Hi Being. I'm not sure if this was a response to my post or not, but if it was, please note I made no comment regarding a climate change/ population causal relationship, just that climate change is likely to stress, generally, the food production system that the world's increasing population depends on. And speculation on what a serious hiccup in that system would lead to... It totally doesn't matter if population growth causes climate change or not, really.Originally Posted by Being
The Rules
Copper- behave toward others to elicit treatment you would like (the manipulative rule)
Gold- treat others how you would like them to treat you (the self regard rule)
Platinum - treat others the way they would like to be treated (the PC rule)
I just thought that the author's presentation of the relation between consumption and population fit within the context of the topic. The population could possibly increase without increasing consumption but that idea doesn't really fit the human condition.
Faith is Hope (see Loki's sig for details)
If hindsight is 20-20, why is it so often ignored?
Time shifting at best, the underlying problems all around the world have not been properly addressed. MAD may have stopped a hot war between USA v USSR back in the day, but none of the problems were really fixed. Also MAD has not stopped them from still fighting via surrogates or directly in lower intensity settings, having a doomsday device does not stop the conflict, just mutates it into something more, insidious.
After the iron curtain fell, many former satellite states went through the processes that were denied them, from having Russia as overlord. Former Yugoslavia event nearly kicked off WW3, that would be a Luke warm war. Most recent mess would be the whole Crimea annexation thing Russia did, somewhere between simmering and Luke warm, with respect to Ukraine and Russia.
Israel vs basically the whole greater ME region. They had a hot war or two, but its always been closer to simmering towards a boil.
Personally I'd question that study that was reported to you, how are they counting the effects of tens of millions of people being displaced, are they counting mental health injuries properly, because the whole ME is basically a basket case of pain that was not quite so ridiculous before 1950, but that could also be a side effect of the population boom after the war and all the medical discoveries that have prolonged life, there are more centenarians than ever before thanks to that.
I won't argue physical injuries/death as those are pretty cut and dry to catalogue in most cases, bit hard to hide a missing limb or a shredded face, dead body/missing body etc. much harder to parse quality of life in a quantifiable manner that everyone can understand/accept and compare. A bit like the situation US veterans have, they have no problems, because they have no resources allocated to deal with the real problems they are going through, after coming back from a hot zone or twenty.
Like those rubbish medical questionnaires that ask, rate your pain on a scale of 1 to 10, but they don't explain what a one is and what a ten is, or a five, so you can figure out if what ever it is a particular number, assuming numerical feedback is useful, perhaps from a stats perspective, maybe not so much from a figuring out on a specific individual. Which gets exponentially trickier if you are dealing with issues like all various forms of depression, rage, fear and anxiety, all those disorders.
But then the world is run by psychopaths anyway, so of course mental health does not matter. Even in the democratic progressive "team good guy" ones.
We could look at suicide rates and substance abuse in such cases, though how much of that is from abusive living conditions and lack of options to get out of a hole, might be too hard to tease apart from factors that directly lead to or stem from classical definitions of war or lack of it. It does seem like what ever you were parsing does exclude coups, failed or otherwise, civil wars that were intentionally provoked but never claimed responsibility for as that would make it an actual classical war.
Economic war is also important as that does massively effect quality of life in the countries targeted by such things, just because the suffering and death is not caused by bullets bombs and blades, does not make it any less of a war, its basically a scaled up variant of laying siege to a castle/fort. "They" can dress it up and say targeted to not impact how ever many hundreds of millions or billions of people (China getting some sanction action these days so, could be first billion from a single country alone rather than an amalgamation of scores around the world), the reality is, the elite never suffer much nor do the targets which is why sanctions do not work for the publicly stated purpose, but they potentially could work from a weaken the nation in question to the point where invasion or trashing becomes "easy".
Sanctions also inflate corruption issues to even higher levels as well, its basically a slow pressure cooker, yes it will break eventually, probably, but not certainly. If that leads to increased criminality and inequality, then, just because the degree of separation is now two, does not absolve the people behind opting for sanctions from the responsibility of those lives. Otherwise the odds are, who ever is applying sanctions is trying to pass off the argument guns don't kill people, people kill people as being all true.
If you need an analogy to make it clearer, its like the whole, "stop testing for Covid, if we don't know, it there for does not exist, it isn't a problem". I'd say there is a very high chance what ever you were listening to was highly selective for a reason as mundane as simply suggesting that we be thankful for all the peace we have had for this period. It isn't peace, its the old, putting a frog in a pot and slowly raising the temperature to bring it to boil, sure it lived longer, maybe it met another frog in that pot, maybe they had family, maybe their children met some other frogs children and they had a family too, but once it gets to that magic temp, it along with its whole family is probably going to go bye bye.
