Unsustainable Exponentiation Of Temperature

ANTHROPOCENE DETERIORATING CLIMATE: CO2, GHG, Questions And Answers:

Nigel: Based on your posts I have great admiration for your depth of research and the quest for truth so I implore you to let me brief you on this climate change subject some more..

PA: Thanks, I appreciate the compliment a lot, and it encourages me to persist in my ways, whatever they are. On all subjects, I try to get all perspectives, keep what I perceive to be right, what is false, and then rebuild a logic around those truths. My positions on everything, including climate, often lead people to label me in ways far removed from, or even opposite to, my balance point. On the human caused climate change, my positions are nuanced and wildly diverse, yet they make a coherent whole. Yes, we are on an eminent +7C trajectory. Should we panic and blow hot air? No. 

Nigel: I am not in denial but am well informed…Yes the climate is changing (Always has) and mostly for the better and we may need some adaptation but we have time and it’s far from an emergency…

Patrice Ayme: I am looking directly across the Golden Gate bridge. I have no doubt that someday, California will have to dam the Golden Gate. Otherwise the most productive agricultural area of the USA will become an interior sea,  flooding twenty million people. 

A recent (2023) paper revealed a tidal way of melting for ice shelves, which had not been discovered prior. Thanks to this new activity, the many authors from many prestigious research centers double the rate of ice shelf melting. It was completely obvious, BTW, that this was happening, as ice shelves breathe with the tides.

I have observed that we are on a cataclysmic 7 degree C trajectory for 2100. France, which has very ancient precise readings, has the long term average at +1.7 C above the famed baseline from 1880 CE. Right now the entire planet is well above 1.5 C. This year, from El Nino, it’s likely going to come closer to +2C, as warm deep water is pushed up to the surface. One has to understand most of the planetary heating is in the polar regions. 

It is an emergency, but that does not mean we should run around like chickens… as we have been. If nuclear power had been developed as it should have been, with new types of reactors, electricity could be 100% carbon free, with safe, non-proliferating and non-polluting fission reactors. In France, Kremlin sponsored ecologists made a secret deal with the Socialist (PS) government of Lionel Jospin, in 1999, to stop nuclear energy, especially the research. Generations of know-how disappeared (French gov launched its nuclear program in January 1938, oldest in the world).  

Nigel: We are exiting an ice age and this has happened before and in the life cycle of humanity we have at least 3 measured periods when temperatures were far higher than the current predictions. 

PA: There are three episodes with temps equal or slightly superior (with three pulses less than 2 C above the present…). .. Around 120,000 years ago (Eemian), temps were not really higher than the present, except for one very short pulse 3C above the present…. but global sea level was 6 meters higher. The climate is full of surprises: there was a warm glaciation (!!!) 450 K years ago… But now we are guaranteed at least +4C within a century, and that’s not been the case for at least 3 million years, and probably much more.

Temp fluctuations in the past rarely happened at the present pace, and when they did (Dryas), that didn’t last.

Nigel: CO2 is at the lowest it’s been for 250 million years and we will be good with 3 times the current amount.

PA: Two centuries ago, we were around 250 ppm CO2, now we are getting close to 600 ppm EQUIVALENT CO2 (CO2 + CH4 + NOx + CFCs + etc.).Cattle in France contributes as much from its CH4 emissions as residential heating (12% of total CO2 equivalent each). Barring volcanism or impact, CO2 levels varied over millennia, or even millions of years (consider the end of the Cretaceous).

Nigel: The other fact is that our industrial impact on CO2 levels is insignificant 

PA: Going from 250 ppm to 600 ppm CO2 equivalents in 140 years is not insignificant. To boot, the main greenhouse gas is H2O, not CO2. The GreenHouse Gases (GHG) act through FORCING. It forces more H2O up, and that’s nonlinear. The exact function, called sensitivity, is unknown.

Observe that in the graph above the temperature curve seems to accelerate higher than the CO2 curve. That’s caused by the other GHG gases…. which add 1/3 of forcing. A better graph would have represented the GHG (which vary according to NOx and CFCs…)

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Nigel: …and our biggest threat is we will destroy our prosperity and ability to fund adaptation by a panic to focus on so-called Net-Zero. So it’s drill baby drill and stop the nonsense on wind and solar and move to nuclear as quickly as possible to avoid pollution. Also reduce globalization and change to a fish farming strategy to save the oceans.

PA: I do not disagree with any of these points. Biden himself opened Alaska to drilling in a way Trump did not dare to do. My position is that massive research is needed. If prosperity is cut down, research will become impossible, which is the worst outcome.

Solar works (in combination with green hydrogen or derivatives). Wind is much more problematic, as the wind belts will migrate in the polar directions.
Nigel: On the trends of fires floods sea levels rise and weather induced tornados and such we see all danger trends reducing and our adaptive capability increases.. there is some work to do on forest fires but it’s NOT the climate but mainly our management approach.

Forests are burning and will burn. The Australian fires were so terrible that they changed the Pacific ocean surface temperature, and caused 3 La Nina in a row, desiccating California. The ravages of old growth forests in California have been heart breaking… even without fire. I documented them on this site with my own pictures. Years before the fires (which I predicted)

Climate Catastrophe: California Forests Dying. Giant Fires Coming In 2018

Nigel: The planet is doing just fine and will continue to do its variable thing…. 

PA: The biosphere could die from hypoxia (second worst case scenario) 

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2014/05/30/global-hypoxia/

It has already started: huge zones of the oceans are too low in oxygen for advanced animal life. It could get worse if the permafrost rots on a hypermassive scale.

Nigel: …it’s us I am worried about as we are moving from science based thinking toward self destructive religion based group think.
More at https://co2coalition.org Home – CO2 Coalition
I suggest you take the quiz… they have a debate in a few weeks I can plug you into to learn more.

My suggestion is you study this scientific based data and we chat more..

PA: An uncle of mine, a famous astronomer, was studying the subject, up at the Jungfrau observatory, in the Berner Oberland… a century ago!

I talked to him, long ago, about the subject of CO2 precisely ( he was mostly an astrophysicist). Founder of the Institut d’Astrophysique, Daniel Challonge was a member of the French Communist Party, and was forbidden to travel to the USA… Although he was the gentlest of souls. He founded the observatory, the Observatoire de Haute Provence, which discovered the first exoplanets (the two PIs, astronomers from Geneva got the Nobel)…

I have been science obsessed all my life. This (grand) uncle, a professional, was friends with my two grandfathers who were amateur astronomers. My own father, a geologist from Algeria who found Algerian gas and oil, was skeptical about the rise of-temperature (of course, he was born in Africa, and roamed the Sahara!) But he died from an African disease before the heat wave which killed thousands in France in 2003, the hottest since precise records started in 1540 CE. The heat caused a crop shortfall in parts of Southern Europe. The death toll has been estimated at more than 70,000, half of them in northern France. The records were beaten since, several times.

This year is guaranteed to shatter records, because of El Nino and the exponentiation of climate change.
Much more effort should be made towards nuclear, especially thermonuclear fusion. It can clearly work, but the efficiencies have to be boosted, and for that government sponsored fundamental research has to be lavishly funded. Star power is also the key to solar system colonization.

My uncle Daniel Challonge has a 30 kilometer diameter crater named after him on the Moon. So science, yes, I know, never leave a moment without it….

Patrice Ayme

Pledges Do Not A Climate Make… Especially When They Rest On Fake Graphs And Inexistent Technology.

At the Paris COP conference, Climate “Pledges” were made. Obstruction by the Obama White House insured that the accord would be weak, toothless, and insignificant. Countries “pledged” to reduce CO2 according to their own agendas. Their projections rested on non-existing technologies and unrealistic deployment thereof. Trump objected to the whole thing in part because it required rich countries to give 100 billions a years to poor countries. I objected because the whole thing was wishful thinking. In particular, many countries made fanciful claims of future CARBON CAPTURE on an industrial scale. Nobody knows how to do this commercially in the average case (although special geological situations work)… Nor is there any imaginable way to do it at an enormous scale, short of freezing CO2 from the air, using electricity from thermonuclear reactors…. Any anti-CO2 tech which creates more CO2 than it removes is counter-effective in my opinion (but not in that of “leaders”… consider the enormous electric car effort, while power generation is left in limbo…) 

Graphs are used to make optimistic declarations about the CO2 future emissions. They typically have unexplained inflection points, where the second derivatives of emissions do not just go from positive to negative, but do it with a discontinuity (a sharp angle requiring infinite force).

The silly inflections are pure wishful thinking, but typical of the projections of the institutions in obedience of the Western establishment. The picture above is… slightly modified from today’s New York Times (10/26/2021). NYT, following the official UN discourse, claims we are in the middle band…. Thanks to “Paris pledges”. However Pledges do not a climate make. Also this assumes two changes of the second derivative of climate emission in short order, that is two inflection points, thus, that great force are to be imminently applied, as if an asteroid had landed, smashing the human CO2 emitting industry… Extending the graph linearly from present emissions give a rise not of 4, but 7 (seven) Degrees Centigrade. This graph considers all CO2 emissions from PRIMARY ENERGY, cement, steel, production and land use, an overall CO2 production from human activity, which is around 60% higher… than at the time of the noisy (and obviously ineffectual, Kyoto Accord). In 2014 we were around 550 Gigatons of CO2, and we augment now at roughly 10%… each year. Only 40% of the CO2 goes in the atmosphere. 30% goes in the ocean, 30% in the ground… Both the ocean and the soil, now carbon sinks, will reverse into carbon producers, given enough warming…

So to claim we have passed an inflection point, with a sharp discontinuity and, or, will have another soon is wishful thinking, as usual.

Let’s look at those appearances and dispel them. The statement “humanity has started to bend the emissions curve” is wishful, and probably false: yes there has been a recent brutal decrease, caused by COVID, its strict (and useless, counterproductive) lockdowns, and a world recession.

BUT the reality is completely different, draconian, and very simple. The production of coal , oil and gas is at maximum, or close to it. And why not? The world population is still augmenting and more people want to enjoy energy. 84% of the world primary energy production is fossil fuels (and energy production is 72% of CO2 production).

Even Great Britain just opened a new coal mine (to make steel).

So the world economy will rebound with a vengeance, and that means more fossil fuel than ever. It’s not a few more wind mills and solar panels made in China which will change a thing. Amusingly, the graph of bending shows a dramatic inflection point, just ahead.

Aside from an asteroid strike, it’s hard to see what could cause a dramatic inflection in the emissions of CO2. It’s not as if a miraculous new energy source was around the corner. There is none. The pure electric solution (wind, solar, batteries) depends upon gigantic investments, around 5 trillion dollars a year, worldwide.

