Posted by: chupacabra
I live in downtown Squamish. I guess we better start saving for a wall across Howe Sound.
Don't forget to make Howe pay for that wall!
Capitalocene
Posted by: KenN
Posted by: chupacabra
I live in downtown Squamish. I guess we better start saving for a wall across Howe Sound.
Don't forget to make Howe pay for that wall!
And if he whines about it... the wall just got 10 feet higher!!
Posted by: chupacabra
Posted by: KenN
Posted by: chupacabra
I live in downtown Squamish. I guess we better start saving for a wall across Howe Sound.
Don't forget to make Howe pay for that wall!
And if he whines about it... the wall just got 10 feet higher!!
Just dynomyte the mtns. in a couple places to block 99 and pick up a couple WW2 German 88's from a garage sale in Libya to mount on the edge of that swanky new pier y'all are building. Cheaper than any wall.
It’s ecologically sustainable “socialism or barbarism if we’re lucky” at this stage of developing capitalist geocide. “The uncomfortable truth,” Istvan Meszaros rightly argued 16 years ago, “is that if there is no future for a radical mass movement in our time, there can be no future for humanity itself.” We make the leap beyond Obama’s, the Clintons’, and Pelosi’s system or its game over for humanity along with the countless other species homo sapiens is wiping out under the soulless command of capital.
Freedom of contract. We sell them guns that kill them; they sell us drugs that kill us.
"To give you an idea, if every American committed to just one meat-free day a week, the impact would be equivalent to switching all our gas-powered cars to hybrids."
http://www.alternet.org/story/134650/the_startling_effects_of_going_vegetarian_for_just_one_day
Freedom of contract. We sell them guns that kill them; they sell us drugs that kill us.
Three-quarters of insect population have been lost in nature reserves over three decades
2018 Starts with “record lows in Arctic sea ice extent”
Andy Rowell, February 20, 2018
And so it goes on. The data does not lie. The Arctic is dying before our eyes.
And as it melts, we enter a vicious circle: the more it melts, so the less heat gets reflected, so the more the planet warms. And that affects us all.
At the end of last year, scientists issued repeated warnings that the region was warming faster than it ever had previously.
The region, they argued, had reached a “new normal’, characterized by “long-term losses in the extent and thickness of the sea ice cover, the extent and duration of the winter snow cover and the mass of ice in the Greenland Ice Sheet and Arctic glaciers, and warming sea surface and permafrost temperature”.
At the time, the meteorologist, Eric Holthaus, said that what the scientists are telling us is that “The Arctic as we once knew it is no more”.
And the bad news keeps on coming. According to the National Snow and Ice Data Centre’s analysis of last month, the region continues to be in trouble. “January of 2018 began and ended with satellite-era record lows in Arctic sea ice extent, resulting in a new record low for the month. Combined with low ice extent in the Antarctic, global sea ice extent is also at a record low.”
The scientists continued: “The monthly average extent of 13.06 million square kilometers (5.04 million square miles) was 1.36 million square kilometers (525,000 square miles) below the 1981 to 2010 average, and 110,000 square kilometers (42,500 square miles) below the previous record low monthly average in 2017.”
One leading Artic ice expert, Ingrid Onarheim, of the University of Bergen and Bjerknes Centre for Climate Research, said: “We are losing sea ice in all seasons now.”
Returning to the theme in recent days, writing on Grist, Eric Holthaus, noted: “Our planet reached another miserable milestone earlier this week: Sea ice fell to its lowest level since human civilization began more than 12,000 years ago.”
Everywhere there are alarms bells from both the Arctic and Antarctic. Eric Holthaus adds: “The past 30 days have averaged more than 21 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than normal in Svalbard, Norway — the northernmost permanently inhabited place in the world. Down south in the Antarctic, sea ice is all but gone for the third straight year as summer winds to a close.”
And with it comes an irony that is nearly too much to comprehend. As the Arctic melts due to climate change, which is being driven by our fossil fuel addiction, the fossil fuel industry is now exploiting the increasingly ice-free region.
As the Independent reported in the last few days: “A ship has made a winter crossing of the Arctic without an icebreaker for the first time as global warming causes the region’s ice sheets to melt.”
