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Thread: The "Event"... What's THAT?

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    Default The "Event"... What's THAT?

    I happened to be re-reading an article Carmody posted a while back and which made me hit the "Pause" button...

    Wait a minute!

    .... All these doom and gloom scenari are not actually meant to "warn" us... they are meant to get the very wealthy to part from their $$ by the billions...


    So, here is that article:
    Survival of the richest: The wealthy are plotting to leave us behind

    Last year, I got invited to a super-deluxe private resort to deliver a keynote speech to what I assumed would be a hundred or so investment bankers. It was by far the largest fee I had ever been offered for a talk — about half my annual professor’s salary — all to deliver some insight on the subject of “the future of technology.”

    I’ve never liked talking about the future. The Q&A sessions always end up more like parlor games, where I’m asked to opine on the latest technology buzzwords as if they were ticker symbols for potential investments: blockchain, 3D printing, CRISPR. The audiences are rarely interested in learning about these technologies or their potential impacts beyond the binary choice of whether or not to invest in them. But money talks, so I took the gig.

    After I arrived, I was ushered into what I thought was the green room. But instead of being wired with a microphone or taken to a stage, I just sat there at a plain round table as my audience was brought to me: five super-wealthy guys — yes, all men — from the upper echelon of the hedge fund world. After a bit of small talk, I realized they had no interest in the information I had prepared about the future of technology. They had come with questions of their own.

    They started out innocuously enough. Ethereum or bitcoin? Is quantum computing a real thing? Slowly but surely, however, they edged into their real topics of concern.

    Which region will be less impacted by the coming climate crisis: New Zealand or Alaska? Is Google really building Ray Kurzweil a home for his brain, and will his consciousness live through the transition, or will it die and be reborn as a whole new one? Finally, the CEO of a brokerage house explained that he had nearly completed building his own underground bunker system and asked, “How do I maintain authority over my security force after the event?”

    The Event. That was their euphemism for the environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear explosion, unstoppable virus, or Mr. Robot hack that takes everything down.

    This single question occupied us for the rest of the hour. They knew armed guards would be required to protect their compounds from the angry mobs. But how would they pay the guards once money was worthless? What would stop the guards from choosing their own leader? The billionaires considered using special combination locks on the food supply that only they knew. Or making guards wear disciplinary collars of some kind in return for their survival. Or maybe building robots to serve as guards and workers — if that technology could be developed in time.

    That’s when it hit me: At least as far as these gentlemen were concerned, this was a talk about the future of technology. Taking their cue from Elon Musk colonizing Mars, Peter Thiel reversing the aging process, or Sam Altman and Ray Kurzweil uploading their minds into supercomputers, they were preparing for a digital future that had a whole lot less to do with making the world a better place than it did with transcending the human condition altogether and insulating themselves from a very real and present danger of climate change, rising sea levels, mass migrations, global pandemics, nativist panic, and resource depletion. For them, the future of technology is really about just one thing: escape.

    There’s nothing wrong with madly optimistic appraisals of how technology might benefit human society. But the current drive for a post-human utopia is something else. It’s less a vision for the wholesale migration of humanity to a new a state of being than a quest to transcend all that is human: the body, interdependence, compassion, vulnerability, and complexity. As technology philosophers have been pointing out for years, now, the transhumanist vision too easily reduces all of reality to data, concluding that “humans are nothing but information-processing objects.”

    It’s a reduction of human evolution to a video game that someone wins by finding the escape hatch and then letting a few of his BFFs come along for the ride. Will it be Musk, Bezos, Thiel…Zuckerberg? These billionaires are the presumptive winners of the digital economy — the same survival-of-the-fittest business landscape that’s fueling most of this speculation to begin with.

