One of the climate feedback loops just went off the chart. Antarctic sea ice extent in southern hemisphere summers is highly variable, but it always recovers in the winter. Thus year it hasn't.
(*six sigma would be once in a billion years - actually five sigma.)
The problem with alarmism is when everything is a crisis nothing is.
It's a fair point, but when one is faced with orbital photos of Australia on fire in 2020 and Mediterranean islands on fire in 2023, one does start wondering if this hug-a-penguin green crap might actually have a bit of a point.
If the UK cut its carbon footprint to zero it would stop precisely nothing,
That's why I always throw my litter in the street, what difference does it make when 99.9% of litter is dropped by other people?
LOL
thats why we burn all that lignite in our coal fired power stations and have 7 of Europes top ten polluters on our land
Weve picked up our litter it would be nice if you Germans could do the same given you produce twice as much carbon as we do.
Deutschland - Spitzenverschmutzer
The German record is terrible. Obviously that is entirely my fault and I will never disagree with you again. Sorry.
Germany's record is terrible.
You lecture the rest of us while chugging out lignite emissions and buying Putins oil and gas. Your green agenda is going backwards because of public resistance to - heat pumps will go tits up here too - and you have closed down all your nuclear .
There are many places one could take a note of the green agenda, but Germany isnt really one of them.
Germany doesn't buy any Russian gas any more, does it? In fact, if you want to be really picky and look at the Enerdata stats, we've bought more Russian gas* than the Germans in 2023.
* Albeit we probably didn't know it was Russian, because we bought if from a UAE broker
You mean we didn't 'know' it was Russian.
Guangzhou is a chemical weapons plant masquerading as a fertilizer plant. We know this. The Chinese know that we know. But we make believe that we don't know and the Chinese make believe that they believe that we don't know, but know that we know. Everybody knows.
I somehow suspect it isn't a £1.3m home in Hampshire. Not if you can afford a RR and helicopter and it appears to have a large plot, lake and covered swimming pool.
We will see. From all the chat I'm expecting NOTHING that hasn't been alleged before, and ZERO actual evidence. Grusch himself has seen ZERO, he is relating takes told to him.
Keep believing folks, if it floats you boat, but don't expect an earth shattering revelation any time soon...
A lot of it may depend on whether they can get names and information from the U.S. Inspector-General of Intelligence.
He seems to have collecting names and evidence for about three years now.
I just don't see anything beyond what we have seen many times before. Unless you subscribe to the X-files state within a state cover-up, its hard to see how this stuff hasn't come out, if there really are crashed UFO's with alien bodies.
Far more likely is the usual grift. There is money to be made writing books, and going on TV's shows talking shit.
I personally would say it's quite easy to see how information could have not come out. An ossified, compartmentalised bureaucracy, then protected by layers of fearsome secrecy legislation.
A large conspiracy, state-within-a-state, or anything like that, is not necessarily part of this sort of compartmentalisation. Something shut away and forgotten about by most, and then with very limited access, to only people who have specific cause to, by their job description, such, perhaps, as Grusch.
I think that's just too Hollywood. Stuff leaks - proper stuff, not drunken bar tales.
There have been a certain number of insider reports for years, but most of the people have been considered axiomatically and culturally crazy.
As the Slate article mentions, if any of this is true, it would be more than a paradigm shift, and more like a complete reordering of reality, for many people.
The problem with so much of this is that UFO's and little green men who became grey aliens is that its a cultural phenomena. People in the middle ages saw things they didn't understand and thought it was angels. After the second world war we saw an explosion of things flying around (aeroplanes, then satellites) and people started to misidentify them. Arnold didn't see flying saucers, he described things skipping like a saucer, yet that story became the flying saucer genesis. And so throughout the fifties and sixties people saw saucer shapes.
TV and film play a part - Close Encounters of the Third Kind caused a huge upsurge in UFO sightings. And aliens became greys, something that followed through into the X-files. The X-files convinced people that a government could cover up a huge conspiracy (aliens and here, are malevalent and experimenting on humans). And now we see this playing out with with yet another grift merchant spinning tales.
Its possible Grusch believes what he has been told and is reporting. Its possible he is being played (i'd argue likely). But what is less likely is that alien races in all their different forms have been visiting the Earth since the 1940's with an ever changing shape and ever changing craft.
I'd love to be wrong. If aliens are here and it is revealed is will change EVERYTHING. But don't hold your breath.
I've posted before a map of reported UFO sightings. They're massively weighted towards the Anglosphere.
We will see. From all the chat I'm expecting NOTHING that hasn't been alleged before, and ZERO actual evidence. Grusch himself has seen ZERO, he is relating takes told to him.
Keep believing folks, if it floats you boat, but don't expect an earth shattering revelation any time soon...
A lot of it may depend on whether they can get names and information from the U.S. Inspector-General of Intelligence.
He seems to have collecting names and evidence for about three years now.
I just don't see anything beyond what we have seen many times before. Unless you subscribe to the X-files state within a state cover-up, its hard to see how this stuff hasn't come out, if there really are crashed UFO's with alien bodies.
Far more likely is the usual grift. There is money to be made writing books, and going on TV's shows talking shit.
I personally would say it's quite easy to see how information could have not come out. An ossified, compartmentalised bureaucracy, then protected by layers of fearsome secrecy legislation.
A large conspiracy, state-within-a-state, or anything like that, is not necessarily part of this sort of compartmentalisation. Something shut away and forgotten about by most, and then with very limited access, to only people who have specific cause to, by their job description, such, perhaps, as Grusch.
I think that's just too Hollywood. Stuff leaks - proper stuff, not drunken bar tales.
Every month or so, @Leon and @WhisperingOracle whip themselves up in an orgy of excitement over the *next* news they're sure will come out. And each time, there's much heat but little light.
Little green men having the tech to travel vast distances to our planet, then being seen - or even crashing many times in just one or two countries - is truly extraordinary, and requires truly extraordinary evidence.
There isn't any. Occam's razor applies.
There is of course the explanation that it is a bunch of drunk teenage aliens out for a laugh. Let's go and find the guy who lives by himself and buzz him. You know the guy everyone thinks is a bit weird. Let's fly across the bow of a USAF plane but in such a way that any video is blurred.
The distances between stars are vast. The tech needed to traverse those distances would require a phenomenal vastness of engineering. If any aliens happened to head our way in some sort of intergenerational ark it would be very very clear and very very obvious.
Or they are from a parallel dimension. And they’ve been here all along, and given our limited bandwidth we only occasionally glimpse them, the same way we cannot begin to smell the 10,000 aromas available to a dog
Yes, that sounds insane
But then, rational physicists calmly discuss the idea of infinite parallel universes - or even the idea we are simply players in a simulation - and no one demands that they be locked up for lunacy
Grusch mentions the interdimensional thesis.
It's not part of our current science, but that doesn't make it impossible.
We will see. From all the chat I'm expecting NOTHING that hasn't been alleged before, and ZERO actual evidence. Grusch himself has seen ZERO, he is relating takes told to him.
Keep believing folks, if it floats you boat, but don't expect an earth shattering revelation any time soon...
A lot of it may depend on whether they can get names and information from the U.S. Inspector-General of Intelligence.
He seems to have collecting names and evidence for about three years now.
I just don't see anything beyond what we have seen many times before. Unless you subscribe to the X-files state within a state cover-up, its hard to see how this stuff hasn't come out, if there really are crashed UFO's with alien bodies.
Far more likely is the usual grift. There is money to be made writing books, and going on TV's shows talking shit.
I personally would say it's quite easy to see how information could have not come out. An ossified, compartmentalised bureaucracy, then protected by layers of fearsome secrecy legislation.
A large conspiracy, state-within-a-state, or anything like that, is not necessarily part of this sort of compartmentalisation. Something shut away and forgotten about by most, and then with very limited access, to only people who have specific cause to, by their job description, such, perhaps, as Grusch.
I think that's just too Hollywood. Stuff leaks - proper stuff, not drunken bar tales.
There have been a certain number of insider reports for years, but most of the people have been considered axiomatically and culturally crazy.
As the Slate article mentions, if any of this is true, it would be more than a paradigm shift, and more like a complete reordering of reality, for many people.
The problem with so much of this is that UFO's and little green men who became grey aliens is that its a cultural phenomena. People in the middle ages saw things they didn't understand and thought it was angels. After the second world war we saw an explosion of things flying around (aeroplanes, then satellites) and people started to misidentify them. Arnold didn't see flying saucers, he described things skipping like a saucer, yet that story became the flying saucer genesis. And so throughout the fifties and sixties people saw saucer shapes.
TV and film play a part - Close Encounters of the Third Kind caused a huge upsurge in UFO sightings. And aliens became greys, something that followed through into the X-files. The X-files convinced people that a government could cover up a huge conspiracy (aliens and here, are malevalent and experimenting on humans). And now we see this playing out with with yet another grift merchant spinning tales.
Its possible Grusch believes what he has been told and is reporting. Its possible he is being played (i'd argue likely). But what is less likely is that alien races in all their different forms have been visiting the Earth since the 1940's with an ever changing shape and ever changing craft.
I'd love to be wrong. If aliens are here and it is revealed is will change EVERYTHING. But don't hold your breath.
We will see. From all the chat I'm expecting NOTHING that hasn't been alleged before, and ZERO actual evidence. Grusch himself has seen ZERO, he is relating takes told to him.
Keep believing folks, if it floats you boat, but don't expect an earth shattering revelation any time soon...
A lot of it may depend on whether they can get names and information from the U.S. Inspector-General of Intelligence.
He seems to have collecting names and evidence for about three years now.
I just don't see anything beyond what we have seen many times before. Unless you subscribe to the X-files state within a state cover-up, its hard to see how this stuff hasn't come out, if there really are crashed UFO's with alien bodies.
Far more likely is the usual grift. There is money to be made writing books, and going on TV's shows talking shit.
I personally would say it's quite easy to see how information could have not come out. An ossified, compartmentalised bureaucracy, then protected by layers of fearsome secrecy legislation.
A large conspiracy, state-within-a-state, or anything like that, is not necessarily part of this sort of compartmentalisation. Something shut away and forgotten about by most, and then with very limited access, to only people who have specific cause to, by their job description, such, perhaps, as Grusch.
I think that's just too Hollywood. Stuff leaks - proper stuff, not drunken bar tales.
There have been a certain number of insider reports for years, but most of the people have been considered axiomatically and culturally crazy.
As the Slate article mentions, if any of this is true, it would be more than a paradigm shift, and more like a complete reordering of reality, for many people.
The problem with so much of this is that UFO's and little green men who became grey aliens is that its a cultural phenomena. People in the middle ages saw things they didn't understand and thought it was angels. After the second world war we saw an explosion of things flying around (aeroplanes, then satellites) and people started to misidentify them. Arnold didn't see flying saucers, he described things skipping like a saucer, yet that story became the flying saucer genesis. And so throughout the fifties and sixties people saw saucer shapes.
TV and film play a part - Close Encounters of the Third Kind caused a huge upsurge in UFO sightings. And aliens became greys, something that followed through into the X-files. The X-files convinced people that a government could cover up a huge conspiracy (aliens and here, are malevalent and experimenting on humans). And now we see this playing out with with yet another grift merchant spinning tales.
Its possible Grusch believes what he has been told and is reporting. Its possible he is being played (i'd argue likely). But what is less likely is that alien races in all their different forms have been visiting the Earth since the 1940's with an ever changing shape and ever changing craft.
I'd love to be wrong. If aliens are here and it is revealed is will change EVERYTHING. But don't hold your breath.
I've posted before a map of reported UFO sightings. They're massively weighted towards the Anglosphere.
Why are aliens so interested in the Anglosphere? Or is it, as you suggest, a cultural phenomena?
Actually not true. A new map - I’ll try and find it on X - shows that the latest concentration of sightings are in the USA but ALSO east Asia, with a scattering elsewhere. Europe is shamefully ignored
It may be cultural, but then it may also be that for a few decades after WW2 Americans were the only people with the money and leisure to look up and worry about UFOs
Ufologists would argue that it is because the little green men are intrigued by our military tech - or worried by it - so they gravitate to its centres. America for a long time. But now also China and Russia
Or it’s a huge American psy-op to freak the Chinese. This is still my best guess (tho I not at all certain)
I AM certain it is not a normal UFO flap being exploited by a “few grifters” who want to “write a book”. That’s laughably stupid, at this point. This week we will see unprecedented Congressional hearings
BIB - and yet Grusch has been doing the classic profile raising things. What's his next career?
We will see. From all the chat I'm expecting NOTHING that hasn't been alleged before, and ZERO actual evidence. Grusch himself has seen ZERO, he is relating takes told to him.
Keep believing folks, if it floats you boat, but don't expect an earth shattering revelation any time soon...
A lot of it may depend on whether they can get names and information from the U.S. Inspector-General of Intelligence.
He seems to have collecting names and evidence for about three years now.
I just don't see anything beyond what we have seen many times before. Unless you subscribe to the X-files state within a state cover-up, its hard to see how this stuff hasn't come out, if there really are crashed UFO's with alien bodies.
Far more likely is the usual grift. There is money to be made writing books, and going on TV's shows talking shit.
I personally would say it's quite easy to see how information could have not come out. An ossified, compartmentalised bureaucracy, then protected by layers of fearsome secrecy legislation.
A large conspiracy, state-within-a-state, or anything like that, is not necessarily part of this sort of compartmentalisation. Something shut away and forgotten about by most, and then with very limited access, to only people who have specific cause to, by their job description, such, perhaps, as Grusch.
I think that's just too Hollywood. Stuff leaks - proper stuff, not drunken bar tales.
There have been a certain number of insider reports for years, but most of the people have been considered axiomatically and culturally crazy.
As the Slate article mentions, if any of this is true, it would be more than a paradigm shift, and more like a complete reordering of reality, for many people.
The problem with so much of this is that UFO's and little green men who became grey aliens is that its a cultural phenomena. People in the middle ages saw things they didn't understand and thought it was angels. After the second world war we saw an explosion of things flying around (aeroplanes, then satellites) and people started to misidentify them. Arnold didn't see flying saucers, he described things skipping like a saucer, yet that story became the flying saucer genesis. And so throughout the fifties and sixties people saw saucer shapes.
TV and film play a part - Close Encounters of the Third Kind caused a huge upsurge in UFO sightings. And aliens became greys, something that followed through into the X-files. The X-files convinced people that a government could cover up a huge conspiracy (aliens and here, are malevalent and experimenting on humans). And now we see this playing out with with yet another grift merchant spinning tales.
Its possible Grusch believes what he has been told and is reporting. Its possible he is being played (i'd argue likely). But what is less likely is that alien races in all their different forms have been visiting the Earth since the 1940's with an ever changing shape and ever changing craft.
I'd love to be wrong. If aliens are here and it is revealed is will change EVERYTHING. But don't hold your breath.
I've posted before a map of reported UFO sightings. They're massively weighted towards the Anglosphere.
Why are aliens so interested in the Anglosphere? Or is it, as you suggest, a cultural phenomena?
Huge reporting bias, frivolous anglophone media prepared to print this stuff.
Good question is where would you visit, or land, if you were an alien civilisation with an ability to pick up and decode human communications?
Depending on your intent, you might choose different places:
1. Wish to remain undetected, but enter the atmosphere / biosphere in order to do "science": send unmanned craft to the open ocean, or areas of uninhabited tropical rainforest with sparse satellite coverage (or jam human satellites). Possibly the Sahara too - somewhere lawless where conventional military would struggle to get to, though you might have to deal with Wagner and bands of Jihadists.
2. Want to encounter humans and animals but avoid heavily defended or militarised locations, on order to do a bit of botany, zoology and anthropology: land on some inhabited tropical Islands (but not Guam, Hawaii, French Polynesia, Diego Garcia or American Samoa), remote parts of the rainforest in PNG or the Amazon (Congo too militarised), or remote parts of the sub-Arctic (Canada or Siberia).
3. Want to make civilisational contact and be "taken to your leader": land in Eastern USA, Western Europe or East Asia. I.e. the places that show up brightest at night from space.
If aliens have the tech to get here (Unlikely), they're not going to be worried about our military capabilities in the slightest.
We will see. From all the chat I'm expecting NOTHING that hasn't been alleged before, and ZERO actual evidence. Grusch himself has seen ZERO, he is relating takes told to him.
Keep believing folks, if it floats you boat, but don't expect an earth shattering revelation any time soon...
A lot of it may depend on whether they can get names and information from the U.S. Inspector-General of Intelligence.
He seems to have collecting names and evidence for about three years now.
I just don't see anything beyond what we have seen many times before. Unless you subscribe to the X-files state within a state cover-up, its hard to see how this stuff hasn't come out, if there really are crashed UFO's with alien bodies.
Far more likely is the usual grift. There is money to be made writing books, and going on TV's shows talking shit.
I personally would say it's quite easy to see how information could have not come out. An ossified, compartmentalised bureaucracy, then protected by layers of fearsome secrecy legislation.
A large conspiracy, state-within-a-state, or anything like that, is not necessarily part of this sort of compartmentalisation. Something shut away and forgotten about by most, and then with very limited access, to only people who have specific cause to, by their job description, such, perhaps, as Grusch.
I think that's just too Hollywood. Stuff leaks - proper stuff, not drunken bar tales.
It’s ALREADY “to Hollywood”. It’s now crossed a line to a point where you can’t dismiss it “as a few grifters hoping to make money”
An honest analysis of the evidence - not the feeble videos and pics - but the behaviour of people close to the issue: is enough to prove that, many times over
For a scientist you are incredibly closed-minded. It’s a shame
Incidentally I see that lab leak has been slam dunked again. The guy who wrote the crucial and original Proximal Origins paper, virologist Kristian Andersen, was - we now know - privately saying “lab leak is so friggin likely, it looks engineered” even as he was publishing the “official” paper which claimed “there is no evidence whatsoever to believe in any lab origin, we can rule this out”
Lol
I love the way you call anyone who doesn't drink the same kool-aid as you 'close-minded'.
Here's a view I hold: unexplained phenomena such as aliens are more likely to be something terrestrial but currently unknown, such as ghosts or past apparitions, than aliens who travelled billions of miles to get here.
But that's also *massively* unlikely. Much more likely is that people make mistakes, exaggerate or lie, and other people take those mistakes as gospel truth.
It's not UFO sightings, it's reported UFO sightings. You may need to cross-reference that map to the growth of internet connectivity and availability. I bet that map takes off when internet-connected phones take off.
We will see. From all the chat I'm expecting NOTHING that hasn't been alleged before, and ZERO actual evidence. Grusch himself has seen ZERO, he is relating takes told to him.
Keep believing folks, if it floats you boat, but don't expect an earth shattering revelation any time soon...
A lot of it may depend on whether they can get names and information from the U.S. Inspector-General of Intelligence.
He seems to have collecting names and evidence for about three years now.
I just don't see anything beyond what we have seen many times before. Unless you subscribe to the X-files state within a state cover-up, its hard to see how this stuff hasn't come out, if there really are crashed UFO's with alien bodies.
Far more likely is the usual grift. There is money to be made writing books, and going on TV's shows talking shit.
I personally would say it's quite easy to see how information could have not come out. An ossified, compartmentalised bureaucracy, then protected by layers of fearsome secrecy legislation.
A large conspiracy, state-within-a-state, or anything like that, is not necessarily part of this sort of compartmentalisation. Something shut away and forgotten about by most, and then with very limited access, to only people who have specific cause to, by their job description, such, perhaps, as Grusch.
I think that's just too Hollywood. Stuff leaks - proper stuff, not drunken bar tales.
There have been a certain number of insider reports for years, but most of the people have been considered axiomatically and culturally crazy.
As the Slate article mentions, if any of this is true, it would be more than a paradigm shift, and more like a complete reordering of reality, for many people.
The problem with so much of this is that UFO's and little green men who became grey aliens is that its a cultural phenomena. People in the middle ages saw things they didn't understand and thought it was angels. After the second world war we saw an explosion of things flying around (aeroplanes, then satellites) and people started to misidentify them. Arnold didn't see flying saucers, he described things skipping like a saucer, yet that story became the flying saucer genesis. And so throughout the fifties and sixties people saw saucer shapes.
TV and film play a part - Close Encounters of the Third Kind caused a huge upsurge in UFO sightings. And aliens became greys, something that followed through into the X-files. The X-files convinced people that a government could cover up a huge conspiracy (aliens and here, are malevalent and experimenting on humans). And now we see this playing out with with yet another grift merchant spinning tales.
Its possible Grusch believes what he has been told and is reporting. Its possible he is being played (i'd argue likely). But what is less likely is that alien races in all their different forms have been visiting the Earth since the 1940's with an ever changing shape and ever changing craft.
I'd love to be wrong. If aliens are here and it is revealed is will change EVERYTHING. But don't hold your breath.
I've posted before a map of reported UFO sightings. They're massively weighted towards the Anglosphere.
We will see. From all the chat I'm expecting NOTHING that hasn't been alleged before, and ZERO actual evidence. Grusch himself has seen ZERO, he is relating takes told to him.
Keep believing folks, if it floats you boat, but don't expect an earth shattering revelation any time soon...
A lot of it may depend on whether they can get names and information from the U.S. Inspector-General of Intelligence.
He seems to have collecting names and evidence for about three years now.
I just don't see anything beyond what we have seen many times before. Unless you subscribe to the X-files state within a state cover-up, its hard to see how this stuff hasn't come out, if there really are crashed UFO's with alien bodies.
Far more likely is the usual grift. There is money to be made writing books, and going on TV's shows talking shit.
I personally would say it's quite easy to see how information could have not come out. An ossified, compartmentalised bureaucracy, then protected by layers of fearsome secrecy legislation.
A large conspiracy, state-within-a-state, or anything like that, is not necessarily part of this sort of compartmentalisation. Something shut away and forgotten about by most, and then with very limited access, to only people who have specific cause to, by their job description, such, perhaps, as Grusch.
I think that's just too Hollywood. Stuff leaks - proper stuff, not drunken bar tales.
Every month or so, @Leon and @WhisperingOracle whip themselves up in an orgy of excitement over the *next* news they're sure will come out. And each time, there's much heat but little light.
