WIP

Interesting! Although when I think of the sports analogy, I get the feeling that some of us are more hard-wired to find common cause and rally round the flag than others. Maybe this is why I've never been a rabid sports fan. I would get more enthused about my hometown winning the Grey Cup, or the Leafs winning the Stanley Cup, if the players actually came from the local area. What does it mean now to win? Our Russians are better than your Russians! I think this may be part of the reason why Junior A Hockey died in a lot of markets. Back in the 60's, the six NHL clubs all had their own Junior A farm clubs, that sported identical uniforms as the pros, and the best players were drafted by those teams. So, in Niagara Falls, most of the city were Boston Bruin fans, because so many of the players (except Bobby Orr) came from the Junior A Flyers. We watched the best of them like: Derek Sanderson, Bill Goldsworthy, Don Marcotte, Jim Lorentz, Steve Atkinson, and maybe a few others, play for the Bruins; and even if they were traded off to other teams, the connection between Niagara Falls and Boston stuck. After the farm club system of organizing Junior A was dropped, many fans started losing interest in the local Junior club. I guess the Granfalloon instinct wasn't strong enough to carry on afterwards for minor hockey in the Niagara Peninsula. I guess the worst Granfalloon cult we have with us these days is nationalism, since some people can be motivated by appeals to patriotism by demagogues who want to build empires.

Exactly! Why should it be a surprise that many people aren't happy living in a place with an imploded economy and no freedom of movement. But the article doesn't mention that Israel is in no way going to allow more Arab citizens of their country. If anything, they are trying to change laws ans expel Israeli Arabs that they have now, so it's a moot point anyway. If peace is actually possible, and a viable Palestinian state could exist, then there would be less interest in moving to Israel. And, as time goes on, the chances of peace seem to get slimmer and slimmer. The secular, democratic constituency in Israel is shrinking and losing influence to the religious nuts. It seems that the decades-long conflict has led to exodus of many secular Jews from Israel, and replaced by orthodox zealots, who want all the land....including the occupied territories. I don't mean to be drifting off topic, but I have no interest in starting my own Israel/Palestine thread. But with all of the Israel threads that pop up in the Rest of the World forum, I'm surprised there isn't one mentioning this recent National Post article, about the internal turmoil caused by the growing Ultra Orthodox community. Maybe someone who's been there can explain to me how these Haredim get to live on welfare, and are free from military service in a nation that even has a military draft for young women. In the West, we are used to thinking of Israel as a western, secular democratic state surrounded by Arab Muslims. But, outside of Tel Aviv, how much of Israel is really secular? And is this just becoming a fight to the death between two theocracies? If it is, why is our government putting all of its support behind the Israeli side at a time like this?

Exactly. But why should we be dealing with global competition in the first place? Labour can't just pick up and leave if wages and working conditions degrade; but money knows no boundaries these days, thanks to deregulation and free trade agreements. Why should we be competing with millions of displaced farmers in China....not to mention their prison labourers? The corporate and advertiser-run media doesn't allow for any revisiting of the promises that were made when these agreements were signed by the P.C.'s, or the promises of the Liberals to scrap them. It's like Canada, the U.S., Mexico, Europe, and pretty much the whole world was caught by this tsunami of inevitable free trade agreements, that promised prosperity for all....before they shipped the factories and the IT jobs off to China and India. And now that the workers face the threat of having their factory closed down for a new one opening in China or elsewhere that pays 50c an hour, the unions have been in a state of steady retreat....so what do anti-union activists want now? The complete subjugation of the working class, and the extinction of the middle class!

Thanks. Glad to be of service.

Well, from what I've seen, the people who are the most sure of themselves, and certain about their information, are the ones who are least informed and have the worst suggestions.

There are no exact numbers dealing with these population projections. There are too many variables to guess whether will reach 7 billion next year, or this year as according to Population Reference Bureau.

