WIP

Thanks! Just more added proof that capitalism needs to be destroyed before it destroys us in the drive for greater and greater profits! Target's share value is just another artifact of modern disaster capitalism - arbitrage is very profitable for some...regardless of how much earnings are lost for employees of the new feudalism! If you're not aware of the absurdities in that short paragraph: if the CEO of Target was concerned about the long term viability of the Company, he would have done what was necessary to avoid the disaster caused by incompetence....poor supply networks, costly overruns and delayed openings of stores. If the company was a success, then he should have received more compensation than for its failure....but I'm not a CEO or a member of a corporate board of directors...the realm where you win whether you earn or lose profits.

I remember back when Iran was blowing up in a big way back in 1979; and at the time, Jimmy Carter was still trying to keep a lid on the situation and keep the Shah in power. As the situation became more chaotic, the CIA came up with a backup plan of having a so called "moderate" democrat become Prime Minister and temporarily have the Shah step aside. but the ayatollahs and all of the opposition groups weren't buying it....and there was a mad scramble for the airport. So, all in all, it seemed like they thought they could control the situation and hold on to power with/or without the Shah.....and the rest is history.....which Americans unfortunately never read or pay attention to! When it comes to the people and the public reaction....I think for the most part that the majority of people just want their government to look after international affairs without getting us into wars and foreign conflicts. Most Americans didn't know that their government was torturing prisoners and setting up secret prisons around the world to stock with prisoners who are rarely charged with crimes. And that's likely the main reason why the Government has been running non-stop propaganda making phony justifications for torture and other war crimes. We are learning that the "Militainment" industry is mostly financed by the Pentagon to make the public more amenable to having a government committing war crimes. In that regard, the majority do allow themselves to be dulled by propaganda, because they don't care enough for truth or what the government does in their name.

MOre than 90% of the Sun's energy reaching the Earth is absorbed by the world's oceans, and sometimes more heat is absorbed into lower ocean layers than at other times. So, what is the point here? Atmospheric temperatures are not a complete guide, and neither are ocean surface temperatures. Some day I'd like to know how this world can have more heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere, while showing no significant increases in temperature! It's more likely that you're missing part of the picture than simple laws of physics like the greenhouse effect no longer apply.

I was planning to get around to reading that magnum opus OP, but still haven't gotten around to attempting to wade through it yet. But, there is something that jumped out at me early in: So, first I'd like to know what is or how long is "the long run?" Because one uncomfortable fact about the effects of warming I've come across lately is that it takes oceans literally centuries to completely circulate heat that's been diffused down to lower layers back up to the surface and back into the atmosphere. And so far, the reports that are being produced for the IPCC and most other climate studies only ask what for a prediction of warming 10 to 50 years into the future/ not 2, 3 or more centuries! So, the takeaway for me is that the full effects of the CO2 and other GHG's we've dumped into the atmosphere so far, are not going to be completely realized until long after we are dead and gone...but, somebody in the future will have to deal with them. In the meantime, if you make a claim that you...and apparently you alone, have the correct value for climate sensitivity, how far into the future are those residual heat effects being calculated?

Okay, so why doesn't Maher Arar deserve his compensation? Or are you saying that we should torture the CEO of Target and send him packing with 10 million dollars?

With campaign finance and other necessary reforms, government is at least the one institution that everyone has an equal say in....while the corporations you worship run on the basis of one dollar/one vote...so the richest players with the most dollars are running the show. So, who's the mafia again? And that's why they create this BS about government spoiling their fun and interfering with their ability to make more money! Truth is that most of the wealthiest corporations today are making the bulk of their money through guaranteed government contracts. And they are not shy about using evil big government for their interests: enforcing their patents, copyrights and contracts; providing public services for their homes and businesses; policing...which is primarily about protecting those with wealth from those who don't have it and want some of it - in cities like NYC for example, devote an inordinate amount of uniformed and plainclothes officers for the commerce district and wealthy upscale neighbourhoods. How about these wealthy self-made billionaires like David Koch..who in fact keeps a luxury condo in Manhattan for doing business on Wall Street....so how about if he provides his own security, like the billionaires in many third world nations have to do to avoid kidnapping etc. Something that may come to America's shores as wealth and income inequality increases.