They compete for the same precious elements. Including polysilicon, 75% of which is made in China. It is not even clear that electric cars are a CO2 advantage at this point, when the whole life cycle of these cars is considered (they’re 700 kilograms heavier than average cars, causing accidents, require huge energy for production, burn fossil fuel electricity in California!)

As long as this lunacy persists, hard morrows to follow. China and Russia, correctly, do not bother to show up at the COP26 climate conference of the UN. China is, on the surface, the world’s top polluter. But that’s only appearance: in truth China produces massively for the US and Europe. So Chinese pollution is in great part Euro-American pollution physically translated to East Asia. And Russia is keeping Europe energetic. That’s a very polluting feat, as much of Russian production is in Siberia and the far north, in very energy demanding places…

So Europe and the USA are not very honest about the CO2 crisis and the climate calamity… And deliberately so, hence their dismissal by Russia and China. Morally speaking, it starts to look like the world upside down. The delusion continues. Meanwhile, we will need a lot of fossil fuels in the next decade, especially if we want to solve the CO2 crisis, because we have to Make Ecology Great Again (MEGA!), and that will require enormous investments, enormous Absolute Worth Energy (AWE)… except if somebody wants to organize a world war… Or another world lockdown, killing more people than it will save, as the ones we have been through just did….

Patrice Ayme

Progress From Prowess: Flying Boats Fear UFOs

Nowadays, some boats fly out of the ocean. And they fly faster than the first planes did, a bit more than a century ago. Foils located below the boats lift them out of the water, and that, in turn reduce friction considerably. Water is one thousand times denser than air. Kinetic energy is ½ mvv, so the energy imparted by an underwater foil, creating lift, will do so with a much smaller surface than a wing [1].  A drastic problem, though, is UFOs. Flying boats go really fast, they can cruise at twenty meters per second (seventy feet). When they encounter an Unidentified Floating Object, it doesn’t work too well. This problem should be fixed for a variety of reasons, from moral to technological, to economic, to, one should say, spiritual.

Technological progress is important: it is the essence of humanity and gave birth to it through a process of artificially natural self-selection. In particular present humanity, with 7.8 billion individuals, using the technologies it had to use to get to its present situation, has put spaceship Earth on an unsustainable course. 

There are two ways out of this: either a spectacular regression, through war, famine and collapse, or a spectacular progress into new technologies which will make our integration with the biosphere sustainable again. 

Around the World Record Holder: 40 days, 23 hours and 30 minutes. In 2017 [2]. It is presently equipped in 2020 with new foils which enables it to stand more outside of the ocean, just skim the water, and went already half way around the world in less than 20 days

The first around the world sailing record for circumnavigation of the world was the Basque Juan Sebastián Elcano and the remaining members of Ferdinand Magellan‘s crew who completed their journey in 1522…. After nearly three years of navigation (and only one ship left out of five; 35 circumnavigators survived out of an initial 270… Let it not be said that the global world we now enjoy was obtained cheaply. And as far as “colonialism” is concerned… Magellan died because it took part in a local war in the Philippines; the main aim of Magellan’s expedition was to prove one could circumnavigate, and thus obtain spices such as pepper and cloves from the Maluku Islands more cheaply…)

Sailing while flying from and out of water could be a technology of the future even for the most massive transport of goods and people. The technology uses computers, because electronics is faster than neurology. High flying kites dragging a boat could help too…

Trading goods is a global, essential activity that creates much of the world’s pollution as it is, and it is therefore essential to reduce said pollution, without killing trading (We trade your brawn against our brains!)

Some have whined that boats going at 25 meters per second through the ocean could collide with sea mammals, and fast sailing was, therefore, an unethical activity. Actually the problem of UFOs, unidentified Floating Objects is dramatic for flying sail boats. In the present Vendee Globe, several boats were damaged by impacts with UFOs, and had to hobble into port (not necessarily from damage to just the foils: the boats go so fast that they can be damaged anywhere). In early November a catamaran hit a UFO in the Atlantic, and capsized, killing the pilot (others below deck survived). Many of these UFOs are… containers dropped from giant cargo ships.

The impact on and with sea mammals could probably be reduced precisely because the foils make noise, from cavitation, the formation of bubbles, and should warn sea creatures. Maybe studies could be made to generate a clearer warning, or maybe collisions are mostly with man-made oceanic debris, and that, per se, should be an important object of study leading to diminution thereof. A French company is making devices which scan the sea ahead of the boats. Flying maxi trimarans have also to steer around icebergs (from satellite data), and growlers…(by looking out!) 

Other ships collide with sea creatures, but nobody cares as the ships are too large to be affected by the collisions. Hence the high speed collisions of flying maxi-trimarans with UFOs attract attention to this problem, which has been so far ignored. Efforts to avoid collisions, necessary for the maxi flying trimarans, and other flying boats, could then lead to reducing collisions and pollutants in the high seas, both laudable objectives. Thus sailboat flying is morally correct.

So let’s celebrate the efforts to fly on boats around the world in less than 40 days! Such efforts are not just technological and even scientific prowess, but also economic and moral prowess!

Meanwhile Elon Musk’s SpaceX flew its astounding Spaceship, SN8, eight of the name. It landed hard, from low pressure in the “header tank”… and exploded, but the test was nevertheless wildly successful. It demonstrated all sorts of capabilities, including aerosurfaces precision control and the ability to flip the huge vehicle upright just before landing. All this is key to the possibility to use rocketry in all sorts of ways, including going around the world in less than an hour… And we will take off from Mars, after fueling there, because it is apparently possible to make oxygen and methane on the Red Planet, from large quantities of briny water, therein. Why to go there? Will whine the losers… Why to go anywhere?

Some will whine that all these technological prowess, from SpaceX or French flying sailboats, is fundamentally inhuman. Far from it. It is those who condemn technological prowess as both exploit and solution, who have understood nothing to human nature, and are fundamentally inhuman.

Patrice Ayme

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[1] Why planes fly is not very clear(!) There are many effects to consider. Same thing for boats, thus flying boats have many types of foils/wings. 

My own guess is that what is most important is the deflection of energy, in which direction the 1/2mvv can be sent. That explains why under water foils can be so small: if just the Bernoulli Principle applied, foils would have to be as large as 1/1,000 as wings. Besides, the Bernoulli Principle, long considered, I think erroneously, as the main reason why the wings of planes provide lift, does not, cannot apply to sailboat foils; because water is not compressible… (Or, at least, not significantly so!)  , 

Actually the world record holder for going around the world, IDEC Sport, a pretty old boat from 2006, established its record in 2017. Then IDEC was fitted with new, more advanced foils, and immediately beat the record of Tea Route, Hong Kong to London. With its new foils, the main part of IDEC just skims on top of the water, it does not outright lift out of the water as more recent boats do. But that is obviously enough to reduce friction considerably. IDEC can cover more than a thousand miles in 24 hours.  

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2018/11/16/those-flying-boats-fight-the-co2-catastrophe/

No improved technology, no progress… What those who don’t want to go back to the Moon forget…

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[2] This boat changed names, not just technologies, a few times, as its (French) sponsors changed. It was known initially as Groupama 3, and had been made for a particular skipper, frank Cammas.

After two abortive attempts ending in 2008 and 2009, Groupama 3 finally took the Jules Verne Trophy in 2010 with a time of 48 days, 7 hours 44 minutes and 52 seconds. Ten years after her record-breaking Transatlantic dash, and now named Idec Sport, the boat again holds the Jules Verne Trophy after Francis Joyon and his crew took her non-stop around the world in 40 days 23 hours, 30 minutes and 30 seconds.

Rogue State Australia, Burned Alive For Its Greenhouse Ecocide

Can a democracy become rogue? It happened to the best. One of the reasons Athens lost her war with Sparta (financed by Persia) was that Athens behaved several times as a rogue state. Complete with holocausts of the innocent (Mylos).

Some states will profit from global heating due to man-made greenhouse gases: Canada, Russia, Scandinavian countries, and even the US, thanks to enormous Alaska (empty and soon to come with a temperate climate; I saw the changes by myself, and was amazed). 

Most states will see complex changes from the increasing greenhouse: one could even imagine Saudi Arabia becoming greener… 

However, in many states, disaster lays in wait: low lying islands will disappear; it may be impossible to make polders in Florida, as the ground is porous. Australia is, of course, a most threatened continent, due to its already dessicated state. But Australia was founded on the psychological principle of unbounded exploitation. As in many Anglo-Saxon colonizing countries, this had the advantage of exterminating the Natives. Around 3% of Australians are descendants of the Aborigines… whereas in neighboring French controlled New Caledonia, descendants of Natives are more than 50%… Australia massacred its Aborigines… for example down to the last in Tasmania… whereas France protected hers.)

As recently as the late Twentieth Century, the Australian government, according to the UN definition, committed genocide (by mass separating children from their Arborigine parents; Canada did the same, at the same time, showing it was an Anglo-Saxon trick).

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In the eyes of Australian exploiters, we are all Aborigines.

Australia fossil fuel export are a very large part of the CO2 problem. It’s mostly Australian plutocrats, not common people, who profited from those exports. Greenpeace activists trying to disrupt Australian Coal exports at Newcastle, Australia. Australia Is out to smother us all.

Australia is the world’s third biggest exporter and fifth biggest miner of fossil fuel in the world.

Common wisdom has it that Australia is responsible for only 1.2% of global emissions at home. However, the Australia Institute says it trails only Russia and Saudi Arabia in exporting fossil fuels.

When exports and what is burned at home in Australia to generate power, are combined, Australia ranks fifth behind China, the US, Russia and Saudi Arabia in responsibility for carbon dioxide from extractive fossil industries.

The findings of the report – that Australia plays a greater role in the climate crisis than usual global greenhouse accounting rules suggest – is not new. , but it goes further than some previous analyses in comparing exports emissions from different countries.

Australia on fire, January 2, 2020. The whole thing will burn down. Any questions?

Roughly the situation seems to be this: Australia, per capita, may emit as much as 25 tons of CO2 per person, per year… by comparison, the world average is 5 tons… And that’s exactly what France archives. In any case, at least 20 tons. 

Domestically, indeed, Australia is the 14th biggest emitter despite having just 0.3% of the global population. The continent country emits absolutely more greenhouse gas than 40 countries with bigger populations. Australian emissions have increased year-on-year since the abolition of a carbon price scheme in 2014.

