It’s so dramatic & so shocking that scientists — typically not prone to hyperbole — published in the journal BioScience: “Life on planet Earth is under siege. We are now in an uncharted territory...”
When we find the entrance to the wormhole in space and can go back in time, maybe there's a fix.
I previously reported that the state of California filed a sweeping climate lawsuit against Exxon Mobil, Shell, BP, ConocoPhillips, and Chevron, as well as the domestic oil industry's biggest lobby, the American Petroleum Institute. It demands the companies help fund recovery efforts related to California's extreme weather events, from rising sea levels to drought and wildfires, that have been supercharged by human-caused climate change.
The real culprits have to include the OPEC/Saudi/Russia cabal that undermines our economy and is a national security risk. The Saudis control US companies like Exxon, own our largest refineries. Biden needs authority to sue them for price fixing and price gouging. Kill many birds with one throw.
A sudden uptick in really weird rainfall amounts in so many places - flooding all over the world is so much worse than it ever was. This has to be the result of the changes we have caused. I think things are getting desperate - just solving the immediate issue of one flood does nothing if they keep happening. Whole cities will have to be moved to higher ground and/or all buildings designed with the bottom level allowed to be flooded periodically. Whereas everybody has been trying to make plans for rising seas - nobody ever thought about huge rainfall being an even worse flood risk !!! I worry for my grandkids - I'll be gone within the next decade or so !
We need more dams and reservoirs to handle the deluges. Expand the electrical grid to send electricity generated at the flooded dams all over the country, and pipelines to move water for drinking and agriculture may be needed. We need to start planning for adaptation in addition to prevention. Who is planning for the actual changes in the climate? Solar panels on homes is a good start.
Like your ideas, but all will take more time than we probably have; only immediate cessation of using fossil fuels can make a difference, and even that might take years to lessen the effects of climate change. Had we done those things forty years ago (or before Exxon scientists warned us,) there might have been some reason for hope.
I checked out solar panels, the newer ones will work even in cloudy environments, but the cost was prohibitive. They wanted to charge me $57,000 financed at 25 years. Interest and all it would cost over $120,000, depending on interest rates, and I am 84, and would die with a lien against my property, as the mortgage is paid off. And it is iffy if the panels or the structure on which they would be placed will last 25 years
At 8%, current Fed rate, if I could get that. Monthly payment is $280, Interest paid over 25 years $55, 476 and total paid (principal and interest) 101, 076
Such a deal, and my monthly bill ranges from $200 to $350. Expensive because it is provided by a Co op, which buys it from a private equity company, PSE. and is transmitted via undersea cable.
And Gloria, they are destroying dams, because they interfere with the ecology, especially fish migration, and that adversely effects the native population.. among other adverse effects.
Reservoirs require rains, and we are experience severe droughts, even Lake Mead is drying up.
We have owned this property since 2001, circumstances had us move away, until 2019, then we moved back, we rented it out in the meantime, but because it has a detached garage apartment, we would spend summers here, to keep an eye on it., then in 2019 we moved back.
The shingle roof was less than 20 years old, and was poorly installed, so we hired a family owned business to install a a metal roof, and although green seemed to be the favorite color of other roofs in my neck of the woods, I had them install a white roof, a heat pump, propane for the "fireplace" and the water heaters. I don't know if a solar water heater would work, especially in fall and winter, at 48 degrees latitude
Yes Mr. Solomon. Heat pumps are a great source of energy transfer. They can pump energy out of the house and into the ground in Summer and out of the ground and into the house in Winter.
Wow, great question, if all roofs were white I'm sure it would help. But you are now competing with an asphalt, developer, construction and roofing lobby, and as you well know we got the best government money can buy, and it predates Citizens United by 200 years. The enemy is the press and the pulpit. (When it comes to the "press" Trump like a broken clock is correct)
Ms. Maloney. The light reflected off the earth back into space is in the infrared range of frequencies. This infrared cannot penetrate the CO2 in the atmosphere. So the heat stays here. Does not escape into space beyond the atmosphere. This is called the "greenhouse effect." The light reaching us from the sun covers the entire range of visible light from ultraviolet to infrared. It is light at the red end of the spectrum which fails to penetrate the CO2 at high enough rates. The rest of the spectrum of light heats the planet's surface. The white roof might keep the house cooler. But the heat from the reflected light would be captured by the atmosphere.
Thank you for explaining. I read that we need the ice to reflect heat from the sun and that we were losing the ice caps, making climate change accelerate.
Mr. Farrar it is easy to-self install solar panels. I have done it more than once; on land and on my boats. There are two types:
1) Monocrystalline which are highly efficient but rigid and their efficiency declines rapidly with even a small shadow over them.
2) Polycrystalline which are about half as efficient as the rigid kind. But the polycrystalline panels are flexible and far less affected by shade. They work on overcast days, while the rigid ones shut down.
You are correct, professional installation is a rip-off.
I have seen solar panels which you can actually roll up, the problem is installation. I'm too old, to even climb a ladders, also temblecie, if I could install them on the roof, then there is wiring them into my power supply.
I live in the country, and have a transformer next to my driveway, and it ties into the main, which supplies power to the house and the garage apartment. I imagine that the wiring alone, as well as the installing the feedback to the transformer, would be expensive.
I just bought a gas/propane generator. The local propane supplier is out here now, connecting it to the propane. It replaces a gas generator, which I now have to sell, but it only connects via a 100 ft construction electrical cord, to the house to run the refrigerator, TV, CPAP and oxygen concentrators. We have a history of power outages, either an anchor snags the undersea cable, or high winds fell a tree, and their are planned outages for maintenance.
William Farrar: This is probably not the aspect of the installation job that you were expecting to discuss, but one of the great stupidities about roof work is that there are no connection points on the ridge beam to connect a human harness to. So people fall off of rooves as soon as they trip or lose their friction. It's ridiculous. Every single roof should be made with eye-bolts sticking up out of the ridge beam in the center of the roof. Perhaps with two of them and a strong wire between them to slide a connection on, like some dog runs. Nobody should be walking on a roof without being tied in. So why are there no connectors on a typical roof? Can I call it rank stupidity? Venality? You tell me. But that would make it so much safer for you and me to be up there working. Just one more aspect of the American construction industry that exasperates me. I'll bet there is at least one country in Europe that requires this common sense device.
Great comment. I suspect that one reason there is no eye bolt on the ridge is almost impossible to lay a leak proof surface around them.
I have two buildings, my home and a two story 2 /12 car garage, the second floor is a two br apartment. It has a barn roof. I had it reroofed about 8 years ago. I didn't watch him do it, but am amazed that he could, asphalt shingles, my house is roofed with white aluminum panels.
about 20 years ago, when I was a spry 64 year old, I climbed up on both roofs, to sprinkle. Tide and TSP to clean the roofs of moss, works great. I also painted both buildings with a 2 inch brush, had to rent a screw jack, to lift me to the heights necessary, and painted while holding my breath. Standing at the door of an aircraft in flight at 1,000 to 5,000 ft attached to a static line is one thing, but being lifted into the air 20 ft or so is quite another.
In my neck of the woods, roofing contractors pick up day labor, from the parking lot of Home Depot. The family that did my roof are Jehovahs' Witnesses and the whole family is involved, the daughter was the pilot who flew in the father. Not a way to make a living.
M. Farrar. I was planning to install panels on the house I currently live in But my wife and kids will probably yell at me to stay off that GD ladder. At 81 and in poor health, they are probably correct. I do like the idea of a propane powered inverter. I might get one. My sister has an automatic one. It's great. She lives isolated in the woods.
Mr. Farrar. I have a friend who is an engineer and installed her own solar panel which sends electricity back into the grid. The power company pays her for that power by subtracting the money from her bill. It cost her $20 grand to do it 10 years ago. She said it was not worth it but did it anyway because she lives in the woods.
It is a state/federal program. We are connected to ComEd and will pay $100/mo. for twenty years. It includes the electric bill. The interest is 4%. We get a $7000. rebate after 8 months of the contract which we will pay on the principle. Our current electric bills are approx. $100. dollars a month at present, but are expected to increase substantially in the next year or so. This is a better deal for ComEd than it is for us, but it will lock in our electric bill for the next 20 years, if we're not all fried by then.
How much was the total cost, before borrowing. We have no mortgage or debts, other than a credit card we use for on line shopping and pay that off every month before it is due. We pay all bills, in full, when we receive the invoice.
How the Ocean Inside the Mantle Affects the Habitability of ...
The mantle rain model also suggests that there is currently one ocean mass in the upper mantle. “Together with the ocean on the surface,” says Andrault, “this ensures that there will always be water on Earth's surface.” “We still have a lot to learn about the deep water cycle,”
Saudi Arabia tapped into it's 10,000 year old aquifer, to water the desert, as they were trying to be self sustaining, and the land collapsed as the water was used up.
Now they have turned to massive de salinization, using reverse osmosis.
I have mixed emotions about rescuing Desereta, the land of Mormons, as they are prime instigators, along with the Catholic Church and Evangelicals of the culture war that has bred Trumpism and with it authoritarians.
Water is already monetized. Do you not get a water bill, or is it hidden in your public utilities bill. I have a well, no chemicals, not even the drugs that people ingest.
The weather, rains, washed out the pollution of the two World Wars. Man's activities since the 1950's have spewed heavy gases into the atmosphere, resulting in global warming.
Patriotism is a bald attempt to exploit the drive to protect one's close tribe extended out to apply to some notion of country or peoples that one will never know or meet. The exploitation is done for the most venal of reasons; to generate such intense emotions that a parent will insanely send off his/her sons to be killed in the service of the elites of that same country. Good for you, rejecting that nonsense. I tell my grandkids, never, NEVER, put yourself in any position where some idiot can force you to take a chance of getting shot, or killed, for some ethereal, unknown reason. Run anywhere. Make a life in Canada or somewhere else. But NEVER become a part of any military machine.
Mr. Palmer I like your advice to your young ones. I was two years in Army ROTC which was required of males in my college. (that requirement stuff is another story) After a male student's two years of service was up we each went alone into a room with two officers who had combat experience. They asked each and very one of us why we thought we were good enough to be second lieutenants in the U.S. infantry. These guys were making the false assumption that I wanted to join the army and go fight in Vietnam. I said I had "no desire or intention to go half way around the world to kill or be killed by people against whom I had no grudge." I said I was "certain that some officer higher than lieutenant with the brains of a monkey and the soul of a butterfly would order me to do something dangerous which would get me or my men killed" This I intended to avoid by not signing the contract. I barely knew where Vietnam was. I told them I thought the war was used to "enrich wealthy families like the Rockefellers." They almost flew into a rage. But caught themselves before they made fools of themselves in front of a 20 year old punk. I saw it in their gestures and their eyes. The interview was over. They had failed to sign up a new piece of meat.
I subsequently made sure my son and nephew heard this story from my own lips years later. I never regretted it. I only regret more boys didn't do the same.
Not long after I was drafted and became a draft resister. But that's another story. They never got me. I was an inch away from fleeing to Canada as I lived in Detroit and visited Canada often. I did not flee.
Unfortunately that series of events followed me the rest of my life and contributed to my firing without cause from my faculty position some years later. I was placed on the politically suspicious person list by both Army intelligence and the Michigan State Police. Yes... State police, if you can believe it. This was not legal of course. But they did it anyway. I know this because years later I had a student who was in the intelligence division of the Mich. State Police. He liked me and told me to use the FOIA to get my records. By then they had put my wife on the list also. She was twice president of our faculty union and three times chief faculty negotiator in our collective bargaining sessions.
In the end, was thrown out of three universities besides being subsequently fired from my faculty position. I hung in there and earned my BA, MA and PhD out of spite. So you can see I appreciate your advice to your young ones.
America put the foxes in charge of the chicken coop. Being rich and successful does not make a good leader all the time. It just means that you are greedy and you may lie steal and cheat cheat to attain it. The supporters of unlimited greed have bought their way into control of the government and along the way, they did not invest in alternative energy or planned parenthood, because they wanted cheap labor and more consumers to drive the land prices up and all commodities up also in order to increase consumer spending. The churches have been supplying laborers, soldiers and breeders to the dictators for centuries! Those right wingers opposed to birth control and abortion are mostly to blame, all throughout the world. Overpopulation was predicted. The right wingers strike again!
Mr. Johnson I agree with you almost all the way. I taught population for many years and my Indian colleagues assured me that the claim made by Americans (me, for one) that the world is overpopulated is an an ethnocentric Western bias. I did not agree with them while populations were growing in most of the world. However, in recent decades since my retirement, most of the nations in the world now have stable populations, meaning the POSITIVE growth RATES are no longer increasing. A large number in fact are also stationary, meaning they have a ZERO RATE of growth. Many are experiencing NEGATIVE RATES of growth. In other words they are shrinking. This turn-around is due to the increase in urbanization worldwide.
Also an increase in female education and subsequent independence. The very thing that the Mike Johnson's want to stop and regress, because it causes sexual insecurity in some males, like him. The man is a dweeb, look at him, an insecure little shit, he has no personal authority and he knows it, that is why he clings to the Bible and his god, for authority.
Mr. Dobbertin: I can't follow your connection between your Indian colleagues and their belief that overpopulation is an ethnocentric Western bias. I was thinking American natives but perhaps you mean people from India that has a gigantic population. Are those Indians committed to unrestrained population growth? Is that a principle that they are taught? I never heard of this.
Mr. palmer. Yes those colleagues were from India. I think they actually agreed with me but could not admit it out loud because of the huge, and at that time, growing Indian population. I think it was a matter of some kind of Hindu pride which I never understood. Perhaps if I had ever lived in India, I would have understood. I really did like those guys and loved their cuisine. I think Korean and Indian food are the best I have ever tasted. With the possible exception of Detroit Soul Food.
Let's talk about India, specifically it's caste system.
When the Aryans invaded India (I assume that these were the people the Greeks and Romans called Scythians. They created a caste system, based on color. India has preserved the caste system, but because of the sexual proclivities and needs of men, color is no longer the determinant. The caste system is now about occupation
The system of the Aryans (Scythians?) was meant to keep the races separated (anti miscegenation). and it is so severe, that should the shadow of an untouchable fall on an Aryan (word means noble), the noble was to drink his own urine.
Ghandi turned it on it's head, by drinking his own urine and prescribing it for others.
There are 5 classes of castes (and they have their own subdivisions)
Brahmins (priests, teachers), Kshatriyas (rulers, warriors), Vaishyas (landowners, merchants) and Sudras (servants), and the 5th group is the group of the untouchables, called Dalits.
You can tell which Indians who migrate to the US. and which caste they belong to, for instance the Vaishyas, inevitably wind up as Republicans (naturally conservative), like Vivek Ramaswamy's parents, or Nikki Haley's parents.
Liberals like Ahrundati Roy are from the Sudra class,. Anand Giridharadas, who often is on MSNBC as a pundit, is obviously either Sudra, or based on his Anand Giridharadas even a Dalit.
Kamala Devi Harris was born in Oakland, California,[9] on October 20, 1964.[10] Her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, was a Tamil Indian biologist,.
The Tamils were once very dark skinned, and as such considered "untouchables"
There have been suggestions (for instance Sir Richard Burton.. not the actor, the 19th century explorer) and others have suggested that the Tamils and Ethiopians shared an origin story.