There is some circumstantial evidence that we were blindsided by the promises and claims advanced when so called free trade became the bipartisan issue of liberals and conservatives back in the 80's....supposedly...in theory at least, only the undesirable low-paying jobs would be outsourced to poor, undeveloped nations. And we'd be doing them a favour too! Because they would have the opportunity to modernize their societies and become like us. At first, a lot of the arguments about free trade and globalization were about which countries were going to win through free trade and which nations would end up losing. In actual fact what happened was that nearly everybody lost....in Canada, U.S., Mexico, wherever....most people haven't won a damn thing through globalization! BUT, a small controlling elite have won and won big, and are still winning today, taking a greater and greater share of the wealth that's produced. So, today every first world nation has its own growing third world of grinding poverty, while the third world nations have their isolated pockets of extreme wealth. Now it's just a matter of percentages that distinguish first world and third world nations, because income and wealth inequality has steadily advanced. It was through globalization of trade and the less covered banking and finance liberalization like creating the WTO, that the corporate class was able to supercede the power of the voting majority. Not only did they rewrite tax rules and change tax rates on investment income for their benefit, but the middle class has tried to hold their place by working longer hours....especially all the women who had to go out into the workforce fulltime beginning in the 70's. And more people started taking on more and more debt as credit became more easily available. So, it wasn't until housing bubbles burst in the U.S. that a lot of people started waking up and noticing how they have fallen, while the small minority of wealthy interests are the only ones still increasing their incomes today. Here in Canada...at least most of Canada, we didn't have the insane runup in real estate prices, so there isn't as far to fall, but a lot of people that used to have good paying jobs and now struggle to hold on to their homes and pay the bills with two or three crappy part time jobs sure as hell notice stories like this one about Target's CEO's compensation for failure!

Seems you are really stretching to derail the topic today!

That's the whole genius behind what military strategists term - asymmetrical warfare. Terrorist attacks are usually very cheap to carry out, while the counter-insurgency measures of empires are costly in both dollar terms and lives lost. I'm sure that it is going to take decades to undo the damage done in places like Iraq and Afghanistan...just as it was in Vientnam. It's the civilian populations living in those countries that are the object of western wrath which have suffered the greatest numbers of casualties. Iraq and Afghanistan are now failed states since regime change, and will never be liveable during our life times.

Sure you're talking about OPEC? Sounds like Alberta! Alberta again? Cause it sure as hell isn't Saudi Arabia or the Gulf sheikdoms! I can't help noticing that the rest of your history lesson seems to omit a number of crucial facts: the oil is under their lands...so shouldn't they have the sovereign right to decide how much to produce and who to sell it to? But, as soon as the colonial era ended, the neocolonial era began using puppet dictators like the Saud and other instant royals...like the Shah of Iran. If western leaders never expected blowback in any shape, way or form, then that was their own stupidity which led to many of today's ongoing conflicts.

Yes I do! But most comedians understand that they can easily cross over a line if they do edgy political humor.....rape jokes for example...may be an attempt to critique men who are too self-absorbed to understand the distinction between consent and no consent, but it still isn't funny to make light of the subject, because of the damage that it does in some people's lives. In the Hebdo case, they were trying to hide behind satire of the growing fascist white supremacist movements, but nevertheless, they drew a caricature of abducted girls as ugly, dark, pregnant monsters. It was their cartoon....not the creation of the nazis! Any women of African ancestry would have noticed these features of their satire. Yes, and the closest he came to crossing the line was that ching chong character that was supposed to be a satire of right wing condescension...but gave Fox the opportunity to seize the moment and call him a racist

