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Thread: Is it Game Over on the climate front?

  1. #1

    Default Is it Game Over on the climate front?

    Read these and try not to get a heart attack, or a sinking feeling of having just been diagnosed with terminal cancer:

    https://jembendell.wordpress.com/201...jxYenHhDla3lHg

    https://www.fasterthanexpected.one/n...an-extinction/

    Apparently a growing number of academics are thinking a global societal collapse triggered by environmental disasters is imminent. "Near Term Human Extinction" is now a term you see more and more often on the forums discussing environmental destruction. Granted, Bendell is a sustainability prof. which isn't exactly a hard science, but he's not alone in his assessment, as is seen by looking at the growing attendance of his Deep Adaptation forum, or the second link I provided.

    Are we headed for extinction tier happenings within our life time, or is this overblown alarmism?


  2. #2

    Default Re: Is it Game Over on the climate front?

    When people are more interested in money...
    One thing is for certain: the more profoundly baffled you have been in your life, the more open your mind becomes to new ideas.
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  3. #3

    Default Re: Is it Game Over on the climate front?

    Human beings seem to innately possess a deep sense of guilt or shame for their existence, and seek to relieve it by sacrificing their life or possessions to please a higher power, whether anthropomorphic and personal like Gaia or impersonal like "nature." Malthusianism is merely a modern incarnation of a very old religion.

    Don't worry, the "point of no return" will never be reached.

    But these “tipping points” and “last chance” claims now have a long history. The United Nations alone has spent more than a quarter of a century announcing a series of ever-shifting deadlines by which the world must act or face disaster from anthropogenic climate change.

    Recently, in 2014, the United Nations declared a climate “tipping point” by which the world must act to avoid dangerous global warming. “The world now has a rough deadline for action on climate change. Nations need to take aggressive action in the next 15 years to cut carbon emissions, in order to forestall the worst effects of global warming, says the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,” reported the Boston Globe.

    But way back in 1982, the UN had announced a two-decade tipping point for action on environmental issues. Mostafa Tolba, executive director of the UN Environment Program (UNEP), warned on May 11, 1982, that the “world faces an ecological disaster as final as nuclear war within a couple of decades unless governments act now.” According to Tolba, lack of action would bring “by the turn of the century, an environmental catastrophe which will witness devastation as complete, as irreversible as any nuclear holocaust.”

    In 1989, the UN was still trying to sell that “tipping point” to the public. According to a July 5, 1989, article in the San Jose Mercury News, Noel Brown, the then-director of the New York office of UNEP was warning of a “10-year window of opportunity to solve” global warming. According to the Herald, “A senior U.N. environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000. Coastal flooding and crop failures would create an exodus of ‘eco-refugees,’ threatening political chaos.”

    But in 2007, seven years after that supposed tipping point had come and gone, Rajendra Pachauri, then the chief of the UN IPPC, declared 2012 the climate deadline by which it was imperative to act: “If there’s no action before 2012, that’s too late. What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future. This is the defining moment.”

    UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon announced his own deadline in August 2009, when he warned of “incalculable” suffering without a UN climate deal in December 2009. And in 2012, the UN gave Planet Earth another four-year reprieve. UN Foundation president and former U.S. Senator Tim Wirth called Obama’s re-election the “last window of opportunity” to get it right on climate change.

    Heir to the British throne Prince Charles originally announced in March 2009 that we had “less than 100 months to alter our behavior before we risk catastrophic climate change.” As he said during a speech in Brazil, “We may yet be able to prevail and thereby to avoid bequeathing a poisoned chalice to our children and grandchildren. But we only have 100 months to act.”

    To his credit, Charles stuck to this rigid timetable—at least initially. Four months later, in July 2009, he declared a ninety-six-month tipping point. At that time the media dutifully reported that “the heir to the throne told an audience of industrialists and environmentalists at St James’s Palace last night that he had calculated that we have just 96 months left to save the world. And in a searing indictment on capitalist society, Charles said we can no longer afford consumerism and that the ‘age of convenience’ was over.”

    At the UN climate summit in Copenhagen in 2009, Charles was still keeping at it: “The grim reality is that our planet has reached a point of crisis and we have only seven years before we lose the levers of control.”

    As the time expired, the Prince of Wales said in 2010, “Ladies and gentlemen we only—we now have only 86 months left before we reach the tipping point.”

    By 2014, a clearly exhausted Prince Charles seemed to abandon the countdown, announcing, “We are running out of time. How many times have I found myself saying this over recent years?”

