https://www.offshore-energy.biz/uk-firm-seeking-partner-for-one-of-north-seas-largest-undeveloped-oil-projects/?fbclid=IwAR3tAjU-fi-p8-zDTVlB7sZqbfLz0TmjVWPDWGLLFCLan4akymkY8oUrMDw

:death:

Next time I'll communicate better by wearing my bright white tennis shoes, my baseball cap, and my cargo shorts so they won't confuse me for being French. — Hanover

There is no way they would have thought you were French; that was them publicly humiliating you for having the temerity to be in France and not speak French. Next time go to Spain. It is of course sacrilege to bend a bagutte, or put it in a bag, but since it sounds like some supermarket and not a proper boulangerie, it wouldn't have been a real baguette anyway, and carrying a folded baguette about town would be a further humiliation akin to having the scarlet letter 'A' embroidered on your dress.

Your logic is valid but this premise makes it unsound. — Jamal

You can have a smaller or larger slice of the pie, but when it gets to half the pie and beyond, you basically have the pie, minus a slice or two. A slice has to have 2 cut sides and the slice between them.

What's a prosecco salad? — Benkei

I don't know, I'm only a peasant. I see you're familiar with lines of coke though.

salad with a dressing — Cuthbert

They're so weird aren't they. Not only do they insist on dressing for dinner, they have to have the dinner dress too.

We peasants need a high carb diet to do all the work. Obviously you white-collar folks will stick to your Prosecco salads and lines of coke and such.

At current melt rate the northern hemisphere won't have any permanent ice by 2040, 2050 at the latest. — Olivier5

"Sea ice" you should say; Greenland ice will take a little longer to melt, fortunately.

Firstly, the Wikipedia statement doesn't even make sense. Secondly, the cited articles don't support it. That Wikipedia article is going to be edited. — Tate

I'm all for editing articles, and I agree the sentence is wooly and inaccurate, and at the same time too precise about the future which remains open to an extent. But wiki is better than clickbait.

It seems only reasonable to consult the inventor about his invention.

... he would ask his servants to bring him slices of meat between two slices of bread, a habit well known among his gambling friends. Other people, according to this account, began to order "the same as Sandwich!", and thus the "sandwich" was born.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Montagu,_4th_Earl_of_Sandwich

Half a bun is not a slice of bread, and neither a frankfurter nor a burger is a slice of meat. Sandwiches are eaten by the aristocracy, and burgers, hot-dogs, chip butties, and doughnuts are peasant food.

Essences can be declared - what else is a patent?

Capital markets are getting wise to this stuff.

“We are seeing the limits to growth and housing affordability and the impacts of poor-quality decision making of where and how to build. We are paying the price for all that now.” — Olivier5

Capital markets are wise enough to build a facility and entice us with the promise of jobs to take out mortgages on places they know full well are going to become worthless and uninhabitable. "We" will be taught to think it our own folly and to trust the wisdom of the market. Again.

https://www.organicconsumers.org/sites/default/files/sowing-hunger-reaping-profits-report.pdf

This is a report on a computer model. — Tate

"Global Warming Good News: No More Ice Ages"

I cannot comment on the computer model, but my argument is that this is very very bad news, not good news.

If ice sheets and glaciers don't melt a bit in the summer, the ice accumulates and starts to advance—in past ice ages, sheets of ice covered all of Canada and most of the Northern United States.

I have already pointed out that Earth has been in a fluctuating ice period for 33 million years. A world without ice is going to be a totally unrecognisable place. Covering Northern Europe and Canada with ice would happen very slowly and would not disrupt the whole world to anything like the same extent.

https://channels.ft.com/en/rethink/how-to-feed-10bn-people-in-a-sustainable-way/?utm_source=FB&utm_medium=sustainability&utm_content=paid&fbclid=IwAR2As2XXpMDsFlIfkqxlI8sawuNqbU7HkFN5GlDAmhz5GczL1vav4D1Q9Ks

We cannot afford for you to eat meat at every meal any more.

To make it clearer, my reason for calling the time of the evolution of humans a period of stability is the Antarctic ice sheet which started developing 33.9 million years ago at the Eocene-Oligocene boundary and this is the 'icehouse period' that we are still in. But manmade global warming is likely to tip us out of the icehouse and into the hothouse which neither humans nor apes have ever experienced.