While I don't think we'll convince one another of anything, am just sharing why I think that report is a disservice at best.
You said it, it is fragile.As for famine - I recently read 1493 which looked at the Colombian Exchange and its cascade of effects into modern times -- one being modern agriculture, with industrial use of fertilizer and pesticide, that more or less eventually wiped out non-intentional famine around the world. Prior to this, a good harvest was apparently very much a crap shoot from year to year, region to region.
The sense I got from that read is modern agriculture is more fragile than most people understand, and running the climate through a blender is going to introduce any number of risks -- and this at the same time hungry humanity is reaching ever greater numbers, despite modernity's tendency to reduce population growth. Generally speaking, in nature a booming population eventually crashes. You might think humanity is exceptional with modern agriculture --we've so far been able to produce more food to feed the boom, but there is a limit somewhere, and we are creating more and more variables and risks that could so easily result in a sudden ugly limit. It isn't unreasonable to think its only a matter of time when population outstrips food supply.
It also a short term mirage, lot of land is ruined or in the process of being ruined from farming exploitation, be that over fertilization leading to salt saturation issues that won't just wash out, to, destabilizing shallow top soil that actually washes away with each rainy season and cuts down to, non farming type soil/rock for which ever crop. Which is an issue separate to climate change, but does contribute to climate change issues as new farmland has to be acquired to replace loss of temporarily good farmland, which might be a mismanagement issue as much as not knowing how to take care of that kind of land.
Old traditional farming techniques don't have that issue but only modern industrial/intensive ones do.
Stupid farming choices like growing rice in CA deserts is just water use abuse, lot of stuff grown in deserts that don't have any business growing those things so of course there are water shortages and droughts going into extreme modes there and other places that grow non suitable crops in non optimal locations.
A lot of water management issues in the US come down to stupid policy decisions, such as needing a green lawn, to fit the 1950's American Dream home setup, don't recall exactly but lawns are one of the largest non food producing or product producing crops in the continental US, it is a vanity item, yet, if your city or your HoA mandates you have green lawn(s) even in the middle of a drought, you must water it while somehow "conserving" water. Yet people are told to fix leaking taps, plumbing or put in water efficient flushing toilets, shower heads or washing machines (clothes or dish), yet the per person use of such things in an average month is often not even one tenth or one twentieth of what you need to use for keeping a lawn green, year round.
If you happen to have a multi acre lawn, then that number jumps to not even one fiftieth or one, one hundredth. (Yeah rich people have literal golf courses worth of lawn in their private "yards", not that golf courses should get a pass because they actually have some marginal use). It is hot where I live so, lawn water use is high, but after the heat waves all the way into places like Canada this year, well, maybe even having a lawn there is now, also pretty stupid, if this heat is the new soon to be normal.
You have to apply for permission to xeriscape (desert garden or rock garden), which is just daft, its obvious, let people do what is needed and save water from waste on pointless things.
If there is a point to that, it was something like thirty percent of water use is for US lawns, out of everything used for farming overall, in the whole of the US. They did not show a break down of, what the water use/savings or requirements would be if people actually grew sensible crops in sensible environments and what it would be if the whole bio fuel/ethanol industry got tossed out and that land put back to actual food production. Though that would be a highly US centric issue regarding farm subsidies as well as fake industries that are also subsidized like bio-fuels as well as the whole FF industry which is another can of worms not quite worth going into beyond acknowledging they were a huge part of the problem(s) after WW2 ended, in terms of the black gold, liquid gold curse that all oil/coal/gas producing nations have been under since.
So there is some play in the system, but the fact the problem of lack of food was "solved" by doing absolutely asinine farming practices means it is a non solution in the long run, a little time was bought, but in the end, we now have numbers to have thrown away that time. Time shifting as far as I am concerned. Especially as some of the garbage US farming techniques have been propagated in other parts of the world too, the conversion of rain forest to farmland in Brazil springs to mind, that land is only good for four to five years and then they have to move on, but they never replant the forest, mostly because they can't, the soil is useless for farming or for forest.
Maybe those vertical/liquid farms can work, but it does seem a bit like grasping at straws at this point, though it is something that would have to be made to work if loftier goals like space travel and building colonies on Mars/Moon and further are to be a thing. If it did work, would make a lot of farmers unemployed and no longer eligible for subsidies which at least in the US is a pretty big political block, sure similar issues exist in other nations that are balancing their food security/independence and economic trade needs, the ones that have real elections at least.
