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Luis Miguel Goitizolo

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RE: ARE WE NOW IN THE END TIMES?
10/17/2018 11:04:27 AM


Spencer Platt / Getty Images
CLIMATE DESK

Who is the we in ‘We are causing climate change’?

This story was originally published by Slate and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

People writing on climate change really like to use the word we. “We could have prevented global warming in the ’80s.” “We are emitting more carbon dioxide than ever.” “We need to ramp up solutions to the climate crisis.”

That verbal tic was in full effect on Monday, after the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its special report on the differences between 1.5 degree and 2 degree Celsius global warming. The IPCC stated in no uncertain terms that climate change will threaten the lives of hundreds of millions of people in the next decades unless greenhouse-gas emissions halve in 10 years and cease entirely in 30. In response, one prominent climate journalist wrote on Twitter, “We had plenty of time & warning to avoid this fate, without undue disruption, but now we can only avoid it with EXTREME disruption. Given how badly we’ve botched it so far, odds are we’ll continue to go too slow.”

Given that climate change is a global problem, the temptation to use we makes sense. But there’s a real problem with it: The guilty collective it invokes simply doesn’t exist. The we responsible for climate change is a fictional construct, one that’s distorting and dangerous. By hiding who’s really responsible for our current, terrifying predicament, we provides political cover for the people who are happy to let hundreds of millions of other people die for their own profit and pleasure.

I mean, think about it. Who is this we? Does it include the 735 million who, according to the World Bank, live on less than $2 a day? Does it include the approximately 5.5 billion people who, according to Oxfam, live on between $2 and $10 a day? Does it include the millions of people, all over the world (400,000 alone in the 2014 People’s Climate March in New York City) doing whatever they can to lower their own emissions and counter the fossil-fuel industry? Does it include Bill McKibben, the elder statesman of the climate movement who wrote his first book about climate change in 1989? How about Greta Thunberg, the 15-year-old girl currently sitting outside the Swedish Parliament on a school strike demanding that her government implement policies that actually end fossil-fuel production, distribution, and consumption? Does it include the indigenous peoples who lived in harmony with their ecosystems for generations upon generations? Does it include our children?

Look, I understand that the we seems real. The fossil-fuel economy, for the moment, provides the structure for what people do on this planet. In its inclusions and exclusions, its laying out the conditions of possibility for human action, it seems totalizing, especially from a middle-class American vantage point. But it’s not totalizing. And it’s certainly not eternal. It requires active reproduction at every moment in time: through subsidies, through construction and repair of its infrastructure, through court cases that uphold its laws, through protection of its “assets” by the military, through Instagram photos that pretend its benefits will bring you joy, and on and on.

Instead of thinking of climate change as something we are doing, always remember that there are millions, possibly billions, of people on this planet who would rather preserve civilization than destroy it with climate change, who would rather have the fossil-fuel economy end than continue. Those people are not all mobilized, by any means, but they are there. Most people are good.

But remember, too, that there are others, some of them running the world, who seem to be willing to destroy civilization and let millions of people die in order that the fossil-fuel economy to continue now. We know who those people are. We are not those people.

Remember as well that there are degrees of complicity. Without structural changes paid for collectively, most of us have no alternative but to use fossil fuels to some degree. As individuals, we must do the very best we can. But constrained choices are not akin to the unthinking complicity of the 10 percent who produce 50 percent of global emissions every year by taking multiple long-haul flights for pleasure travel, heating their homes instead of putting on a sweater, and driving swollen SUVs that they replace every few years. Nor are constrained choices akin to the deep and shameful complicity of the many in the print and television news media who refuse to mention climate change even in the stories about climate change effects they’re already reporting.

Complicit people and institutions must be called out and encouraged to change. And the fossil-fuel industry must be fought, and the governments that support the fossil-fuel economy must be replaced. But none of us will be effective in this if we think of climate change as something we are doing. To think of climate change as something that we are doing, instead of something we are being prevented from undoing, perpetuates the very ideology of the fossil-fuel economy we’re trying to transform.

Climate change may well inspire a reckoning for you about what it means to be human and what your morals are. Fine. But always remember: This is a battle against the forces of destruction to save something of this achingly beautiful, utterly miraculous world for your children. The fossil-fuel industry and the governments that support it are literally colluding to stop you from creating a world that runs on safe energy. They are trying to maintain the fossil-fuel economy. As for me, and for the millions of people who want to undo climate change, I say: We are against them, and we are going to fight for dear life.

Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society.



(GRIST)



"Choose a job you love and you will not have to work a day in your life" (Confucius)

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Luis Miguel Goitizolo

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RE: ARE WE NOW IN THE END TIMES?
10/17/2018 3:47:58 PM

Here’s why hurricanes are rapidly exploding in strength

Hurricane Michael’s sudden intensification fits a recent pattern.

This NOAA/RAMMB satellite image taken on Wednesday afternoon shows Hurricane Michael as it approaches the U.S. Gulf Coast. (Lizabeth Menzies/NOAA/RAMMB/AFP)

The unforgettable thing about record-setting Hurricane Michael will always be how rapidly it became a near-Category 5 storm, perfectly timed for a sneak attack on the Florida Panhandle.

On Tuesday morning, Floridians knew a storm was coming but not how strong it would be. As of 5 a.m., Michael was a strong Category 1 hurricane with a minimum pressure of 973 millibars, a measure of atmospheric pressure indicating that air is rising in the storm, pulling winds toward its center. The official forecast took the storm up to mid-Category 3 at landfall.

But 24 hours later, Michael was already far stronger: It now had 140 mph winds and a pressure falling sharply. The wind speed increased 45 mph in just 24 hours, representing a leap from Category 1 to Category 4 — and the storm wasn’t done intensifying.


'The whole town is gone:' Hurricane Michael wipes out Florida coastal community

Pressure would ultimately fall to 919 millibars, one of the lowest measures of any hurricane at landfall in the United States — and the winds responded by increasing to 155 mph right as the storm struck the coast. This was a borderline Category 5 storm, and it’s clear that the only reason Michael didn’t quite cross that threshold was because it was crossing beaches by that time instead.

This process of “rapid intensification” — extremely dangerous near a coastline — is something we keep seeing lately. Technically, it is defined by the National Hurricane Center as an increase in wind speeds of 35 mph or more in 24 hours.

All of the worst hurricanes of the past two years — Harvey, Irma, Maria, Florence and Michael — intensified even more rapidly than this. Maria increased a stunning 80 mph in wind speeds, leaping from a Category 1 to a Category 5 storm in 24 hours, not long before its catastrophic landfall in Puerto Rico that ultimately led to thousands of deaths.

Harvey and Michael didn’t strengthen quite so much, so fast, but they rapidly intensified in the crucial hours before making their final continental U.S. landfalls.

Recent rapid hurricane intensification events in the Atlantic basin.

Rapid intensification means that a storm has found itself in an ideal environment — one usually characterized by warm waters and little adverse wind shear. Michael accomplished its feat while crossing waters in the Gulf of Mexico that ranged from 1 to 2 degrees Celsius (1.8 to 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than normal. That represents an enormous reservoir of extra potential hurricane energy, beyond what the warm Gulf already provides this time of year.

In fact, according to hurricane expert Kerry Emanuel of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Michael could have become even stronger if not for some adverse wind shear, potentially reaching full Category 5 strength. That’s what happened in a model of the storm that Emanuel ran in real time. “With no shear, Michael would have intensified substantially faster,” he said.

Climate scientists have begun to focus on hurricane rapid intensification as an increasingly prevalent feature in the world we’re entering. Simply put, with warmer seas, storms ought to be able to pull this off more often.

In a recent study in the Journal of Climate, researchers found more rapid intensifications in a simulation of a human-warmed world, and also that this would prove a key pathway toward more intense hurricanes in general.

“The rapid intensification of these storms, which was part of what made them so dangerous and devastating, is something models are telling us global warming should make more common globally over the present century,” said Gabriel Vecchi, one of the authors of the study and a climate scientist at Princeton University. ″However, I don’t think I’m in a position to say — one way or the other — whether global warming played an important role in Michael’s rapid intensification,” he cautioned.

“Our present thoughts and efforts need to be with the people affected by Michael,” Vecchi continued in an email. “But after that we need to plan for the longer term in a way that acknowledges the combined impact [that] greenhouse gas emissions and other human factors (like urbanization near coasts) have on increasing our future risk to hurricanes.”


(The Washington Post)



"Choose a job you love and you will not have to work a day in your life" (Confucius)

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Luis Miguel Goitizolo

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RE: ARE WE NOW IN THE END TIMES?
10/17/2018 5:32:24 PM
SOTT Logo Radio

NewsReal: West Discovers Saudi Arabia Has Human Rights Issues & The Real Reason People Hate Trump

newsreal trump jamal khashoggi saudi arabia
In a collective gasp heard 'round the world, the Western establishment media last week discovered that the Saudi regime is capable of doing evil stuff.