The only humane way to deal with these problems is start dealing now with the combined problems of overuse of natural resources and increasing greenhouse gas levels, is to get past the fossil fuel age, and to bring back the U.N.-sponsored birth control information programs that the religious reactionaries have put a halt to in many places. It doesn't take a deliberate policy of mass murder to reduce the world's population, since ignorance and neglect will do that job in the coming decades. And, after reading Gwynn Dyer's book about the CIA and other agencies' contingency plans for dealing with the political, economic and security implications of climate change; it gives the appearance that the people who control the levers of power are not climate skeptics, nor overpopulation skeptics, but instead have made a cold-blooded calculus that there will be a massive die-off of the world' population in the coming decades; and their only concern is how to protect their own interests under this nightmare scenario.

6,867,905,957 This number may have changed since 5 seconds ago.

From what I've seen lately, we don't have a hundred years to wait for the population to start dropping. For one thing, the environmental impacts of climate change are already having an impact on food production, which I hear we are going to notice with food prices this year, even without further disasters like the fires in Russia, droughts and floods in Australia etc.. And, we are not at stasis right now when it comes to population and our use of natural resources. We are in a state of "overshoot" where we are removing more natural resources than is being replenished. If the irrational optimists are right, and modern living will reduce birth rates; we still have the problem that the modern, western way of life has an environmental impact many times greater than the average third world citizen. And we have an economic system in place that depends on growth to sustain itself, and caters to the whims of consumers, who many times have more crap than they honestly know what to do with. If there is a way to solve these problems without mass calamity, it doesn't appear to be easy, or forthcoming in the immediate future.

The religious right, and the Catholic Church don't seem to have much success bringing back patriarchy over here, and encouraging women to have 5 to 10 children; but through charity and missionary work in Africa and other poor nations, they are preventing any serious efforts for population control. And this is in countries that are at or close to the breaking point, because of dwindling sources of fresh water, and erosion of topsoil. And, of course, every third world nation that has a Muslim majority, also has poor access to birth control and a culture that encourages patriarchy, and keeping women stuck in the baby-making business. This would be excusable to some degree, if there was still lots of available land and resources for the world's population.....but, there are no new worlds to conquer. We are going to hit 7 billion this year; guess how many people were living on Earth a hundred years ago.....I think I'll just make you go through the effort and look it up.

From what I understand, Palestinians living in occupied territories are stuck in quasi-prison camp, with walls and security checkpoints restricting travel within the territories. And, with the absence of a real economy is it a genuine comparison? The article makes it sound like they want to convert to Judaism or something.

Agreed.....as long as the Conservative Party changes its name to the Conservative Corporate Party. I don't recall any elections where the Communists or the Marxist-Leninist Party won more than about 100 votes, and until an honest attempt is made to extend proportional representation, third parties will become increasingly irrelevant. The Liberals are all over the map! Is Iggy any less a servant of the rich and powerful than Harper is? There would only be minor improvements....like preventing the theocons and other social conservatives from advancing their agendas any further. And that's where the similarities end. Fascism is not socialism! The far left may abolish private property and private ownership for collectivization or state control. But, the far right fascist centralizes state power in the interests of the aristocracy. Under classic fascism, the political leader(s) have ultimate power; but under the present system we have now, we have neither fascism nor real democracy, but instead a state where the world's largest corporations are able to exert necessary control over nation states through GATT and other "free trade" agreements, financing through the World Bank and IMF, and when all else fails -- regime change courtesy of America's oversized military. The best definition for this kind of existence I've seen is "Inverted Totalitarianism.".

