to 12 million metric tons of plastic washed offshore in 2010 alone, or about 1.5% to 4.5% of the worldâs total plastic productionâenough to cover every foot of coastline on the planet. And, thatâs just the beginning of the problems, the team says, as scientists still donât know where more than 99% of ocean plastic debris ends upâand what impact itâs having on marine life and the human food supply. Whatâs more, the authors predict that the annual amount of plastic waste tumbling out to sea will more than double in the next 10 years.
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/02/here-s-how-much-plastic-enters-ocean-each-year
WHEN THE MERMAIDS CRY: THE GREAT PLASTIC TIDE
âWitnesses have watched in horror seabirds choosing plastic pieces, red, pink, brown and blue, because of their similarity to their own food. It is estimated that of the 1.5 million Laysan Albatrosses which inhabit Midway, all of them have plastic in their digestive system; for one third of the chicks, the plastic blockage is deadly, coining Midway Atoll as âalbatross graveyardsâ by five media artists, led by photographer Chris Jordan, who recently filmed and photographed the catastrophic effects of the plastic pollution there.â
http://plastic-pollution.org/
A WHOPPING 91% OF PLASTIC ISN’T RECYCLED
Mass production of plastics, which began just six decades ago, has accelerated so rapidly that it has created 8.3 billion metric tonsâmost of it in disposable products that end up as trash. If that seems like an incomprehensible quantity, it is. Even the scientists who set out to conduct the worldâs first tally of how much plastic has been produced, discarded, burned or put in landfills, were horrified by the sheer size of the numbers.
https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/07/plastic-produced-recycling-waste-ocean-trash-debris-environment/
Actually none of it is recycled– some is down cycled.
I worked in a recycling operation for a while, teaching in Marin.
Here’s a photographer’s artistic view.
Running the Numbers II: Portraits of global mass culture
(2009 – Current)
Chris Jordan Photography
http://www.chrisjordan.com/gallery/rtn2/#gyre
Running the Numbers II: Portraits of global mass culture
(2009 – Current)
Gyre, 2009 8×11 feet, in three vertical panels
Depicts 2.4 million pieces of plastic, equal to the estimated number of pounds of plastic pollution that enter the world’s oceans every hour. All of the plastic in this image was collected from the Pacific Ocean.
Click the image to zoom.
OK, I give up, it’s an impossible problem and will never be solved.
Florida brewery unveils six-pack rings that spare sea turtles, not snare them
By Thomas Leavy
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/florida-saltwater-brewery-non-plastic-six-pack-rings-spare-sea-turtles/
The threat of plastic waste to marine wildlife is well known; the most ubiquitous image of its impact is that of seafaring turtles and gulls ensnared in the net-like rings that yoke six-packs of canned beverages together. Now one Florida brewery is rolling out a solution for making them safer.
Saltwater Brewery, based in Delray Beach, is working with the startup E6PR (short for Eco Six Pack Rings) on a “sustainable way of handling cans.” The project is a collaborative effort between New York ad agency We Believers, Mexican biodegradable supplier Entelequia, and private investors from the beverage packing industry.
Manufactured with “by-product waste and other materials,” the reimagined rings will be compostable when disposed of properly, and biodegradable if they end up being littered.
Sure but………
ARCTIC SEA ICE JAMMED WITH PLASTICS FROM PACIFIC GARBAGE PATCH
Sea ice from the remote Arctic Ocean may look clear and pristine, but up to 12,000 tiny pieces of plastic may be embedded in a single chunk small enough to sit on your hand, researchers have found.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/arctic-ice-microplastics-1.4632912
And……..
GREAT PACIFIC GARBAGE PATCH IS 16 TIMES BIGGER THAN PREVIOUSLY ESTIMATED
âA new study involving scientists from around the world suggests there are more than 79,000 tonnes of ocean plastic in a 1.6 million square kilometre area of the North Pacific Ocean, often referred to as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. That’s 16 times more than previous estimates.â
http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/great-pacific-garbage-patch-1.4582626
Hmm, maybe we can cover the Arctic Ocean with Styrofoam, and restore some of the lost albedo /sarc
Don’t give the oil heads ideas.
Styrofoam, brilliant. Geoengineering solutions are everywhere. How long will it take for people to stop moaning about climate change and doing something?
Get the contract and make yourself a bundle Fred. Letâs see, arctic sea area 14,056,000 square km timesâŚâŚ
7 million kilograms of plastic in the Arctic ocean. Shame shame.
How long will it take for people to stop moaning about climate change and doing something?
LMAO at the irony and hypocrisy of you asking that question. đ đ
It’s even funnier that you’re too stupid to recognize sarcasm, even when it is blatantly staring you in the face! Do all you trolls have severe brain damage or are you just a particularly extreme outlier on the left side of the IQ bell curve?!
I like it, about time too. It is not just turtles but land animals too. If I nave a 6 pack I always cut open the rings before it goes in the rubbish. My big regret, here, is there is no glass recycling – and I have bottles to throw out.
NAOM
Longstanding and serious problem. It’s mostly originating from countries which have no waste disposal laws where everything gets dumped, though also from littering in countries like the US. The underlying problem, however, is plastics: they’re not biodegradable, with the exception of the nylons where bacteria have evolved to eat them. If it were only long-use hard plastics being littered the volume would be low, so single-use plastics really should be outlawed.
Plus I hope some mad scientists engineer bacteria which digest polyester, acrylic, styrofoam, etc…
EU is looking at banning single use plastics (hope that doesn’t include syringes). Biodegradeables can go too far like the reusable shopping bag, that I used to have, that was made of them. Turned to powder in my hand!
NAOM
How academics and the media can build a nationwide and harmful myth. Now we know that it was the enactment of legal abortions that stopped the adolescent crime wave in its tracks.
“The Superpredator Scare “
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YidALyBwat0
There’s substantial evidence at this point, though, suggesting a link between leaded gasoline and the adolescent crime wave, not abortion. Actually, islandboy might be interested to know Jamaica is now the most recent country on the very long list of countries showing the connection. Unsurprisingly, that country was relatively late to ban leaded gasoline and so the link to violence took longer to show up.
Keep in mind lead from batteries can NOT be econonically recycled into storage batteries. It’s over for lead use for energy storage… At least sourced in the New World North. Other chems are fractional cost.
Leaded gasoline? BS, I didn’t see those characteristics in my classmates, the older kids, the young adults and they all grew up in the lead plume. It’s a case of being raised unwanted, in poor bad homes and often being dumped into the system. Abortions stopped most of that, as shown by data. If you have a totally dysfunctional and horrible life as a child, odds are that that person will be dysfunctional also.
That same generation you say was lead addled brought you the modern world of internet, space travel, computers, cell phones, and many other tech, medical and science advances. So if they were all addled by lead, why are the following generations not supersmart instead of being riddled with ADHD and other learning disabilities?
