@enoch,

i hear ya,but that is our responsibility,not the journalist or speaker.

I'm gonna be old school and insist that anybody wanting to be referred to as a journalist MUST meet the bar I laid out of putting the whole truth above and beyond bias, agenda and profit. If you are collecting, presenting or commentating on things but fail to meet that bar your not a journalist, your a commentator, propagandist, political hack or some other designation but journalists are supposed to look for the truth.

As you suggest though, they are slowly becoming extinct .

I do agree that unilateral disarmament is a difficult thing to achieve, but there are other arguments as to why it should be pursued. I am sure we agree on a lot of things on this subject, but let me at least put the other side out there:

1. America as the over achieving nation in the world has a duty to lead by example. How can the country with the largest nuclear arsenal expect other countries to start the process that we all signed up to? Hey France, why didn't you get rid of your 87 nukes? Well America, why haven't you touched that pile of 500? (making up numbers here to illustrate the point)

2. The US isn't worried about Best Korea nuking them because they would need a staging platform and a functional ballistic missile. They can be launched from subs, but NK isn't really your worry there. The most developed nations are the concern, and if you could get an agreement it could happen, with peacekeepers and mutually open inspections, and pressure on smaller countries to abide or be trade embargoed to stop them (which the west does/has done already). Unlikely as things are right now, i agree.

3. We have ageing equipment housing extremely dangerous explosives. They require a huge amount of maintenance and whatnot, costing billions. The UK has to replace their system soon to the tune of hundreds of billions of pounds. Imagine what kind of alternative modern anti-nuclear defence system we could develop using all that money and all our technology? That way we could be safe from nukes without using nukes and it would cost less in the long run.

Also if you claim your weapons as part of a defence, it's a bit of a giveaway that you're bullshitting if you then go off around the world antagonising other countries, knowing that they can't really fight back. So i think in fairness we should crack open that self-defence argument and see what percentage of it is referring to "a good offence".

Having said all that, binning all the US nukes overnight wouldn't be a great idea. The UK would be less of a target and safer without nukes imo, but the US would probably make the world a lot safer just by having less.

Let's be honest here, the amount of nukes we have is preposterous. No one could possibly have any reason to use that many, the potential for absolute worldwide devastation is far too high to need that many - you could potentially finish the world off in a nuclear winter, according to the average figures given, in about 100 'small' nukes. Not 100 each per country, but 100 total worldwide.

And remember, that doesn't mean you can use 90 and be safe. The figure 100 was enough to likely cause a global famine by causing temperature drops leading to crop failures. That doesn't account for extinction of animals and the devastation of the natural balance (which would lead to our eventual extinction) which can be wildly unpredictable. You could shoot 40 at a country, win the conflict, and cause the starvation of millions+ in your own (and other) countries for the next 20 odd years..... or worse.

Man will stick his dick in anything.
Neanderthal didn't go extinct.

But Neanderthals didn't go extinct, they are able to spot the dna in the genes of Europeans/Asians so...

My concern is this : Imagine a global extinction event , lets say a repeat of the event that killed off the dinosaurs : a massive asteroid direct hit , instantly killing everything on roughly the same continent or general planetside , such an impact would punch a hole in the very tectonic plate it lands on and cause massive waves not just in water , but in the ground itself , waves of rock and earth surface taveling around the globe meeting on the far side of the impact and ricocheting back again . We are talking GLOBAL earthquakes off the scales, for YEARS after the impact as the tectonic plates are slowliy settling in, all this is followed by a thick cloud of ash from the impact, refueled by frequent vulcanic eruptions , this will block out most sunlight , so after the initial toasting , the few lucky survives of this pandemonium can look forward to hundreds of years of atomic winter. Sounds pretty fuckin bad.

But guess what : thats still better conditions for life than Mars. And Mars is goddamn paradise compared to the other planets around us. Anything outside our immediate neighbourhood ? Forget it , they are ATLEAST thousands of years travel away, making moving anything of note there unfeasable. We ARE a one planet species. Get used to it , take good care of this one , its all we got.