Apparently breeding and British colonialism, disrupted the caste system., based on skin color.
India's caste system, has bled into American politics.
Mr. Farrar. When I was an academic my friend Binod Agrawal, a Brahmin and a brilliant Cultural Anthropologist with a degree from the Univ. of Wisconsin insisted I read the Bhagavad Gita which, he said, would help me understand India. I do not read San skrit and the Gita is looooong. I beat out my brains on an English translation and gained only a little insight into Indian Mythology. I had already rejected Western Mythology when young. So there was no way I was ready to substitute or adopt Eastern Mythology. Eventually I had to tell Dr. Agrawal that the Gita gave me a headache and seemed to be the philosophy of a slave. But it gave me no insights into India's virtually defining cultural characteristic: the caste system. Binod was an affectionate, extremely tolerant man who overlooked my clumsy, unintentional insult and this is a summary of what I learned from him:
When India's first and longest serving Prime Minister was a young man he went to Cambridge university on a scholarship. At Cambridge Jawaharlal Nehru was taught by English scholars that a light skinned group of humans called Aryans descended into India from the North and took a dominating control over the darker skinned people there. These Aryans imposed a system of social stratification on the Indians which was based on skin color. Nehru then incorporated that narrative in his dissertation about the history of India. And because he subsequently became the most significant national political leader in modern Indian history, many people began to take that story seriously.
This entire story of Aryan-introduced social stratification based on color is an invention of the racist scholars at Cambridge. For centuries before Nehru went to England; Hindu Scholars were writing a true and accurate history of their own land. The whole bit about an invasion of superior "Aryans" from the North is an English invention. The Indian system of social stratification is something that evolved over centuries. It is all bound up with Indian Mythology and the distinction between the 5 levels was based on inherited occupations right from the earliest Indian times. Stratification based on skin color is a view from the perspective of Western eyes. The same eyes that created brown-skinned-Negro Chattel slavery in the New World.
A compelling counter argument. I see the merit, yet there it stands, even today there is lingering racism in the caste system. Brahmins by and large are light skinned, untouchables very dark skinned, and those in between, gradations of light to dark.
You would be hard pressed to find a dark skinned Brahmin.
Right wing Indians in America, tend to be "white" like Nikki Haley, dark skinned Indians in America tend to be liberal like Anand Giridharadasor Ahrundati Roy.
Pretty much like in America and Europe, even Russia
Mmerose. In countries which are largely rural the main economic activity is agriculture of various sorts. Farming. Children are an asset because they can work for the family in agricultural pursuits. Farm-work. This encourages high fertility.
In cities children are a liability because they are expensive to raise and they contribute nothing to the family. Also cities are more likely to have possibilities for females to acquire education outside the home and jobs to work outside the home. this encourages low fertility.
These are factors which the brilliant English Anglican Bishop Thomas Malthus ( first honors in mathematics at Cambridge and father of Demography) could not imagine, much less, predict in 1830.
Getting back to you delayed, but in the meantime it occurred to me that your excellent explanation correlates nicely with (pro-choice) "blue" urban islands in the sea of ex-urban (holy sperm no matter what) "red" map that America has politically. Evidence seems to be that this divergence is smoothed out if government actually supports mothers and the post-born, i.e. Scandinavia, of course.
LOL. Holy sperm no matter what. You have just but your finger on the real , visceral reason behind the antiabortion crowd, which (BTW) are not all Christians, I met (on line) an atheist libertarian who believed that women who have an abortion should be executed for muder. How dare they reject the holy sperm.
Whether you like meat or support the meat industry, it is well accepted in the health care industry that a diet heavy in meat is not healthy. Increased plague in the coronaries leading to hypertension, leading to compromised heart function ( ejection fraction), associated w thoracic and abdominal aneurysms, as well as peripheral vascular disease. Depending on one’s genetics, you either see this sooner rather than later.
By the way, cardiovascular disease is the number one cause or mortality.
Mr. Moncrief. Cardiovascular disease is not the number one cause of death. Vascular disease is. Fatal emboli and aneurisms occur in both the heart and brain as well as other organs. These emboli are indeed caused by build-up of soft plaque in the epithelia cells. But this buildup is not caused by excessive lipid-rich meat consumption. The human body cannot survive without cholesterol. Every cell in the body needs it. 85% of it is produced in the liver. Leaving only 15% or less contributed by our diet. Hence cholesterol from the food is not significant as a source.
Think of each cholesterol cell as analogous to a miniature "tool box." When inflammation occurs in the epithelial cells of the arteries, these cholesterol "tool boxes" travel to the sight and get deposited there in order to repair the damage from the inflammation. That is the function of the cholesterol "tool boxes." Occasionally a piece of cholesterol-formed plaque breaks loose and travels to the heart, brain or other organ, potentially causing death through deprivation of oxygen and nutrients. The cholesterol is involved in this death of tissue. But it is not the root cause. Sugar is.
We must ask: What causes the inflammation in the wall of he artery in the first place? The answer is sugar in the diet, especially cane sugar and high fructose corn syrup, and all of the other forms of sugar we eat. Sugar (glucose) in the blood causes the body to produce insulin which breaks down the sugar into an assimilable form. Concentrated sugar causes spikes in insulin. This results in inflammation of the artery walls. Thus the buildup of dangerous soft plaque. So we see that the root cause of vascular disease is spiking glucose and insulin caused by high concentrations of sugar in the diet.
The leading cause of death one hundred years ago was infection like influenzas, pneumonia, polio, etc.,not vascular disease. This change in causes of death must be explained. The food industry in the last century has become one of the biggest businesses in the U.S.; huge corporations concentrated in fewer and fewer hands each decade. The Kellogg brothers thought, for religious reasons, children should eat a non-meat breakfast. They were Seventh Day Adventists, vegetarians. Today manufactured food of the sort they developed is ubiquitous. Commonly, the main ingredient is sugar.
Americans typically begin very early in life eating lots of sugar.
Now what about all this concern over cholesterol in the diet? During WWll an economist named Ancel keys handled the logistics of packaging food in convenient containers for American soldiers in the field. after the war he acquired a reputation as a nutritionist. He was not. In the 1950s he conducted a nutrition study called The seven Countries which was so flawed as to be flagrantly dishonest. On the basis of this dishonest study he reported that cholesterol in the food we eat is killing us. On January 13, 1961 his face appeared on the front cover of Time magazine with the headline which claimed fat in the diet causes death from CAD. This was the spark that lit the flame of sensational claims about cholesterol; which are still with us today.
Fear of cholesterol has generated a profitable industry. Food producers who sell industrial products mislabelled as food, and full of carbohydrates, especially sugars. As the hysteria over meat spread the U. S. government got into the game. The first government dietary guidelines were published in 1980 recommending low cholesterol intake. In response, the food industry began to remove lipids from their products and found that the public did not like the flat taste of fat-free food. So the industry began to add sugar to make the food more tasty. In 1980, 15%of Americans were obese. Beginning after 1980 that number immediately began to rapidly rise. Today it is over 40% of Americans in the obese category.
Drug companies got into the game by developing drugs that lower cholesterol in the blood. Statins. They are the hottest selling, most profitable drugs in the U.S. today. In spite of all the hype about how Statins lower cholesterol and lower death rates, there is not convincing empirical evidence to support this claim. Virtually all the studies into Statins are funded by drug companies and they refuse to release the raw data from those studies. Hence no independent researchers can verify their results. Furthermore there are independent studies which indicate Statins do not significantly lower cholesterol nor do they lower death rates.
Meat can be harmful to us; but not because of the naturally occurring cholesterol. Meat is harmful when modern industrial food production fills it full of various chemical additives. Nitrites, nitrates, salt and so on.
Hucksters are found all over the world. But America is the rich land where it has been raised to an immense, institutionalize form.
If you are interested I can provide many examples of original, empirical studies and meta studies about this topic.
Mr. Dobbertin: I don't know how you got onto this topic from Thom's article but I love it and all the subsequent comments it gave rise to. I agree with you. I eat tons of dairy and I ignore all the warnings about fat and the magic ingredient-of-the-month (currently turmeric, formerly blueberries, acai berries, apple cider vinegar and those monstrosities, various gummi bears with magical ingredients). I know how unproven all the statin obsession is. When I had a hernia (A HERNIA!) some doc prescribed me a statin. Fortunately I had enough knowledge to laugh at him. I am 85, eat fruits and vegetables by nature and rarely get any sugar outside of some ice cream now and then. My typical breakfast is a head of broccoli. I cringe when I remember my childhood of breakfast Cheerios. The American breakfast of cereals is the most highly processed you can find. Imagine boiling up oats until they are soft, chopping them up, mixing them with "vitamins", bulking agents, preservatives, cohering adjuvants and then extruding them through spinnerets into doughnut form, drying them in an oven and then packing them for unsuspecting children. Yukk! No diabetes anywhere in sight. Haven't had a soda in fifty years. For carbs I eat pastas or special breads like croissants and never worry about it. I really can't believe the claim that your body breaks down starches into sugars the same as eating a soluble sugar. It's got to be a slow, measured process quite different from guzzling HFCS sodas. I pay no attention to the cholesterol Nazis. Cholesterol is insoluble in water and so the absorption of ingested cholesterol from your gut has got be slow if even possible. Despite this, my labs show Cholesterol to be in the middle of their preferred range (like all my values). I know about the Framingham study that exploded all the cholesterol warnings but I never heard of all those other studies you mentioned. Wonderful interchange. Thanks to all you guys and your arcane knowledges.
Paul, thanks for the very valuable information. I was diagnosed with insulin resistance in 2006. referred to a dietitian, all I learned was stay away from sugar and simple carbs.
So I stopped using sugar, and switched to Stevia (no sugars) and drink one can of Stevia each day with dinner. Otherwise my only drink is water. Those with insulin resistance carry fat high on he stomach, not the beer drinkers pot belly.
I am naturally thin, been so all of my life, and the only excess weight I have is high on my stomach. In February this year, I started a diet, no breakfast, lunch is soup, home made or Campbells, and dinner is usually a shrimp or taco salad (with refried beans). I cannot get pork, salmon or most fish past my lips, nor fowl of any type. So I use Beyond beef or beyond sausage.
I weigh myself every morning and prick my finger just before the noon meal.
I've lost 40 lbs, and my blood glucose has dropped to between 85 and 106, my AIC as of Friday, was 5.6
Diabetes is one scary disease, my wife's grandmother lost two legs, a friend lost one leg and then died, a cousin died of diabetes, his mother and my mother were insulin resistant.
Apparently the disease is genetic and passed down from the mother, not the father. No one on my fathers side ever had diabetes, either they lived into their 90's or died of environmentally caused cancer. (Either lived in cancer capital of US. Crossett. AR. home of Koch's Georgia Pacific or on the gulf coast just outside of the oil refineries that they worked in (cancer alley).
I have read this series of comments with great interest, since I come from a hyper-cholesteremic family yet, myself, have no sweet tooth at all, but have same cholesterol as my mother, who turned down statins, and her sister, who was "pickled" (my word) in statins, both surviving >90. What I gather is that the inflammation is the key. (?) I broke out with rosacea in my mid thirties, with flagrant rash and pimples in high stress job by late thirties, and the dermatologist was, like, duh, too bad. Dr. Andrew Weil early book connected me to supplement of GLA via, highest concentration, Borage oil. The thing is, that if you are a certain ultra-white European, maybe GLA can suppress inflammation throughout your circulatory system. (?) I am 70, have one stent but always wonder, is the GLA the reason I'm alive at all?
Mmerose. If the rosacea you had in your youth left a butterfly pattern on your face, over your nose. I suggest you might want to go to an elderly Internist or Endocrinologist and ask if you might have Lupus Erythematosus. Go to an elderly doctor with much experience. Younger doctors are much less likely to have diagnosed it before or even seen it. It is a rare disease of the immune system. It is not curable. But there are ways to avoid flare-ups and treat symptoms if they occur. Do you have any accurate photos of your face when you were young?
Thank you for your kind reflections. My outbreak only started with a single indelible red spot on right cheek in mid thirties. What's sad is the only thing current dermatologist has to recommend is anti-fungal, (no help) same as 30 years ago. Fortunately, it's not too severe, and I'm old anyway!.
Mmerose. I know nothing about Andrew Weil's research, although I have read a little about him. I cannot comment on his ideas.
My research at Iowa State Univ. was in Agriculture for the USDA. My research experience at Michigan State Univ. was for one of its medical schools the Allopathic one. It had both Osteopathic and Allopathic medical schools on one campus in those days. It also had a nursing school and a veterinary school. Can you believe it? Four medical schools on one campus. The place was huge, covering several square miles. For graduate work it was great. For undergrad work; I do not recommend it. Too big.
You are correct in that inflammation is the big thing to look for.
It is interesting that your aunt or mother made it to over 90 with hypercholesterolemia. My point exactly. My mother-in-law died in her 102nd year and had high cholesterol and loved to eat huge piles of bacon every morning. I had a good friend Ebbe who was one of the oldest people in the U. S. when she died in her 112th year. She ate anything she wanted.
I do not come to any generalized conclusions on the basis of only two women. But they are indeed examples. It has been done. I refuse statins also. They are poison which attacks the liver.
Uh oh. I don't take statins. I refuse drugs made in a laboratory, but I do take red yeast rice, 600 mg in the morning , with cranberry juice and a bit of apple, ground in a blender and 600 in the evening
In addition you’re confusing the pro inflammatory response of hyperglycemia for excess lipid producing plaque ( with or without calcium). It is the rupture of the plaque, forming a thrombosis that results in sudden death or severe ischemia. Again, it is genetics along w the consumption of lipid that will determine risk. Peripheral arterial disease has the same pathophysiology but is not the leading cause of death.
Your comment would have been informative and helpful,, had you not started with "Thou protest too much", That was unnecessary, and a misappropriation of Shakespeare, as Mr Dobbertin was not protesting.
Just so you know, I’m completely apathetic to your criticism of my writing style. It would be like me telling you that red yeast is not as effective as statins. It’s your choice.
The writer spent an enormous amount of space trying to sound convincing in his biased ( and unscientific approach) arguing the lack of evidence for death rate ( #1) for heart disease. If that s not protesting waaaay too much I don’t know what is.
By the way, if the red yeast is not reducing your cholesterol/tryglicerides/LDL then you’re wasting money.
Mr./Ms. Zeits. Why was heart disease not the number one cause of death a century ago. Are you aware of the Seven Countries study? The original West of Scotland study? Have you looked at the statistics on rise in obesity and diabetes in the U. S.? the Women's Health Initiative 1991? The MRFIT study1974-1982? The Tecumseh Community health study?The World health organization study 1971? The Lipid Research Clinics CoronaryPrimary Prevention trial 1984? The Anti-Coronary Club Project 1957? I could list a dozen more I think. But this is from my memory right now.
George Mann was the designer of the infamous Framingham study 1950-1960. Are you aware of what he said about it in the New England Journal of Medicine 1977?
Have you seen Kilmer McCully's study of homocysteine levels and CHD? He was at Harvard.