However, once exports of fossil fuels extracted in Australia are accounted for, that already horrific number is multiplied. Looking at the numbers, it seems that, if domestic fossil fuel usage is 5, exports are 12. In other words, Australia’s per person contribution to the CO2 crisis would be at least 80 tons of CO2 per person, per year. By comparison, a Permanent UN Security Council member such as France, with the world’s third nuclear arsenal, essential to the defense of the West, contributes, per person, around only 7%, in CO2 emissions, of what Australia, with less than a third of the population of France, contributes!  

The fact Australia is poisoning us all, simply because Australian are submitted to their manipulative plutocrats, is a world SECURITY problem. It’s not just moral. The situation of wealthy fuel exporters with a diversified economy is different from say, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, or the UAE. Saudi Arabia has little choice (tourism?) Indonesia has also little choice. However, Canada, Australia, or Russia, or Norway, do NOT HAVE ANY EXCUSES. They are nasty, rogue states, and their citizens, when not aware of the problem, are part of the problem!

Australia is responsible for 7% of global fossil fuel exports as measured on their carbon dioxide conversion. Australia’s coal exports doubled between 2000 and 2015 and now make up 29% of the global coal trade. Liquefied natural gas exports tripled over the same timeframe to 6% of trade, and continue to increase. 

Australian leaders have boasted that their country has known of no recession in the last 30 years, or so. Right. But it was a Faustian bargain: they achieved this by selling their soul, and their fossil fuels, to the Devil (mostly China).

Patrice Ayme

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P/S: Observe that the perennation of the plutocratic spirit: plutocracy, Pluto-kratia, Evil-power, enabled Australia, as a state, to engage in holocaust against the Aborigines (not an exaggeration: 100% elimination of the Aborigines in Tasmania, a much better score than Hitler with the Jews). This satanic mindset extended up to the 1970s (separation of the children!) Now it has extended to the entire planet, we are all Aborigines being smothered, cooked and soon boiled by the Aussies.

Plutocracy, once established is not just an oligarchy, it’s the Dark Side fully empowered, and power is effect and main expression, thus it’s very persistent: states given to plutocracy can only be cured by greater power, that is, violent revolution.

Also notice this: present day Australians, whose ancestors recently arrived, can only be viewed as renters, momentary stewards of the land. They just don’t have the right to devastate, eliminate and exterminate the Great Barrier Reef, a victim not just of the Global Heating, but also of Australian intensive agriculture (those plutocrats again!).

Same as Australia didn’t have a right to exterminate the Aborigines, a crime against humanity…

“Bleak” Climate Catastrophe Better Than Non CO2-Wall Street Energy (Says Pluto!)

‘Bleak’ U.N. Report Finds World Heading to Climate Catastrophes

What the United Nations doesn’t say is that the fossil fuel plutocracy is entangled with the banking and investing (“Wall Street”) plutocracy: they hold the world, and they love their fossil fuel, CO2 machine, because it intrinsically concentrate power in a few hands.

Four years after countries struck a well-advertised deal in Paris to rein in greenhouse gas emissions in an effort to avert the worst effects of global heating, humanity is headed toward those very same climate catastrophes, according to a United Nations report issued 11/26/2019, with China and the United States, the two biggest polluters, having expanded their carbon footprints last year.

“The summary findings are bleak,” the report said: countries have failed to halt the rise of greenhouse gas emissions even after repeated warnings from scientists. The result, the authors added, is that “deeper and faster cuts are now required.”

Fat chance. Obviously, nuclear war is a more palatable option, according to most SUV drivers and jet-setting tourists…

The hellish energy system we use presently is used because the plutocrats in power get more power that way. And because We The Sheeple addicted to Pluto media, doesn’t know that another way was feasible, even 30 years ago.

Because CO2 Was Not Enough, We Added Mercury:

Next to San Francisco, coastal mountain lions can have lethal levels of mercury in their blood. How? Mercury rises, in a bio-absorbable form, in the coastal upwelling, and is condensed by the fog. This mercury is dropped in the ocean from smoke of coal generation, a world away. 

The rise in CO2 is brutal, most of it goes into the oceans, where it turns into carbonic acid, which kills plankton. As LIPs, Large Igneous Provinces, can do, massive CO2 production can kill oceans, collapsing food chains, worldwide, and killing oxygen production. Then, in combination with rising temperatures, massive oxydation all over (for example of permafrost and other half decomposed biomass ready to burn in tropical area), the oxygen content of the atmosphere could actually collapse. This is probably how the enormous mass extinction between Permian and Trias proceeded (form the eruption of the Siberian Traps).

We are engineering such an extinction now. When taking all the other man-made greenhouse gases in consideration, as we must, we are not far from 500 ppm of CO2 equivalent greenhouse gases, a level not seen in dozens of millions of years. We are rising the CO2 at such a rate, that planetary heating is lagging, giving us a fake sense of non-emergency.

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The Road Not Taken Nuclear and H2:

Seas will rise by 20 meters, guaranteed. It could happen in decades.  This can be mitigated only by massive deployment of new safe nuclear and hydrogen (and its derivatives: ammonia, methanol) for massive green energy storage, transportation [1].  

Contrarily to what fake pseudo-ecologists have led us to believe, nuclear energy can be made perfectly safe: most reactors still deployed use 1950s technology made to maximize plutonium production. Plutonium free nuclear energy (for example from Thorium) is feasible, and could have been long massively deployed, if the effort to do so had been accomplished [2].

4,000 fourth generation, or Thorium nuclear reactors could produce all of the world’s electricity, and plenty enough “green” hydrogen to operate hydrogen trains, hydrogen ships, etc.

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Wealthy Countries Exporting Fossil Fuels Are Criminal. Why No Thorium?

Countries such as Norway and Canada or the USA, which geared their economies towards fossil fuel exports, while they could do something else, should be condemned, ostracized, vilified, etc. Them and their accomplice citizenry. (That Arabia or Indonesia, or Venezuela export oil is one thing: they have no choice to be part of the world economy; they should be encouraged to convert to green energy). Norway has actually gigantic reserves of Thorium, orders of magnitude above its fossil fuel reserves; it’s also one of the world’s wealthiest countries, per capita. The UN should order Norway to finance Thorium reactor research….  

In a further act of fossil fuel-Wall Street friendly malice, US presidential Sanders has dropped a fossil fuel tax from his government program. No time, he says. Well, that’s stupid, not to say venal. Fossil fuels have giant subsidies and kill of the order of ten million people a year (according to the WHO). A carbon tax would implicitly contain a no-subsidy provision… 

In this disaster, many noisy ecologists and scientists are actually working against their official position. For example, they would view my discourse as panicky. But I am the reasonable one, and they are the ignorant trying desperately to please the authorities while only mildly disagreeing with them (but for a few exceptions).

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Land To Go Under, Oxygen To Falter… What could go wrong?

Surely, they say, we won’t run out of oxygen. Hey, it never happened before. Well, that’s not true: it did happen before, but there were no monkeys around. Surely, they say, seas won’t go up twenty meters. But it did happen before, and not so long ago. In the Jurassic, seas were 70 meters higher.

More than three million years ago, in the mid-Pliocene era, before the apparition of the genus Homo, the planet’s mean surface temperature was between 2°C and 3.5°C higher than pre-industrial levels while the atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration was about 400 parts per million [3] – a figure we have already surpassed as greenhouse gas emissions continue rising.

New methods of analysing marine geological sediments to construct a global sea-level record have brought ominous news in 2019: the West Antarctic ice shield melted around 450K BP… under an “atmospheric forcing” milder than what we are already experiencing now (it was around 400 ppm CO2). And the rain of ominous news is getting worse. 

A study by recent PhD, Dr Georgia Grant from New Zealand, confirms that one third of Antarctica’s ice sheets melted during the Pliocene era (she has advisers older than her). Thus seas rose up to 25 metres above today’s level. The era experienced sea level fluctuations between 5 and 25 meters above the present, with an average of 13 metres.

My own opinion, long published, is that the two giant basins of East Antarctica Wilkes and Aurora, may also collapse soon. The scenario is clear: the mouths of said basins is at polar circle latitude. Once warm water sneaks below,collapse could be a matter of decades, even years; By themselves, they would rise seas by more than 15 meters… All real estate less than 30 meter high should be sold. Of course, few serious people would believe this… because they are uninformed fools, and they bleat: didn’t happen before…

Yes, it did: go watch the Jurassic. Maybe in a theater near you, oh simple minds… The Jurassic was the Jurassic because of high seas, high CO2, high temperatures. There may have been a little glacier up high somewhere on the high mountains in Antarctica.

Antarctica Friis Hills. Yes, Antarctica will melt. Completely. Soon. Brace for impact. Present mathematical predictions pertaining to the human impact on climate are purely linear. Reality is generally linear only in first approximation; reality in full tends to be nonlinear (yes, I use the same meta argument in the foundations of Quantum Physics)

Ninety (90) percent of the heat from global warming to date has gone into the ocean, and much of it into the Southern Ocean which bathes the Antarctic ice sheet. Said sheet has been protected by a curtain of freezing cold water. Soon it will fray. At least one third of Antarctica’s ice sheet, and perhaps as much as half—equivalent to up to 20 metres sea-level rise—sits below sea-level and is vulnerable to widespread and catastrophic collapse from ocean heating. Consider the map in:

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2016/04/01/runaway-antarctica/ 

… and look carefully how much of Antarctica is underwater. Much of it, it turns out is already covered with lakes (below the ice!)

Much of Antarctica melted in the past when atmospheric carbon dioxide levels were 400 ppm… And, as I said above, we are not at 400 ppm… We are already at 500 ppm. 

(OK, right, I am exaggerating, we will reach 466 ppm, all greenhouse gases forcing in 2020… Extrapolating slightly from: https://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/indicators/atmospheric-greenhouse-gas-concentrations-6/assessment)

As I said, long ago, more than a decade ago, a rise of two degrees Centigrade is too much, because it will trigger massive polar melting:

2 DEGREE CELSIUS RISE IS TOO MUCH!

I have explained the problem in detail… it is a nonlinear story.

Some will scoff. They have linear minds, and live to please the establishment. Typically they live in universities to please The Man, Pluto.

OK, right now, hundreds of people have been shot in Iran, secretly, and 200 have been hanged, even more secretly (I just talked to an Iranian friend who escaped Iran… yesterday. Nov 25, 2019…). Ah, and also 13 French soldiers died in desiccating Mali, yesterday: the French Republic is fighting the savage Islamists, rendered mad by the greenhouse, in places I used to know. Two helicopters apparently collided, during combat…  

When the greenhouse heating has become a daily catastrophe juggernaut, expect more of the same lethal fighting of man against man, and, if we are not careful, with nukes. Even Trump has to get used to the idea: all well considered, after all, the US is also back fighting in Syria (where the French are also engaged in combat against the Islamists…).

