CON26
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Up Stories Evia 2021 The IPCC came out with another report today, which is a lead-in to another climate conference, this time in Glasgow
[See the full post at: CON26]Track the NorCal fires:
https://caltopo.com/map.html#ll=40.70346,-122.26685&z=8&b=oo&a=modis_mp
I lived in SoCo for 20 years.
Covid info and opinion here is top notch, with some minimal expcetions.
Climate coverage here is the complete opposite.
Here ya’ go Dr. P.
This should keep you busy:http://arctic-news.blogspot.com/
https://www.reddit.com/r/StormComing/
http://www.desdemonadespair.net/
If you need more, let me know 😉
dr p: perhaps the most stunning intersection of these two topics is the story of dr. charles hoffe of lytton b.c.
he has lost half of his income for running post-vaccine d-dimer tests on his patients and making a fuss about the results
and,
most his town burnt to the ground a day after setting canada’s all time temperature record (2?) for 3 consecutive days in a row eventually reaching 49.6ºC.
these two headlines are side by side at zh:
“A Look Back At Nixon’s Infamous Monetary Decision”
and
“Dixie Fire Now Single Largest Wildfire In California History, Only 21% Contained”
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DISCLAIMER! (i have to put this because as soon as people see the word “gold” they don’t listen). Gold Is Stupid. it is useless and it’s extraction is extremely toxic. no money should be linked to anything so pointless. i do like shiny jewelry, though)
i believe these two events are intrinsically linked. in the days of the gold standard, you could only destroy the earth as fast as you could find gold to finance it with.
look at the chart above posted by germ. you’ll see global surface temperatures went ¡BA-ZOING! shortly after 1970.
now, with fiat money, we can destroy the earth as fast as bankers can come up with ways to keep the house of tokens viable. wanna frack? we’ll get you the cash. wanna open a gold mine? we’ll get you the cash. wanna build a 797 SUPERJUMBOGOOSEBIRD luxury airliner? we’ll get you the cash.
I REPEAT, GOLD IS NOT MONEY.
but, when money was somehow linked to the earth, we only had so much with which to be greedy.
and mmt?! god forbid something so easy, so awesome and so helpful get into the hands of humans, for they shall use this spigot to finance the construction of the swarms of ai drone locusts that gandhi warned us about.
the best i can come up with is tree-based currency. really, we just need one currency. why is my labour worth more than a hondureño’s just because my oligarchs are richer?
anyhoo, ¡down with fiat! ¡up with trees!
Ride Bike, Grow Veggies, Live in Thailand…
2 out of 3 aint bad…
We (my wife primarily) grow a good deal of what we eat…
We didn’t have A/C for the first 14 years; but, turning 72yo I became suseptable to temperatures above 35c (95f) and we installed A/C…we use it sparingly…CON26 is an excellent article/essay Ilargi and spot on…
Life lately seems to have become one big CON after another…the lies, medical fraud, fake vaccines and on and on and on…ad infinitum…
Keeping a grasp of the here and now has never been more critical and more difficult…
Truly times that try mens souls…i found an interesting article at global research, but i can post no links or, now it seems, quotes.
basically it says there doesn’t exist enough land for carbon offsets to actually get to net zero.
I decided a few years back that arguing with my conservative family members about “global warming” was pointless. Much more effective to point out how we humans were polluting the planet and point out that we were being “bad stewards.” (Since their religion suggests god wants them to be “good stewards” it was a good place to start the conversation from.). Why argue about warming when there are so many other points to agree about? The vast majority of humans (capitalist sociopaths excepted) prefer not to pollute the planet once they understand the extent of the pollution. Most of us find the natural world beautiful. What we need is to work together to make changes…and our leaders are either themselves capitalist sociopaths or are funded by the capitalist sociopaths, so expecting effective change from that lot is a joke.
Great post Raul. This is where my lack of trust in authorities started. They will poison every river and every tree as long as they are behind a wall with security. We simply lost our seventh generation philosophy but I try where I can to adhere.
“Carbon offsets” don’t work if the forests burn.
I remember the commercial from the 1970s, with a Native American standing at the side of the road as a car drives by and flings out a bag of garbage at his feet. Or something like that. It may have been part of the Give a Hoot, Don’t Pollute campaign.
But the Native American was played by an Italian, and it wasn’t so much the bag of paper garbage that was the problem, as it was the car that it was tossed out of. From the extraction of the materials to make it to the fuel that runs it to the roadways that allowed humans to create a vast sprawling network to the shopping opportunities it created and then became dependent on to keep the “economy” afloat, truly one of the worst manifestations of human ingenuity ever. (And turns out, the oil companies were already aware of the carbon thing being a bit of a stickler.)