Finally, I ask you in all seriousness, do you know the difference between actual measures of variation between experimental and control groups on the one hand and relative measures on the other hand? Do you understand the concept of mathematical "Normality" as first developed by the brilliant French mathematician De Moivre? It is the foundation of inferential statistics. Please forgive me if this sounds sarcastic. I do not mean it that way at all. I have looked into these studies and more as well. I taught inferential stats for 4 decades.
or you could have spent your time acquiring a medical degree and understand the literature.
A first grader can do a google search and find the number one cause of death ( again, cardiovascular disease). Whether you understand the pathophysiology does not concern nor your studies of correlations. I find it ironic that you mention the Framingham study ( still ongoing). It focused lipodystrophies as the primary cause of fatal MI and has contributed a great deal the interaction of genetics and diet.
Mr./Ms. Zeits your comment about the Framingham debacle indicates that you did not read the 1977 words of the man who designed it.
If you did you would know that the "new" info coming out of it is a continuation of twisted figures and lying with statistics. Your comment about correlation indicates you know nothing about statistical inference. Correlation has nothing to do with what I said and little relation to the t-tests and Z-tests researchers use in their stratified, randomized, often double blind studies. What you said has nothing to do with Occam's razor. What you said is wrong and somewhat non-sensible. I cannot make out if you are hopelessly confused and uninformed or if you simply made typing errors. Stick with Google for your research and you will learn little of value beyond that of a first grader. A little analysis can take one well beyond the attention-directing (or misdirecting) algorithms of Machine thinking. Medical degrees indicate technical training similar to plumbers, computer techs, and electricians they do not reflect education. There is a difference. When the uninformed begin to substitute "genetics" in their statements as a substitute for analysis, I yawn. I've heard genetics a thousand times from college Freshmen whose heads are filled with folklore.
I am 84, see my doctor every six months, just had a Lifeline Screening, all of the tests on my heart and circulatory system are normal, except I have mild plaque in my left and right arteries.
I am mostly, a vegetarian now, except for mini pepperoni sausages, which I eat on occasion, I can't stand the taste of fresh pork, fowl or anything but mild white fish, like haddock,cod and flounder. The only meat that I ate in my life was beef, and until I joined the service I was a vegetarian (my mom was the world's worst cook, and couldn't even cook a hamburger, much less a roast.
I steered (pun) away from beef for all of my adult life, best I could, except when I had no choice, which is what happens in a chow hall or in a combat zone. Even hungry in the jungle I could not even chew a pork chop when delivered by a Huey.
I haven't eaten red meat in years, well except on trips when hunger drives me to McDonalds, and I only make about one or two of them a year, for a specialist medical appointment, yet I still have arterial plaque, maybe it would have been worse,if I regularly consumed red meat.
My last office visit on Sep 12, 23 was a blood pressure of 130/64 not bad for a prediabetic 84 yr old.
I chalk that up to being a "semi-vegetarian" Until 2005 my body weight fluctuated around 140 lbs, I'm now 5'8 was 5'10 when young. Then diagnosed with insulin resistance. and I put on about 80 lbs, all of it in the upper stomach, none in ass legs, arms. In Feb this year I started semi fasting, cut intake of sugars and simple carbs, ate a protein bar for lunch, maybe soup, and a light dinner, mostly salads and have lost 37 lbs, and my Blood Glucose has dropped to between 97 and 106.
We are indeed what we eat, and for the most part, Americans are gluttons, especially for fast foods like burgers, fried chicken, french fries, ice cream and milk shakes.
Mr. Farrar. I managed to go from 182 lbs. to 132lbs. in one summer. Too much weight loss, too quickly. I do not recommend it. I had one day when I was so weak I could barely stand without help. No Internist would recommend it either. On advice of my doctor I put back on some weight. I am no where near 182 lbs. though. I am 5' 7", around 148 lbs. It fluctuates a little. At age 18 I was 138 lbs. and on the school gymnastic team.
I can tell you how I did it. But you would not like the diet I used. Furthermore, it was an unhealthy and even dangerous diet as my Internist said.
Thanks,. Diabetes runs in my family, passed along via via mothers, to child.
It starts as Insulin Resistance and progresses. I have a 1st Cousin who died of diabetes (male), sweet were his comfort food, I have an aunt who had it, by mother who had it (she died from other problems, congestive heart failure).
And I have it. I steer clear, best I can, from simple carbs, because the body breaks them down into sugar, and my body can't handle the insulin spikes, as I am insulin resistant. My meal today has been a protein bar (IQ bar, only 1 sugar and 11 carbs. no cholesterol, my dinner will be another shrimp salad, with Marie's blue cheese dressing, only one tablespoon, but too many as I am lactose intolerant and it comes out almost as fast as it comes in.
By the way, in answer to your comment following this response. I enjoyed your comment on dietary cholesterol.
When feeling randy, I eat Wheatbix, with margarine, salt and Coconut/Almond "Milk". I know it isn 't milk, I haven't drank milk since I was a kid, it makes me fart, and the kids in school, that sat behind me called me fartyard. And I haven't ate sugary cereals or sugar on anything since I was a kid, If I need to sweeten something I use Stevia (zero sugars), and at night with my salad, a can of Zevia, a soft drink sweetened with Zevia, (zero sugars), alas it comes in an aluminum can which I otherwise steer clear of. some reports say that it is a cause of Alzheimers and I already have Sometimers (so my wife says)
Mr. Farrar. Sounds to me as though you have a handle on it. I too satisfy my sweet tooth with Stevia. I hope we don't some day see some reliable research that indicates it causes Subterranean, Central Amazonian Guff Guff fatality. We can always hope, right?
LOL. Incredibly, Stevia comes from a member of the geranium family .
I watched, over a decade ago, a documentaria. An Amazionian tribe had a cure for diabetes.
One of the PhRMA companies, sent a person to the Amazon to get the formula. Took it back tested it and quit because they couldn't find the chemical, they ignored the Amazonians who told them that it wasn't one plant, but a combination.
I think also they don't want to cure diabetes, cancer or anything They learned their lesson with Jonas Saulk, cure a disease with one shot or pill and there go your profits.
Have you noticed that polio is rearing its head again. Thanks to RFK Jr and the rest of the brain dead right wingers
I came back from the Dr's today, semi annual diabetes check up, A1C is 5.6, my diet is working, also lost 32 lbs.. And got my flu shot, now to get the latest covid booster.
As far as I am concerned, all those idiot anti vaxxers and MAGAts, can and should die off, maybe there is then the chance of saving our democracy.
Funny Stevia should come up. I so don't have a sweet tooth that I taste "sweet" from across the room, when someone opens a packet.
Can't stand it. Always wanted only the bacon and eggs, or maybe a hamburger for breakfast. Some individuals are biologically compatible with the Atkins program, definitely me!
Mr. Farrar. you definitely do not sound to me like someone with Alzheimers. You do sometimes come off as a Grumpy Old Man though. Have you seen the movie?
I have a love/hate reaction to this, but fun is connection to Mom being a bad cook! My Mom was an early career woman who enthusiastically deployed the busy-woman's 50's "microwave," known as the "pressure cooker." If you want to cure your kid of ever wanting to eat anything good for them, reduce it to bitter mush in a pressure cooker. Worked on me!
Laughs out loud. I use my pressure cooker for two things split pea soup, and it is a mush, which is just the way I want it, and black eyed and pinto beans., but I time them so they don't turn to mush
Black eyed peas, rice and okra, my favorite meal, besides Spinach.
Mr. Farrar. As a young man in Detroit I found a couple places near my apt. where I could get the best okra in my life. They were "soul food" places. What ever happened to soul food restaurants? The food was unique.
Mr. Farrar. I do not think of "fast foods" as food. I think of them as industrial products misleadingly sold as food. If we do not kill ourselves with the machinery of war we will do it with the industrial poisons called food.
The reality is that there is not sufficient data or modeling capabilities to know all that is taking place. The U.S. government cannot even forecast the weather a few days in advance with any accuracy. The only weather stations are at airports in a few cities and so meteorologists need to extrapolate (guess) to fill in the gaps.
The problem is that the people in power, i.e. the energy and agriculture industries, do not care about future generations of people that they do not know and are not going to encounter in their gated communities or on their private jets or their children meet at private schools. The people who care do not have the power to effect change and this has been true for the environmental degradation in the USA and in Europe and in the overseas colonies they have controlled.
Good piece, Thom. US military leadership believe climate change is real, and has been preparing for the downstream consequences of it for decades now. It could get ugly.
And we still have the tools to solve this crisis of our own making: we just have to use them before it’s too late. There isn't a loud enough hue and cry to make this a top news story and people are lazy when it involves taking some responsibility for their circumstances.
So long as the fossil fuel kingdom is able to rival the power of government (that's us), their poisonous reign will only accelerate the washing away of Earth and Earth's sole steward - democracy.
Most people probably failed to notice it but Thom just mentioned recycling IN A NEGATIVE LIGHT. He recognized that recycling is a corporate scam pushed by corporations BECAUSE it is an end-of-pipe approach. In other words, corporations who despise regulations (that might control what kind of crap they can make and send out into markets) are delighted to have the public take on the job of doing something - anything - with their degraded products after it is too late to do anything productive or effective. In other words, RECYCLING! Everyone knows that we are swimming in a world increasingly polluted by the no longer wanted detritus of our consumption - we call it WASTE. But nobody is doing anything about it because the deluded environmentalists and government actors are twisted up in their useless recycling efforts. It never seems to bother any activists that every reference to recycling is in the range of 5% or less. Sometimes there are phony reports of larger effects but the books are being cooked - on purpose! Alexander Pope told us a hundred years ago - "Hope springs eternal in the human breast, Man never is but always to be blest" Folks, he was talking about recycling. It's "promise" is always in the future. Never now. There is only one way to solve the problem of waste that is drowning us. That is to turn to universal, perpetual reuse. That is the essence of Zero Waste Theory (see zerowasteinstitute.org and gettingtozerowaste.com) which I developed when I was running Zero Waste Systems Inc. in the seventies and eighties. We need a massive research effort to find the specific ways in which every single product can be redesigned for perpetual reuse. This is not a magical effort, like recycling claims to be. You cannot just rub a lamp and get a genie to tell you how products need to be redesigned for reuse. Some of the general principles can be discerned, and I provide many detailed plans, but as an industry wide revolution it will take hard work - some of it political, some of if financial and much of it technical. It will provide a hundred thousand new jobs at a high technical level. It will begin a whole new industrial effort that can be exported worldwide at great profit (like solar panels). And it will reduce the ridiculous belief - promoted by know-nothing recyclers - that waste avoidance consists of keeping bare, low value, degraded materials out of the dump. Waste creation actually happens only when useless, throwaway products are created at great expenditure of raw materials, heat, clean water, clean air, electricity, labor and investment in a factory for one-time use to be consumed and then discarded. The actual act of discard - or burial or incineration - is just an afterthought, a coda to waste which was decided when that product was designed and manufactured TO BE DISCARDED. We are talking about a huge contribution to climate change which everyone is studiously avoiding. Just the remaking of steel and concrete products is estimated to generate over 15% of all carbon dioxide emissions. For ten years, Zero Waste Systems Inc. eagerly took on the most difficult reuse task of all by finding new uses for all of the excess, unwanted, used chemicals in the SF Bay Area. We found simple reuses for hundreds of tons, millions of dollars worth of chemicals. We proved the concept. If we can do that, why can't we succeed with the far easier designs for reuse for non-toxic, non-threatening general products of industry, including vehicles, buildings and bridges, not to mention garments, electronics and appliances. Like so many ventures, it isn't that hard if you just stop telling yourself why it can't be done and get down to doing it.
We have been conditioned to be consumers. Consumers are glorified, as they mean profits and jobs. In the 19th and early 20th Century, TB was a common disease,only they called it consumption. as the disease consumed the body. Consumers are consuming themselves and the future of their progeny.
I haul my own trash to the dump, but i have two recycle bins, which I empty into a lawn bag. I don't do it because I believe I am helping the environment, because a bag of recycle cost $5 and a bag of trash $10.
I am also aware that the recycle ends up in a dump, or being shipped to Asia,where waifs and women sort through it, and most plastics wind up in the Pacific, there are islands of plastic and trash in the Pacific, bigger than Rhode Island, and they are eaten by fish and birds, or strangled by the those plastic rings that hold soda bottles or cans. So we eat the plastic poisoned critters and poison ourselves.
Autopsies have revealed that the kidneys and livers are full of nano or micro plastics.
William: My garbage company gives me two bins. I put the garbage one away and never use it. They pretend that the contents of the second one will be recycled. Okay, I pretend that I am putting in recyclable stuff. We both know it is a dance of deceit. I say it reminds me of the Soviet era joke by a worker: "they pretend to pay us so we pretend to work".
The reason I never use the garbage bin is because the only use of that is for organic matter. Since I reduce the size of all organic matter and distribute it around my yards, onto the soil where it soon disappears, I never need to get rid of any organic matter. Only paper, glass, metal, plastic. All of which can go into the pretend recycling bin. I pay their full bill every month because it isn't worth arguing about. Their slogan is Waste Zero. I went in to the office to tell them that I am the acknowledged person who invented the term ZERO WASTE back in 1974 but they weren't impressed. My ex asks me how I like being the inventor of something that has gone all around the world. My one regret is that I didn't copyright it. I'd be a millionaire today if I got 0.1 cent for every usage.
I would prefer to steer clear of the recitation of horrors associated with abundant and thoughtless discard. Everyone knows all about those - the dying animals, the polluted oceans. No one cares. I have been explaining for forty years that there are scientific and rational approaches to eliminating - not reducing - waste generation but no one cares. I have never had anyone come up to me and say let's get a non-profit started on this important environmental topic. They just keep pushing that useless recycling and then pretending that they are doing all they can. The city of Berkeley spends $15M every year for recycling. That is a supposedly progressive city that is so much in the grip of the recycling mafia that they can't see beyond it. In 2018 the Chinese announced that they would no longer be the suckers who took all of the West's garbage (pardon me, recycling) and they pulled the rug out from under recycling. It all died - Boom! But like the zombies in the movies, it has a second life, because it has to. It's so important to not regulate the production of goods so the public has to continue believing that after it's entirely too late to do any good, they can "solve" the problem with never a regulation on the horizon. You can learn a lot more at zerowasteinstitute.org but I don't get praised in comments any more. The world is content to die by drowning. Waste generation has a lot to do with climate change but you would never know it to read any of the environmental magazines. Just clickbait on recycling of this or that item is as far as they take it.
My organic garbage goes to feed the raccoon family, fox and ravens that live in the wood next to my house. Paper and cardboard are burned in the fire box in my unused kennel, only bottles, cans are put in the recycle bin, the little bit left of garbage, goes into my garbage bin and about once every month and a half or two, I haul them to the transfer station, they charge $5 a can for recycle and $10 for trash. My trash includes the ashes from the kennel.
When I see pictures of the wild life killed by our plastic, and that "land mass" of plastic, as large or larger than Manhattan floating in the Pacific I get sick.
