Manhattan Project 2.0 part 5

The Global Meltdown of FEAR (3 of 3) Page last updated: 7/15/2010 Global Warming Once global Warring was in full swing here comes Global Warming into the big time. Aside from some pathological corporate executives, we all care about the environment, right? So let’s have a look at this issue, which is also being used to usher in AGI. Ok, now CO2 has definitely gone up, and odds are humans have surely contributed to it. CO2 is a greenhouse gas. That’s “A greenhouse gas”, not “THE greenhouse gas”. Now does this mean that humans have CAUSED all of the perceived warming? Surely we have contributed to it, but to say without exception we have caused all of it is irrational. How much have we contributed to it? Nobody knows. Nobody can even say for sure how much a doubling of CO2 would increase global temperatures, or what the historical temperature record even equates to. Another important fact is that all of the warnings and projections you’ve ever seen have been made by computers. The problem with that is no human anywhere is smart enough to be able to properly program a computer to do this, and no array of supercomputers anywhere is powerful enough to even handle the job. The scientists all know this, and even NASA admits doubt in the computer models. Humans certainly are contributing CO2 to the natural cycles, CO2 has been on the rise, and it is a greenhouse gas. Naturally, we should strive to not increase such any more than we can avoid… The point with all of this isn’t to try and convince that the threat of global warming isn’t real. I don’t know for sure that it is or isn’t, and neither does anybody else. If they try and tell you they know for sure in one direction or another then their motives and rationale should be in question. It could be the worst case scenario, irrelevant, or we could go into a mini ice age for all anybody knows. Now you might be able to build a case that leans more to one direction, but to speak anything with absolute certainty is still akin to declaring you know for a fact whether or not a “god” is real. You’re certainly free to believe that any given “god” is or isn’t real, but that is still faith in your belief. We probably shouldn’t care what people believe in this regard, unless they said we need a trillion dollars per year to fund something based on their given faith. What do we know about historical temperatures? Not as much as you might think. We have historical records going back a hundred years or so, modern satellites we’ve had for about 30 years, and the scientific “proxy” record that is mainly from various types of core samples. Core samples can often be accurate for their regions. The problem is when climate scientists try and match them to modern temperature records, from the mid-1900′s on, they end up with a “decline”. That’s what the better part of the whole Climategate fiasco was about. The infamous quotes about them trying to “hide the decline” was the climate scientists trying to make their proxies actually match what we have a pretty good idea of what temperatures actually have been in more modern times. So to make proxies “match” modern records they have to “artificially adjust” the data. The results often look like this: Here’s another example of “corrected” data, this time by NASA: The following animation shows the vastness of lack of land temperature stations across the globe: Only being able to look back 30 years with satallites, even if they didn’t have flaws doesn’t actually get us very far, but we do have the historical surface records? The problem surface data is spotty record keeping, total lack of records for vast periods of time and over vast regions, and the Urban Heat Island Effect to keep in mind. UHIE is the reality that urban modernization skews surface temperatures, and it turns out that most US based surface stations are located in urban or at least semi-urban locations. SurfaceStations.org is an open database project to visit and photo each of the over 1200 station sites in the US. So far they’ve visited over 80% of US sites, and the results are ‘alarming’: The results thus far show that only about 10% of U.S. based surface stations are what we’d consider scientific. Wait, the unscientific ones are only projected to be off by a degree or 2. The problem is, about one degree Celsius is the only rise in temperatures we’ve even seen in the 100 years, and that’s according to the IPCC. Here is an example of a scientific station, and its 100 year data graph: A study released in 2010 compares rural & urban station data, between raw & “corrected” data, and the results are striking. First is the raw data, and second is the “corrected” data: What that clearly shows is that “corrections”, made by the U.S. National Climate Data Center, adjust rural stations up, intead of urban stations down. At least we have satellites, right? Well we have for about 30 years now, but even these have some flaws. Compare the two maps: Wait, everybody knows that the tropics don’t warm nearly as much as the arctic regions. Here we can see one of the longest surface temperature records from the Arctic region, Jan Mayen Island 350 miles northeast of Iceland on the fringes of the Arctic Ocean: According to these numerous remote surface stations, no major long term warming in Denmark worth discussing: In fact that graph shows actual cooling after 1940 and even more after 1960, much like the “hide the decline” Climategate computer code that is in reference to the proxy data. Following IPCC’s 20th Century graph,with