Little green men having the tech to travel vast distances to our planet, then being seen - or even crashing many times in just one or two countries - is truly extraordinary, and requires truly extraordinary evidence.
There isn't any. Occam's razor applies.
There is of course the explanation that it is a bunch of drunk teenage aliens out for a laugh. Let's go and find the guy who lives by himself and buzz him. You know the guy everyone thinks is a bit weird. Let's fly across the bow of a USAF plane but in such a way that any video is blurred.
The distances are too vast. If any aliens happened to head our way in some sort of ark ship it would be very very clear and very very obvious.
What about the ant in the sand below the Mohave desert theory.
There are ants three metres below in the sand happily living out their lives with their colonies and whatnot and no human ever found them hence humans don't exist.
Or then there's the turtles.
You're misreading what I've written.
It's likely aliens are out there, it's very unlikely they'll make contact with us. Space is vast and the speed limit (c) is extremely slow for the size.
Ah yes indeed that could easily be the case. Bonkers as it is to envisage the universe it is equally bonkers to think that we are the very only life forms in existence.
While the universe is vast compared to the speed of light and it might take 30 years to reach a star we make the mistake of humanizing alien races. 30 years for a human is a long time. If however the average life span of an alien species is 1000 years then 30 years become less problematic as a gap to cross.
Not saying its the case but assuming because we see that time span as too long for interstellar flight doesn't make it so necessarily for an alien race
We will see. From all the chat I'm expecting NOTHING that hasn't been alleged before, and ZERO actual evidence. Grusch himself has seen ZERO, he is relating takes told to him.
Keep believing folks, if it floats you boat, but don't expect an earth shattering revelation any time soon...
A lot of it may depend on whether they can get names and information from the U.S. Inspector-General of Intelligence.
He seems to have collecting names and evidence for about three years now.
I just don't see anything beyond what we have seen many times before. Unless you subscribe to the X-files state within a state cover-up, its hard to see how this stuff hasn't come out, if there really are crashed UFO's with alien bodies.
Far more likely is the usual grift. There is money to be made writing books, and going on TV's shows talking shit.
I personally would say it's quite easy to see how information could have not come out. An ossified, compartmentalised bureaucracy, then protected by layers of fearsome secrecy legislation.
A large conspiracy, state-within-a-state, or anything like that, is not necessarily part of this sort of compartmentalisation. Something shut away and forgotten about by most, and then with very limited access, to only people who have specific cause to, by their job description, such, perhaps, as Grusch.
I think that's just too Hollywood. Stuff leaks - proper stuff, not drunken bar tales.
Every month or so, @Leon and @WhisperingOracle whip themselves up in an orgy of excitement over the *next* news they're sure will come out. And each time, there's much heat but little light.
Little green men having the tech to travel vast distances to our planet, then being seen - or even crashing many times in just one or two countries - is truly extraordinary, and requires truly extraordinary evidence.
There isn't any. Occam's razor applies.
There is of course the explanation that it is a bunch of drunk teenage aliens out for a laugh. Let's go and find the guy who lives by himself and buzz him. You know the guy everyone thinks is a bit weird. Let's fly across the bow of a USAF plane but in such a way that any video is blurred.
The distances between stars are vast. The tech needed to traverse those distances would require a phenomenal vastness of engineering. If any aliens happened to head our way in some sort of intergenerational ark it would be very very clear and very very obvious.
Or they are from a parallel dimension. And they’ve been here all along, and given our limited bandwidth we only occasionally glimpse them, the same way we cannot begin to smell the 10,000 aromas available to a dog
Yes, that sounds insane
But then, rational physicists calmly discuss the idea of infinite parallel universes - or even the idea we are simply players in a simulation - and no one demands that they be locked up for lunacy
Grusch mentions the interdimensional thesis.
It's not part of our current science, but that doesn't make it impossible.
He also mentions a ship that is bigger on the inside. Did he fall asleep one night and wake up watching Dr Who?
As I am often called a pessimist, though I think there are good reasons for pessimism on the subject of climate change and whether mankind will actually do anything to stop it. There is a bright note in that a sea level rise of several metres means I will be living in a beach front property.
Rather depends exactly how much it rises, and won't you be having rather a lot of people living in your garden shed?
It wont rise past my house I doubt and nope don't have a garden shed so they can go live in london
"It wont rise past my house I doubt"
Didn't know you lived on a boat, Pagan
I am 60 metres above sea level so it is unlikely
Complete melting of antarctica would do it. As you say, unlikely.
That would potentially happen within a thousand or so years on current CO2 loadings, though of course it's hard to imagine what human society would look like in a thousand years. Indeed it's hard to imagine what human society will look like in a hundred years. It's possible we'll all just be data by then. One big neural net.
In the shorter (i.e. during 21st century) term the really worrying thing is the knock-on impacts we'll get from warming, not just the natural disasters but the human social upheavals: notably warfare, migration and refugee crises, revolutions etc. It's possible that climate change rather than being the proximate cause for human society collapsing becomes the trigger for other proximate causes. After all we've managed just under 80 years of no nuclear attacks since Nagasaki but not without several near misses.
I am personally somewhat optimistic that the combination of stabilising/declining global population and technological change towards net zero will spare us the worst. 2.5C warming perhaps. Catastrophic in many ways but not as bad as 3C, which in turn isn't as back as 4C and so on.
That's one of the good things about climate change mitigation. It isn't a binary issue. Every bit of mitigation makes things somewhat less bad than they might otherwise have been. We are already undershooting the BAU emissions projections from the 1990s so we're already better that worst case scenario.
What do you envisage the scenario for the climate wars will be and when do you think it will transpire.
A few:
1. Arab-spring style: drought or floods in key agricultural areas lead to commodity inflation and rapid migration to cities of young men. Revolutions break out. One of them in a strategically important country leads to a series of events culminating in war. The Threads scenario suggests this would be Iran. Various papers already showing the climate linkages with the timing and locations of the Arab spring and Syrian civil war 2. Climate refugee crisis: drought in Sahel triggers large exodus towards Europe, states start shutting frontiers against each other, some twat like Lukashenko decides to weaponise this, etc etc 3. Water resources: drought upstream leads to one country shutting off water supply to another downstream. War breaks out. Big powers get involved then boom. Has happened a few times in the past
Those are triggers. More likely a gradually increasing series of stresses from environmental damage until a breaking point.
We will see. From all the chat I'm expecting NOTHING that hasn't been alleged before, and ZERO actual evidence. Grusch himself has seen ZERO, he is relating takes told to him.
Keep believing folks, if it floats you boat, but don't expect an earth shattering revelation any time soon...
A lot of it may depend on whether they can get names and information from the U.S. Inspector-General of Intelligence.
He seems to have collecting names and evidence for about three years now.
I just don't see anything beyond what we have seen many times before. Unless you subscribe to the X-files state within a state cover-up, its hard to see how this stuff hasn't come out, if there really are crashed UFO's with alien bodies.
Far more likely is the usual grift. There is money to be made writing books, and going on TV's shows talking shit.
I personally would say it's quite easy to see how information could have not come out. An ossified, compartmentalised bureaucracy, then protected by layers of fearsome secrecy legislation.
A large conspiracy, state-within-a-state, or anything like that, is not necessarily part of this sort of compartmentalisation. Something shut away and forgotten about by most, and then with very limited access, to only people who have specific cause to, by their job description, such, perhaps, as Grusch.
I think that's just too Hollywood. Stuff leaks - proper stuff, not drunken bar tales.
There have been a certain number of insider reports for years, but most of the people have been considered axiomatically and culturally crazy.
As the Slate article mentions, if any of this is true, it would be more than a paradigm shift, and more like a complete reordering of reality, for many people.
The problem with so much of this is that UFO's and little green men who became grey aliens is that its a cultural phenomena. People in the middle ages saw things they didn't understand and thought it was angels. After the second world war we saw an explosion of things flying around (aeroplanes, then satellites) and people started to misidentify them. Arnold didn't see flying saucers, he described things skipping like a saucer, yet that story became the flying saucer genesis. And so throughout the fifties and sixties people saw saucer shapes.
TV and film play a part - Close Encounters of the Third Kind caused a huge upsurge in UFO sightings. And aliens became greys, something that followed through into the X-files. The X-files convinced people that a government could cover up a huge conspiracy (aliens and here, are malevalent and experimenting on humans). And now we see this playing out with with yet another grift merchant spinning tales.
Its possible Grusch believes what he has been told and is reporting. Its possible he is being played (i'd argue likely). But what is less likely is that alien races in all their different forms have been visiting the Earth since the 1940's with an ever changing shape and ever changing craft.
I'd love to be wrong. If aliens are here and it is revealed is will change EVERYTHING. But don't hold your breath.
Graham hancock theory
1. People who trip on DMT (naturally occurring hallucinogen, active ingredient in ayahuasca) see, to an extraordinary extent, the same things, even when not forewarned about the probability of seeing these things. "Machine elves" - little green men in high tech settings.
2. We endogenously produce small quantities of DMT (this is uncontroversially the case, though nobody knows why)
3. People who naturally produce more than DMT than others, spontaneously have these hallucinations.
Though this doesn't explain 1., which is the most interesting part of it.
We will see. From all the chat I'm expecting NOTHING that hasn't been alleged before, and ZERO actual evidence. Grusch himself has seen ZERO, he is relating takes told to him.
Keep believing folks, if it floats you boat, but don't expect an earth shattering revelation any time soon...
A lot of it may depend on whether they can get names and information from the U.S. Inspector-General of Intelligence.
He seems to have collecting names and evidence for about three years now.
I just don't see anything beyond what we have seen many times before. Unless you subscribe to the X-files state within a state cover-up, its hard to see how this stuff hasn't come out, if there really are crashed UFO's with alien bodies.
Far more likely is the usual grift. There is money to be made writing books, and going on TV's shows talking shit.
I personally would say it's quite easy to see how information could have not come out. An ossified, compartmentalised bureaucracy, then protected by layers of fearsome secrecy legislation.
A large conspiracy, state-within-a-state, or anything like that, is not necessarily part of this sort of compartmentalisation. Something shut away and forgotten about by most, and then with very limited access, to only people who have specific cause to, by their job description, such, perhaps, as Grusch.
I think that's just too Hollywood. Stuff leaks - proper stuff, not drunken bar tales.
There have been a certain number of insider reports for years, but most of the people have been considered axiomatically and culturally crazy.
As the Slate article mentions, if any of this is true, it would be more than a paradigm shift, and more like a complete reordering of reality, for many people.
The problem with so much of this is that UFO's and little green men who became grey aliens is that its a cultural phenomena. People in the middle ages saw things they didn't understand and thought it was angels. After the second world war we saw an explosion of things flying around (aeroplanes, then satellites) and people started to misidentify them. Arnold didn't see flying saucers, he described things skipping like a saucer, yet that story became the flying saucer genesis. And so throughout the fifties and sixties people saw saucer shapes.
TV and film play a part - Close Encounters of the Third Kind caused a huge upsurge in UFO sightings. And aliens became greys, something that followed through into the X-files. The X-files convinced people that a government could cover up a huge conspiracy (aliens and here, are malevalent and experimenting on humans). And now we see this playing out with with yet another grift merchant spinning tales.
Its possible Grusch believes what he has been told and is reporting. Its possible he is being played (i'd argue likely). But what is less likely is that alien races in all their different forms have been visiting the Earth since the 1940's with an ever changing shape and ever changing craft.
I'd love to be wrong. If aliens are here and it is revealed is will change EVERYTHING. But don't hold your breath.
I've posted before a map of reported UFO sightings. They're massively weighted towards the Anglosphere.
Why are aliens so interested in the Anglosphere? Or is it, as you suggest, a cultural phenomena?
Huge reporting bias, frivolous anglophone media prepared to print this stuff.
Good question is where would you visit, or land, if you were an alien civilisation with an ability to pick up and decode human communications?
Depending on your intent, you might choose different places:
1. Wish to remain undetected, but enter the atmosphere / biosphere in order to do "science": send unmanned craft to the open ocean, or areas of uninhabited tropical rainforest with sparse satellite coverage (or jam human satellites). Possibly the Sahara too - somewhere lawless where conventional military would struggle to get to, though you might have to deal with Wagner and bands of Jihadists.
2. Want to encounter humans and animals but avoid heavily defended or militarised locations, on order to do a bit of botany, zoology and anthropology: land on some inhabited tropical Islands (but not Guam, Hawaii, French Polynesia, Diego Garcia or American Samoa), remote parts of the rainforest in PNG or the Amazon (Congo too militarised), or remote parts of the sub-Arctic (Canada or Siberia).
3. Want to make civilisational contact and be "taken to your leader": land in Eastern USA, Western Europe or East Asia. I.e. the places that show up brightest at night from space.
This is harking back to the billionaire conversation the other day. You are suffering from a failure of imagination. Why wouldn't aliens by thousands of miles tall by a million miles wide. Or a million times that? Or...or...
You are assigning them human attributes, rationality and behaviour. Super illogical.
One of the climate feedback loops just went off the chart. Antarctic sea ice extent in southern hemisphere summers is highly variable, but it always recovers in the winter. Thus year it hasn't.
(*six sigma would be once in a billion years - actually five sigma.)
Its not so much the sea ice but the risk that the ice shelf on Antartica is now able to slide off on a massive scale. If that happens Canary Warf becomes Canary ponds.
The rise in sea level will probably become the UK's biggest headache in the future. There is evidence that the sea level during the last interglacial period - the last time temperatures were comparable to now - was around 6 to 9 metres higher than today. It takes a while* for all that water to warm and the ice to melt, so it won't be our problem. It'll be a nasty legacy for our children and grandchildren though.
* Having said that, there have been occasions in the past when tipping points have passed and the Earth's climate has changed very rapidly, as Richard Tyndall has pointed out. It's very difficult to know what these points might be and when they will be passed, but the warming of the Earth is unlikely to remain a smooth process.
I agree about the sudden tipping points and of course that is possible. But your contention that the last time temperatures were this warm was in the last interglacial is simply wrong. In both historical and pre-historical times we have seen temperatures significantly warmer than now. This does not inform what might happen going forward as such but making such obviously refutable errors doesn't help the debate.
The last three Julys on Earth have been the three warmest ever recorded. But, they may also be the warmest months to occur on our planet in about 120,000 years.
Bit of nuance. Uncertainty is important. Reconstructing past temperatures is hard. Take the use of tree ring data and the 'divergence'. If tree rings are a good proxy for temperature, why are they not working now?
It's worth reading beyond the first line of the article.
Even if you've also read the strapline? "The past few summers have been the warmest on Earth in a long, long time."
Then the first sentence: "The last three Julys on Earth have been the three warmest ever recorded."
(BBM). Oopsadaisy! Surely some mistake? I was going to ask what kind of average they were using and whether in theory it treats all points on the Earth's surface equally, but really when faced with an article like that, who cares?
From the article:
"There's little doubt among scientists that we're now probably experiencing the warmest climate in some 120,000 years, even reaching above a particularly warm period around 7,000 years ago, during a post-ice age era called the Holocene.
"I agree entirely that it's very likely the last few summers have been the warmest in the last ~100,000-115,000 years," David Black, a paleoclimatologist at Stony Brook University, said over email. "It's very probable that we've begun to exceed the warmest part of the Holocene."
"It is safe to say that it's true," added Jennifer Marlon, a research scientist at Yale University's School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, in an interview. "You'll find a scientific consensus among experts even on that point now I'd bet, which says a lot."
Marlon noted that during that hotter time 7,000 years ago, only the northern hemisphere experienced some pretty warm summers, "but now we are warmer year round."
Back in 2013, Rahmstorf already argued that the current climate had already surpassed this warmest period of the Holocene. And in the last five years, the case has only grown stronger."
"during a post-ice age era called the Holocene"
This is still the Holocene. I conclude the writer didn't know what they were talking about, as usual.
In the Middle Eocene there was no ice on the planet at all - not even in Antarctic regions - and it was a hell of a lot warmer than now.
I conclude that the Earth will be absolutely fine. 5 degrees warming will not make the planet uninhabitable for humans or wipe out life.
The main risk, therefore, is to society as it is now (and why should we expect to continue exactly as we are?) and to individual species that cannot move easily due to direct habitat loss.
The earth will indeed be absolutely fine; nor is it likely to become uninhabitable for the human species.
But you have no idea what the main risks to global civilisation might be. I would suggest the ability to feed more than a couple of billion people might be one of those things.
One of the climate feedback loops just went off the chart. Antarctic sea ice extent in southern hemisphere summers is highly variable, but it always recovers in the winter. Thus year it hasn't.
(*six sigma would be once in a billion years - actually five sigma.)
Its not so much the sea ice but the risk that the ice shelf on Antartica is now able to slide off on a massive scale. If that happens Canary Warf becomes Canary ponds.
The rise in sea level will probably become the UK's biggest headache in the future. There is evidence that the sea level during the last interglacial period - the last time temperatures were comparable to now - was around 6 to 9 metres higher than today. It takes a while* for all that water to warm and the ice to melt, so it won't be our problem. It'll be a nasty legacy for our children and grandchildren though.
* Having said that, there have been occasions in the past when tipping points have passed and the Earth's climate has changed very rapidly, as Richard Tyndall has pointed out. It's very difficult to know what these points might be and when they will be passed, but the warming of the Earth is unlikely to remain a smooth process.
I agree about the sudden tipping points and of course that is possible. But your contention that the last time temperatures were this warm was in the last interglacial is simply wrong. In both historical and pre-historical times we have seen temperatures significantly warmer than now. This does not inform what might happen going forward as such but making such obviously refutable errors doesn't help the debate.
The last three Julys on Earth have been the three warmest ever recorded. But, they may also be the warmest months to occur on our planet in about 120,000 years.
Bit of nuance. Uncertainty is important. Reconstructing past temperatures is hard. Take the use of tree ring data and the 'divergence'. If tree rings are a good proxy for temperature, why are they not working now?
It's worth reading beyond the first line of the article.
Even if you've also read the strapline? "The past few summers have been the warmest on Earth in a long, long time."
Then the first sentence: "The last three Julys on Earth have been the three warmest ever recorded."
(BBM). Oopsadaisy! Surely some mistake? I was going to ask what kind of average they were using and whether in theory it treats all points on the Earth's surface equally, but really when faced with an article like that, who cares?
From the article:
"There's little doubt among scientists that we're now probably experiencing the warmest climate in some 120,000 years, even reaching above a particularly warm period around 7,000 years ago, during a post-ice age era called the Holocene.
"I agree entirely that it's very likely the last few summers have been the warmest in the last ~100,000-115,000 years," David Black, a paleoclimatologist at Stony Brook University, said over email. "It's very probable that we've begun to exceed the warmest part of the Holocene."
"It is safe to say that it's true," added Jennifer Marlon, a research scientist at Yale University's School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, in an interview. "You'll find a scientific consensus among experts even on that point now I'd bet, which says a lot."
Marlon noted that during that hotter time 7,000 years ago, only the northern hemisphere experienced some pretty warm summers, "but now we are warmer year round."
Back in 2013, Rahmstorf already argued that the current climate had already surpassed this warmest period of the Holocene. And in the last five years, the case has only grown stronger."
And their evidence? These are assertions. They may be right, but actually measuring this is not easy. Tree rings go back only so far, other methods further.
The evidence would be the large number of research papers on the topic that each of the quoted scientists has published in scientific journals. Of course we can't be certain what the climate was like in the past, just as we cannot be certain about anything in science. But the evidence that we do have points towards the current global temperature now being higher than at any time since the Eemian interglacial.
I think that the estimates of past temperatures have been a noble effort, but are not beyond criticism. Tree rings, and the divergence problem raises huge issues. If a tree ring from 1900 can infer temperature, why doesn't it work in 2015?
On tree rings, I suspect you know the answer, although it's a legitimate question with regard to historical records - were there other factors at play then, as there are now?
But there are, of course, many different climate proxies. Cores, from sediments or ice looking at chemical compositions. Counts of insects of particular types from such samples. Counts of pollen types, etc, etc. Now, to some extent they may be calibrated on each other and on the instrumental period, which is - of course - a small part of the whole. But it's not obvious what common factors would affect all of them, for most of the record, other than climate.
We will see. From all the chat I'm expecting NOTHING that hasn't been alleged before, and ZERO actual evidence. Grusch himself has seen ZERO, he is relating takes told to him.
Keep believing folks, if it floats you boat, but don't expect an earth shattering revelation any time soon...
A lot of it may depend on whether they can get names and information from the U.S. Inspector-General of Intelligence.
He seems to have collecting names and evidence for about three years now.
I just don't see anything beyond what we have seen many times before. Unless you subscribe to the X-files state within a state cover-up, its hard to see how this stuff hasn't come out, if there really are crashed UFO's with alien bodies.
Far more likely is the usual grift. There is money to be made writing books, and going on TV's shows talking shit.
I personally would say it's quite easy to see how information could have not come out. An ossified, compartmentalised bureaucracy, then protected by layers of fearsome secrecy legislation.
A large conspiracy, state-within-a-state, or anything like that, is not necessarily part of this sort of compartmentalisation. Something shut away and forgotten about by most, and then with very limited access, to only people who have specific cause to, by their job description, such, perhaps, as Grusch.
I think that's just too Hollywood. Stuff leaks - proper stuff, not drunken bar tales.
Every month or so, @Leon and @WhisperingOracle whip themselves up in an orgy of excitement over the *next* news they're sure will come out. And each time, there's much heat but little light.
Little green men having the tech to travel vast distances to our planet, then being seen - or even crashing many times in just one or two countries - is truly extraordinary, and requires truly extraordinary evidence.
There isn't any. Occam's razor applies.
There is of course the explanation that it is a bunch of drunk teenage aliens out for a laugh. Let's go and find the guy who lives by himself and buzz him. You know the guy everyone thinks is a bit weird. Let's fly across the bow of a USAF plane but in such a way that any video is blurred.
The distances between stars are vast. The tech needed to traverse those distances would require a phenomenal vastness of engineering. If any aliens happened to head our way in some sort of intergenerational ark it would be very very clear and very very obvious.