I'm waiting for someone to tell me how endless growth can be accommodated with finite resources. The concerns expressed by a group of academics in the 1968 Club of Rome Report are still looming over us today: they warned of a population bottleneck and dieoff if our populations and resource exploitation continued on unchecked. And over the last 40 years, all we've done is double the population and industrialize agriculture to degrade topsoil and water supplies even further. Any renewable resource that is used up beyond its capacity to rebuild, becomes used up and in a worse collapse than if the extra efforts had never been made in the first place. the difference today is that civilization, food supplies and industrial agriculture are global. So a famine in one region raises demand and food prices everywhere. Once the tipping point is reached where degraded farm lands are unable to meet rising population demands for food, then everything starts collapsing in unexpected ways. That's how civilizations have collapsed in the past and will continue to do so in the future. But, this global civilization has put all of the chips on the table at once, so collapse could be complete and leave nothing afterwards, as the blowbacks from mass migrations, wars...including nuclear wars, make this world even more dangerous than it is today. To be technical about it, agriculture was not some sort of invention 10,000 years ago, as envisioned by early anthropologists. Natufian hunter-gatherers had been gathering seeds and carrying them along with them to plant along hillsides in Asia Minor at least 10, 000 years earlier during the Pleistocene. Definitive evidence is provided by botanists who discovered evidence of hybridization of rye grains as far back as 18,000 years ago. They also started planting other non-shattering hybrid grains which they slowly developed over time along hillsides, because the weather changed too rapidly to allow for any permanent settlements using sedentary agriculture. And, it is almost certain that no hunter-gatherer bands were at all interested in taking up farming...just as hunter-gatherers in modern times only move out of the forests and become farmers when they are forced to by encroachment from slash-and-burn agriculture. They were more than happy to continue on doing the occasional planting of favorite foods as they migrated, and circled back to check for results. It has been noted many times that hunter-gatherers have had a much more comfortable life that involved much less work and effort to provide food, than from tilling the soil! About 40 years ago, archaeologists digging in the hillsides around Greece were shocked to discover that pre-agricultural remains of 10 to 12,000 years ago, showed people who were taller, had much better teeth and greater bone density than those in the same region after the age of farming began! Since then, multiple lines of evidence show fixed agriculture to have been a cultural development that took place out of necessity/ not some great advance that motivated hunter-gatherers to leave the forests! Simple facts from archaeological evidence show that population densities grew too large to continue to support traditional living in Asia Minor and along the Nile and other areas. It's worth noting that despite the usual progress BS, the knowledge of building monuments with stone tools was already in place long before fixed agricultural settlements began. The prime example being the Gobekli Tepe did in southern Turkey near the Syrian border, which until the untimely death of project leader - Klaus Schmidt, was still excavating lower layers of the site dated back 12,000 years ago. Schmidt's theory about Gobekli Tepe was that the site - consisting of a series of monuments with no permanent settlements surrounding the area, was a place of great spiritual significance for Natufian hunter-gatherers for thousands of years. and once or twice during the year, large numbers of different tribes would gather at the site for some sorts of ritualistic purposes and carry on with the task that went on for thousands of years - building the large stone monuments. Schmidt considers the burial of Gobekli Tepe which occurred more than 6,000 years ago, to be an even greater mystery than the building of the monuments; since the massive quantities of earth dumped over the site to bury the monuments, created a sizeable hill that everyone believed was a natural land feature, until erosion revealed glimpses of the site to goat herders several decades ago. Burying the monuments would have taken several generations of work also. Why did they build the monuments, and why did they bury them? Both will remain mysteries which Schmidt believes tie in with the story of the Garden of Eden and later being cast out of paradise. Whatever happened, just like the evidence for hybridizing seeds, the building of large stone monuments for religious or ritualistic purposes, show that knowledge was already in place for everything that is later considered the great breakthrough in civilization. Also worth noting that the first agricultural settlements, like Catalhoyuk contained thousands of mud-brick homes, yet the city has no walls or fortifications. A sign that warfare and invasions and plundering were not a concern for people until more recent times as population densities became greater. So, did civilization take off? Considering where we are today and the story of civilization for the last 5000 years, it looks like we started heading down the wrong road a Have you not heard that wildfires are increasing in frequency and severity as the climate gets hotter? And the CO2 fertilization effect is one of those natural carbon sequestration effects which take large amounts of time to achieve results of reducing atmospheric carbon. Right now, forests are being burned, and post-WWII agriculture does not rebuild soil...which would have been the best way of reducing carbon increases today. Yet another issue, and I'll just assume right now that you will load up lots of MRA propaganda that tries to pretend that it's the women who are the problem with today's world! Never mind who holds virtually all of the political and economic power in patriarchal societies...which still exist here in the west I might add! Lot's of Arab-haters like to point fingers so they can say 'there's someone over there who's worse than what we are,' but western civilization built upon the three Judeo-christian religions put a lot of obstacles in the path of any attempts to transition to more equal societies. Even up to earlier agricultural societies...like the first nations of this continent, the women had their own leaders and the men had to deal with them, rather than have complete control as was the custom in the old world regimes.

It's ridiculous to point fingers at the so called right in France as being the ones who use the welfare queen abusive labels, when they present the same damn thing in their cartoons! They made a flimsy excuse of using satire and criticizing religion, to heap the same abuses on African immigrants. It's sort of like the shit Bill Maher does on a weekly basis! Throw in a few tropes to make Democrats happy, and load up the show with Neocon horseshit.

Because this whole thread is an example of taking issues out of context and being completely ignorant of history! Islamists already run Saudi Arabia and Yemen, and will be running these countries regardless of U.S. interference! The difference could be that, without foreign meddling on behalf of outside oil and strategic interests, the people in this region might actually have governments that represent the interests of the majority of people. What they have now, has been an endless series of corrupt, CIA-sponsored potentates who steal the bulk of their nations' wealth, while being guaranteed continued rulership over their people through U.S. naval and covert forces in the region......up till now! Now things are getting interesting! Because neither side representing the competing interests of Sunnis and Shias, are interested in doing America's bidding anymore. After hearing all the B.S. about how drone warfare and other immoral and illogical operations were necessary to stop Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, now the U.S. will have to choose between AQAP and the likely Iranian-sponsored Houthi rebels.....looks like everything backfired in a big way because these are people who go in with guns and bags of money, and hire a few local lackies, rather than learn about the nations they attempt to occupy or control. Which maybe a good thing in the long run, because if it wasn't for the hubris of the rulers of empires, they would run everything and never be dislodged from power! And now we may see the clay feet of the Saud Empire exposed. Should make for interesting times.