    Of course, it wasn’t always this way. There was a brief moment, in the early 1990s, when the digital future felt open-ended and up for our invention. Technology was becoming a playground for the counterculture, who saw in it the opportunity to create a more inclusive, distributed, and pro-human future. But established business interests only saw new potentials for the same old extraction, and too many technologists were seduced by unicorn IPOs. Digital futures became understood more like stock futures or cotton futures — something to predict and make bets on. So nearly every speech, article, study, documentary, or white paper was seen as relevant only insofar as it pointed to a ticker symbol. The future became less a thing we create through our present-day choices or hopes for humankind than a predestined scenario we bet on with our venture capital but arrive at passively.

    This freed everyone from the moral implications of their activities. Technology development became less a story of collective flourishing than personal survival. Worse, as I learned, to call attention to any of this was to unintentionally cast oneself as an enemy of the market or an anti-technology curmudgeon.

    So instead of considering the practical ethics of impoverishing and exploiting the many in the name of the few, most academics, journalists, and science-fiction writers instead considered much more abstract and fanciful conundrums: Is it fair for a stock trader to use smart drugs? Should children get implants for foreign languages? Do we want autonomous vehicles to prioritize the lives of pedestrians over those of its passengers? Should the first Mars colonies be run as democracies? Does changing my DNA undermine my identity? Should robots have rights?

    Asking these sorts of questions, while philosophically entertaining, is a poor substitute for wrestling with the real moral quandaries associated with unbridled technological development in the name of corporate capitalism. Digital platforms have turned an already exploitative and extractive marketplace (think Walmart) into an even more dehumanizing successor (think Amazon). Most of us became aware of these downsides in the form of automated jobs, the gig economy, and the demise of local retail.

    "The future became less a thing we create through our present-day choices or hopes for humankind than a predestined scenario we bet on with our venture capital but arrive at passively."

    But the more devastating impacts of pedal-to-the-metal digital capitalism fall on the environment and global poor. The manufacture of some of our computers and smartphones still uses networks of slave labor. These practices are so deeply entrenched that a company called Fairphone, founded from the ground up to make and market ethical phones, learned it was impossible. (The company’s founder now sadly refers to their products as “fairer” phones.)

    Meanwhile, the mining of rare earth metals and disposal of our highly digital technologies destroys human habitats, replacing them with toxic waste dumps, which are then picked over by peasant children and their families, who sell usable materials back to the manufacturers.

    This “out of sight, out of mind” externalization of poverty and poison doesn’t go away just because we’ve covered our eyes with VR goggles and immersed ourselves in an alternate reality. If anything, the longer we ignore the social, economic, and environmental repercussions, the more of a problem they become. This, in turn, motivates even more withdrawal, more isolationism and apocalyptic fantasy — and more desperately concocted technologies and business plans. The cycle feeds itself.

    The more committed we are to this view of the world, the more we come to see human beings as the problem and technology as the solution. The very essence of what it means to be human is treated less as a feature than bug. No matter their embedded biases, technologies are declared neutral. Any bad behaviors they induce in us are just a reflection of our own corrupted core. It’s as if some innate human savagery is to blame for our troubles. Just as the inefficiency of a local taxi market can be “solved” with an app that bankrupts human drivers, the vexing inconsistencies of the human psyche can be corrected with a digital or genetic upgrade.

    Ultimately, according to the technosolutionist orthodoxy, the human future climaxes by uploading our consciousness to a computer or, perhaps better, accepting that technology itself is our evolutionary successor. Like members of a gnostic cult, we long to enter the next transcendent phase of our development, shedding our bodies and leaving them behind, along with our sins and troubles.

    Our movies and television shows play out these fantasies for us. Zombie shows depict a post-apocalypse where people are no better than the undead — and seem to know it. Worse, these shows invite viewers to imagine the future as a zero-sum battle between the remaining humans, where one group’s survival is dependent on another one’s demise. Even Westworld — based on a science-fiction novel where robots run amok — ended its second season with the ultimate reveal: Human beings are simpler and more predictable than the artificial intelligences we create. The robots learn that each of us can be reduced to just a few lines of code, and that we’re incapable of making any willful choices. Heck, even the robots in that show want to escape the confines of their bodies and spend their rest of their lives in a computer simulation.