Or they are from a parallel dimension. And they’ve been here all along, and given our limited bandwidth we only occasionally glimpse them, the same way we cannot begin to smell the 10,000 aromas available to a dog
Yes, that sounds insane
But then, rational physicists calmly discuss the idea of infinite parallel universes - or even the idea we are simply players in a simulation - and no one demands that they be locked up for lunacy
Absolutely. String theory, quantum theory, a thousand other theories, damnit even the hadal snailfish. All defy rational understanding.
We will see. From all the chat I'm expecting NOTHING that hasn't been alleged before, and ZERO actual evidence. Grusch himself has seen ZERO, he is relating takes told to him.
Keep believing folks, if it floats you boat, but don't expect an earth shattering revelation any time soon...
A lot of it may depend on whether they can get names and information from the U.S. Inspector-General of Intelligence.
He seems to have collecting names and evidence for about three years now.
I just don't see anything beyond what we have seen many times before. Unless you subscribe to the X-files state within a state cover-up, its hard to see how this stuff hasn't come out, if there really are crashed UFO's with alien bodies.
Far more likely is the usual grift. There is money to be made writing books, and going on TV's shows talking shit.
I personally would say it's quite easy to see how information could have not come out. An ossified, compartmentalised bureaucracy, then protected by layers of fearsome secrecy legislation.
A large conspiracy, state-within-a-state, or anything like that, is not necessarily part of this sort of compartmentalisation. Something shut away and forgotten about by most, and then with very limited access, to only people who have specific cause to, by their job description, such, perhaps, as Grusch.
I think that's just too Hollywood. Stuff leaks - proper stuff, not drunken bar tales.
There have been a certain number of insider reports for years, but most of the people have been considered axiomatically and culturally crazy.
As the Slate article mentions, if any of this is true, it would be more than a paradigm shift, and more like a complete reordering of reality, for many people.
The problem with so much of this is that UFO's and little green men who became grey aliens is that its a cultural phenomena. People in the middle ages saw things they didn't understand and thought it was angels. After the second world war we saw an explosion of things flying around (aeroplanes, then satellites) and people started to misidentify them. Arnold didn't see flying saucers, he described things skipping like a saucer, yet that story became the flying saucer genesis. And so throughout the fifties and sixties people saw saucer shapes.
TV and film play a part - Close Encounters of the Third Kind caused a huge upsurge in UFO sightings. And aliens became greys, something that followed through into the X-files. The X-files convinced people that a government could cover up a huge conspiracy (aliens and here, are malevalent and experimenting on humans). And now we see this playing out with with yet another grift merchant spinning tales.
Its possible Grusch believes what he has been told and is reporting. Its possible he is being played (i'd argue likely). But what is less likely is that alien races in all their different forms have been visiting the Earth since the 1940's with an ever changing shape and ever changing craft.
I'd love to be wrong. If aliens are here and it is revealed is will change EVERYTHING. But don't hold your breath.
I've posted before a map of reported UFO sightings. They're massively weighted towards the Anglosphere.
Why are aliens so interested in the Anglosphere? Or is it, as you suggest, a cultural phenomena?
Huge reporting bias, frivolous anglophone media prepared to print this stuff.
Good question is where would you visit, or land, if you were an alien civilisation with an ability to pick up and decode human communications?
Depending on your intent, you might choose different places:
1. Wish to remain undetected, but enter the atmosphere / biosphere in order to do "science": send unmanned craft to the open ocean, or areas of uninhabited tropical rainforest with sparse satellite coverage (or jam human satellites). Possibly the Sahara too - somewhere lawless where conventional military would struggle to get to, though you might have to deal with Wagner and bands of Jihadists.
2. Want to encounter humans and animals but avoid heavily defended or militarised locations, on order to do a bit of botany, zoology and anthropology: land on some inhabited tropical Islands (but not Guam, Hawaii, French Polynesia, Diego Garcia or American Samoa), remote parts of the rainforest in PNG or the Amazon (Congo too militarised), or remote parts of the sub-Arctic (Canada or Siberia).
3. Want to make civilisational contact and be "taken to your leader": land in Eastern USA, Western Europe or East Asia. I.e. the places that show up brightest at night from space.
If aliens have the tech to get here (Unlikely), they're not going to be worried about our military capabilities in the slightest.
They might be concerned or intrigued that we are about to blow ourselves up, and destroy our entire planet. Rather than “frightened” for themselves
Frankly, if I was a wandering alien or an inter dimensional being, I’d find Planet Earth quite fascinating at this point. It’s like kids. When they are babies they are boring. When they are teens they are irritating
But when they are about 6-10 they are fascinating. Adorable yet eerie. The personality is being formed. You want to observe
We will see. From all the chat I'm expecting NOTHING that hasn't been alleged before, and ZERO actual evidence. Grusch himself has seen ZERO, he is relating takes told to him.
Keep believing folks, if it floats you boat, but don't expect an earth shattering revelation any time soon...
A lot of it may depend on whether they can get names and information from the U.S. Inspector-General of Intelligence.
He seems to have collecting names and evidence for about three years now.
I just don't see anything beyond what we have seen many times before. Unless you subscribe to the X-files state within a state cover-up, its hard to see how this stuff hasn't come out, if there really are crashed UFO's with alien bodies.
Far more likely is the usual grift. There is money to be made writing books, and going on TV's shows talking shit.
I personally would say it's quite easy to see how information could have not come out. An ossified, compartmentalised bureaucracy, then protected by layers of fearsome secrecy legislation.
A large conspiracy, state-within-a-state, or anything like that, is not necessarily part of this sort of compartmentalisation. Something shut away and forgotten about by most, and then with very limited access, to only people who have specific cause to, by their job description, such, perhaps, as Grusch.
I think that's just too Hollywood. Stuff leaks - proper stuff, not drunken bar tales.
There have been a certain number of insider reports for years, but most of the people have been considered axiomatically and culturally crazy.
As the Slate article mentions, if any of this is true, it would be more than a paradigm shift, and more like a complete reordering of reality, for many people.
The problem with so much of this is that UFO's and little green men who became grey aliens is that its a cultural phenomena. People in the middle ages saw things they didn't understand and thought it was angels. After the second world war we saw an explosion of things flying around (aeroplanes, then satellites) and people started to misidentify them. Arnold didn't see flying saucers, he described things skipping like a saucer, yet that story became the flying saucer genesis. And so throughout the fifties and sixties people saw saucer shapes.
TV and film play a part - Close Encounters of the Third Kind caused a huge upsurge in UFO sightings. And aliens became greys, something that followed through into the X-files. The X-files convinced people that a government could cover up a huge conspiracy (aliens and here, are malevalent and experimenting on humans). And now we see this playing out with with yet another grift merchant spinning tales.
Its possible Grusch believes what he has been told and is reporting. Its possible he is being played (i'd argue likely). But what is less likely is that alien races in all their different forms have been visiting the Earth since the 1940's with an ever changing shape and ever changing craft.
I'd love to be wrong. If aliens are here and it is revealed is will change EVERYTHING. But don't hold your breath.
I've posted before a map of reported UFO sightings. They're massively weighted towards the Anglosphere.
Why are aliens so interested in the Anglosphere? Or is it, as you suggest, a cultural phenomena?
Huge reporting bias, frivolous anglophone media prepared to print this stuff.
Good question is where would you visit, or land, if you were an alien civilisation with an ability to pick up and decode human communications?
Depending on your intent, you might choose different places:
1. Wish to remain undetected, but enter the atmosphere / biosphere in order to do "science": send unmanned craft to the open ocean, or areas of uninhabited tropical rainforest with sparse satellite coverage (or jam human satellites). Possibly the Sahara too - somewhere lawless where conventional military would struggle to get to, though you might have to deal with Wagner and bands of Jihadists.
2. Want to encounter humans and animals but avoid heavily defended or militarised locations, on order to do a bit of botany, zoology and anthropology: land on some inhabited tropical Islands (but not Guam, Hawaii, French Polynesia, Diego Garcia or American Samoa), remote parts of the rainforest in PNG or the Amazon (Congo too militarised), or remote parts of the sub-Arctic (Canada or Siberia).
3. Want to make civilisational contact and be "taken to your leader": land in Eastern USA, Western Europe or East Asia. I.e. the places that show up brightest at night from space.
If aliens have the tech to get here (Unlikely), they're not going to be worried about our military capabilities in the slightest.
If they have the tech to get here they quite possibly also have the ethical frameworks to want to "do no harm", which means not triggering violent warfare or species extermination. They would have had their own colonial histories back at home I'm sure. So they would want to visit somewhere they could make a limited impact and ideally go undetected.
As I am often called a pessimist, though I think there are good reasons for pessimism on the subject of climate change and whether mankind will actually do anything to stop it. There is a bright note in that a sea level rise of several metres means I will be living in a beach front property.
Rather depends exactly how much it rises, and won't you be having rather a lot of people living in your garden shed?
It wont rise past my house I doubt and nope don't have a garden shed so they can go live in london
"It wont rise past my house I doubt"
Didn't know you lived on a boat, Pagan
I am 60 metres above sea level so it is unlikely
Complete melting of antarctica would do it. As you say, unlikely.
That would potentially happen within a thousand or so years on current CO2 loadings, though of course it's hard to imagine what human society would look like in a thousand years. Indeed it's hard to imagine what human society will look like in a hundred years. It's possible we'll all just be data by then. One big neural net.
In the shorter (i.e. during 21st century) term the really worrying thing is the knock-on impacts we'll get from warming, not just the natural disasters but the human social upheavals: notably warfare, migration and refugee crises, revolutions etc. It's possible that climate change rather than being the proximate cause for human society collapsing becomes the trigger for other proximate causes. After all we've managed just under 80 years of no nuclear attacks since Nagasaki but not without several near misses.
I am personally somewhat optimistic that the combination of stabilising/declining global population and technological change towards net zero will spare us the worst. 2.5C warming perhaps. Catastrophic in many ways but not as bad as 3C, which in turn isn't as back as 4C and so on.
That's one of the good things about climate change mitigation. It isn't a binary issue. Every bit of mitigation makes things somewhat less bad than they might otherwise have been. We are already undershooting the BAU emissions projections from the 1990s so we're already better that worst case scenario.
What do you envisage the scenario for the climate wars will be and when do you think it will transpire.
A few:
1. Arab-spring style: drought or floods in key agricultural areas lead to commodity inflation and rapid migration to cities of young men. Revolutions break out. One of them in a strategically important country leads to a series of events culminating in war. The Threads scenario suggests this would be Iran. Various papers already showing the climate linkages with the timing and locations of the Arab spring and Syrian civil war 2. Climate refugee crisis: drought in Sahel triggers large exodus towards Europe, states start shutting frontiers against each other, some twat like Lukashenko decides to weaponise this, etc etc 3. Water resources: drought upstream leads to one country shutting off water supply to another downstream. War breaks out. Big powers get involved then boom. Has happened a few times in the past
Those are triggers. More likely a gradually increasing series of stresses from environmental damage until a breaking point.
I think a lot of the pressures we see with migration are down to globalisation as much as anything else. If you live in a shit hole part of the world but can see via the media, the internet, movies etc that living in the west is awesome, why wouldn't you bust a gut to try to get there and have some of it for yourself? Or rather stay herding goats in the Ethiopian Highlands, eking out a life. Yes climate change may well cause issues, but I believe more are caused by folk wanting to get better lives.
Its not unlike the old communist states and the lack of goods in the shops compared to the decadent west.
As I am often called a pessimist, though I think there are good reasons for pessimism on the subject of climate change and whether mankind will actually do anything to stop it. There is a bright note in that a sea level rise of several metres means I will be living in a beach front property.
Rather depends exactly how much it rises, and won't you be having rather a lot of people living in your garden shed?
It wont rise past my house I doubt and nope don't have a garden shed so they can go live in london
"It wont rise past my house I doubt"
Didn't know you lived on a boat, Pagan
I am 60 metres above sea level so it is unlikely
Complete melting of antarctica would do it. As you say, unlikely.
That would potentially happen within a thousand or so years on current CO2 loadings, though of course it's hard to imagine what human society would look like in a thousand years. Indeed it's hard to imagine what human society will look like in a hundred years. It's possible we'll all just be data by then. One big neural net.
In the shorter (i.e. during 21st century) term the really worrying thing is the knock-on impacts we'll get from warming, not just the natural disasters but the human social upheavals: notably warfare, migration and refugee crises, revolutions etc. It's possible that climate change rather than being the proximate cause for human society collapsing becomes the trigger for other proximate causes. After all we've managed just under 80 years of no nuclear attacks since Nagasaki but not without several near misses.
I am personally somewhat optimistic that the combination of stabilising/declining global population and technological change towards net zero will spare us the worst. 2.5C warming perhaps. Catastrophic in many ways but not as bad as 3C, which in turn isn't as back as 4C and so on.
That's one of the good things about climate change mitigation. It isn't a binary issue. Every bit of mitigation makes things somewhat less bad than they might otherwise have been. We are already undershooting the BAU emissions projections from the 1990s so we're already better that worst case scenario.
What do you envisage the scenario for the climate wars will be and when do you think it will transpire.
A few:
1. Arab-spring style: drought or floods in key agricultural areas lead to commodity inflation and rapid migration to cities of young men. Revolutions break out. One of them in a strategically important country leads to a series of events culminating in war. The Threads scenario suggests this would be Iran. Various papers already showing the climate linkages with the timing and locations of the Arab spring and Syrian civil war 2. Climate refugee crisis: drought in Sahel triggers large exodus towards Europe, states start shutting frontiers against each other, some twat like Lukashenko decides to weaponise this, etc etc 3. Water resources: drought upstream leads to one country shutting off water supply to another downstream. War breaks out. Big powers get involved then boom. Has happened a few times in the past
Those are triggers. More likely a gradually increasing series of stresses from environmental damage until a breaking point.
Have we not had similar instances previously of such things. Aren't these things sort of going on all the time?
One of the climate feedback loops just went off the chart. Antarctic sea ice extent in southern hemisphere summers is highly variable, but it always recovers in the winter. Thus year it hasn't.
(*six sigma would be once in a billion years - actually five sigma.)
Its not so much the sea ice but the risk that the ice shelf on Antartica is now able to slide off on a massive scale. If that happens Canary Warf becomes Canary ponds.
The rise in sea level will probably become the UK's biggest headache in the future. There is evidence that the sea level during the last interglacial period - the last time temperatures were comparable to now - was around 6 to 9 metres higher than today. It takes a while* for all that water to warm and the ice to melt, so it won't be our problem. It'll be a nasty legacy for our children and grandchildren though.
* Having said that, there have been occasions in the past when tipping points have passed and the Earth's climate has changed very rapidly, as Richard Tyndall has pointed out. It's very difficult to know what these points might be and when they will be passed, but the warming of the Earth is unlikely to remain a smooth process.
I agree about the sudden tipping points and of course that is possible. But your contention that the last time temperatures were this warm was in the last interglacial is simply wrong. In both historical and pre-historical times we have seen temperatures significantly warmer than now. This does not inform what might happen going forward as such but making such obviously refutable errors doesn't help the debate.
The last three Julys on Earth have been the three warmest ever recorded. But, they may also be the warmest months to occur on our planet in about 120,000 years.
Bit of nuance. Uncertainty is important. Reconstructing past temperatures is hard. Take the use of tree ring data and the 'divergence'. If tree rings are a good proxy for temperature, why are they not working now?
It's worth reading beyond the first line of the article.
Even if you've also read the strapline? "The past few summers have been the warmest on Earth in a long, long time."
Then the first sentence: "The last three Julys on Earth have been the three warmest ever recorded."
(BBM). Oopsadaisy! Surely some mistake? I was going to ask what kind of average they were using and whether in theory it treats all points on the Earth's surface equally, but really when faced with an article like that, who cares?
From the article:
"There's little doubt among scientists that we're now probably experiencing the warmest climate in some 120,000 years, even reaching above a particularly warm period around 7,000 years ago, during a post-ice age era called the Holocene.
"I agree entirely that it's very likely the last few summers have been the warmest in the last ~100,000-115,000 years," David Black, a paleoclimatologist at Stony Brook University, said over email. "It's very probable that we've begun to exceed the warmest part of the Holocene."
"It is safe to say that it's true," added Jennifer Marlon, a research scientist at Yale University's School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, in an interview. "You'll find a scientific consensus among experts even on that point now I'd bet, which says a lot."
Marlon noted that during that hotter time 7,000 years ago, only the northern hemisphere experienced some pretty warm summers, "but now we are warmer year round."
Back in 2013, Rahmstorf already argued that the current climate had already surpassed this warmest period of the Holocene. And in the last five years, the case has only grown stronger."
"during a post-ice age era called the Holocene"
This is still the Holocene. I conclude the writer didn't know what they were talking about, as usual.
In the Middle Eocene there was no ice on the planet at all - not even in Antarctic regions - and it was a hell of a lot warmer than now.
I conclude that the Earth will be absolutely fine. 5 degrees warming will not make the planet uninhabitable for humans or wipe out life.
The main risk, therefore, is to society as it is now (and why should we expect to continue exactly as we are?) and to individual species that cannot move easily due to direct habitat loss.
Sure, there's a stable equilibrium where people happily inhabit a Middle Eocene climate. It's getting between equilibria is the tricky bit.
We will see. From all the chat I'm expecting NOTHING that hasn't been alleged before, and ZERO actual evidence. Grusch himself has seen ZERO, he is relating takes told to him.
Keep believing folks, if it floats you boat, but don't expect an earth shattering revelation any time soon...
A lot of it may depend on whether they can get names and information from the U.S. Inspector-General of Intelligence.
He seems to have collecting names and evidence for about three years now.
I just don't see anything beyond what we have seen many times before. Unless you subscribe to the X-files state within a state cover-up, its hard to see how this stuff hasn't come out, if there really are crashed UFO's with alien bodies.
Far more likely is the usual grift. There is money to be made writing books, and going on TV's shows talking shit.
I personally would say it's quite easy to see how information could have not come out. An ossified, compartmentalised bureaucracy, then protected by layers of fearsome secrecy legislation.
A large conspiracy, state-within-a-state, or anything like that, is not necessarily part of this sort of compartmentalisation. Something shut away and forgotten about by most, and then with very limited access, to only people who have specific cause to, by their job description, such, perhaps, as Grusch.
I think that's just too Hollywood. Stuff leaks - proper stuff, not drunken bar tales.
There have been a certain number of insider reports for years, but most of the people have been considered axiomatically and culturally crazy.
As the Slate article mentions, if any of this is true, it would be more than a paradigm shift, and more like a complete reordering of reality, for many people.
The problem with so much of this is that UFO's and little green men who became grey aliens is that its a cultural phenomena. People in the middle ages saw things they didn't understand and thought it was angels. After the second world war we saw an explosion of things flying around (aeroplanes, then satellites) and people started to misidentify them. Arnold didn't see flying saucers, he described things skipping like a saucer, yet that story became the flying saucer genesis. And so throughout the fifties and sixties people saw saucer shapes.
TV and film play a part - Close Encounters of the Third Kind caused a huge upsurge in UFO sightings. And aliens became greys, something that followed through into the X-files. The X-files convinced people that a government could cover up a huge conspiracy (aliens and here, are malevalent and experimenting on humans). And now we see this playing out with with yet another grift merchant spinning tales.
Its possible Grusch believes what he has been told and is reporting. Its possible he is being played (i'd argue likely). But what is less likely is that alien races in all their different forms have been visiting the Earth since the 1940's with an ever changing shape and ever changing craft.
I'd love to be wrong. If aliens are here and it is revealed is will change EVERYTHING. But don't hold your breath.
I've posted before a map of reported UFO sightings. They're massively weighted towards the Anglosphere.
We will see. From all the chat I'm expecting NOTHING that hasn't been alleged before, and ZERO actual evidence. Grusch himself has seen ZERO, he is relating takes told to him.
Keep believing folks, if it floats you boat, but don't expect an earth shattering revelation any time soon...
A lot of it may depend on whether they can get names and information from the U.S. Inspector-General of Intelligence.
He seems to have collecting names and evidence for about three years now.
I just don't see anything beyond what we have seen many times before. Unless you subscribe to the X-files state within a state cover-up, its hard to see how this stuff hasn't come out, if there really are crashed UFO's with alien bodies.
Far more likely is the usual grift. There is money to be made writing books, and going on TV's shows talking shit.
I personally would say it's quite easy to see how information could have not come out. An ossified, compartmentalised bureaucracy, then protected by layers of fearsome secrecy legislation.
A large conspiracy, state-within-a-state, or anything like that, is not necessarily part of this sort of compartmentalisation. Something shut away and forgotten about by most, and then with very limited access, to only people who have specific cause to, by their job description, such, perhaps, as Grusch.
I think that's just too Hollywood. Stuff leaks - proper stuff, not drunken bar tales.
There have been a certain number of insider reports for years, but most of the people have been considered axiomatically and culturally crazy.
As the Slate article mentions, if any of this is true, it would be more than a paradigm shift, and more like a complete reordering of reality, for many people.
The problem with so much of this is that UFO's and little green men who became grey aliens is that its a cultural phenomena. People in the middle ages saw things they didn't understand and thought it was angels. After the second world war we saw an explosion of things flying around (aeroplanes, then satellites) and people started to misidentify them. Arnold didn't see flying saucers, he described things skipping like a saucer, yet that story became the flying saucer genesis. And so throughout the fifties and sixties people saw saucer shapes.
TV and film play a part - Close Encounters of the Third Kind caused a huge upsurge in UFO sightings. And aliens became greys, something that followed through into the X-files. The X-files convinced people that a government could cover up a huge conspiracy (aliens and here, are malevalent and experimenting on humans). And now we see this playing out with with yet another grift merchant spinning tales.
Its possible Grusch believes what he has been told and is reporting. Its possible he is being played (i'd argue likely). But what is less likely is that alien races in all their different forms have been visiting the Earth since the 1940's with an ever changing shape and ever changing craft.
I'd love to be wrong. If aliens are here and it is revealed is will change EVERYTHING. But don't hold your breath.
I've posted before a map of reported UFO sightings. They're massively weighted towards the Anglosphere.
Why are aliens so interested in the Anglosphere? Or is it, as you suggest, a cultural phenomena?