I joined the Reform Party when it first started organizing in Ontario 20 years ago. It was grassroots in the sense that every crackpot group from fundamentalists and anti-abortion crusaders, anti-immigration neo-nazi-types were moving in on mass and trying to take over riding associations. Within a short time, the Alberta leadership had to start establishing more command and control, and move away from the grassroots populist BS. After it morphed into Canadian Alliance, and then absorbed most of the former P.C. Party, Stephen Harper started bringing in his U.S. advisers and turning it into the Canadian Republican Party. Makes sense to me; now explain how cutting corporate taxes and tax breaks for the wealthy are living within our means? My father came of age during the Great Depression -- before unions became commonplace. Back in those days, most people were back working for less than a dollar a day if they could find jobs, and that's why factories and other workplaces became unionized. Your father, and you and your friends grew up during a time when they could take the five day work week, the eight hour day, Workmen's Compensation, and better wages all for granted. Now that we are in a time when unions are being busted, and wages are falling, I'm surprised how many of the floundering middle class can't figure out which side their bread is buttered on. For all of the complaints and whining about unions, if you're an average person, you wouldn't be earning what you get now,if it hadn't been for the unions.....and that includes all of you who have never been part of a union. You've benefited from the presence of unions, because employers (like the old Dofasco Steel Co. here in Hamilton) that did not want an organized workforce, had to offer their workers equivalent wages and working conditions. And if we had the so called "right to work laws" that Reagan and many state governments introduced in the U.S., that would have allowed workers who would not support the union, to enjoy the same benefits. The end result is no union, and everybody working for near minimum wages.

And they are irrelevant to the electoral process, because the Democrats and Republicans seem to be capable of bipartisanship when it comes to fixing the system to shut out third parties. We are headed in that same direction in Canada! We too will soon have a rightwing party that unabashedly serves corporate interests, and when the unwashed masses get restless, our only alternative will be the Liberals -- who also serve corporate interests, but more covertly by extracting a few minor compromises from them. And ofcourse we will have the same talkingheads in Ottawa, just like the talkingheads in Washington, who pretend that the politicos they curry the favour of, are really representing the interests of the majority.

I hope it's not what he uses as a pickup line! I figured you're not easily phased by that kind of talk, but it gets on my nerves that he seems to feel the need to derail threads like this. It's the same thing every time. A few others have covered this point also. You never know who you're talking to....for all we know bush_cheney may be either the real Bush or the real Cheney.....more likely the latter I suppose. I used to have jpeg sent to me in an email titled: "your internet dream girl".....which of course featured some dirty, scruffy old guy with a beard, sitting at the keyboard, naked from the waist up. That picture could be more effective than warning labels on cigarette packages!

Most of their land is a rocky desert that's as useless as Moonscape. We'll have to check in on Israel, because right now the most under-reported story coming from there is the conflict with Palestinians over water use from the Jordan River and underground aquifers. Israel has taken control of these water sources, and as their population grows, they are taking more water. They seem to be culturally stuck in patriarchy...similar to what the religious right wants for us over here. If they won't allow women into the workforce, and especially have control over reproduction (that seems to be what limits family size), they will just keep going on the same trend until collapse. And if we consider what a source of instability young Saudi men are who leave the country, this will be a problem that spills over their borders. All of the high-yield wonder plants created during the 1960's Green Revolution. It stopped the frequent famines in India, and many other nations that were already on the brink of unsustainability at the time, but that was only a temporary reprieve, not a permanent solution. And those high yield plants are more susceptible to unstable climate than natural varieties: The second problem is, of course, global warming. The rule of thumb is that with every one-degree C rise in average global temperature, we lose 10 percent of global food production. In some places, the crops will be damaged by drought; in others by much hotter temperatures. Or, as in Russia’s case today, by both. So food production will be heading down as demand continues to increase, and something has to give. What will probably happen is that the amount of internationally traded grain will dwindle as countries ban exports and keep their supplies for themselves. That will mean that a country can no longer buy its way out of trouble when it has a local crop failure: there will not be enough exported grain for sale. This is the vision of the future that has the soldiers and security experts worried: a world where access to enough food becomes a big political and strategic issue even for developed countries that do not have big surpluses at home. It would be a very ugly world indeed, teeming with climate refugees and failed states and interstate conflicts over water (which is just food at one remove). http://westcoastclimateequity.org/2010/08/09/dramatic-depletion-of-world-food-production-linked-to-wildfires/ And this isn't just the Third World's problem: Extreme heat is the single best predictor of corn and soybean yields in the United States. While average yields have risen continuously since World War II, we find no evidence that relative tolerance to extreme heat has improved between 1950 and 2005. Climate change forecasts project a sharp increase in extreme heat by the end of the century, with the potential to significantly reduce yields under current technologies. http://www.nber.org/papers/w16308.pdf