    The mental gymnastics required for such a profound role reversal between humans and machines all depend on the underlying assumption that humans suck. Let’s either change them or get away from them, forever.

    Thus, we get tech billionaires launching electric cars into space — as if this symbolizes something more than one billionaire’s capacity for corporate promotion. And if a few people do reach escape velocity and somehow survive in a bubble on Mars — despite our inability to maintain such a bubble even here on Earth in either of two multibillion-dollar Biosphere trials — the result will be less a continuation of the human diaspora than a lifeboat for the elite.

    When the hedge funders asked me the best way to maintain authority over their security forces after “the event,” I suggested that their best bet would be to treat those people really well, right now. They should be engaging with their security staffs as if they were members of their own family. And the more they can expand this ethos of inclusivity to the rest of their business practices, supply chain management, sustainability efforts, and wealth distribution, the less chance there will be of an “event” in the first place. All this technological wizardry could be applied toward less romantic but entirely more collective interests right now.

    They were amused by my optimism, but they didn’t really buy it. They were not interested in how to avoid a calamity; they’re convinced we are too far gone. For all their wealth and power, they don’t believe they can affect the future. They are simply accepting the darkest of all scenarios and then bringing whatever money and technology they can employ to insulate themselves — especially if they can’t get a seat on the rocket to Mars.

    Luckily, those of us without the funding to consider disowning our own humanity have much better options available to us. We don’t have to use technology in such antisocial, atomizing ways. We can become the individual consumers and profiles that our devices and platforms want us to be, or we can remember that the truly evolved human doesn’t go it alone.

    Being human is not about individual survival or escape. It’s a team sport. Whatever future humans have, it will be together.


    Related (propaganda?):
    Rothschilds Commission Construction of Their Own Floating City "On an EMERGENCY Schedule" -- What do they know that we don't?
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    Default Re: The "Event"... What's THAT?

    Then...

    ... today:

    HSBC warns governments and corporations are not prepared for climate change

    RT
    Wed, 08 Aug 2018 13:03 UTC


    Road to the future? © Josh Edelson/AFP/Getty Images

    One of the world's largest banks, HSBC, has highlighted research indicating that Earth is running out of resources to sustain life and that governments and corporations are failing to prepare for the effects of climate change.

    The world has spent its entire budget of natural resources for the year after crossing the threshold on August 1. The date, dubbed 'Earth Overshoot Day', marks the earliest point the planet hit its annual resource limit.

    HSBC highlighted the issue using research from the Global Footprint Network (GFN), an independent think tank that promotes conservation and sustainability. The bank blamed businesses and governments for not adequately preparing for climate change, and not using natural resources efficiently.

    The bank noted extreme weather events, such as rising temperatures across Europe and wildfires in California, Greece and Scandinavia in its remarks about the research. "As scientists work on attribution analysis for specific events - the general consensus is that climate change is making these events more likely to occur and more severe," HSBC said, according to Business Insider.

    Quote
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    The largest king penguin colony in the world has shrunk by 88% over the last 30yrs

    11:00 PM - 31 Jul 2018
    7 replies 53 retweets 40 likes

    Overshoot Day is calculated by taking the amount of natural resources generated by the Earth that year, dividing it by humanity's consumption of Earth's natural resources, and multiplying by the number of days in a year.


    For most of the history of the planet, Earth was able to produce more resources every year than humans could use. However by the early 1970s the balance shifted and human consumption began outstripping what the planet could reproduce.