The 'brutal murder' of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Turkey is bizarre on a number of levels, not least because everyone knows about it, yet it's not even confirmed that he's actually dead and not just missing.

US Congress appears to be going straight for the jugular, threatening sanctions against its - to this point, from its perspective - unblemished Middle Eastern ally. So 'sanctions', maybe, but cancelling the weapons sales which sustain the proxy war in Yemen? No way!

In addition to discussing the latest Saudi intrigue, this week's podcast explores the ongoing outbreak of Trump Anxiety Disorder across the West, but primarily in the USA. Joe Quinn elaborates on his idea that the real reason people hate Trump is that he is NOT a liar...

Running Time: 01:03:20

Download: OGG, MP3


Listen live, chat, and call in to future shows on the SOTT Radio Network!


(sott.net)


"Choose a job you love and you will not have to work a day in your life" (Confucius)

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Luis Miguel Goitizolo

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RE: ARE WE NOW IN THE END TIMES?
10/17/2018 5:44:36 PM
Bizarro Earth

The Dark Story Behind 'Man-Made Global Warming', Those Who Created it - And Why

global warming

'Behold, your new God!'
The recent UN global warming conference under auspices of the deceptively-named International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concluded its meeting in South Korea discussing how to drastically limit global temperature rise. Mainstream media is predictably retailing various panic scenarios "predicting" catastrophic climate change because of man-made emissions of Greenhouse Gases, especially CO2, if drastic changes in our lifestyle are not urgently undertaken. There is only one thing wrong with all that. It's based on fake science and corrupted climate modelers who have reaped by now billions in government research grants to buttress the arguments for radical change in our standard of living. We might casually ask "What's the point?" The answer is not positive.

The South Korea meeting of the UN IPCC discussed measures needed, according to their computer models, to limit global temperature rise to below 1.5 Centigrade above levels of the pre-industrial era. One of the panel members and authors of the latest IPCC Special Report on Global Warming, Drew Shindell, at Duke University told the press that to meet the arbitrary 1.5 degree target will require world CO2 emissions to drop by a staggering 40% in the next 12 years. The IPCC calls for a draconian "zero net emissions" of CO2 by 2050. That would mean complete ban on gas or diesel engines for cars and trucks, no coal power plants, transformation of the world agriculture to burning food as biofuels. Shindell modestly put it, "These are huge, huge shifts."

The new IPCC report, SR15, declares that global warming of 1.5°C will "probably" bring species extinction, weather extremes and risks to food supply, health and economic growth. To avoid this the IPCC estimates required energy investment alone will be $2.4 trillion per year. Could this explain the interest of major global banks, especially in the City of London in pushing the Global Warming card?

This scenario assumes an even more incredible dimension as it is generated by fake science and doctored data by a tight-knit group of climate scientists internationally that have so polarized scientific discourse that they label fellow scientists who try to argue as not mere global warming skeptics, but rather as "Climate Change deniers." What does that bit of neuro-linguistic programming suggest? Holocaust deniers? Talk about how to kill legitimate scientific debate, the essence of true science. Recently the head of the UN IPCC proclaimed, "The debate over the science of climate change is well and truly over."

What the UN panel chose to ignore was the fact the debate was anything but "over." The Global Warming Petition Project, signed by over 31,000 American scientists states,
"There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gasses is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth."
'Chicken Little'

The most interesting about the dire warnings of global catastrophe if dramatic changes to our living standards are not undertaken urgently, is that the dire warnings are always attempts to frighten based on future prediction. When the "tipping point" of so-called irreversibility is passed with no evident catastrophe, they invent a new future point.

In 1982 Mostafa Tolba, executive director of the UN Environment Program (UNEP), warned the "world faces an ecological disaster as final as nuclear war within a couple of decades unless governments act now." He predicted lack of action would bring "by the turn of the century, an environmental catastrophe which will witness devastation as complete, as irreversible as any nuclear holocaust." In 1989 Noel Brown, of the UN Environmental Program (UNEP), said entire nations could be wiped off the face of the earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000. James Hansen, a key figure in the doomsday scenarios declared at that time that 350 ppm of CO2 was the upper limit, "to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted." Rajendra Pachauri, then the chief of the UN IPPC, declared that 2012 was the climate deadline by which it was imperative to act: "If there's no action before 2012, that's too late." Today the measured level is 414.