My point is, tetraethyl lead was everywhere and should have effected everyone, it didn’t. On the other side of the coin, abortions are done by those in bad circumstances and unable to or do not want to raise a child, focusing the problem to a narrow set of the population.
Of course right wingers and religious zealots will say anything to downplay this one..
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zk6gOeggViw
https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2018/02/an-updated-lead-crime-roundup-for-2018/
They both had an effect. Lead’s is about twice that for abortion by the wiki article report on one study, and more for violent crime and murder (I think the big murder countries in Central America were very late in getting rid of lead).
Colombia was the most edgy place in the 70’s, but El Salvador and Guatemala were not for the casual vacationer– in fact vacationers were a liability.
If you actually had a return date, you were a vacationer.
George, maybe you can explain why Great Britain has such a high rate of violent crime. I was surprised when I found this graph.
Fish, why does the US have the most prisoners of any developed country in the worldââand the largest total prison population of any nation? Private prisons for profit?
Doug, you know exactly why and this has been discussed on this site before.
I was actually looking for information, nothing to do with nation bashing.
Yes, the US legal system sucks bigtime, is way behind many Euro nations and is being used politically.
Not sure what the people publishing the violent crime graph did.
I just checked Austria.
Population 2009: 8.343 Million (says Google)
divided by 100,000 = 83.43
eurostat says (1) 47,600 violent crimes recorded by Police in 2009.
47,600 / 83.43 = 571 (rounded up)
(1)
http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=File:Violent_crimes_recorded_by_the_police,_2002-12_YB14-de.png
Look for Ăsterreich (a.k.a Austria)
Good call. The internet is full of undefined information.
Gerry, Looking up âCrime Index for Country 2018â Austria, on one list, was 110th. Japan came out on “top” at 115th. I’ve spent a lot of time in Austria, love the place, NEVER felt unsafe. Too busy enjoying the beer maybe. Vienna is to die for, because of the music, but usually end up in Innsbruck đ
https://www.numbeo.com/crime/rankings_by_country.jsp
I’m not much for sweets, but have indulged in a slice or two of Sachertorte topped with whipped cream, while stopping for coffee en route from Munich to Budapest. đ
I doubt if all those countries report crime the same way. UK changed its method sometime around 2000 and rates went up by a factor of 3 or 4 if I remember correctly. The most reliable and usually quoted numbers are from an annual survey – i.e. they just ask a sample of people if they have been subject to actual or threatened violence in the last year. This is a lot higher than police reports, though the difference is narrowing. Slapping, poking, racial slurs if they feel threatening, “I’ll rip yer effing ‘ead off”, etc. all count – I think it’s defined a lot narrower elsewhere. Numbers had been falling since 1990s, especially for alcohol related issues, but I think that changed in the recent couple of years, mainly because of internecine drug gang violence , which is especially noticeable in knife assault and murder. The gangs are postcode related, I think there’s a google map for London gang areas. There are huge amounts of data on the government statistical web site if you want to investigate further.
Yeah, probably just how violent crimes are defined and reported.
The Guardian is reporting an increasing level of violence.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/apr/26/surge-in-knife-offences-fuels-rise-in-violent
What surprised me was that 20% of people surveyed had reported being subject to crime in the past year (if I am interpreting it correctly).
” Eight in 10 adults had not experienced any of the crimes asked about in our survey in the latest year”
I would second George’s point that it is the recording, British bureaucracy. Also crimes are rated differently in different countries, take USA with misdemeanor and felony whereas UK it is just a crime. Mexico might count high overall but much of the violence is within small groups of the population, the general level is much lower than that within gangs (gang on gang) and in the drug business (client punished for debt). I feel safer here than in the UK! There are US cities with higher rates than Mexico but it is funny to see gringos panicking about crime, here, when they come from certain US cities!
NAOM
Did you know that the UK banned leaded gasoline *over a decade* after the US? It did. For the UK, the end of leaded gasoline started in 1999, with phaseout only *started* in 1982.
https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/change-at-the-pumps-the-slow-death-of-lead-1134587.html
The US started the phaseout in the 1970s and had reduced it by 91% by the end of 1986, so that it was insignificant by 1995.
So the UK had leaded gasoline later than the US. We should expect the UK crime rate to start to drop sharlply starting in 2017, about 18 years after the UK leaded gasoline ban.
By the way, Rick Nevin *predicted the Venezuela crime waves* based on the leaded gasoline situation in Venezuela. *In advance*. And he was *correct*. This is proven.
Geoff, I see the correlation but don’t agree with the causation. If lead was the problem then everyone born before 1975 would have been of lower intelligence and super-violent. Only a small portion of the population was (and is ) that way.
It appears much more likely that the effects of lead are small for the general population, but may be just enough to push an already dysfunctional person further over the edge.
Since the introduction of legal abortion and the reduction of many pollutants were essentially simultaneous there is no way to fully separate them. My view is that a horrible upbringing is the major factor since the general population was not much affected by lead.
At the same time society had changed to a much more sexually free mode (lots of unwanted pregnancies) and the rise of drug use occurred, creating a complex set of conditions that did not exist in the 1940’s and 1950’s.
If lead was the problem then everyone born before 1975 would have been of lower intelligence and super-violent.
That’s not how this kind of contamination works. People who work with the products, live near a factory or mine, live near roadways, work in gas stations, all get higher doses. Also, some people are more resistant to the effects of chemicals. There are a lot of factors that can affect outcomes.
Please back up your claims on that with some research showing how “this kind of contamination works”.
From Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_epidemiology) and only because I don’t have time to fill you in on an established branch of science. It branches off into Occupational Epidemiology, which I was introduced to as part of my training to be a Health and Safety rep some 30 years ago.
Environmental epidemiology is a branch of epidemiology concerned with the discovery of the environmental exposures that contribute to or protect against injuries, illnesses, developmental conditions, disabilities, and deaths; and identification of public health and health care actions to manage the risks associated with harmful exposures. Environmental epidemiology studies external factors that affect the incidence, prevalence, and geographic range of health conditions. These factors may be naturally occurring or may be introduced into environments where people live, work, and play. Environmental exposures are involuntary and thus generally exclude occupational exposures (covered by occupational epidemiology) and voluntary exposures such as active smoking, medications, and diet.
I also have at hand the textbook “Occupational Health and Safety: A Training Manual”. Page 34 shows a pretty common map to explain how Environmental Epidemiology works: it shows lung cancer occurrences in areas adjacent to a steel mill in Hamilton, Ontario (the rates are 15% higher than comparable areas). I’m not going to teach you a course in this: take my word that there are people who study this stuff.
I don’t necessarily agree with the conclusions of the lead studies (haven’t read ’em, so I can’t comment) but your argument is absolutely baseless and shows complete ignorance of the field.
Please produce nominal exposure levels to tetraethyl lead during the period in question, LD 50, TLV and TWA, mutagenic effects and developmental toxicity.