    Last year's Earth Overshoot Day fell on August 2 and it has occurred earlier each year since 1971 when it fell on December 21. Humanity is using around 1.7 times the amount of resources Earth produces per year, GFN estimates. By 2020, the group projects that human demand on the planet's ecosystems will likely exceed what nature is able to regenerate by 75 percent.
    "We use more ecological resources and services than nature can regenerate through overfishing, overharvesting forests and emitting more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than ecosystems can absorb," the nonprofit's website reads.
    The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) claims that temperatures will rise by around 15 percent worldwide by the year 2100. HSBC believe that this will lead to more extreme weather events with a heightening social and economic cost.
    "In our view, adaptation will move further up the agenda with a growing focus on the social consequences," the analysts said.
    HSBC's intervention in the climate debate is just the latest from banks and asset managers who are now actively factoring climate risks into their decision-making. Earlier this year, over 200 of the world's largest investors, including BlackRock and JP Morgan Chase, pledged to report the risk that climate change poses to their business. The Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures is an initiative aiming to develop a consistent framework for firms to disclose climate-related financial risks.
    SOTT Comment: IPCC's faulty predictions of rising temperatures are based on a faulty premise and therefore the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures' financial risk assessments will be faulty as well. That said, and given we are entering a massive cold spell, some of the above statistics have relativistic value and implication. We shouldn't doubt that human consumption is outstripping the Earth's capacity to provide, compounded by scant evidence of compensating preparation for a future lack of resources in terms of an ice age.
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    Default Re: The "Event"... What's THAT?

    To address the HSBC article with any measure of balance, and to take it more seriously than just a PR stunt to sell bankers as guiding lights and natural leaders ( excuse my hate speech ), it's worth spending the time watching this documentary/epically sad story about 'environmental' statistics.


    I just do NOT accept the bank's case as being serious about anything at all. There is a massive hole in the picture they paint, while trying to tick all the boxes that protect bankers from the results of their own existence and practices.


    I realise that many people are about as likely to actually watch this as I am to read a ten thousand word document - almost zero, but I'll include it here for the few who will.


    Last edited by Bill Ryan; 9th August 2018 at 17:35. Reason: changed the video to one without Hungarian hard subtitles
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    Default Re: The "Event"... What's THAT?

    What is the faulty premise?

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    Default Re: The "Event"... What's THAT?

    What is the hole in the picture they paint?

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    Default Re: The "Event"... What's THAT?

    The "Meat industry".


    And I'm not a vegan or vegetarian.


    Meat production is provably the biggest impact on all the stressed statistics that are used to make the case that we are doomed without radical change. There is a mysterious silence all the way through the industry and nearly all the environmental protection groups. Greenpeace wouldn't even speak to the producer at all.


    Why ?
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    Default Re: The "Event"... What's THAT?

    Trying to stay on topic - why are TPTB denying climate change? Similar to the Rothschilds escape, why is China building cities that are uninhabited? Is it because they know what is coming, and realize we can't all be saved? They are trying to avoid panic, i.e., admitting there is a problem would necessitate finding a solution, and there isn't one?

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    Default Re: The "Event"... What's THAT?

    Quote Posted by avatar (here)
    Trying to stay on topic - why are TPTB denying climate change? Similar to the Rothschilds escape, why is China building cities that are uninhabited? Is it because they know what is coming, and realize we can't all be saved? They are trying to avoid panic, i.e., admitting there is a problem would necessitate finding a solution, and there isn't one?

    I don't think the PTB are denying "climate change". Why do you say they are ?


    I see them trying to sell climate change as a crock of a package based on partial evidence and false assumptions that skirt around anything they want to keep going for themselves. Similarly, I see them trying to bring about a "disclosure" that has all those same faults.


    Regarding the elephant in the room, the meat industry, I do wonder if there is something fundamentally deeper going on, to do with our energies resulting from so much grossly industrial scale meat consumption. I tend to believe that the top crooks are more magician than crook. There could well be something about meat that holds their paradigm together for them.


    Considering the lethality of speaking out about the environmental problem of the meat industry, there's another possibility to consider. Suppose there is some kind of deal that's been made with non human entities from off this world to make 'meat animals' abundantly available to be TAKEN . . . ?
    Last edited by norman; 9th August 2018 at 21:57.
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    Default Re: The "Event"... What's THAT?