You are losing track of the relative time scales here. The history of humanity is a point on the geological timescale. We could be living right smack in the middle of one of those "wild fluctuations of climate" that you mentioned and not notice it. — SophistiCat

Perhaps I wasn't clear. The history of humanity spans roughly the Quaternary period, which consists of alternating glaciations and interglacials over the last 3 million years or so; the beginning of the stone age is a little further back into the Pliocene Epoch. That is what I call a period of stability relative to the much larger climate variations over geological time. Note that i call the mere covering of Northern Europe and Canada with an ice sheet benign stability in the context of major disruptive events.

You only just worked this out? — Banno

It has become more apparent as the working poor have lost their economic power, and the social welfare gains of the C20th are rolled back. But don't worry, it's all going to get much worse.

I am wasting my time there because it will only become possible for humanity to restrain themselves from disrupting their own environment to the point of self-extinction by reaching a much wider consensus than we currently have. To the already converted, there is not much to say except 'farewell'. Do you have anything more to say than criticising your allies?

The story so far.

We have solar cycles, about which not much is known over the long term, because the records cannot be read through the inferred influences of the atmosphere. We know that solar radiation varies with the eleven year sunspot cycle, and another 100 year cycle, and we infer from. We also know from astronomical study of main sequence stars, that the sun is getting hotter, by about 25% over 3billion years or so.

Insolation of Earth is further modified by Milankovitch cycles. These have periods of 26000, 41,000, and 100,000 yrs. The reason why the North polar region is the influential one for these cycles is that most of the land mass is in the Northern hemisphere and the land heats and cools more quickly than the sea, and ice forms more easily on land, because sea has salt as antifreeze. So the Antarctic is more stable.

The temperature of Earth's surface is produced by insolation modified by transparency and insulation effects of the atmosphere, and the reflectivity of the surface itself, and by the absorption of heat by photosynthesis. (Forests also have a large cooling influence through transpiration and associated cloud production.)

The lesson I take from the 2 billion yr old story of cyanobacteria poisoning the atmosphere with oxygen and producing a snowball Earth, which might have remained stable until the present because of the reflectivity of ice, but for some vulcanism restoring a bit of CO2 and maybe darkening the ice a bit with ash, is that the Gaia hypothesis is not true. The living planet is not self regulating.

Rather, there have been wild fluctuations of climate through geological time far larger than can be accounted for by variations of insolation. The history of humanity has been one of unusual climate stability sufficiently long for the effects of milankovitch cycles to become noticeable.

When Prime Minister Harold Macmillan was asked what was the greatest challenge for a statesman, he replied: 'Events, dear boy, events'.

Vulcanism, asteroids, continental drift, and changes to the biome. Human civilisation is a change to the biome that has affected every region and every species. It is events that destabilise the climate and send it careering off to a heating or cooling until it arrives at a new semi-stable climate maybe tens of degrees hotter or cooler. This happens because of positive feedback and tipping points, which complex systems analysts will be familiar with.

:rofl: Folks have been looking for a real world example ever since whichever pedant it was raised the 'grue' thing, and you have found it! My heartiest commiserations!

Do you have advice for how to make it clearer? — Tate

Well I put up links to help folks with terminology and timelines, and numbers of years ago are really useful for sorting things.

This graph shows the dramatic change that one little lifeform called cyanobacteria caused, almost resulting in the final mass extinction due to the loss of atmospheric CO2.
The whole globe was covered in ice. — Tate

The Snowball Earth hypothesis proposes that, during one or more of Earth's icehouse climates, the planet's surface became entirely or nearly entirely frozen. It is believed that this occurred sometime before 650 M.Y.A. (million years ago) during the Cryogenian period. Proponents of the hypothesis argue that it best explains sedimentary deposits that are generally believed to be of glacial origin at tropical palaeolatitudes and other enigmatic features in the geological record. Opponents of the hypothesis contest the implications of the geological evidence for global glaciation and the geophysical feasibility of an ice- or slush-covered ocean,[3][4] and they emphasize the difficulty of escaping an all-frozen condition. A number of unanswered questions remain, including whether Earth was a full snowball or a "slushball" with a thin equatorial band of open (or seasonally open) water.

The snowball-Earth episodes are proposed to have occurred before the sudden radiation of multicellular bioforms known as the Cambrian explosion.

But the Cambrian explosion started about 539 million years ago, so the first glaciation period in your graph is not a snowball earth event but the Late Ordovician glaciation and the whole globe was not covered in ice.

