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.
“The inhabitants of Easter Island chopped down the last trees to transport a few more statues down to the coast, in the hope that they would bring back the forest.”
The world, as seen from behind a herd of extremely flatulent cows.
BRRISON; The Moon’s a Balloon.
http://www.cometisonnews.com/
A demonstration of a troll’s effort to divert and disrupt.
Villager
28 Sep, 2013 – 10:00 pm
Anon, and Mary’s views on kosher….
Perhaps we could be informed of the ‘K’ view on climate change.
There are over 2,000 comments on the BBC website page. The headline leaves no doubt as to which side of the debate the BBC supports.
IPCC climate report: humans ‘dominant cause’ of warming
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-24292615
Any truth in the rumour Malcolm Rifkind to resign JIC Chairmanship post to stave off demand for independent prosecution for treason made to the CPS. This is with regard to his lying on the Commons Floor to shill for Syria bombing during the recent vote. The video YouTube “evidence” now proved false with the gassed children proved to have been kidnapped elsewhere. The Israeli “intercepts” transcripts (if concocted by the same crowd in Herzliya that gave us the fake laughable “auschwitz” mavi marmara audio), when made public, should provide a final nail in the coffin of this JIC dual loyalty Pollard !
I love my Sunday breakfast.
Bacon, black pudding, link and Lorne sausage, fried eggs, fried bread, mushrooms and a pint of Guinness.
Or I might save the planet and have some seeds and water instead.
Rather than just trolling the positions of Tony Blair and the BBC might I kindly suggest that the issue is important enough to warrant some thought on her part.
It is interesting how a number here have sought to argue that the slow down in the rate of global warming can be taken as evidence that global warming has ceased – and can be used as evidence for their own narrow political perspectives. It cannot – if they want to see some real evidence rather than engage in political posturing might I suggest that they look here
http://www.skepticalscience.com/global-cooling-intermediate.htm
“They must find it hard to take Truth for Authority who have so long mistaken Authority for Truth.”
This applies perfectly to the BBC – on the Today programme John Humphreys was putting the denialist case and citing its authority as the fact that Lord Lawson supports it (there being a marked absence of scientific facts to do the real job). Meanwhile a bunch of people who study the data, who know a great deal about the climate and who develop their theories according to the scientific method are dismissed as involved in a communist conspiracy aimed at bringing down the capitalist free market (and therefore Lord Lawson). Not hard to see which side is irrational here.
“Anything man does on this planet is natural to this planet.”
Along the same line as “everything is natural”, everything is free and eternal, etc.
But the concept of nature becomes unintelligibly wide with this treatment, so a new word should be allowed to address these current differences between human technological phenomenon and those which have arisen and remained through ancient ‘natural’ history (such as life itself).
What can a naturalist say now?
Juteman
By all means enjoy your Sunday breakfast – but if you try that everyday saving the planet will be the least of your worries. Wholemeal toast, muesli and tea for me (with added lower fat cow products).
While we enjoy our Sunday breakfasts, take a minute to think about this young Nepalese boy who died in the super-rich, wonder-State of Qatar:
At 16, Ganesh got a job in Qatar. Two months later he was dead
http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2013/sep/25/qatar-nepalese-workers-poverty-camps
@RD.
As I can’t afford a decent pension, my Scottish diet should make sure I don’t need one. I don’t want to work until I am 90, so a fatal heart attack around 65 will do nicely. Preferably after enjoying my breakfast.
I pity my fellow Scots that depend on foodbanks. Due to lack of fresh meat, they might have to live for decades in poverty, and not get the benefit of an early heart attack.
Just passing thru to feed my coffee cravings and see what the grownups are up to.
Seems there’s less malice around. That’s a breath of fresh air.
As for the great Global Warming / Climate Change debate I can’t add any expertise to the brew, but, when I read the Liar in Chief patronising us with, “ No serious-minded person could possibly doubt that climate change is manmade…” I smell a rat.
Aside from Bliar’s record with facts there is the small matter of just why a “serious minded person” should alight from his favourite Bombardier aircraft to warn us of the menace of human induced climate change.
Surely a reasonably minded person would now start to ask is this issue being hijacked by those whose actions pour more CO2 into the atmosphere in a week than most of os can manage in a year.
And then when I see they have a comodotized, bank-friendly, carbon credit solution ready and running I start to get very suspicious.
What about seriously addressing the ways we live and relate to our planet-home? The twelve design principles of Permaculture might be a good start.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permaculture#Twelve_design_principles
Also cheer-leading for industrial scale destruction in the ME might not be such a cool climate change solution. Better to just park that Bombardier and take a train to the Hague (yes Tony, there’s a tunnel) and turn yourself in to the ICC. There are millions who would love to see you embark on your sentence of 10 years community service in Fallujah.