    From what i can tell, we will be unable to avoid some sort of high tech near future scenario. However, we can quite possibly choose our own route through this maze. For instance, if we individually choose tech that gives us more independence, then that's what we should do. If we can choose to 'live off the grid', then perhaps we should. If robots can free us from really difficult or dangerous tasks, then maybe we should use them for that. If 3d printers can allow us to live more independently, then why not?

    The super wealthy can build their bubbles and go live in them. If us average folks can selectively corral the best of the coming tech enhancements, and build ourselves a sustainable lifestyle, then why not? The way the consumer society works, with all the gazzillions of small fry entrepreneurs wanting to find a way to sell whatever comes available, i can see the products being available to give us a real alternative.

    For instance, solar energy becomes really cheap, and allows us to nearly have free energy. We can go off grid with ease and still run gadgets that make our lives easier. Electric vehicles cut our pollution and noise.

    Then, 3d printers make it easy to build your own house, make clothing, make vehicles, and even food. Perhaps people have to band together to afford a 3d printer sophisticated enough, but people survive in groups anyway.

    New tech permits the cheap desalination of sea water. Very arid places can be cultivated. Deserts become covered in lush vegetation. The Earth's arable land quintuples. Lots of room and food for everybody.

    And using this new freedom and independence to get closer to mother Earth, through growing really nutritious food, and getting closer to our spirit, this might really benefit us.

    I can go on, but i hope you get the idea. The 'event' is our choosing how to use this coming tech. And the results could be excellent.

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    Default Re: The "Event"... What's THAT?

    Quote Posted by Justplain (here)
    From what i can tell, we will be unable to avoid some sort of high tech near future scenario. However, we can quite possibly choose our own route through this maze. For instance, if we individually choose tech that gives us more independence, then that's what we should do. If we can choose to 'live off the grid', then perhaps we should. If robots can free us from really difficult or dangerous tasks, then maybe we should use them for that. If 3d printers can allow us to live more independently, then why not?

    The super wealthy can build their bubbles and go live in them. If us average folks can selectively corral the best of the coming tech enhancements, and build ourselves a sustainable lifestyle, then why not? The way the consumer society works, with all the gazzillions of small fry entrepreneurs wanting to find a way to sell whatever comes available, i can see the products being available to give us a real alternative.

    For instance, solar energy becomes really cheap, and allows us to nearly have free energy. We can go off grid with ease and still run gadgets that make our lives easier. Electric vehicles cut our pollution and noise.

    Then, 3d printers make it easy to build your own house, make clothing, make vehicles, and even food. Perhaps people have to band together to afford a 3d printer sophisticated enough, but people survive in groups anyway.

    New tech permits the cheap desalination of sea water. Very arid places can be cultivated. Deserts become covered in lush vegetation. The Earth's arable land quintuples. Lots of room and food for everybody.

    And using this new freedom and independence to get closer to mother Earth, through growing really nutritious food, and getting closer to our spirit, this might really benefit us.

    I can go on, but i hope you get the idea. The 'event' is our choosing how to use this coming tech. And the results could be excellent.
    Yes, I agree , a lovely utopia. However you fail to mention the self-servers, there are millions up on millions of them. Not all humans are self-servers, just most of them, even some of the poorest. It's inherent I'm afraid, we all have the propensity, to do our fellow humans down. Even more so in a survival situation . Read how people survived WW2 and the atrocities they committed too stay alive, not a pretty picture . There is , imho , a reset coming it was started some years ago, all I can advise ( for what it's worth ) is get right spiritually. This for me, is our only out.
    Am I one of many or am I many of one ? interesting .

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    Default Re: The "Event"... What's THAT?

    The event - or climate-flip - is what we are in now.

    In previous warming/cooling and CO2 cycles, ice core samples confirm that SOMETHING warmed the oceans (not a greenhouse process) and the warming triggered CO2 release from them. The linkage of CO2 levels to rising temperature occurs between 200-1,000 years AFTER the warming starts. Science tells us that whatever the initial warming is caused by, the increase in CO2 produces more warming.

    The system is not stable- there is positive feed-back. This means that the results of the initial warming re-enforce the trend rather than damping it down.