This graph shows the dramatic change that one little lifeform called cyanobacteria caused, almost resulting in the final mass extinction due to the loss of atmospheric CO2. — Tate

Here you are unequivocally muddled; the cyanobacteria began photosynthesis about 3.5 Billion years ago and the oxygenation of the atmosphere about 2 billion years ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event

Streetlight is always proud. "I am the right hand and therefore I am in charge." :roll:

At the bottom of the graph you see four purple blocks representing events that some geologists call ice ages. it doesn't really matter what we call these larger scale cold spells. The point is: we're in one. — Tate

The word "quaternary" refers to the idea that there were four ice ages in the past. We now call those glacial periods. — Tate

It bloody well does matter what we call them. You really need to stop waving "ice ages" about quite so carelessly. Do you not see how confusing you are making it for anyone reading the thread? I assume you are clear that the 4 ice ages you were talking about on page one don't even add up to the last of the 4 ice ages you are now talking about, because the quaternary period only covers the last 3 million years approx and just the last "cold spell" in your graph above covers 50 million years. But you certainly do not make it clear to the reader.

What the heck would that look like tho? — Changeling

You know how when you want to open a jar, one hand holds the jar and the other the lid and they twist against each other to get the job done? You and I would work together like that. And when the jar was open, we wouldn't be fighting over the contents.

Ethics? The alleged inadequacies of utilitarianism & Kantianism? — Agent Smith

No, parents and politicians.

1. is a colloquialism, not meant to be taken seriously.
— jgill

Are you sure? — Agent Smith

Yes, quite sure. "Rule" is an ill-defined entity that can be an axiom, a law, a tautology or simply a statistical likelihood. It's a well known saying much used by parents and politicians to excuse their hypocrisy.

1. For every rule there is an exception (premise).
Ergo,
2. The rule for every rule there is an exception itself must have an exception (subconclusion).
Ergo,
3. There are some rules that have no exception (main conclusion). — Agent Smith

4. 1. is false. (RAA)

Trade unions began during the industrial revolution. Lots of workers in one place allowed them to identify together and organise together. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_trade_unions_in_the_United_Kingdom
Prior to that there were the guilds but these were more of a middle class thing.

The trade union as a working class institution has lost much of its power because of globalisation and automation; decentralised occupations such as domestic servants restaurant and bar staff, never had much of an organisation or the ability to cause significant disruption by striking.

I suggest that the current upsurge of interest in trade unions is a manifestation of the loss of power of working people to influence the conditions of their employment. "Don't it always seem to go, that you don't know what you got 'til it's gone."

The consumer has been king because mass production was the way to make money, so the masses needed to be paid so they could spend. Robotics and digital printing make mass production unnecessary for sophisticated luxury. The proletariat is no longer of any value, and therefore has no power.

Can I suggest that we take this slowly, and provide sufficient detail to avoid misunderstandings as much as possible. I'm going to start with this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_time_scale

These graphics and tables will give an idea of geological timescales, and allow some orientation if we need to talk about 'snowball earth' previous extinction events or whatever.

Then, we can look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milankovitch_cycles There are 3 cycles that interact with different periods: precession, obliquity and eccentricity. (This is still a simplification as the link makes clear.)

it said that there had been four ice ages. That's what they could see from looking at rocks. — Tate

Do you mean looking at ice cores? Looking at rocks would involve much longer timescales.

The Last Glacial Period (LGP), also known colloquially as the last ice age or simply ice age,[1] occurred from the end of the Eemian to the end of the Younger Dryas, encompassing the period c. 115,000 – c. 11,700 years ago. The LGP is part of a larger sequence of glacial and interglacial periods known as the Quaternary glaciation which started around 2,588,000 years ago and is ongoing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Glacial_Period


Assuming you are talking about the cycles of the Quaternary glaciation, we need to consider This:

The 100,000-year-problem refers to the lack of an obvious explanation for the periodicity of ice ages at roughly 100,000 years for the past million years, but not before, when the dominant periodicity corresponded to 41,000 years. The unexplained transition between the two periodicity regimes is known as the Mid-Pleistocene Transition, dated to some 800,000 years ago.

Perhaps you can shed some light on that?

My takeaway thus far though is to notice that the change in climate we are now undergoing has been man-made in a couple of centuries, and for us to have noticed the effect so very quickly suggests that it dwarfs the effect of the Milankovitch cycles. Looking at the larger history of earth climate, one sees such huge variations that it seems clear that earth climate is a complex system with many semi-stable attractors. This is the worry that climate scientists have, that our CO2 emissions can move the earth from its current glacial/interglacial cycling to a permanently different semi stable cycling.