Huge reporting bias, frivolous anglophone media prepared to print this stuff.
Good question is where would you visit, or land, if you were an alien civilisation with an ability to pick up and decode human communications?
Depending on your intent, you might choose different places:
1. Wish to remain undetected, but enter the atmosphere / biosphere in order to do "science": send unmanned craft to the open ocean, or areas of uninhabited tropical rainforest with sparse satellite coverage (or jam human satellites). Possibly the Sahara too - somewhere lawless where conventional military would struggle to get to, though you might have to deal with Wagner and bands of Jihadists.
2. Want to encounter humans and animals but avoid heavily defended or militarised locations, on order to do a bit of botany, zoology and anthropology: land on some inhabited tropical Islands (but not Guam, Hawaii, French Polynesia, Diego Garcia or American Samoa), remote parts of the rainforest in PNG or the Amazon (Congo too militarised), or remote parts of the sub-Arctic (Canada or Siberia).
3. Want to make civilisational contact and be "taken to your leader": land in Eastern USA, Western Europe or East Asia. I.e. the places that show up brightest at night from space.
This is harking back to the billionaire conversation the other day. You are suffering from a failure of imagination. Why wouldn't aliens by thousands of miles tall by a million miles wide. Or a million times that? Or...or...
You are assigning them human attributes, rationality and behaviour. Super illogical.
True to an extent but we see on earth how superficially similar species evolve completely independently in different ecological niches. So it's also illogical to argue that somehow human/animal like forms of the sort we have here wouldn't have evolved to look quite similar on other planets with similar chemistry and pressure.
We will see. From all the chat I'm expecting NOTHING that hasn't been alleged before, and ZERO actual evidence. Grusch himself has seen ZERO, he is relating takes told to him.
Keep believing folks, if it floats you boat, but don't expect an earth shattering revelation any time soon...
A lot of it may depend on whether they can get names and information from the U.S. Inspector-General of Intelligence.
He seems to have collecting names and evidence for about three years now.
I just don't see anything beyond what we have seen many times before. Unless you subscribe to the X-files state within a state cover-up, its hard to see how this stuff hasn't come out, if there really are crashed UFO's with alien bodies.
Far more likely is the usual grift. There is money to be made writing books, and going on TV's shows talking shit.
I personally would say it's quite easy to see how information could have not come out. An ossified, compartmentalised bureaucracy, then protected by layers of fearsome secrecy legislation.
A large conspiracy, state-within-a-state, or anything like that, is not necessarily part of this sort of compartmentalisation. Something shut away and forgotten about by most, and then with very limited access, to only people who have specific cause to, by their job description, such, perhaps, as Grusch.
I think that's just too Hollywood. Stuff leaks - proper stuff, not drunken bar tales.
There have been a certain number of insider reports for years, but most of the people have been considered axiomatically and culturally crazy.
As the Slate article mentions, if any of this is true, it would be more than a paradigm shift, and more like a complete reordering of reality, for many people.
The problem with so much of this is that UFO's and little green men who became grey aliens is that its a cultural phenomena. People in the middle ages saw things they didn't understand and thought it was angels. After the second world war we saw an explosion of things flying around (aeroplanes, then satellites) and people started to misidentify them. Arnold didn't see flying saucers, he described things skipping like a saucer, yet that story became the flying saucer genesis. And so throughout the fifties and sixties people saw saucer shapes.
TV and film play a part - Close Encounters of the Third Kind caused a huge upsurge in UFO sightings. And aliens became greys, something that followed through into the X-files. The X-files convinced people that a government could cover up a huge conspiracy (aliens and here, are malevalent and experimenting on humans). And now we see this playing out with with yet another grift merchant spinning tales.
Its possible Grusch believes what he has been told and is reporting. Its possible he is being played (i'd argue likely). But what is less likely is that alien races in all their different forms have been visiting the Earth since the 1940's with an ever changing shape and ever changing craft.
I'd love to be wrong. If aliens are here and it is revealed is will change EVERYTHING. But don't hold your breath.
Graham hancock theory
1. People who trip on DMT (naturally occurring hallucinogen, active ingredient in ayahuasca) see, to an extraordinary extent, the same things, even when not forewarned about the probability of seeing these things. "Machine elves" - little green men in high tech settings.
2. We endogenously produce small quantities of DMT (this is uncontroversially the case, though nobody knows why)
3. People who naturally produce more than DMT than others, spontaneously have these hallucinations.
Though this doesn't explain 1., which is the most interesting part of it.
I am quite “intimately” involved in the world’s most advanced scientific investigations into Point 1
As I am often called a pessimist, though I think there are good reasons for pessimism on the subject of climate change and whether mankind will actually do anything to stop it. There is a bright note in that a sea level rise of several metres means I will be living in a beach front property.
Rather depends exactly how much it rises, and won't you be having rather a lot of people living in your garden shed?
It wont rise past my house I doubt and nope don't have a garden shed so they can go live in london
"It wont rise past my house I doubt"
Didn't know you lived on a boat, Pagan
I am 60 metres above sea level so it is unlikely
Complete melting of antarctica would do it. As you say, unlikely.
That would potentially happen within a thousand or so years on current CO2 loadings, though of course it's hard to imagine what human society would look like in a thousand years. Indeed it's hard to imagine what human society will look like in a hundred years. It's possible we'll all just be data by then. One big neural net.
In the shorter (i.e. during 21st century) term the really worrying thing is the knock-on impacts we'll get from warming, not just the natural disasters but the human social upheavals: notably warfare, migration and refugee crises, revolutions etc. It's possible that climate change rather than being the proximate cause for human society collapsing becomes the trigger for other proximate causes. After all we've managed just under 80 years of no nuclear attacks since Nagasaki but not without several near misses.
I am personally somewhat optimistic that the combination of stabilising/declining global population and technological change towards net zero will spare us the worst. 2.5C warming perhaps. Catastrophic in many ways but not as bad as 3C, which in turn isn't as back as 4C and so on.
That's one of the good things about climate change mitigation. It isn't a binary issue. Every bit of mitigation makes things somewhat less bad than they might otherwise have been. We are already undershooting the BAU emissions projections from the 1990s so we're already better that worst case scenario.
What do you envisage the scenario for the climate wars will be and when do you think it will transpire.
A few:
1. Arab-spring style: drought or floods in key agricultural areas lead to commodity inflation and rapid migration to cities of young men. Revolutions break out. One of them in a strategically important country leads to a series of events culminating in war. The Threads scenario suggests this would be Iran. Various papers already showing the climate linkages with the timing and locations of the Arab spring and Syrian civil war 2. Climate refugee crisis: drought in Sahel triggers large exodus towards Europe, states start shutting frontiers against each other, some twat like Lukashenko decides to weaponise this, etc etc 3. Water resources: drought upstream leads to one country shutting off water supply to another downstream. War breaks out. Big powers get involved then boom. Has happened a few times in the past
Those are triggers. More likely a gradually increasing series of stresses from environmental damage until a breaking point.
Have we not had similar instances previously of such things. Aren't these things sort of going on all the time?
Yes, and they are already at least partly being triggered by climate shifts. It's like arguing humans have shot each other with weapons for millennia so what's the harm in giving them all more guns.
We will see. From all the chat I'm expecting NOTHING that hasn't been alleged before, and ZERO actual evidence. Grusch himself has seen ZERO, he is relating takes told to him.
Keep believing folks, if it floats you boat, but don't expect an earth shattering revelation any time soon...
A lot of it may depend on whether they can get names and information from the U.S. Inspector-General of Intelligence.
He seems to have collecting names and evidence for about three years now.
I just don't see anything beyond what we have seen many times before. Unless you subscribe to the X-files state within a state cover-up, its hard to see how this stuff hasn't come out, if there really are crashed UFO's with alien bodies.
Far more likely is the usual grift. There is money to be made writing books, and going on TV's shows talking shit.
I personally would say it's quite easy to see how information could have not come out. An ossified, compartmentalised bureaucracy, then protected by layers of fearsome secrecy legislation.
A large conspiracy, state-within-a-state, or anything like that, is not necessarily part of this sort of compartmentalisation. Something shut away and forgotten about by most, and then with very limited access, to only people who have specific cause to, by their job description, such, perhaps, as Grusch.
I think that's just too Hollywood. Stuff leaks - proper stuff, not drunken bar tales.
Every month or so, @Leon and @WhisperingOracle whip themselves up in an orgy of excitement over the *next* news they're sure will come out. And each time, there's much heat but little light.
Little green men having the tech to travel vast distances to our planet, then being seen - or even crashing many times in just one or two countries - is truly extraordinary, and requires truly extraordinary evidence.
There isn't any. Occam's razor applies.
There is of course the explanation that it is a bunch of drunk teenage aliens out for a laugh. Let's go and find the guy who lives by himself and buzz him. You know the guy everyone thinks is a bit weird. Let's fly across the bow of a USAF plane but in such a way that any video is blurred.
The distances are too vast. If any aliens happened to head our way in some sort of ark ship it would be very very clear and very very obvious.
What about the ant in the sand below the Mohave desert theory.
There are ants three metres below in the sand happily living out their lives with their colonies and whatnot and no human ever found them hence humans don't exist.
Or then there's the turtles.
You're misreading what I've written.
It's likely aliens are out there, it's very unlikely they'll make contact with us. Space is vast and the speed limit (c) is extremely slow for the size.
Even the first point is subject to debate. With a current sample size of 1, it's very hard to estimate how prevalent alien life might be, especially intelligent alien life. At the extreme, it could be that the evolution of intelligent life requires a series of incredibly unlikely coincidences and that we really are the only ones here.
My own feeling - and it's nothing more than that - is that simple forms of life probably exist around the universe, but that complex, intelligent beings are extremely rare and will probably never be encountered by humanity. But I'd be happy to be proved wrong. If they're friendly, that is.
Obviously this racism as everybody loves a flash solicitor.
High-flying London lawyers and sleepy countryside villages are not always the happiest of combinations, especially when the criminal law specialist really wants to take to the air.
Mayus Karia bills himself as a “ferocious litigator” but the residents of Durley, in Hampshire, will doubtless have a litany of other names for the solicitor-advocate, who has triggered a row over plans to make frequent helicopter landings at his six-bedroom £1.3 million home.
Neighbours in the village, which has a population of about 1,000, have objected to having their “peace ended” by the “flash” lawyer.
The dispute started when Karia, who qualified as a solicitor in 2005 and is said on his law firm’s website to have an “unrivalled . . . sixth sense in litigation”, won permission to construct a helipad in his back garden.
Officials at Winchester city council originally granted him only two personal use round trips a month between the hours of 8am and 6pm. However, local authority planning application documents show that last month Karia applied for unrestricted use to allow multiple landings and take-offs.
In the application, an agent for Karia said the lawyer needed “a loosening of the restriction to allow flexibility of irregular visits by some clients . . .”
Karia, a father of three, who charges between £1,000 and £1,200 an hour for legal advice, is said by neighbours to drive an SUV Rolls-Royce, while his firm, London Litigation Partnership Solicitors, describes him as “a ferocious and meticulous litigator”. His firm’s website goes on to liken his legal skills to “the genius of Field Marshal Montgomery in the battlefield”.
I wonder if the locals would be interested in some collectible SAM systems? Perhaps a nice old Blowpipe?
Or for the deep enthusiast, a Skysweeper.
I'd have thought you would go for Green Mace. (Seen it in the Royal Artillery Museum at Woolwich long ago - before they sold it off for yuppie, sorry London investment, flats.)
We will see. From all the chat I'm expecting NOTHING that hasn't been alleged before, and ZERO actual evidence. Grusch himself has seen ZERO, he is relating takes told to him.
Keep believing folks, if it floats you boat, but don't expect an earth shattering revelation any time soon...
A lot of it may depend on whether they can get names and information from the U.S. Inspector-General of Intelligence.
He seems to have collecting names and evidence for about three years now.
I just don't see anything beyond what we have seen many times before. Unless you subscribe to the X-files state within a state cover-up, its hard to see how this stuff hasn't come out, if there really are crashed UFO's with alien bodies.
Far more likely is the usual grift. There is money to be made writing books, and going on TV's shows talking shit.
I personally would say it's quite easy to see how information could have not come out. An ossified, compartmentalised bureaucracy, then protected by layers of fearsome secrecy legislation.
A large conspiracy, state-within-a-state, or anything like that, is not necessarily part of this sort of compartmentalisation. Something shut away and forgotten about by most, and then with very limited access, to only people who have specific cause to, by their job description, such, perhaps, as Grusch.
I think that's just too Hollywood. Stuff leaks - proper stuff, not drunken bar tales.
Every month or so, @Leon and @WhisperingOracle whip themselves up in an orgy of excitement over the *next* news they're sure will come out. And each time, there's much heat but little light.
Little green men having the tech to travel vast distances to our planet, then being seen - or even crashing many times in just one or two countries - is truly extraordinary, and requires truly extraordinary evidence.
There isn't any. Occam's razor applies.
There is of course the explanation that it is a bunch of drunk teenage aliens out for a laugh. Let's go and find the guy who lives by himself and buzz him. You know the guy everyone thinks is a bit weird. Let's fly across the bow of a USAF plane but in such a way that any video is blurred.
The distances between stars are vast. The tech needed to traverse those distances would require a phenomenal vastness of engineering. If any aliens happened to head our way in some sort of intergenerational ark it would be very very clear and very very obvious.
Or they are from a parallel dimension. And they’ve been here all along, and given our limited bandwidth we only occasionally glimpse them, the same way we cannot begin to smell the 10,000 aromas available to a dog
Yes, that sounds insane
But then, rational physicists calmly discuss the idea of infinite parallel universes - or even the idea we are simply players in a simulation - and no one demands that they be locked up for lunacy
Grusch mentions the interdimensional thesis.
It's not part of our current science, but that doesn't make it impossible.
He also mentions a ship that is bigger on the inside. Did he fall asleep one night and wake up watching Dr Who?
Or do the writers of science fiction often read UFO claims ?
This is also documented, just as many of its quantum and parallel-universal themes are taken from more mainstream contemporary theoretical physics and concerns, as also often discussed here.
One of the climate feedback loops just went off the chart. Antarctic sea ice extent in southern hemisphere summers is highly variable, but it always recovers in the winter. Thus year it hasn't.
(*six sigma would be once in a billion years - actually five sigma.)
Its not so much the sea ice but the risk that the ice shelf on Antartica is now able to slide off on a massive scale. If that happens Canary Warf becomes Canary ponds.
The rise in sea level will probably become the UK's biggest headache in the future. There is evidence that the sea level during the last interglacial period - the last time temperatures were comparable to now - was around 6 to 9 metres higher than today. It takes a while* for all that water to warm and the ice to melt, so it won't be our problem. It'll be a nasty legacy for our children and grandchildren though.
* Having said that, there have been occasions in the past when tipping points have passed and the Earth's climate has changed very rapidly, as Richard Tyndall has pointed out. It's very difficult to know what these points might be and when they will be passed, but the warming of the Earth is unlikely to remain a smooth process.
I agree about the sudden tipping points and of course that is possible. But your contention that the last time temperatures were this warm was in the last interglacial is simply wrong. In both historical and pre-historical times we have seen temperatures significantly warmer than now. This does not inform what might happen going forward as such but making such obviously refutable errors doesn't help the debate.
The last three Julys on Earth have been the three warmest ever recorded. But, they may also be the warmest months to occur on our planet in about 120,000 years.
Bit of nuance. Uncertainty is important. Reconstructing past temperatures is hard. Take the use of tree ring data and the 'divergence'. If tree rings are a good proxy for temperature, why are they not working now?
It's worth reading beyond the first line of the article.
Even if you've also read the strapline? "The past few summers have been the warmest on Earth in a long, long time."
Then the first sentence: "The last three Julys on Earth have been the three warmest ever recorded."
(BBM). Oopsadaisy! Surely some mistake? I was going to ask what kind of average they were using and whether in theory it treats all points on the Earth's surface equally, but really when faced with an article like that, who cares?
From the article:
"There's little doubt among scientists that we're now probably experiencing the warmest climate in some 120,000 years, even reaching above a particularly warm period around 7,000 years ago, during a post-ice age era called the Holocene.
"I agree entirely that it's very likely the last few summers have been the warmest in the last ~100,000-115,000 years," David Black, a paleoclimatologist at Stony Brook University, said over email. "It's very probable that we've begun to exceed the warmest part of the Holocene."
"It is safe to say that it's true," added Jennifer Marlon, a research scientist at Yale University's School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, in an interview. "You'll find a scientific consensus among experts even on that point now I'd bet, which says a lot."
Marlon noted that during that hotter time 7,000 years ago, only the northern hemisphere experienced some pretty warm summers, "but now we are warmer year round."
Back in 2013, Rahmstorf already argued that the current climate had already surpassed this warmest period of the Holocene. And in the last five years, the case has only grown stronger."
"during a post-ice age era called the Holocene"
This is still the Holocene. I conclude the writer didn't know what they were talking about, as usual.
In the Middle Eocene there was no ice on the planet at all - not even in Antarctic regions - and it was a hell of a lot warmer than now.
I conclude that the Earth will be absolutely fine. 5 degrees warming will not make the planet uninhabitable for humans or wipe out life.
Evidence that it's already getting too hot for some humans to think logically?
Probably not, as some humans are incapable of that at any temperature.
Do enlighten me as to where the logic fail is (remembering to include the cut sentence).
5 degrees warming will not wipe out life on earth but it will pose problems for society as it currently organised.
But...what will society look like in 200 years even without climate change? You really have no idea.
The expectation that everything will carry on roughly as it is now is utterly flawed. It won't.
I don't think pumping CO2 into the atmosphere is a particularly good experiment, and I agree we should stop it if possible, but is it the most alarming thing about the future of the human race? I very much doubt it.
A professor (paleoarchaeologist) friend of mine likes to say that the Younger Dryas ended on 'the second Tuesday in Lent', it was that quick. Humans adapted because they could move and there weren't that many of them. Maybe that's where we'll end up again. Does that matter?
I think all this brand analysis is probably correct, but misses the point.
Musk is a hype man; it’s the only thing he’s any good at, but he is really good at it. Selling hype (remember “you can rent your self-driving Tesla out to people who need transport”?) is what turned Tesla into an avalanche of wealth for him. Selling hype (”re-usable launch vehicles will transform the space business!”) kept people personally invested in SpaceX.
None of this is a criticism - you need someone capable of selling the dream if you want to fund a company that requires many years to get from now to profitability. If they hype doesn’t always come true, but the company ends up making money then that’s just fine.
He’s trying to create the same play with Twitter by turning people’s attention to a grand future where the company owns a dominating payment & transaction infrastructure under the X branding. If he can convince enough people that this is real then they will ignore the current dire state of the company’s finances & will continue to invest in the company on the promise of future riches, just as people did with Tesla.
It worked out for Tesla investors after all & there might well be enough Musk believers out there who will think it will work for them this time around. You can see them all buying blue ticks on Twitter right now - they’re eager to throw their money into the pit.
So the fact that he’s throwing the established brand on the bonfire doesn’t matter: Twitter is dying anyway - he’s trashed the company by torching its relationship with its main customers & there’s probably no way back. His escape hatch is to turn it into another hype vehicle & sell a new investment round to ever hopeful suckers / investors.
Will it work? Maybe, but this time around he doesn’t have an experienced team of domain experts around him to protect him from his own worst ideas, so I suspect he’s more likely to crash & burn than not. But for him personally all he needs to do is to extract enough wealth from a new round of suckers to quietly exit with his personal wealth intact, with an option on the upside if X does turn out to be a surprise barnstormer. He’ll probably achieve that.
We will see. From all the chat I'm expecting NOTHING that hasn't been alleged before, and ZERO actual evidence. Grusch himself has seen ZERO, he is relating takes told to him.
Keep believing folks, if it floats you boat, but don't expect an earth shattering revelation any time soon...
A lot of it may depend on whether they can get names and information from the U.S. Inspector-General of Intelligence.
He seems to have collecting names and evidence for about three years now.
I just don't see anything beyond what we have seen many times before. Unless you subscribe to the X-files state within a state cover-up, its hard to see how this stuff hasn't come out, if there really are crashed UFO's with alien bodies.
Far more likely is the usual grift. There is money to be made writing books, and going on TV's shows talking shit.
I personally would say it's quite easy to see how information could have not come out. An ossified, compartmentalised bureaucracy, then protected by layers of fearsome secrecy legislation.
A large conspiracy, state-within-a-state, or anything like that, is not necessarily part of this sort of compartmentalisation. Something shut away and forgotten about by most, and then with very limited access, to only people who have specific cause to, by their job description, such, perhaps, as Grusch.
I think that's just too Hollywood. Stuff leaks - proper stuff, not drunken bar tales.
There have been a certain number of insider reports for years, but most of the people have been considered axiomatically and culturally crazy.
As the Slate article mentions, if any of this is true, it would be more than a paradigm shift, and more like a complete reordering of reality, for many people.
The problem with so much of this is that UFO's and little green men who became grey aliens is that its a cultural phenomena. People in the middle ages saw things they didn't understand and thought it was angels. After the second world war we saw an explosion of things flying around (aeroplanes, then satellites) and people started to misidentify them. Arnold didn't see flying saucers, he described things skipping like a saucer, yet that story became the flying saucer genesis. And so throughout the fifties and sixties people saw saucer shapes.
TV and film play a part - Close Encounters of the Third Kind caused a huge upsurge in UFO sightings. And aliens became greys, something that followed through into the X-files. The X-files convinced people that a government could cover up a huge conspiracy (aliens and here, are malevalent and experimenting on humans). And now we see this playing out with with yet another grift merchant spinning tales.
Its possible Grusch believes what he has been told and is reporting. Its possible he is being played (i'd argue likely). But what is less likely is that alien races in all their different forms have been visiting the Earth since the 1940's with an ever changing shape and ever changing craft.
I'd love to be wrong. If aliens are here and it is revealed is will change EVERYTHING. But don't hold your breath.
Graham hancock theory
1. People who trip on DMT (naturally occurring hallucinogen, active ingredient in ayahuasca) see, to an extraordinary extent, the same things, even when not forewarned about the probability of seeing these things. "Machine elves" - little green men in high tech settings.