But oh well! Here we are. This is what happens when you pour vast unchecked amounts of highly concentrated energy into a system–biological organisms are going to use that energy at the fastest rate possible. Humans, despite our recent fantasies and denials, are biological organisms.
I long ago stopped looking at it as “us” and “them.” Sure, there are the big baddies that have lots of money and power and “control” things (and as Ivan Illich showed, the more energy, the greater the inequity) and there are those that protest this “injustice” and then the masses who are basically trying to survive and hope their children do not drown seeking a better existence. (Side note: In the United States, motor vehicle crashes are a leading cause of death among children. In 2018, 636 children 12 years old and younger died in motor vehicle traffic crashes, and more than 97,000 were injured.)
But overall, we are simply part of a system. And no one individual can change that system. Dimitri Orlov calls it the technosphere, and uses what is perhaps a metaphor, or perhaps he believes it to be a self-actualized creature. In any event, we all have roles to fulfill, based on where we were born, our genetic capabilities, how we were raised, and what fate, circumstance, luck etc. brings down the pike for us.
Obviously mathematically most of us will be unknown unheralded extras on this stage, not Muhammad Ali or Miley Cyrus or Hunter Biden or Ghandi. The ever increasing energy inputs allow more of us to be born and survive, up to a point.
But as the Limits to Growth study foresaw, we are hitting that point. And now we begin the de-energizing of the current global civilization. It will be particularly messy because A. there are so many of us and B. we have so many methods of killing one another.
I share our hosts frustration with the various ineffectual and hypocritical protest movements, and they often do play right into the hands of the “elite”–I’m looking at you, Greta. That kind of naive sentimentality is easily employed by those wishing to present a veneer of “action” and “protest.”
But it is equally sentimental to talk about “saving the planet.” I’m not the first to say it, but the planet does not need saving. And the hubris required to believe the human race is even remotely up to the task is quite plentiful.
I lean toward John Michael Greer’s long view take on that–the planet’s climate is changing, the current civilization is waning. We will undoubtedly lose some magnificent species and whole habitats on the down cycle. But humans will most likely make it through, albeit in much smaller numbers, to create new societies for at least some time into the future. How this will play out in terms of the particulars is anybody’s guess. But we are definitely in the midst of a big bump down!
Many would be tempted to take a nihilistic approach, which is understandable. Raul mentions faith in our leaders. That is most definitely not the place to put faith. But much of humanity has lost touch not just with nature, but with the strength and inspiration nature provides to build a life of faith.
So that is what we can do. Try to create a life that we believe in, based on whatever moral or ethical or spiritual compass we are charting by. It could involve helping others in some way (always excellent for getting out of one’s own self-inflicted miseries), living a simple life, taking care of things around us as best as we can–whatever meshes with your beliefs. But it definitely takes Action and Intent and Effort to build faith and reap the benefits. And don’t expect it to save the world. It might help save a piece of your sanity.;^)
“Carbon offsets” can’t work anyway. …As soon as the tree rots, and it will, the carbon is re-released. It’s a scam, and the same scam as “cows release methane” … release that CO2 which was just trapped a week ago by the grass and hay. Net-neutral.
They are a profit-only, science-free zone. Ask any engineer. But we can’t, because they would interject #Truth and #Reality, our only enemies we are in rebellion to.
“That’s how much they care for a ‘healthy planet’ (how about we discuss what that actually is?)”
Yes. An excellent suggestion.
Covid may come and go along with the political scandal de jour. Expecting true leadership from the sociopaths with their bloody fists on the political and economic levers is fruitless.
Yet, one step toward resurrecting a healthy planet is envisioning what that looks like along with providing examples of how to get there. Yes to bikes and growing veggies but I trust the readers can provide a myriad of other examples with which to advance towards a healthier planet and simultaneously saw away at the perch where the sociopths roost.
Go for it Ilargi.
All human ‘economics’ is merely a sub, subset of Ecology, which itself is a subset the laws of thermodynamics.
The study of energy transformation and entropy is The Heart of Darkness.
It predates life itself.
Solar systems, galaxies, blackholes, all followed the paths of energy transformation embodied in thermodynamics.
We know some but are probably missing a few tricks of thermodynamics.
Is light the fastest thing in the universe? Maybe, maybe not.
Dmitry Orlov’s book Shrinking the Technosphere was IMHO a continuation of Ivan Illict’s ideas proposed in his book Energy and Equity (Ideas in Progress)
Like Orlov and his Technosphere, Nate Hagens also proposed human enterprise as a Super-organism, an energy hungry giant amoeba whose only goal is More.
Raul’s “we can change as individuals but not as a group” alludes to the same mechanism.
Human groups of any size have a mind of their own.
None of us are as stupid as all of us.
But that quickly degenerates into Teamwork, it’s OK to leave them to die.
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