future projections, it doesn’t show the post-1940 decline as seen above (described by Tom Wigley as a “blip” here): But does any of this prove that we don’t have to worry about “global warming”? Maybe not. The one thing it does prove is uncertainty in what we do know. The fact is we humans know more about the moon than we know about the oceans, and understanding oceans is critical to understanding and therefore predicting climate. Is all of that worth running down the street like our hair is on fire and Godzilla is behind us? The earth could very well have warmed like they say it has, but the truth is even they aren’t certain what the actual temperature record is. The classical city of Venice proves humans can handle some rising water levels just fine. People romantacize over Venice, some even go as far as calling it “the most beautiful city built by man“, while it’s time we all realize that poverty is the greatest threat to the environment. Like with the global War on Terror, we need to be rational about how we approach these complex challenges. The one thing that cannot be debated is the looming, near term, economic mega-crisis that promises to harm more people than terrorists or a rise in global temperatures could ever dream of in their worst nightmare scenarios. Drought? One thing that can be said of technology is that in 20+ years humans should have no problem mastering energy, which means more water desalination for all. We adapt, and many people would actually prosper if ‘global warming’ were to happen. Consider the vast often desolate spans of land in Russia and Canada. Yet today, literally billions are currently facing economic despair in the short term. Islamic terrorism, in its most dire projection, could harm several tens of thousands, via a theoretical suitcase nuke, which Bush, one of the biggest proponents of that claimed threat, didn’t even take hardly a single step to prevent via controlling the borders. A terrorist could easily slip through amongst the literally hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants that do each year. At this point we might ask ourselves, in the face of the suitcase armed Al Qaeda terrorists, why didn’t it happen already years ago? Then we have Obama, who doesn’t only wish to give safe haven to almost literally every illegal immigrant within the border, he actively works to keep the borders unprotected. What makes things crazy here is he even carries on about the threats we face in this world, giving credence to the threats faced by the global “War on Terror”. Then we have Global Warming, a perceived far off decades away threat, to millions, if we don’t act now. The problem with both of these scenarios is each promises to cost into the range of trillions every year, now, risking the liberty and prosperity of literally billions of people in the immediate near term. The underlying problem with both major issues is ultimately fossil fuels, especially oil. Who couldn’t even deep down admit that oil is the major driving force for U.S. presence in the Middle East, or that getting off fossil fuels would be a good thing? Meanwhile, we face a potentially larger problem: nuclear waste. We truly need to make a massive impact on GHG emissions, end the burning of coal and create a hydrogen economy to virtually eliminate the use of petroleum as a fuel (and war). At the same time, we have nuclear waste to deal with. There do exist various forms of renewable energy, but currently prices aren’t entirely financially practical for the average person to hope to become energy self-sufficient via these means. Eventually it will become affordable for most people out there, assuming economic collapse doesn’t come first, via wasted money on the War on Terror and Global Warming. Even if people could afford more renewable energy platforms it still doesn’t solve all of the energy problems of civilization and the world, so unless something radical changes with the way we garner energy we’re going to have no hope of drastic GHG emissions (short of global poverty). The Einstein’s of today have numerous designs for Generation IV nuclear power plants. Over 95% of the potential fuel in uranium ore is wasted using todays less safe GenII and GenIII reactors. GenIV plants promise vastly more safety, and potentially less than 10% of the physical footprint of todays reactors. These reactors, coupled with next-gen pyrometallurgical processing, promise to utilize the vast ‘reserves’ of what we currently refer to as  ‘spent’ nuclear ‘waste’. Just going by the stores of current waste, humanity could be powered for over a century, without having to mine more radioactive ores. The problem is environmentalists oppose anything to do with nuclear energy, and newer generation plants have been prevented since the 1970′s. In the U.S. we’re using plants built in the Three Mile Island era, and large funding of nuclear development has been thwarted. In the meantime, obscene amounts of nuclear waste has built up and has been ejected into the atmosphere via burning coal. If people really want to see peace in the world, then this is the ticket. Not only does this process allow existing nuclear weapons to be converted into electricity, it makes the necessity of refinement for energy production mute. No more weapons as a by-product of energy production, and it enables a hydrogen economy meaning less petroleum usage. It doesn’t solve the challenge of all of the things we make from oil derivatives (plastics, paints, etc), but such endless cheap energy would fuel enormous growth