    In the summer of 2017, Prince Charles’s one-hundred-month tipping point finally expired. What did Charles have to say? Was he giving up? Did he proclaim the end times for the planet? Far from it. Two years earlier, in 2015, Prince Charles abandoned his hundred-month countdown and gave the world a reprieve by extending his climate tipping point another thirty-five years, to the year 2050!

    A July 2015 interview in the Western Morning News revealed that “His Royal Highness warns that we have just 35 years to save the planet from catastrophic climate change.” So instead of facing the expiration of his tipping point head on, the sixty-nine-year-old Charles kicked the climate doomsday deadline down the road until 2050 when he would be turning the ripe age of 102. (Given the Royal Family’s longevity, it is possible he may still be alive for his new extended deadline.) Former Irish President Mary Robinson issued a twenty-year tipping point in 2015, claiming that global leaders have “at most two decades to save the world.”

    Al Gore announced his own ten-year climate tipping point in 2006 and again in 2008, warning that “the leading experts predict that we have less than 10 years to make dramatic changes in our global warming pollution lest we lose our ability to ever recover from this environmental crisis.” In 2014, with “only two years left” before Gore’s original deadline, the climatologist Roy Spencer mocked the former vice president, saying “in the grand tradition of prophets of doom, Gore’s prognostication is not shaping up too well.”

    Penn State Professor Michael Mann weighed in with a 2036 deadline. “There is an urgency to acting unlike anything we’ve seen before,” Mann explained. Media outlets reported Mann’s made a huge media splash with his prediction, noting “Global Warming Will Cross a Dangerous Threshold in 2036.”

    Other global warming activists chose 2047 as their deadline, while twenty governments from around the globe chose 2030 as theirs, with Reuters reporting that millions would die by 2030 if world failed to act on climate: “More than 100 million people will die and global economic growth will be cut by 3.2% of GDP by 2030 if the world fails to tackle climate change, a report commissioned by 20 governments said on Wednesday. As global avg. temps rise due to ghg emissions, the effects on the planet, such as melting ice caps, extreme weather, drought and rising sea levels, will threaten populations and livelihoods, said the report conducted by the humanitarian organization DARA.”

    As we saw in chapter five, top UK scientist Sir David King warned in 2004 that that by 2100 Antarctica could be the only habitable continent.
    Perhaps the best summary of the tipping-point phenomenon comes from UK scientist Philip Stott. “In essence, the Earth has been given a 10-year survival warning regularly for the last fifty or so years. We have been serially doomed,” Stott explained. “Our post-modern period of climate change angst can probably be traced back to the late-1960s, if not earlier. By 1973, and the ‘global cooling’ scare, it was in full swing, with predictions of the imminent collapse of the world within ten to twenty years, exacerbated by the impacts of a nuclear winter. Environmentalists were warning that, by the year 2000, the population of the US would have fallen to only 22 million. In 1987, the scare abruptly changed to ‘global warming’, and the IPCC (the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) was established (1988), issuing its first assessment report in 1990, which served as the basis of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC).
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  4. #4

    Default Re: Is it Game Over on the climate front?

    Quote Originally Posted by Prodromos View Post
    Human beings seem to innately possess a deep sense of guilt or shame for their existence, and seek to relieve it by sacrificing their life or possessions to please a higher power, whether anthropomorphic and personal like Gaia or impersonal like "nature." Malthusianism is merely a modern incarnation of a very old religion.

    Don't worry, the "point of no return" will never be reached.
    You really don't understand how corporations work. They're making money for themselves and their shareholders. In that order.
    One thing is for certain: the more profoundly baffled you have been in your life, the more open your mind becomes to new ideas.
    -Neil deGrasse Tyson

    Let's think the unthinkable, let's do the undoable. Let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all.

  5. #5
    B. W.'s Avatar Primicerius
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    Default Re: Is it Game Over on the climate front?

    Nothing but horse hockey. Fortunately, Trump just appointed someone that the climate communists fear more than anyone else. The time that all this BS is coming to be exposed for what it is appears to be not too far off.

    BTW, the term fossil fuels is a misnomer. Oil is a naturally occurring product of the earth's inner cores reacting to one another as well as the biodegrading of ancient organisms. That is the reason there is so much of it.

    Going further, the earth's climate is driven by cosmic forces, not by man's actions.

  6. #6

    Default Re: Is it Game Over on the climate front?

    Quote Originally Posted by B. W. View Post
    Going further, the earth's climate is driven by cosmic forces, not by man's actions.
    Citation needed.