A way to dispose of garbage and radiocactive material is incineratethem with browns gas, which itself can be fueled with the burnable trash. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxyhydrogen
Mr. Hartman. I remember when, not many years ago the naysayers shouted that renewable energy like solar, wind, and water would never be inexpensive enough to compete with petroleum and coal in the market place. Today they are silenced. They were wrong. Not many years ago also, there was a company in Michigan which was the major producer of the huge blades for wind generators. The Gougeon brothers. They are no longer number one, possibly because they have no grant from the federal government to build them. European and Asian companies are now in the lead. One wonders: what happened?
I agree that meat is a food which puts a heavy load on our agricultural system, Land, water etc. But it is not inherently unhealthy to eat, as most Americans unfortunately believe today. See my reply to Mr. Moncrief.
I don't like meat, it's taste or texture, and neither did our ancestors, that's why the invented Worcestershire Sauce, Mustard, Ketchup, and colonized Africa and Asia, for spices.
For those that simply must have beef or pork. A must try is Beyond Beef or Beyond Sausage. I really can’t tell the difference. We make a Shepherds Pie out of Beyond Beef, mashed potatoes and French cut green beans. Beyond beef is expensive, but tasty.
To add fuel to the fire. The Holocene is the area from the end of the last ice age until the 1950;s, in the 1950’s technology really took off and we entered the anthropocene, the age of man, or more specifically the era in which man’s activities, affected the climate
The anthropocene is projected to be the most short lived of epochs.
We already see the effects, mass migration from south to north, in ocean and on land., it won’t be long before the north is overwhelmed, and unable to accommodate, much less feed, the millions seeking jobs and food in the north.
Insects and parasites that posed a problem in the south, like Fire Ants and tree boring beetles, have moved north and are threatening our food stock and trees. They are adapting and have jumped into mammals, including humans.
And in self defense….nothing, humans have to enjoy themselves today, even at the expense of their own future.
In my book, I would rather go out like the passengers of the Titan, they didn't even have an inkling they were going to be dead. Here one moment, and then gone in 2 nanoseconds next, before the brain could register it, they ceased to exist. Much better and faster than whose who died on the Titanic and whose shoes now litter the ocean floor.
Mr. Farrar. I too wish to "go out" quickly. My relatives know I love them. No need to say goodby. What is the "Titan"? I have a first edition of Lord's TITANIC. I read it decades ago. I also have an update which I intend to finish soon.
Maybe a (rare) typo of Farrar's. Funny thing is, there was a story often cited as pre-cognitive: was it HG Wells? Titled "The Titan" that uncannily described the disaster long before.
This is a good call for action, but I do have a caveat - there are currently some 1 BILLION cars and trucks around the world that run on fossil fuels and even this year, over 90% of all vehicles built will be fossil-fueled vehicles. We must have an aggressive program of CO2 and methane mitigation and capture - the alternative is to shut down the modern advanced natjons' economies and return to a pre-automobile existence to limit the use of fossil fuels. No one has the trillions of dollars it would take to replace all fossil-fuel vehicles, and materials are in too-short supply for that level of production.....
Bad news, all discussions of global warming are academic. We are past the tipping point, and if we stopped using gasoline or diesel tomorrow it would not save us. The tipping point was 350 parts per million (ppm) of Carbon Dioxide, and we hit 400 ppm, a year ago. It is now extropic, an outward turning spiral. warming has already melted the tundra, especially in Siberia, and trapped methane returns to gaseous form, and is being blown out leaving huge craters, same is happening on the northern sea floor. Global warming has wiped out Arctic ice and we are looking at an ice free arctic ocean in summer, the much sought NW passage. The north pole is now water.
Loss of sea ice, means that heat is no longer reflected back into space, but absorbed by water and earth . Albedo is an expression of the ability of surfaces to reflect sunlight (heat from the sun). Light-coloured surfaces return a large part of the sunrays back to the atmosphere (high albedo). Dark surfaces absorb the rays from the sun (low albedo).
The arctic Jet Stream has already been affected, and that is why we have heat domes in summer and blizzards never seen before in the midwest and the south.
Greenland's glaciers are melting, and they desalinate the Atlantic current (which includes the Gulf Stream), the result is 100 degree water off Florida, hurricanes jumping to force 5, like Otis did when it tore up Aculpulco.
But that's not all. The Atlantic current keeps the East Coast of America warmer in winter, than it would otherwise be, and also England and Europe.
If you live on the East Coast and in the South, you will be hit twice as hard this winter, as you were last year, and last year was bad.
Yes, James Hansen's newest paper (currently in peer review) says that just the pollution we have already put into the atmosphere will result in a temperature rise pf 10 deg C (18 deg F)..... His paper takes into account all the secondary and tertiary effects of the primary warming, like the ones you describe above..... We are well and truly hosed.....
That is what I fear Bruce. That is what I fear. It is already too late.
I was born at the optimal time of the anthropocene, I have enjoyed the benefits of democracy, of technology, of social living, and (fingers crossed) I will miss the train wreck barreling towards me. Quite selfish, considering I have 11 grand children and 9 great grandchildren and one great great grandchild.
I had a great tour on this marble that circles the sun, no regrets. Life for me is good, but all good things must come to an end.
The ironic thing here is we cavil about "saving the planet"..... The planet will be just fine, and perhaps more so if we manage to remove ourselves stage left. Recent experience in recovering ecosystems indicates that within 100-200 years, the earth's ecosystem will again be in balance, not what it was before we came, but sustainable. We can save Gaia by going extinct or reverting to a completely sustainable world economy.....
So you have great great grandkids too. You must have started at an early age also.
Returning the planet to a sustainable world economy is just what the Plutocrats don't want.
What use is there in being wealthy, if you can't lord it over the rest of the people.
Their will always those who will lie, cheat, steal, murder to sit on the top rung of the social ladder. be it William the Conqueror, Mark Zuckerburg, Henry VIII, Elon Musk, Julius Caesar or Pete Peterson. Matters not race, religion or ethnicity.
In my site at gettingtozerowaste.com I offer a paper on a form of mass transportation that has the potential to make the private automobile 90% irrelevant, by offering the public a far superior method of moving people that I happen to have stumbled on while living in Turkey in the 1960's. It is called the Dolmush system and it works better than gigantic buses and trains running on fixed time schedules, even if they are empty. If we are serious about solving the transportation then we absolutely cannot afford ON TIME departures. We MUST change to ON FULL departure. It can work, it is efficient and it is achievable, if we can just abandon our obsolete assumptions about scheduling.
I would think this could work well, but it would need to use smaller vehicles so they fill up faster, and then have many more vehicles available. Many people who work or have appointments do have to keep schedules, so the system must be able to get them to where they need to be when they need to be there. Frequent service would lead many people to use such a system.
Mr. Dobbertin: The Chinese have it wrong. The longest journey begins with A STEP IN THE RIGHT DIRECTION. We try to start many journeys here with a step in the wrong direction, which only leads us astray. I run a website and promote solving the world's problems with waste generation by replacing all products with better designed products that are designed for perpetual reuse. It is entirely feasible, if we only were serious about solving the world's waste of resources and pollution due to trying to throw things away into some magical "away". I like to point out that recycling is a serious step in the WRONG DIRECTION and therefore is leading us AWAY from solutions. Thus my cavil on your Chinese proverb.
This is the first posting I have seen about the profligate waste these days of resources that have to last as long as there are humans and civilization - what will future generations 500, 1000, 10,000 years from now say when they realize we buried trillions of dollars worth of valuable metals and other materials in landfills. lost to the future.....
Bruce: Was it Jared Diamond in Guns Germs and Steel who asks what the last Easter Islander said as he cut down the last tree to make the last statue? I know what it was, and it's the same thing your hypothetical futureman will say: "Technology will solve the problem."
I just hate the dominant notion that there will always be waste. Everyone just knows this, even though there is not a shred of scientific or reasonable analysis to support this comforting supposition. Then the bright eyed researchers can announce in ecstatic terms that they have "solved" the problems of waste. Recently, some scientist discovered that if he passed some giant electrical shock through "plastic waste" (whatever that really is) he could convert it into carbene and "clean" hydrogen. His assumption is that there will always be this plastic waste to work with - that it is an inexhaustible resource. In the current climate of "waste uber alles" the thought that we could actually produce useful plastic products that did not end up contaminating all of us and blowing around the continents is not thinkable. Not worth thinking about. Never can be or will be or is wanted to be changed. We will live in the midst of plastic waste (and all the other kinds too) until the earth goes red giant and it's all over. Incineration will be the ultimate cleanser, when the earth is too polluted to inhabit any longer.
We are historically the Big Kahuna in contributing to climate change (China is now ahead somewhat), so we bear a significant responsibility for cleaning up or mitigating the damage as much as we can. But this will eventually have to be an "all-hands" effort by all developed countries.....
Ms. Stokes. If you have been out of the U.S. for some time; you might not be aware that city buses are frequently electric or hybrid these days. But we are still way behind the rest of the developed world when it comes to mass transit. Especially Europe, Japan and China. Interesting that France has stopped short-haul flying. Good idea. Airplanes are neat and have their place. But thermodynamically they are extremely inefficient and big polluters.
Ms. Stokes. Before I was born Los Angeles had the largest intra urban electric rail system in the world. In the 1930s General Motors bought it and dismantled it. POOFF GONE. Generalize that.
Beats the heck out of me - we should have had all that stuff long ago. But we did no planning for this at all and in many areas, there is little or no land available to build it. Here in Texas, there is a plan (if it doesn't die) to build the first high-speed rail in the US (180mph/270km/h) from Dallas to Houston, and of course the airlines are fighting this, plus all the conservative farmers and ranchers who do not want their rural way of life even marginally disturbed.....
I should also say that range issues will keep full-electric vehicles from going inter-city for the near future - we very much need vastly better battery technology than lithium-ion..... For city buses and commuter cars, battery power is quite sufficient - we need the political will to get this going. Our Republican Party is unalterably opposed to anything dealing with climate change or electric propulsion.....that is a real problem here.
Mr. Culver. All batteries are constructed from various metals which have differing electron affinities. Aluminum is the most ubiquitous metal on the surface of earth. If, or when some brilliant young engineer finds a way to use aluminum with other metals; we are off and running. Maybe.
I'm not a cow. You are not a cow. Babies are not calves. Milk comes from a mammal not a nut. I don't mind cutting down on red meat. The current cost of beef demands that. But, I'm 82 years old. When I was young, we were told that vegetables did not have complete proteins and that, therefore, you had to mix them properly. Like Trichinosis in pork, that is no longer a thing. Now the claim is that you can live on kale alone. Liquified Kale, that is. And you failed to give me links to the science that was NOT quoted but implied in the article.
Mr. Farrar. Liquid kale ( sounds blah, doesn't it?) reminds me of Thorn, Charlton Heston's detective who cried "Soylent green is people." I eat kale for the nitrogen oxide it produces in my bloodstream. But I do no care for its flavor unless it is doctored up with lemon juice, at least.
Prices aren't high for any other reason than pure unadultered greed, and rationing won't solve that problem. But it will acerbate the situation and possibly result in the radical right rising up en masse. People breed like rabbit, people just have to have that orgasm, and produce mini me's so they can pass on their ill obtained goodies to their progeny, and so they bred themselves into cutting down trees. Like the song The Yellow Taxi, mentions that paved over paradise and put up a parking lot.
Now people drive to work, in some cases 2 hours or more, one way, to feed the families that their need for orgasm has produced.
Ration gas, sans an attack by ET and you are looking at a revolt which the extremes of left and right would welcome with glee.
Myself I don't mind. A one way trip to town is 3.5 miles I make the trip about twice a week, for food, mail and packages. A tank of gas lasts me about two months or more.
Mr. Farrar. Do you know that most of the world's countries no longer have a fertility high enough for their population to grow? It is necessary for each woman to produce 2.1 children for any population to remain at a stationary, fixed size. Few countries currently meet this number. This decline is related to urbanization on a world wide scale.
Yes, many countries in the developed world face declining populations - China will lose half her current population to old age and too few young people, most likely by 2050-2060. Many other countries will follow to some extent.....
Daughter of WWII generation, here. Ration stamps were so much more than "fair way of distributing fuel." Ration stamps were a patriotic symbol of contributing to the War Effort to save Western Civilization! If the citizenry doesn't have that sense of crisis, fuggedaboudit.
Warming temperatures and climate change are symptoms of the real problem. The oceans are the driving engine of the climate and are the true lungs of the planet. Pollution is killing the oceans. Pollution from agriculture runoff fertilizer and petroleum-agrochemicals, cargo ship exhaust, black carbon, microplastics, rising acidity. Read the work of Howard Dryden and Diane Duncan of the GOES Foundation (Global Oceanic Environmental Survey).
When we find the entrance to the wormhole in space and can go back in time, maybe there's a fix.
I previously reported that the state of California filed a sweeping climate lawsuit against Exxon Mobil, Shell, BP, ConocoPhillips, and Chevron, as well as the domestic oil industry's biggest lobby, the American Petroleum Institute. It demands the companies help fund recovery efforts related to California's extreme weather events, from rising sea levels to drought and wildfires, that have been supercharged by human-caused climate change.
"Oil and gas companies have privately known the truth for decades — that the burning of fossil fuels leads to climate change — but have fed us lies and mistruths to further their record-breaking profits at the expense of our environment. Enough is enough," said Rob Bonta, California's attorney general. https://www.npr.org/2023/09/16/1199974919/california-oil-lawsuit-climate-change?fbclid=IwAR33AvbiLRnaM32wuJOEKlcXUBZXyC2SHlvvp1L-FWhUJ-LXbjHeuQ4hZQQ
The real culprits have to include the OPEC/Saudi/Russia cabal that undermines our economy and is a national security risk. The Saudis control US companies like Exxon, own our largest refineries. Biden needs authority to sue them for price fixing and price gouging. Kill many birds with one throw.
Thanks Dan, another great comment, best of luck with California, considering that we now have a MAGA contaminated judiciary.
How long would it take to sue them? Ten years? Twenty?
In math, something is greater than nothing.
A sudden uptick in really weird rainfall amounts in so many places - flooding all over the world is so much worse than it ever was. This has to be the result of the changes we have caused. I think things are getting desperate - just solving the immediate issue of one flood does nothing if they keep happening. Whole cities will have to be moved to higher ground and/or all buildings designed with the bottom level allowed to be flooded periodically. Whereas everybody has been trying to make plans for rising seas - nobody ever thought about huge rainfall being an even worse flood risk !!! I worry for my grandkids - I'll be gone within the next decade or so !
We need more dams and reservoirs to handle the deluges. Expand the electrical grid to send electricity generated at the flooded dams all over the country, and pipelines to move water for drinking and agriculture may be needed. We need to start planning for adaptation in addition to prevention. Who is planning for the actual changes in the climate? Solar panels on homes is a good start.
Like your ideas, but all will take more time than we probably have; only immediate cessation of using fossil fuels can make a difference, and even that might take years to lessen the effects of climate change. Had we done those things forty years ago (or before Exxon scientists warned us,) there might have been some reason for hope.
Need to relocate from danger.
__________
Day after day, more people come to L... A.
Don't you tell anybody, the whole place's shaking away
Where can we go, when there's no San Francisco?
Better get ready to tie up the boat in Idaho
Where can we go, when there's no San Diego
Better get ready to tie up the boat in Idaho
Do you know the swim, you better learn quick Jim
Those who don't know the swim, better sing the hymn
______________________________
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EsiFotSjgpQ
Thanks Dan, the very last place a progressive wants to land is in Idaho.
