I have been trying for the last few days to discover a coherent logic towards my feelings on man’s relationship with his environment. This is proving not to be simple.
The process started when I heard on World Service radio a gentleman from the International Panel on Climate Change discussing their latest report. As you know, I tend to accept the established opinion on climate change, and rather take the view that if all our industrial activity were not affecting the atmosphere, that would be strange.
But what struck me was that the gentleman said that a pause in warming for the last fifteen years was not significant, as fifteen years was a blip in processes that last over millennia.
Well, that would certainly be very true if you are considering natural climate change. But we are not – we are considering man-made climate change. In terms of the period in which the scale of man’s industrial activity has been having a significant impact on the environment, surely fifteen years is a pretty important percentage of that period? Especially as you might naturally imagine the process to be cumulative – fifteen years at the start when nothing much happened would be more explicable.
Having tucked away that doubt, I started to try to think deeper. Man is, of course, himself a part of nature. Anything man does on this planet is natural to this planet. I do not take the view man should not change his environment – otherwise I should not be sitting in a house. The question is rather, are we inadvertently making changes to the environment to our own long term detriment?
That rejection of what you might call the Gaia principle – that the environmental status quo is an end in itself – has ramifications. It is hard to conceptualise our relationship with gases or soil, but easier in terms of animals. I am not a vegetarian – I am quite happy that we farm and eat cattle, for example – and you might argue that the cattle are pretty successful themselves, symbiotic survivors of a kind. Do I think other species have a value in themselves? Is there any harm in killing off a species of insect, other than the fact that biodiversity may be reduced in ways that remove potential future advantages to man, or there may be knock on consequences we know not of that damage man somehow? I am not quite sure, but in general I seem in practice to take the view that exploitation of other species and substantial distortion of prior ecological balance to suit men’s needs is fine, so presumably the odd extinction is fine too, unless it damages man long term.
I strongly disapprove of hurting animals for sport, and want to see them have the best quality of life possible, preferably wild. But I like to eat and wear them. I am not quite sure why it is OK to wear animal skin on our feet or carry it as a bag, but not to wear “fur”. What is the difference, other than that leather has had the hair systematically rubbed off as part of the process of making it? A trivial issue, but one that obviously relates to the deeper questions.
Yes I draw a distinction between animals which are intelligent and those which are not. I would not eat whale or dolphin. But this does not seem entirely logical – animal intelligence and sensibility is evidently a continuum. Many animals mourn, for example. The BBC World Service radio (my main contact with the outside world at present – I have just today found my very, very weak internet connection just about works if I try it at 5am) informed me a couple of days ago that orang-utans have the ability to think forward and tell others where they will be the next day. Why cattle and fish are daft enough to eat is hard to justify.
I quite appreciate the disbenefits to man of radically changing his environment, even if it could be done without long term risk to his existence – the loss of beauty, of connection to seasons and forms of behaviour with which we evolved. But I regard those as important only as losses to man, not because nature is important intrinsically. In short, if I thought higher seas, no polar bears and no glaciers would not hurt man particularly, I don’t suppose I would have much to say against it. I fear the potential repercussions are too dangerous to man. At base, I don’t actually care about a polar bear.
Jon,
I wasn’t upset at the NASA tweet. I actually thought it amusing and highly appropriate in the circumstances. For the record I clearly don’t really think every single American is – well what I said. But surely that was obvious?
Jon – I appreciate your composure and balance.
No, we cannot ‘cheer’ China. We can set China side by side and observe. We see authoritarian rule. We see loss of freedoms, monitoring and imprisonment. We see environmental exploitation and abuse.
Within that correlation we are unable to understand cruel, brutalizing, unreliable, unnecessary and hugely expensive activities for no measurable gain; to understand apartheid, military intervention, illegal occupation and legal torture.