As the rats destroy their cage, as humans destroy their planet, they will fight each other. 

Patrice Ayme

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[1] Thorium reactors were made to work inside labs in the 1960s. To deploy them in a massive energy production program would have required a much less great effort than the Manhattan project (first, because we know they can be made). It’s a question of knowing what sorts of pipes to use, etc: tech details… Thorium produces little and not long lasting nuclear waste.

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[2] Once we have enormous thermonuclear reactors, to mechanically extract the CO2 from the atmosphere, we will be able to stabilize the heating of the planet to a Jurassic state, by lowering the CO2 ppm. 

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[3] The lowering of temperatures is associated to the rise of Homo. We don’t know if that’s causal, but a reasoning is easily done: lowering temps opened giant parts of the Earth to the sort of savannah park favorable to humans (by opposition to tropical forests)… In particular in Eurasia, augmenting enormously the niche favorable to the social killer ape.

How To Remove CO2 From the Atmosphere: Water Volcanic, Calcium & Magnesium Desertic Tropical Ranges. Contemplate Indonesia!

DID INDONESIA CAUSE THE LAST THREE MILLION YEARS OF GLACIATION? SOLVING THE CO2 CATASTROPHE BY ACTIVE, FEASIBLE REMOVAL:

In the last 500 million years, three-quarters of the time or so, the planet enjoyed a hot, Jurassic style climate. It was not the case during the evolution of the genus Homo, one characteristic of which is the ability to endure cold and even subpolar climate. Enormous glaciations then rolled in, one after the other. What happened? Well, the mystery has now been unveiled.

This is not just a curiosity. Indeed, said discovery provides us with a solution to the CO2 catastrophe: just water dry tropical volcanic ranges and similar areas with plenty of calcium and magnesium, and the CO2 will be removed, stabilizing the atmosphere. Watering those particular mineral areas provides with a believable mechanism to decrease CO2 when enormous amounts of cheap clean energy is available… in a generation or two. (This is the first plausible mechanism ever suggested to do so!)

***

Sacred mountain of Zoroastrianism, the major historical religion of civilization, Mount Damavand is the highest point in Iran higher than the Alps or even the Caucasus. It is an active volcano in full sight of gigantic Teheran. The gas and fumaroles on top was a problem when I circled the crater. This is the northern side, facing the Caspian sea, a lush area. Other sides are extremely dry, and I propose to water them. That of course would require gigantic, power-hungry engineering beyond the capability of present civilization.

Global climate change around 3–4 Million years ago influenced the evolution of hominids, via the aridification of Africa, and what happened next, the Pleistocene glaciation about 2.75 Myr ago… thereafter the Earth’s climate suffered rolling glaciations… while human species evolved ever faster.

Most explanations of these climatic events used to involve changes in circulation of the North Atlantic Ocean due to the closing of the Isthmus of Panama. The idea is that a strong current of warm water was going north from the Pacific, joining, and augmenting the Gulf Stream, thus preventing any ice to form in the Arctic. With no ice in the Arctic, the albedo of Earth was significantly lower, thus all these infrared, instead of being sent back to space by reflecting snows, were trapped in the Arctic. A warm Arctic brought temperatures up, overall.

However, the closure of the Indonesian seaway 3–4 Myr ago could also be responsible for these climate changes: it acts similarly to the contemporaneous Panama closing (but as we will see, Indonesia does more than Panama). Closing the Indonesian seaway brought the aridification of Eastern Africa. The simplest theory and results from ocean circulation modelling show that the displacement of mighty New Guinea, about 5 Myr ago, at 100 kilometers per million years, going north, and west, closed the seaway. (But not just that, as we will see.)

That would have switched the source of flow through Indonesia—from warm South Pacific to relatively cold North Pacific waters (all waters below 100 meters are now blocked by narrow, shallow straights inside the Indonesian archipelago). This blockage would have decreased sea surface temperatures in the Indian Ocean, leading to reduced rainfall over Eastern Africa. Changes in the equatorial Western Pacific, by making heat stagnate there, probably reduced atmospheric heat transport from the tropics to higher latitudes, stimulating global cooling around the poles, and the eventual growth of ice sheets., which, in turn, cooled the planet further!

All of a sudden, shallow waters all over! The right side, the gigantic island of New Guinea, moved north, but also west, at 100 kilometers per million years, strangling the Indonesian seaway, starting 5 millions years ago (coincident with the same in Mesoamerica) This blocked the Earth’s warmest waters to enter the Indian ocean.

But there is another way in which Indonesia enters the climatic picture: CO2 removal by chemical reaction with basaltic rocks. This happened because the tectonic collisions caused the rise of high mountains, hence intense weathering.

***.

Basalt Make CO2 Into Rock:

Basalt generally has a composition of 45–55 % SiO2, 2–6 wt% total alkalis, 0.5–2.0% TiO2, 5–14 wt% FeO and 14% or more Al2O3. Contents of CaO are commonly near 10%, those of MgO commonly in the range 5 to 12%.

Limestone is a sedimentary rock which is often composed of the skeletal fragments of marine organisms such as coral, foraminifera and molluscs. Its major materials are the minerals calcite and aragonite, which are different crystal forms of calcium carbonate (CaCO3).

Immediate conclusion: if one adds CO2 to basalt, one should be able to make limestone. Indeed:

When CO2 is in presence of water, it reacts and makes carbonic acid. Putting lots of CO2 into water makes a Seltzer water which is acidic enough to destroy basalt. The low pH water (3.2) worked to dissolve the calcium and magnesium ions in the basalts, which then reacted with the carbon dioxide to make calcium and magnesium carbonates (which are whitish). Cores drilled into experimental sites in basalt showed rock with the tell-tale white carbonates occupying the pore spaces. Roughly it seems that 100 kilograms of basalt turned 50 kilograms of CO2 into rock. So far so good… One could locate power plants on top of basalt flows? Probably not: the process costs of the order of $17 a ton… That would augment the cost of burning oil by 20% (back of envelope computation in my head)… One has to understand the cheapest energy is already photovoltaic energy… In 2018…

Researchers tagged the CO2 they injected in basalt, 600 meters down, with carbon-14, a radioactive form of carbon. None of the injected CO2 was leaking back to the surface or finding its way out through a distant watercourse, as no radioactivity came out: the capture of CO2 by basalt is highly efficient.

***

Indonesia is sucking CO2 out of the atmosphere:

Many mountains in Indonesia and New Guinea consist of ancient volcanic rocks from belching volcanoes caused by subduction of various tectonic plates. When ocean floors were caught in a colossal tectonic collision between a chain of island volcanoes and a continent, those volcanic  rocks were thrust high. Lashed by warm tropical, acidic, corrosive, penetrating rains, these basaltic rocks react with CO2 sequestering the product inside the basalt. That is why, with only 2% of the world’s land area, Indonesia accounts for 10% of its long-term CO2 absorption. Its mountains could explain why massive ice sheets have persisted, waxing and waning, for several million years: evidence shows that the normal state of the planet in the last half a billion years, is a hothouse, with crocodiles all the way to the north of Greenland…

Researchers claim to have found that such tropical mountain-building collisions in wet areas coincide with nearly all of the half-dozen or so significant glacial periods in the past 500 million years. “These types of environments, through time, are what sets the global climate,” said Francis Macdonald, a geologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in Washington, D.C. (December 2018). If Earth’s CO2 has a machine producing it, the rise of mountains like Indonesia’s could be it.

Long-term changes in the planet’s temperature are governed by shifts in CO2 atmospheric density. Plate tectonics refurbishes continually the planet’s surface. For decades, scientists have debated what turned the CO2 on, to the dramatic extent it did. Volcanoes were long prime suspects. Volcanoes erupt where plates dive beneath one another. By spewing carbon from Earth’s interior, they could turn up the thermostat. That was the idea. But it’s a bit stupid: CO2 was in atmosphere, gets captured by rocks, sediments, gets buried, and then belched out: it sounds like a rather quick (on a geological scale) zero sum game: what comes in comes right out…

Rock weathering of massive mountain ranges, seems a smarter approach: it depends on mountain building driven by plate tectonics. Indeed, sometimes there are giant mountain ranges, as big, or bigger than the present Himalayas. Sometimes, most often, not: as observed, the planet is a hot-house ¾ of the time, just as there are no massive wet tropical ranges, most of the time.

The Hercynian range, which spans the Appalachians, Scotland, and countless ranges in Europe, is still here for all to see (started 480 millions ago, it became Himalayan like when Africa collided with North America as part of the construction of Pangea).

When tropical mountains contain seafloor rocks rich in calcium and magnesium, they react with CO2 dissolved in rainwater to form limestone, which is eventually buried on the ocean floor. Both processes matter in removing CO2 from the atmosphere, This also explains why there were gigantic amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere in the Carboniferous era, and they mysteriously vanished: they are in all these rocks, such as all these limestone ranges….

Having the right rocks to drive the CO2-chewing reaction is not sufficient. Climate matters, as I said. For example, the Siberian Traps, a region that saw devastating volcanic eruptions 252 million years ago, are rich in such rocks but absorb little CO2: it’s too damn cold, the chemistry doesn’t happen much because of the cold (details aren’t clear yet).

More clearly, in Arabia, one finds plenty of heat and volcanic rocks, but the solvent, water, is absent: CO2 rains down as carbonic acid after reacting with water… But only then. So… If could make it rain in Arabia, we could eliminate massive amounts of CO2. @,lacks another ingredient. “It’s hotter than Hades but it doesn’t rain.” Indonesia’s location in the rainy tropics is just right. “That is probably what’s keeping us centered in an ice age,” Kent adds.

***

The Preceding Suggests THE Viable, Sustainable and Definitive Remedy to the CO2 catastrophe:

Lots of cockmaniacal plans have been proposed to mitigate the CO2 catastrophe (Harvard, the Pluto university, is going to try to throw a veil on the atmosphere… although that won’t solve the CO2 problem, but trust the nasty to come up with nastier…)

Some of mitigation of CO2 will happen naturally: as, and if, the Siberian Traps become tropical, and if it rains there much, CO2 will be removed from the atmosphere. More generally, as the entire planet warms, it moistens up, and all volcanic zones of the planet become CO2 absorbing: this is a natural way to prevent CO2 from raising so much the planet boils.

