Sunday 1 December 2013

most important research this year. Summary: we're F%^&ked

back when I was a kid, I used to listen to
Greenpeace tell us how factory effluent and
raping of forests was going to kill us.

Then, the world created banksters. It seemed
that the environment didn't matter any more
because, once, we had lots of paper money,
and now we don't. So, we're on a paper chase
and haven't given two thoughts to the environment.

Canada's PM Harper is set on forcing uneconomical
tarsands oil on the US, so that it can leak out all
over Tex-Arkana and suburbs near you.

Idiots are ruining water tables with their fracking
juice just to get a bit of shale gas, while the earth
belches and shakes.

And, we can do nothing about these. Nothing short of
blocking their access by thousands of determined
people, 24/7 will work, and as I said, you and I
are too busy chasing paper.

In all this, we've forgotten the old demons.
Industrialists , at least those who can  get bank loans,
are busy using up Earth's resources at such a rate
that one scientist who actually looked at the data,
held a conference talk called :

Is Earth F%&ked?

His answer : More or less [Fucked , that is]

Enjoy your Black Friday trawl.
Hug a Black person, too. That would be a good thing.

checkit: New statesman


Naomi Klein: How science is telling us all to revolt
Is our relentless quest for economic growth killing the planet? Climate scientists have seen the data – and they are coming to some incendiary conclusions.
By Naomi Klein Published 29 October 2013 10:00
In December 2012, a pink-haired complex systems researcher named Brad Werner made his way through the throng of 24,000 earth and space scientists at the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union, held annually in San Francisco. This year’s conference had some big-name participants, from Ed Stone of Nasa’s Voyager project, explaining a new milestone on the path to interstellar space, to the film-maker James Cameron, discussing his adventures in deep-sea submersibles.
But it was Werner’s own session that was attracting much of the buzz. It was titled “Is Earth F**ked?” (full title: “Is Earth F**ked? Dynamical Futility of Global Environmental Management and Possibilities for Sustainability via Direct Action Activism”).
Standing at the front of the conference room, the geophysicist from the University of California, San Diego walked the crowd through the advanced computer model he was using to answer that question. He talked about system boundaries, perturbations, dissipation, attractors, bifurcations and a whole bunch of other stuff largely incomprehensible to those of us uninitiated in complex systems theory. But the bottom line was clear enough: global capitalism has made the depletion of resources so rapid, convenient and barrier-free that “earth-human systems” are becoming dangerously unstable in response. When pressed by a journalist for a clear answer on the “are we f**ked” question, Werner set the jargon aside and replied, “More or less.”
There was one dynamic in the model, however, that offered some hope. Werner termed it “resistance” – movements of “people or groups of people” who “adopt a certain set of dynamics that does not fit within the capitalist culture”. According to the abstract for his presentation, this includes “environmental direct action, resistance taken from outside the dominant culture, as in protests, blockades and sabotage by indigenous peoples, workers, anarchists and other activist groups”.