Nihil
Nihil's JournalNope, Southern England ...
... and Eyjafjallajokull shut down Heathrow & other major airports for
several days (back in 2010) so no planes going across the sky made
for a relaxing interlude.
It will be interesting to see how this story develops (in the international press at least).
So far, all that is apparent is that the same people on DU who would be cheering the police
if they did this to a Russian or Egyptian in the same situation are indignantly protesting the
"total innocence" of the Americans on the same amount of "evidence" ...
... and, in addition to Nick's post, there is one key phrase in the whole of your post:
> With a concerted will we can reverse our wasteful use of space and
> create offsetting green carbon sinks which can suck up the higher levels
> of carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas heating us up - while pumping out
> more oxygen.
"With a concerted will".
Even a simple scan of the headlines on any given day shows that this is
not going to happen.
If there is no "concerted will" to stop people killing, maiming & generally causing
pain to each other, no "concerted will" to stop the exponential growth in population
(despite the obvious fate of the children being born in most cases), no "concerted
will" to rebalance the obscene differential in wealth & living standards - all of which
affect millions of people every day - then there is no chance of getting any
"concerted will" focussed on a problem whose true impact is yet to hit home and
which will require total cooperation for *decades* to even turn around.
Completely true but it's like hitting your head against a wall to get people to understand this!
So many "people" (remembering the new rules!) are totally missing the
difference between 172 fat-cat MPs and 270,000(*) Labour Party members!
FFS!
(*) = as of 2015 anyway
Cameron? Definitely on the list of biggest losers. Corbyn? Hardly ...
Maybe you've forgotten about (or never learned about) the major league losers like
Neil Kinnock, Ed Milliband, Nick Clegg, John Major, Iain Duncan Smith, Michael Howard, ...?
The first two were previous Labour leaders, Clegg was allegedly a Liberal Democrat,
Major, IDS & Howard were Tory leaders. All were/are vain & greedy losers.
The Liberal Democrats are - deservedly - a non-starter these days, primarily due
to the cowardly, self-serving treachery of Clegg. No-one will trust them again for
decades.
Labour deserves to be a permanent minority party if they screw up this opportunity
to leave Blair's Conservative-Labour mongrel behind and get back to representing
the workers, the poor, the people who they have been deliberately ignoring for
countless years in favour of playing the same crony-capitalism games as the Tories.
The Tories are only in power through a) inertia and b) lack of competition.
If Corbyn is shafted before he even gets chance to clean out the champagne socialists
of the PLP, Labour will remain a bunch of squabbling, bed-wetting little non-entities.
That is a *much* better option than "reservoirs" of CO2 ...
Performing the natural conversion to limestone using hot mafic rocks is
a safe way to "store" CO2 - probably the *only* safe way.
Pushing it down into what was previously a natural reservoir (before the
drilling bit unsealed it for the first time) and hoping that it will stay there
forever is ridiculously stupid - only good for extracting money from the
well-meaning who have little background in science (or history).
e.g., Lake Nyos, 1986, 1700+ people killed + livestock + wild creatures in
a 16 mile radius ... the solution is to bleed the CO2 directly into the atmosphere
rather than risk letting it build up again for another catastrophic event.
(And to think that some of the people supporting the above "coke-bottle"
approach are the very ones who scream blue murder about nuclear waste ...)
Not an option for me but, until this week, I hadn't even considered that the Leavers might win.
I too am starting to get concerned about the apparent "groundswell" of support
for national stupidity that could only too easily be reflected in the polling booth.
I work in an international company whose registered head office is in London
(although the CEO is now based in New York). I am surrounded by Europeans
(EU & Nordic) as well as a fair scattering from further afield (including Russia,
Turkey, Egypt, Lebanon, Caribbean Islanders, Antipodeans, Central Africans).
Our whole business works because we deal fairly with *all* countries so we could
be unbelievably badly hit if the "Leave" idiots actually win: the company would
survive but the London office (including the IT department where I work) would not
only lose people directly (due to the fascists clamping down on work visa rules)
but quite likely have to relocate out of the UK in order to maintain the business
relationships with a number of other countries. That's a serious job risk for someone
who isn't old enough to retire yet but is viewed as "well past it" when job hunting.