  7. #7
    Daruwind's Avatar Citizen
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    Default Re: Is it Game Over on the climate front?

    Quote Originally Posted by B. W. View Post
    Going further, the earth's climate is driven by cosmic forces, not by man's actions.
    You are right and at the same time wrong. ;-) Easy example - erruption of a Volcano can influence climate of whole Earth, I think we all will agree that humanity is more than able to produce similar quantities of energy, particles, gases...

    You don´t need to outmatch Sun´s energy output to change Earth climate... All you need is slight change.
    Last edited by Daruwind; March 08, 2019 at 11:48 AM.
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  8. #8
    Muizer's Avatar member 3519
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    Default Re: Is it Game Over on the climate front?

    It's come to the point where I feel tempted to say "Please, not one of these threads again". Climate sceptics are so ........ deplorable. Really why is it that if we go to a doctor or a car mechanic, we expect them to diagnose and fix our problems, but where climate measures are conerned, every ignoramus feels they're entirely justified to disparage experts and dismiss their findings. If you were diagnosed with cancer, would you scour the web until you found some obscure little doctor's practice who would tell you cancer is a lie invented by an oppressive establishment? I hope not. So why is it that conspiracy theorists and lone voices amongst climate scientists are sought out with exactly that level of eagerness? Please everyone, don't make a laughing stock out of yourselves by "substantiating your opinions with evidence" here. Leave it to the experts and F(*&& act on their recommendations for the world's sake.......
    "Lay these words to heart, Lucilius, that you may scorn the pleasure which comes from the applause of the majority. Many men praise you; but have you any reason for being pleased with yourself, if you are a person whom the many can understand?" - Lucius Annaeus Seneca -

  9. #9

    Default Re: Is it Game Over on the climate front?

    Quote Originally Posted by Whitey McKnightey View Post
    Are we headed for extinction tier happenings within our life time, or is this overblown alarmism?
    A bit of both, but given we noticed the problem on time and rang the alarm, it's much more likely to overcome it than if it was just ignored.

    Still it's too used for political sectarianism and propaganda reasons. As well as preaching reasons. Of course there will be sceptics to all kinds of preaching, including when you make solving a technical problem into a moral issue.
    It will be seen that, as used, the word ‘Fascism’ is almost entirely meaningless. In conversation, of course, it is used even more wildly than in print. I have heard it applied to farmers, shopkeepers, Social Credit, corporal punishment, fox-hunting, bull-fighting, the 1922 Committee, the 1941 Committee, Kipling, Gandhi, Chiang Kai-Shek, homosexuality, Priestley's broadcasts, Youth Hostels, astrology, women, dogs and I do not know what else.

    -George Orwell

  10. #10

    Default Re: Is it Game Over on the climate front?

    [QUOTE=Whitey McKnightey;15756139

    Are we headed for extinction tier happenings within our life time, or is this overblown alarmism?
    [/QUOTE]

    I think societal collapse is more realistic than extinction.

    It will probably be more gradual, with states on the periphery (like Pakistan) collapsing first, increasing the number of "failed states". I think it will also be closely tied to collapse of the economic system which we postponed in 2008.

    I for one don't think we deserve better. Humanity can itself. Meanwhile I'll try to enjoy life while I can, getting high and hope goes down the drain rather later than sooner.

  11. #11
    B. W.'s Avatar Primicerius
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    Default Re: Is it Game Over on the climate front?

    Quote Originally Posted by Daruwind View Post
    You are right and at the same time wrong. ;-) Easy example - erruption of a Volcano can influence climate of whole Earth, I think we all will agree that humanity is more than able to produce similar quantities of energy, particles, gases...

    You don´t need to outmatch Sun´s energy output to change Earth climate... All you need is slight change.
    This is a fairly simple explanation so maybe you should take a few minutes and watch it:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYoOcaqCzxo

    Quote Originally Posted by Muizer View Post
    It's come to the point where I feel tempted to say "Please, not one of these threads again". Climate sceptics are so ........ deplorable. Really why is it that if we go to a doctor or a car mechanic, we expect them to diagnose and fix our problems, but where climate measures are conerned, every ignoramus feels they're entirely justified to disparage experts and dismiss their findings. If you were diagnosed with cancer, would you scour the web until you found some obscure little doctor's practice who would tell you cancer is a lie invented by an oppressive establishment? I hope not. So why is it that conspiracy theorists and lone voices amongst climate scientists are sought out with exactly that level of eagerness? Please everyone, don't make a laughing stock out of yourselves by "substantiating your opinions with evidence" here. Leave it to the experts and F(*&& act on their recommendations for the world's sake.......
    OMG!