40 years ago, CEO's did not get paid anything near what they are walking away with today! How is it that only the upper income level, which consists of those who have the power to push the hands of politicians to write and rewrite the tax laws and business regulations in their favour, are the only ones who have had any substantial increase in income over the last 40 years?

Fine then! Tax his severance at 90%.

And, as I've pointed out many times before, we are talking about a complex system here with more variables being discovered every day....such as our ecosystems being impacted by microbes that live deep within the Earth. That LHC on the other hand, is the kind of problem that engineers like to deal with: one with few variables whose probabilities can be accurately determined beforehand....well they had at least one screw up when they first turned it on, but when you are talking about climate, you are making ridiculous claims like 400+ CO2 is no problem, without any justification, other than we're still breathing, and aside from extreme weather, we're still carrying on with the same kind of activities we've become accustomed to. There are no reliability tests for climate any where in comparison to something like the LHC! But, instead of erring on the side of caution, the general consensus of climate policy-makers across political spectrums from conservative to liberal, is that we can still add X amount of carbon until the atmosphere warms another 2 degrees. Worth noting that this is a politically established benchmark, since 20 years ago, the first IPCC report advised that one degree of increased warming should be the target to aim for to stop adding carbon. The reason it was moved to 2 degrees, was because 1 degree of warming was already baked in by latent heat accumulated in the world's oceans which hasn't impacted atmospheric temperatures yet. As that target seems to become increasingly unrealistic because of economic and political forces, some are talking about "adapting" to a 4 degree warmer world. All of these assessments are total BS because any actual climate research models I've looked at, try to estimate probabilities, not carbon budgets! The last full report I read which estimated the risks of various carbon levels, gave a 10% chance that today's 400ppm (note CO2 is not the total GHG levels) would raise ocean temperatures enough and melt enough ice in the Arctic and Antarctic to cause further releases of stored carbon in permafrost and methane ice (clathrates). And, recent research on clathrates are finding there are a lot more of them than expected, since clathrates form in deeper waters of more temperate oceans....they are not just an artifact of the Arctic Ocean. At the present target of 450, the odds go up to close to 50% of runaway climate change. Who takes those kinds of risks? Even 10% risk should have been high enough to demand a total change in economics. But, that is not how policymakers who look at short time windows and re-election look at these issues! So, they concocted an outright fraud, by presenting the data to the public as a Carbon Budget....as if it's like money in a cash drawer, and we only have to be concerned when our budget is used up! Finally, it's worth noting that past extinction events are not a complete guide for future extinctions. As noted, land animals had no barriers to migration during the PETM....and they sure as hell are there now! So far, the major reason for species extinctions and biodiversity loss, has been human encroachment on natural environments, not climate change....yet! The reason why James Hansen declared a few years back that a "Venus Syndrome" type of extinction had to be taken seriously is that, we are living near the end of a long period of carbon sequestration. Carbon levels rose as high as 800 to 900 during the peak of the PETM; but since that time, CO2 levels have been steadily moving downwards, so that during the Pleistocene, they were cycling between 300 and 175ppm. There is a lot more carbon locked up ready to unleash when temperatures are high enough, and today's warming is happening faster than the PETM. And the Sun burns hotter than the Great Dying event at the end of the Permian Era...so, even the Permian...after everything is completely figured out, is still not a guide for what to expect in our Sixth Extinction. As I have come to understand this issue, the failures to deal with climate change come from one side that has a vested interest in denying the problem exists, and another side that says it will be easy to fix, and that we can carry on with present day economies demanding more energy, more growth and more resources from the ground. If world leaders were ever honest about the issue, then maybe surviving extinction might be possible.....otherwise..............

The good thing about modern so called "free enterprize" is that if you've got enough money or you are well enough connected with the upper echalons of corporate power, you only fail upwards when you screw up! Exhibit A: Target's package for ex-CEO matches package for all 17,600 Canadian workers Target’s "employee trust" package for its Canadian workers, announced last week, amounts to $70 million ($56 million US). It’s designed to provide each worker with 16 weeks of pay. Target Canada's liquidation will begin in 2-3 weeks Target's launch into Canada 'a multifaceted failure' Depending on who’s doing the calculation, the golden handshake handed to ex-CEO Gregg Steinhafel last May is in roughly in the same ballpark. Fortune Magazine put the value of his total "walk-away" package, including stock options and other benefits, at $61 million US, including severance of $15.9 million. 60 million+ Now that ought to keep the lights on when he moves back home and ponders whatever executive opportunities await him....where he can fail next, and cost thousands their jobs!