Just a thought.
Btw, just look at the data. Seems that, whatever the cause(s) we already have climate chaos. Something’s afoot.
Must go. Be sure to contunue behaving yourselves.
Mary, here is an extract:
“And meditation is not something that you practise for an hour or ten minutes and the rest of the day do your mischief. Meditation is the whole of life and that is the beauty of meditation, it is not something set aside, it covers and enters into all our activities and to all our thoughts and feelings. So it is not something that you practise or give attention to once a day or three times a day or ten times a day and the rest of the day live a life that is shoddy, neurotic, mischievous, violent.
And if you would understand what meditation is the mind must be totally free from all violence and aggression. Are you following all this? As I said, as the speaker said, this is a very serious matter and if you don’t want to listen to it, don’t. But you should know something of all this, it is good for you to know this. We are educated in violence, our ways of life, all our activity is a form of violence. We are geared to war, and war is very profitable, and we are educated to kill, kill not only the poor animals for our food but also kill your neighbours in the name of God, in the name of peace, in the name of your country, in the name of your bank account. And it is part of our tradition, both religiously, economically and socially, the competition of the priest to become a bishop, climb the ladder, the hierarchical ladder of spiritual whatever it is. And we are also aggressive, we think it is necessary to be aggressive in order to progress. That word ‘progress’ at one time meant, to enter the enemy country fully armed. I hope you appreciate the meaning of that word. And aggression was a form of security, the animals, if you have observed them, are very aggressive amongst themselves – as the top dog. So there is in us not only aggression but violence. And we deem it necessary.
Intelligence is above and beyond violence and aggression. That intelligence comes when one understands the full nature and the structure of violence outwardly and inwardly with all its aggression. Then in that understanding flowers intelligence. That intelligence can operate in our daily life and therefore there needs to be no violence at all.Because intelligence is not an intellectual thing, intelligence comes into being when man is whole, when he is acting totally with all his being, when he is not fragmented, when his actions are not contradictory, and when he is aware of his contradictions choicelessly. Then out of that awareness comes this sensitive, pliable, rich intelligence, which will operate in our daily life, which will give us deep abiding security, which violence and aggression cannot. So a mind that is enquiring into meditation must be free of violence and aggression.
And there arises a question, which is, where do you draw the line between intelligence and violence? You kill animals to eat and the animals are becoming rather expensive because they need a great deal of the land and so gradually you are being forced to become vegetarians, of necessity. Some writer some time ago wrote an article in this country saying, vegetarianism is spreading like some awful disease in this beautiful land. So where do you draw the line? You put on shoes of leather, you support war when you buy a stamp, when you pay your tax. Where do you draw the line between the least killing, the least violence and aggression? And that intelligence that is not involved in violence, in killing, when that intelligence operates there is no line. It will operate intelligently when the problem is put before you.”
http://www.jkrishnamurti.org/krishnamurti-teachings/view-text.php?tid=1126&chid=830&w=animals
I suppose we all have ‘the beast’ inside us Ben – thanks for your kind comment.
“Some people make a living, others make a killing” – an exclusive new documentary on Tony Blair which will break unexplored ground.
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/22595538/the-killing-of-tony-blair
Hi People,
I couldn’t resist another coffee and lightning tour of the threads. It’s good to reconnect with you all.
I offer this link for perspective.
http://htwins.net/scale2/
It can take a while to work, but I promise it’s worth the wait.
Pour youself a nice cuppa, or wharever you fancy. Put those tired feet up….and explore.
I’m deffinitely hitting the road again now, but in the words of my Great Uncle Fu, “I will return!”
Will this be reported on the BBC by the loyal partei propagandist Nick Robinson? Probably not.
Tell the Conservative Party Conference in Manchester: SAVE OUR NHS. Defend Jobs and Services. No to Austerity.
March and Rally – Sunday 29 September 2013
Supporters of the National Health Service and all those who want to defend jobs, services and a decent welfare state will be marching in Manchester to deliver a clear message to Conservative Party Conference that we mean to Save Our NHS from cuts and privatisation.
A march and rally have been called by the North West TUC, backed by unions and NHS campaign groups. They’ll be assembling at Liverpool Road (M3 4FP) from 11am, and marching to a rally in Whitworth Park.
The protest will highlight the impact of huge job losses and spending cuts across the health service, as well as the rapid sell-off of the most lucrative parts of the NHS to private healthcare companies – many of whom like Circle are also Conservative Party donors.
The event will also raise concerns about the wider effect that government economic policies are having upon communities across the UK.
http://www.tuc.org.uk/industrial/tuc-22405-f0.cfm
Sofia Good to hear from you. What you say is true.
Villager I enquired what the revered K had to say about climate change/global warming etc. I did not ask for more of your preaching.