2. We endogenously produce small quantities of DMT (this is uncontroversially the case, though nobody knows why)
3. People who naturally produce more than DMT than others, spontaneously have these hallucinations.
Though this doesn't explain 1., which is the most interesting part of it.
I am quite “intimately” involved in the world’s most advanced scientific investigations into Point 1
True Story
We citizen scientists are not shirking the task.
Great thing is, you can make the stuff at home from known good ingredients and know exactly what it is.
One of the climate feedback loops just went off the chart. Antarctic sea ice extent in southern hemisphere summers is highly variable, but it always recovers in the winter. Thus year it hasn't.
(*six sigma would be once in a billion years - actually five sigma.)
Its not so much the sea ice but the risk that the ice shelf on Antartica is now able to slide off on a massive scale. If that happens Canary Warf becomes Canary ponds.
The rise in sea level will probably become the UK's biggest headache in the future. There is evidence that the sea level during the last interglacial period - the last time temperatures were comparable to now - was around 6 to 9 metres higher than today. It takes a while* for all that water to warm and the ice to melt, so it won't be our problem. It'll be a nasty legacy for our children and grandchildren though.
* Having said that, there have been occasions in the past when tipping points have passed and the Earth's climate has changed very rapidly, as Richard Tyndall has pointed out. It's very difficult to know what these points might be and when they will be passed, but the warming of the Earth is unlikely to remain a smooth process.
I agree about the sudden tipping points and of course that is possible. But your contention that the last time temperatures were this warm was in the last interglacial is simply wrong. In both historical and pre-historical times we have seen temperatures significantly warmer than now. This does not inform what might happen going forward as such but making such obviously refutable errors doesn't help the debate.
The last three Julys on Earth have been the three warmest ever recorded. But, they may also be the warmest months to occur on our planet in about 120,000 years.
Bit of nuance. Uncertainty is important. Reconstructing past temperatures is hard. Take the use of tree ring data and the 'divergence'. If tree rings are a good proxy for temperature, why are they not working now?
It's worth reading beyond the first line of the article.
Even if you've also read the strapline? "The past few summers have been the warmest on Earth in a long, long time."
Then the first sentence: "The last three Julys on Earth have been the three warmest ever recorded."
(BBM). Oopsadaisy! Surely some mistake? I was going to ask what kind of average they were using and whether in theory it treats all points on the Earth's surface equally, but really when faced with an article like that, who cares?
From the article:
"There's little doubt among scientists that we're now probably experiencing the warmest climate in some 120,000 years, even reaching above a particularly warm period around 7,000 years ago, during a post-ice age era called the Holocene.
"I agree entirely that it's very likely the last few summers have been the warmest in the last ~100,000-115,000 years," David Black, a paleoclimatologist at Stony Brook University, said over email. "It's very probable that we've begun to exceed the warmest part of the Holocene."
"It is safe to say that it's true," added Jennifer Marlon, a research scientist at Yale University's School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, in an interview. "You'll find a scientific consensus among experts even on that point now I'd bet, which says a lot."
Marlon noted that during that hotter time 7,000 years ago, only the northern hemisphere experienced some pretty warm summers, "but now we are warmer year round."
Back in 2013, Rahmstorf already argued that the current climate had already surpassed this warmest period of the Holocene. And in the last five years, the case has only grown stronger."
"during a post-ice age era called the Holocene"
This is still the Holocene. I conclude the writer didn't know what they were talking about, as usual.
In the Middle Eocene there was no ice on the planet at all - not even in Antarctic regions - and it was a hell of a lot warmer than now.
I conclude that the Earth will be absolutely fine. 5 degrees warming will not make the planet uninhabitable for humans or wipe out life.
The main risk, therefore, is to society as it is now (and why should we expect to continue exactly as we are?) and to individual species that cannot move easily due to direct habitat loss.
The earth will indeed be absolutely fine; nor is it likely to become uninhabitable for the human species.
But you have no idea what the main risks to global civilisation might be. I would suggest the ability to feed more than a couple of billion people might be one of those things.
Currently we produce more than enough food to feed 8 billion people. Humanity will peak around 10 billion people and then start to decline and probably quite quickly.
One of the climate feedback loops just went off the chart. Antarctic sea ice extent in southern hemisphere summers is highly variable, but it always recovers in the winter. Thus year it hasn't.
(*six sigma would be once in a billion years - actually five sigma.)
Its not so much the sea ice but the risk that the ice shelf on Antartica is now able to slide off on a massive scale. If that happens Canary Warf becomes Canary ponds.
The rise in sea level will probably become the UK's biggest headache in the future. There is evidence that the sea level during the last interglacial period - the last time temperatures were comparable to now - was around 6 to 9 metres higher than today. It takes a while* for all that water to warm and the ice to melt, so it won't be our problem. It'll be a nasty legacy for our children and grandchildren though.
* Having said that, there have been occasions in the past when tipping points have passed and the Earth's climate has changed very rapidly, as Richard Tyndall has pointed out. It's very difficult to know what these points might be and when they will be passed, but the warming of the Earth is unlikely to remain a smooth process.
I agree about the sudden tipping points and of course that is possible. But your contention that the last time temperatures were this warm was in the last interglacial is simply wrong. In both historical and pre-historical times we have seen temperatures significantly warmer than now. This does not inform what might happen going forward as such but making such obviously refutable errors doesn't help the debate.
The last three Julys on Earth have been the three warmest ever recorded. But, they may also be the warmest months to occur on our planet in about 120,000 years.
Bit of nuance. Uncertainty is important. Reconstructing past temperatures is hard. Take the use of tree ring data and the 'divergence'. If tree rings are a good proxy for temperature, why are they not working now?
It's worth reading beyond the first line of the article.
Even if you've also read the strapline? "The past few summers have been the warmest on Earth in a long, long time."
Then the first sentence: "The last three Julys on Earth have been the three warmest ever recorded."
(BBM). Oopsadaisy! Surely some mistake? I was going to ask what kind of average they were using and whether in theory it treats all points on the Earth's surface equally, but really when faced with an article like that, who cares?
From the article:
"There's little doubt among scientists that we're now probably experiencing the warmest climate in some 120,000 years, even reaching above a particularly warm period around 7,000 years ago, during a post-ice age era called the Holocene.
"I agree entirely that it's very likely the last few summers have been the warmest in the last ~100,000-115,000 years," David Black, a paleoclimatologist at Stony Brook University, said over email. "It's very probable that we've begun to exceed the warmest part of the Holocene."
"It is safe to say that it's true," added Jennifer Marlon, a research scientist at Yale University's School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, in an interview. "You'll find a scientific consensus among experts even on that point now I'd bet, which says a lot."
Marlon noted that during that hotter time 7,000 years ago, only the northern hemisphere experienced some pretty warm summers, "but now we are warmer year round."
Back in 2013, Rahmstorf already argued that the current climate had already surpassed this warmest period of the Holocene. And in the last five years, the case has only grown stronger."
"during a post-ice age era called the Holocene"
This is still the Holocene. I conclude the writer didn't know what they were talking about, as usual.
In the Middle Eocene there was no ice on the planet at all - not even in Antarctic regions - and it was a hell of a lot warmer than now.
I conclude that the Earth will be absolutely fine. 5 degrees warming will not make the planet uninhabitable for humans or wipe out life.
Evidence that it's already getting too hot for some humans to think logically?
Probably not, as some humans are incapable of that at any temperature.
A professor (paleoarchaeologist) friend of mine likes to say that the Younger Dryas ended on 'the second Tuesday in Lent', it was that quick. Humans adapted because they could move and there weren't that many of them. Maybe that's where we'll end up again. Does that matter?
Probably a lot of them died too (though there weren't many in the North Atlantic region most affected by the end of the Younger Dryas).
We're a lot more conscious and less tolerant of mass extinction these days. Though an interesting question is whether the pace of improvement in natural disaster protection will be greater or less than the pace of increase in natural disaster magnitude or prevalence.
The reason I am interested is because I am trying to express as succinctly as possible the rule for doubling the final letter of a regular verb when forming the past tense. Once we have dealt with verbs that end in -e, -y or single -s, the rule "double only when the penultimate letter, considered on its own, represents a stressed vowel" is tantalisingly close to being sufficient. But bouquet breaks it. Or at least it does if we suppose the e on its own represents the final vowel sound. The last letter must be pronounced if it is to be doubled.
"bouqueted wines", "delightfully bouqueted", "lemon will be bouqueted"
But even if we say it isn't a verb, it could still conceivably be one and in that case when forming the past tense or verbal adjective we wouldn't double the t.
One of the climate feedback loops just went off the chart. Antarctic sea ice extent in southern hemisphere summers is highly variable, but it always recovers in the winter. Thus year it hasn't.
(*six sigma would be once in a billion years - actually five sigma.)
Its not so much the sea ice but the risk that the ice shelf on Antartica is now able to slide off on a massive scale. If that happens Canary Warf becomes Canary ponds.
The rise in sea level will probably become the UK's biggest headache in the future. There is evidence that the sea level during the last interglacial period - the last time temperatures were comparable to now - was around 6 to 9 metres higher than today. It takes a while* for all that water to warm and the ice to melt, so it won't be our problem. It'll be a nasty legacy for our children and grandchildren though.
* Having said that, there have been occasions in the past when tipping points have passed and the Earth's climate has changed very rapidly, as Richard Tyndall has pointed out. It's very difficult to know what these points might be and when they will be passed, but the warming of the Earth is unlikely to remain a smooth process.
I agree about the sudden tipping points and of course that is possible. But your contention that the last time temperatures were this warm was in the last interglacial is simply wrong. In both historical and pre-historical times we have seen temperatures significantly warmer than now. This does not inform what might happen going forward as such but making such obviously refutable errors doesn't help the debate.
The last three Julys on Earth have been the three warmest ever recorded. But, they may also be the warmest months to occur on our planet in about 120,000 years.
Bit of nuance. Uncertainty is important. Reconstructing past temperatures is hard. Take the use of tree ring data and the 'divergence'. If tree rings are a good proxy for temperature, why are they not working now?
It's worth reading beyond the first line of the article.
Even if you've also read the strapline? "The past few summers have been the warmest on Earth in a long, long time."
Then the first sentence: "The last three Julys on Earth have been the three warmest ever recorded."
(BBM). Oopsadaisy! Surely some mistake? I was going to ask what kind of average they were using and whether in theory it treats all points on the Earth's surface equally, but really when faced with an article like that, who cares?
From the article:
"There's little doubt among scientists that we're now probably experiencing the warmest climate in some 120,000 years, even reaching above a particularly warm period around 7,000 years ago, during a post-ice age era called the Holocene.
"I agree entirely that it's very likely the last few summers have been the warmest in the last ~100,000-115,000 years," David Black, a paleoclimatologist at Stony Brook University, said over email. "It's very probable that we've begun to exceed the warmest part of the Holocene."
"It is safe to say that it's true," added Jennifer Marlon, a research scientist at Yale University's School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, in an interview. "You'll find a scientific consensus among experts even on that point now I'd bet, which says a lot."
Marlon noted that during that hotter time 7,000 years ago, only the northern hemisphere experienced some pretty warm summers, "but now we are warmer year round."
Back in 2013, Rahmstorf already argued that the current climate had already surpassed this warmest period of the Holocene. And in the last five years, the case has only grown stronger."
"during a post-ice age era called the Holocene"
This is still the Holocene. I conclude the writer didn't know what they were talking about, as usual.
In the Middle Eocene there was no ice on the planet at all - not even in Antarctic regions - and it was a hell of a lot warmer than now.
I conclude that the Earth will be absolutely fine. 5 degrees warming will not make the planet uninhabitable for humans or wipe out life.
Evidence that it's already getting too hot for some humans to think logically?
Probably not, as some humans are incapable of that at any temperature.
Do enlighten me as to where the logic fail is (remembering to include the cut sentence).
5 degrees warming will not wipe out life on earth but it will pose problems for society as it currently organised.
But...what will society look like in 200 years even without climate change? You really have no idea.
The expectation that everything will carry on roughly as it is now is utterly flawed. It won't.
I don't think pumping CO2 into the atmosphere is a particularly good experiment, and I agree we should stop it if possible, but is it the most alarming thing about the future of the human race? I very much doubt it.
A professor (paleoarchaeologist) friend of mine likes to say that the Younger Dryas ended on 'the second Tuesday in Lent', it was that quick. Humans adapted because they could move and there weren't that many of them. Maybe that's where we'll end up again. Does that matter?
"pose problems for society as it currently organised" makes it sound like we might have to switch from FPTP to some form of AV to deal with the challenge. In reality, and without wanting to catastrophise, you inevitably lose most of the world's cities and food production (even if the loss is only temporary while we adapt to the new normal). Both entail war on an unprecedented scale. You make the point yourself: there weren't that many of them. There are now.
I think Sunak will call the GE in October 24 and whereas 2019 was the Brexit election will 2024 be the climate change one ?
I do think there is plenty of space for the conservatives to accept climate change and net zero, but to make the case that the transition has to be possible, affordable, acceptable and proportionate
One of the climate feedback loops just went off the chart. Antarctic sea ice extent in southern hemisphere summers is highly variable, but it always recovers in the winter. Thus year it hasn't.
(*six sigma would be once in a billion years - actually five sigma.)
Its not so much the sea ice but the risk that the ice shelf on Antartica is now able to slide off on a massive scale. If that happens Canary Warf becomes Canary ponds.
The rise in sea level will probably become the UK's biggest headache in the future. There is evidence that the sea level during the last interglacial period - the last time temperatures were comparable to now - was around 6 to 9 metres higher than today. It takes a while* for all that water to warm and the ice to melt, so it won't be our problem. It'll be a nasty legacy for our children and grandchildren though.
* Having said that, there have been occasions in the past when tipping points have passed and the Earth's climate has changed very rapidly, as Richard Tyndall has pointed out. It's very difficult to know what these points might be and when they will be passed, but the warming of the Earth is unlikely to remain a smooth process.
I agree about the sudden tipping points and of course that is possible. But your contention that the last time temperatures were this warm was in the last interglacial is simply wrong. In both historical and pre-historical times we have seen temperatures significantly warmer than now. This does not inform what might happen going forward as such but making such obviously refutable errors doesn't help the debate.
The last three Julys on Earth have been the three warmest ever recorded. But, they may also be the warmest months to occur on our planet in about 120,000 years.
Bit of nuance. Uncertainty is important. Reconstructing past temperatures is hard. Take the use of tree ring data and the 'divergence'. If tree rings are a good proxy for temperature, why are they not working now?
It's worth reading beyond the first line of the article.
Even if you've also read the strapline? "The past few summers have been the warmest on Earth in a long, long time."
Then the first sentence: "The last three Julys on Earth have been the three warmest ever recorded."
(BBM). Oopsadaisy! Surely some mistake? I was going to ask what kind of average they were using and whether in theory it treats all points on the Earth's surface equally, but really when faced with an article like that, who cares?
From the article:
"There's little doubt among scientists that we're now probably experiencing the warmest climate in some 120,000 years, even reaching above a particularly warm period around 7,000 years ago, during a post-ice age era called the Holocene.
"I agree entirely that it's very likely the last few summers have been the warmest in the last ~100,000-115,000 years," David Black, a paleoclimatologist at Stony Brook University, said over email. "It's very probable that we've begun to exceed the warmest part of the Holocene."
"It is safe to say that it's true," added Jennifer Marlon, a research scientist at Yale University's School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, in an interview. "You'll find a scientific consensus among experts even on that point now I'd bet, which says a lot."
Marlon noted that during that hotter time 7,000 years ago, only the northern hemisphere experienced some pretty warm summers, "but now we are warmer year round."
Back in 2013, Rahmstorf already argued that the current climate had already surpassed this warmest period of the Holocene. And in the last five years, the case has only grown stronger."
"during a post-ice age era called the Holocene"
This is still the Holocene. I conclude the writer didn't know what they were talking about, as usual.
In the Middle Eocene there was no ice on the planet at all - not even in Antarctic regions - and it was a hell of a lot warmer than now.
I conclude that the Earth will be absolutely fine. 5 degrees warming will not make the planet uninhabitable for humans or wipe out life.
Evidence that it's already getting too hot for some humans to think logically?
Probably not, as some humans are incapable of that at any temperature.
Do enlighten me as to where the logic fail is (remembering to include the cut sentence).
You really post something like "In the X period it was hotter than it is now. I conclude everything will be fine." and then challenge someone to spot the flaw in your logic?
But again I should thank you for putting climate change denialism into a nutshell.
We will see. From all the chat I'm expecting NOTHING that hasn't been alleged before, and ZERO actual evidence. Grusch himself has seen ZERO, he is relating takes told to him.
Keep believing folks, if it floats you boat, but don't expect an earth shattering revelation any time soon...
A lot of it may depend on whether they can get names and information from the U.S. Inspector-General of Intelligence.
He seems to have collecting names and evidence for about three years now.
I just don't see anything beyond what we have seen many times before. Unless you subscribe to the X-files state within a state cover-up, its hard to see how this stuff hasn't come out, if there really are crashed UFO's with alien bodies.
Far more likely is the usual grift. There is money to be made writing books, and going on TV's shows talking shit.
I personally would say it's quite easy to see how information could have not come out. An ossified, compartmentalised bureaucracy, then protected by layers of fearsome secrecy legislation.
A large conspiracy, state-within-a-state, or anything like that, is not necessarily part of this sort of compartmentalisation. Something shut away and forgotten about by most, and then with very limited access, to only people who have specific cause to, by their job description, such, perhaps, as Grusch.
I think that's just too Hollywood. Stuff leaks - proper stuff, not drunken bar tales.
Every month or so, @Leon and @WhisperingOracle whip themselves up in an orgy of excitement over the *next* news they're sure will come out. And each time, there's much heat but little light.
Little green men having the tech to travel vast distances to our planet, then being seen - or even crashing many times in just one or two countries - is truly extraordinary, and requires truly extraordinary evidence.
There isn't any. Occam's razor applies.
There is of course the explanation that it is a bunch of drunk teenage aliens out for a laugh. Let's go and find the guy who lives by himself and buzz him. You know the guy everyone thinks is a bit weird. Let's fly across the bow of a USAF plane but in such a way that any video is blurred.
The distances between stars are vast. The tech needed to traverse those distances would require a phenomenal vastness of engineering. If any aliens happened to head our way in some sort of intergenerational ark it would be very very clear and very very obvious.
Or they are from a parallel dimension. And they’ve been here all along, and given our limited bandwidth we only occasionally glimpse them, the same way we cannot begin to smell the 10,000 aromas available to a dog
Yes, that sounds insane
But then, rational physicists calmly discuss the idea of infinite parallel universes - or even the idea we are simply players in a simulation - and no one demands that they be locked up for lunacy
Grusch mentions the interdimensional thesis.
It's not part of our current science, but that doesn't make it impossible.
He also mentions a ship that is bigger on the inside. Did he fall asleep one night and wake up watching Dr Who?
One of the climate feedback loops just went off the chart. Antarctic sea ice extent in southern hemisphere summers is highly variable, but it always recovers in the winter. Thus year it hasn't.
(*six sigma would be once in a billion years - actually five sigma.)
Its not so much the sea ice but the risk that the ice shelf on Antartica is now able to slide off on a massive scale. If that happens Canary Warf becomes Canary ponds.
The rise in sea level will probably become the UK's biggest headache in the future. There is evidence that the sea level during the last interglacial period - the last time temperatures were comparable to now - was around 6 to 9 metres higher than today. It takes a while* for all that water to warm and the ice to melt, so it won't be our problem. It'll be a nasty legacy for our children and grandchildren though.
* Having said that, there have been occasions in the past when tipping points have passed and the Earth's climate has changed very rapidly, as Richard Tyndall has pointed out. It's very difficult to know what these points might be and when they will be passed, but the warming of the Earth is unlikely to remain a smooth process.
I agree about the sudden tipping points and of course that is possible. But your contention that the last time temperatures were this warm was in the last interglacial is simply wrong. In both historical and pre-historical times we have seen temperatures significantly warmer than now. This does not inform what might happen going forward as such but making such obviously refutable errors doesn't help the debate.
The last three Julys on Earth have been the three warmest ever recorded. But, they may also be the warmest months to occur on our planet in about 120,000 years.
Bit of nuance. Uncertainty is important. Reconstructing past temperatures is hard. Take the use of tree ring data and the 'divergence'. If tree rings are a good proxy for temperature, why are they not working now?
It's worth reading beyond the first line of the article.
Even if you've also read the strapline? "The past few summers have been the warmest on Earth in a long, long time."
Then the first sentence: "The last three Julys on Earth have been the three warmest ever recorded."
(BBM). Oopsadaisy! Surely some mistake? I was going to ask what kind of average they were using and whether in theory it treats all points on the Earth's surface equally, but really when faced with an article like that, who cares?
From the article:
"There's little doubt among scientists that we're now probably experiencing the warmest climate in some 120,000 years, even reaching above a particularly warm period around 7,000 years ago, during a post-ice age era called the Holocene.
"I agree entirely that it's very likely the last few summers have been the warmest in the last ~100,000-115,000 years," David Black, a paleoclimatologist at Stony Brook University, said over email. "It's very probable that we've begun to exceed the warmest part of the Holocene."
"It is safe to say that it's true," added Jennifer Marlon, a research scientist at Yale University's School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, in an interview. "You'll find a scientific consensus among experts even on that point now I'd bet, which says a lot."
Marlon noted that during that hotter time 7,000 years ago, only the northern hemisphere experienced some pretty warm summers, "but now we are warmer year round."
Back in 2013, Rahmstorf already argued that the current climate had already surpassed this warmest period of the Holocene. And in the last five years, the case has only grown stronger."
"during a post-ice age era called the Holocene"
This is still the Holocene. I conclude the writer didn't know what they were talking about, as usual.
In the Middle Eocene there was no ice on the planet at all - not even in Antarctic regions - and it was a hell of a lot warmer than now.
I conclude that the Earth will be absolutely fine. 5 degrees warming will not make the planet uninhabitable for humans or wipe out life.