Mr. Farrar. On the other hand, maybe Idaho needs a large influx of progressives. I am too old myself.
I checked out solar panels, the newer ones will work even in cloudy environments, but the cost was prohibitive. They wanted to charge me $57,000 financed at 25 years. Interest and all it would cost over $120,000, depending on interest rates, and I am 84, and would die with a lien against my property, as the mortgage is paid off. And it is iffy if the panels or the structure on which they would be placed will last 25 years
At 8%, current Fed rate, if I could get that. Monthly payment is $280, Interest paid over 25 years $55, 476 and total paid (principal and interest) 101, 076
Such a deal, and my monthly bill ranges from $200 to $350. Expensive because it is provided by a Co op, which buys it from a private equity company, PSE. and is transmitted via undersea cable.
And Gloria, they are destroying dams, because they interfere with the ecology, especially fish migration, and that adversely effects the native population.. among other adverse effects.
Reservoirs require rains, and we are experience severe droughts, even Lake Mead is drying up.
The easiest fix is to paint all roofs white.
Solar hot water. We had a house in Miami, built in 1939, with a solar hot water unit. Technology is two pieces of glass. https://www.energy.gov/energysaver/solar-water-heaters
Attended seminars in DC produced by DOE & MIT re thermal power. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_energy Many sites are close to geysers and hot springs. In others, need to drill only a few feet. PG&E has several geothermal plants. Geothermal energy is derived from heat within the Earth's crust. https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/geothermal/geothermal-power-plants.php
Also thermal storage, taking advantage of heat pumps. https://www.pge.com/includes/docs/pdfs/mybusiness/energysavingsrebates/demandresponse/pls/TESFactsheet.pdf
Bidenomics is all over it. https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/blog/2023/10/23/bidenomics-in-action-clean-energy-jobs-and-investments-taking-hold-across-america/
We have owned this property since 2001, circumstances had us move away, until 2019, then we moved back, we rented it out in the meantime, but because it has a detached garage apartment, we would spend summers here, to keep an eye on it., then in 2019 we moved back.
The shingle roof was less than 20 years old, and was poorly installed, so we hired a family owned business to install a a metal roof, and although green seemed to be the favorite color of other roofs in my neck of the woods, I had them install a white roof, a heat pump, propane for the "fireplace" and the water heaters. I don't know if a solar water heater would work, especially in fall and winter, at 48 degrees latitude
Yes Mr. Solomon. Heat pumps are a great source of energy transfer. They can pump energy out of the house and into the ground in Summer and out of the ground and into the house in Winter.
Would painting all roofs white compensate for the loss of sunlight reflection by the melting poles? Probably not, but it should help.
Wow, great question, if all roofs were white I'm sure it would help. But you are now competing with an asphalt, developer, construction and roofing lobby, and as you well know we got the best government money can buy, and it predates Citizens United by 200 years. The enemy is the press and the pulpit. (When it comes to the "press" Trump like a broken clock is correct)
Ms. Maloney. The light reflected off the earth back into space is in the infrared range of frequencies. This infrared cannot penetrate the CO2 in the atmosphere. So the heat stays here. Does not escape into space beyond the atmosphere. This is called the "greenhouse effect." The light reaching us from the sun covers the entire range of visible light from ultraviolet to infrared. It is light at the red end of the spectrum which fails to penetrate the CO2 at high enough rates. The rest of the spectrum of light heats the planet's surface. The white roof might keep the house cooler. But the heat from the reflected light would be captured by the atmosphere.
Thank you for explaining. I read that we need the ice to reflect heat from the sun and that we were losing the ice caps, making climate change accelerate.
Mr. Farrar it is easy to-self install solar panels. I have done it more than once; on land and on my boats. There are two types:
1) Monocrystalline which are highly efficient but rigid and their efficiency declines rapidly with even a small shadow over them.
2) Polycrystalline which are about half as efficient as the rigid kind. But the polycrystalline panels are flexible and far less affected by shade. They work on overcast days, while the rigid ones shut down.
You are correct, professional installation is a rip-off.
I have seen solar panels which you can actually roll up, the problem is installation. I'm too old, to even climb a ladders, also temblecie, if I could install them on the roof, then there is wiring them into my power supply.
I live in the country, and have a transformer next to my driveway, and it ties into the main, which supplies power to the house and the garage apartment. I imagine that the wiring alone, as well as the installing the feedback to the transformer, would be expensive.
I just bought a gas/propane generator. The local propane supplier is out here now, connecting it to the propane. It replaces a gas generator, which I now have to sell, but it only connects via a 100 ft construction electrical cord, to the house to run the refrigerator, TV, CPAP and oxygen concentrators. We have a history of power outages, either an anchor snags the undersea cable, or high winds fell a tree, and their are planned outages for maintenance.
William Farrar: This is probably not the aspect of the installation job that you were expecting to discuss, but one of the great stupidities about roof work is that there are no connection points on the ridge beam to connect a human harness to. So people fall off of rooves as soon as they trip or lose their friction. It's ridiculous. Every single roof should be made with eye-bolts sticking up out of the ridge beam in the center of the roof. Perhaps with two of them and a strong wire between them to slide a connection on, like some dog runs. Nobody should be walking on a roof without being tied in. So why are there no connectors on a typical roof? Can I call it rank stupidity? Venality? You tell me. But that would make it so much safer for you and me to be up there working. Just one more aspect of the American construction industry that exasperates me. I'll bet there is at least one country in Europe that requires this common sense device.
Great comment. I suspect that one reason there is no eye bolt on the ridge is almost impossible to lay a leak proof surface around them.
I have two buildings, my home and a two story 2 /12 car garage, the second floor is a two br apartment. It has a barn roof. I had it reroofed about 8 years ago. I didn't watch him do it, but am amazed that he could, asphalt shingles, my house is roofed with white aluminum panels.
about 20 years ago, when I was a spry 64 year old, I climbed up on both roofs, to sprinkle. Tide and TSP to clean the roofs of moss, works great. I also painted both buildings with a 2 inch brush, had to rent a screw jack, to lift me to the heights necessary, and painted while holding my breath. Standing at the door of an aircraft in flight at 1,000 to 5,000 ft attached to a static line is one thing, but being lifted into the air 20 ft or so is quite another.
In my neck of the woods, roofing contractors pick up day labor, from the parking lot of Home Depot. The family that did my roof are Jehovahs' Witnesses and the whole family is involved, the daughter was the pilot who flew in the father. Not a way to make a living.
M. Farrar. I was planning to install panels on the house I currently live in But my wife and kids will probably yell at me to stay off that GD ladder. At 81 and in poor health, they are probably correct. I do like the idea of a propane powered inverter. I might get one. My sister has an automatic one. It's great. She lives isolated in the woods.
Mr. Farrar. I have a friend who is an engineer and installed her own solar panel which sends electricity back into the grid. The power company pays her for that power by subtracting the money from her bill. It cost her $20 grand to do it 10 years ago. She said it was not worth it but did it anyway because she lives in the woods.
We have a much better deal than that on our solar panels.
Tell me about it please. How much, how many sq ft, and who?
It is a state/federal program. We are connected to ComEd and will pay $100/mo. for twenty years. It includes the electric bill. The interest is 4%. We get a $7000. rebate after 8 months of the contract which we will pay on the principle. Our current electric bills are approx. $100. dollars a month at present, but are expected to increase substantially in the next year or so. This is a better deal for ComEd than it is for us, but it will lock in our electric bill for the next 20 years, if we're not all fried by then.
How much was the total cost, before borrowing. We have no mortgage or debts, other than a credit card we use for on line shopping and pay that off every month before it is due. We pay all bills, in full, when we receive the invoice.
We need a pipeline from flood zones to the parched and arid Southwest.
Are there oceans under our oceans?
How the Ocean Inside the Mantle Affects the Habitability of ...
The mantle rain model also suggests that there is currently one ocean mass in the upper mantle. “Together with the ocean on the surface,” says Andrault, “this ensures that there will always be water on Earth's surface.” “We still have a lot to learn about the deep water cycle,”
Saudi Arabia tapped into it's 10,000 year old aquifer, to water the desert, as they were trying to be self sustaining, and the land collapsed as the water was used up.
Now they have turned to massive de salinization, using reverse osmosis.
I have mixed emotions about rescuing Desereta, the land of Mormons, as they are prime instigators, along with the Catholic Church and Evangelicals of the culture war that has bred Trumpism and with it authoritarians.
Pipeline. Canada has more lakes than the rest of the world combined. If the Romans could build Aqueducts without the benefit of machinery, it should be easy to run pipes from Canada into our major aquifers. https://www.usgs.gov/mission-areas/water-resources/science/principal-aquifers-united-states
Mr. Solomon. It would not be in the best interest of Canadians to allow that. I don't blame them. We have enough of our own if we stop polluting it.
I believe the obstacle has always been monetizing water, from an ethical POV. That's why it hasn't happened yet.
Water is already monetized. Do you not get a water bill, or is it hidden in your public utilities bill. I have a well, no chemicals, not even the drugs that people ingest.
Oh Ms. D, it has already happened.
Where? We have no water pipeline like that in the SW???
In France there are no short flights allowed in the Country. IF you want to go somewhere you take a train or electric coach.
Trains are fast sometimes not reliable, but worth it.
As for the 2 wars how much pollution does that cause?
The weather, rains, washed out the pollution of the two World Wars. Man's activities since the 1950's have spewed heavy gases into the atmosphere, resulting in global warming.
So you live in France?
I live where I am at the moment. 4 Country's later.
I call myself international. I do not want anything to do with patriotism or religion or any other .ism.
Patriotism is a bald attempt to exploit the drive to protect one's close tribe extended out to apply to some notion of country or peoples that one will never know or meet. The exploitation is done for the most venal of reasons; to generate such intense emotions that a parent will insanely send off his/her sons to be killed in the service of the elites of that same country. Good for you, rejecting that nonsense. I tell my grandkids, never, NEVER, put yourself in any position where some idiot can force you to take a chance of getting shot, or killed, for some ethereal, unknown reason. Run anywhere. Make a life in Canada or somewhere else. But NEVER become a part of any military machine.
Mr. Palmer I like your advice to your young ones. I was two years in Army ROTC which was required of males in my college. (that requirement stuff is another story) After a male student's two years of service was up we each went alone into a room with two officers who had combat experience. They asked each and very one of us why we thought we were good enough to be second lieutenants in the U.S. infantry. These guys were making the false assumption that I wanted to join the army and go fight in Vietnam. I said I had "no desire or intention to go half way around the world to kill or be killed by people against whom I had no grudge." I said I was "certain that some officer higher than lieutenant with the brains of a monkey and the soul of a butterfly would order me to do something dangerous which would get me or my men killed" This I intended to avoid by not signing the contract. I barely knew where Vietnam was. I told them I thought the war was used to "enrich wealthy families like the Rockefellers." They almost flew into a rage. But caught themselves before they made fools of themselves in front of a 20 year old punk. I saw it in their gestures and their eyes. The interview was over. They had failed to sign up a new piece of meat.
I subsequently made sure my son and nephew heard this story from my own lips years later. I never regretted it. I only regret more boys didn't do the same.
Not long after I was drafted and became a draft resister. But that's another story. They never got me. I was an inch away from fleeing to Canada as I lived in Detroit and visited Canada often. I did not flee.
Unfortunately that series of events followed me the rest of my life and contributed to my firing without cause from my faculty position some years later. I was placed on the politically suspicious person list by both Army intelligence and the Michigan State Police. Yes... State police, if you can believe it. This was not legal of course. But they did it anyway. I know this because years later I had a student who was in the intelligence division of the Mich. State Police. He liked me and told me to use the FOIA to get my records. By then they had put my wife on the list also. She was twice president of our faculty union and three times chief faculty negotiator in our collective bargaining sessions.
In the end, was thrown out of three universities besides being subsequently fired from my faculty position. I hung in there and earned my BA, MA and PhD out of spite. So you can see I appreciate your advice to your young ones.
A perfect example of "the truth hurts"
This is truly awful.
America put the foxes in charge of the chicken coop. Being rich and successful does not make a good leader all the time. It just means that you are greedy and you may lie steal and cheat cheat to attain it. The supporters of unlimited greed have bought their way into control of the government and along the way, they did not invest in alternative energy or planned parenthood, because they wanted cheap labor and more consumers to drive the land prices up and all commodities up also in order to increase consumer spending. The churches have been supplying laborers, soldiers and breeders to the dictators for centuries! Those right wingers opposed to birth control and abortion are mostly to blame, all throughout the world. Overpopulation was predicted. The right wingers strike again!
Mr. Johnson I agree with you almost all the way. I taught population for many years and my Indian colleagues assured me that the claim made by Americans (me, for one) that the world is overpopulated is an an ethnocentric Western bias. I did not agree with them while populations were growing in most of the world. However, in recent decades since my retirement, most of the nations in the world now have stable populations, meaning the POSITIVE growth RATES are no longer increasing. A large number in fact are also stationary, meaning they have a ZERO RATE of growth. Many are experiencing NEGATIVE RATES of growth. In other words they are shrinking. This turn-around is due to the increase in urbanization worldwide.
Also an increase in female education and subsequent independence. The very thing that the Mike Johnson's want to stop and regress, because it causes sexual insecurity in some males, like him. The man is a dweeb, look at him, an insecure little shit, he has no personal authority and he knows it, that is why he clings to the Bible and his god, for authority.
Mr. Dobbertin: I can't follow your connection between your Indian colleagues and their belief that overpopulation is an ethnocentric Western bias. I was thinking American natives but perhaps you mean people from India that has a gigantic population. Are those Indians committed to unrestrained population growth? Is that a principle that they are taught? I never heard of this.
Mr. palmer. Yes those colleagues were from India. I think they actually agreed with me but could not admit it out loud because of the huge, and at that time, growing Indian population. I think it was a matter of some kind of Hindu pride which I never understood. Perhaps if I had ever lived in India, I would have understood. I really did like those guys and loved their cuisine. I think Korean and Indian food are the best I have ever tasted. With the possible exception of Detroit Soul Food.
Let's talk about India, specifically it's caste system.
When the Aryans invaded India (I assume that these were the people the Greeks and Romans called Scythians. They created a caste system, based on color. India has preserved the caste system, but because of the sexual proclivities and needs of men, color is no longer the determinant. The caste system is now about occupation
The system of the Aryans (Scythians?) was meant to keep the races separated (anti miscegenation). and it is so severe, that should the shadow of an untouchable fall on an Aryan (word means noble), the noble was to drink his own urine.
Ghandi turned it on it's head, by drinking his own urine and prescribing it for others.
There are 5 classes of castes (and they have their own subdivisions)
Brahmins (priests, teachers), Kshatriyas (rulers, warriors), Vaishyas (landowners, merchants) and Sudras (servants), and the 5th group is the group of the untouchables, called Dalits.
You can tell which Indians who migrate to the US. and which caste they belong to, for instance the Vaishyas, inevitably wind up as Republicans (naturally conservative), like Vivek Ramaswamy's parents, or Nikki Haley's parents.
Liberals like Ahrundati Roy are from the Sudra class,. Anand Giridharadas, who often is on MSNBC as a pundit, is obviously either Sudra, or based on his Anand Giridharadas even a Dalit.
