Earth 4 Degrees Hotter

I am finding this article by Robert Hunziker to be terrifying reading. Much of the life on this planet is going to be wiped out as a result of our specie's ignorance, delusion and stupidity. We are enslaved by a system of oligarchy and corruption and insanity and it doesn't look like we're going to be able to free ourselves from it to avoid this cataclysm.

According to the scientific forum 4 Degrees Hotter: “Less than a billion people will survive.” Expect, on average, more than a million human global warming deaths every week. As such, mass graveyards stacked with bodies would become a new normal.
Prominent climate scientists were quoted in the 4 Degrees Hotter article:
According to Professor Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, one of Europe’s most eminent climate scientists, director of the Potsdam Institute: “At 4C Earth’s … carrying capacity estimates are below 1 billion people.”
Echoing that opinion, professor Kevin Anderson of the prestigious Tyndall Centre for Climate Change stated: “Only about 10% of the planet’s population would survive at 4C.”
A global average of 4C means land temperatures would be 5.5C-6C hotter, especially inland from coasts. The tropics would be too hot for people to live and most of the temperate regions would be desertified.
As a result, half of the planet would be uninhabitable. Populations would be driven towards the poles. Over 136 port cities each with populations of one-half to one million would require sea walls or translocation of nearly one-half billion people.
In Europe, new deserts would spread to Italy, Spain, Greece, and Turkey as the Sahara figuratively leaps across the Straits of Gibraltar. In Switzerland, summer would be as hot as Baghdad today. Europe’s population would be forced into a “Great Trek North” in order to survive.
Even as recently as this century, the European heat wave of 2003 killed 35,000, but it was only a sampler of what too much heat does to the human body. (Source: The 2003 European Heatwave Caused 35,000 Deaths, New Scientist, October 10, 2003)
At the time, and according to the New Scientist, in 2003: “The EPI says it is confident that the August heat wave has broken all records for heat-related deaths and says the world must cut the carbon dioxide emissions that contribute to global warming.”
But, today, that’s a bad joke with CO2 in 2003 at 378 ppm. Today it’s 410. Therefore, “must cut the carbon dioxide emissions that contribute to global warming” has been a total bust!

Read the whole thing and figure out what you can actually do to stop it. Even if it means forgoing eating meat every damned day and renouncing your alleged birthright to fly in airplanes.

Latest Books

So a quick word about the latest books I'm reading.

What the Hell is Wrong With Doug Ford?

I've said it before but I'll say it again; For a financially secure, suburban family with both parents in the house, the Ford children sure turned out to be a bunch of human wrecks. I sincerely believe it must have been an abusive household. We know that Rob Ford's own marriage had its explosions. And we know that everyone pretended things were fine. I'm just making these painful speculations because it's obvious that Doug Ford is one twisted human being.

What sorts of people try to profit off of health care? What sorts of people want to gouge the sick and outright exclude the poor from life-saving medical care? What sorts of people hike the prices of pharmaceuticals needed by tens of thousands of people for the soul reason of profit maximization? We call these people "greedy psychopaths."

And what do we call the politicians who serve these greedy psychopaths? Craven, boot-licking asswipe psychopaths. Like all the Repugnicans and coporate Democrats who think to themselves: "Sure it'd be nice if my constituents could get health care without going bankrupt. It'd be better for the majority of my fellow US-Americans if we had systems like they have in Canada or Europe. But if we did go that way, a few very wealthy people who pay my bills and promise myself and my family lovely things for my services, will be discomfited. So I guess that hundreds of thousands of my fellow citizens will continue to be gouged, bankrupted, and die."

It's an open question whether politics attracts people who are that much more debased than the average person, or whether very average people get debased by the processes they're inserted into. (It's probably a combination. Sick people becoming further debased by a sick system.)

Here in Canada, the Liberals under Paul Martin did a lot of the heavy-lifting to privatize our national health system. With a lot of help from "conservative" provincial governments. In so doing they engaged in a lot of the usual Liberal self-delusion about destroying things in order to save them and outright self-deception about how they were actually "building a country where everyone had a fair shot and fairness and justice and aren't we all as awesome as it's humanly possible to be?"

It's really been the Conservatives; first under Preston Manning and then under stephen harper, who dedicated themselves outright to the destruction of public health care in Canada. And though they do this with the usual ideologically-based twaddle about the "efficiencies" of the private sector and "choice" and other garbage, they're still quite well aware of the fact that the policies they're pushing are going to bring the nightmare of profiteering and gouging and denial of care and death that plays out south of the border.

These people are mentally diseased. But I'm sure they come to their state of affliction by numerous ways. Abusive households; sexually molested, religious insanity, abandonment and other traumas. Plus plain-old stupidity. Not a lot going on upstairs. Too moronic to grasp the extent of their debasement. Zero empathy.

Which brings me back to Doug Ford. He's brazen in his corruption and in his service to oligarchic scum. But the thing is, he seems to be genuinely mystified when people don't like him. He's rich. White. Male. He's a pretty big guy. He probably got to have his way a lot in high school. He's not very academically inclined so he dropped-out of college and went to work in the family business. There his achievements have been middling. But he's "the boss." He dominated his younger brother. Rob was genuinely trying to help individual constituents while holding himself together during the day to get to his next drunken stupor. When Doug became a councilor he used his position more for personal enrichment than Rob did. But as a councilor, Doug Ford found himself as an equal amidst people who didn't have to kiss his ass. And he didn't like it. He didn't like not being able to fire people who disagreed with him. He didn't like his behaviour being held up to scrutiny and accountability.

And now he's premier of Ontario. He actually forces his MPPs to give him standing ovations or they'll be punished. And he's probably convinced himself that their enthusiasm is genuine. Because he's fucked in the head. He's a real piece of shit-work. He's fucking-over Ontario on numerous levels for reasons of his stupid ideology and because of his overall corruption. But he still wants people to like him.

What sort of person would kill someone while driving drunk and then go that person's hospital room with the family and friends of the victim standing beside the death bed, and try to tell them the victim should have been more careful and ask everybody there to be his friend? A truly sick, fucked-up, monumentally stupid person. Like Doug Ford.

Vote For Whatever Party You Like

I mean, first of all, it's not going to matter anyway. Big Oil owns the Liberals and the Conservatives. And, I found out the other day, that one of the NDP's genius managers (the unelected "professionals" who have produced failure after failure) makes some extra cash on the side as a lobbyist for Big Oil as well. Who knows what corporate scum from Big Oil has been talking to the Green Party about whatever?

The main contest (as always) will be between the lying pretty-boy Justin Trudeau, and the creepy Christo-fascist Andrew Scheer. What a dismal state of affairs! Neither side will do anything about the crisis of global warming. We're a few years away from Armageddon and we expect to lower our carbon output by sometime around the year 2555. But, as I said, none of the other parties can be expected to do much different.

But, for gawd's sake; Don't listen to the hypocritical screechings of Trudeau-groupies about the dangers of vote-splitting and how that might give the Conservatives a majority. I say again, I will always say, that if a Conservative majority is such a horrible thought, then abolishing our First-Past-The-Post electoral system should have been job one. But this fear-mongering and voter-shaming that the Libs practice is part of their DNA.  They simply can't help themselves. But I'll never vote Liberal again. I might never vote again.

The methane farts that will erupt as the permafrost CONTINUES to melt will doom us all regardless of what party you hold your nose to vote for.

Artist's depiction of the surface of the planet Venus. I wonder if life first formed on Venus and developed into a technological civilization that started the feedback loops that produced the nightmare world that exists today.