If the U.S. would get the hell out of Yemen and Saudi Arabia, all of this bullshit about "Islamism" would come to an end! Because right now the Houthi separatist Shia's in eastern Yemen have taken over the presidential palace in the capital - Sanaa, and if the U.S. is really fighting Al Qaeda, all they have to do is stop supporting what's left of the government there. Same goes for the Saudi's. They have enemies on all sides for a number of reasons: squandering billions of dollars worth of petroleum wealth for decades; oppressing Shia minorities and other minorities in Arabia; and supporting the oppression of Shia's in the Emirates (wouldn't even exist without the Saudis and the U.S.). So, since as I've mentioned many, many times before - Saudi Arabia is the fountainhead of this brand of Islam that is being taught and promoted throughout the Muslim World. So: Neocons, why are you supporting America's so called "War On Terror," when just like other fake wars...like the war on drugs....it is a sham war that feeds the problem and has no intentions of resolving it!

One point I was going to add in before when I was active on this thread, was that 54 people have been charged with different sorts of unlawful speech offenses since the Paris attacks. So, the story that France or any other western nation is some bastion of free speech is pure horseshit! The other thing that has bothered me since the wall-to-wall coverage of the Hebdo shootings started, is that, on the same day a bomb goes off in Yemen and kills more than 30 people....doesn't make the news....investigators arriving on the scene of a Boko Haram invasion and massacre in northern Nigeria believe more than 2000 were killed....and it barely makes the news! Sort of puts into perspective who's lives matter/ and who's lives don't matter much in the eyes of western media. On your point about this 'free to insult religion' bullshit, I like to follow the guideline of 'I wouldn't say anything about someone that I wouldn't say to their face.' I think that kept a lot of prurient speech at bay in times past, but since the internet got going, there are too many clowns and trolls out there hiding behind their keyboards, who don't care about anyone or any consequences, as long as they get attention!

You don't seem shy about loading up your posts with unsubstantiated claims. And I don't have time to wade through yet another one of your book-length posts loaded with your stock theories! You apparently have a lot more time to spend in front of a computer than I do. And, as I've noted a few times here before, when I joined MLW several years ago, I was still on the comfortable right of Canadian opinion, but becoming disillusioned and unsatisfied with right wing solutions to economic, social and environment issues. My opinions are still in flux, and I haven't reached definitive conclusions on a lot of issues yet. And, I have no advanced education in the hard sciences and social sciences and philosophy, but I am getting better at detecting when some college boy is trying to load me down with a bunch of stupid, pointless objections...especially when their own theorizing flies in the face of majority opinion of the scientific community....such as regarding the efficacy of geoengineering schemes. The Russel George debacle a few years ago, is a prime example of how f***ing around with a complex system can make things worse afterwards! They are just quoting a published scientific study, which if anything, provides unjustified positive messages at its close, such as: 'despite the loss of biodiversity in the world's oceans, there hasn't, as of yet, been the same rates of species extinctions as had occurred on land.' The first thing that jumps out at me with this statement, is that, unlike the Earth's continents, which have been bifurcated and subdivided by the products of human civilization: cities, roads, fences and other artificial barriers to migration, the world's oceans allow for the movement from one habitat to another. It has been noted in the past regarding the PETM, that despite the fast (by pre-human terms) runup in temperatures, the period was relatively minor as an extinction event compared to other past extinctions. And the fact that there were no humans building crap to block migration routes is considered a major factor for many species survival, because...not only did alligators move north, so did many migratory land animals, as the tropics became extremely hot....possibly hot enough to incinerate all plant and animal life within 30 degrees of the equator for significant period of time...but that is still subject of debate among paleontologists. Regardless, it was so hot that it was a bad time to be living in the tropics, so there was definitely a drastic decline in the tropic zone on land during the hottest period. The rapid declines in marine life of all sorts, can be cross-referenced with the logs and journals of whaling boats and large fishing expeditions of the past two centuries. They kept accurate notes of their catches, and the comparisons with their results from today's fishing expeditions are considered as evidence by some oceanographers that the dieoff of marine life has been ongoing for at least two centuries. So, when the scientists quoted in that NY Times piece say that the oceans could face mass extinction, but there's still time to turn things around....that's the point where I see spin being applied! Because there is lots of converging evidence from many different directions that we have set things up for our own extinction, but no respectable scientist who studies the collapse of marine life, rising GHG levels and increasing evidence from methane increase in the Arctic that the "clathrate gun" has already been fired, along with the mounting problems that there will be a global collapse in agricultural production because of topsoil loss, declining water availability etc.....all of this is coming together and will land on us some time in the coming years or decades. So, I don't even see where these ocean scientists have a logical reason to be hopeful at this point in time...except that this is what they feel they are supposed to tell the public! It doesn't matter what WE prefer! We depend on an undetermined amount of animal, plant species, and microbes to keep the planet suitable for our continued existence. If you are gambling that we can destroy most of the biota of this planet and still invent crap that will guarantee our survival, you're a fool...but unfortunately you are in good company! Because the people of all sorts of political and economic ideologies who share this unjustified elevated sense of hubris, dominate the culture of this world. And the voices who question humanistic presumptions about the civilization we have ended up with today, are on the margins and are out of sight of the vast majority of media consumers today. Read: The Spirit Level by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett for the best analysis of how wide ranging the harmful effects of inequality are. The most startling findings for most people are that: once economic productivity is high enough to meet most people's basic needs, increases in wealth do not contribute to happiness or limit unhealthy social indicators like depression, anti-social behaviour etc. The relative equality of the society determines how healthy it is physically and mentally. But the only reason their findings are shocking to a lot of people is they don't have any awareness of the kinds of social groupings that humans adapted to for most of human history (immediate return hunter-gathering) and that beginning with fixed agriculture less than 10,000 years ago, we are still struggling with hierarchies, and male-dominated societies. The improvements in technology - especially food production in recent times, haven't done much to make societies healthier today. But, they can start by being more equal, since as the most interesting factoid from the book for me was the high ranking of a relatively poor nation - Costa Rica, compares with much wealthier, but much more unequal United States of America....which at the time the data was gathered, was ranking near the bottom of the developed nations. This came after America's experiment in neoliberalism has turned it from one of the most equal/ to one of the most unequal nations in terms of wealth.