    In terms of climate, this means that higher CO2 reflects heat back to the planet, & reduces heat radiation to space.

    The 'climate change' debate is always obfuscated and manipulated by TPTB. They want it to be a question of whether climate is changing. What is is really about is whether the change that is happening is man-made or not, and whether human action could arrest the process.

    Not sure whether it is man made completely, but the 'man made climate change' lobby are beginning to put on their 'TOLD YOU SO' badges.

    Of course, nothing in the Paris accord was ever going to reduce the exponential growth in Chinese and Indian coal & oil consumption, so it was always window dressing and political froth.

    The big flip is starting now. I do not think it could have been stopped. What it will consist of is run-away CO2 release plus ocean bed methane bubbling up , that will cause warming & weather destabilisation.

    All the big carbon sinks are being released.

    Some examples from the UK

    a) The Norfolk broads were a large area of peat marshes, so plant material would fall into anoxic water below and build up a huge bed of waterlogged peat-carbon. AGRICULTURE wanted this land. They drained most of it and farmed the peat-rich soil. Result- CO2 sink gone, and peat decays into the atmosphere.

    The modern day equivalent is happening on a much larger scale in south east Asia. Peat jungles are being felled and drained for Palm Oil etc. All that peat will be gasified.

    b) Recent Moor fires this year.

    The moors in UK also carry layers of waterlogged peat. As far as I know this has never burned before even when there is a bracken fire above, because it stays wet. This year it dried out and burned.

    There are huge peat areas in Canada and Russia. Some may burn. If the frozen tundras thaw more often, this will increase CO2 release.

    These are huge positive feed-back mechanisms. The only way to stop them would be to interfere with the amount of solar radiation hitting the planet.

    We could benefit from reduced solar output a la Maunder Minimum.

    [IMG][/IMG]
    Last edited by Baby Steps; 11th August 2018 at 11:09.
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    Default Re: The "Event"... What's THAT?

    Quote Posted by Baby Steps (here)
    The event - or climate-flip - is what we are in now.

    In previous warming/cooling and CO2 cycles, ice core samples confirm that SOMETHING warmed the oceans (not a greenhouse process) and the warming triggered CO2 release from them. The linkage of CO2 levels to rising temperature occurs between 200-1,000 years AFTER the warming starts. Science tells us that whatever the initial warming is caused by, the increase in CO2 produces more warming.
    [...]
    Here is the omitted step from the "warming" of oceans:

    Quote Posted by Hervé (here)
    The main "Greenhouse gas," no-one seems to pay attention to, that affects weathers, local and global: Water Vapor:
    [...]
    That's what starts the feedback loop.

    Of course, the only currently known source for heating oceans are the innumerable active submarine volcanoes amping their activities...


    So, now, what amps up volcanic activities?

    For that we can only turn towards what regulates activities in our solar system and refine our knowledge of the "Electric Universe":

    Quote Posted by Hervé (here)
    [...]
    There seems to be something happening in the cosmos of our solar system:

    Weird volcanoes are erupting across the solar system

    Elizabeth Howell Live Science
    Sat, 28 Jul 2018 09:04 UTC


    © NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/ASI/INAF/JIRAM
    This annotated image highlights the location of the new heat source close to the south pole of Io. The image was generated from data collected on Dec. 16, 2017, by the Jovian Infrared Auroral Mapper (JIRAM) instrument aboard NASA's Juno mission when the spacecraft was about 290,000 miles (470,000 kilometers) from the Jovian moon. The scale to the right of image depicts of the range of temperatures displayed in the infrared image.
    Higher recorded temperatures are characterized in brighter colors - lower temperatures in darker colors.
    [...]
    "La réalité est un rêve que l'on fait atterrir" San Antonio AKA F. Dard

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    Default Re: The "Event"... What's THAT?

    Quote Posted by Baby Steps (here)

    Not sure whether it is man made completely, but the 'man made climate change' lobby are beginning to put on their 'TOLD YOU SO' badges.
    Yes, they are. But they might have to take them off again if there's a really harsh Northern Hemisphere winter coming up next.