I heard this clown who was campaign manager or something for Bush on Bill Maher's season opener last night, try to earn whatever he gets from the NRA, by making a point that someone, either his family, the college he attended etc. should have notified the authorities to take him off to a psychiatric unit for evaluation. Problem is, they're not doing that in Arizona, because funding for mental health programs was one of the first things cut in Republican austerity budgets. They even have about 100 people, who have been informed that they have been taken off the waiting lists for organ donations.....and these are the people screaming about "death panels!"

They already have lots of desalinization plants in the Arabian Peninsula, where oil revenues made it cost-effective to reclaim deserts. The problem is that the population in countries like Saudi Arabia is growing faster than any possible tech fix to sustain them. Back during the 1970's oil embargo, there were only 11 million people in Saudi Arabia; now there are over 30 million. And even countries that can turn seawater into fresh water have the problems posed by degradation of topsoil and in tropical countries, summer high temperatures are reaching levels that are destroying green-revolution hybrids.

No, just stopping the religious right from doing what they are now doing, would fix the population side of this problem. It doesn't take sterilization or one-child policies....simply an end to religious indoctrination against abortion and birth control by conservative religious leaders, be they Muslim, Catholic, or Evangelicals, has kept the populations increasing in third world nations that are running out of fresh water and arable land.

I was hoping you could follow the math, because statistics is not my strong suit! From what I got, if we are presently consuming 1.5 times a sustainable level of earth resources, and that number will rise to two times by 2030, assuming present population trends and GDP + the factoid mentioned about how the greater the amount of overshoot = reduced sustainable biocapacity of the environment -- then, we end up with a conclusion that our present population is consuming three times as much resources as the Earth can provide. You can either cut the global population to one third, or cut the environmental impact to one third...or some combination of the two -- but, just carrying on the way we are doing now leads to disaster. And of course this is a very rough estimate, as an actual estimate of biocapacity depends on population, consumption and technology. But, if anything, the rush to industrialize in developing third world nations, and our inability to deal with our own environmental problems means we are heading for a crash -- whatever the size and scale, agricultural yields are going to drop because of the combined problems of groundwater depletion, destruction of topsoil, and climate instability that is creating more severe floods and droughts. I didn't agree with this logic before, and I'm not going to start now. Whatever super-duper high tech fixes come along, it is not going to keep taking more and more resources without any cost. One example would be what’s happening to fresh water aquifers all around the world. Currently over half of us are in countries where aquifers are being overpumped. As “fossil” aquifers are pumped (such as under the Sahara Desert), that water is not replaced. So when that water is depleted, pumping ends since there is no more water flowing in. Non-fossil aquifers have a “recharge rate” – the rate at which new, fresh water flows in. As long as water is pumped out at or below the recharge rate, the aquifer will continue to supply the same amount of water year after year after year. However, these rechargeable aquifers are being overpumped. http://www.eoearth.org/article/Aquifer_depletion As noted above, how does that electric car or fusion plant deal with declining fresh water all over the world?

Does The NDP Still Have A Reason To Exist why should it? If the only alternative is to either vote Liberal or Conservative, damn right they have a reason to exist! Look at the way the two party - duopoly in the U.S. has frozen out the interests of working class people on free trade, taxes, deregulation etc. etc.