Evidence that it's already getting too hot for some humans to think logically?
Probably not, as some humans are incapable of that at any temperature.
Do enlighten me as to where the logic fail is (remembering to include the cut sentence).
5 degrees warming will not wipe out life on earth but it will pose problems for society as it currently organised.
But...what will society look like in 200 years even without climate change? You really have no idea.
The expectation that everything will carry on roughly as it is now is utterly flawed. It won't.
I don't think pumping CO2 into the atmosphere is a particularly good experiment, and I agree we should stop it if possible, but is it the most alarming thing about the future of the human race? I very much doubt it.
A professor (paleoarchaeologist) friend of mine likes to say that the Younger Dryas ended on 'the second Tuesday in Lent', it was that quick. Humans adapted because they could move and there weren't that many of them. Maybe that's where we'll end up again. Does that matter?
"pose problems for society as it currently organised" makes it sound like we might have to switch from FTPT to some form of AV to deal with the challenge. In reality, and without wanting to catastrophise, you inevitably lose most of the world's cities and food production (even if the loss is only temporary while we adapt to the new normal). Both entail war on an unprecedented scale. You make the point yourself: there weren't that many of them. There are now.
I think it's more serious than that. We may need to consider STV.
I think Sunak will call the GE in October 24 and whereas 2019 was the Brexit election will 2024 be the climate change one ?
I do think there is plenty of space for the conservatives to accept climate change and net zero, but to make the case that the transition has to be possible, affordable, acceptable and proportionate
All subjective criteria. Your idea might differ from mine, and Mr Sunak's sure will.
Mr. Urquhart, our debt interest payments are enormous. But running a surplus is a strange alien concept that even were we to enter the best of the good times would be rejected by politicians.
Brown running a needless deficit in a boom wasn't exactly fantastic. But saving rather than spending doesn't buy you headlines or voters.
We will see. From all the chat I'm expecting NOTHING that hasn't been alleged before, and ZERO actual evidence. Grusch himself has seen ZERO, he is relating takes told to him.
Keep believing folks, if it floats you boat, but don't expect an earth shattering revelation any time soon...
A lot of it may depend on whether they can get names and information from the U.S. Inspector-General of Intelligence.
He seems to have collecting names and evidence for about three years now.
I just don't see anything beyond what we have seen many times before. Unless you subscribe to the X-files state within a state cover-up, its hard to see how this stuff hasn't come out, if there really are crashed UFO's with alien bodies.
Far more likely is the usual grift. There is money to be made writing books, and going on TV's shows talking shit.
I personally would say it's quite easy to see how information could have not come out. An ossified, compartmentalised bureaucracy, then protected by layers of fearsome secrecy legislation.
A large conspiracy, state-within-a-state, or anything like that, is not necessarily part of this sort of compartmentalisation. Something shut away and forgotten about by most, and then with very limited access, to only people who have specific cause to, by their job description, such, perhaps, as Grusch.
I think that's just too Hollywood. Stuff leaks - proper stuff, not drunken bar tales.
It’s ALREADY “to Hollywood”. It’s now crossed a line to a point where you can’t dismiss it “as a few grifters hoping to make money”
An honest analysis of the evidence - not the feeble videos and pics - but the behaviour of people close to the issue: is enough to prove that, many times over
For a scientist you are incredibly closed-minded. It’s a shame
Incidentally I see that lab leak has been slam dunked again. The guy who wrote the crucial and original Proximal Origins paper, virologist Kristian Andersen, was - we now know - privately saying “lab leak is so friggin likely, it looks engineered” even as he was publishing the “official” paper which claimed “there is no evidence whatsoever to believe in any lab origin, we can rule this out”
Lol
I love the way you call anyone who doesn't drink the same kool-aid as you 'close-minded'.
Here's a view I hold: unexplained phenomena such as aliens are more likely to be something terrestrial but currently unknown, such as ghosts or past apparitions, than aliens who travelled billions of miles to get here.
But that's also *massively* unlikely. Much more likely is that people make mistakes, exaggerate or lie, and other people take those mistakes as gospel truth.
It's not UFO sightings, it's reported UFO sightings. You may need to cross-reference that map to the growth of internet connectivity and availability. I bet that map takes off when internet-connected phones take off.
Indeed, *reported* UFO sightings. But that does not explain why other first-world areas don't suffer from the same phenomena. For instance, France and Spain. It's almost as if you get most reports in areas of the world where English is the predominant language. Because the hysteria is *mainly* an English-language one.
Your latter point is interesting: then again, if access to t'Internet is a reason for non-reporting (and I doubt that's a factor because AIUI reports showed the same sort of pattern pre-1990s), then it should be remembered that the UFO hysteria can also spread over t'Internet as well, especially in other languages. Cause and effect, and all that...
It'll be interesting to see if (say) a massively popular Chinese UFO film comes out, and then reported sightings in China increase massively.
We will see. From all the chat I'm expecting NOTHING that hasn't been alleged before, and ZERO actual evidence. Grusch himself has seen ZERO, he is relating takes told to him.
Keep believing folks, if it floats you boat, but don't expect an earth shattering revelation any time soon...
A lot of it may depend on whether they can get names and information from the U.S. Inspector-General of Intelligence.
He seems to have collecting names and evidence for about three years now.
I just don't see anything beyond what we have seen many times before. Unless you subscribe to the X-files state within a state cover-up, its hard to see how this stuff hasn't come out, if there really are crashed UFO's with alien bodies.
Far more likely is the usual grift. There is money to be made writing books, and going on TV's shows talking shit.
I personally would say it's quite easy to see how information could have not come out. An ossified, compartmentalised bureaucracy, then protected by layers of fearsome secrecy legislation.
A large conspiracy, state-within-a-state, or anything like that, is not necessarily part of this sort of compartmentalisation. Something shut away and forgotten about by most, and then with very limited access, to only people who have specific cause to, by their job description, such, perhaps, as Grusch.
I think that's just too Hollywood. Stuff leaks - proper stuff, not drunken bar tales.
Every month or so, @Leon and @WhisperingOracle whip themselves up in an orgy of excitement over the *next* news they're sure will come out. And each time, there's much heat but little light.
Little green men having the tech to travel vast distances to our planet, then being seen - or even crashing many times in just one or two countries - is truly extraordinary, and requires truly extraordinary evidence.
There isn't any. Occam's razor applies.
There is of course the explanation that it is a bunch of drunk teenage aliens out for a laugh. Let's go and find the guy who lives by himself and buzz him. You know the guy everyone thinks is a bit weird. Let's fly across the bow of a USAF plane but in such a way that any video is blurred.
The distances are too vast. If any aliens happened to head our way in some sort of ark ship it would be very very clear and very very obvious.
What about the ant in the sand below the Mohave desert theory.
There are ants three metres below in the sand happily living out their lives with their colonies and whatnot and no human ever found them hence humans don't exist.
Or then there's the turtles.
You're misreading what I've written.
It's likely aliens are out there, it's very unlikely they'll make contact with us. Space is vast and the speed limit (c) is extremely slow for the size.
Even the first point is subject to debate. With a current sample size of 1, it's very hard to estimate how prevalent alien life might be, especially intelligent alien life. At the extreme, it could be that the evolution of intelligent life requires a series of incredibly unlikely coincidences and that we really are the only ones here.
My own feeling - and it's nothing more than that - is that simple forms of life probably exist around the universe, but that complex, intelligent beings are extremely rare and will probably never be encountered by humanity. But I'd be happy to be proved wrong. If they're friendly, that is.
I think that's exactly where I am. Except there is still the milk all separating into one side of the coffee cup/monkey and shakespeare thing I am vaguely conscious of.
One of the climate feedback loops just went off the chart. Antarctic sea ice extent in southern hemisphere summers is highly variable, but it always recovers in the winter. Thus year it hasn't.
(*six sigma would be once in a billion years - actually five sigma.)
Its not so much the sea ice but the risk that the ice shelf on Antartica is now able to slide off on a massive scale. If that happens Canary Warf becomes Canary ponds.
The rise in sea level will probably become the UK's biggest headache in the future. There is evidence that the sea level during the last interglacial period - the last time temperatures were comparable to now - was around 6 to 9 metres higher than today. It takes a while* for all that water to warm and the ice to melt, so it won't be our problem. It'll be a nasty legacy for our children and grandchildren though.
* Having said that, there have been occasions in the past when tipping points have passed and the Earth's climate has changed very rapidly, as Richard Tyndall has pointed out. It's very difficult to know what these points might be and when they will be passed, but the warming of the Earth is unlikely to remain a smooth process.
I agree about the sudden tipping points and of course that is possible. But your contention that the last time temperatures were this warm was in the last interglacial is simply wrong. In both historical and pre-historical times we have seen temperatures significantly warmer than now. This does not inform what might happen going forward as such but making such obviously refutable errors doesn't help the debate.
The last three Julys on Earth have been the three warmest ever recorded. But, they may also be the warmest months to occur on our planet in about 120,000 years.
Bit of nuance. Uncertainty is important. Reconstructing past temperatures is hard. Take the use of tree ring data and the 'divergence'. If tree rings are a good proxy for temperature, why are they not working now?
It's worth reading beyond the first line of the article.
Even if you've also read the strapline? "The past few summers have been the warmest on Earth in a long, long time."
Then the first sentence: "The last three Julys on Earth have been the three warmest ever recorded."
(BBM). Oopsadaisy! Surely some mistake? I was going to ask what kind of average they were using and whether in theory it treats all points on the Earth's surface equally, but really when faced with an article like that, who cares?
From the article:
"There's little doubt among scientists that we're now probably experiencing the warmest climate in some 120,000 years, even reaching above a particularly warm period around 7,000 years ago, during a post-ice age era called the Holocene.
"I agree entirely that it's very likely the last few summers have been the warmest in the last ~100,000-115,000 years," David Black, a paleoclimatologist at Stony Brook University, said over email. "It's very probable that we've begun to exceed the warmest part of the Holocene."
"It is safe to say that it's true," added Jennifer Marlon, a research scientist at Yale University's School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, in an interview. "You'll find a scientific consensus among experts even on that point now I'd bet, which says a lot."
Marlon noted that during that hotter time 7,000 years ago, only the northern hemisphere experienced some pretty warm summers, "but now we are warmer year round."
Back in 2013, Rahmstorf already argued that the current climate had already surpassed this warmest period of the Holocene. And in the last five years, the case has only grown stronger."
"during a post-ice age era called the Holocene"
This is still the Holocene. I conclude the writer didn't know what they were talking about, as usual.
In the Middle Eocene there was no ice on the planet at all - not even in Antarctic regions - and it was a hell of a lot warmer than now.
I conclude that the Earth will be absolutely fine. 5 degrees warming will not make the planet uninhabitable for humans or wipe out life.
Evidence that it's already getting too hot for some humans to think logically?
Probably not, as some humans are incapable of that at any temperature.
Do enlighten me as to where the logic fail is (remembering to include the cut sentence).
You really post something like "In the X period it was hotter than it is now. I conclude everything will be fine." and then challenge someone to spot the flaw in your logic?
But again I should thank you for putting climate change denialism into a nutshell.
I would just point out that many of us accept climate change, but that our own actions have to be proportionate, and the pressure has to be directed to Russia, China, Saudi Arabia and others who have only this last week rejected the G20 proposals on climate change and intend using fossil fuels indefinitely
Did you see the documentary done by those idiots following John McAfee?
They bought into the cult and it was fascinating to watch. Every day McAfee promised the Big Revelations were coming. Just got to do these 3 things first… ops, not today. Tomorrow.
The moment they actually cornered McAfee into answering a question straight - by mistake - and his mask cracked… it was looking behind Oz’s curtain.
He’s trying to create the same play with Twitter by turning people’s attention to a grand future where the company owns a dominating payment & transaction infrastructure under the X branding. If he can convince enough people that this is real then they will ignore the current dire state of the company’s finances & will continue to invest in the company on the promise of future riches, just as people did with Tesla.
Maybe this is a stupid question, but are there any figures or analysis anywhere on whether the money we have borrowed as a nation and then “invested” has generated a return and if so, how much of a return?
Dig that term, "UFO experiencer". I once saw some UFOs too (all in the same sighting), but fortunately unlike this bloke I haven't had "orbs" over my house every day since I saw them. I wonder what effect that has on his mental health.
One of the climate feedback loops just went off the chart. Antarctic sea ice extent in southern hemisphere summers is highly variable, but it always recovers in the winter. Thus year it hasn't.
(*six sigma would be once in a billion years - actually five sigma.)
The problem with alarmism is when everything is a crisis nothing is.
It's a fair point, but when one is faced with orbital photos of Australia on fire in 2020 and Mediterranean islands on fire in 2023, one does start wondering if this hug-a-penguin green crap might actually have a bit of a point.
If the UK cut its carbon footprint to zero it would stop precisely nothing,
That's why I always throw my litter in the street, what difference does it make when 99.9% of litter is dropped by other people?
LOL
thats why we burn all that lignite in our coal fired power stations and have 7 of Europes top ten polluters on our land
Weve picked up our litter it would be nice if you Germans could do the same given you produce twice as much carbon as we do.
Deutschland - Spitzenverschmutzer
The German record is terrible. Obviously that is entirely my fault and I will never disagree with you again. Sorry.
Germany's record is terrible.
You lecture the rest of us while chugging out lignite emissions and buying Putins oil and gas. Your green agenda is going backwards because of public resistance to - heat pumps will go tits up here too - and you have closed down all your nuclear .
There are many places one could take a note of the green agenda, but Germany isnt really one of them.
Germany doesn't buy any Russian gas any more, does it? In fact, if you want to be really picky and look at the Enerdata stats, we've bought more Russian gas* than the Germans in 2023.
* Albeit we probably didn't know it was Russian, because we bought if from a UAE broker
High-flying London lawyers and sleepy countryside villages are not always the happiest of combinations, especially when the criminal law specialist really wants to take to the air.
Mayus Karia bills himself as a “ferocious litigator” but the residents of Durley, in Hampshire, will doubtless have a litany of other names for the solicitor-advocate, who has triggered a row over plans to make frequent helicopter landings at his six-bedroom £1.3 million home.
Neighbours in the village, which has a population of about 1,000, have objected to having their “peace ended” by the “flash” lawyer.
The dispute started when Karia, who qualified as a solicitor in 2005 and is said on his law firm’s website to have an “unrivalled . . . sixth sense in litigation”, won permission to construct a helipad in his back garden.
Officials at Winchester city council originally granted him only two personal use round trips a month between the hours of 8am and 6pm. However, local authority planning application documents show that last month Karia applied for unrestricted use to allow multiple landings and take-offs.
In the application, an agent for Karia said the lawyer needed “a loosening of the restriction to allow flexibility of irregular visits by some clients . . .”
Karia, a father of three, who charges between £1,000 and £1,200 an hour for legal advice, is said by neighbours to drive an SUV Rolls-Royce, while his firm, London Litigation Partnership Solicitors, describes him as “a ferocious and meticulous litigator”. His firm’s website goes on to liken his legal skills to “the genius of Field Marshal Montgomery in the battlefield”.
I wonder if the locals would be interested in some collectible SAM systems? Perhaps a nice old Blowpipe?
Or for the deep enthusiast, a Skysweeper.
I'd have thought you would go for Green Mace. (Seen it in the Royal Artillery Museum at Woolwich long ago - before they sold it off for yuppie, sorry London investment, flats.)
One of the climate feedback loops just went off the chart. Antarctic sea ice extent in southern hemisphere summers is highly variable, but it always recovers in the winter. Thus year it hasn't.
(*six sigma would be once in a billion years - actually five sigma.)
Its not so much the sea ice but the risk that the ice shelf on Antartica is now able to slide off on a massive scale. If that happens Canary Warf becomes Canary ponds.
The rise in sea level will probably become the UK's biggest headache in the future. There is evidence that the sea level during the last interglacial period - the last time temperatures were comparable to now - was around 6 to 9 metres higher than today. It takes a while* for all that water to warm and the ice to melt, so it won't be our problem. It'll be a nasty legacy for our children and grandchildren though.
* Having said that, there have been occasions in the past when tipping points have passed and the Earth's climate has changed very rapidly, as Richard Tyndall has pointed out. It's very difficult to know what these points might be and when they will be passed, but the warming of the Earth is unlikely to remain a smooth process.
I agree about the sudden tipping points and of course that is possible. But your contention that the last time temperatures were this warm was in the last interglacial is simply wrong. In both historical and pre-historical times we have seen temperatures significantly warmer than now. This does not inform what might happen going forward as such but making such obviously refutable errors doesn't help the debate.
The last three Julys on Earth have been the three warmest ever recorded. But, they may also be the warmest months to occur on our planet in about 120,000 years.
Bit of nuance. Uncertainty is important. Reconstructing past temperatures is hard. Take the use of tree ring data and the 'divergence'. If tree rings are a good proxy for temperature, why are they not working now?
It's worth reading beyond the first line of the article.
Even if you've also read the strapline? "The past few summers have been the warmest on Earth in a long, long time."
Then the first sentence: "The last three Julys on Earth have been the three warmest ever recorded."
(BBM). Oopsadaisy! Surely some mistake? I was going to ask what kind of average they were using and whether in theory it treats all points on the Earth's surface equally, but really when faced with an article like that, who cares?
From the article:
"There's little doubt among scientists that we're now probably experiencing the warmest climate in some 120,000 years, even reaching above a particularly warm period around 7,000 years ago, during a post-ice age era called the Holocene.
"I agree entirely that it's very likely the last few summers have been the warmest in the last ~100,000-115,000 years," David Black, a paleoclimatologist at Stony Brook University, said over email. "It's very probable that we've begun to exceed the warmest part of the Holocene."
"It is safe to say that it's true," added Jennifer Marlon, a research scientist at Yale University's School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, in an interview. "You'll find a scientific consensus among experts even on that point now I'd bet, which says a lot."
Marlon noted that during that hotter time 7,000 years ago, only the northern hemisphere experienced some pretty warm summers, "but now we are warmer year round."
Back in 2013, Rahmstorf already argued that the current climate had already surpassed this warmest period of the Holocene. And in the last five years, the case has only grown stronger."
"during a post-ice age era called the Holocene"
This is still the Holocene. I conclude the writer didn't know what they were talking about, as usual.
In the Middle Eocene there was no ice on the planet at all - not even in Antarctic regions - and it was a hell of a lot warmer than now.
I conclude that the Earth will be absolutely fine. 5 degrees warming will not make the planet uninhabitable for humans or wipe out life.
Evidence that it's already getting too hot for some humans to think logically?
Probably not, as some humans are incapable of that at any temperature.
Do enlighten me as to where the logic fail is (remembering to include the cut sentence).
You really post something like "In the X period it was hotter than it is now. I conclude everything will be fine." and then challenge someone to spot the flaw in your logic?
But again I should thank you for putting climate change denialism into a nutshell.
I would just point out that many of us accept climate change, but that our own actions have to be proportionate, and the pressure has to be directed to Russia, China, Saudi Arabia and others who have only this last week rejected the G20 proposals on climate change and intend using fossil fuels indefinitely
Russia & Saudi Arabia are oil & gas exporters. If the rest of the world decided not to buy their carbon, they’d stop producing it sharpish - they wouldn’t have the capital required to keep the taps open.
China is just doesn’t want to be bossed around by anyone else. But the economics of solar & wind are going to result in them turning off the coal plants regardless: It is now cheaper to build and install a solar or wind farm cluster than it is to keep a coal plant running in the US. I would imagine much the same goes for China, probably more so given that most of the solar panels are made there.
Which is all to say that none of this is a valid justification for doing nothing ourselves: Weaning the country off fossil fuel imports is good for the planet & it’s also good for our national security. We should not be swayed by the self-interested actions of fossil fuel exporters.
'X' is a terrible 'brand', meaningless, unmemorable, and unprotectable. The whole thing only makes sense as one of those 'shock' stories where they say they're changing the name of Pizza Hut to Pasta Hut, or that they're discontinuing Heinz Salad Cream. Just to generate conversation before changing things back.
Maybe this is a stupid question, but are there any figures or analysis anywhere on whether the money we have borrowed as a nation and then “invested” has generated a return and if so, how much of a return?
If not, WTF are we doing?
Well......As by chance I was just reading this....
It is worth noting in passing that this Review of Waste Policy was itself impossible to cost accurately or even monitor its effectiveness or whether it could be done better. Whitehall does not work like that.
...Despite being intended to be assessed over five years, the bin funding scheme only lasted one; the Department which issued the guidance no longer exists and the great eye of Ministerial or public interest has since moved on....
Fun thread. Some heroic sealioning from the "Don't look up" crowd, and aliens.
I don't think the analogy stacks up. In "Don't Look Up" the end of the world was upon us with no prospect of survival with some, most people choosing not to acknowledge that. A bit like you and me every day not confronting the prospect of our own deaths.
With climate change there are a lot of unknowns to start with, including where we will end up in 50, 100, 1,000 years and also there is an effort at mitigation and/or adaptation. That then becomes a political decision and we discussed the uses of incentives and punishment.
'X' is a terrible 'brand', meaningless, unmemorable, and unprotectable. The whole thing only makes sense as one of those 'shock' stories where they say they're changing the name of Pizza Hut to Pasta Hut, or that they're discontinuing Heinz Salad Cream. Just to generate conversation before changing things back.
Musk wants an 'everything' app, I think he's unlikely to change back to Twitter.
'X' is a terrible 'brand', meaningless, unmemorable, and unprotectable. The whole thing only makes sense as one of those 'shock' stories where they say they're changing the name of Pizza Hut to Pasta Hut, or that they're discontinuing Heinz Salad Cream. Just to generate conversation before changing things back.
One can hope, but Musk has history with the idea of x.com;
Maybe this is a stupid question, but are there any figures or analysis anywhere on whether the money we have borrowed as a nation and then “invested” has generated a return and if so, how much of a return?
If not, WTF are we doing?
For governments, spending money to build a bridge from here to there is "investment". Depending upon the type of spending there is an economic multiplier which determines how much benefit will be derived, for each dollar spent.
There is a good article about it here, one of the first on google.
One of the climate feedback loops just went off the chart. Antarctic sea ice extent in southern hemisphere summers is highly variable, but it always recovers in the winter. Thus year it hasn't.