Do you even know the reaction products from using tetraethyl lead in gasoline/
To which I say:
Bite me.
You can’t follow the basic science, and I said I wasn’t teaching a course.
You want to test his theories, be my guest.
Look it up yourself.
One factor is the increase in traffic. Go back to the 40s, 50s there were far fewer cars about so less pollution. Also ISTR researchers found a direct correlation with proximity to roads.
NAOM
Wait, the problem started in the 40’s and 50’s. That means the violent actors were born in the Depression times, WWII the Korean War, Vietnam War era, and radiation from multiple nuclear bomb tests. Can’t have anything to do with hard times, broken homes, missing fathers, drugs, increasing population or anything else, nahhh, no way. It was also during the height of the pollution plume. Wow, we can correlate all kinds of things.
Oh no, I grew up right near a road and so did all my classmates and friends. In fact we spent a lot of time on and near roads. Everyone had one or two cars per family. No one that I know of did any violent crime.
Of course we had large chemical factories in the area, maybe that counteracted the effects of the toxic lead. đ
Shark attacks and ice cream sales trend together also.
Correlation is not causation. Repeat that one hundred times.
Many occurrences have multiple causes. Repeat that one thousand times.
You’re using so many fallacies I won’t go through them individually.
I’ll just ask you to look at the work of Rick Nevin, which shows astoundingly good correlations, *with the correct time lag*, between childhood lead exposure and crime rates.
Then I’ll ask you to look at the neurobiology evidence: we literally know the mechanism by which lead causes crime, by making people dumb and causing them to have poor impulse control.
We have a known neurobiology causation, supported by hundreds of correlations across countries, across neighborhoods; enough to remove nearly all other confounding variables, including time, because leaded gasoline was introduced and removed at different times in different places.
This is PROVEN. Read *all* of Rick Nevin’s work and *all* of Kevin Drum’s articles on the topic; you’ll figure it out. The prime cause of the crime waves was lead.
Also, you can track separate crime spikes linked to lead
(1) by each country, by each city, by each neighborhood
(2) for lead paint, lead pipes, and leaded gasoline separately (gasoline is the biggest due to more bioavailability and higher quantities)
Oh, and people in prison for violent crimes (but not for crimes like fraud!) have higher lead levels recorded in their bones and teeth than the average population.
There is nothing else like this in the social sciences.
Overwhelming piles of correlations plus a known neurobiological mechanism is causation. Repeat that one thousance times.
Learn to use spellchecker.
Apparently you are saying that upbringing has no effect on development or social behavior.
You are also saying that the general population was not affected by the products of burning tetraethyl lead since there was no recorded effects for the bulk of the population.
You do know that lead is still a major exposure hazard through much of the US. Yet have not explained how this is not correlated in the studies.
Confirmation bias.
GoneFishing, the lead-crime correlation has been proven in other countries which did not introduce legal abortion at the same time (abortion is still illegal in Ireland, and THEY have a solid lead-crime correlation).
Yes, other things affect intelligence and impulse control. Lead exposure in early childhood makes both worse for everyone, but some people started with more intelligence (genetically) or more impulse control (genetically) and some people learned more or practiced more impulse control. So it increases the percentage of violent crimes, but doesn’t “make everyone a criminal”.
Though the men who worked in the tetraethyl lead factories, who got extremely high exposures, went from being perfectly nice family men to ax-murdering their wives, as documented in the 1920s… so there’s that.
“Lead exposure in early childhood makes both worse for everyone, but some people started with more intelligence (genetically) or more impulse control (genetically) and some people learned more or practiced more impulse control. So it increases the percentage of violent crimes, but doesnât âmake everyone a criminalâ.”
So you have proof that IQ fell for the general population during that time and recovered afterward. I would like to see that. Do you also have data on an increase in kidney failures and subsequent recovery?
“Yes, other things affect intelligence and impulse control”
Glad you agree there were simultaneous multiple factors at work.
Yeah, Rick Nevin and several other researchers (well-documented by Kevin Drum, who’s linked to most of the studies) have done massive work on the lead-crime link.
It is the strongest result I have ever seen in the social sciences. It’s proven at this point.
As Population Growth Slows, Populism Surges
By Philip Auerswald and Joon Yun
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/22/opinion/populist-populism-fertility-rates.html
The last time that populism â what we broadly define as political movements that ostensibly set the interests of âordinary peopleâ against elites as well as an âotherâ â swept across Europe and the United States was marked by the same combination of slow economic and fertility growth that today prevails in advanced industrialized countries in the West and Asia.
Economies have recently picked up some steam, but not before nearly a decade of sluggish economic growth â and, in most of the world, declining fertility rates. The United States is no exception: The fertility rate among Americans has hit a 30-year low.
The shift from global population growth toward population decline is emerging as one of the least appreciated forces that is, along with urbanization and digital disruption, upending the political and economic status quo.
In the worldâs largest cities, where populations are densely concentrated and growing, economies are generally thriving and cosmopolitanism is embraced. Where populations are sparse or shrinking, usually in rural places and small cities, economies are often stagnant, and populism sells.
Why does it hold such appeal in these places? Nativist, nationalist rhetoric â âMake America (or Whatever Other Country) Great Againâ â appeals because it promises to restore the rightful economic and cultural stature of âcommon peopleâ in relation to a decadent urban intelligentsia. In Hungary, Austria, the Czech Republic, Poland, Thailand and Turkey, populism has been fed by the juxtaposition of rural population and economic decline against the growth and increasing prosperity of the largest cities.
I don’t think these two guys have ever lived in any big cities. As a native of Sao Paulo, population 12 million, and a long time resident of The Big Apple, population 8.5 million, I can tell you there is plenty of extreme poverty in both of those places.
Regardless this is all still based on the myths of the possibility of perpetual growth and neoliberal economics, clashing with the limits of growth and physical reality. We are already in deep population overshoot and there will probably be some economic contraction and possibly population die off before too long. Populism or nativism sure as hell won’t fix any of the underlying problems.
Growth, both of the economy and the population can not continue forever.
The Extinction That Never Happened
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LhyQ5z5f-m8
CANADA’S DIRTY SECRET: CANADA LEADS THE DEVELOPED WORLD IN PER CAPITA PRODUCTION OF GARBAGE.
Asked if there is an ultimate solution to proliferating waste, Hoornweg pauses and says quietly, âPeople have to buy less.â The problem, he adds, is that âour economy is based on endless growth, endless production of what our landfills tell us is basically junk. The stuff wouldn’t be in them if it wasn’t junk! I mean, nobody wants our economy to fail; we can’t tell the companies that employ Canadians to just stop producing stuff, or the stores to stop selling it. Then again, our economy is already failing us in the way it messes up the planet in the service of all this crap. The cycle just keeps going: manufacture, consume, discard.â
Meanwhile back in Toronto, it is six in the morning. Eight hundred waste collection vehicles are already on the streets â emptying green bins, gathering garbage, collecting bottles, cans and newspapers. At Green Lane, the first 18-wheeler has arrived with its 37 tonnes of rubbish. On the landfill’s sea of rotting garbage, the Caterpillars are roaring, the methane is spinning into the wells. By 7, the Canada Fibers plant on Arrow Road is rumbling with beer cans and ketchup bottles. The transfer stations are all but bursting.