Our touchstone is calibrated on the energy of life and the motivation to create and magnify all that is beautiful. That is the human spirit. That is our power, even if born Chinese, American, British or alien, discomfort, misery, suffering and torment cannot hinder or diminish our growth towards that enlightenment.
One of the few positives.
Telemetry from the two early warning spacecraft (NASA: ACE and ESA: SOHO) still coming through as normal even if almost everything else has gone dark. So far anyway.
http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/ace/EPAM_24h.html
If it stops working I’d suggest drinking heavily.
WTF Up again? http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/ace/EPAMp_24h.html
Oh in case anyone us shitting themselves right now – these levels are not dangerous. Yet 🙂
Ben Franklin -Machine Gun Preacher (Unleaded Version)
1 Oct, 2013 – 9:44 pm
Sorry, but I just have to ask; ‘what good is a mosquito?’
Population control. Sorry, I had to answer.
“Population control. Sorry, I had to answer.”
That’s the only thing I can think of. Now about those comets and asteroids……
Ignorance is bliss, AA. I’m not shatting meself because I don’t know WTFIM…
“Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something; in the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones.” – Bertrand Russell
The most salient aspect of human irrationality is inability to suspend judgement. The search for truth is twisted into a search for certainties. Uncertainty is habitually dismissed, though it is no less valid information.
Evidence of the above aplenty on this blog and this thread in particular. The generally high level of innumeracy amongst the British sentence-stringing classes does not help matters.
Some sane voices here daring to point out that consensus is a political term that has no place in science, that any beautiful theory can be killed by a single ugly fact etc. Thank you, there is hope yet. Craig, well done.
So long, and thanks for all the fish.
This is the way the world ends.
http://members5.boardhost.com/medialens/msg/1380642864.html
“Earlier this year, designer Melanie Patrick produced a graphic illustrating a UK opinion poll revealing that 59% think that fewer than 10,000 Iraqis have died since the 2003 invasion. ”
AA; Please note Expat’s link wrt above. Do you think c***s can be an international stipulation.
We can blame it on Carbon Dioxide poisoning, just to be diplomatic. 🙂
Bibi Satanyahu is getting jittery. The last time the zios dissed the US Navy with the USS Liberty false flag-174 lives lost, they ended up with their sub INS Dakar at the bottom of the Med. Now with that missile (which was shot down by the Russians) fired at Syria by him, he could have caused THOUSANDS of US Navy deaths, the US fleet is like sitting ducks for the indefensible hypersonic yakhont which Syria has. The Americans initially denied knowledge of the “training exercise”, the zios thought it was them who shot it down, only to belatedly agree. Both parties then finally realised it was the Russians. But satanyahu has to be very alert now, the navy brass will sink one of his dolphin subs soon, they do not forgive or forget its only a matter of time The “by deception ye shall wage war” crowd, will find Uncle Sam very unforgiving about the missile con.
The missing Link to my post @ 4;35pm yesterday, i got caught So outa time and had to rush off to see Barcelona play their footie at Celtic park – Iniesta is da man.
the Link
426 Dead Syrian Children? US 1% Heartlessly Poverty-Kill 1 Million Children/Month in Gruesome Slow Agony
http://www.globalresearch.ca/426-dead-syrian-children-us-1-heartlessly-poverty-kill-1-million-childrenmonth-in-gruesome-slow-agony/5352292
Alcanon
is this shit for real, i know they were shutting down But WTF…
“NASA employees have been told they risk being arrested and thrown in jail if they turn up for work unpaid, That was in writing”.
“Recent attempted Ison observations
Deep-Impact – Self destructed
BRRISON – Didn’t work.
Observations from Mars – Shut down. Data already received today appears to have been destroyed because it was “illegal”.
AND Whilst How serious this Stuff is – You Do make me chuckle –
Ison imagery from Mars has now been cancelled and I am about to explode.
“One of the few positives.
“Telemetry from the two early warning spacecraft (NASA: ACE and ESA: SOHO) still coming through as normal even if almost everything else has gone dark. So far anyway.