The tanker contained liquefied natural gas and was the first to make a crossing from South Korea to northern Russia in the winter months.
Sarah North, senior oil strategist for Greenpeace International told the Independent, because of climate change and the melting Arctic “ironically, we can deliver fossil fuels more quickly. It’s like a heavy smoker using his tracheotomy to smoke two cigarettes at once.”
http://priceofoil.org/2018/02/20/2018-starts-with-record-lows-in-arctic-sea-ice-extent/
Last edited by: tungsten on Feb. 20, 2018, 10:54 a.m., edited 1 time in total.
Posted by: tungsten
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/is-fake-news-okay-if-the-cause-is-good/article37290997/
Last edited by: KenN on Feb. 20, 2018, 11:47 a.m., edited 1 time in total.
Posted by: KenN
Posted by: tungsten
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/is-fake-news-okay-if-the-cause-is-good/article37290997/
Whatever smart ass. You're slippin'. You had two months to knock that down.
Read this... https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/02/19/there-is-no-time-left/ ...and tell again how your children will thrive?
Last edited by: tungsten on Feb. 20, 2018, 10:04 p.m., edited 1 time in total.
_Hey fuckers,....forget all that other shit....WE'RE DEAD! _
The Arctic Heats Up in the Dead of Winter
Posted By Robert Hunziker On March 6, 2018
Every once in a while a climatic event hits that forces people to sit down to catch their breath. Along those lines, abnormal Arctic heat waves in the dead of winter may force scientists to revaluate downwards (or maybe upwards, depending) their most pessimistic of forecasts.
By the end of February 2018, large portions of the Arctic Ocean north of Greenland were open blue water, meaning no ice. But, it’s wintertime, no daylight 24/7, yet no ice in areas where it’s usually some meters thick! In a remarkable, mindboggling turn of events, thick ice in early February by month’s end turned into wide open blue water, metaphorically equivalent to an airline passenger at 35,000 feet watching rivets pop off the fuselage.
The sea ice north of Greenland is historically the thickest, most solid ice of the North Pole. But, it’s gone all of a sudden! Egads, what’s happening and is it a danger signal? Answer: Probably, depending upon which scientist is consulted. Assuredly, nobody predicted loss of ice north of Greenland in the midst of winter.
Wide open blue seas in the Arctic expose all of humanity to risks of Runaway Global Warming (“RGW”) as, over time, massive amounts of methane erupts with ancillary sizzling of agricultural crops, and as the Arctic heats up much faster than the rest of the planet, this also throws a curve ball at weather patterns all across the Northern Hemisphere, radical weather patterns ensue, like snow on the French Riviera only recently.
According to Ruth Mottram, a climate scientist at the Danish Meteorological Institute in Copenhagen, February was the warmest (hottest) on record in the Arctic, which includes 10 days of temps above freezing. As for Arctic temps in February, that’s hot! “We’ve actually got open water at the top of Greenland right now, which is incredibly unusual,” (Mottram – Source: Europe’s Cold Blast, Arctic’s Heat Wave are ‘Two Sides of the Same Coin,” Public Radio International, March 2, 2018).
“This is an anomaly among anomalies. It is far enough outside the historical range that it is worrying – it is a suggestion that there are further surprises in store as we continue to poke the angry beast that is our climate,” said Michael Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University. (Source: Jonathan Watts, Global Environmental Editor, Arctic Warming: Scientists Alarmed by ‘Crazy Temperature Rise’, The Guardian, Feb. 27, 2018).
During February the world’s most northerly weather station at Cape Morris Jesup on the tip of Greenland registered temps warmer than London and Zurich for days on end. The Cape Morris Jesup weather station is only 440 miles away from the North Pole.
When analyzing or writing about the complexities of ecosystem events, like loss of Arctic sea ice, it is easy to overstate negatives, if only because there is no evidence of a similar event in recent climate history. Furthermore, the scientific community is widely split on likely consequences, running the gamut from “no worries for at least 100 years” to “the world will incinerate within 10 years,” meaning Runaway Global Warming (RGW”), as a result of massive release of methane (“CH4”) trapped in frozen waters for millennia, causing temps to crank up by 10 °F-to-15 °F, which will pretty much wipe out a lot of agricultural crops. In turn, the world turns into a dystopian hellhole and reverts to caveman/cavewoman lifestyle.