By 9:30, the malls are open. The first wave of shoppers moves purposefully toward the televisions and yoga pants and electronic gadgetry. And lawn ornaments and fleece blankets and revolutionary new kitchenware.
Because advertising is powerful.
Because consumerism is intoxicating.
Because retail therapy is easier and less costly than planetary therapy.
https://www.canadiangeographic.ca/article/canadas-dirty-secret
They should save their money for upcoming hard times.
What happens to the wild in a highly developed island nation.
Parklife: Our national parks are ecological deserts, run for the benefit of a tiny minority. Itâs time we reclaimed them.
http://www.monbiot.com/2018/03/03/parklife/
The Utter Weirdness of the British Countryside
http://www.monbiot.com/2018/04/03/the-utter-weirdness-of-the-british-countryside/
Well old chap, just don’t forget to pack a picnic basket with crumpets and orange marmalade and a thermos with piping hot tea. Then you’re off to do some ‘proper’ off roading, through the soggy bogs of the Wilds of Wales, chasing sheep up the hills in your Electric Range Rover conversion, Cheerio! đ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGjOY4JBmy4&t=700s
Electric Range Rover | Fully Charged
Flexible concrete, what will they think of next? Mother nature helped with this one, modeling abalone shells. It’s also adaptive, with increased thermal capacity, heals itself, and neutralize pollutants. Smart concrete for smart building.
We call the resulting ductile concrete engineered cementitious composite (ECC) or strain-hardening cementitious composite. It can deform up to 3 to 5 percent in tension before it fails, which gives it 300 to 500 times more tensile strain capacity than normal concrete. This allows a slab of it to undergo a lot of bending without fracturing into pieces, earning it the nickname of flexible or bendable concrete.
ECC was invented at the University of Michigan, and it has now acquired a following of hundreds of universities and industrial entities conducting further engineering research and technology development.
We call the resulting ductile concrete engineered cementitious composite (ECC) or strain-hardening cementitious composite. It can deform up to 3 to 5 percent in tension before it fails, which gives it 300 to 500 times more tensile strain capacity than normal concrete. This allows a slab of it to undergo a lot of bending without fracturing into pieces, earning it the nickname of flexible or bendable concrete.
https://theconversation.com/bendable-concrete-with-a-design-inspired-by-seashells-can-make-us-infrastructure-safer-and-more-durable-93621
Yep! Absolutely. I’ve posted this a few times already but what the hell, I’ll post it once again.
Dr. Alysia Garmulewicz specifically talks about the structure of abalone shells. She also talks about 3D printing of concrete poles of variable density from the base to its tip based on how palm trees grow.
The Biggest Revolution in 3D Printing is Yet to Come
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_wHT-FsCJjM
I know we talk a lot about depressing topics such as mass biological extinctions and I admit I have my own serious doubts about the the chances that human civilization will stick around even another century, given the paths we are currently on. But, and it is a big but, there are multiple converging disruptive technologies that could be real game changers in the near future. So it ain’t really over till the fat lady sings.
Check out the latest Tony Seba talk, he seems to be right on track:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ox5LtxqQNHw
rEVolution 2018 / Tony Seba
As Thomas Kuhn said about paradigm change, it often depends on the old guard literally dying off.
Therefore, understanding the ‘Kuhn Cycle’ now becomes more highly relevant than ever:
http://www.thwink.org/sustain/glossary/KuhnCycle.htm
The global environmental sustainability problem is so large, complex, novel, urgent, and its solution so difficult that solving the problem entails creation of a new paradigm. Just conceiving of the problem requires a fundamentally new way of thinking. Before The Limits to Growth defined the problem in 1972, there was little realization that human system growth could not be infinite. So called “progress” cannot go on forever. The environment cannot be tamed and subjugated, as mankind has done before to everything else that stood in the way of “progress.”
Kuhn Cycle diagramEnvironmentalism finds itself in the Pre-science step of the Kuhn Cycle. It lacks a valid paradigm for solving its central problem of sustainability. Yet the field’s members are assuming they are in the Normal Science step, where a field has a paradigm that works well enough for that field to be called a bona fide science. This is a grave error.
Civilization as a whole is in the Model Crisis step. The model it uses to run itself, mostly free market democracy, a collection of national governments, and some central coordination like the UN and the World Bank, is no longer capable of solving the world’s top problems.
.
While totally into abalone shells ( and yum! and fun to harvest)— 3d printing? Not so much– it is actually very mature, but with little application.
I had hopes, and even did some real time applications with it, but I’m still waiting.
Material seems the big issue.
While Tesla is very mature (10 years and still majorly bleeding), 3d printing has been around even longer.
Best of luck to both.
3d printing? Not so muchâ it is actually very mature, but with little application.
I had hopes, and even did some real time applications with it, but Iâm still waiting.
Material seems the big issue.
Um, did you even watch the youtube video I linked to? It’s all about materials science and developing a materials palette appropriate for 3D printing applications.
But you are right about it being quite mature. I was working with it in prototyping for the toy industry back in the mid to late 90’s and the available materials palette was pretty much limited to plastics. Things have changed quite dramatically since those early days…
We shall see– I was a early adapter, and did a bit of work with them last year.
They still have not adapted well.
But we shall see– I hope for the best.
The next solution has always been right around the corner, but it doesn’t seem to capture needed market share.
The next solution has always been right around the corner, but it doesnât seem to capture needed market share.
Blame the ‘Market’! đ
But seriously, if you go back to the video, Dr. Alysia Garmulewicz is very careful to make clear that she is not interested in creating the next ‘SOLUTION’. It is more about the convergence of 3D technology with advances in materials science based on an engineering of natural materials, which is bound to reach a tipping point and a consequent adoption following an S curve.
It is a disruption waiting to happen. Pretty much akin to what Tony Seba has talked about, for example why a 600 dollar smart phone was simultaneously released by both Apple and Google in 2007 and not in 2005 or 2009.
https://www.rdmag.com/article/2018/01/biomimicry-harmonizing-product-and-nature-advanced-modeling-and-simulation
Biomimicry: Harmonizing Product and Nature With Advanced Modeling and Simulation
Thu, 01/18/2018 – 4:12pm
by Sean McGee, Product Marketing Manager for BIOVIA Dassault Systèmes
The challenges that todayâs scientists and engineers face have evolved beyond answering a single question. Everything from improving materials performance to uncovering new drugs to designing new technologies must not only succeed technologically – it must also minimize its impact on the environment. Creating a sustainable world is both a noble and necessary goal, yet we do not need to reinvent the wheel to achieve it. It has already been done. Nature has created a vast toolbox of context-responsive, self-repairing, life-friendly and environmentally sustainable materials with an equally vast collection of uses.
http://www.pnas.org/content/115/6/1198
Rotational 3D printing of damage-tolerant composites with programmable mechanics
Significance
Natural composites exhibit hierarchical and spatially varying structural features that give rise to high stiffness and strength as well as damage tolerance. Here, we report a rotational 3D printing method that enables exquisite control of fiber orientation within engineered composites. Our approach broadens their design, microstructural complexity, and performance space by enabling site-specific optimization of fiber arrangements within short carbon fiberâepoxy composites. Using this approach, we have created composites with programmable strain distribution and failure as well as enhanced damage tolerance.