(*six sigma would be once in a billion years - actually five sigma.)
Its not so much the sea ice but the risk that the ice shelf on Antartica is now able to slide off on a massive scale. If that happens Canary Warf becomes Canary ponds.
The rise in sea level will probably become the UK's biggest headache in the future. There is evidence that the sea level during the last interglacial period - the last time temperatures were comparable to now - was around 6 to 9 metres higher than today. It takes a while* for all that water to warm and the ice to melt, so it won't be our problem. It'll be a nasty legacy for our children and grandchildren though.
* Having said that, there have been occasions in the past when tipping points have passed and the Earth's climate has changed very rapidly, as Richard Tyndall has pointed out. It's very difficult to know what these points might be and when they will be passed, but the warming of the Earth is unlikely to remain a smooth process.
I agree about the sudden tipping points and of course that is possible. But your contention that the last time temperatures were this warm was in the last interglacial is simply wrong. In both historical and pre-historical times we have seen temperatures significantly warmer than now. This does not inform what might happen going forward as such but making such obviously refutable errors doesn't help the debate.
The last three Julys on Earth have been the three warmest ever recorded. But, they may also be the warmest months to occur on our planet in about 120,000 years.
Bit of nuance. Uncertainty is important. Reconstructing past temperatures is hard. Take the use of tree ring data and the 'divergence'. If tree rings are a good proxy for temperature, why are they not working now?
It's worth reading beyond the first line of the article.
Even if you've also read the strapline? "The past few summers have been the warmest on Earth in a long, long time."
Then the first sentence: "The last three Julys on Earth have been the three warmest ever recorded."
(BBM). Oopsadaisy! Surely some mistake? I was going to ask what kind of average they were using and whether in theory it treats all points on the Earth's surface equally, but really when faced with an article like that, who cares?
From the article:
"There's little doubt among scientists that we're now probably experiencing the warmest climate in some 120,000 years, even reaching above a particularly warm period around 7,000 years ago, during a post-ice age era called the Holocene.
"I agree entirely that it's very likely the last few summers have been the warmest in the last ~100,000-115,000 years," David Black, a paleoclimatologist at Stony Brook University, said over email. "It's very probable that we've begun to exceed the warmest part of the Holocene."
"It is safe to say that it's true," added Jennifer Marlon, a research scientist at Yale University's School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, in an interview. "You'll find a scientific consensus among experts even on that point now I'd bet, which says a lot."
Marlon noted that during that hotter time 7,000 years ago, only the northern hemisphere experienced some pretty warm summers, "but now we are warmer year round."
Back in 2013, Rahmstorf already argued that the current climate had already surpassed this warmest period of the Holocene. And in the last five years, the case has only grown stronger."
"during a post-ice age era called the Holocene"
This is still the Holocene. I conclude the writer didn't know what they were talking about, as usual.
In the Middle Eocene there was no ice on the planet at all - not even in Antarctic regions - and it was a hell of a lot warmer than now.
I conclude that the Earth will be absolutely fine. 5 degrees warming will not make the planet uninhabitable for humans or wipe out life.
Evidence that it's already getting too hot for some humans to think logically?
Probably not, as some humans are incapable of that at any temperature.
A professor (paleoarchaeologist) friend of mine likes to say that the Younger Dryas ended on 'the second Tuesday in Lent', it was that quick. Humans adapted because they could move and there weren't that many of them. Maybe that's where we'll end up again. Does that matter?
Probably a lot of them died too (though there weren't many in the North Atlantic region most affected by the end of the Younger Dryas).
We're a lot more conscious and less tolerant of mass extinction these days. Though an interesting question is whether the pace of improvement in natural disaster protection will be greater or less than the pace of increase in natural disaster magnitude or prevalence.
Incidentally before my undergrad physical geography interview way back in 1994 the paper I was presented with to read and comment on was the famous 1989 paper by Dansgaard "Abrupt termination of the Younger Dryas Climate Event". I now realise that was one of the most revolutionary papers in recent scientific study, because it ushered in a new acceptance that things on earth can change much more quickly than we thought.
'X' is a terrible 'brand', meaningless, unmemorable, and unprotectable. The whole thing only makes sense as one of those 'shock' stories where they say they're changing the name of Pizza Hut to Pasta Hut, or that they're discontinuing Heinz Salad Cream. Just to generate conversation before changing things back.
Fun thread. Some heroic sealioning from the "Don't look up" crowd, and aliens.
I don't think the analogy stacks up. In "Don't Look Up" the end of the world was upon us with no prospect of survival with some, most people choosing not to acknowledge that. A bit like you and me every day not confronting the prospect of our own deaths.
With climate change there are a lot of unknowns to start with, including where we will end up in 50, 100, 1,000 years and also there is an effort at mitigation and/or adaptation. That then becomes a political decision and we discussed the uses of incentives and punishment.
Other than that, good analogy.
Unless ofcourse, things move on, and "don't look up" starts to apply to UFO allegations..
'X' is a terrible 'brand', meaningless, unmemorable, and unprotectable. The whole thing only makes sense as one of those 'shock' stories where they say they're changing the name of Pizza Hut to Pasta Hut, or that they're discontinuing Heinz Salad Cream. Just to generate conversation before changing things back.
Well given the number of pixels devoted to it on here and elsewhere on the internet, it certainly got people talking about it.
'X' is a terrible 'brand', meaningless, unmemorable, and unprotectable. The whole thing only makes sense as one of those 'shock' stories where they say they're changing the name of Pizza Hut to Pasta Hut, or that they're discontinuing Heinz Salad Cream. Just to generate conversation before changing things back.
I have been aware for 40 years of the album Morrocan (sic) Roll by Brand X. You have inspired me to listen to it. Not very good, Steely Dan wannabe stuff.
'X' is a terrible 'brand', meaningless, unmemorable, and unprotectable. The whole thing only makes sense as one of those 'shock' stories where they say they're changing the name of Pizza Hut to Pasta Hut, or that they're discontinuing Heinz Salad Cream. Just to generate conversation before changing things back.
Think Orange. It is what the future is.
Google must be slavering at the money Musk will have to spend to stay at the top of page 1 for all 'X' searches.
You made a sweeping assertion that the laffer curve is a fiction. In my view that’s just partisan garbage
From a philosophical perspective, in a free society, if the government takes 100% of earned income there is no incentive to earn income and hence government revenue approaches zero. Similarly if the government takes 0% of earned income then by definition its income is zero.
I’m not sure how you can argue with the endpoints.
Clearly reality is somewhere in between: all the Laffer curve really says that reducing someone’s net income (by increasing the tax take) reduces the incentive to work. I’m not sure that’s too controversial?
The complexity is what is the shape of the curve. Under Osborne HMRC said he peak was in the high 40s as a share. That’s plausible (I certainly know that it would “feel wrong” if the government were to take more than 50% of my wages) but knowing Osborne I assume he fiddled the analysis
But saying a problem is difficult and a matter of debate doesn’t make it an”fiction”. It’s a useful tool for how to think about tax rates from a philosophical perspective
I'm saying it is invariably used by people who can't draw one, don't know where we are on it, don't care overmuch, and use it as a duckspeak tag to justify tax cuts for themselves.. if you can't draw the curve and it exists only as a rhetorical/partisan tool, then describing it as a "fiction" makes sense.
Many things are misused - it doesn’t mean they are fiction.
For example “privatising the NHS” is bollocks. But a potent attack. It has a metaphysical existence that exceeds the reality
One of the climate feedback loops just went off the chart. Antarctic sea ice extent in southern hemisphere summers is highly variable, but it always recovers in the winter. Thus year it hasn't.
(*six sigma would be once in a billion years - actually five sigma.)
Its not so much the sea ice but the risk that the ice shelf on Antartica is now able to slide off on a massive scale. If that happens Canary Warf becomes Canary ponds.
The rise in sea level will probably become the UK's biggest headache in the future. There is evidence that the sea level during the last interglacial period - the last time temperatures were comparable to now - was around 6 to 9 metres higher than today. It takes a while* for all that water to warm and the ice to melt, so it won't be our problem. It'll be a nasty legacy for our children and grandchildren though.
* Having said that, there have been occasions in the past when tipping points have passed and the Earth's climate has changed very rapidly, as Richard Tyndall has pointed out. It's very difficult to know what these points might be and when they will be passed, but the warming of the Earth is unlikely to remain a smooth process.
I agree about the sudden tipping points and of course that is possible. But your contention that the last time temperatures were this warm was in the last interglacial is simply wrong. In both historical and pre-historical times we have seen temperatures significantly warmer than now. This does not inform what might happen going forward as such but making such obviously refutable errors doesn't help the debate.
The last three Julys on Earth have been the three warmest ever recorded. But, they may also be the warmest months to occur on our planet in about 120,000 years.
Bit of nuance. Uncertainty is important. Reconstructing past temperatures is hard. Take the use of tree ring data and the 'divergence'. If tree rings are a good proxy for temperature, why are they not working now?
It's worth reading beyond the first line of the article.
Even if you've also read the strapline? "The past few summers have been the warmest on Earth in a long, long time."
Then the first sentence: "The last three Julys on Earth have been the three warmest ever recorded."
(BBM). Oopsadaisy! Surely some mistake? I was going to ask what kind of average they were using and whether in theory it treats all points on the Earth's surface equally, but really when faced with an article like that, who cares?
From the article:
"There's little doubt among scientists that we're now probably experiencing the warmest climate in some 120,000 years, even reaching above a particularly warm period around 7,000 years ago, during a post-ice age era called the Holocene.
"I agree entirely that it's very likely the last few summers have been the warmest in the last ~100,000-115,000 years," David Black, a paleoclimatologist at Stony Brook University, said over email. "It's very probable that we've begun to exceed the warmest part of the Holocene."
"It is safe to say that it's true," added Jennifer Marlon, a research scientist at Yale University's School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, in an interview. "You'll find a scientific consensus among experts even on that point now I'd bet, which says a lot."
Marlon noted that during that hotter time 7,000 years ago, only the northern hemisphere experienced some pretty warm summers, "but now we are warmer year round."
Back in 2013, Rahmstorf already argued that the current climate had already surpassed this warmest period of the Holocene. And in the last five years, the case has only grown stronger."
"during a post-ice age era called the Holocene"
This is still the Holocene. I conclude the writer didn't know what they were talking about, as usual.
In the Middle Eocene there was no ice on the planet at all - not even in Antarctic regions - and it was a hell of a lot warmer than now.
I conclude that the Earth will be absolutely fine. 5 degrees warming will not make the planet uninhabitable for humans or wipe out life.
Evidence that it's already getting too hot for some humans to think logically?
Probably not, as some humans are incapable of that at any temperature.
Do enlighten me as to where the logic fail is (remembering to include the cut sentence).
You really post something like "In the X period it was hotter than it is now. I conclude everything will be fine." and then challenge someone to spot the flaw in your logic?
But again I should thank you for putting climate change denialism into a nutshell.
I would just point out that many of us accept climate change, but that our own actions have to be proportionate, and the pressure has to be directed to Russia, China, Saudi Arabia and others who have only this last week rejected the G20 proposals on climate change and intend using fossil fuels indefinitely
China is decarbonising at pace and will go wherever the money is. The danger is precisely the opposite, that they leapfrog us in capitalising on the green industrial revolution.
As for the other gaggle of clowns, does anyone think we will succeed in putting pressure on Russia or Saudi? No, let's instead help to bankrupt them by accelerating fossil fuel usage into the economic dustbin of history. If they don't have markets for their dirty commodities they won't have the power and money to do bad things like invading their neighbours or buying footballers.
'X' is a terrible 'brand', meaningless, unmemorable, and unprotectable. The whole thing only makes sense as one of those 'shock' stories where they say they're changing the name of Pizza Hut to Pasta Hut, or that they're discontinuing Heinz Salad Cream. Just to generate conversation before changing things back.
What fool would sell inflation backed bonds? Surely the point of government debt is that it inflates away not hangs around extracting value and providing an actual return.
'X' is a terrible 'brand', meaningless, unmemorable, and unprotectable. The whole thing only makes sense as one of those 'shock' stories where they say they're changing the name of Pizza Hut to Pasta Hut, or that they're discontinuing Heinz Salad Cream. Just to generate conversation before changing things back.
Musk wants an 'everything' app, I think he's unlikely to change back to Twitter.
It's going to be interesting to see what happens when all the service/trademark owners of 'X' (Apple, Microsoft, and Meta all have conflicting registered marks) enforce their marks, as they are obligated to do or they lose it.
You made a sweeping assertion that the laffer curve is a fiction. In my view that’s just partisan garbage
From a philosophical perspective, in a free society, if the government takes 100% of earned income there is no incentive to earn income and hence government revenue approaches zero. Similarly if the government takes 0% of earned income then by definition its income is zero.
I’m not sure how you can argue with the endpoints.
Clearly reality is somewhere in between: all the Laffer curve really says that reducing someone’s net income (by increasing the tax take) reduces the incentive to work. I’m not sure that’s too controversial?
The complexity is what is the shape of the curve. Under Osborne HMRC said he peak was in the high 40s as a share. That’s plausible (I certainly know that it would “feel wrong” if the government were to take more than 50% of my wages) but knowing Osborne I assume he fiddled the analysis
But saying a problem is difficult and a matter of debate doesn’t make it an”fiction”. It’s a useful tool for how to think about tax rates from a philosophical perspective
On one level it certainly is fiction. It's a fictional curve for which nobody can provide the formula or co-ordinates.
On another level it clearly exists - as a real weapon used by rich people to keep their taxes as low as possible.
HMRC did an analysis. I couldn’t find it quickly but here is a mention of the analysis by a government minister in parliament. And we all know those are true…
One of the climate feedback loops just went off the chart. Antarctic sea ice extent in southern hemisphere summers is highly variable, but it always recovers in the winter. Thus year it hasn't.
(*six sigma would be once in a billion years - actually five sigma.)
Its not so much the sea ice but the risk that the ice shelf on Antartica is now able to slide off on a massive scale. If that happens Canary Warf becomes Canary ponds.
The rise in sea level will probably become the UK's biggest headache in the future. There is evidence that the sea level during the last interglacial period - the last time temperatures were comparable to now - was around 6 to 9 metres higher than today. It takes a while* for all that water to warm and the ice to melt, so it won't be our problem. It'll be a nasty legacy for our children and grandchildren though.
* Having said that, there have been occasions in the past when tipping points have passed and the Earth's climate has changed very rapidly, as Richard Tyndall has pointed out. It's very difficult to know what these points might be and when they will be passed, but the warming of the Earth is unlikely to remain a smooth process.
I agree about the sudden tipping points and of course that is possible. But your contention that the last time temperatures were this warm was in the last interglacial is simply wrong. In both historical and pre-historical times we have seen temperatures significantly warmer than now. This does not inform what might happen going forward as such but making such obviously refutable errors doesn't help the debate.
The last three Julys on Earth have been the three warmest ever recorded. But, they may also be the warmest months to occur on our planet in about 120,000 years.
Bit of nuance. Uncertainty is important. Reconstructing past temperatures is hard. Take the use of tree ring data and the 'divergence'. If tree rings are a good proxy for temperature, why are they not working now?
It's worth reading beyond the first line of the article.
Even if you've also read the strapline? "The past few summers have been the warmest on Earth in a long, long time."
Then the first sentence: "The last three Julys on Earth have been the three warmest ever recorded."
(BBM). Oopsadaisy! Surely some mistake? I was going to ask what kind of average they were using and whether in theory it treats all points on the Earth's surface equally, but really when faced with an article like that, who cares?
From the article:
"There's little doubt among scientists that we're now probably experiencing the warmest climate in some 120,000 years, even reaching above a particularly warm period around 7,000 years ago, during a post-ice age era called the Holocene.
"I agree entirely that it's very likely the last few summers have been the warmest in the last ~100,000-115,000 years," David Black, a paleoclimatologist at Stony Brook University, said over email. "It's very probable that we've begun to exceed the warmest part of the Holocene."
"It is safe to say that it's true," added Jennifer Marlon, a research scientist at Yale University's School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, in an interview. "You'll find a scientific consensus among experts even on that point now I'd bet, which says a lot."
Marlon noted that during that hotter time 7,000 years ago, only the northern hemisphere experienced some pretty warm summers, "but now we are warmer year round."
Back in 2013, Rahmstorf already argued that the current climate had already surpassed this warmest period of the Holocene. And in the last five years, the case has only grown stronger."
"during a post-ice age era called the Holocene"
This is still the Holocene. I conclude the writer didn't know what they were talking about, as usual.
In the Middle Eocene there was no ice on the planet at all - not even in Antarctic regions - and it was a hell of a lot warmer than now.
I conclude that the Earth will be absolutely fine. 5 degrees warming will not make the planet uninhabitable for humans or wipe out life.
Evidence that it's already getting too hot for some humans to think logically?
Probably not, as some humans are incapable of that at any temperature.
Do enlighten me as to where the logic fail is (remembering to include the cut sentence).
You really post something like "In the X period it was hotter than it is now. I conclude everything will be fine." and then challenge someone to spot the flaw in your logic?
But again I should thank you for putting climate change denialism into a nutshell.
I would just point out that many of us accept climate change, but that our own actions have to be proportionate, and the pressure has to be directed to Russia, China, Saudi Arabia and others who have only this last week rejected the G20 proposals on climate change and intend using fossil fuels indefinitely
Russia & Saudi Arabia are oil & gas exporters. If the rest of the world decided not to buy their carbon, they’d stop producing it sharpish - they wouldn’t have the capital required to keep the taps open.
China is just doesn’t want to be bossed around by anyone else. But the economics of solar & wind are going to result in them turning off the coal plants regardless: It is now cheaper to build and install a solar or wind farm cluster than it is to keep a coal plant running in the US. I would imagine much the same goes for China, probably more so given that most of the solar panels are made there.
Which is all to say that none of this is a valid justification for doing nothing ourselves: Weaning the country off fossil fuel imports is good for the planet & it’s also good for our national security. We should not be swayed by the self-interested actions of fossil fuel exporters.
Agreed. Also it should be noted that low carbon energy is increasing fast in China (6.4% in 2007 to 18.4% in 2022) and fossil fuel use is falling, but still a long way to go. They also produce a lot of cheap solar panels that help the rest of the world decarbonise.
One of the climate feedback loops just went off the chart. Antarctic sea ice extent in southern hemisphere summers is highly variable, but it always recovers in the winter. Thus year it hasn't.
(*six sigma would be once in a billion years - actually five sigma.)
Its not so much the sea ice but the risk that the ice shelf on Antartica is now able to slide off on a massive scale. If that happens Canary Warf becomes Canary ponds.
The rise in sea level will probably become the UK's biggest headache in the future. There is evidence that the sea level during the last interglacial period - the last time temperatures were comparable to now - was around 6 to 9 metres higher than today. It takes a while* for all that water to warm and the ice to melt, so it won't be our problem. It'll be a nasty legacy for our children and grandchildren though.
* Having said that, there have been occasions in the past when tipping points have passed and the Earth's climate has changed very rapidly, as Richard Tyndall has pointed out. It's very difficult to know what these points might be and when they will be passed, but the warming of the Earth is unlikely to remain a smooth process.
I agree about the sudden tipping points and of course that is possible. But your contention that the last time temperatures were this warm was in the last interglacial is simply wrong. In both historical and pre-historical times we have seen temperatures significantly warmer than now. This does not inform what might happen going forward as such but making such obviously refutable errors doesn't help the debate.
The last three Julys on Earth have been the three warmest ever recorded. But, they may also be the warmest months to occur on our planet in about 120,000 years.
Bit of nuance. Uncertainty is important. Reconstructing past temperatures is hard. Take the use of tree ring data and the 'divergence'. If tree rings are a good proxy for temperature, why are they not working now?
It's worth reading beyond the first line of the article.
Even if you've also read the strapline? "The past few summers have been the warmest on Earth in a long, long time."
Then the first sentence: "The last three Julys on Earth have been the three warmest ever recorded."
(BBM). Oopsadaisy! Surely some mistake? I was going to ask what kind of average they were using and whether in theory it treats all points on the Earth's surface equally, but really when faced with an article like that, who cares?
From the article:
"There's little doubt among scientists that we're now probably experiencing the warmest climate in some 120,000 years, even reaching above a particularly warm period around 7,000 years ago, during a post-ice age era called the Holocene.
"I agree entirely that it's very likely the last few summers have been the warmest in the last ~100,000-115,000 years," David Black, a paleoclimatologist at Stony Brook University, said over email. "It's very probable that we've begun to exceed the warmest part of the Holocene."
"It is safe to say that it's true," added Jennifer Marlon, a research scientist at Yale University's School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, in an interview. "You'll find a scientific consensus among experts even on that point now I'd bet, which says a lot."
Marlon noted that during that hotter time 7,000 years ago, only the northern hemisphere experienced some pretty warm summers, "but now we are warmer year round."
Back in 2013, Rahmstorf already argued that the current climate had already surpassed this warmest period of the Holocene. And in the last five years, the case has only grown stronger."
"during a post-ice age era called the Holocene"
This is still the Holocene. I conclude the writer didn't know what they were talking about, as usual.
In the Middle Eocene there was no ice on the planet at all - not even in Antarctic regions - and it was a hell of a lot warmer than now.
I conclude that the Earth will be absolutely fine. 5 degrees warming will not make the planet uninhabitable for humans or wipe out life.
Evidence that it's already getting too hot for some humans to think logically?
Probably not, as some humans are incapable of that at any temperature.
Do enlighten me as to where the logic fail is (remembering to include the cut sentence).
You really post something like "In the X period it was hotter than it is now. I conclude everything will be fine." and then challenge someone to spot the flaw in your logic?
But again I should thank you for putting climate change denialism into a nutshell.
I would just point out that many of us accept climate change, but that our own actions have to be proportionate, and the pressure has to be directed to Russia, China, Saudi Arabia and others who have only this last week rejected the G20 proposals on climate change and intend using fossil fuels indefinitely
China is decarbonising at pace and will go wherever the money is. The danger is precisely the opposite, that they leapfrog us in capitalising on the green industrial revolution.