Indeed, the dangers that arise with loss of Arctic ice are multifold, including loss of the Arctic as the planet’s biggest reflector/air conditioner. When covered with white reflective ice, it reflects up to 90% of solar radiation back into outer space. Without ice, that same 90% is absorbed within a dark blue background, potentially heating up tons upon tons, and more tons yet, of frozen methane, metaphorically similar to throwing kindling onto a hot fire, as global warming heats up big time and sizzles agricultural crops down to blackened stubs throughout the mid latitudes, driving humanity into the farthest northern latitudes for survival, a crowded scenario indeed.
Generally speaking, people shrug their shoulders with a signal of “so what” when confronted with the risks of global warming/climate change. After all, nothing horrible will happen until well into the latter part of this century, or beyond, right? Well, yes and no, as the real issue that comes into play is timing. How fast is climate change/global warming happening?
And that’s the rub because, across the board, scientists agree ecosystem changes today are exponential, which could be problematic. As explained by one scientist, linear versus exponential means that a person can take 30 linear steps to the water cooler across the room but if exponential, the 30 steps takes him/her around the world, more than once. That’s exponential, and that’s the rate of change in ecosystems, like the Arctic. Therein lies the unknown risk factor of how soon temps mushroom upwards? Nobody knows for sure, but they do know that ecosystems are changing exponentially, especially in the ocean.
Here’s the ultimate risk: 55 million years ago global temps spiked during the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (“PETM”). The temp surge by 6 °C (11 °F) happened in just 13 years, which if repeated today, would be unbelievably devastating, but the science is controversial as to the timing of the surge 55 millions ago. Some scientists say 13 years; some scientists that look at the same data say 1500 years. Hopefully, it’s the latter. But unfortunately, with exponential change already underway, that wish does not look very promising.
Postscript: “The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.” (Albert A. Bartlett 1923-2013, American Physicist)
URL to article: https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/03/06/the-arctic-heats-up-in-the-dead-of-winter/
Last edited by: tungsten on April 6, 2018, 12:10 p.m., edited 1 time in total.
Canada’s proposed climate plan doesn’t even get halfway to its goal because of problems buying offsets from the U.S.. In fact, the gap between proposed policy and Canada’s Paris commitment is twice as big as advertised.
The Trudeau government says its proposed climate policies will get Canada to within 66 million tonnes of our 2030 climate target. That's already a big gap, but the federal accounting also assumes we can subtract a huge chunk of Canada's emissions and pay to add them to the U.S. ledger through carbon credits — something the Americans haven’t agreed to do.
Canada obviously can't assign our emissions to an unwilling nation. The Paris Accord is clear on this. Without this unapproved transfer of our emissions to the United States, Canada's climate gap nearly doubles.
If the U.S. does pull out of the Paris agreement, as President Trump has vowed, then the offsets would clearly not be valid.
Freedom of contract. We sell them guns that kill them; they sell us drugs that kill us.
MAY 2, 2018
Extinction: a Deplorable Failure
by BRIAN HOREJSI
In April 2018 Canada’s most southerly caribou population, one shared by British Columbia and Idaho, dwindled to three animals, all females. Along with numerous other scientists and honest activists, I expected this, and predicted it 30 years ago when the population already numbered only 40; Extinction looms not because caribou were or are somehow malfunctioning – they’ve always depended entirely on intact old growth forests – but because our so-called regulatory system, “our” public service and our elected officials, have treated, and continue to treat, environmental protection and conservation as the little red wagon bouncing along in the dust and debris behind the development–economy–consumption bulldozer.
Each year, for 50 years – people who have the vision and experience to understand the environmental reality of industrial corporate government impacts, fueled by deteriorating democratic and legal institutions, have been urging governments to “take action now”. And still people in positions of authority are either not listening, or refusing to act.
Canada’s environmental protection and management system is broken – and it has been for a very long time. With a few policy and regulatory exceptions – like the Protected Areas program in B.C. in the ‘90s – the provinces are not doing better.