Kamala Devi Harris was born in Oakland, California,[9] on October 20, 1964.[10] Her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, was a Tamil Indian biologist,.
The Tamils were once very dark skinned, and as such considered "untouchables"
There have been suggestions (for instance Sir Richard Burton.. not the actor, the 19th century explorer) and others have suggested that the Tamils and Ethiopians shared an origin story.
Apparently breeding and British colonialism, disrupted the caste system., based on skin color.
India's caste system, has bled into American politics.
Mr. Farrar. When I was an academic my friend Binod Agrawal, a Brahmin and a brilliant Cultural Anthropologist with a degree from the Univ. of Wisconsin insisted I read the Bhagavad Gita which, he said, would help me understand India. I do not read San skrit and the Gita is looooong. I beat out my brains on an English translation and gained only a little insight into Indian Mythology. I had already rejected Western Mythology when young. So there was no way I was ready to substitute or adopt Eastern Mythology. Eventually I had to tell Dr. Agrawal that the Gita gave me a headache and seemed to be the philosophy of a slave. But it gave me no insights into India's virtually defining cultural characteristic: the caste system. Binod was an affectionate, extremely tolerant man who overlooked my clumsy, unintentional insult and this is a summary of what I learned from him:
When India's first and longest serving Prime Minister was a young man he went to Cambridge university on a scholarship. At Cambridge Jawaharlal Nehru was taught by English scholars that a light skinned group of humans called Aryans descended into India from the North and took a dominating control over the darker skinned people there. These Aryans imposed a system of social stratification on the Indians which was based on skin color. Nehru then incorporated that narrative in his dissertation about the history of India. And because he subsequently became the most significant national political leader in modern Indian history, many people began to take that story seriously.
This entire story of Aryan-introduced social stratification based on color is an invention of the racist scholars at Cambridge. For centuries before Nehru went to England; Hindu Scholars were writing a true and accurate history of their own land. The whole bit about an invasion of superior "Aryans" from the North is an English invention. The Indian system of social stratification is something that evolved over centuries. It is all bound up with Indian Mythology and the distinction between the 5 levels was based on inherited occupations right from the earliest Indian times. Stratification based on skin color is a view from the perspective of Western eyes. The same eyes that created brown-skinned-Negro Chattel slavery in the New World.
A compelling counter argument. I see the merit, yet there it stands, even today there is lingering racism in the caste system. Brahmins by and large are light skinned, untouchables very dark skinned, and those in between, gradations of light to dark.
You would be hard pressed to find a dark skinned Brahmin.
Right wing Indians in America, tend to be "white" like Nikki Haley, dark skinned Indians in America tend to be liberal like Anand Giridharadasor Ahrundati Roy.
Pretty much like in America and Europe, even Russia
You tantalize with your final observation. Why does urbanization reduce fertility?
Mmerose. In countries which are largely rural the main economic activity is agriculture of various sorts. Farming. Children are an asset because they can work for the family in agricultural pursuits. Farm-work. This encourages high fertility.
In cities children are a liability because they are expensive to raise and they contribute nothing to the family. Also cities are more likely to have possibilities for females to acquire education outside the home and jobs to work outside the home. this encourages low fertility.
These are factors which the brilliant English Anglican Bishop Thomas Malthus ( first honors in mathematics at Cambridge and father of Demography) could not imagine, much less, predict in 1830.
Getting back to you delayed, but in the meantime it occurred to me that your excellent explanation correlates nicely with (pro-choice) "blue" urban islands in the sea of ex-urban (holy sperm no matter what) "red" map that America has politically. Evidence seems to be that this divergence is smoothed out if government actually supports mothers and the post-born, i.e. Scandinavia, of course.
LOL. Holy sperm no matter what. You have just but your finger on the real , visceral reason behind the antiabortion crowd, which (BTW) are not all Christians, I met (on line) an atheist libertarian who believed that women who have an abortion should be executed for muder. How dare they reject the holy sperm.
I'd like to know where you got your figures on the evil "meat" and the good "vegetables". From Mother Earth News?
Whether you like meat or support the meat industry, it is well accepted in the health care industry that a diet heavy in meat is not healthy. Increased plague in the coronaries leading to hypertension, leading to compromised heart function ( ejection fraction), associated w thoracic and abdominal aneurysms, as well as peripheral vascular disease. Depending on one’s genetics, you either see this sooner rather than later.
By the way, cardiovascular disease is the number one cause or mortality.
Mr. Moncrief. Cardiovascular disease is not the number one cause of death. Vascular disease is. Fatal emboli and aneurisms occur in both the heart and brain as well as other organs. These emboli are indeed caused by build-up of soft plaque in the epithelia cells. But this buildup is not caused by excessive lipid-rich meat consumption. The human body cannot survive without cholesterol. Every cell in the body needs it. 85% of it is produced in the liver. Leaving only 15% or less contributed by our diet. Hence cholesterol from the food is not significant as a source.
Think of each cholesterol cell as analogous to a miniature "tool box." When inflammation occurs in the epithelial cells of the arteries, these cholesterol "tool boxes" travel to the sight and get deposited there in order to repair the damage from the inflammation. That is the function of the cholesterol "tool boxes." Occasionally a piece of cholesterol-formed plaque breaks loose and travels to the heart, brain or other organ, potentially causing death through deprivation of oxygen and nutrients. The cholesterol is involved in this death of tissue. But it is not the root cause. Sugar is.
We must ask: What causes the inflammation in the wall of he artery in the first place? The answer is sugar in the diet, especially cane sugar and high fructose corn syrup, and all of the other forms of sugar we eat. Sugar (glucose) in the blood causes the body to produce insulin which breaks down the sugar into an assimilable form. Concentrated sugar causes spikes in insulin. This results in inflammation of the artery walls. Thus the buildup of dangerous soft plaque. So we see that the root cause of vascular disease is spiking glucose and insulin caused by high concentrations of sugar in the diet.
The leading cause of death one hundred years ago was infection like influenzas, pneumonia, polio, etc.,not vascular disease. This change in causes of death must be explained. The food industry in the last century has become one of the biggest businesses in the U.S.; huge corporations concentrated in fewer and fewer hands each decade. The Kellogg brothers thought, for religious reasons, children should eat a non-meat breakfast. They were Seventh Day Adventists, vegetarians. Today manufactured food of the sort they developed is ubiquitous. Commonly, the main ingredient is sugar.
Americans typically begin very early in life eating lots of sugar.
Now what about all this concern over cholesterol in the diet? During WWll an economist named Ancel keys handled the logistics of packaging food in convenient containers for American soldiers in the field. after the war he acquired a reputation as a nutritionist. He was not. In the 1950s he conducted a nutrition study called The seven Countries which was so flawed as to be flagrantly dishonest. On the basis of this dishonest study he reported that cholesterol in the food we eat is killing us. On January 13, 1961 his face appeared on the front cover of Time magazine with the headline which claimed fat in the diet causes death from CAD. This was the spark that lit the flame of sensational claims about cholesterol; which are still with us today.
Fear of cholesterol has generated a profitable industry. Food producers who sell industrial products mislabelled as food, and full of carbohydrates, especially sugars. As the hysteria over meat spread the U. S. government got into the game. The first government dietary guidelines were published in 1980 recommending low cholesterol intake. In response, the food industry began to remove lipids from their products and found that the public did not like the flat taste of fat-free food. So the industry began to add sugar to make the food more tasty. In 1980, 15%of Americans were obese. Beginning after 1980 that number immediately began to rapidly rise. Today it is over 40% of Americans in the obese category.
Drug companies got into the game by developing drugs that lower cholesterol in the blood. Statins. They are the hottest selling, most profitable drugs in the U.S. today. In spite of all the hype about how Statins lower cholesterol and lower death rates, there is not convincing empirical evidence to support this claim. Virtually all the studies into Statins are funded by drug companies and they refuse to release the raw data from those studies. Hence no independent researchers can verify their results. Furthermore there are independent studies which indicate Statins do not significantly lower cholesterol nor do they lower death rates.
Meat can be harmful to us; but not because of the naturally occurring cholesterol. Meat is harmful when modern industrial food production fills it full of various chemical additives. Nitrites, nitrates, salt and so on.
Hucksters are found all over the world. But America is the rich land where it has been raised to an immense, institutionalize form.
If you are interested I can provide many examples of original, empirical studies and meta studies about this topic.
Mr. Dobbertin: I don't know how you got onto this topic from Thom's article but I love it and all the subsequent comments it gave rise to. I agree with you. I eat tons of dairy and I ignore all the warnings about fat and the magic ingredient-of-the-month (currently turmeric, formerly blueberries, acai berries, apple cider vinegar and those monstrosities, various gummi bears with magical ingredients). I know how unproven all the statin obsession is. When I had a hernia (A HERNIA!) some doc prescribed me a statin. Fortunately I had enough knowledge to laugh at him. I am 85, eat fruits and vegetables by nature and rarely get any sugar outside of some ice cream now and then. My typical breakfast is a head of broccoli. I cringe when I remember my childhood of breakfast Cheerios. The American breakfast of cereals is the most highly processed you can find. Imagine boiling up oats until they are soft, chopping them up, mixing them with "vitamins", bulking agents, preservatives, cohering adjuvants and then extruding them through spinnerets into doughnut form, drying them in an oven and then packing them for unsuspecting children. Yukk! No diabetes anywhere in sight. Haven't had a soda in fifty years. For carbs I eat pastas or special breads like croissants and never worry about it. I really can't believe the claim that your body breaks down starches into sugars the same as eating a soluble sugar. It's got to be a slow, measured process quite different from guzzling HFCS sodas. I pay no attention to the cholesterol Nazis. Cholesterol is insoluble in water and so the absorption of ingested cholesterol from your gut has got be slow if even possible. Despite this, my labs show Cholesterol to be in the middle of their preferred range (like all my values). I know about the Framingham study that exploded all the cholesterol warnings but I never heard of all those other studies you mentioned. Wonderful interchange. Thanks to all you guys and your arcane knowledges.
Paul, thanks for the very valuable information. I was diagnosed with insulin resistance in 2006. referred to a dietitian, all I learned was stay away from sugar and simple carbs.
So I stopped using sugar, and switched to Stevia (no sugars) and drink one can of Stevia each day with dinner. Otherwise my only drink is water. Those with insulin resistance carry fat high on he stomach, not the beer drinkers pot belly.
I am naturally thin, been so all of my life, and the only excess weight I have is high on my stomach. In February this year, I started a diet, no breakfast, lunch is soup, home made or Campbells, and dinner is usually a shrimp or taco salad (with refried beans). I cannot get pork, salmon or most fish past my lips, nor fowl of any type. So I use Beyond beef or beyond sausage.
I weigh myself every morning and prick my finger just before the noon meal.
I've lost 40 lbs, and my blood glucose has dropped to between 85 and 106, my AIC as of Friday, was 5.6
Diabetes is one scary disease, my wife's grandmother lost two legs, a friend lost one leg and then died, a cousin died of diabetes, his mother and my mother were insulin resistant.
Apparently the disease is genetic and passed down from the mother, not the father. No one on my fathers side ever had diabetes, either they lived into their 90's or died of environmentally caused cancer. (Either lived in cancer capital of US. Crossett. AR. home of Koch's Georgia Pacific or on the gulf coast just outside of the oil refineries that they worked in (cancer alley).
I have read this series of comments with great interest, since I come from a hyper-cholesteremic family yet, myself, have no sweet tooth at all, but have same cholesterol as my mother, who turned down statins, and her sister, who was "pickled" (my word) in statins, both surviving >90. What I gather is that the inflammation is the key. (?) I broke out with rosacea in my mid thirties, with flagrant rash and pimples in high stress job by late thirties, and the dermatologist was, like, duh, too bad. Dr. Andrew Weil early book connected me to supplement of GLA via, highest concentration, Borage oil. The thing is, that if you are a certain ultra-white European, maybe GLA can suppress inflammation throughout your circulatory system. (?) I am 70, have one stent but always wonder, is the GLA the reason I'm alive at all?
Mmerose. If the rosacea you had in your youth left a butterfly pattern on your face, over your nose. I suggest you might want to go to an elderly Internist or Endocrinologist and ask if you might have Lupus Erythematosus. Go to an elderly doctor with much experience. Younger doctors are much less likely to have diagnosed it before or even seen it. It is a rare disease of the immune system. It is not curable. But there are ways to avoid flare-ups and treat symptoms if they occur. Do you have any accurate photos of your face when you were young?
Thank you for your kind reflections. My outbreak only started with a single indelible red spot on right cheek in mid thirties. What's sad is the only thing current dermatologist has to recommend is anti-fungal, (no help) same as 30 years ago. Fortunately, it's not too severe, and I'm old anyway!.
Mmerose. I know nothing about Andrew Weil's research, although I have read a little about him. I cannot comment on his ideas.
My research at Iowa State Univ. was in Agriculture for the USDA. My research experience at Michigan State Univ. was for one of its medical schools the Allopathic one. It had both Osteopathic and Allopathic medical schools on one campus in those days. It also had a nursing school and a veterinary school. Can you believe it? Four medical schools on one campus. The place was huge, covering several square miles. For graduate work it was great. For undergrad work; I do not recommend it. Too big.
You are correct in that inflammation is the big thing to look for.
It is interesting that your aunt or mother made it to over 90 with hypercholesterolemia. My point exactly. My mother-in-law died in her 102nd year and had high cholesterol and loved to eat huge piles of bacon every morning. I had a good friend Ebbe who was one of the oldest people in the U. S. when she died in her 112th year. She ate anything she wanted.
I do not come to any generalized conclusions on the basis of only two women. But they are indeed examples. It has been done. I refuse statins also. They are poison which attacks the liver.
Uh oh. I don't take statins. I refuse drugs made in a laboratory, but I do take red yeast rice, 600 mg in the morning , with cranberry juice and a bit of apple, ground in a blender and 600 in the evening
Thanks for feedback.
Thou dost protest too much.
Heart Disease is the number cause of death.
In addition you’re confusing the pro inflammatory response of hyperglycemia for excess lipid producing plaque ( with or without calcium). It is the rupture of the plaque, forming a thrombosis that results in sudden death or severe ischemia. Again, it is genetics along w the consumption of lipid that will determine risk. Peripheral arterial disease has the same pathophysiology but is not the leading cause of death.
Your comment would have been informative and helpful,, had you not started with "Thou protest too much", That was unnecessary, and a misappropriation of Shakespeare, as Mr Dobbertin was not protesting.
You did yourself harm .
Just so you know, I’m completely apathetic to your criticism of my writing style. It would be like me telling you that red yeast is not as effective as statins. It’s your choice.
The writer spent an enormous amount of space trying to sound convincing in his biased ( and unscientific approach) arguing the lack of evidence for death rate ( #1) for heart disease. If that s not protesting waaaay too much I don’t know what is.
By the way, if the red yeast is not reducing your cholesterol/tryglicerides/LDL then you’re wasting money.
Whatever, I really don't care what your opinion of me happens to be.