If it stops working I’d suggest drinking heavily”.
And so it’s really the final farewell to The voyagers. Due to the Fuckwits
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lTEK7HhFLMw&list=PL0E27FA056224583B
P.S. J
Jon that was a wee bit unfair re Alcanon Going Nova methinks
Arbed –
u posted about the Yasuni/ITT project in Ecuador. it was $3.6 billion they hoped to raise, assisted by the very UN that pushes the manmade global warming scam. all they actually received is $13.3 million. yet the UN pretends the west will give the developing world $100 billion per year to help with “MM global warming”!
Wikipedia: The Yasuni-ITT Initiative was launched by president Rafael Correa of Ecuador
at the U.N. General Assembly in 2007…
To administer the funds donated to the Yasuni-ITT Initiative, the Yasuni-ITT
Trust Fund was officially launched on 3 August 2010. The Yasuni-ITT Trust
Fund is administered by the Multi-Donor Trust Fund of the United Nations
Development Programme (UNDP)…
During the six year history of the initiative, only $336 million had been
pledged, Correa said, and of that only $13.3 million had actually been
delivered.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yasun%C3%AD-ITT_Initiative
the Waorani people have agreed to drilling, in return for some development, and Ecuador’s saying it’s only 0.1% of the 6,500 square mile territory that will be affected (initially, anyway?).
btw, the only way the $100 billion per year for the developing world was going to be possible was if the public allowed the financial sector to get their carbon trading going – the financialisation of carbon dioxide – derivatives & all. even then, we’d probably dictate how every cent needed to be spent on expensive western technology that can’t even provide baseload energy.
to get the absolute hypocrisy & deceptive wording of the following, it helps if u know all the nefarious characters involved. for Steyer to begin by suggesting the financial sector hadn’t even considered making trillions out of MANMADE GLOBAL WARMING before Aug 2012 is a downright lie:
11 Oct: Bloomberg: Edward Robinson: Climate Change Rescue in U.S. Makes Steyer Converge With (Hank) Paulson
Billionaire Tom Steyer recalls a dinner at the U.S. Treasury in Washington with two senior department officials and six money managers. It was August 2012, and the meal was part of an effort by the agency to keep up with what the financial community was worrying about. The diners discussed China’s slowdown, Federal Reserve policy and other trends affecting the U.S. economy.
Steyer says they were overlooking the biggest game changer of all. He told the group the country would have to overhaul its energy policy to address greenhouse gas emissions, Bloomberg Markets magazine will report in its November issue. His fellow guests were skeptical.
“It’s like I was saying that what’s going to make a difference in the economy is unicorns,” says Steyer, 56, the founder of Farallon Capital Management LLC, a San Francisco hedge-fund firm with about $20 billion in assets. He declines to name the other people present because the meeting was off the record but says they control a lot of money. “I thought to myself: These guys need to be made aware of the risks here.”
So in December, Steyer ended his 26-year career as a hedge-fund manager and set out to make an economic case for addressing climate change. He wasn’t the only person from the financial world to have this idea: Henry Paulson, Treasury secretary from 2006 to 2009 and a longtime conservationist, and Michael Bloomberg, the outgoing mayor of New York, which had suffered the costliest hurricane damage in its history, were also plotting how to reframe the issue.