My children are still starting their own lives (finishing education, working first jobs).
They find the unwanted excess of job seekers from Eastern Europe, China & Africa
to be a real issue but not one that blinds them to the benefits of the EU - just something
that needs to be resolved by politicians who aren't themselves profiting from the
increased numbers of immigrants.
My siblings are getting old (brother + one brother-in-law both being cancer survivors
with a risk of recurrence). I am now the only one of us who is still working in
full-time employment (and as anything other than a carer). They rely on their
pensions supporting them for the rest of their lives.
My parents-in-law are in their eighties and have been the cause of several
emergency dashes & upheavals over the last few years (only going to get worse).
They rely on the NHS, on their pensions and yes, on their only UK-based child (and
her family) being able to drive to them whenever something goes wrong.
From my perspective, there is nothing wrong with the EU that a little political will
couldn't resolve (not that spines are ever in surplus with politicians) whilst the
amount of good that it provides is immeasurable.
I hadn't anticipated that there might be sufficient numbers of low-information
voters (and/or desperate gamblers out to make a profit at any cost) that the
vote could become close or that there could even be enough people who would
believe the inconsistent & disconnected bollocks being disseminated by the "Leave"
campaign.
The realisation that I may have over-estimated the intelligence of my fellow Britons
is as worrying as it is surprising. This could mean a stressful few weeks ahead until
the issue is resolved (one way or the other).
Like I said, leaving the UK simply isn't an option for me but I can't honestly fault
anyone else for investigating the possibility.
*Something* is "Truly lamentable"
> Who was here for T-rex's disappearance?
Lots of other creatures, some of whom survived.
> Who vainly fretted about the peterosaur's (sic) demise?
Other pterosaurs.
> Where were the caring when millions of other creatures came and went thru the eons???
Just because you weren't there doesn't mean that other creatures cared about each other.
"Caring" didn't start (and end) when Bronze Age peasants started to force their mythologies upon others.
> We humans are NO DIFFERENT than a mega-volcano or a giant asteroid impact - except,
> unlike those catastrophes, we recognize ourselves as such.
WRONG. There is no choice involved with a mega-volcano or giant asteroid, merely luck
or good fortune to be in a suitable place to survive.
The global destruction that we as a species have been performing over the centuries
is completely voluntary - a result of deliberate choices made (usually for personal greed).
That is a MAJOR FUCKING DIFFERENCE.
> But this rock has NEVER been about continuity. Never.
Continuity at geological scales has never been the issue for ecologists, only the
religious morons who insist that they can't be doing any real harm as their sky fairy
is looking after them.
> It coalesced out of bits of stellar detritus and morphed from an inhospitable blob
> to a lab for the spark of life to play upon.
... over billions of years ...
The damage that we have done has mostly been done over a couple of centuries.
That damage has been known and widely publicised for decades.
That damage has increased with every year due to greed.
Every week, more decisions are made to make the situation worse for short-term
profit, in the full knowledge of the destruction that is involved.
*That* is why we are different from a volcano or roaming stellar boulder.
> But who of we civilized sorts is ready to give up their flat screens and spend
> our afternoons skinning some hapless monkey for the evening meal?
> Who? Yeah - I thought so.
No official monkeys around here so the best we can manage is to skin
some of the fat selfish bastards who don't care about other creatures
and prefer to sit on their arse in front of their flat screen TVs.
As someone else noted (in a slightly different context), there is a serious cascade effect here too.
It's not as simple as country A (e.g., Syria) going then country B (e.g., Yemen) next
then country C ... as shitloads of the the people who were in country A have now
moved to countries S & T, overloading them so the combined migration spreads to
countries H, K & P which then ...
There is going to be a serious battening down of the hatches in the near (very near)
future which will have the effect of pouring fuel on the anger of the migrants, leading
to some serious unrest and the corresponding backlashes.
One big clusterfuck affecting ever-increasing amounts of the 99% while the scum
at the top continue to "justify" their obscene greed and dismissal of the problems.
"Interesting times".