Abstract
Natural composites exhibit exceptional mechanical performance that often arises from complex fiber arrangements within continuous matrices. Inspired by these natural systems, we developed a rotational 3D printing method that enables spatially controlled orientation of short fibers in polymer matrices solely by varying the nozzle rotation speed relative to the printing speed. Using this method, we fabricated carbon fiberâepoxy composites composed of volume elements (voxels) with programmably defined fiber arrangements, including adjacent regions with orthogonally and helically oriented fibers that lead to nonuniform strain and failure as well as those with purely helical fiber orientations akin to natural composites that exhibit enhanced damage tolerance. Our approach broadens the design, microstructural complexity, and performance space for fiber-reinforced composites through site-specific optimization of their fiber orientation, strain, failure, and damage tolerance.
We shall see– lets hope for the best.
Just think, if we can make concrete durable enough and civilization does crash it will be around for hundreds of years or longer as reminder of our endeavors.
On the other hand if we change the paradigm of civilization concrete structures will merely be eyesores and problems to work around since they are very difficult to remove.
The problem with reinforced concrete
While repair may be justified to preserve the architectural legacy of iconic 20th-century buildings, such as those designed by reinforced concrete users like Frank Lloyd Wright, it is questionable whether this will be affordable or desirable for the vast majority of structures. The writer Robert Courland, in his book Concrete Planet, estimates that repair and rebuilding costs of concrete infrastructure, just in the United States, will be in the trillions of dollars â to be paid by future generations
https://theconversation.com/the-problem-with-reinforced-concrete-56078
Just think, if we can make concrete durable enough and civilization does crash it will be around for hundreds of years or longer as reminder of our endeavors. On the other hand if we change the paradigm of civilization concrete structures will merely be eyesores and problems to work around since they are very difficult to remove.
The Romans had some pretty durable concrete…
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/07/why-modern-mortar-crumbles-roman-concrete-lasts-millennia
Why modern mortar crumbles, but Roman concrete lasts millennia
By Zahra AhmadJul. 3, 2017 , 1:00 PM
History contains many references to the durability of Roman concrete, including this cryptic note written in 79 B.C.E., describing concrete exposed to seawater as: âa single stone mass, impregnable to the waves and everyday stronger.â What did it mean? To find out, the researchers studied drilled cores of a Roman harbor from Pozzuoli Bay near Naples, Italy. When they analyzed it, they found that the seawater had dissolved components of the volcanic ash, allowing new binding minerals to grow. Within a decade, a very rare hydrothermal mineral called aluminum tobermorite (Al-tobermorite) had formed in the concrete. Al-tobermorite, long known to give Roman concrete its strength, can be made in the lab, but itâs very difficult to incorporate it in concrete. But the researchers found that when seawater percolates through a cement matrix, it reacts with volcanic ash and crystals to form Al-tobermorite and a porous mineral called phillipsite, they write today in American Mineralogist.
Talk about adaptive material design. That Roman concrete uses the very problem for most materials, seawater, to make it more durable.
Damn, who ever would have thought cement could be so interesting.
http://ima-cnmnc.nrm.se/tobermoritepdf.pdf
Inorganic chemists and material scientists.
Now Arizona is the next state to get rid of teaching evolution science.
Evolution wording removed from draft of Arizona school science standards
Lauren Castle, The Republic | azcentral.com
https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/arizona-education/2018/05/22/arizona-draft-school-science-standards-removes-evolution-diane-douglas-intelligent-design/628941002/
The Arizona Department of Education hopes to make changes to science standards, which will affect K-12 districts and charter schools. The changes include removing the word “evolution” in some areas and describing it as a “theory” in others.
At a public community meeting in April, Associate Superintendent of High Academic Standards Carol Lippert said the department is trying to connect science practices with content to show how it is practiced in the real world.
Ed Reitz, 92, testified in support of the changes at the community meeting.
“The teaching of evolution is something that concerns me because it is a theory and it is not science,” stated Reitz.
The great-grandfather read part of a book he wrote on the issue.
“Over 70 years now we have been teaching our youth that we have came from pre-existing vertebrates and God, the creator, is not allowed to be taught in most of our public schools,” read Reitz. “The result is now what we are observing in colleges and universities throughout the land.”
It’s part of natural selection, some of them don’t quite reach the top floor.
Well if I must thank this God of yours for anything it will be that I never had to go to school in Arizona.
Nothing ever seems to die. The Enlightenment is still in contention. The Crusades still continue to this day. The Civil War is still in the minds and hearts of many.
Humans sure carry a lot of mental baggage around with them, thousands of years worth.
I am sure when later this century fossil fuels are mostly replaced that there will still be contention over their demise and it will keep raising it’s ugly head along with nuclear power for many long centuries to come.
Sometimes I think âcivilizationâ is currently in reverse gear. This is especially true when I sit in a restaurant and watch people staring at cel phones rather than engaging in conversation. As a student, proficiency in two languages besides English was a requirement, even in the faculty of science (most of my mates chose Spanish and something like Latin or French). Foreign travel, especially immersion in different cultures, which goes hand-in-hand with geology and geophysics has probably contributed more to my personal education than anything learned in school apart from the math and a few of the geology courses that was required for my work. Nowadays I come close to despair when I hear about people being hassled by police, border guards, etc. for not speaking English. Shouldnât people be encouraged to embrace âforeignâ cultures and learn from them?
immersion in different cultures, which goes hand-in-hand with geology and geophysics
Don't worry Doug, then you will feel perfectly at home as we all head back to the 'Nouveau Stone Age'! đ
For the record, there is nothing that makes me more depressed, than seeing a resurgence of populism, nativism, ultra nationalism and xenophobia around the world today. We have apparently learned nothing from history.
Or is it the New Plastic age. Wonder how volume of plastic compares with that of stone (flint) tooling scattered around the world?
From the 3D revolution video we produce about 300 million metrics tons of plastics annually. I’m not sure how much stone we used during the stone age. It mostly seems to have blended back into the ground. đ
Hey, things have to break down and get bad for the new paradigm to come to fruition. It certainly is not gong to happen without a major push and a vacuum to fill. Fasten your seat belts, turbulence ahead.