I'm late because updates weren't showing for this thread: What exactly do you define as cherrypicking? I read your national geographic story....I'm pretty sure I've read this same one before a number of times already...and there is nothing of substance different from what I have already put down in this thread! I mentioned before that the Tripati analysis is considered more accurate, but whether CO2 went above 400 during the Pliocene or stayed just below, as according to Tripati is immaterial! Your source doesn't say definitively that CO2 was above 400 during the Pliocene, and it points out that it is believed to be an era at the end of a spike in CO2 levels during the PETM over 50 million years ago, and there was a gradual progression through carbon sequestration, to slowly remove carbon from the atmosphere until recent times: Read your linked article again! Some time during the Pliocene, it probably crossed the 400 ppm mark, as it's doing now-but back then it was on its way down. As a result, at the end of the Pliocene, it became cold enough for continental ice sheets to start forming in the northern hemisphere. The Pliocene, says geologist Maureen Raymo of Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, "was the last gasp of warmth before the slow slide into the Ice Ages." I'm saying that, GHG levels are the main determining factor over time for setting the thermostat, or global average temperatures. There are tons of idiotic claims made that since CO2 levels were much higher in the distant past...even during apparent ice ages, like the Ordovician, then 400ppm is no problem today! But, the estimated solar output of the Sun during that Ordovician...when some geologists believe ice sheets covered the entire planet for much of the era...was only about 70% of modern solar output. So, the Sun has been growing hotter over time, and the high atmospheric CO2 levels of the distant past would have this world spiraling towards a Venus Syndrome today. Never mind the cycles. The fact that CO2 levels varied from about 180ppm during peak ice ages up to 300 during the briefer interglacial thawing events, would indicate that most of life on Earth was adapting towards living on a colder planet. And we have upended that trend in less than 150 years! Much too short a time for any plants or animals to adapt to rapid changes in environment. Anecdotes tossed off like "alligators were swimming in the Arctic Ocean back in the Eocene" are pointless today. The creatures of that time had much longer to adapt to a warmer environment. You have to go pretty far back in time to find lower CO2 and glaciation attached to mass extinctions! Like the Ordovician-Silurian period when it's believed (but I don't know if it has been definitively proven yet) that ice covered the entire land surface of Earth right down to the Equator. And, nothing like that has occurred for a long time. I don't even know if anyone has tried to do an exhaustive analysis of the biota of Planet Earth in comparison with today, but a few biologists have speculated that ice ages were good for most life...for one thing they didn't extend down below mid-latitudes...North America being the greatest expansion of ice during the last one. The colder ocean waters of the Arctic and Antarctic are much richer in sea life than the comparative blue ocean waters of the Tropics, because of upwelling of nutrients from the deeper ocean layers. This process is blocked by high temperature surface waters in the Tropics. And, on land...it may be tie between plants and animals driven south by advancing glaciers and cold temperatures, but also having available more land surface in the lower to mid-latitudes because of the lower sea levels. So, aside from a few land species that couldn't adapt to the changes....like the Mastodon apparently...there like was as great or greater abundance of life on land and a much greater abundance of life in the oceans than during those interglacial periods. If the totality of living creatures have a strong effect on carbon levels...as some Gaia theorists believe, most of the life on this planet were trying to keep the thermostat down. First off, none of these geoengineering schemes, except for a rock-weathering enhanced plan in Norway, do not reduce carbon levels...therefore CO2 continues to be absorbed by the world's oceans, turning them more acidic, and increasing the dieoff of life in the oceans. And, I mentioned before that humans...animals that had been