Fact is the subject of your complaint was not complaining, hence "thou protests too much" is a non sequitur
Mr./Ms. Zeits. Why was heart disease not the number one cause of death a century ago. Are you aware of the Seven Countries study? The original West of Scotland study? Have you looked at the statistics on rise in obesity and diabetes in the U. S.? the Women's Health Initiative 1991? The MRFIT study1974-1982? The Tecumseh Community health study?The World health organization study 1971? The Lipid Research Clinics CoronaryPrimary Prevention trial 1984? The Anti-Coronary Club Project 1957? I could list a dozen more I think. But this is from my memory right now.
George Mann was the designer of the infamous Framingham study 1950-1960. Are you aware of what he said about it in the New England Journal of Medicine 1977?
Have you seen Kilmer McCully's study of homocysteine levels and CHD? He was at Harvard.
Finally, I ask you in all seriousness, do you know the difference between actual measures of variation between experimental and control groups on the one hand and relative measures on the other hand? Do you understand the concept of mathematical "Normality" as first developed by the brilliant French mathematician De Moivre? It is the foundation of inferential statistics. Please forgive me if this sounds sarcastic. I do not mean it that way at all. I have looked into these studies and more as well. I taught inferential stats for 4 decades.
or you could have spent your time acquiring a medical degree and understand the literature.
A first grader can do a google search and find the number one cause of death ( again, cardiovascular disease). Whether you understand the pathophysiology does not concern nor your studies of correlations. I find it ironic that you mention the Framingham study ( still ongoing). It focused lipodystrophies as the primary cause of fatal MI and has contributed a great deal the interaction of genetics and diet.
As we say in medicine, Occam’s razor.
Mr./Ms. Zeits your comment about the Framingham debacle indicates that you did not read the 1977 words of the man who designed it.
If you did you would know that the "new" info coming out of it is a continuation of twisted figures and lying with statistics. Your comment about correlation indicates you know nothing about statistical inference. Correlation has nothing to do with what I said and little relation to the t-tests and Z-tests researchers use in their stratified, randomized, often double blind studies. What you said has nothing to do with Occam's razor. What you said is wrong and somewhat non-sensible. I cannot make out if you are hopelessly confused and uninformed or if you simply made typing errors. Stick with Google for your research and you will learn little of value beyond that of a first grader. A little analysis can take one well beyond the attention-directing (or misdirecting) algorithms of Machine thinking. Medical degrees indicate technical training similar to plumbers, computer techs, and electricians they do not reflect education. There is a difference. When the uninformed begin to substitute "genetics" in their statements as a substitute for analysis, I yawn. I've heard genetics a thousand times from college Freshmen whose heads are filled with folklore.
I am 84, see my doctor every six months, just had a Lifeline Screening, all of the tests on my heart and circulatory system are normal, except I have mild plaque in my left and right arteries.
I am mostly, a vegetarian now, except for mini pepperoni sausages, which I eat on occasion, I can't stand the taste of fresh pork, fowl or anything but mild white fish, like haddock,cod and flounder. The only meat that I ate in my life was beef, and until I joined the service I was a vegetarian (my mom was the world's worst cook, and couldn't even cook a hamburger, much less a roast.
I steered (pun) away from beef for all of my adult life, best I could, except when I had no choice, which is what happens in a chow hall or in a combat zone. Even hungry in the jungle I could not even chew a pork chop when delivered by a Huey.
I haven't eaten red meat in years, well except on trips when hunger drives me to McDonalds, and I only make about one or two of them a year, for a specialist medical appointment, yet I still have arterial plaque, maybe it would have been worse,if I regularly consumed red meat.
My last office visit on Sep 12, 23 was a blood pressure of 130/64 not bad for a prediabetic 84 yr old.
I chalk that up to being a "semi-vegetarian" Until 2005 my body weight fluctuated around 140 lbs, I'm now 5'8 was 5'10 when young. Then diagnosed with insulin resistance. and I put on about 80 lbs, all of it in the upper stomach, none in ass legs, arms. In Feb this year I started semi fasting, cut intake of sugars and simple carbs, ate a protein bar for lunch, maybe soup, and a light dinner, mostly salads and have lost 37 lbs, and my Blood Glucose has dropped to between 97 and 106.
We are indeed what we eat, and for the most part, Americans are gluttons, especially for fast foods like burgers, fried chicken, french fries, ice cream and milk shakes.
Mr. Farrar. I managed to go from 182 lbs. to 132lbs. in one summer. Too much weight loss, too quickly. I do not recommend it. I had one day when I was so weak I could barely stand without help. No Internist would recommend it either. On advice of my doctor I put back on some weight. I am no where near 182 lbs. though. I am 5' 7", around 148 lbs. It fluctuates a little. At age 18 I was 138 lbs. and on the school gymnastic team.
I can tell you how I did it. But you would not like the diet I used. Furthermore, it was an unhealthy and even dangerous diet as my Internist said.
Thanks,. Diabetes runs in my family, passed along via via mothers, to child.
It starts as Insulin Resistance and progresses. I have a 1st Cousin who died of diabetes (male), sweet were his comfort food, I have an aunt who had it, by mother who had it (she died from other problems, congestive heart failure).
And I have it. I steer clear, best I can, from simple carbs, because the body breaks them down into sugar, and my body can't handle the insulin spikes, as I am insulin resistant. My meal today has been a protein bar (IQ bar, only 1 sugar and 11 carbs. no cholesterol, my dinner will be another shrimp salad, with Marie's blue cheese dressing, only one tablespoon, but too many as I am lactose intolerant and it comes out almost as fast as it comes in.
By the way, in answer to your comment following this response. I enjoyed your comment on dietary cholesterol.
When feeling randy, I eat Wheatbix, with margarine, salt and Coconut/Almond "Milk". I know it isn 't milk, I haven't drank milk since I was a kid, it makes me fart, and the kids in school, that sat behind me called me fartyard. And I haven't ate sugary cereals or sugar on anything since I was a kid, If I need to sweeten something I use Stevia (zero sugars), and at night with my salad, a can of Zevia, a soft drink sweetened with Zevia, (zero sugars), alas it comes in an aluminum can which I otherwise steer clear of. some reports say that it is a cause of Alzheimers and I already have Sometimers (so my wife says)
Mr. Farrar. Sounds to me as though you have a handle on it. I too satisfy my sweet tooth with Stevia. I hope we don't some day see some reliable research that indicates it causes Subterranean, Central Amazonian Guff Guff fatality. We can always hope, right?
LOL. Incredibly, Stevia comes from a member of the geranium family .
I watched, over a decade ago, a documentaria. An Amazionian tribe had a cure for diabetes.
One of the PhRMA companies, sent a person to the Amazon to get the formula. Took it back tested it and quit because they couldn't find the chemical, they ignored the Amazonians who told them that it wasn't one plant, but a combination.
I think also they don't want to cure diabetes, cancer or anything They learned their lesson with Jonas Saulk, cure a disease with one shot or pill and there go your profits.
Have you noticed that polio is rearing its head again. Thanks to RFK Jr and the rest of the brain dead right wingers
I came back from the Dr's today, semi annual diabetes check up, A1C is 5.6, my diet is working, also lost 32 lbs.. And got my flu shot, now to get the latest covid booster.
As far as I am concerned, all those idiot anti vaxxers and MAGAts, can and should die off, maybe there is then the chance of saving our democracy.
Funny Stevia should come up. I so don't have a sweet tooth that I taste "sweet" from across the room, when someone opens a packet.
Can't stand it. Always wanted only the bacon and eggs, or maybe a hamburger for breakfast. Some individuals are biologically compatible with the Atkins program, definitely me!
Mr. Farrar. you definitely do not sound to me like someone with Alzheimers. You do sometimes come off as a Grumpy Old Man though. Have you seen the movie?
Mr. Farrar. You might be interested in my reply to Mr. Moncrief about dietary cholesterol.
I have a love/hate reaction to this, but fun is connection to Mom being a bad cook! My Mom was an early career woman who enthusiastically deployed the busy-woman's 50's "microwave," known as the "pressure cooker." If you want to cure your kid of ever wanting to eat anything good for them, reduce it to bitter mush in a pressure cooker. Worked on me!
Laughs out loud. I use my pressure cooker for two things split pea soup, and it is a mush, which is just the way I want it, and black eyed and pinto beans., but I time them so they don't turn to mush
Black eyed peas, rice and okra, my favorite meal, besides Spinach.
Mr. Farrar. As a young man in Detroit I found a couple places near my apt. where I could get the best okra in my life. They were "soul food" places. What ever happened to soul food restaurants? The food was unique.
Mr. Farrar. I do not think of "fast foods" as food. I think of them as industrial products misleadingly sold as food. If we do not kill ourselves with the machinery of war we will do it with the industrial poisons called food.
And it’s contributing to the climate crisis. This guy needs to pull his investments from the meat lobby and do his due diligence. Ignorance kills.
Mr. Sievers. Please see my reply to Mr. Montcrief. It might address your question.
The reality is that there is not sufficient data or modeling capabilities to know all that is taking place. The U.S. government cannot even forecast the weather a few days in advance with any accuracy. The only weather stations are at airports in a few cities and so meteorologists need to extrapolate (guess) to fill in the gaps.
The problem is that the people in power, i.e. the energy and agriculture industries, do not care about future generations of people that they do not know and are not going to encounter in their gated communities or on their private jets or their children meet at private schools. The people who care do not have the power to effect change and this has been true for the environmental degradation in the USA and in Europe and in the overseas colonies they have controlled.
Good piece, Thom. US military leadership believe climate change is real, and has been preparing for the downstream consequences of it for decades now. It could get ugly.
Yes Exregulator, so I have read also.
And we still have the tools to solve this crisis of our own making: we just have to use them before it’s too late. There isn't a loud enough hue and cry to make this a top news story and people are lazy when it involves taking some responsibility for their circumstances.
Get out in the street?
Never worked before, ie massive worldwide Iraq War demonstrations.
So long as the fossil fuel kingdom is able to rival the power of government (that's us), their poisonous reign will only accelerate the washing away of Earth and Earth's sole steward - democracy.
Most people probably failed to notice it but Thom just mentioned recycling IN A NEGATIVE LIGHT. He recognized that recycling is a corporate scam pushed by corporations BECAUSE it is an end-of-pipe approach. In other words, corporations who despise regulations (that might control what kind of crap they can make and send out into markets) are delighted to have the public take on the job of doing something - anything - with their degraded products after it is too late to do anything productive or effective. In other words, RECYCLING! Everyone knows that we are swimming in a world increasingly polluted by the no longer wanted detritus of our consumption - we call it WASTE. But nobody is doing anything about it because the deluded environmentalists and government actors are twisted up in their useless recycling efforts. It never seems to bother any activists that every reference to recycling is in the range of 5% or less. Sometimes there are phony reports of larger effects but the books are being cooked - on purpose! Alexander Pope told us a hundred years ago - "Hope springs eternal in the human breast, Man never is but always to be blest" Folks, he was talking about recycling. It's "promise" is always in the future. Never now. There is only one way to solve the problem of waste that is drowning us. That is to turn to universal, perpetual reuse. That is the essence of Zero Waste Theory (see zerowasteinstitute.org and gettingtozerowaste.com) which I developed when I was running Zero Waste Systems Inc. in the seventies and eighties. We need a massive research effort to find the specific ways in which every single product can be redesigned for perpetual reuse. This is not a magical effort, like recycling claims to be. You cannot just rub a lamp and get a genie to tell you how products need to be redesigned for reuse. Some of the general principles can be discerned, and I provide many detailed plans, but as an industry wide revolution it will take hard work - some of it political, some of if financial and much of it technical. It will provide a hundred thousand new jobs at a high technical level. It will begin a whole new industrial effort that can be exported worldwide at great profit (like solar panels). And it will reduce the ridiculous belief - promoted by know-nothing recyclers - that waste avoidance consists of keeping bare, low value, degraded materials out of the dump. Waste creation actually happens only when useless, throwaway products are created at great expenditure of raw materials, heat, clean water, clean air, electricity, labor and investment in a factory for one-time use to be consumed and then discarded. The actual act of discard - or burial or incineration - is just an afterthought, a coda to waste which was decided when that product was designed and manufactured TO BE DISCARDED. We are talking about a huge contribution to climate change which everyone is studiously avoiding. Just the remaking of steel and concrete products is estimated to generate over 15% of all carbon dioxide emissions. For ten years, Zero Waste Systems Inc. eagerly took on the most difficult reuse task of all by finding new uses for all of the excess, unwanted, used chemicals in the SF Bay Area. We found simple reuses for hundreds of tons, millions of dollars worth of chemicals. We proved the concept. If we can do that, why can't we succeed with the far easier designs for reuse for non-toxic, non-threatening general products of industry, including vehicles, buildings and bridges, not to mention garments, electronics and appliances. Like so many ventures, it isn't that hard if you just stop telling yourself why it can't be done and get down to doing it.
We have been conditioned to be consumers. Consumers are glorified, as they mean profits and jobs. In the 19th and early 20th Century, TB was a common disease,only they called it consumption. as the disease consumed the body. Consumers are consuming themselves and the future of their progeny.
I haul my own trash to the dump, but i have two recycle bins, which I empty into a lawn bag. I don't do it because I believe I am helping the environment, because a bag of recycle cost $5 and a bag of trash $10.
I am also aware that the recycle ends up in a dump, or being shipped to Asia,where waifs and women sort through it, and most plastics wind up in the Pacific, there are islands of plastic and trash in the Pacific, bigger than Rhode Island, and they are eaten by fish and birds, or strangled by the those plastic rings that hold soda bottles or cans. So we eat the plastic poisoned critters and poison ourselves.
Autopsies have revealed that the kidneys and livers are full of nano or micro plastics.
William: My garbage company gives me two bins. I put the garbage one away and never use it. They pretend that the contents of the second one will be recycled. Okay, I pretend that I am putting in recyclable stuff. We both know it is a dance of deceit. I say it reminds me of the Soviet era joke by a worker: "they pretend to pay us so we pretend to work".
The reason I never use the garbage bin is because the only use of that is for organic matter. Since I reduce the size of all organic matter and distribute it around my yards, onto the soil where it soon disappears, I never need to get rid of any organic matter. Only paper, glass, metal, plastic. All of which can go into the pretend recycling bin. I pay their full bill every month because it isn't worth arguing about. Their slogan is Waste Zero. I went in to the office to tell them that I am the acknowledged person who invented the term ZERO WASTE back in 1974 but they weren't impressed. My ex asks me how I like being the inventor of something that has gone all around the world. My one regret is that I didn't copyright it. I'd be a millionaire today if I got 0.1 cent for every usage.
I would prefer to steer clear of the recitation of horrors associated with abundant and thoughtless discard. Everyone knows all about those - the dying animals, the polluted oceans. No one cares. I have been explaining for forty years that there are scientific and rational approaches to eliminating - not reducing - waste generation but no one cares. I have never had anyone come up to me and say let's get a non-profit started on this important environmental topic. They just keep pushing that useless recycling and then pretending that they are doing all they can. The city of Berkeley spends $15M every year for recycling. That is a supposedly progressive city that is so much in the grip of the recycling mafia that they can't see beyond it. In 2018 the Chinese announced that they would no longer be the suckers who took all of the West's garbage (pardon me, recycling) and they pulled the rug out from under recycling. It all died - Boom! But like the zombies in the movies, it has a second life, because it has to. It's so important to not regulate the production of goods so the public has to continue believing that after it's entirely too late to do any good, they can "solve" the problem with never a regulation on the horizon. You can learn a lot more at zerowasteinstitute.org but I don't get praised in comments any more. The world is content to die by drowning. Waste generation has a lot to do with climate change but you would never know it to read any of the environmental magazines. Just clickbait on recycling of this or that item is as far as they take it.