    I was around when all this crap started. Here's a little more info on it:

    Senator Tim Worth, 1992: "We have got to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic policy and environmental policy."

    Mikhail Gorbachev, former chief communist on the planet, 1996: "The threat of environmental crisis will be the international disaster key to unlock the New World Order."

    Richard Benedick, U.S. State Department, 1992: "A global warming treaty must be implemented even if there is no scientific evidence to back the greenhouse effect."
    Last edited by B. W.; March 08, 2019 at 04:46 PM.

  12. #12
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    Default Re: Is it Game Over on the climate front?

    Quote Originally Posted by B. W. View Post
    This is a fairly simple explanation so maybe you should take a few minutes and watch it:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYoOcaqCzxo"

    Not gonna watch 40 minute video for topic. My time it too valuable to me. But feel free to write here point from it..

    Once more, I agree with you, that Sun and Earth are big players in this game. However humankind does not have to do too much to tip the scale of balance...The same with Ice ages for example. It is result of a few steps influencing each other.
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  13. #13

    Default Re: Is it Game Over on the climate front?

    Quote Originally Posted by Muizer View Post
    It's come to the point where I feel tempted to say "Please, not one of these threads again". Climate sceptics are so ........ deplorable. Really why is it that if we go to a doctor or a car mechanic, we expect them to diagnose and fix our problems, but where climate measures are conerned, every ignoramus feels they're entirely justified to disparage experts and dismiss their findings. If you were diagnosed with cancer, would you scour the web until you found some obscure little doctor's practice who would tell you cancer is a lie invented by an oppressive establishment? I hope not. So why is it that conspiracy theorists and lone voices amongst climate scientists are sought out with exactly that level of eagerness? Please everyone, don't make a laughing stock out of yourselves by "substantiating your opinions with evidence" here. Leave it to the experts and F(*&& act on their recommendations for the world's sake.......
    "Climate science" is a relatively new field where the climate-change orthodoxy is ruthlessly enforced. Good luck getting in if you don't buy into the hysteria.

    There are many examples where the transition from paid employment in climate research to retirement has been accompanied by a significant change of heart away from acknowledging the seriousness of global warming. It seems that scientists too are conscious of the need to eat, and like everyone else must consider the consequences of public dissent from the views of the powers-that-be. One example was Dr Brian Tucker. He was the Director of the Australian Numerical Meteorology Research Centre, and subsequently became Chief of the CSIRO Division of Atmospheric Research. He was heavily involved in the development of the IPCC. During his time with CSIRO he was the ‘go to’ man for journalists and radio programmers seeking stories on matters to do with climate change. On retirement he became a writer and speaker for the Institute of Public Affairs, and greatly surprised his former colleagues with his very public change to an openly sceptical view on the subject.
    https://www.thegwpf.org/content/uplo...tridge2018.pdf

    I'm curious, what do you think about the consensus among philosophers of religion that God exists? Do you accept it, or are you a Skeptic™?
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  14. #14

    Default Re: Is it Game Over on the climate front?

    Quote Originally Posted by Prodromos View Post
    I'm curious, what do you think about the consensus among philosophers of religion that God exists? Do you accept it, or are you a Skeptic™?
    Do you honestly think that Science and Philosophy work the same way?
    They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more.

  15. #15
    swabian's Avatar igni ferroque
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    Default Re: Is it Game Over on the climate front?

    I fear it's going to be early summer by the end of March this year. Just like the last two years. I can see myself settling in with the freaking Innuit in 10 years or so. I loathe heat.

  16. #16
    B. W.'s Avatar Primicerius
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    Default Re: Is it Game Over on the climate front?

    Quote Originally Posted by Daruwind View Post
    Not gonna watch 40 minute video for topic. My time it too valuable to me. But feel free to write here point from it..

    Once more, I agree with you, that Sun and Earth are big players in this game. However humankind does not have to do too much to tip the scale of balance...The same with Ice ages for example. It is result of a few steps influencing each other.
    You're still pursuing a false reality. Personally, I think you're confusing climate change with pollution. Mankind can have a tremendous effect on local environs, but those are strictly regional effects. As for you volcano theory, Mount Saint Helen's produced more greenhouse gases in one day than mankind has done in its entire collective history.