Absolutely, the US could learn a lot from European countries.
The best model I can come up for much of the world now is a war footing and cold war scenario, even within countries. It’s not really a happy cooperative place even though we have a global economy. Some of the paranoia is justified and some is not, but we now live in a world where separating fact from fiction is a full time job.
but we now live in a world where separating fact from fiction is a full time job.
Ya think?! I think some of us should be getting time and a half for overtime and a hefty hazard pay bonus too.
http://www.businessinsider.com/science-questions-quiz-public-knowledge-education-2018-5
Each year the government asks 10 simple questions to test the public’s knowledge of science. Can you correctly answer them all?
I’m still sort of hoping that the charts depicting the % of correct answers by country is totally fake.
Though I do wonder how many Trump would get right vs. say, Angela Merkel, Emmanuel Macron, Xi Jinping or Vladimir Putin?
I’ll bet he scores lower than Turkey’s ErdoÄan where fewer people accept the ‘Theory’ of Evolution than in the US.
As Hans Rosling found out, knowledge is often the power to get things wrong. He showed that chimpanzees would do better than students or college professors on his tests.
Since the random score would be 50%, a score of 60% is just plain pathetic, but expected. Most people do not understand or remember science, even if they have had courses in it.
Most people do not understand or remember science, even if they have had courses in it.
Especially because most people never understood how science is supposed to work, so at best they vaguely remember some facts they were forced to memorize for some test.
Of course there are some brighter spots in the universe at large:
http://www.tng-project.org/about/
“The IllustrisTNG project is a suite of state-of-the-art cosmological galaxy formation simulations. Each simulation in IllustrisTNG evolves a large swath of a mock Universe from soon after the Big-Bang until the present day while taking into account a wide range of physical processes that drive galaxy formation. The simulations can be used to study a broad range of topics surrounding how the Universe â and the galaxies within it â evolved over time.”
Having been an operator of a large telescope at an observatory and one of the educators to the visiting public, I found them curious about and open to knowledge across a wide variety of ages.
Maybe we do not know how to teach science to the general public or even to most children. I always found the reality of actually being at a large and complex instrument or even a small one made it much easier to show both the capabilities and the difficulties of observing nature.
I don’t think one has to make it grand and exciting, just real. Show people how to look at the world and see it in a wider view.
Nothing ever seems to die.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VoP1E9J4jpg
Best Whack A Mole Game Ever!!
A fair analog, except there is no winning and the player would be surrounded by moles. đ
And you posted this drivel because?
Anyways, who cares?!
Bet you’ll still need to understand the scientific meaning of the word ‘Theory’ to get into any of these programs.
ASU School of Life Sciences
https://sols.asu.edu/admissions
Robots vs Monsanto?
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-farming-tech-chemicals-insight/robots-fight-weeds-in-challenge-to-agrochemical-giants-idUSKCN1IN0IK
Robots fight weeds in challenge to agrochemical giants
Dominated by companies such as Bayer, DowDuPont, BASF and Syngenta, the industry is bracing for the impact of digital agricultural technology and some firms are already adapting their business models.
The stakes are high. Herbicide sales are worth $26 billion a year and account for 46 percent of pesticides revenue overall while 90 percent of GM seeds have some herbicide tolerance built in, according to market researcher Phillips McDougall.
That’s just one more potentially disruptive technological application for AI enhanced autonomous rolling robots that probably wasn’t even on Tony Seba’s radar yet.
https://www.ecorobotix.com/en/
DISCOVER OUR WEEDING ROBOT
The first ever completely autonomous machine for the ecological and economical weeding of row crops, meadows and intercropping cultures.
20X LESS HERBICIDE
Thanks to the precise detection and discriminating spraying of weeds.
100% AUTONOMOUS
Works up to 12 hours a day without a human operator â solar powered, no rechargeable batteries.
130 KG OF SIMPLICITY
Lightweight design minimises soil compaction â reliable, robust and non-hazardous.
I like it.
Want!
Fred â from a report in Nautilus (canât get the link to work)
DOLPHINS ARE HELPING US HUNT FOR ALIENS
It was John Lillyâs research that inspired the groupâs name: If humans couldnât even communicate with animals that shared most of our evolutionary history, he believed, they were a bit daft to think they could recognize signals from a distant planet. With that in mind, the Order of the Dolphin set out to determine what our ocean-going compatriots here on Earth might be able to teach us about talking to extraterrestrials. Lillyâs work on interspecies communication has since gone in and out of vogue several times within the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) community. Today, itâs back in fashion, thanks to new applications of information theory and to technological advancements, such as the Cetacean Hearing and Telemetry (CHAT) device, a submersible computer interface that establishes basic communication with dolphins. The return to dolphins as a model for alien intelligence came in 1999, when SETI Institute astronomer Laurance Doyle proposed using information theory to analyze animal communication systems, particularly the whistle repertoire of bottlenose dolphinsâŚDoyle confirmed that dolphin signals werenât random noise by turning to the work of Harvard linguist George Zipf who, in the 1930s, had found a striking pattern common to human languages.
Always interesting stuff to think about.
here’s the link, it seems to work.
http://nautil.us/blog/-dolphins-are-helping-us-hunt-for-aliens
Assuming interstellar communication exists.
Odds are we will be finding alien machine communication rather than biological. Also, even biological communication through space would probably be machine coded.
Since EM communication between star systems would not work due to low speed, we probably have no clue how to “tune in” on interstellar messaging and will never hear anything.
Which means that we could only hear local communications, transmitted over millions of miles at most, which would be of infinitesimal power by the time they reach us. Even those communications might be focused and use even lower power.
Looking at it from the reverse perspective:
“Very soon we will become undetectable,” he said. In short, in space no one will hear us at all.”
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2010/jan/27/aliens-cant-hear-us-astronomer
And then there are the problems of intention, power and frequency.
https://briankoberlein.com/2015/02/19/e-t-phone-home/
SWEEPING GENE SURVEY REVEALS NEW FACETS OF EVOLUTION
The study’s most startling result, perhaps, is that nine out of 10 species on Earth today, including humans, came into being 100,000 to 200,000 years ago. “This conclusion is very surprising, and I fought against it as hard as I could,” Thaler told AFP. That reaction is understandable: How does one explain the fact that 90 percent of animal life, genetically speaking, is roughly the same age? Was there some catastrophic event 200,000 years ago that nearly wiped the slate clean?
Environmental trauma is one possibility, explained Jesse Ausubel, director of the Program for the Human Environment at The Rockefeller University. “Viruses, ice ages, successful new competitors, loss of preyâall these may cause periods when the population of an animal drops sharply,” he told AFP, commenting on the study. “In these periods, it is easier for a genetic innovation to sweep the population and contribute to the emergence of a new species.”