Practically, if one finally masters thermonuclear power, and, or, photovoltaic energy becomes super cheap, one could make it rain artificially (or massively water) dry tropical volcanic rock areas (such as Arabia, Iran). Thus one would remove enormous quantities of CO2 from the atmosphere. That will have to be done by 2100, just to stabilize the climate in the standard hothouse, the Jurassic mode ( what Trump calls a “super climate”), with sea level ten meters higher and crocodiles in Newfoundland…

Over the past few years, academic Macdonald and his collaborators have searched for other times when tectonics and climate could have conspired to open an Indonesia-size CO2 sink. They found that glacial conditions 90 million and 50 million years ago lined up neatly with the collisions of a chain of island volcanoes in the now-vanished equatorial Neo-Tethys Ocean with the African and Asian continents. A similar collision some 460 million years ago started to form the Appalachians, but it was thought to have taken place in the subtropics, where a drier climate (from trade winds) does not favor weathering. By reanalyzing ancient magnetic fields in rocks formed in the collision, Macdonald’s team found the mountains actually rose deep in the tropics. And their uplift matched a 2-million-year-long glaciation. “They’re developing a pretty compelling story that this was a climate driver in Earth’s past,” says Lee Kump, a paleoclimatologist at Pennsylvania State University in University Park.

Those cases are not exceptions. Indeed, the team compiled a database of every tectonic “suture”—the linear features left by tectonic collisions—known to contain ophiolites, characteristic pieces of sea floor, and pillow lavas and the like, volcanic sea floor, over the past half-billion years. Based on magnetism in each suture’s rocks and a model of continental drift, they mapped their ancient latitudes to see which formed in the warm and rainy tropics, and when. “We were surprised that this is not as complicated as we thought,” Macdonald said.

The team compared the results to records of past glaciations and found a strong correlation. They also looked for declines in volcanism, which might have cooled the climate (from lessening of CO2 emissions). But their influence was much weaker, Macdonald said.

A recent study challenges the mountain CO2 weathering-thermostat notion with evidence for the importance of volcanoes (as I said, it has to be rather a zero sum, when considering volcanoes from subduction, because what goes in comes pretty fast out!) The study used ages from thousands of zircons, durable crystals that can indicate volcanic activity, to show that upticks in volcanic emissions were the dominant force driving the planet’s warm periods. But there are two types of volcanisms: what I call “core volcanism” (“Traps”, Large Igneous Provinces, LIPs) brings in massive amounts of fresh CO2 from way down inside the mantle… It’s likely both streams of ideas have at least one hand on the truth.

The beauty of absorption by volcanic rocks of CO2 is that it explains not just why glaciations start, but also why they stop.

A hothouse Earth appears to be the planet’s default state, prevailing for three-fourths of the past 500 million years. We will have it again by 2100: the dice are thrown, it’s in the air.

An Indonesia-style collision may push the global climate into a glacial period, but only for a while. Mountains erode and continents drift. And the planet warms again.

Science doesn’t just bring understanding, it brings also the means to act on the universe. Now we have the trick to reduce CO2… (And I am, by the way, the first to propose it: massive watering of the desiccated zones!) To give us the means, we have to keep on deploying photovoltaic energy and thermonuclear reactors (I say “deploying”, because there is plenty of evidence that a massive thermonuclear reactor could work: the bigger, the more efficient, it’s a matter of mass against surface).

The alternative to the solution to the CO2 catastrophe by weathering and geological chemistry is a CO2 driven holocaust. Developing science and technology is not just profitable, pleasant, and human. It is also the moral thing to do. And the only moral solution to CO2 there is.

Patrice Ayme

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P/S: By public request, a partial list of references supporting the research above:

References: Closing of the Indonesian seaway as a precursor to east African aridification around 3–4 million years ago
Mark A. Cane & Peter Molnar
Nature volume 411, pages 157–162 (10 May 2001)

Swanson-Hysell, N.L. and Macdonald, F.A., 2017. Tropical weathering of the Taconic orogeny as a driver for Ordovician cooling, Geology, G38985. 1.

(That was 440 million years ago, and the continents looked nothing like now; only Siberia is recognizable… It was a free floating continent…)

Tropical uplift may set Earth’s thermostat
Paul Voosen
Science 04 Jan 2019:

For scary, or when Antarctica partially melted under similar conditions to what we are going to get within a decade:

Antarctic ice melt 125,000 years ago offers warning
Paul Voosen
Science 21 Dec 2018:

 

CLIMATE CHANGES: CO2, Islam, & The Eternal Return Of Fascism

Another day, another Islamist attack in France. This was “Islam de France“, as it is among all too many youth. The two (French) Islamist “martyrs” were shot dead by the BRI (Brigade d’Intervention Rapide). Armed with knives and a gun they took hostage several parishioners in a church. The 86 year old priest was made to kneel before his throat was cut. Several other elderly persons were cut. The Islamist “martyrs” were so busy filming their “heroic” deeds, that a nun was able to escape discreetly, and alerted the police. As with the latest attack in Bavaria at a music concert two days ago, the Islamist pseudo-state ISIS claimed it set it up. The area, in rural Normandy, is known as one of the most Islamized places in France, thanks to a Salafist mosque (which, if one followed Israeli methods, would have been dynamited long ago!)

No wonder Donald Trump wants “extreme vetting” of French visa applicants.

Yes, I know, it’s dreary. Yes I know, among the looming threats gathering out there, Islamism is the silliest fanatical cretinism on steroids. However, Islamism is dreadful enough to cause great dislocation, and lack of focus on the real problems. After all, it was the (de facto) pro-Islamist mood which Kanzler Merkel organized, all by herself. The reaction to this pro-Islam mood, in turn, broke the European Union’s back with Brexit (I watch plenty of German TV, and I was aghast with the let’s-embrace-Islam mood the Merkel-led authorities promoted rashly, with their naive approach… Admitting refugees (which I am for) is one thing, welcoming the mood of the religion which has caused the refugee crisis is something else: it is in an absolute contradiction).

Want to see a real threat? Something really hot and hard? Here it is, spiking up, as I said it would, so long ago: 

Climate Changes: CO2, Islam, & The Eternal Return Of Fascism. Temperature In 2016 Is Exceeding All Expectations Scientists Who Are Paid To Sound Nice Officially Expected.

[Image source: Dr. Stephan Rahmstorf. Data source: NASA GISS. Data 1880 CE to April 2016.]

What is the reason for this sharp spike? Fundamentally the global rise in temperature is driven by the man-made GreenHouse Gases (GHG: CO2, CH4, NOx, ClFs, etc.). The GHGs block infrared radiation more than normal air does, trapping heat in the biosphere. This “climate forcing” warms up the lower atmosphere (and cools the irrelevant stratosphere!) The GHG density is increasing at a steady pace from human industry. But the resulting warming, and thus the GHG emissions have clearly now started to self feed. (How do we know this? From the divergence of the graphs. More on this another day.)

What of the change of mental climate Islam brings? Is it benevolent as the proselytizers of Islam claim, a “religion of peace”? Or do we need to read what is really going on, and find out why 18 year olds with criminals pasts, and no education to speak of, know Islam way better that judicial and legislating authorities in the West claim to?

Those who fight for Islam get “special reward”:

Quran (4:95) – “Not equal are those believers who sit (at home) and receive no hurt, and those who strive and fight in the cause of Allah with their goods and their persons. Allah hath granted a grade higher to those who strive and fight with their goods and persons than to those who sit (at home). Unto all (in Faith) Hath Allah promised good: But those who strive and fight Hath He distinguished above those who sit (at home) by a special reward.”

Those who don’t help God, go to hell:

Quran (9:39) – “If ye go not forth God will afflict you with a painful doom…”

When fighting the unbelievers, God hates a coward and throws him to hell:

Quran (8:15-16) – “O ye who believe! when ye meet the Unbelievers in hostile array, never turn your backs to them. If any do turn his back to them on such a day – unless it be in a stratagem of war, or to retreat to a troop (of his own)- he draws on himself the wrath of Allah, and his abode is Hell,- an evil refuge (indeed)!”

Those who die, fighting for God, go to paradise:

Quran (3:169-170) – “Think not of those who are slain in Allah’s way as dead. Nay, they live, finding their sustenance in the presence of their Lord; They rejoice in the bounty provided by Allah: And with regard to those left behind, who have not yet joined them (in their bliss), the (Martyrs) glory in the fact that on them is no fear, nor have they (cause to) grieve.”

As usual, the preceding is confirmed, and amplified, in numerous parts of the Hadith and the Sira:

Muslim (20:4678) – It has been reported on the authority of Jabir that a man said: “Messenger of Allah, where shall I be if I am killed?” He replied: “In Paradise.” The man threw away the dates he had in his hand and fought until he was killed (i. e. he did not wait until he could finish the dates).

Abu Dawud (14:2515) – I asked the Prophet (Peace Be Upon Him): Who are in Paradise? He replied: “Prophets are in Paradise, martyrs are in Paradise.”

If you are young, depressed, and believe in the preceding, and surrounded with what preachers and sacred texts tell you are unbelievers who deserve to die, what would you do? The answer is all too obvious.

I was watching a top, senior, just retired, French judge,  and she calmly pontificated that youth who committed assassinations of unbelievers in the name of Islam perverted Islam. Well, if you read Islamist sacred texts, you can judge the judge. I judge that judges like that, who pontificate that fanatical Jihadists “pervert Islam”  are themselves perverse idiots and could well be viewed to be a deeper source of terrorism than the youth who commits such assassinations, to start with. Yes, some will say I am out-Trumping Trump. But think about it: the white judge just claim that Islam, Literal Islam, is perfect, and youth was perverse. OK, then the judges say that the quotes above are perfect, while accusing those who act on them of what, exactly?

Another angle on the same problem: imagine that a youthful would-be assassin confronts a judge. The judge tells the youth to be less perverse and to follow Islam more closely? In the case of the assassination of the priest this happened precisely with one of the two 19-year-old Islamist assassin: the youth opined that he would be a better Muslim, follow the Qur’an better. So he was judged mature enough by a lady judge to be freed from jail, where he had been for eight months after being arrested in Turkey for trying to slip into Syria.

The climate in the West has been that Islam was good, whereas poor youth was bad, uneducated, not worth of correct schooling and employment. Verily, the truth is the other way around: Islam has been good for plutocracy, and orienting, actively or indirectly, youth towards Islam, Literal, Wahhabist, Salafist Islam, a perversion.