    During the last ice age the earth was inhabited by large mega-fauna who roamed the earth in numbers of hundreds of millions. For example, at the end of the last ice age there about 14 million mastodons living on the earth and they were just one of around 16 elephant species on the planet. There were giant buffaloes, giant cattle, giant sloths, giant single horn rhinos (referred to in the bible as unicorns), and various other grazing and hunting species all producing greenhouse gases 24/7 for over a hundred thousand years and it did not bring on global warming.

    The last ice age ended suddenly with the Younger-Dryas period and there is accumulating evidence that it was brought about by a cosmic intervention of some sort. It was followed by several millennia of unstable climate variations. The last six or seven thousand years have seen the most stable climate that the earth has seen in the last 250,000 years...it is an abnormality and it will not last.

    The best evidence suggests that we are about to experience a mini ice age which will be far more hazardous to civilization than any minor warming effects. We still haven't reached the high temperatures that were experienced around 300 AD and that is an optimum temperature for farming and food growth.

  17. #17
    Daruwind's Avatar Citizen
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    Default Re: Is it Game Over on the climate front?

    Quote Originally Posted by B. W. View Post
    You're still pursuing a false reality. Personally, I think you're confusing climate change with pollution. Mankind can have a tremendous effect on local environs, but those are strictly regional effects. As for you volcano theory, Mount Saint Helen's produced more greenhouse gases in one day than mankind has done in its entire collective history.

    ...

    The best evidence suggests that we are about to experience a mini ice age which will be far more hazardous to civilization than any minor warming effects. We still haven't reached the high temperatures that were experienced around 300 AD and that is an optimum temperature for farming and food growth.
    No. I´m not. Point is, factors can be interchangeable one for another. It doesn´t matter if you put into atmosphere a tons of pollutions via Volcanic activity, fall of meteorite and subsequent wildfires or due to nuclear war or due to industry pollutions. What matters is earth ability to absorb or reflect Sun´s energy. It doens´t matter if gases in atmosphere are via farts of mega fauna of due to car engines. What matter is if total sum of all these elements will reach certain treshold for Ice age for example or not.

    I agree with you that we do not know when and if next glacial period will occur. I saw articles stating that human activity could already prevented or at least postponed it but we ultimately don´t know...Of course if we add external events or moer volcanic activity, it could change the situation quickly..
    Last edited by Daruwind; March 09, 2019 at 01:21 PM.
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  18. #18

    Default Re: Is it Game Over on the climate front?

    The elephant in the room, which virtue-signaling liberal left prefers to ignore, is that Western nations do a rather miniscule input into affecting Earth then places like China or India. Therefore measures such as proposed by our buffoon Trudeau with his carbon tax or AOC with her moronic proposition to ban planes and cows, do 0 to reduce such input.

  19. #19

    Default Re: Is it Game Over on the climate front?

    Quote Originally Posted by Heathen Hammer View Post
    The elephant in the room, which virtue-signaling liberal left prefers to ignore, is that Western nations do a rather miniscule input into affecting Earth then places like China or India. Therefore measures such as proposed by our buffoon Trudeau with his carbon tax or AOC with her moronic proposition to ban planes and cows, do 0 to reduce such input.
    Ahh yes. The usual conservative argument against...well, most things. Doing something would be hard and might not completely solve the problem, so better not try at all.

    So let me get this straight. Do nothing because.... <checks his notes> They do nothing? Is that right? Follow the wrong people's examples? Do what bad people do? The wrong people are right?

    I'm not sure you understand how this works. Or ever have.

    You're certainly not an ethical authority worth following.
    Last edited by Gaidin; March 09, 2019 at 04:22 PM.
    One thing is for certain: the more profoundly baffled you have been in your life, the more open your mind becomes to new ideas.
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  20. #20

    Default Re: Is it Game Over on the climate front?

    Quote Originally Posted by Gaidin View Post
    Ahh yes. The usual conservative argument against...well, most things. Doing something would be hard and might not completely solve the problem, so better not try at all.

    So let me get this straight. Do nothing because.... <checks his notes> They do nothing? Is that right? Follow the wrong people's examples? Do what bad people do? The wrong people are right?

    I'm not sure you understand how this works. Or ever have.

    You're certainly not an ethical authority worth following.
    Huh? You seem to either not read the text you quoted or are pretending to do so.
    Again, read and repeat:
    Countries that cause the most damage to environment are not Western.
    Imposing extra taxes or banning planes and animals in Western countries will help deal with damage done by China and India as much as hopes and prayers would. If you want to see effective action from the West to prevent damage to environment, that would require complete social and economic overhaul, something that is not practically possible without literal revolutions and/or coups of most Western governments. Good luck with that.

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