The three men agreed to join forces to persuade investors, policy makers and the public that the consequences of unchecked carbon emissions would eventually blow away whatever short-term costs are involved in curbing the pollution…
Robert Rubin, who served as Treasury secretary from 1995 to 1999, and former Secretary of State George Shultz have signed on as advisers…
The economic study they’re funding, which they’ve dubbed Risky Business, will be published in late 2014. They say it’s just one piece of a larger strategy to reboot the issue as a global priority…
Nicholas Stern, chair of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics and Political Science, counters that making a fiscal case for regulating carbon may be the best way to break through the resistance on the issue…
Paulson and Steyer each consulted Stern separately last spring as they formulated their thinking on the issue…
Paulson and Steyer make an odd couple. The former cabinet official, who worked under President George W. Bush through the height of the financial crisis, is a reserved Republican…
Steyer is a gregarious Democratic Party fund-raiser…
They have two things in common. One is Goldman Sachs. Steyer began his career at the investment bank in the early 1980s on the risk arbitrage desk run by Rubin, who went on to become the firm’s co-chairman, from 1990 to 1992…
Along with Steyer and Bloomberg, Paulson is betting that as climate change, once a distant possibility, becomes altogether real, our economic self-interest will be the thing that finally provokes a popular call for action. That will almost certainly have to be making carbon dioxide emissions expensive by either taxing or regulating the gas on a global basis, Steyer says.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-10-01/climate-change-rescue-in-u-s-makes-steyer-converge-with-paulson.html
I wrote about Pandemrix/narcolepsy the other day. Here Dr Mark Porter speaks to Prof Gringras. The adjuvant in the vaccine, squalene, is suspect for triggering the narcolepsy cases.
Flu vaccine and narcolepsy;
Availability:7 days left to listen
Duration: 28 minutes
1 October 2013
Dr Mark Porter goes on a weekly quest to demystify perplexing health issues.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03brkvt
Related Links
◾Pandemic flu vaccination linked to narcolepsy in UK children (www.hpa.org.uk)
◾Home Professional Reference Narcolepsy and Cataplexy Narcolepsy and Cataplexy (www.patient.co.uk)
◾Professor Paul Gringras – sleep expert (www.guysandstthomas.nhs.uk)
The walls came tumbling down, NOT.
A Wall for a Wall: Mirroring Racism
by William A. Cook / October 1st, 2013
Now that our President has handed over the resolution of the Syrian debacle to the United Nations, perhaps justice demands that he hand over resolution of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict to that international body as well. One can turn to the reality of the illegal machinations of the Israeli Zionist government any day of the week and see and know and feel the terror that exists for the occupied people who are defenseless before the impunity granted to the state of Israel for crimes that any other member nation of the UN would, as is true of Syria, be brought for justice before the International Courts. Consider these items from today’s news:
In the 12 years since September 2000 up to the end of September 2012 Israel killed 6,550 Palestinians in their homeland. Of these, 1,335 were children. Over the same period Palestinians killed 590 Israelis in their homeland, including 85 children.
This is a kill-ratio of 11 to 1. When it comes to children, the Israelis are even more proficient, achieving a kill-ratio of nearly 16 to 1. This does not take into account the Israeli onslaught on Gaza from 27 December 2008 – 18 January 2009 which killed nearly 1,400 Palestinians a huge number of whom were children. Obama, the US president-in-waiting at the time, refused to lift a finger, let alone utter a word of condemnation.
Finally, the above does not take into account the thousands of Palestinian homes demolished by the Israeli military machine funded by the United States.
/..
http://dissidentvoice.org/2013/10/a-wall-for-a-wall-mirroring-racism/
The UN report on Syrian chemical weapons questions not only whether sarin was the nerve-gas used but the whole science behind the report. Recently the WHO released a report due to pressure from the public regarding Iraq birth deformities. It analysis again was weak with no real facts and figures regarding DNA samples of those exposed. Unfortunately it was a branch of the BMC that compiled the report dragging down the good name of that body. This Syrian report is just as bad.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/chemical-weapon-expert-opinion-on-the-un-report-on-syria/5352319
Some sane voices here daring to point out that consensus is a political term that has no place in science,
The process of peer review and publication does however ensure that some agreement by some reasonably eminent workers in a given field is required before a piece of work is authenticated. And unfortunately political terms are all that politicians understand. This is a highly political issue. Politicians have neither the time nor the inclination to wade through scientific papers about subjects of which they do not have even a basic grasp. They have to ask (the honest ones) if informed opinion supports a proposition, and that has to rely on consensus. Consensus is of little relevance to raw research, certainly. But it is monumentally relevant to the implementation of science in the wider world.
that any beautiful theory can be killed by a single ugly fact etc.