Solution, no. Semi-mitigation....possibly if it could be done, but there would be tradeoffs, it wouldn't be a simple 'now it's only CO2' solution....as if that was a solution, there's still too much CO2 too.

I'm intrigued by the engineered bacteria idea...at this point it couldn't be much worse than just releasing all the methane (OK, it could), but it's like that one time I went to the lake to bone my girlfriend, but the mosquitos were going crazy and she said there is no way. By the time people decided it was worth the risk and started developing them, it would be too late anyway, but we might mitigate the extinction event for the insects....who knows?

Um....uninhabitable for 100 years? How do you figure? It's likely that when the ocean temps rise enough, and are acidic enough, most sea life dies, sinks, rots, and releases massive amounts of hydrogen sulfide killing anything that's left.
(WIKI-Kump, Pavlov and Arthur (2005) have proposed that during the Permian–Triassic extinction event the warming also upset the oceanic balance between photosynthesising plankton and deep-water sulfate-reducing bacteria, causing massive emissions of hydrogen sulfide which poisoned life on both land and sea and severely weakened the ozone layer, exposing much of the life that still remained to fatal levels of UV radiation.)
Along with all the other damages of climate change, and the apocalypse that >7 billion people will cause on the way out, it's going to be way longer than 100 years before humans can live off nature if ever....way way longer.

We are hard to kill, but we aren't extremophiles. We'll die, or become mole people, but some other life will continue.

The simplest counter arguments to your dismissal are, 1) it's not a single degree, it's a number of degrees in a short time, releasing massive amounts of methane at once instead of over a few millennia. 2) it's exactly what happened 250 million years ago when climate change happened rapidly enough to release massive methane deposits in a short time frame, causing massively more climate change and a mass extinction event. Since then, there has not been the same kind of rapid mass increase in ocean temperature since the methane deposits were replaced.

It's about the speed of the temperature change, not just the amount of temperature change. Methane is short lived in the atmosphere, so if a change happened over 1000 years, the same total amount of methane might be released as a 100 year change, but only 10% of it will be in the atmosphere at a time. Consider, we've raised the temperature fast enough that the permafrost is melting at the same time as ice at the bottom of the ocean. That's a fairly unique situation that releases two enormous deposits of methane at the same time.

Our understanding does not need to be "complete" to be scientifically valid, or right. We may not know everything we need to know about the climate, but what we do KNOW is how methane reacts in the atmosphere, and how methane hydrates melt at certain temperatures/pressures, and we are near those levels in the deep oceans and permafrost areas today....so close that there are massive methane pockets bubbling out of the northern oceans and recently frozen ground worldwide.

These methane clathrate (methane hydrate/hydromethane) deposits have been releasing both under the ocean and from permafrost melt for years now...with the rate of their melt release increasing exponentially.
Pound for pound, the comparative impact of CH4 on climate change is more than 25 times greater than CO2 over a 100-year period.
For those of you who are religious....this is the 'burning seas' you would expect from the apocalypse, because the pockets of gas coming from the ocean are highly flammable, even explosive.
This is why I have said for over a decade that there's absolutely no chance to avoid human extinction along with a world wide extinction of most of life. Once the methane started bubbling up from the sea floor, any chance of stopping the change was gone, and that was a while ago and we've done absolutely nothing but increase the amount of greenhouse gasses we produce. The ocean responds quite slowly to climate change, so there's nothing that can be done now that it's warm enough to release the methane, even if we stopped producing all greenhouse gasses today.

This is game over, people, game over. A massive methane release will have almost immediate effects and could double the entire temperature rise since the industrial revolution almost overnight. When (not if) that happens, say goodbye to nature both on land and in the seas.
The above number, 80% of life on earth vanished, is misleading. 80% of species were lost completely forever, 98% of all biomass died, so of the 20% of species that were left, only 10% of their population survived. Humanity won't.
*doublepromote
*quality

True enough, but in 62, or even 72 or 82, we could have still done something about it, so it wasn't the insurmountable problem we addressed far too late that it is today.
By 92, it was getting to be too late to 'solve', and now it's so beyond too late for action that it's an unavoidable planet wide extinction level event, and barely even partially mitigatable, not that we're actually trying.