    From what I can understand (and intuit), we're seeing increasingly wild oscillating instability, not a stead warming trend. (In Ecuador, where I am, the 'summer' has been cold, cloudy and damp, and there was a highly uncharacteristic freak snowfall last week.)

    This sister thread, as many reading this know — Weird, wild weather: floods, freak storms, giant hail, record lows, all over the world — showcases some of the oscillations, that aren't always to do with warming. At all.

    The problem with oscillations, though, is that they're not always long-term stable: sometimes the gyroscope can wobble right off the table. If that happens, we may have no way of knowing where it's going to fall.

    And if too much methane is released too quickly in a super-hot spell from the tundra and under the arctic ice, for example (FAR more than by any cattle, anywhere), then that might tip over the entire table.

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    Default Re: The "Event"... What's THAT?

    For those of us who are not scientists, it is hard to make sense of all the conflicting ideas floating around out there. You have succinctly and without spin put forth a reasonable (to me at least) premise. Thank you very much!

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    Default Re: The "Event"... What's THAT?

    WHAT WOULD THE EARTH LOOK LIKE IF ALL THE ICE MELTED?

    [IMG][/IMG]

    Study: 634 Million People at Risk from Rising Seas

    Quote The world at night makes for some interesting satellite images: Most everything is dark, except for the continents outlined in bright points of light. That's because people have always built cities and towns along the coasts.
    "Anecdotally, we know that people do live near oceans," says Deborah Balk, the acting associate director of the Institute for Demographic Research at the City University of New York.
    "We know that the major cities in the world are located near the mouths of rivers," Balk says. "It's nice to live near water. But, I think, historically, people have also known that there are risks."
    Those risks may change as the global climate warms. Last month, an international panel of researchers warned that sea levels could rise by more than a foot over the next century. Other scientists believe it could be much more than that. Hurricanes may become more severe as well.
    All of this made Balk wonder: Exactly how many people live in places that could potentially face flooding and storm damage? That information wasn't available. There were only vague estimates.
    "For a while, it was said, 'Oh, two-thirds of all the population lives within 100 kilometers of a coastline," Balk says.
    Then, in another study, researchers suggested it was closer to one-third of the world's population. But this estimate was based only on distance from the coast — it did not incorporate the elevation of the land, and how that might affect risk from flooding or sea-level rises.
    So Balk and some colleagues used satellite data to map out places along the coast that have low elevations — less than 30 feet above sea level. Then, to find out who lived there, they looked at census figures from 224 countries.
    The numbers showed that low-elevation areas are home to 634 million people.
    "Roughly one in 10 persons in the world lives in this low-elevation coastal zone," Balk says.
    Some of the countries have very large populations: The 10 countries with the most people in the low coastal areas are China, India, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Indonesia, Japan, Egypt, United States, Thailand, and the Philippines.
    The countries with the largest share of their populations living in low-elevation areas are Bahamas, Suriname, the Netherlands, Vietnam, Guyana, Bangladesh, Djibouti, Belize, Egypt, and Gambia.
    It turns out that two-thirds of world's largest cities — cities with more than five million people — are at least partially in these low areas. That's important, because people are increasingly moving to cities.
    "Over the next 100 years, where we anticipate seeing sea level rise, we will also see most of our population growth occurring in urban areas," Balk says.
    Balk says this study is just a start. Some low-lying places will be more at risk than others because of weather patterns and geography. For example, here in the U. S., the southern Gulf Coast is more vulnerable than the West Coast. Still, Balk hopes this study will help encourage people to start thinking more about the potential risk to coastal areas, especially in poor countries.
    Thomas Dietz is a professor at Michigan State University. He studies the human side of climate change, and says the new study is a great start.
    "This is the first paper I've seen," he says, "that really folds in a detailed analysis of exactly how much effect there will be from climate change and where in the world it will occur. I think it's a first-rate paper that's likely to generate a lot of attention as people realize how serious the coastal problem is."
    But Dietz thinks we need to get even more detail on who lives in the very lowest areas along the coast.
    "We just don't have good enough satellite imagery at this point to go further than what they did in this analysis," he says. "Nonetheless, I think the analysis is really an important step forward, because it highlights the need to really incorporate these kinds of factors in planning."
    The study appears in the current issue of the journal Environment and Urbanization, and will be discussed this weekend at a meeting of the Population Association of America in New York City.
    Climate Change Could Cause Rapid Rise in Sea Levels March 23, 2006