In theory idiotic places like CA, NM and AZ could solve their water problems by building a massive amount of desalination plants and building a massive aqueduct system, but, I think people prefer to just scream at each other instead of try things. It would not be cost effective at all, but if they all insist on living unreasonable lifestyles they should have at it. It won't stop the whole western US going up in mega scale wildfires each year, but they can have the privilege of maybe rebuilding their farms every year and squeezing in a single crop and harvesting that before it all burns down again. Certainly would be an endless job creation scheme.
Not a fan of the Malthusian J curve theory. Maybe, a human takes one week to die due to lack of water, on average, it is one month for total lack of food, on average, for a healthy adult. If the food supply chain gets disrupted, it will be a slow process for some areas and fast for others. We can see this behavior in the global vaccine roll out, rich countries got everything they needed first, poor countries, still waiting. Same will happen for food. Odds are military and VIPs will retain good food access the longest, similar to what you see with sanction squeeze effects in North Korea, everyone else gets to be malnourished for as long as possible, those people are too weak to revolt at that point which is why... NK is still a thing despite being in effective siege conditions for what ever it has been now, seventy years, sixty, not total but good enough.And if/when millions and billions suddenly (relatively speaking) find themselves without enough to eat, violence will increase. Governments will destabilize. Demagogues and despots will seize their moment. Wars the establishment would never risk will be risked. The "system" will stumble. Population will drop.
Not too sure going for war for bread basket type locations will work, everyone nearby and perhaps from afar will want that pie, in fighting over it, in and around it, they may well end up burning the little scraps of paradise/oasis for farming in the process, or worse dumping land mines everywhere making it useless that way, there by shortening the rope on that noose all the quicker on themselves as well as competitors. Wars are exceptionally wasteful endeavors and with a weakened ecosystem on nature side of the equation the damage will be that much amplified, you don't see many studies about the loss of nature thanks to WW1 and 2 but nature did take a few for the team too.
Ethiopia and Somalia are probably good case studies for that, be a bit more convoluted when dealing with larger unions/nations, there should be more co-operation and resiliency, if not then what is the merit of such large nations/unions, alliances and treaties don't mean anything if they decide to be like animals and revert to everyone for themselves. Odds are it will be a multi decade decline, if not century level, Ethiopia has been in famine on and off since the 80s I think, they are sort of still a functional country thanks to outside help, but how fast will it go when the help dries up, though I think they are in the process of splitting in two right now, though that might be pandemic related more than famine at this particular time or perhaps both, I am aware, but there simply is too much to follow on topic, around the world.
Either way, it won't be fast, it will be slow and painful. The real question is, when do people start looking at one another and see a friend, a neighbor, a traveler or a family member as steak in need of carving, cooking and being served on a plate, not the squeaky clean fun of soylent green, the more visceral Hannibal Lector or Saw/Silent Hill type experience. Though it would be somewhat of a fools errand to try and predict a when, I'll agree that much. Maybe there is stuff out there we not "found yet", but you know, psychos gotta psycho, power over life > life, its a fun game till it is not and all that.
Study warns of 'irreversible transition' in ocean currents that could rapidly freeze parts of North America
I do not understand, exactly, how the Earth's oceans work but I'm pretty sure they are all connected. So how is it possible to
without raising all sea levels.raise sea levels along the U.S. East Coast
Faith is Hope (see Loki's sig for details)
If hindsight is 20-20, why is it so often ignored?
I've wondered that too, but I think the ocean, taken globally, isn't as simple as a swimming pool or bathtub, where its surface is uniform everywhere. The sense I got from a few things I've read/ listened to is that temperature, currents, wind, lunar gravity all affect the ocean surface regionally. I'm sure there's more.
I went to the linked washington post article which linked to another and found this:
“When carbon emission rates are at present day levels and higher, we see greater basin average sea level rise in the Atlantic relative to the Pacific,” says Krasting. “This also means that single global average measures of sea level rise become less representative of the regional scale changes that we show in the study.”
In the new research, the scientists used a high powered climate change model based at the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton, N.J., that simulates the ocean, the atmosphere and the cycling of carbon throughout the Earth system. The goal was to determine how much sea level rise would occur in the Atlantic, versus the Pacific, under a variety of global carbon emissions scenarios.