As for the other gaggle of clowns, does anyone think we will succeed in putting pressure on Russia or Saudi? No, let's instead help to bankrupt them by accelerating fossil fuel usage into the economic dustbin of history. If they don't have markets for their dirty commodities they won't have the power and money to do bad things like invading their neighbours or buying footballers.
China is certainly investing in the solar and EV revolutions at a massive pace.
Maybe this is a stupid question, but are there any figures or analysis anywhere on whether the money we have borrowed as a nation and then “invested” has generated a return and if so, how much of a return?
If not, WTF are we doing?
For governments, spending money to build a bridge from here to there is "investment". Depending upon the type of spending there is an economic multiplier which determines how much benefit will be derived, for each dollar spent.
There is a good article about it here, one of the first on google.
Anyhow
You are a financy bloke so serious question,
Currently as shown below UK debt is extremely large. In the many years Ive worked in stressed companies ( stress usually introduced by Private Equity !) converting debt to equity is often one of the required steps ( keeps the bills down and the ratings folks happy )
Since QE is essentially us issuing debt to ourselves what is to stop HMG converting £1trn of debt to equity thereby relieving the public finances ?
One of the climate feedback loops just went off the chart. Antarctic sea ice extent in southern hemisphere summers is highly variable, but it always recovers in the winter. Thus year it hasn't.
(*six sigma would be once in a billion years - actually five sigma.)
Its not so much the sea ice but the risk that the ice shelf on Antartica is now able to slide off on a massive scale. If that happens Canary Warf becomes Canary ponds.
The rise in sea level will probably become the UK's biggest headache in the future. There is evidence that the sea level during the last interglacial period - the last time temperatures were comparable to now - was around 6 to 9 metres higher than today. It takes a while* for all that water to warm and the ice to melt, so it won't be our problem. It'll be a nasty legacy for our children and grandchildren though.
* Having said that, there have been occasions in the past when tipping points have passed and the Earth's climate has changed very rapidly, as Richard Tyndall has pointed out. It's very difficult to know what these points might be and when they will be passed, but the warming of the Earth is unlikely to remain a smooth process.
I agree about the sudden tipping points and of course that is possible. But your contention that the last time temperatures were this warm was in the last interglacial is simply wrong. In both historical and pre-historical times we have seen temperatures significantly warmer than now. This does not inform what might happen going forward as such but making such obviously refutable errors doesn't help the debate.
The last three Julys on Earth have been the three warmest ever recorded. But, they may also be the warmest months to occur on our planet in about 120,000 years.
Bit of nuance. Uncertainty is important. Reconstructing past temperatures is hard. Take the use of tree ring data and the 'divergence'. If tree rings are a good proxy for temperature, why are they not working now?
It's worth reading beyond the first line of the article.
Even if you've also read the strapline? "The past few summers have been the warmest on Earth in a long, long time."
Then the first sentence: "The last three Julys on Earth have been the three warmest ever recorded."
(BBM). Oopsadaisy! Surely some mistake? I was going to ask what kind of average they were using and whether in theory it treats all points on the Earth's surface equally, but really when faced with an article like that, who cares?
From the article:
"There's little doubt among scientists that we're now probably experiencing the warmest climate in some 120,000 years, even reaching above a particularly warm period around 7,000 years ago, during a post-ice age era called the Holocene.
"I agree entirely that it's very likely the last few summers have been the warmest in the last ~100,000-115,000 years," David Black, a paleoclimatologist at Stony Brook University, said over email. "It's very probable that we've begun to exceed the warmest part of the Holocene."
"It is safe to say that it's true," added Jennifer Marlon, a research scientist at Yale University's School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, in an interview. "You'll find a scientific consensus among experts even on that point now I'd bet, which says a lot."
Marlon noted that during that hotter time 7,000 years ago, only the northern hemisphere experienced some pretty warm summers, "but now we are warmer year round."
Back in 2013, Rahmstorf already argued that the current climate had already surpassed this warmest period of the Holocene. And in the last five years, the case has only grown stronger."
"during a post-ice age era called the Holocene"
This is still the Holocene. I conclude the writer didn't know what they were talking about, as usual.
In the Middle Eocene there was no ice on the planet at all - not even in Antarctic regions - and it was a hell of a lot warmer than now.
I conclude that the Earth will be absolutely fine. 5 degrees warming will not make the planet uninhabitable for humans or wipe out life.
Evidence that it's already getting too hot for some humans to think logically?
Probably not, as some humans are incapable of that at any temperature.
Do enlighten me as to where the logic fail is (remembering to include the cut sentence).
You really post something like "In the X period it was hotter than it is now. I conclude everything will be fine." and then challenge someone to spot the flaw in your logic?
But again I should thank you for putting climate change denialism into a nutshell.
What I said was that climate change would cause trouble for current human society (which it will) but the Earth won't turn into a dead planet, like some of the alarmists seem to suggest.
But society will have to adapt to any number of changes which we cannot predict, along with ones that we can. There's an undercurrent that "if only we stop climate change, everything will be fine".
It won't. Change is inevitable.
A friend of mine is a professor of palaeoarchaeology and he likes to say that the Younger Dryas ended on the first Tuesday in Lent, it was that quick. And yet we have this exceptionalist idea that everything is going to stay just how we like it if we do our penance and don't pollute the atmosphere.
Fine, we shouldn't run this CO2 experiment, I agree. But don't expect stopping it to solve even 5% of the World's problems.
Anyway, I shall go back to planning how to grow moss to restore some habitat. Its as good an occupation as any other. It might even capture a few carbons.
Maybe this is a stupid question, but are there any figures or analysis anywhere on whether the money we have borrowed as a nation and then “invested” has generated a return and if so, how much of a return?
If not, WTF are we doing?
For governments, spending money to build a bridge from here to there is "investment". Depending upon the type of spending there is an economic multiplier which determines how much benefit will be derived, for each dollar spent.
There is a good article about it here, one of the first on google.
Anyhow
You are a financy bloke so serious question,
Currently as shown below UK debt is extremely large. In the many years Ive worked in stressed companies ( stress usually introduced by Private Equity !) converting debt to equity is often one of the required steps ( keeps the bills down and the ratings folks happy )
Since QE is essentially us issuing debt to ourselves what is to stop HMG converting £1trn of debt to equity thereby relieving the public finances ?
I think the next phase is going to be Quantitative tightening. Somehow the government has to withdraw liquidity from the market and that is likely going to be how.
They can't convert debt to equity because what would the equity holders own? A bit of the M62?
As I am often called a pessimist, though I think there are good reasons for pessimism on the subject of climate change and whether mankind will actually do anything to stop it. There is a bright note in that a sea level rise of several metres means I will be living in a beach front property.
Rather depends exactly how much it rises, and won't you be having rather a lot of people living in your garden shed?
It wont rise past my house I doubt and nope don't have a garden shed so they can go live in london
Thank you for the link, which I found interesting. Floating houses, whether custom built, converted barges or canal boats are not uncommon in England. They are not cheap however, and things like mooring fees, getting a GP, letter delivery and hull maintenance are not easy.
Maybe this is a stupid question, but are there any figures or analysis anywhere on whether the money we have borrowed as a nation and then “invested” has generated a return and if so, how much of a return?
If not, WTF are we doing?
For governments, spending money to build a bridge from here to there is "investment". Depending upon the type of spending there is an economic multiplier which determines how much benefit will be derived, for each dollar spent.
There is a good article about it here, one of the first on google.
Anyhow
You are a financy bloke so serious question,
Currently as shown below UK debt is extremely large. In the many years Ive worked in stressed companies ( stress usually introduced by Private Equity !) converting debt to equity is often one of the required steps ( keeps the bills down and the ratings folks happy )
Since QE is essentially us issuing debt to ourselves what is to stop HMG converting £1trn of debt to equity thereby relieving the public finances ?
I think the next phase is going to be Quantitative tightening. Somehow the government has to withdraw liquidity from the market and that is likely going to be how.
They can't convert debt to equity because what would the equity holders own? A bit of the M62?
As I am often called a pessimist, though I think there are good reasons for pessimism on the subject of climate change and whether mankind will actually do anything to stop it. There is a bright note in that a sea level rise of several metres means I will be living in a beach front property.
Rather depends exactly how much it rises, and won't you be having rather a lot of people living in your garden shed?
It wont rise past my house I doubt and nope don't have a garden shed so they can go live in london
Thank you for the link, which I found interesting. Floating houses, whether custom built, converted barges or canal boats are not uncommon in England. They are not cheap however, and things like mooring fees, getting a GP, letter delivery and hull maintenance are not easy.
Check out boat mortgages. And why they are the way they are.
Those interested in the practicality of interstellar travel might want to look at the Prologue in "Summertide", the first book in Charles Sheffield's "Heritage Universe" series. (Sheffield knew a little bit about science: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Sheffield )
Briefly, Sheffield described an earth that was sending out colony ships, with the colonists in cold sleep. There is nothing in his description of the ships that sounds impossible to this amateur. And earth scientists have concluded that we are unlikely to contact intelligent aliens when a ship finds an enormous structure built by very advanced aliens millions of years before.
(Spoilers: At the end of the Prologue, word has come in from a small interstellar colony that faster-than-light may be possible. The Heritage Universe stories that follow that Prologue describe searches for those aliens, called "Builders", but with the protagonists traveling almost instantaneously between "Bose-Einstein" points.
I found the books interesting reads, but am disappointed that he never resolved the problem he posed in that Prologue. Perhaps he might have, had he lived longer.)
Comments
It's not part of our current science, but that doesn't make it impossible.
Not saying its the case but assuming because we see that time span as too long for interstellar flight doesn't make it so necessarily for an alien race
1. Arab-spring style: drought or floods in key agricultural areas lead to commodity inflation and rapid migration to cities of young men. Revolutions break out. One of them in a strategically important country leads to a series of events culminating in war. The Threads scenario suggests this would be Iran. Various papers already showing the climate linkages with the timing and locations of the Arab spring and Syrian civil war
2. Climate refugee crisis: drought in Sahel triggers large exodus towards Europe, states start shutting frontiers against each other, some twat like Lukashenko decides to weaponise this, etc etc
3. Water resources: drought upstream leads to one country shutting off water supply to another downstream. War breaks out. Big powers get involved then boom. Has happened a few times in the past
Those are triggers. More likely a gradually increasing series of stresses from environmental damage until a breaking point.
1. People who trip on DMT (naturally occurring hallucinogen, active ingredient in ayahuasca) see, to an extraordinary extent, the same things, even when not forewarned about the probability of seeing these things. "Machine elves" - little green men in high tech settings.
2. We endogenously produce small quantities of DMT (this is uncontroversially the case, though nobody knows why)
3. People who naturally produce more than DMT than others, spontaneously have these hallucinations.
Though this doesn't explain 1., which is the most interesting part of it.
You are assigning them human attributes, rationality and behaviour. Super illogical.
But you have no idea what the main risks to global civilisation might be. I would suggest the ability to feed more than a couple of billion people might be one of those things.
But there are, of course, many different climate proxies. Cores, from sediments or ice looking at chemical compositions. Counts of insects of particular types from such samples. Counts of pollen types, etc, etc. Now, to some extent they may be calibrated on each other and on the instrumental period, which is - of course - a small part of the whole. But it's not obvious what common factors would affect all of them, for most of the record, other than climate.
Frankly, if I was a wandering alien or an inter dimensional being, I’d find Planet Earth quite fascinating at this point. It’s like kids. When they are babies they are boring. When they are teens they are irritating
But when they are about 6-10 they are fascinating. Adorable yet eerie. The personality is being formed. You want to observe
Its not unlike the old communist states and the lack of goods in the shops compared to the decadent west.
It’s kinda nice in a retro way. Eastern Europe can still throw up these culinary moments when you remember food in the USSR and you shudder
True Story
My own feeling - and it's nothing more than that - is that simple forms of life probably exist around the universe, but that complex, intelligent beings are extremely rare and will probably never be encountered by humanity. But I'd be happy to be proved wrong. If they're friendly, that is.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3hAeWX9YZ2I
This is also documented, just as many of its quantum and parallel-universal themes are taken from more mainstream contemporary theoretical physics and concerns, as also often discussed here.
5 degrees warming will not wipe out life on earth but it will pose problems for society as it currently organised.
But...what will society look like in 200 years even without climate change? You really have no idea.
The expectation that everything will carry on roughly as it is now is utterly flawed. It won't.
I don't think pumping CO2 into the atmosphere is a particularly good experiment, and I agree we should stop it if possible, but is it the most alarming thing about the future of the human race? I very much doubt it.
A professor (paleoarchaeologist) friend of mine likes to say that the Younger Dryas ended on 'the second Tuesday in Lent', it was that quick. Humans adapted because they could move and there weren't that many of them. Maybe that's where we'll end up again. Does that matter?
Musk is a hype man; it’s the only thing he’s any good at, but he is really good at it. Selling hype (remember “you can rent your self-driving Tesla out to people who need transport”?) is what turned Tesla into an avalanche of wealth for him. Selling hype (”re-usable launch vehicles will transform the space business!”) kept people personally invested in SpaceX.
None of this is a criticism - you need someone capable of selling the dream if you want to fund a company that requires many years to get from now to profitability. If they hype doesn’t always come true, but the company ends up making money then that’s just fine.
He’s trying to create the same play with Twitter by turning people’s attention to a grand future where the company owns a dominating payment & transaction infrastructure under the X branding. If he can convince enough people that this is real then they will ignore the current dire state of the company’s finances & will continue to invest in the company on the promise of future riches, just as people did with Tesla.
It worked out for Tesla investors after all & there might well be enough Musk believers out there who will think it will work for them this time around. You can see them all buying blue ticks on Twitter right now - they’re eager to throw their money into the pit.
So the fact that he’s throwing the established brand on the bonfire doesn’t matter: Twitter is dying anyway - he’s trashed the company by torching its relationship with its main customers & there’s probably no way back. His escape hatch is to turn it into another hype vehicle & sell a new investment round to ever hopeful suckers / investors.
Will it work? Maybe, but this time around he doesn’t have an experienced team of domain experts around him to protect him from his own worst ideas, so I suspect he’s more likely to crash & burn than not. But for him personally all he needs to do is to extract enough wealth from a new round of suckers to quietly exit with his personal wealth intact, with an option on the upside if X does turn out to be a surprise barnstormer. He’ll probably achieve that.
Great thing is, you can make the stuff at home from known good ingredients and know exactly what it is.
We're a lot more conscious and less tolerant of mass extinction these days. Though an interesting question is whether the pace of improvement in natural disaster protection will be greater or less than the pace of increase in natural disaster magnitude or prevalence.
UK to run up highest debt interest bill in developed world
https://www.ft.com/content/b25903fd-2ebe-4f65-aa20-c21d873946f3
I do think there is plenty of space for the conservatives to accept climate change and net zero, but to make the case that the transition has to be possible, affordable, acceptable and proportionate
But again I should thank you for putting climate change denialism into a nutshell.
Brown running a needless deficit in a boom wasn't exactly fantastic. But saving rather than spending doesn't buy you headlines or voters.
Edit - Ah, I see it's Suffolk.
Your latter point is interesting: then again, if access to t'Internet is a reason for non-reporting (and I doubt that's a factor because AIUI reports showed the same sort of pattern pre-1990s), then it should be remembered that the UFO hysteria can also spread over t'Internet as well, especially in other languages. Cause and effect, and all that...
It'll be interesting to see if (say) a massively popular Chinese UFO film comes out, and then reported sightings in China increase massively.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rendlesham_Forest_incident
Did you see the documentary done by those idiots following John McAfee?
They bought into the cult and it was fascinating to watch. Every day McAfee promised the Big Revelations were coming. Just got to do these 3 things first… ops, not today. Tomorrow.
The moment they actually cornered McAfee into answering a question straight - by mistake - and his mask cracked… it was looking behind Oz’s curtain.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powa_Technologies
If not, WTF are we doing?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voronezh_UFO_incident
In yesterday's Daily Mail:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-12316755/Im-UFO-experiencer-visited-creatures-red-eyes-glowing-orbs-stories-compelling-NASA-CIA-studying-me.html
Dig that term, "UFO experiencer". I once saw some UFOs too (all in the same sighting), but fortunately unlike this bloke I haven't had "orbs" over my house every day since I saw them. I wonder what effect that has on his mental health.
Carnyx said: Malmesbury said: TheScreamingEagles said:Obviously this racism as everybody loves a flash solicitor.
High-flying London lawyers and sleepy countryside villages are not always the happiest of combinations, especially when the criminal law specialist really wants to take to the air.
Mayus Karia bills himself as a “ferocious litigator” but the residents of Durley, in Hampshire, will doubtless have a litany of other names for the solicitor-advocate, who has triggered a row over plans to make frequent helicopter landings at his six-bedroom £1.3 million home.
Neighbours in the village, which has a population of about 1,000, have objected to having their “peace ended” by the “flash” lawyer.
The dispute started when Karia, who qualified as a solicitor in 2005 and is said on his law firm’s website to have an “unrivalled . . . sixth sense in litigation”, won permission to construct a helipad in his back garden.
Officials at Winchester city council originally granted him only two personal use round trips a month between the hours of 8am and 6pm. However, local authority planning application documents show that last month Karia applied for unrestricted use to allow multiple landings and take-offs.
In the application, an agent for Karia said the lawyer needed “a loosening of the restriction to allow flexibility of irregular visits by some clients . . .”
Karia, a father of three, who charges between £1,000 and £1,200 an hour for legal advice, is said by neighbours to drive an SUV Rolls-Royce, while his firm, London Litigation Partnership Solicitors, describes him as “a ferocious and meticulous litigator”. His firm’s website goes on to liken his legal skills to “the genius of Field Marshal Montgomery in the battlefield”.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/high-flying-lawyers-plans-for-helipad-hit-turbulence-in-village-rwqgrwg5g
I wonder if the locals would be interested in some collectible SAM systems? Perhaps a nice old Blowpipe?
Or for the deep enthusiast, a Skysweeper.
I'd have thought you would go for Green Mace. (Seen it in the Royal Artillery Museum at Woolwich long ago - before they sold it off for yuppie, sorry London investment, flats.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3hAeWX9YZ2I
Green Mace was never finished IIRC - a weird example of a spec driven development that forgot to ask WTF concerning the spec.
Skysweeper made it to production.
China is just doesn’t want to be bossed around by anyone else. But the economics of solar & wind are going to result in them turning off the coal plants regardless: It is now cheaper to build and install a solar or wind farm cluster than it is to keep a coal plant running in the US. I would imagine much the same goes for China, probably more so given that most of the solar panels are made there.
Which is all to say that none of this is a valid justification for doing nothing ourselves: Weaning the country off fossil fuel imports is good for the planet & it’s also good for our national security. We should not be swayed by the self-interested actions of fossil fuel exporters.
It is worth noting in passing that this Review of Waste Policy was itself impossible to cost accurately or even monitor its effectiveness or whether it could be done better. Whitehall does not work like that.
...Despite being intended to be assessed over five years, the bin funding scheme only lasted one; the Department which issued the guidance no longer exists and the great eye of Ministerial or public interest has since moved on....
https://www.egforum.org.uk/blogs/the-reluctant-civil-servant-the-unexpected-importance-of-bin-collection
So £250m invested, no idea on return on investment....and not even sure it was all spent on bin issue.
With climate change there are a lot of unknowns to start with, including where we will end up in 50, 100, 1,000 years and also there is an effort at mitigation and/or adaptation. That then becomes a political decision and we discussed the uses of incentives and punishment.
Other than that, good analogy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X.com
It seems eminently plausible that it's his personal Rosebud.
There is a good article about it here, one of the first on google.
All still too early to say , so far.
For example “privatising the NHS” is bollocks. But a potent attack. It has a metaphysical existence that exceeds the reality
As for the other gaggle of clowns, does anyone think we will succeed in putting pressure on Russia or Saudi? No, let's instead help to bankrupt them by accelerating fossil fuel usage into the economic dustbin of history. If they don't have markets for their dirty commodities they won't have the power and money to do bad things like invading their neighbours or buying footballers.
What happens if we have a significant recession?
https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/SN00249/SN00249.pdf
Also it should be noted that low carbon energy is increasing fast in China (6.4% in 2007 to 18.4% in 2022) and fossil fuel use is falling, but still a long way to go.
They also produce a lot of cheap solar panels that help the rest of the world decarbonise.
You are a financy bloke so serious question,
Currently as shown below UK debt is extremely large. In the many years Ive worked in stressed companies ( stress usually introduced by Private Equity !) converting debt to equity is often one of the required steps ( keeps the bills down and the ratings folks happy )
Since QE is essentially us issuing debt to ourselves what is to stop HMG converting £1trn of debt to equity thereby relieving the public finances ?
But society will have to adapt to any number of changes which we cannot predict, along with ones that we can.
There's an undercurrent that "if only we stop climate change, everything will be fine".
It won't. Change is inevitable.
A friend of mine is a professor of palaeoarchaeology and he likes to say that the Younger Dryas ended on the first Tuesday in Lent, it was that quick. And yet we have this exceptionalist idea that everything is going to stay just how we like it if we do our penance and don't pollute the atmosphere.
Fine, we shouldn't run this CO2 experiment, I agree. But don't expect stopping it to solve even 5% of the World's problems.
Anyway, I shall go back to planning how to grow moss to restore some habitat. Its as good an occupation as any other. It might even capture a few carbons.
They can't convert debt to equity because what would the equity holders own? A bit of the M62?
Briefly, Sheffield described an earth that was sending out colony ships, with the colonists in cold sleep. There is nothing in his description of the ships that sounds impossible to this amateur. And earth scientists have concluded that we are unlikely to contact intelligent aliens when a ship finds an enormous structure built by very advanced aliens millions of years before.
(Spoilers: At the end of the Prologue, word has come in from a small interstellar colony that faster-than-light may be possible. The Heritage Universe stories that follow that Prologue describe searches for those aliens, called "Builders", but with the protagonists traveling almost instantaneously between "Bose-Einstein" points.
I found the books interesting reads, but am disappointed that he never resolved the problem he posed in that Prologue. Perhaps he might have, had he lived longer.)