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When Climate Changes, Species Go, And Smarter Ones Thrive:

Dinosaurs, pterosaurs, mesosaurs, plesiosaurs, and the like were all what some now call “mesotherms”: their temperature was in-between. They depended too much upon the balmy Jurassic and then Cretaceous climate to insure their own temperature. When the climate cooled, they faltered, and then disappeared. Whereas the hot “endotherms” (self-warm), mammals and birds, thrived.

A change of climate changes which species thrive, or even exist. It is the same with ruling systems of ideas, such as religions, and the mental climates they bring.

Islam created a wonderful climate among desert nomads. Prior to it, Arabs were at each others’ throats, and killed girls to limit the population explosion. Meanwhile, the Arabs were fully exposed, and frustrated, by the great civilizations swirling around them: Ethiopian, Yemenite, Egyptian, Zoroastrian, and then the formidable Greco-Roman civilization, and its partial descendant, the Persian Sassanid empire. However, soon after 605 CE things changed: a formidable war between Sassanids (Zoroastrian Persians) and “Rome”, turned suddenly to Persia’s advantage (the Persian Shah In Shah was all the bolder as the Romans had put him back on his throne earlier: a case of back-stabbing).

It is a long story, and I want to tell it (but will have to do so some other time). It is a matter of climate. In more ways than one.

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Mental Climate Catastrophes Brought Islam:

To understand the change of species which Islam brought, one has to understand the anti-intellectual climate which brought a deep mental freeze in “Rome” (Constantinople), and the influence the resulting refugee crisis of fleeing Roman intellectuals had in Persia. Then a terrible storm arose: an all-out war between Constantinople and Persia, of an extraordinary violence, back and forth, like a tsunami going one way, and then the other.

Thanks to a crazed out Persian emperor, Persia made the greatest invasion of the Mediterranean basin in 1,000 years, even conquering all the way to Libya, something it had never done before. By 622 CE, the situation was so desperate, that emperor Heraclius thought of evacuating the Roman capital to Carthage. Just when the enormous reforms he had made back to a citizen army and other reconstitution of ancient Greco-Roman traditions, changed the climate completely in the Roman empire. That change of mood mobilized the population, and enabled to reverse the military tide.

***

Why Islam Swept All:

Islam is a war religion. As simple as that. It went much further that way that Roman Catholic Orthodox had (= Christianism imposed by the Roman state, now headed from Constantinople and Milan). Christianism celebrated a “Lord” mimicking Constantine’s behavior. That included the summary execution of the son… and Verses of the Sword:  Luke 19; 27 is unambiguous. The mythic Jesus Christ supposedly said:

“But as for these enemies of mine, who did not want me to reign over them, bring them here and slaughter them before me.”

It could not be any clearer. A total negation of the state of law. A proclamation of human sacrifice. Yes, when thinking of religion, remember this: human sacrifice is about having a religious reason for killing others.

“Religious” means non-legal. “Legal” does not just mean legal in the Roman sense, but legal in the ethological sense.

Hence the imposition of (fascist, mono-dictatorial, lethal, jealous, imperious) Christianism, between Roman emperors Constantine and Theodosius (both initially generals, reigning absolutely on the entire empire) changed the climate completely. Instead of having a state of law, one passed to a state of caprice of the emperor, sultan, prophet or caliph at the head. Or, as Constantine modestly depicted himself “thirteenth apostle”.

This anti-intellectual climate appeared just when a greater intellectual activity was called for. This is what generally happens, it’s no accident.

Meanwhile, to the south-east, the Arabs saw all of this. They saw the Persians invade Yemen and seize Aden. They saw Rome nearly collapse, and, while Muhammad was fighting Mecca from Yathrib (= Medina), from 622 Ce to 630 CE, he saw the fabulous Roman counter-attack, and Persia collapse in coups, civil wars, queens reigning for a year or two, top generals assassinated…

The Roman nadir was in 622 CE. In 630 CE, Muhammad was religious dictator of Mecca. As a prophet, he could re-organize the Qur’an, and he did. Exit the kind, loving and tolerant Islam. However, quite a bit of the Meccan religious arsenal was preserved, including perhaps the Satanic Verses, and certainly the Moon as a symbol, Mecca as a religious center, complete with meteorite and recycled Kabaa.

So Muhammad changed the climate, but not too much where not needed. Instead he led a crusade of united warriors to the north, to attack the Romans (who smirked and avoided contact, as they had just concluded peace with the Sassanid Persians, reconstituting the old borders… and had decided to spurn Monophysite Arabs).

Kill or fight the enemy, go to paradise? What better mental climate to impose an empire?

What is sure is that, if we don’t kill the CO2 rise pretty soon, the notion of paradise will change. And that this Literal Islam, Salafism, Wahhabism, Wall Street compatible Islam, thing is an un-amusing distraction.

***

Nothing new under the sun; civilizations can die quickly:

1,500 years ago, or so, the mighty Moche civilization, along the coast of Peru knew a drought and a super El Nino (certainly amplified by natural climate change, probably of volcanic origin).

The Moche survived initially, but their religion became all-consuming (full of human sacrifices and pyramids). It is the usual reaction: when a society gets stressed, it reacts as a baboon troop: everybody of one mind, behind the chief (right now Trump).

In a civilization, if more than one fascist movement appear (say the Communists at the same time as the Nazis, as in Germany in the 1920s; or Syria now), civil strife ensues. This is what happened to the Moche, and in such a violent manner, that the civilization collapsed.

Something similar, a super drought in the Seventh Century, accompanied by civil war and ecological devastation, nearly eradicated the Mayan civilization, thereafter a shadow of its former self (until the Spaniards showed up, 6 centuries later).

***

“Hydraulic Dictatorships” And, Or Fascist Over-Reaction?

The basic problem of the zone where Islam festers, has been ecological. A massive, epochal drought, tied to the interglacial cycle, started more than 6,000 years ago, triggering the Egyptian civilization. The drought forced the Egyptians to get along with agriculture, in a very long and narrow valley, and vast associated oases, where hydraulic was crucial. Fernand Braudel rightly introduced the notion of “Hydraulic Dictatorship”. And the reasoning is obvious: big hydraulics means big society, armies of workers, relative wealth, hence big army to protect the whole thing, etc. So I supported that reasoning (which I had developed on my own). However, I am starting to have second thoughts: after all, many Western societies, including some Greek city-states, and Rome for much of her history, and the various regimes which descended from the Franks/French, including England, did not fall into the same pattern (nor did Egypt, mostly, for that matter).

After all, the entire region was long the richest in the world, where many Neolithic and civilization basic techniques were discovered, invented and blossomed. And the climate got desperately dry 6,000 years ago, when the deserts became basically uninhabitable. Still, the area was at the very forefront of civilization until the massive Celto-Greco-Roman (“The West”) took over, starting 23 centuries ago. Some of the degeneracy occurred before Islam, or even just before the Hellenistic civilization of the Trojan War took off. However Babylonians and later, the Achaemenid empire still made civilizational innovations. And yet the fact the Achaemenids’ greatness depended mostly upon one man, Darius The Great a sort of Zoroastrian Muhammad, with more brains, experience and statesmanship, reveals the truth: the Middle Earth had become way too fascist already 3,000 years ago, used as it was, by then, upon depending on just one individual. A climate of intellectual fascism had come to rule. (It’s no coincidence that the monotheism of Abrahamism, blind obedience to the Lord, mauling all and any human decency, came to fester there.)

So what could be going on? The mental climate may have over-reacted to the increasingly desertic situation. A climate of intellectual fascism had come to rule, and rightly so. Yet, in my view, there was an overshooting of the fascist mood. A bit like an immune system over-reacts, and a lethal auto-immune disease develops. True, strong government were needed, associated to strong religions, such as Judaism, and Constantine’s “Catholicism”. A bit of the Dark Side is often necessary. But Islam ended changing the mental climate way too far to the Dark Side (contemplate the quotes above).

Political and intellectual fascism can self feed, through religious effect (= the madness of the crowds), similarly to the self-feeding of the climate we are witnessing now (the ever crazier ending of the Nazi regime is a case in point! The more desperate the military situation was getting, the more insanely lethal the Nazis became, including against their own ilk!) Thus, as fascism arises from bad situations, as a healthy, and most effective defense reflex, it can bring in an even worse situation, through its own actions, which, in turn, ask for even more fascist action. Just as, the higher the temperature, the more methane and carbon dioxide released, hence more greenhouse, more temperature, thus more methane and carbon dioxide, etc…

The climate is changing, whether we want it or not. We have to do as the Egyptians did, 6,000 years ago: change minds, moods and civilization. We have to do much because now history is moving at the fastest clip ever. And history shows that civilizations which lasted many centuries, or even millennia, can collapse in days, and commonly do so in years.

Patrice Ayme’

 

Economy: Moods Are Changing

“TROUBLE” WITH EUROPE? WHY NOT THE US?

New York Nobel economists viewed from Europe, or the US, as “liberal”, or “leftist” do not like Europe, nor do they understand that the USA’s superior economic performance is just something the Clinton crowd likes to crow about. When one looks inside, and compares, ain’t pretty. Joseph Stiglitz: The Euro is the Problem (April 14, 2016) https://youtu.be/30xfMtJZ6iY  http://bit.ly/24k2oC2  #video #lecture.

No, the Euro is not the problem. Actually, Europe just smashed growth forecasts. The problem is that Europe is managed by people from Goldman-Sachs, or who wish to be employed by Goldman-Sachs, or who have a high opinion of Goldman-Sachs, or by people who take advice from people affected by the preceding disease. (As usual, I use here “Goldman-Sachs” as a shorthand for the malevolent, parasitic “money changers”, as Roosevelt and the Bible called them, based mostly in New York and London, with state machinery at their beck and call).

European Productivity, Especially In Franco-German Euro Zone, Has Long Been Higher Than In the USA. So The Scorn Of US Economists Should Consider This Important Fact

Question to Stiglitz: Do you think any of the groundwork has been laid to reduce that inequality going forward?

Stiglitz: “We’re in a little bit of better place, but not a lot better. It’s obviously better to have 5 percent unemployment than 10 percent unemployment. And there’s been the beginning of a housing recovery that has helped restore some of the wealth of ordinary Americans. But the damage that has been done is very deep and has persistent effects. The labor force participation rate of people in their 40s, 50s, is still lower than it’s been in decades. People who lost their jobs in 2008, didn’t get jobs in 2009, ‘10, ‘11, maybe aren’t likely to get a job ever. If they do, it’s not going to be anywhere near as good as their old job. There are many people for whom they lost their job at 50 or 55 and are unlikely to ever work again. The scar is permanent.

Another aspect of what I would say is the imperfect recovery, is that the marginalized groups remain marginalized. And while they’ve benefitted, the levels of unemployment are still very very high.”