True. If the fact is established with reference to data and analysis. Rather, that is, than on the opinion of Lord Lawson. 🙂
Oddie cut-and-pastes without reading:
Along with Steyer and Bloomberg, Paulson is betting that as climate change, once a distant possibility, becomes altogether real, our economic self-interest will be the thing that finally provokes a popular call for action. That will almost certainly have to be making carbon dioxide emissions expensive by either taxing or regulating the gas on a global basis, Steyer says.
If the really big money’s on global warming, wouldn’t you be as well following the big money, Oddie? Rather than the obviously self-interested section of the fossil fuel industry which is so vigorously promoting your line?
Consensus or not, Blair’s (and Thatcher’s) psychopathology explored:
http://medicalxpress.com/news/2013-09-lady-thatcher-tony-blair-hubristic.html
There really is a case for humanely destroying them after two terms in office.
We will be given directions to the ‘promised land’ this morning. No not Israel.
ZBC ‘News’ tell us what Cameron WILL BE saying later this morning. Strange that.
David Cameron: We’ll make UK a ‘land of opportunity’
David Cameron will call for people to take more responsibility for themselves
Conservative Conference 2013 Live
Surplus plan responsible – Cameron
Cameron: Be great to have Boris back
Job centre ‘nine-to-five’ plan
David Cameron will say “profit, wealth creation, tax cuts, enterprise… are not dirty, elitist words” in his big Conservative conference speech later.
Putting his party firmly on the side of business, he will also promise to make the UK “a land of opportunity”.
He will say that “at long last, and for the first time ever” people will be able to “make it” wherever they live, whatever their background.
His speech to close the conference is due to take place at about 11:00 BST.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-24358392
Tweet from London
America was not shut down properly. Would you like to start America in safe mode, with free healthcare and without the guns? (Recommended)
and another:
https://twitter.com/snipeyhead/status/385258896111468544/photo/1
🙂
He will say that “at long last, and for the first time ever” people will be able to “make it” wherever they live, whatever their background.
He really is getting desperate, then.
Cameron, Osborne and Gove in formation:
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/pigs.jpg
Solve this to defeat spam.
http://www.probability.net/WEBfubini.pdf
Re. the Daily Mail’s assault on Ralph Milliband:
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2012/apr/20/cameron-family-tax-havens
Offshore; Dad must have hated Britain, eh? Dad’s little tax scam;
http://globaldocuments.morningstar.com/documentlibrary/Document/ec3dcb9ffb02c630042fa1ac2c7d56de.msdoc/original
Daily Mail, Grant Schapps and Lynton Crosby, please copy.
And while we’re on loaded relatives, and how anyone will be able to make it, regardless of background, how about this walking disaster?
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/george-osbornes-unemployed-brother-buys-245591
@Dreoilin 10.30am
Simply brilliant. If only!
Little-publicised (Wiki) FACT: Grant S(c)happs of the Bedroom Tax was formerly National President of UK BBYO, a Zionist youth organisation. No doubt he visited Israel and learned how to deal with the dispossessed, from the experts.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UK_and_Ireland_BBYO
You mean this Daddy Komodo
Directors
John Anderson
Jeroen Bos
Ian Cameron
Brent Haines
James Hoar
Andrew Hunziker
Daniel Martineau
Nicholas Peppiatt
Betty Roberts
Patrick Smiley
Andrew Weight
A strange coincidence that the offshore vehicle was called Blairmore Holdings!
The name and some of the .characters still exist thirty one years later as
Blairmore Funds PLC.
https://www.duedil.com/company/IE509173/blairmore-funds-public-limited-company/people