I love him, hate political correctness, media is ignoring the over 400 rapes and murders dubbed "the femicide" in Juarez in border, none of the perps caught, they run into US get welfare, timestamps, HUD housing and pay zero taxes.

Liberals enjoy sheltering rapists with tax money but every day more found dead in Juarez as young as 6.


I hate political correctness, and voting Trump. Already voted him in primary and my neighbor is Guatemalan he became a US citizen legally and his entire family and cousins voted Trump at primary but Guatamalans tend to hate what cartels are going at border and know exactly what's going in more than any kids online believing what is said on television..

Hell the exit poll in my town was awesome Trump got 62% black vote , 78% Guatemalan vote (large population)

Folks are absolutely fed up with hypersensitive sissies , we need blunt directness .

I'd rather have Bill Hicks, as a President :-P

But when John Cheeseof Monty Python says political correctness and liberalism in America has gone too far and he's joined all other comedians in banning tours at colleges and he hopes Trump will end political correctness sissiness you know the country is about to destroy the Democrats just like they did in 1968.

In 1968 the time called "white riot" but whites and blacks rioted and Democrat convention shut down and Democrats lost the next 10 elections. Over political correctness.

Proof that history has repeated itself. The liberals collapse every 60 years. 60 years before this Richard Henry Pratt the man who invented the word "racism" out of thin air as a slur when he invented political correctness and attached individualism, claiming individualism is racist, that all cultures should be forcefully eradicated and forced to mix , be caused the genocide of Indians and extinction of dozen languages until violently stopoed.


1968 white riot ending all Democrat for decade
https://youtu.be/epxmX_58tOo


Think tank Industry social change political correctness rule maker director gives speech how just like Germany and Sweden to destroy America
https://youtu.be/nFAQNjqH1zA


I do hope Trump can win and stay blunt, cuss out the retard media and idiot corporate owned government and at least get folks back to those of us of generation X who were adamantly Anti political correctness, to quote Rage Against The Machine "fuck you, I won't do what you tell me"



-grin-

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

Scott Adams is a smart guy. Lots of bright people are trying to warn us about the rise of Trump. Andrew Sullivan is calling a Trump presidency an "extinction level event". http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/04/america-tyranny-donald-trump.html#

not really-life = sentient life is the only assertion which i clarified and this assumption was stated from the beginning so was implied. the suggestion that this changes everything is a classic straw man fallacy.

the imperatives which i am espousing on are merely non-violence and a rejection of oppression, exploitation and using others as property and economic commodities which almost every human believes when it concerns humans and perhaps a few other species. it is only the others whom should be considered under the umbrella of moral concern which is the key point of the issue for most people.

as far as the population, the main reason WHY the human population IS such an issue is due to the consumption of animal products. along with the obvious moral and ethical issues of murdering other sentient beings, the production of animal based foods requires many times the resources to produce an equivalent calorie compared to plant based food which drives things like climate change, resource depletion, water scarcity, biodiversity, species extinction and other aspects of environmental devastation.

when a video such as this one comes up which highlights people being kind to an animal, it is disturbing that people are so disconnected that they do not make the connection between the animals in the video whom they feel good about being rescued and the countless others which are being tortured and murdered for their dinner plate. this is exactly what the short article i posed above articulates so well.

“Ask ten people on the street if they think it’s wrong to injure or kill animals for one’s amusement or pleasure, and nine or ten will say yes, of course. Chances are all ten of those people freely consume animal products, simply because they like to and they’re used to doing it." - Karen Manfrede

Not really though, there are enough people who are fond of cows that we would no doubt keep them alive as pets and zoo animals. Like all the other animals that are extinct in the wild but not in captivity.

Their numbers would certainly dwindle, but I think there's no suffering in not having been born. Besides, if you're concerned about biodiversity the number of species eradicated by expanding pasture land has got to be in the 1,000s, especially in places like rainforests.