And the simulation found that at high emissions scenarios similar to current rates, the Atlantic sea levels rise considerably faster than the Pacific, with particularly noteworthy impacts for the U.S. East Coast. (Other recent research by scientists with the U.S. Geological Survey has suggested this increased rate of sea level rise is already happening — finding sea level rise rates “~ 3–4 times higher than the global average” along a large stretch of the U.S. East Coast, which the researchers dubbed a sea level rise “hotspot.”)
The reason for the difference, the researchers say, is that the Atlantic, more than the Pacific, is characterized by a strong “overturning” ocean circulation — technically known as the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC — that spans the north-south length of the globe and ultimately connects waters off New York with those at the tip of Antarctica. This means that waters circulate through the entire Atlantic much faster than they do throughout the Pacific: A “parcel” of water that sinks beneath the surface in the Atlantic will generally make it back to the surface again in 200 to 300 years, versus about three times as long for the Pacific, Krasting explains.
For this reason, scientists sometimes say that Atlantic waters are “younger” than Pacific waters.
Another way of putting it is that the Atlantic waters “ventilate” more, plunging from the surface to great depths before eventually making their way back to the surface again. But if this circulation slows due to climate change, the study finds, less cold water will dive to ocean depths in the North and far South Atlantic (technically called “deep water formation”), leading to warmer water pooling below the surface and, ultimately, greater warming overall.
“The average temperature of the basin actually goes up, because you’re not bringing that cool water,” says Krasting. Warm water expands, and that’s the cause of the sea level rise expected in the study.
The Rules
Copper- behave toward others to elicit treatment you would like (the manipulative rule)
Gold- treat others how you would like them to treat you (the self regard rule)
Platinum - treat others the way they would like to be treated (the PC rule)
Somebody is taking this seriously...
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world...wQs?li=BBnb7Kz
India will edge past China as the world’s most populous country sometime around 2027introduced a bill pushing for smaller families — two children at most
Faith is Hope (see Loki's sig for details)
If hindsight is 20-20, why is it so often ignored?
And "Great" Britain's tax payers would prefer old people just die the fuck off already...
https://abcnews.go.com/Health/wireSt...older-79868540
Faith is Hope (see Loki's sig for details)
If hindsight is 20-20, why is it so often ignored?
It's hard to admit that "the elderly" can become a burden to society. Especially for wealthy, first world democracies that embrace ageing and illness as part of Capitalism in the for-profit healthcare sector.
You talked about consumers as "shareholders" in the other thread, and how there's a comeuppance coming. There's a lot of truth to that, but no one wants to admit that we're trading longevity and quality of life, on the backs of our youth, because we're self-centered and selfish.
I've tried to calculate the "meta" costs of living, and come to the conclusion that my children (and society) are actually harmed if I live beyond my 80's. But our modern culture says we should all want to live to be 100.....so wtf
Absolutely depends on the state of your health. I know people in their 80s with limited cognitive function and super frail. And I knew a 92 year old who still went on walks solo and was still sharp. I imagine the former isn't much of a life but the later is still golden years.
The *latter* example of a 92 yr old who can walk alone and is still mentally sharp.....isn't a very good definition of "quality of life", and doesn't justify what younger generations are expecting or paying for.
But you're right that it all depends on the state of your health. And in the US, 50 states can decide what that means. Yee Haw Republicans really did want to trade a chicken for a check-up.
Last edited by GGT; 09-10-2021 at 03:26 AM.
Thanks for jogging my memory! Hi Ira!
"Spreading Democracy" won't mean a damn thing when the planet is experiencing various stages of mass destruction. We're already facing huge economic migration patterns related to climate change, but refuse to admit it...let alone make plans to ameliorate it. We don't really believe that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, if it means changing the power structures that have been in control for so many years.
Drill Baby Drill was one of the worst political memes of all time, but it managed to activate a Republican base that only cared about continuing their power at the expense of the planet; and since their major political "donors" were from the fossil fuel and financial industries.....it makes sense in a very scary way.
The paradox is that the Republican Party poses itself as the "pro-life" and Freeedom party of small government, but it's really just a fascist Death Cult that wants to hang onto power, no matter what. And people fall for it.
USA #1!
We've reached the point of tribalism where people call their political opposites part of a death cult. The right did it first surrounding abortion and crime legislation, but now we're full circle.
Yeah, how unreasonable to call a party that actively opposes Covid restrictions and brainwashed its followers into not taking necessary precautions (including getting vaccinated) a death cult.
Go have a look at the top 25 states by Covid cases and top 25 states by vaccinations.
Hope is the denial of reality
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