primarily adapted for life in the tropics (except for Neanderthals) would not welcome a return to ice age conditions. But, my point wasn't that we should head into another ice age, it was that the ice ages had become the norm over recent geologic history and that's what the rest of the natural world was most suited for. What it's not suited for is a world at 400 that is rapidly increasing Co2 levels and getting hotter, along with an oversized human population that is still trying to expand and take away more natural habitats! Lots of red herrings here to smell up the place! First off, in case you are not aware of it, it has been recently determined that when the Triassic began, it took at least 100,000 years for life to flourish again to match the biodiversity lost during the Permian Extinction. Estimates of the number of species lost during the P/T Extinction are usually set at 95%...could be higher, and if it was 100% of advanced life, we wouldn't be here to argue about how much more risilient we are today! In fact, if one mammal-like reptile (i forget the name) joined the extinction, we would have lost our distant ancestor and not be here for that reason alone. Our capacity for geoengineering may be what seals our fate here on Earth! Because some idiots are trying to apply engineering solutions to a complex system that is still not completely understood. before I would let engineers and technologists tinker around with living systems, I would insist that they first design and make functional an artificial biosphere...like Biosphere 2 experiments that kept going out of control for unknown reasons and had to be unsealed. This is also the first step before any long term space exploration and colonization can be attempted, but some experts think it's easy to solve. It's a matter of how many extinctions and how fast! A certain level (no one knows yet) of biodiversity is essential for maintaining ecosystems and stuff we don't like to worry about...like the nitrogen-phosphorus cycle, but when that starts to break down we're screwed! From Mother Jones, reprinted from the Guardian: We're Destroying the Planet in Ways That Are Even Worse Than Global Warming Humans are "eating away at our own life support systems" at a rate unseen in the past 10,000 years by degrading land and freshwater systems, emitting greenhouse gases and releasing vast amounts of agricultural chemicals into the environment, new research has found. Two major new studies by an international team of researchers have pinpointed the key factors that ensure a livable planet for humans, with stark results. Of nine worldwide processes that underpin life on Earth, four have exceeded "safe" levels: human-driven climate change, loss of biosphere integrity, land system change, and the high level of phosphorus and nitrogen flowing into the oceans due to fertilizer use. Researchers spent five years identifying these core components of a planet suitable for human life, using the long-term average state of each measure to provide a baseline for the analysis. They found that the changes of the last 60 years are unprecedented in the previous 10,000 years, a period in which the world has had a relatively stable climate and human civilization has advanced significantly. Carbon dioxide levels, at 395.5 parts per million, are at historic highs, while loss of biosphere integrity is resulting in species becoming extinct at a rate more than 100 times faster than the previous norm. And you think we are going to survive this one because we have the capabilities of causing mass extinctions? Except that the rapid changes we have started, are changing the precipitation patterns....such as the Amazon is drying out right now. How long will the internet last after the power goes out? You have not even given a thought to how much energy and resources are needed and to build all the crap of modern civilization. Our present way of life has not been planned for any long term survival. In decades or centuries at most, there will be nothing left except for the decaying edifice of the monuments we have built for ourselves...unless a complete change in thinking about how we live and use the resources of this planet - both renewable and non-renewable. Without that...and time is probably getting very short for making a significant difference, it will all end like all other past civilizations built upon hubris and narcissism, except the next collapse of this global civilization will likely be total.