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/04/stiglitz-inequality/…

Entirely right, Mr. Stiglitz. So why do American economists give lessons to Europeans? The US economy is chugging along at 2% per annum, rather less than Franco-Germania at this point. And it can be argued that the inflation of the US GDP is mostly asset inflation.

When Stiglitz obsesses about unemployment, it’s obviously neither here, nor there: Unemployment is not the end-all, be-all, of the wellbeing of a socioeconomy. Slaves, in all and any economy, tend to be fully employed.

In the San Francisco Bay Area, unemployment is only 3%. However, a one bedroom rents for $3,000 a month, and that’s more than half the median family income (pre-tax). So is that good, or is that hell? I want you to contemplate a twenty lanes freeway, all gridlocked, and the eight lanes overpasses above, too, if you approve, Stiglitz style. (Jam augment GDP!)

Meanwhile, Trump is going parabolic in California, because tolerating the intolerable has become intolerable. Only when tolerating the intolerable becomes intolerable do revolutions happen. Maybe Trump should pick up Sanders as running mate, ha ha ha.

Revolutions are the engine of evolution. They re-unite Homo with the natural ethology from which plutocracy had torn him from. To evolve again, for the better.

Another editorial from Krugman along the same half-wit lines as Stiglitz: “The Diabetic Economy”. Krugman: “LISBON — Things are terrible here in Portugal, but not quite as terrible as they were a couple of years ago. The same thing can be said about the European economy as a whole. That is, I guess, the good news.

The bad news is that eight years after what was supposed to be a temporary financial crisis, economic weakness just goes on and on, with no end in sight. And that’s something that should worry everyone, in Europe and beyond.

First, the positives: the euro area — the group of 19 countries that have adopted a common currency — posted decent growth in the first quarter. In fact, for once it was better than growth in the U.S.

Europe’s economy is, finally, slightly bigger than it was before the financial crisis, and unemployment has come down from more than 12 percent in 2013 to a bit over 10 percent.

But it’s telling that this is what passes for good news. We complain, rightly, about the slow pace of U.S. recovery — but our economy is already 10 percent bigger than it was pre-crisis, while our unemployment rate is back under 5 percent.

And there is, as I said, no end in sight to Europe’s chronic underperformance. Look at what financial markets are saying.”

Children such as Stiglitz and Krugman have great oracles, called “markets”, and they “look” at what they “say”. (Beats saying what they look like, any day!)

Krugman: “Responding to critics of easy money who denounce low rates as “artificial” — because economies shouldn’t need to keep rates this low — [A Fed Reserve Bank governor] suggested that we compare low interest rates to the insulin injections that diabetics must take.

Such injections aren’t part of a normal lifestyle, and may have bad side effects, but they’re necessary to manage the symptoms of a chronic disease.

In the case of Europe, the chronic disease is persistent weakness in spending, which gives the continent’s economy a persistent deflationary bias even when, like now, it’s having a relatively good few months. The insulin of cheap money helps fight that weakness, even if it doesn’t provide a cure.

But while monetary injections have helped to contain Europe’s woes — one shudders to think of how badly things might have gone without the leadership of Mario Draghi [ex-Partner Goldman-Sachs, Patrice Ayme nota bene], president of the European Central Bank — they haven’t produced anything that looks like a cure. In particular, despite the bank’s efforts, underlying inflation in Europe seems stuck far below the official target of 2 percent.

Meanwhile, unemployment in much of Europe, very much including my current location, is still at levels that are inflicting huge human, social and political damage.

It’s notable that in Spain, which these days is being touted as a success story, youth unemployment is still an incredible 45 percent…”

For once, Krugman gets it half right. Right for Germany, but not for France, which has discarded the Euro 3% deficit spending limit, and is going at an official, near-British like 4.5% (official):

“The thing is, it’s not hard to see what Europe should be doing to help cure its chronic disease. The case for more public spending, especially in Germany — but also in France, which is in much better fiscal shape than its own leaders seem to realize — is overwhelming.

There are large unmet needs for infrastructure and investors are essentially begging governments to take their money. Did I mention that the real 10-year interest rate, the rate on bonds that are protected from inflation, is minus 0.8 percent?

And there’s good reason to believe that spending more in Europe’s core would have big benefits for peripheral nations, too.

But doing the right thing seems to be politically out of the question. Far from showing any willingness to change course, German politicians are sniping constantly at the central bank, the only major European institution that seems to have a clue about what is going on.

Put it this way: Visiting Europe can make an American feel good about his own country.”

Why is Krugman feeling so good? Because the US is “producing” three times more GreenHouse Gases (GHG) as the French? Not a non-sequitur, or just a slap in the face: the US expansion, in the last six years as largely been driven by fracking for oil and gas.

***

Patrice’s Grain of Salt: MOODS THEY ARE CHANGING:

The “trouble” in Europe is not just economic. A new philosophy, a new mood, is taking over. Monetary spending, what GDP looks at, is increasingly looked at as a sin. In France, exchange and repair Internet sites are booming. People increasingly repair the devices they use, and recycle and, or, exchange them for others.

Another point, well-known, is that, to re-establish the economy, banks were given money, lots of money. But the bank driven economy comes short. If anything, banks are viewed as organized crime institutions. In other words, people have had enough of the way the economy is organized.

Who needs a car, when public transportation, or the occasional rental will solve the problem? Some car companies sell electric cars, yet, when people need to go on a family trip, they can get a fossil fuel driven machine, which goes much further. The end result is to lower demand. This is also the effect of increasing efficiency. Solar cells on a roof kill a lot of the old economy, the more efficient they get.

The economy serves the society, not vice versa. Moods have to change to incorporate more of the society. A recent example: two professors working at UC BErkeley (one of them French), invented a revolutionary method to cut DNA into desired pieces. They applied for a US Patent. The US PTO sat on it: indeed, what could two women invent? Six moths laterr, a macho team of males from MIT applied for the same patent, for the same invention. Ah, males, thus pillars of society, said Conventional Wisdom. The MIT gentlemen (or is that horsemen charging, Genghis Khan style?) were immediately granted the Patent.

A lot of the economy organized according to the old mood is just organized thievery, or crime. Giving twenty trillion of dollars to the very same banks and connected financial types who organized the 2008 crisis is organized mismanagement of the economy to replenish the criminals. It would have been more just to give the money to We The People directly, instead of giving it to our oppressors. Ah, but it could not be done, because conventional economics prevent it.

Conventional economy right now is little more that the instauration of a feudal order. Malia Obama, eldest daughter of president Obama, will enter Harvard University. There the peers of Stiglitz and Krugman will teach her of the rightful place of the haves, and why it is just that they own the world. And the fault of the have nots, that they do not.

Malia’s present school is “Sidwell Friends School“, a “very exclusive” (as it self-defines) school. Her sister attends it too. Tuition is a modest $40,000 a year. So the two girls, together, cost $80,000, just to enjoy the “very exclusive” position they earned in life. That’s a third higher than US family median income, pre-tax.

It cost significantly more to attend the school where great liberal economist Stiglitz preaches from (Columbia). American economists are right to trash Europe. After all, the European model is the enemy. Should it win, American economists would earn just a fraction of what they presently get.

Patrice Ayme’  

Asia After Full Glacial Melt

What is that a map of? (Answer at the bottom.)

The positive side of a full glacial melt is that the devastated Aral Sea will be reconstituted to its former glory, and more. Tourists may be able to travel from Missouri to the Aral Sea on electric cruise ships. Let’s notice in passing that shallow seas were characteristic of the Jurassic, and exerted a positive feed-back on the climate, which was remarkably warm and wet then… thanks to these shallow seas. The Earth was ice-free (except on the top of very high mountains).

The Decision Is Now. The Next Two Decades Will Decide If This Is What Will Be

Some may sneer, but there is tremendous inertia in the system. Here is a depiction of temperatures in the last half a billion years:

The Projection That We Are On Two Degree Centigrade Rise By 2050 Is Optimistic: It Ignores Positive Feed-Back On Ice Melt

As soon as we launch the shallow sea effect, it will feed-back on itself. That will be another feed-back on top of the ice melt feed-back. Scandalously, a European Union Commissioner just declared that the COP 21 treaty will be ratified in 2018 only. The French government has declared this “scandalous”, and intends to do something about it on Monday (EC Commissioners have been obviously on the take from major fossil fuel company such as Exxon, as stealth recordings recently showed).

Hence the moral quality of the following graph depicting Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions, per capita, and per country:

GHG Per Capita: The Redder, The Worse. The Way Of Life Of Some “Leading” Countries Brings Us Back To The Jurassic

At this point, some always ask: what can we do? Shall we recycle? Recycling is a related question, yet mostly independent of the energy problem. It’s much more efficient than fighting racism by never saying “nigger”, but still, it pales relative to burning fossils. Energy procurement has got to change radically. One has to de-carbonize. Now. Not just in 2050: by then it will be too late.

To de-carbonize, there is just one way: tax carbon so heavily that silly activities such as frantic tourism by plane, disappear altogether. So those who want to do something moral should agitate for an enormous carbon tax (while compensating for the poor with some of the proceeds).

Something similar is to push for local sustainable energy. An example: San Francisco just passed a law requiring plants or solar panels on roofs of all new building less than ten stories tall (to start with). Starting January 1, 2017. The law is identical to a mandate passed in France last year that all new buildings be covered in partial green roofing or solar panels.

In France, buildings producing more energy than they use have been erected. In other French news, Paris organized its first car race since 1951… 65 years ago. It was done with Formula One style cars: monospaces. It was also remarkably silent: the cars were electric. An Audi driven by the Brazilian Di Grassi won this “Formula E” event. There will be another one, next year (a necessary way of fighting terrorism is to act and behave as if there was no terror).

If enormous de-carbonization is not imposed quickly, fabulous wars may ensue… Except if some countries have such a lead in military matters that none of the others will try anything; as is presently the case of the West, mostly the USA, relative to the Rest; a fascinating twist on might makes right.

However, morality means “the mores”, what has proven sustainable to a tribe. And this brings still another moral twist. Some tribes (also known as nations) have profited a lot from war, thus may not be, very secretly, deep down inside, that adverse to adversity of the lethal type. Indeed, if adversity enables them to unleash the Dark Side, their empire may extend. Or, at least, such is the computation. because, in the past, war always proved such an excellent lever. It is especially the case of the USA (although Russia also lives under that illusion; and giant countries such as Canada and Australia are not far behind in that same general mood; even China, considering its recent conquest of gigantic, highly profitable Tibet and Xing Kiang, may feel that way, all too much).