As UK scientist Philip Stott notes,
"In essence, the Earth has been given a 10-year survival warning regularly for the last fifty or so years. ...Our post-modern period of climate change angst can probably be traced back to the late-1960s...By 1973, and the 'global cooling' scare, it was in full swing, with predictions of the imminent collapse of the world within ten to twenty years...Environmentalists were warning that, by the year 2000, the population of the US would have fallen to only 22 million. In 1987, the scare abruptly changed to 'global warming', and the IPCC (the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) was established (1988)..."
Flawed Data

A central flaw to the computer models cited by the IPCC is the fact that they are purely theoretical models and not real. The hypothesis depends entirely on computer models generating scenarios of the future, with no empirical records that can verify either these models or their flawed prediction. As one scientific study concluded, "The computer climate models upon which "human-caused global warming" is based have substantial uncertainties and are markedly unreliable. This is not surprising, since the climate is a coupled, non-linear dynamical system. It is very complex." Coupled refers to the phenomenon that the oceans cause changes in the atmosphere and the atmosphere in turn affects the oceans. Both are complexly related to solar cycles. No single model predicting global warming or 2030 "tipping points" is able or even tries to integrate the most profound influence on Earth climate and weather, the activity of the sun and solar eruption cycles which determine ocean currents, jet stream activity, El ninos and our daily weather.

An Australian IT expert and independent researcher, John McLean, recently did a detailed analysis of the IPCC climate report. He notes that HadCRUT4 is the primary dataset used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to make its dramatic claims about "man-made global warming", to justify its demands for trillions of dollars to be spent on "combating climate change." But McLean points to egregious errors in the HadCRUT4 used by IPCC. He notes, "It's very careless and amateur. About the standard of a first-year university student." Among the errors, he cites places where temperature "averages were calculated from next to no information. For two years, the temperatures over land in the Southern Hemisphere were estimated from just one site in Indonesia." In another place he found that for the Caribbean island, St Kitts temperature was recorded at 0 degrees C for a whole month, on two occasions. TheHadCRUT4 dataset is a joint production of the UK Met Office's Hadley Centre and the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia. This was the group at East Anglia that was exposed several years ago for the notorious Climategate scandals of faking data and deleting embarrassing emails to hide it. Mainstream media promptly buried the story, turning attention instead on "who illegally hacked East Anglia emails."

Astonishing enough when we do a little basic research, we find that the IPCC never carried out a true scientific inquiry into the possible cases of change in Earth climate. Manmade sources of change were arbitrarily asserted, and the game was on.

Malthusian Maurice Strong

Few are aware however of the political and even geopolitical origins of Global Warming theories. How did this come about? So-called Climate Change, aka Global Warming, is a neo-malthusian deindustrialization agenda originally developed by circles around the Rockefeller family in the early 1970s to prevent rise of independent industrial rivals, much as Trump's trade wars today. In my book, Myths, Lies and Oil Wars, I detail how the highly influential Rockefeller group also backed creation of the Club of Rome, Aspen Institute, Worldwatch Institute and the MIT 'Limits to Growth' report. A key early organizer of Rockefeller's 'zero growth' agenda in the early 1970s was David Rockefeller's longtime friend, a Canadian oilman named Maurice Strong. Strong was one of the early propagators of the scientifically unfounded theory that man-made emissions from transportation vehicles, coal plants and agriculture caused a dramatic and accelerating global temperature rise which threatens civilization, so-called Global Warming.

As chairman of the 1972 Earth Day UN Stockholm Conference, Strong promoted an agenda of population reduction and lowering of living standards around the world to "save the environment." Some years later the same Strong restated his radical ecologist stance: "Isn't the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn't it our responsibility to bring that about?" Co-founder of the Rockefeller-tied Club of Rome, Dr Alexander King, admitted the fraud in his book, The First Global Revolution. He stated, "In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill... All these dangers are caused by human intervention...The real enemy, then, is humanity itself."

Please reread that, and let it sink in. Humanity, and not the 147 global banks and multinationals who de facto determine today's environment, bear the responsibility.