Very little...just like most Hebdo supporters, I take most of what I've learned since the last time they were in the news from 2nd hand sources. But, what's telling to me, is that the supporters who try to present them as unqualified defenders of free speech have not adequately explained away this cartoon in particular in my opinion:

The powerful players among us who run governments and corporations want to present a fantasy of individual equality here. So, in the Al Gorean universe, everyone agrees to inflate their tires, put up a windmill or a solar panel and buy and hybrid or electric car and voila! Problem solved! But, not in the real world, where a handful of players control the fates of billions of people who only have sham representative democracies at best, which have less and less control over economic decision-making. And those in power want more wealth and more power, and don't care what the consequences are! If they did, they would have already started an environment version of a Marshall Plan to save Planet Earth! There is no way out of looming ecological collapse without somehow changing the systems we live under today. First, we have to recognize that winner-take-all capitalism has only benefited a scant few who own all the wealth (latest numbers inform us that the 85 richest billionaires have equal wealth with the poorest half of the world population). A lot of people need to clear the fog in their heads and start questioning the economic system running this world, and change it fast, before everything is consumed and nothing is left but a gigantic waste dump! Ocean Life Faces Mass Extinction, Broad Study Says We're Destroying the Planet in Ways That Are Even Worse Than Global Warming 4 ways humans are endangering life on Earth

Interesting that you think you can convert or deconvert by disrespecting people for their beliefs, and acting superior to them. Is this what they're teaching now in new atheist fantasyland? Think for a second, how many people change their opinions about anything because some know-it-all tells them they're wrong? And there is a big problem for anyone claiming that their ideas are based on reason and evidence: everyone....no exceptions does most of their decision-making at an unconscious level. And a feeling of certainty about correctness is a secondary emotion, not a result of pure, conscious reasoning! What separates those who are truly more open to new evidence from those who will continue to reject change, is how much emotional attachment they feel with core beliefs. And this is a very fundamental aspect of personality that does not change during adulthood. It is a product of genetics and the epigenetic effects of brain development during early childhood. If you truly are basing even your core beliefs...like what sort of universe we live in, on reason and evidence, you will be likely to change and alter your beliefs throughout your life....and that pisses a lot of people off, not just religious fundamentalists, but atheist fundamentalists also, who create their own pejoratives for those who have fallen away from true non-faith, like "faitheist" or "accommodationalist," when they can't win the debate with reason and evidence. The main reason why organized religion is on the decline in some (not all) western nations, is because the state has filled an increasing number of social roles that previously had only been provided by churches. At one time, if you didn't belong to the church, you had nowhere to turn in times of need. And that is still the case in many nations.....like the United States! Find me any prominent atheist advocate writer, blogger, podcaster etc. who strays outside of standard modern humanist teaching that is not only pro-science, but also unquestioningly pro-technology, and in fact has faith that future tech will fix all of our present messes, even those largely caused by the technologies developed so far, and will save us from self-destruction no matter how bad the situation looks...if we're using latest evidence on the environment as a yardstick? I haven't come across any high profile atheists of late who haven't adopted a humanist version of redemption. Except that instead of relying on a supernatural intercessor, the humanist faith is that human invention will save our world from extinction and set us on course for an increasingly brighter 'heaven-like' future, that will include the standard tropes of leaving Earth and conquering the solar system...then the galaxy etc., and virtual immortality through conquering death by new technological innovations. Looks much like religion to me, whatever you want to call it! And some of the strongest advocates qualify as much as fundamentalists as the fanatics of any religion based on supernatural forces. Violations of international law are only prosecuted when they are committed by states that have become the focus of regime change by the U.S. Otherwise, it's meaningless....which was my point. The only law that is truly international, is corporate governance through trade and banking regulating bodies like the WTO. There is no international law with teeth that will ever be able to enforce environmental standards, but when it comes to important things like controlling money, that's different. And who is the government? They are supposed to be answerable to the people, but that's only the sham representative governments which have less and less authority over important issues. The important stuff is done by the deep state of government, and they work in secret, and intend to keep it that way! They shouldn't exist in the first place. They have created reams of propaganda through entertainment culture...some of it accurately termed - Militainment, that pretends they are only interested in protecting us from foreign and domestic threats....and not serving their true purpose - running an empire. One at a time: in most western nations, Muslims are first and 2nd generation immigrants...typically visible minorities, and more likely than not to be near the bottom of the economic hierarchy....so, crap like Hebdo, which doesn't acknowledge these inconvenient facts in their own society, is racist and anti-immigrant in much of their crap where they will claim they are only criticizing religious beliefs. There is no reason for a "men's rights" movement to exist in the first place in any nation I am aware of, let alone here in Canada! These seem to be mostly a motley collection of misogynists and hardluck internet clowns who got rejected and want revenge on feminists etc. Obviously it strays off topic, but there were obvious reasons why feminist movements had to start to address inequalities in our patriarchal societies...and they haven't changed in recent decades as much as some guys want to believe. A man who has grievances in our society does not have a legitimate reason to be forming a similar gender-based organization to advance his aims, any more than David Duke does trying to create a national association for the advancement of white people...or whatever the crap he is calling it now. If you're a white man in Canada or the U.S., you need to look at other issues besides race and gender to figure out the reasons why.