Notice in passing that the US emits close to 20 tons of GreenHouse Gases per year, per capita. That’s around three times more than the French. And France is not three times poorer, per capita. Actually, according to Hillary Clinton, France is richer, per capita, than the USA: she herself says that the USA cannot afford universal health care. Whereas the French can afford a universal health care system. It is even worse than that, as the French health care system (with the Italian and Swedish ones) is leading in quality, whereas the USA trails, in quality of health care, behind all developed countries.

Once again, what Hillary really means is that those who are paying for her propaganda and helping her with various services, cannot afford a country with universal health care, because they are too busy overdosing inside their private jets (allusion to Prince, one of many). One’s morality not better than one’s logic.

The naïve, gullible and thoroughly obsolete, often believe there is just one way to be logical. But logic can be pretty much anything. Anything goes in logic. Differently from cooking ,where a few rules apply. In cooking at the very least, one should not put too much salt, or burn food to such a crisp that it becomes, well, pure carbon.

However logic is much more adaptable. And thus, a fortiori, is morality.

Tomorrow’s morality has often be made from yesterday’s computation. And computations can sometimes go awry.

So what to do? Change the moods ASAP. Solar roofs are an example. Another is the just announced change of the Twenty Dollar Bill. It figures president Jackson. Jackson followed Jefferson’s example, conquering and annexing giant swathes of territory for the USA. Those two, with Washington himself, were the three most important presidents, in the sense that they created, not just the USA as a state, but also its extent and its mood. Jackson was as macho as Washington, if not more. He went on his conquests, as the head of the US Army, without any order, and Congress did not dare contradict him, lest he made a coup. He had no problem harboring a bullet or two from successful duels.

Nowadays, more and more people in the USA feel that Jackson’s mentality is something which should not be viewed as an example anymore. So Obama and his sidekicks want to replace him by an abolitionist ex-slave who happened to be a woman (I had never heard from, I think, demonstrating that the masses need to further their education, indeed.)  Not bad. At the last hour, Obama and Al. minister admirably the details. However, if one removes all the slave masters from US currency, one may be left with the insipid mild and neutral pseudo-bridges found on European currency.

Removing the face of slavery would not be progress, if all one did, was to forget, and thus deny, where one came from, institutionally speaking, and in the genealogy of moods.

Without its demonic males to lead and fabricate appropriately evil systems of thought, the USA would not have become the world’s leading empire it is now. Beyond whether this is right or wrong, it’s important to remember that, first of all, that’s what happened. Yes, the USA was fabricated by slave masters. This politely brings in the natural question: Is the USA still ruled by slave masters?

The first moral duty is always to the truth. When the morality used is the one closest to the essence of the genus Homo. Yet, special circumstances, (such as inheriting a continent which has been grabbed,) have incited special moralities to blossom.

Patrice Ayme’

 

Biblical Flood Starting Anew

Abstract: update on Sea Level Rise. The meat of the essay is at the end, in the section “THE SITUATION IS ACTUALLY CATACLYSMIC“.

Heard of The Flood? As in the Bible? Sea level rose 120 meters (400 feet), in the period centered around 10,000 years ago. The cause? More than half of Earth’s ice melted in a few millennia,  During the rest of the early Holocene, the rate of rise of the world’s ocean reached peaks as high as 60  millimeters (2.5 inches) per year. The melting of the ice happened because Earth’s positional and orbital parameters had made northern hemisphere’s summers too warm (most of the ice shields rested on the large continents of the north). Nowadays only two enormous ice shields are left: Greenland and Antarctica.

Those who enjoy catastrophes will love it: we have 75 meters of further sea rise to enjoy pretty soon, on our way to a Jurassic climate (the Jurassic was characterized by gigantic warm shallow seas on top of the continents). Her was the situation in the Miocene, when CO2 was at 500 ppm (where we will be at in ten years, see conclusion below).

Absent Drastic Measures Immediately, This Miocene Antarctica State Will Happen Right Away. In this picture, the WAIS, in front has collapsed, Wilkes and Aurora basins partly so. Google With my full name and the features to find out more.

[Even then, that picture from the U.of Mass. did not fully collapse the Aurora Basin, up right, which I expect to collapse first. Maybe they did not drill there, and are just speculating, whereas I have a reasoning on the Totten Glacier, outlet to the Aurora extremely deep basin, which is being quickly undermined as we speak.]

Says the New York Times in “Seas Are Rising at Fastest Rate in Last 28 Centuries”:

“The worsening of tidal flooding in American coastal communities is largely a consequence of greenhouse gases from human activity, and the problem will grow far worse in coming decades, scientists reported Monday.

Those emissions, primarily from the burning of fossil fuels, are causing the ocean to rise at the fastest rate since at least the founding of ancient Rome, the scientists said. They added that in the absence of human emissions, the ocean surface would be rising less rapidly and might even be falling.

The increasingly routine tidal flooding is making life miserable in places like Miami Beach; Charleston, S.C.; and Norfolk, Va., even on sunny days.

Though these types of floods often produce only a foot or two of standing saltwater, they are straining life in many towns by killing lawns and trees, blocking neighborhood streets and clogging storm drains, polluting supplies of freshwater and sometimes stranding entire island communities for hours by overtopping the roads that tie them to the mainland.”

In a way, this is Biblical justice, perfectly appropriate for a deeply Christian community: America has sinned, being, by far, the most country most guilty in the burning of fossil fuels (and don’t brandish China: this is the place where global plutocrats, mostly of US obedience, have their factories, so that they can escape all regulations, including those trying to abate fossil fuel burning (all European countries have de facto hefty carbon taxes).

The USA is guilty of letting its plutocrats run amok, not just subjugating civilization, unleashing the terrorists, but also, even worse, burning their way through the biosphere. Now the USA has to pay the price. New York Times:

“Such events are just an early harbinger of the coming damage, the new research suggests.

“I think we need a new way to think about most coastal flooding,” said Benjamin H. Strauss, the primary author of one of two related studies released on Monday. “It’s not the tide. It’s not the wind. It’s us. That’s true for most of the coastal floods we now experience.”

In the second study, scientists reconstructed the level of the sea over time and confirmed that it is most likely rising faster than at any point in 28 centuries, with the rate of increase growing sharply over the past century — largely, they found, because of the warming that scientists have said is almost certainly caused by human emissions.

They also confirmed previous forecasts that if emissions were to continue at a high rate over the next few decades, the ocean could rise as much as three or four feet by 2100.

Experts say the situation would then grow far worse in the 22nd century and beyond, likely requiring the abandonment of many coastal cities.

The findings are yet another indication that the stable climate in which human civilization has flourished for thousands of years, with a largely predictable ocean permitting the growth of great coastal cities, is coming to an end.

“I think we can definitely be confident that sea-level rise is going to continue to accelerate if there’s further warming, which inevitably there will be,” said Stefan Rahmstorf, a professor of ocean physics at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, in Germany, and co-author of one of the papers, published online Monday by an American journal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

In a report issued to accompany that scientific paper, a climate research and communications organization in Princeton, N.J., Climate Central, used the new findings to calculate that roughly three-quarters of the tidal flood days now occurring in towns along the East Coast would not be happening in the absence of the rise in the sea level caused by human emissions…The change in frequency of those tides is striking. For instance, in the decade from 1955 to 1964 at Annapolis, Md., an instrument called a tide gauge measured 32 days of flooding; in the decade from 2005 to 2014, that jumped to 394 days.”

Four feet by 2100? 1,2 meter? That would be nice; it would give us plenty of time to correct the error of our ways. In truth, we are running out of time. I think a minimum of 40 feet (12 meters) is likely. By the way, we have enough refined knowledge now to know that the “Little Ice Age” between 1400 CE and 1800 CE dropped sea level by 8 centimeters.

THE SITUATION IS ACTUALLY CATACLYSMIC. The United Nations’ IPCC did not include in its computations the possible melting of the ice shields of Greenland and Antarctica. For three reasons: first, it was viewed as impossible, before, at least a few millennia; secondly, there was no mathematical model for the melting; finally, no plausible mechanism was held to be plausible to melt said ice shields.

My reasoning is the exact opposite: first an obvious mechanism for the melting of the ice shields exists: the ice shields can up up to 4 kilometers thick. Thus they press down on the continental crust so much, that much of Greenland and Antarctica is well below sea level. Not by just a few hundred feet, but outright, by kilometers. Deeper than the Grand Canyon. In these gigantic areas, the ice of the ice shields is in direct contact with the continental crust. Those areas are protected by rock thresholds on the margins of the ice shields (where the crust goes back up, because where the ice ends, there is no more weight pressing down on the continent).

Right now, warm water, which is denser at 4Centigrades (40 Fahrenheit), eats at the “grounding lines” of the ice shields where the ice of the shields touches the rock directly. When past the threshold, warm water will be able to drop down on the other side, deeper than the Grand Canyon, and should be able to shock fracture and melt a Texas sized ice shield ice shield in a few decades. That will be found all too soon.

Scientists presently handsomely paid to strike moderates postures will be very “surprised”.

Three scientific papers published in the last two months support my, admittedly drastic, point of view. One observed the collapse of a colossal glacier in northwest Greenland, eaten by a current at one degree C. It was a miniature reproduction of what to expect for entire ice shields. Two others observed the past, and that Antarctica was unstable at 500 ppm CO2. What they did not say is how dramatic the situation was. Indeed, sounding moderate is how they get funded by a benevolent, plutocratically ruled government (and by government, I also mean the corrupt Supreme Court, not just the latest elected buffoons). The scientists who evoked the 500 ppm of CO2 omitted two significant details, where the devil lurks. They claimed that it would take 30 years to get there. That’s not correct; at the present rate, we will add 100 ppm of CO2 within 25 years. But not just that: there are other man-made GreenHouse Gases (GHG): CH4, NOx, Fluorocarbons, etc. All these gases warm up the lower atmosphere much more than CO2. So the correct measurement is not CO2 ppm, but CO2 EQUIVALENT ppm.

We are right now ABOVE 450 ppm in EQUIVALENT CO2, and will be at 500 ppm within ten years. Let’s hope there will be more boats than on the Titanic.

Patrice Ayme’

P/S: If anything, the preceding is a conservative estimate. Indeed very serious scientists evaluated already the man-made greenhouse gases at 478 ppm in 2013. This means we will be above 500 ppm in CO2 equivalent within six years, in line with my previous analyses, such as “Ten Years To Catastrophe“. See:

http://oceans.mit.edu/news/featured-stories/5-questions-mits-ron-prinn-400-ppm-threshold