B.C. has barely nibbled on the fringes of serious environmental conservation. In April the BC government dredged up about $2 million to “protect” caribou habitat; it amounts to dollars down the drain; just another case of “gently try and nudge the gate closed after the horse is out of the barn”. Without a regulatory regime that carries a big legal stick, and builds on core public support, Canadians will suffer through extinction of native fish and wildlife populations again and again.
Inadequate, “window-dressing” measures have also ruled the day in the US part of this caribou range; complicit in this sad situation are the State of Idaho and the U.S. Fish and wildlife service who essentially “wrote off” these caribou years ago.
It is a self-perpetuating aggravation to mismanage forest resources by systematically overcutting; like someone hooked on opiods, it forces dependency on the euphoria of extreme over exploitation. An entire “system” – essentially a house of cards – builds around it. And old growth forests are degraded and dissected. That’s where B.C. finds itself today. B.C.s actual Forest Harvest level is two or three times greater than that which would allow public lands ecosystems, biological diversity, watersheds, and carbon storage cycles, to survive in a measurably viable and functional ecological, social and economic state.
Self-serving blather about incremental-ism, “adaptive management”, “not significant”, “not imminent” dominates public service analysis and policy about land use and habitat, all while the proverbial elevator, free falling from the 50th floor, screeches by the first floor on its way to extinction This public service individual and institutional failure to value wildlife and ecologically intact ecosystems has helped formulate the message to the public that wildlife is just another impediment to “progress”.
Politically driven deferral to Native Indian Band participation has crippled essential reforms, impaired conservation progress and siphoned off millions of dollars desperately needed for conservation, habitat acquisition and easements. It has diffused accountability and clarity when exactly the opposite is essential.
Instead of tough, hard wired and hard bordered legislation and action based on science and management evidence for the benefit of all British Columbians and the Nation as a whole, the PM and his insiders, aided by some Premiers, mount a massive forfeiture campaign, stripping environmental management and hundreds of millions of dollars from the Public Service that at least has slim prospects of being held accountable by citizens (laws that guarantee all citizens oversight), and handing it over to the 600 or so Indian tribes.
It is no surprise that conservation has lost the will of the people. I attribute that almost entirely to failed public service leadership – they always find a way to mitigate or “trade off”, or “balance”, but never, it seems, to draw and stand on “a line in the sand”. Far too many environmental activists and organizations have done the same, with notable exceptions (in interior BC, for example). And most academics have stood on the dock as this ship sailed. Our dominating “economic” system was designed to force the natural world to accommodate industrialization and explosive human consumption, as if the natural world were another man made contraption.
Americans have also struggled with containing rampant consumption, but they did manage to protected 53 million acres of roadless habitat over a decade ago, and have a legislated wilderness system that protects another 50 million acres; so please, don’t test my patience with the mindless argument that we need to access every scrap of public land to serve our consumption economy! Sadly, America is suffering now, but it still has the bar set higher than Canada has ever dreamt of.
No need to wonder how British Columbia or Alberta would react to a gutsy Federal Endangered species Act, as opposed to milk-toast, trifling Species at Risk Act (SARA), or a national Wilderness Act, that would force habitat protection, for example, for these provinces southern mountain grizzly bears and boreal caribou; the yowling would reach hysterical levels!
Europeans, along with native Indians, decimated the genetic, behavioral and social lineages in hundreds of wildlife populations as the former swept across North America. We say they did it out of greed, ignorance, arrogance, entitlement, indifference, selfishness, even hate, and just plain stupidity. So I ask you, what makes it different this time? And next time?
There is no denying the urgent need for powerful prescriptive regulatory intervention to protect and save B.C.s and Canada’s ecologically functional landscapes and our wildlife. But if the past tells us anything it may well be that we shall never see the necessary reality. This deplorable situation will betray all of us.
Dr. Brian L. Horejsi is a wildlife and forest ecologist. He writes about environmental affairs, public resource management and governance and their entrenched legal and social bias
Freedom of contract. We sell them guns that kill them; they sell us drugs that kill us.
We need some positive news about the environment here for once! I will post some when I find some.
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