But the last true mass extinction event was 65.5 million years ago when a likely asteroid strike wiped out land-bound dinosaurs and half of all species on Earth. This means a population “bottleneck” is only a partial explanation at best. “The simplest interpretation is that life is always evolving,” said Stoeckle.
Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2018-05-gene-survey-reveals-facets-evolution.html#jCp
Thanks Doug.
For one thing, an Ice Age is a repetitive severe climate change roller coaster. More than enough change for genetic forcing. To see how fast natural selection and evolution can work, read “Darwin Comes to Town: How the Urban Jungle Drives Evolution “.
The studyâs most startling result, perhaps, is that nine out of 10 species on Earth today, including humans, came into being 100,000 to 200,000 years ago.
Yep! I actually was going to comment on that when GF, posted a link about the ‘Extinction That Never Was’, the other day. In the linked video there was an example cited of the living Coelecanth, long thought extinct only to have been supposedly found alive and often mistakenly called a ‘living Fossil’!
Coelecanth is a Devonian lobed fin fish that thrived in the oceans 450-500 million years ago. Its importance lies in the fact that it is considered the âmissing link
As we know, evolution and natural selection have not stopped. Only if they did, could we have real living fossils so the fact that most organisms alive today have come into existance within the last 200,000 years is exactly what we should expect. What that means is, that there are no closely related living genetic relatives of 450-500 million year old coelacanths. So, even though we find morphologically very similar looking fishes alive today, they are just as genetically modern as are you and I.
https://ecologicablog.wordpress.com/2013/08/24/coelacanths-are-not-living-fossils/
Coelacanths are not living fossils
The term âliving fossilâ is often misleadingly used in the popular press to describe species which have, supposedly, stopped evolving. Commonly cited examples include horseshoe crabs, Ginkgo trees, hagfish and, perhaps the most famous of all, the coelacanths, a group of lobe finned fish with a very long evolutionary history of which two species still survive in the deep waters of the West Indian Ocean…
…Thatâs how the story goes at least, and ever since itâs discovery journalists have talked about the fish that has been âleft behind by evolutionâ. But is this really true? Can a species really exist for a span of time so great that it will have seen ice ages come and go, mountain ranges form and the great super-continent of Gondwana break apart, and through all this not change at all? Over recent years a mountain of evidence has been steadily growing showing that this is in fact not the case, coelacanths, like any other species, are constantly evolving to adapt to changing conditions…
…It is sometimes claimed that there is a low rate of change in coelacanth DNA and that this leads slow evolution. However, this idea is now being challenged by systematic studies of the coelacanth genome which do not detect slow rates of genetic change. In one study forty-four genes were analysed and no dramatic decrease in the rate of change compared to other species was detected. Furthermore, there is no known reason why coelacanths should have slowly evolving genomes. Their environment in the deep ocean, while relatively stable, is not particularly unusual and is inhabited by other species which are not considered living fossils.
Cheers!
Now hold on, during a mass extinction whole groups can come to an end and would have no descendant line (trilobites, most dinosaurs, etc.). When apparent descendants show up in modern times for those lost long ago in the fossil record, it is likely that the fossil record is incomplete rather than extinction occurring , which was the point of the article.
The fossil record we have is extremely incomplete and geologically conditional.
Agreed!
However the video you linked made an incorrect reference to the Coelacanths being ‘Living Fossils’, a popular and common misconception, which would imply that they have stopped evolving. That was my quibble.
There is no doubt about the fossil record being incomplete. And my comment was more in reply to Doug, regarding his surprise that most living organisms alive today, are genetically modern versions of rather distantly related organisms that are, for all intents and purposes, already truly extinct. And not at all intended as a criticism of your main point.
A comparison of the living coelacanths (genus Latimeria) with some of its extinct relatives. The morphological differences are striking. Image from Casane and Laurenti..
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I don’t take it as criticism Fred, I just like to be clear (meaning I can be pedantic as the next science guy at times) đ
I don’t think that anyone believes species have stopped evolving or radiating. Nor does anyone say that this a species from the past that did not change. The term living fossil is merely being used to indicate that a long “extinct” line still actually exists despite our inability to find fossil records of the continuation. Sort of a living ghost, which indicates our lack of evidence and incomplete knowledge due to the fossil selection process combined with our fossil finding process.
Direct from the Department of Vertebrate Zoology, Division of Fishes
“Coelacanths (seel-a-canths) were once known only from fossils and were thought to have gone extinct approximately 65 million years ago (mya), during the great extinction in which the dinosaurs disappeared. The most recent fossil record dates from about 80 mya but the earliest records date back as far as approximately 360 mya. At one time coelacanths were a large group comprising about 90 valid species that were distributed worldwide in both marine and freshwaters. Today, there are two known living species.”
The first living coelacanth was discovered in 1938 and bears the scientific name Latimeria chalumnae. The species was described by Professor J.L.B. Smith in 1939 and was named after its discoverer, Miss Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer. Although Latimeria is a genus distinct from the fossil forms, all coelacanths share numerous features and are easily recognized by their distinctive shape and lobed fins.
bold mine
http://vertebrates.si.edu/fishes/coelacanth/coelacanth_wider.html
The current modern species “Latimeria chalumnae” is recognized as a different species from ancient fossil species.
BTW, fossil relatives are often determined by internal morphology as well as external. The use of external appearance of fossils to determine species came back to bite paleontologists and many museums when they improperly identified young and immature dinosaurs as being different species from each other and adults of that same species.
Don’t you love fuzzy science? Always room for more discovery.
From the site above to give insight into how relationships are determined.
WHAT MAKES COELACANTHS UNIQUE?
Numerous characteristics are unique to the coelacanth among living fishes. Among them is the presence of a “rostral organ” in the snout that is part of the electrosensory system, and an intracranial joint or “hinge” in the skull that allows the anterior portion of the cranium to swing upwards, greatly enlarging the gape of the mouth. Neither character exists in any other living vertebrate. Other unique anatomical features include a hollow fluid-filled “notochord” (a primitive feature in vertebrates) underlying the spinal cord and extending the length of the body, vertebrae that are incompletely formed or totally lacking bony centra, an oil-filled gas bladder, fleshy “lobed” or limb-like fins that are internally supported by bone, and paired fins that move in a synchronized tetrapod-like pattern.
…Other unique anatomical features include a hollow fluid-filled ânotochordâ (a primitive feature in vertebrates) underlying the spinal cord and extending the length of the body, vertebrae that are incompletely formed or totally lacking bony centra, an oil-filled gas bladder, fleshy âlobedâ or limb-like fins that are internally supported by bone, and paired fins that move in a synchronized tetrapod-like pattern.