Thanks, so you came up with Waste Zero.
Thanks for confirming that recycling is a scam.
My organic garbage goes to feed the raccoon family, fox and ravens that live in the wood next to my house. Paper and cardboard are burned in the fire box in my unused kennel, only bottles, cans are put in the recycle bin, the little bit left of garbage, goes into my garbage bin and about once every month and a half or two, I haul them to the transfer station, they charge $5 a can for recycle and $10 for trash. My trash includes the ashes from the kennel.
When I see pictures of the wild life killed by our plastic, and that "land mass" of plastic, as large or larger than Manhattan floating in the Pacific I get sick.
A way to dispose of garbage and radiocactive material is incineratethem with browns gas, which itself can be fueled with the burnable trash. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxyhydrogen
I have a number of books on a Brown's gas generator,it sublimates matter to the molecular level https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sublimation_(phase_transition)
Mr. Hartman. I remember when, not many years ago the naysayers shouted that renewable energy like solar, wind, and water would never be inexpensive enough to compete with petroleum and coal in the market place. Today they are silenced. They were wrong. Not many years ago also, there was a company in Michigan which was the major producer of the huge blades for wind generators. The Gougeon brothers. They are no longer number one, possibly because they have no grant from the federal government to build them. European and Asian companies are now in the lead. One wonders: what happened?
I agree that meat is a food which puts a heavy load on our agricultural system, Land, water etc. But it is not inherently unhealthy to eat, as most Americans unfortunately believe today. See my reply to Mr. Moncrief.
I don't like meat, it's taste or texture, and neither did our ancestors, that's why the invented Worcestershire Sauce, Mustard, Ketchup, and colonized Africa and Asia, for spices.
Mr. Farrar. So true.
For those that simply must have beef or pork. A must try is Beyond Beef or Beyond Sausage. I really can’t tell the difference. We make a Shepherds Pie out of Beyond Beef, mashed potatoes and French cut green beans. Beyond beef is expensive, but tasty.
To add fuel to the fire. The Holocene is the area from the end of the last ice age until the 1950;s, in the 1950’s technology really took off and we entered the anthropocene, the age of man, or more specifically the era in which man’s activities, affected the climate
The anthropocene is projected to be the most short lived of epochs.
We already see the effects, mass migration from south to north, in ocean and on land., it won’t be long before the north is overwhelmed, and unable to accommodate, much less feed, the millions seeking jobs and food in the north.
Insects and parasites that posed a problem in the south, like Fire Ants and tree boring beetles, have moved north and are threatening our food stock and trees. They are adapting and have jumped into mammals, including humans.
And in self defense….nothing, humans have to enjoy themselves today, even at the expense of their own future.
In my book, I would rather go out like the passengers of the Titan, they didn't even have an inkling they were going to be dead. Here one moment, and then gone in 2 nanoseconds next, before the brain could register it, they ceased to exist. Much better and faster than whose who died on the Titanic and whose shoes now litter the ocean floor.
Mr. Farrar. I too wish to "go out" quickly. My relatives know I love them. No need to say goodby. What is the "Titan"? I have a first edition of Lord's TITANIC. I read it decades ago. I also have an update which I intend to finish soon.
Titan was the name of the submersible that imploded. It happened so fast, that there was no death, the people just ceased to exist.
Maybe a (rare) typo of Farrar's. Funny thing is, there was a story often cited as pre-cognitive: was it HG Wells? Titled "The Titan" that uncannily described the disaster long before.
Titan was the submersible that imploded while viewing the Titanic.
Not a typo at all.
This is a good call for action, but I do have a caveat - there are currently some 1 BILLION cars and trucks around the world that run on fossil fuels and even this year, over 90% of all vehicles built will be fossil-fueled vehicles. We must have an aggressive program of CO2 and methane mitigation and capture - the alternative is to shut down the modern advanced natjons' economies and return to a pre-automobile existence to limit the use of fossil fuels. No one has the trillions of dollars it would take to replace all fossil-fuel vehicles, and materials are in too-short supply for that level of production.....
Bad news, all discussions of global warming are academic. We are past the tipping point, and if we stopped using gasoline or diesel tomorrow it would not save us. The tipping point was 350 parts per million (ppm) of Carbon Dioxide, and we hit 400 ppm, a year ago. It is now extropic, an outward turning spiral. warming has already melted the tundra, especially in Siberia, and trapped methane returns to gaseous form, and is being blown out leaving huge craters, same is happening on the northern sea floor. Global warming has wiped out Arctic ice and we are looking at an ice free arctic ocean in summer, the much sought NW passage. The north pole is now water.
Loss of sea ice, means that heat is no longer reflected back into space, but absorbed by water and earth . Albedo is an expression of the ability of surfaces to reflect sunlight (heat from the sun). Light-coloured surfaces return a large part of the sunrays back to the atmosphere (high albedo). Dark surfaces absorb the rays from the sun (low albedo).
The arctic Jet Stream has already been affected, and that is why we have heat domes in summer and blizzards never seen before in the midwest and the south.
Greenland's glaciers are melting, and they desalinate the Atlantic current (which includes the Gulf Stream), the result is 100 degree water off Florida, hurricanes jumping to force 5, like Otis did when it tore up Aculpulco.
But that's not all. The Atlantic current keeps the East Coast of America warmer in winter, than it would otherwise be, and also England and Europe.
If you live on the East Coast and in the South, you will be hit twice as hard this winter, as you were last year, and last year was bad.
Meanwhile https://www.foxweather.com/weather-news/fall-takes-a-pause-with-heat-expanding-across-us Midwest, Northeast sweat with summerlike temperatures continuing.
But wait for winter, we go from one extreme to another.
Yes, James Hansen's newest paper (currently in peer review) says that just the pollution we have already put into the atmosphere will result in a temperature rise pf 10 deg C (18 deg F)..... His paper takes into account all the secondary and tertiary effects of the primary warming, like the ones you describe above..... We are well and truly hosed.....
That is what I fear Bruce. That is what I fear. It is already too late.
I was born at the optimal time of the anthropocene, I have enjoyed the benefits of democracy, of technology, of social living, and (fingers crossed) I will miss the train wreck barreling towards me. Quite selfish, considering I have 11 grand children and 9 great grandchildren and one great great grandchild.
I had a great tour on this marble that circles the sun, no regrets. Life for me is good, but all good things must come to an end.
I'm 82, so the likelihood is I will check out before the worst of it, but the great-great grandkids might have a worse time of it.....
The ironic thing here is we cavil about "saving the planet"..... The planet will be just fine, and perhaps more so if we manage to remove ourselves stage left. Recent experience in recovering ecosystems indicates that within 100-200 years, the earth's ecosystem will again be in balance, not what it was before we came, but sustainable. We can save Gaia by going extinct or reverting to a completely sustainable world economy.....
So you have great great grandkids too. You must have started at an early age also.
Returning the planet to a sustainable world economy is just what the Plutocrats don't want.
What use is there in being wealthy, if you can't lord it over the rest of the people.
Their will always those who will lie, cheat, steal, murder to sit on the top rung of the social ladder. be it William the Conqueror, Mark Zuckerburg, Henry VIII, Elon Musk, Julius Caesar or Pete Peterson. Matters not race, religion or ethnicity.
In my site at gettingtozerowaste.com I offer a paper on a form of mass transportation that has the potential to make the private automobile 90% irrelevant, by offering the public a far superior method of moving people that I happen to have stumbled on while living in Turkey in the 1960's. It is called the Dolmush system and it works better than gigantic buses and trains running on fixed time schedules, even if they are empty. If we are serious about solving the transportation then we absolutely cannot afford ON TIME departures. We MUST change to ON FULL departure. It can work, it is efficient and it is achievable, if we can just abandon our obsolete assumptions about scheduling.
I would think this could work well, but it would need to use smaller vehicles so they fill up faster, and then have many more vehicles available. Many people who work or have appointments do have to keep schedules, so the system must be able to get them to where they need to be when they need to be there. Frequent service would lead many people to use such a system.
Mr. Culver. the Chinese have a saying: the longest journey begins with the first step.
Mr. Dobbertin: The Chinese have it wrong. The longest journey begins with A STEP IN THE RIGHT DIRECTION. We try to start many journeys here with a step in the wrong direction, which only leads us astray. I run a website and promote solving the world's problems with waste generation by replacing all products with better designed products that are designed for perpetual reuse. It is entirely feasible, if we only were serious about solving the world's waste of resources and pollution due to trying to throw things away into some magical "away". I like to point out that recycling is a serious step in the WRONG DIRECTION and therefore is leading us AWAY from solutions. Thus my cavil on your Chinese proverb.
Mr. Palmer. You are correct, of course. The right direction is better.
This is the first posting I have seen about the profligate waste these days of resources that have to last as long as there are humans and civilization - what will future generations 500, 1000, 10,000 years from now say when they realize we buried trillions of dollars worth of valuable metals and other materials in landfills. lost to the future.....
Bruce: Was it Jared Diamond in Guns Germs and Steel who asks what the last Easter Islander said as he cut down the last tree to make the last statue? I know what it was, and it's the same thing your hypothetical futureman will say: "Technology will solve the problem."
I just hate the dominant notion that there will always be waste. Everyone just knows this, even though there is not a shred of scientific or reasonable analysis to support this comforting supposition. Then the bright eyed researchers can announce in ecstatic terms that they have "solved" the problems of waste. Recently, some scientist discovered that if he passed some giant electrical shock through "plastic waste" (whatever that really is) he could convert it into carbene and "clean" hydrogen. His assumption is that there will always be this plastic waste to work with - that it is an inexhaustible resource. In the current climate of "waste uber alles" the thought that we could actually produce useful plastic products that did not end up contaminating all of us and blowing around the continents is not thinkable. Not worth thinking about. Never can be or will be or is wanted to be changed. We will live in the midst of plastic waste (and all the other kinds too) until the earth goes red giant and it's all over. Incineration will be the ultimate cleanser, when the earth is too polluted to inhabit any longer.
Sounds good, provided there is a chance that we can turn it all around.
I think you are talking about the USA?
We are historically the Big Kahuna in contributing to climate change (China is now ahead somewhat), so we bear a significant responsibility for cleaning up or mitigating the damage as much as we can. But this will eventually have to be an "all-hands" effort by all developed countries.....
Yes BUT where are your high speed trains, where are your electric coaches and busses?
Ms. Stokes. If you have been out of the U.S. for some time; you might not be aware that city buses are frequently electric or hybrid these days. But we are still way behind the rest of the developed world when it comes to mass transit. Especially Europe, Japan and China. Interesting that France has stopped short-haul flying. Good idea. Airplanes are neat and have their place. But thermodynamically they are extremely inefficient and big polluters.
Ms. Stokes. Before I was born Los Angeles had the largest intra urban electric rail system in the world. In the 1930s General Motors bought it and dismantled it. POOFF GONE. Generalize that.
Beats the heck out of me - we should have had all that stuff long ago. But we did no planning for this at all and in many areas, there is little or no land available to build it. Here in Texas, there is a plan (if it doesn't die) to build the first high-speed rail in the US (180mph/270km/h) from Dallas to Houston, and of course the airlines are fighting this, plus all the conservative farmers and ranchers who do not want their rural way of life even marginally disturbed.....
Build them parallel to , or even better, over the Interstate.
I should also say that range issues will keep full-electric vehicles from going inter-city for the near future - we very much need vastly better battery technology than lithium-ion..... For city buses and commuter cars, battery power is quite sufficient - we need the political will to get this going. Our Republican Party is unalterably opposed to anything dealing with climate change or electric propulsion.....that is a real problem here.
Mr. Culver. All batteries are constructed from various metals which have differing electron affinities. Aluminum is the most ubiquitous metal on the surface of earth. If, or when some brilliant young engineer finds a way to use aluminum with other metals; we are off and running. Maybe.
I'm not a cow. You are not a cow. Babies are not calves. Milk comes from a mammal not a nut. I don't mind cutting down on red meat. The current cost of beef demands that. But, I'm 82 years old. When I was young, we were told that vegetables did not have complete proteins and that, therefore, you had to mix them properly. Like Trichinosis in pork, that is no longer a thing. Now the claim is that you can live on kale alone. Liquified Kale, that is. And you failed to give me links to the science that was NOT quoted but implied in the article.
Liquified kale, sounds like Soylent Green.. snickers.
Ridiculous sci fi, but honestly : Is it?
Mr. Farrar. Liquid kale ( sounds blah, doesn't it?) reminds me of Thorn, Charlton Heston's detective who cried "Soylent green is people." I eat kale for the nitrogen oxide it produces in my bloodstream. But I do no care for its flavor unless it is doctored up with lemon juice, at least.
I love greens, especially spinach, brussel sprouts, all the cuneiform's but cannot eat kale. I've tried, but just can't.
How about ration stamps instead for making meat more expensive. Ration stamps for gasoline may also be a more fair way of distributing fuel.
Rationing worked during WWII, but Americans no longer have the patience or self-discipline to pull it off.
Prices aren't high for any other reason than pure unadultered greed, and rationing won't solve that problem. But it will acerbate the situation and possibly result in the radical right rising up en masse. People breed like rabbit, people just have to have that orgasm, and produce mini me's so they can pass on their ill obtained goodies to their progeny, and so they bred themselves into cutting down trees. Like the song The Yellow Taxi, mentions that paved over paradise and put up a parking lot.
Now people drive to work, in some cases 2 hours or more, one way, to feed the families that their need for orgasm has produced.
Ration gas, sans an attack by ET and you are looking at a revolt which the extremes of left and right would welcome with glee.
Myself I don't mind. A one way trip to town is 3.5 miles I make the trip about twice a week, for food, mail and packages. A tank of gas lasts me about two months or more.
Mr. Farrar. Do you know that most of the world's countries no longer have a fertility high enough for their population to grow? It is necessary for each woman to produce 2.1 children for any population to remain at a stationary, fixed size. Few countries currently meet this number. This decline is related to urbanization on a world wide scale.
Yes, many countries in the developed world face declining populations - China will lose half her current population to old age and too few young people, most likely by 2050-2060. Many other countries will follow to some extent.....
You are right that it would have to be mandatory.
Daughter of WWII generation, here. Ration stamps were so much more than "fair way of distributing fuel." Ration stamps were a patriotic symbol of contributing to the War Effort to save Western Civilization! If the citizenry doesn't have that sense of crisis, fuggedaboudit.
Warming temperatures and climate change are symptoms of the real problem. The oceans are the driving engine of the climate and are the true lungs of the planet. Pollution is killing the oceans. Pollution from agriculture runoff fertilizer and petroleum-agrochemicals, cargo ship exhaust, black carbon, microplastics, rising acidity. Read the work of Howard Dryden and Diane Duncan of the GOES Foundation (Global Oceanic Environmental Survey).