I'm not sure if James Lovelock is still actively doing scientific research, but the numbers that are gathered to estimate human ecological footprint (basically, what we are taking from our natural environment) has come from a number of sources; and although the numbers fluctuate...think of China's impact for example, which has substantially increased over the last 25 years with their rapid industrialization program -- the world population (which will reach 7 billion this year) is consuming about 25% more resources than Earth is producing – during any given time period. And that means we are consuming our resource base. Obviously this 25% overshoot is not sustainable: We maintain this overshoot by liquidating the Earth’s resources. Overshoot is a vastly underestimated threat to human well-being and the health of the planet, and one that is not adequately addressed. Today humanity uses the equivalent of 1.5 planets to provide the resources we use and absorb our waste. This means it now takes the Earth one year and six months to regenerate what we use in a year. Moderate UN scenarios suggest that if current population and consumption trends continue, by the 2030s, we will need the equivalent of two Earths to support us. And of course, we only have one. http://www.footprintnetwork.org/en/index.php/GFN/page/footprint_basics_overview/ Another crucial point to understand is this: the longer we overshoot and consume more resources than the sustainable level, the more the long-term “sustainable level” actually declines! So, the longer we are taking out more than is being put back, the less the level of sustainable consumption of resources, and we may end up four, five or six times the sustainable level.

Maybe not; but those jetpacks and flying cars may add to greenhouse gas levels.

Since there is a lengthy rebuttal of your objections to CO2 being a crucial factor in climate change in post#14, there's not much point to repeating ad nauseum. You never heard of him before, but you already know his motivations. I've been following his writing since he collaborated with Donald Brownlee on Rare Earth, which attempts to throw a little cold water on the common belief found in Star Trek and the thoughts of Carl Sagan and many others, that the Universe is teeming with advanced extraterrestrial civilizations. Ward and Brownlee took a hard look at limited range of habitable zones in our galaxy, and concluded that planets supporting complex life forms would be extremely rare. Later, from some of his public lectures, I learned that Ward put his scientific career in jeopardy while working for Luis Alvarez in the Canary Islands, at a rock strata from the time of the P-T Extinction. He was supposed to be looking for evidence of large asteroid impact, which Alvarez became convinced was the cause of all mass extinctions. Instead, Ward started moving in the direction of natural earth changes - mainly volcanic activity - causing "The Great Dying" at the end of the Permian. He ended up with his research funding cut by the Alvarez team, and having to look for new employment and finding some other ways to raise funds and continue his own research. So, to me that sounds like someone who is dedicated to his work and in search of the truth, not easy money!

Yes, the relationship between CO2 and the Greenhouse Effect has been established science for over a hundred years. This is not a debateable issue any more. If you increase carbon in the atmosphere, it is going to retain more energy from the Sun. And some past extinctions coincide with the breakup of continents. But the breakup of the supercontinent - Pangea, was also a time of high volcanic activity. The Permian-Triassic Extinction, which is the main subject of Peter Ward's research; finds that the creation of slow moving volcanic activity - the flood basalts formed in Siberia, were a time when carbon levels were extremely high, and the world's oceans suffered almost total extinction of life...except for hydrogen sulfite-producing bacteria. Up till recent times, paleontologists were looking for asteroid hits to explain periods of mass extinction...especially after Luis Alvarez linked the K-T Extinction that killed the dinosaurs to the asteroid that hit the Yucatan 63 million years ago. But Alvarez's former grad student (Peter Ward) has noticed that volcanic activity (including at the K-T) is likely the most significant factor. Fastforwarding to the present: the reason why Ward and a few other paleontologists are stepping in to the climate debate, is because we are creating the same conditions in a much shorter period of time than previous extinctions. Your link is a little dated, since it seems to be made up of research that is at least ten to twenty years old. More recent developments in paleoclimate research have developed more accurate chemical tests that correlate more closely with other methods of analysis. The following study from last year, which I have posted numerous times previously, can accurately plot CO2 levels back 20 million years, and as the headline notes, we have to go back 15 million years to a time when atmospheric CO2 levels were this high. Chemical analysis of rocks may not be as accurate as ice core samples, but it's getting better: Last Time Carbon Dioxide Levels Were This High: 15 Million Years Ago, Scientists Report