RD I am sure you are not at all interested in my views or thoughts on the matter. If I said A, you would disagree and jeer just as you would if I said B.
All I know is that I lead a very ecologically low impact friendly lifestyle, care for others and for Mother Earth and her wonders.
“In Scotland over 14,000 people use food banks – a figure which has more than doubled since the previous year as welfare changes begin to affect families.”
http://www.thirdforcenews.org.uk/2013/09/dwp-attempt-cover-up-over-food-bank-figures/
“It stated that government policies forced some of the most deprived members of society to “shoulder the heaviest burden of national debt created by the super-rich”.”
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-24321105
It was the increasing forestation that killed the mammoth eventually, they could do not much about it.
The dinosaur’s died out, depending on what theory you believe, because they could not do anything about it, or adapt.
Now humans can do something about their behaviour, they could ‘do different’ (UEA’s motto, 50th anniversary this week) if those who wield power wanted to, or could see the benefits of a changed human attitude.
Climate change is winning over Human change, to continue to argue and question the methods, even work against this consensus in the name of keeping inequality were it is now, that is what will bring us down.
We have the mental abilities and we know how to do different, but we don’t want to and most of our leaders still believe that they can run away from it, that increasing chaotic weather patterns don’t include his kind and class, are somehow something to be ignored.
We have seen nothing yet. I think that this article, genuine as it is, is also the worst of Craigs, because it looks as if his reaction to the IPCC headlines and stories in our MSM sounds as if he’s going through the motions, his headline and last sentence express the sentiment he feels about this issue.
Just have written to a developer here in Norwich, which is promising ecological heaven on earth, I’m trying to persuade them to actually mean it and use the excellent rural scope to use local low CO2 natural materials and recycled material for their build, for example, not from high energy intensive bricks. I let you know their answer.
http://www.beyondgreen.co.uk/tag/consultation/
Hullo Sofia nice to hear from you
i tend to wonder
if living things in nature are driven by survival,
then some of the things humans do are certainly Not natural,
But one can’t beat the Peoples of the first nations for wisdom –
“A man’s heart away from nature becomes hard; lack of respect for growing, living things soon leads to a lack of respect for humans too.”
Chief Luther Standing Bear
“The tipi is much better to live in; always clean, warm in winter, cool in summer, easy to move. The white man builds big house, cost much money, like a big cage, shut out sun, can never move: always sick.”
Chief Flying Hawk
“George Osborne’s dominatrix friend is ready to tell all”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/10341440/George-Osbornes-dominatrix-friend-is-ready-to-tell-all.html
“Tories seeking to oust Blunt ‘don’t want a gay MP’”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/conservative/10338326/Tories-seeking-to-oust-Blunt-dont-want-a-gay-MP.html
“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?”
Craig – it’s good to see that you are trying to make your own mind up, but I’m afraid that to judge by these statements, you aren’t getting it.
The gentleman was right. You don’t even have to look back millennia; a few centuries will do. There used to be ice fairs on the Thames. They stopped, because of regional warming, shortly before industrialisation. That warming could’t possibly have been caused by industrialisation.
The loonies whose minds jump to attention whenever the task arises of ‘explaining’ the official story, will doubtless tell us that that doesn’t imply what it obviously does imply: namely, that climate change happens in a big way without any help from industry.
The climate has always changed, and it always will.
The crazed loons are those who believe that human beings can (or should) stop the climate from changing. Such an idea really is horrendously insane. Even the Nazis with their ‘thousand year Reich’ didn’t go that far.
That’s one part of the message of all the propaganda we are exposed to, wall-to-wall.
Another is that we should all tighten our belts, do recycling work for free, etc. etc., pay for plastic bags to ‘help the environment’ while Tesco and Sainsbury throw away millions of tonnes of food, and all while our arrogant masters tell us how we should act, because they so committed to looking after the planet and humanity.
Perish the thought that they’re a bunch of fucking wide boys who’d say any old shit to make a buck, and that they’re smashing up the planet like no-one’s business. Perish the thought that a society based on profit can’t last.
Mustn’t say stuff like that.
A third, more subtle, part is that a big economic collapse is coming, which I don’t think anyone who’s serious is in the slightest doubt about. And I mean a big economic collapse, with a much smaller world population at the end of it.
A cull.
Martin Rees, the current Master of Trinity College, Cambridge – the professed atheist who goes to church because he thinks religion is good for people (or for serfs and scribes anyway, not for the elite like him) – claims that the present century is a key one, on the scale of billions of years.
He’s probably only saying what he’s supposed to say, but that doesn’t make his statement any the less mad.
Also note that ‘climate change’ is just a more user-friendly and hasty rebrand of ‘global warming’, introduced when news got out that some parts of the world are getting colder.