    Expert Explains Possible Effect of Rise in Sea Levels March 23, 2006

    Studies: Human Response Won't Stop Global Warming March 17, 2005
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    Default Re: The "Event"... What's THAT?

    The medieval warm period didn't tip things over.


    What we don't have is data over the same range for other planets in the solar system. At this point in time we know other planets are showing changes along with Earth.



    Last edited by norman; 10th August 2018 at 15:20.
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    Default Re: The "Event"... What's THAT?

    Every once in a while I am drawn into a discussion on global warming. It is interesting how many comments come from otherwise fairly sane individuals who don't know much about the subject. So I interject:

    1. The powers that be lie to us all the time and also do not tell us the reality of what is happening on the planet. I always start with the lies, disinformation and propaganda being spewed by the PTB. I then throw in the quote in Hoagland and Bara's book "Dark Mission" from the science advisor to President Reagan on the never ending lies coming from NASA. Then it's on to the reality of it all.

    2. We are currently undergoing a major magnetic pole shift. What does that do to earth temps? No doubt the PTB have access to super computer modeling that approximates the effects of a magnetic pole shift. They do not share any of this vital information. This is the first important piece of info not discussed by climate change activists. It is very hard to quantify these effects given the PTB's insistence on not coming clean with us, but no doubt the magnetic pole shift is having an effect on earth weather.

    3. There are 2 large methane releases on the planet that would naturally have a negative affect on global temps. One humongous release off the far northeastern coast of Russia and one large one in Antarctica. These two releases have the potential to move temps upward just by themselves. Major factor.

    4. The sun is heating up. A moon of Saturn that contains lots of ice now has lakes due to warming. How does the sun heating up affect earth temps?

    5. Could be the biggie here. NASA announced recently that Niburu is now inside the orbit of Pluto. What does NASA really know about this infrequent visitor and how does Niburu change earth's weather?

    6. Is/are there any other factors relevant here that the PTB are hiding from us?

    Note that the PTB have been mute on all the above subjects. Wonder why? Perhaps it is to once again suck us into spending more of our hard earned money on something we have virtually no control over.

    Yes temps are rising on our blue planet. But are they rising due to human behavior, or something else? I say something else is by far the leading cause.

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    Default Re: The "Event"... What's THAT?

    Also, given the number of deep underground military bases just in the US alone, I'm guessing that the "Event" will be a "Kill Shot" envisioned by Ed Dames (see Avalon Library). A major mass coronal ejection that will destroy the electrical grid (amongst other things). The mother of all EMP pulses. Best guess is that it will happen by 2030.

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    Default Re: The "Event"... What's THAT?

    What do they want? What have they got planned?

    Well, if there was something awful looming, the best way to retain control while that event was looming - and it's signs became apparent, would be to concoct an alternative explanation for the looming signs - like climate change, and drop in the idea that building windmills might help. Then people have a sense that something is being done, we can make a difference etc.

    They want population reduction. The easiest way sounds like bio weapons, but, again how to retain control while doing the 'wiping out'? Maybe disrupt communications especially the internet. Could a man made EMP be disguised as a solar flare?

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    Default Re: The "Event"... What's THAT?

    Yes, Mr. Phillips, because only the creme of the crop psychopaths deserve to live. (I refuse to call him prince). Thanks for caring.
    "The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what we share with someone when we are uncool." From the movie "Almost Famous""l "Let yourself stand cool and composed before a million universes." Walt Whitman

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