Following the Earth Summit, Maurice Strong was named Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations, and Chief Policy Advisor to Kofi Annan. He was the key architect of the 1997-2005 Kyoto Protocol that declared manmade Global Warming, according to "consensus," was real and that it was "extremely likely" that man-made CO2 emissions have predominantly caused it. In 1988 Strong was key in creation of the UN IPCC and later the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change at the Rio Earth Summit which he chaired, and which approved his globalist UN Agenda 21.

The UN IPCC and its Global Warming agenda is a political and not a scientific project. Their latest report is, like the previous ones, based on fake science and outright fraud. MIT Professor Richard S Lindzen in a recent speech criticized politicians and activists who claim "the science is settled," and demand "unprecedented changes in all aspects of society." He noted that it was totally implausible for such a complex "multifactor system" as the climate to be summarized by just one variable, global mean temperature change, and primarily controlled by just a 1-2 per cent variance in the energy budget due to CO2. Lindzen described how "an implausible conjecture backed by false evidence, repeated incessantly, has become 'knowledge,' used to promote the overturn of industrial civilization." Our world indeed needs a "staggering transformation," but one that promotes health and stability of the human species instead.

About the author

F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and geopolitics, exclusively for the online magazine "New Eastern Outlook."
(sott.net)



"Choose a job you love and you will not have to work a day in your life" (Confucius)

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Luis Miguel Goitizolo

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RE: ARE WE NOW IN THE END TIMES?
10/17/2018 6:02:09 PM

‘Bodies lying everywhere’: Shooting at Crimea college has echoes of Columbine massacre

Edited time: 17 Oct, 2018 14:42


© Sputnik / Екатерина Кейзо; © Twitter / @ea_potapoff

It started like any normal day on campus at the polytechnic college in the Crimean city of Kerch — but it quickly turned into a horror story, drawing somber comparisons to the fateful 1999 Columbine Massacre in Colorado.

Before the day would end, at least 19 lives would be taken and dozens of students would suffer injury at the hands of a gun-wielding man.

As the drama unfolded, conflicting information was making its way online. In the initial confusion, reports suggested there had been a gas explosion inside the building — but it soon became clear that something much more horrifying was playing out.

Police were now reporting that an“unidentified explosive device” had gone off inside the canteen on the first floor of the college. Forensics experts and FSB explosive ordnance teams were quickly dispatched and tasked with “preventing other possible explosions” as word trickled out that authorities were treating the incident as a possible terror attack. They would later change the classification from terror attack to multiple homicide.

But it wasn’t just the explosion. Inside the building, people were hearing gunfire. Some would later describe seeing men with their faces covered burst into the building, armed with assault rifles and firecrackers, opening fire indiscriminately, terrorizing students and teachers. Only one man responsible for the shooting was found, but in the panic and confusion of the moment, people believed they saw more than one killer. Investigators haven't ruled out there may be more.


Online, witnesses accounts and gruesome details were beginning to appear on social media. “There was a blast and then the shooting…we started jumping out of the windows… children’s bodies were lying all over the place,” one student recalled of the horror.

As medics tended to injuries at the scene, other victims were rushed to hospital. Local Russian media posted photos showing ambulances and injured people lying on stretchers outside the college. As the dust settled, images from CCTVcameras appeared on the Telegram channel Mash. They showed a young man, wearing a white t-shirt with black text and holding a large gun, making his way down a stairwell. On Twitter, the comparisons to the Columbine massacre immediately began. His clothes bore striking resemblance to those of Eric Harris, one of the two students who killed 13 people and injured 24 with guns and knives at the Colorado high school almost 20 years ago.

The man was quickly identified as Vladislav Roslyakov — an 18 year-old student of the college who police now say shot himself on the second floor of the building after carrying out his rampage.

It turned out that little more than one month ago, on September 8, Roslyakov had received a permit for a 12 caliber rifle. He bought 150 rounds of ammunition for the weapon just a few days before he would walk onto his college campus and murder 19 people.

READ MORE: Gun-wielding Kerch terrorist suspect caught on CCTV (PHOTO)

Then came the reports about this man and the kind of person he was. Quiet, closed-off, uncommunicative and interested in maniacs and serial killers, his classmates said. His parents, they explained, had divorced not long ago. He and his mother had left his father and lived together in a rented apartment.

In a cruel twist of fate, some Russian media reported, that Galina Roslyakova, the killer’s mother, a nurse who works at the Kerch Oncology Center, was there to admit patients wounded by her own son.


(RT)


"Choose a job you love and you will not have to work a day in your life" (Confucius)

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