that could allow everyone to be able to afford more economically friendly replacements that are almost always far more expensive than oil derivatives. On top of it all, nations can all work together to fund and develop these technologies that promise to end wars instead of fuel an arms race as in the past. What Gives? Clearly each issue is over-exaggerated, but even if they aren’t we have the solutions on the horizon, yet rational responses are non-existent while we’re on the brink of economic collapse and unnecessary world war. The thing is the policy makers all know these facts, odds and solutions. The push for near-trillion dollar military budgets to fight “terrorists”, as if they’re beyond the scope of the Soviet Union, doesn’t make much sense. Neither does the extreme global warming related proposals, such as a global government and a global carbon tax which would cost trillions and therefore promises to bankrupt what’s left of the worlds economy. Proposals like Kyoto are well known to do little to actually solve the perceived problem. All this push, while the premise of each issue is highly debatable and their risks over-stated. That’s the truth that the advocates pushing for either issue don’t want to admit. Some explaination for this wreckless nonsense is control. As scholar Robert Higgs points out, in his paper titled “Fear: The Foundation of Every Governments Power“: Over the ages, governments refined their appeals to popular fears, fostering an ideology that emphasizes the people’s vulnerability to a variety of internal and external dangers from which the governors—of all people!—are represented to be their protectors. Government, it is claimed, protects the populace from external attackers and from internal disorder, both of which are portrayed as ever-present threats. Sometimes the government, as if seeking to nourish the mythology with grains of truth, does protect people in this fashion—even the shepherd protects his sheep, but he does so to serve his own interest, not theirs, and when the time comes, he will shear or slaughter them as his interest dictates. Were we ever to stop being afraid of the government itself and of the bogus fears it fosters, the government would shrivel and die, and the host would disappear for the tens of millions of parasites in the United States—not to speak of the vast number of others in the rest of the world—who now sap the public’s wealth and energies directly and indirectly by means of government power. What you might ask yourself is why is it that each of these ’2 parties’ are so perfectly tuned against the other on almost every issue imaginable. The bigger question is how does a population of 300 million people end up being molded and shaped by 2 different viewpoints? How can that be rational? Again, how can one side of every issue be totally correct? Use your reason: what are the odds? Now consider all the the issues we’re all divided over. Abortion, health care, crime, drugs, immigration, guns, liberty, death penalty, terrorism, climate change, and so on. Add the others to that list. Now which ones aren’t emotional issues? Almost literally every issue that each of the two dominant political party’s push, and fights against, are logic destroying emotional issues. With these two parties, and their subsets of issues, that are supposed to represent 300 million people, ask yourself which ones they agree upon. How long is that list? Such a list is almost non-existent. How can these two parties be almost perfectly opposed to each other on virtually every issue that is important to people? What are the odds of such an occurrence to be natural? Have you ever read Sun Tsu’s ancient manuscript “The Art of War”? It contains edifices of tactics of warfare that are still used by the Pentagon to this day. In particular, the concepts of divide and conquer and winning wars without direct military conflicts as the paths of true victory as the supreme methods of warfare. Isn’t it amazing that political polling and voter turnouts over the past decade have demonstrated a near 50/50 division of political ideology? What are the odds of that? So we’re in the middle of a collapse that by all measures looks deliberate, that was caused by the Federal Reserve and its ‘private’ stock-holder banks, who sucked in unfathomable amounts of cash on the ways up and down, and were handed trillions of unaccountable dollars in “bailout” money in the aftermath. Despite all of this, there’s still this push for a near-trillion dollar military budget (in the US alone), along with a global government based on a $1+ trillion per year global carbon tax. Meanwhile the Obama administration is spending at all time record levels on all other fronts, even outpacing the Bush administration. We’re already on the brink here, how can they push harder, and tax us in all new ways? The numbers and facts shows this looming total collapse to be a deliberately orchestrated “Economic World War” by the ruling plutocrat elitists. Why won’t the politicians stop spending and dividing us over trivial issues? And is there something else to this money crisis that answers these questions as well as the nonsense of the 2 major threat issues? The answer is yes. Between the extreme budgets for the War on Terror, the extreme measures being pushed for Global Warming, on top of  the cash crunch we face in this technological 21st Century, it’s hard to make sense of this world gone mad. That is until we factor in the common thread behind that unites all three issues… Enter the AGI Manhattan Project.