LOL! Funny you should chose to specifically mention that đ
Probably the most widely held belief about coelacanths is that, even if they are genetically different, they look exactly the same now as they did millions of years ago. This belief is mistaken. No fossils are known for either species of surviving coelacanth or even for members of its genus, Latimeria. This suggests that the scientists responsible for classifying the fossil and living species consider the morphological differences so great the they should be placed in widely separated groups. In fact, there are significant differences in the body shape and structure of modern and extinct coelacanth species. These include changes in the number of vertebral arches and substantial differences in skull morphology. The swim bladder of coelacanths has also changed from being filled with oil in the extinct genus Macropoma, to being ossified in modern species, suggesting that the two groups lived in very different environments. Lastly, there are substantial differences in size, with modern coelacanths being three and a half times larger than their closest extinct relative (one and a half vs half a metre).
And yes, while I do indeed love fuzzy science! There is still plenty of room for being a bit pedantic now and then.
There is a good reason why science is so depleted and misunderstood by the general public.
On YouTube I performed two simple searches. One was “climate news” and the other “gaps in the fossil record”.
The “climate news” search revealed a list rife with denier “news” and commentary.
The “gaps in the fossil record” showed a lot of creationist videos.
With that type of propaganda filling the media and overwhelming the time to sort it out, it’s no wonder people think much actual science is really in question and that there are actual debates or that science is just wrong.
Unfortunately that is no accident, it is by deliberate design! (pun intended)
Not too sure how to fight those forces.
Cheers!
You may be more correct than you believe. They were designed to be more controlled by their hippocampus and less so by their frontal cortex.
Possibly a core larger distribution of hippocampus operators and a smaller distribution core of prefrontal cortex operators was a positive evolutionary development up until lately.
The key is for the prefrontal cortex operators to work on the distribution of hybrid Hc-PC operators to achieve their desired results. Don’t waste time and energy on the pure Hc operators.
The reason why so many alternative theory videos proliferate on YouTube is because mainstream American academics, in concert with mainstream American media, have spent the last half-century perfecting a highly sophisticated complex web of rhetorical word constructs, institutionalized mass self-deceit and intellectual denial, guilt, poverty, and forgery.
Their work is perpetuated and legitimized not by the soundness of their arguments, not by any lessons and evidence of history, but purely by the weight of intimidation by the numbers, by purging anyone who dissents through labeling them “right-wing” and by immense psychological pressure to conform with mainstream leftist aggression and tyranny.
American universities, colleges, and schools, have become sites of mass indoctrination and conformism, where entire generations of our future leaders and makers are being taught what to think, rather than how to think. This has resulted in America’s threat recognition mechanisms of self-correction and self-preservation becoming unilaterally disarmed, much like a ship without a compass.
Troll alert
Oh, yeah!
When does the book burning and imprisoning of the educated start?
Dunno, I dropped out of third grade, don’t even know what a book looks like…
Books are like Playboy magazine with more pages and no pictures.
Gene, I disagree with your analysis. It smells strongly of some twisted form of propaganda. In fact, I’m pretty certain you are severely brainwashed. Or perhaps, you were just trying to make a big joke, and failed at it?
Speaking of climate change, from realclimate, further evidence that AMOC has indeed run amok!
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2018/05/if-you-doubt-that-the-amoc-has-weakened-read-this/
If you doubt that the AMOC has weakened, read this
Filed under: Climate modelling Climate Science Instrumental Record IPCC Oceans Paleoclimate â stefan @ 28 May 2018
A few weeks ago, weâve argued in a paper in Nature that the Atlantic overturning circulation (sometimes popularly dubbed the Gulf Stream System) has weakened significantly since the late 19th Century, with most of the decline happening since the mid-20th Century.
BTW, They have shared the paper in Nature as open access.
The AMOC terminus depends upon overturning. Overturning is due to density changes. There are two primary drivers of density change in sea water, temperature and salinity. Since cold fresh water melt from Greenland and Arctic Ice melt intrusion does both then the response would be to disrupt the overturning of the AMOC, as well as shift and redistribute it’s overturning area.
This slow down in overturning would produce a small rise in sea level at that OT area and slow the current.
Next question is: With a slower current did the actual heat transport rate change?
All that aside, with an assumed reduction in heat transport into the sub-Arctic regions due to AMOC slowing over the last 70 years, does anyone find it counterintuitive that the Arctic sea ice melt has increased over that same period?
All that aside, with an assumed reduction in heat transport into the sub-Arctic regions due to AMOC slowing over the last 70 years, does anyone find it counterintuitive that the Arctic sea ice melt has increased over that same period?
Well, I have yet to read the full paper in Nature but it seems that one of the consequences of the AMOC slowdown is the formation of a sub-polar Atlantic ‘Cold Blob’ that only Bob Frisky could love… đ
Exhibit #1, and the prime observational finding, is a long-term cooling trend in the subpolar Atlantic â the only region in the world which has cooled while the rest of the planet has warmed. This âcold blobâ or âwarming holeâ has been shown in IPCC reports since the 3rd assessment of 2001; it is shown in Fig. 1 in a version from the last (5th) IPCC report. In fact it is Figure 1 of the Summary for Policy Makers there â you canât get more prominent than that.
Most of the Arctic is showing 420 ppm CO2.
Meanwhile Brazil is getting a little taste of what peak oil will look like for those countries that don’t prepare and invest in the transition to a non fossil fuel based transportation and energy system.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-brazil-transport/truckers-clear-some-roads-in-brazil-but-protests-continue-idUSKCN1IS0LM
Brazil’s Temer makes concessions to lure truckers back to work
After seven days of protests, shortages of basic goods around the country had become increasingly critical. Hospitals reported a lack of medical supplies, while many farm animals are dying or being culled because of a lack of feed.
Brazil is a global leader in commodities exports and industry groups said they expected delays in shipments from everything from soybeans to meats and sugar.
Major cities such as Rio de Janeiro have sharply reduced public transportation, while many schools and universities said they would not open on Monday.
With gas stations low on fuel across most of the country, police and military forces have been escorting fuel convoys to supply ambulances, police vehicles and buses for public transportation in most large cities in Brazil.
One of the presidential decrees signed by Temer cuts diesel prices by 46 centavos per liter, or about 12 percent of its retail price, for a period of 60 days. The government will compensate state-led oil company Petroleo Brasileiro SA for the price cut.
Lot of stress and social strife in Brazil right now. Imagine what might happen if there are real permanent shortages of fuel that can’t be resolved through price concessions.
Those truckers should be working as much as possible. Their jobs might not exist in 10 years.
http://thedevilspanties.com/archives/12505
NAOM
Rep. Garrett announces he is an alcoholic and will not seek re-election
https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Rep-Garrett-announces-he-is-an-alcoholic-and-12949368.php
So is this a plus or minus for our Republican Friends?
Could help to adjust—–
One for Fred
https://i.chzbgr.com/full/9153026560/h5228E61A/
NAOM
Heck, I don’t need to go to Brazil for that! There’s Aventura Mall just down the road from me… đ
New posts up.
http://peakoilbarrel.com/open-thread-non-petroleum-may-29-2018/
and
http://peakoilbarrel.com/open-thread-petroleum-may-29-2018/