Mary 29 Sep, 2013 – 8:01 am …..
….. and Briar 29 Sep, 2013 – 9:27 am
…and this is why:
In 2006, three organisations co-sponsored a secret day-long seminar held at Television Centre on January 26, 2006.
(1) CMEP, operated by BBC reporter Roger Harrabin and climate activist Dr Joe Smith, a small outfit set up to lobby the media on global warming, funded by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, WWF and the University of East Anglia (home of the Climategate emails scandal).
(2) A lobbying group calling itself the International Broadcasting Trust, which in the previous seven years had received £520,000 from the Department for International Development’s foreign-aid budget for “media research” – which includes lobbying the BBC on issues such as climate change.
(3) The BBC
In 2007, the BBC announced its future policy on global warming:
The BBC then spent a considerable amount of time and money trying to keep secret the names of those “scientific experts” but eventually a freedom of Information request revealed them.
Full list of attendees here:
http://order-order.com/2012/11/13/the-list-of-names-the-bbc-did-not-want-you-to-see-scientist-exposed-by-climategate-set-bbc-policy/
Whatever your views on AGW, we are entitled to hear the
As this blog demonstrates, the debate on climate change isn’t settled. There are scientists, repeat scientists, on both sides citing conflicting data and different interpretations of that data. It is not a respectable argument to merely assert that those on one side or the other are unscientific/shills/ corrupt/etc.
We pay the BBC to provide us with impartial information. In the hugely important matter of climate change, it has a declared policy to favour one side of the debate. Now we know how that policy has been arrived at, alarm bells should be ringing. Everybody who is certain that AGW is established beyond doubt should ask themselves how much of that certainty is based on information supplied by the BBC, and whether their other sources may be similarly prejudiced.
Keeping an open mind on this subject is not “scoffing at the entire notion of science.” Keeping an open mind is what a scientist should do.
And it doesn’t preclude being a responsible environmentalist either.
@A Node – you’re right.
But ‘science’ is under central control, and climate change propaganda involves the funding of two sides…
…ditto 911: the ‘men in Asian caves’ position versus the ‘truther’ position.
The question that people should be asking isn’t whether to follow this or that bunch of experts, but why the propaganda is being put out on such an enormous scale, by big business interests and the governments they control.
“We pay the BBC to provide us with impartial information”
Stop it, my sides are killing me!
I keep saying to people: read Dan Brown’s latest novel, Inferno, and find out what message it has inserted or reinforced inside tens of millions of minds. You may be very surprised about its message on terrorism and the need for a big cull.
Let’s not pretend there’s a real market and that everything that’s in bestsellers such as this and Fifty Shades is the result of authors, publishers and agents sitting around working out what will sell best. Opinion and consumer choices are controlled, in this as in all the other sectors. What sells best isn’t determined by mugs who go in bookshops are fiddle with their Kindles or whatever. ‘Firms and households’ economic nonsense is strictly for morons only.
Dan Brown is the guy who, for all his ‘conspiracy’ branding, has never written a thing that doesn’t uphold the ultimate rightness of western governments and US business interests.
And now he comes out backing the viewpoint of the ‘committed’ bio-terrorist.
(Don’t believe me? Then read the book and decide for yourself! 🙂 )
N_ Spot on. I thought that about Dan Brown’s novels from reading The Da Vinci Code to Angels & Demons with their not exactly accurate portrayal of how secret societies manipulate the populace. How it works is quite clever. By joining and swearing an oath of allegiance you are committed and there is little way back. It is not ordinary third degree masons that society has to worry about, though they, as a part of the pyramid are part of the manipulation, unwittingly or otherwise. Once part of it favours are heaped upon initiates. But as one favour deserves another each and every one of them is compromised. You might not want to do the favour asked, but as with the armed forces and police, who have many masons amid their ranks, the initiate already knows how to obey these orders regardless of the morality, and when duty is called upon the initiates have to be there.
Dan Brown is what is called a formula writer. His style is that of all popular novelists, a few narrative hooks, lots of dialogue, intrigue, a touch of magic, a few deaths and other techniques that make them, and let’s be honest about it, highly readable. He is a grand master of his art.
@N_
Do you really think that because you don’t understand how climate change is man-made, that others also don’t understand? Why did I bother to get a degree in science only for it to leave me as ignorant and uninformed about scientific principles as you?
It doesn’t take much CO2 to have a direct effect on people –
http://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/co2-comfort-level-d_1024.html
How some people just don’t get it –
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Dunning-Kruger_effect
PS – Global warming as a WHOLE is still taking place despite it being non uniform. Some idiots can’t get their heads around the difference between localised effects versus global average effects – hence some cold spells in some places while net global trend is upwards.