I'm in two minds about this question.

On the one hand, when one does separate the halves of the brain, one can see evidence of a division of mind.

Sperry moved on to human volunteers who had a severed corpus callosum. He showed a word to one of the eyes and found that split-brain people could only remember the word they saw with their right eye. Next, Sperry showed the participants two different objects, one to their left eye only and one to their right eye only and then asked them to draw what they saw. All participants drew what they saw with their left eye and described what they saw with their right eye. Sperry concluded that the left hemisphere of the brain could recognize and analyze speech, while the right hemisphere could not.

https://embryo.asu.edu/pages/roger-sperrys-split-brain-experiments-1959-1968

But on the other, since it seems to be merely a matter of connection and communication, the separation of my mind from your mind is a trivial matter, and mind is more like water than like anything discrete and separate, and if only we could communicate better we would all be of one mind.

Do you not think their success is far more likely to be down to their (Cambridge Analytica) campaign strategy, rather than people seeing a few measly votes and thinking 'sod it, let's leave Europe, I'm sold"? — Isaac

No. I think their success was down to frightening the Tories into adopting their policy, which they did by "splitting the vote." Without those losing votes, there would have been no referendum.

Being content is also a goal. — Xtrix

You can make anything a goal, if you make it your goal it is a goal.

It is a capitalist psychology par excellence
— unenlightened

This is simply wrong. You can read even a fraction of my 3000+ posts to see why. Has nothing to do with capitalism— nothing. In fact the entire post is an attempt to frame personal change in the direction away from capitalism. — Xtrix

I am not accusing you of being a capitalist. Nevertheless, your psychology as described is highly individualist as distinct from social in emphasis, materiallist and pragmatic and entirely directed to an endless succession of wants and needs, which is exactly the focus that capitalism demands of a consumer. If your goal is to get away from capitalism, this is not a good basis for doing so. That is my criticism, nothing personal.

Here is a nice little piece on Gregory Bateson, that might hint at other ways of looking at things.

Tories are not necessarily persuaded to be less bigoted by an increasing Labour vote. They may even be persuaded to be more bigoted to pick up the EDL vote to compensate. — Isaac

Indeed. Life is complicated. One can influence different people in different ways with the same small act. Nevertheless, Brexit got done despite the Brexit party never winning significantly, because the movement became a bandwagon and the bigots climbed aboard. So losing votes matter.

If vote (in a situation where I know I'm in a minority) I haven't done some small amount of good. I've done no good at all. The opposition party have won and get to enact their policies in exactly the same way they would have if I hadn't voted. Exactly the same. Not a small but insignificant difference (such as with reducing one's carbon footprint), absolutely no difference at all. — Isaac

This is not true. Political movements inevitably start small and have to grow. One way they are seen to grow is by increasing their support in an election. Thus If I vote Green and the Green candidate does not win, still I have demonstrated some support for Green policies.

For another example, the Brexit party never made much of an impression in winning elections, but they managed to 'get Brexit done', by influencing other parties who became frightened of having 'their' voters poached. Showing support influences others.

maybe because you've already designated that place as "whereof one cannot speak', you see no point in trying. — Metaphysician Undercover

I'm not wedded to it. I suggest a new thread. Try and describe the thinking self in system theoretic terms, and let's see if we can make sense it. What are the boundaries, inputs, outputs, and internal functions? Have you read Bateson's "Steps to an Ecology of Mind"? It's old, but might make a good starting point. But, word to the wise, it does tend to get associated with some odd stuff if you're googling ( beware Neuro-Linguistic Programming). But I can see the self as a complex system within the ecosystem of mind, and the mind as an element of the eco-system that is civilisation - it needs laying out.

Politicians always tell you to vote and they always want you to vote. If the turnout is very low it looks bad on them. sometimes I want it to look bad on them.

One suggestion has been to count the spoilt ballots, and if the spoilt ballots 'win' all the candidates are barred and a new election with new candidates is held. Politicians invariably reject this idea, and that makes me think it a good idea. It has the merit at least of distinguishing protest from apathy.

Anarchist slogans I have known and loved:

Don't vote, it only encourages them.

It doesn't matter who you vote for, the government always gets in.

But in practice, I usually find someone to vote for, or at least someone to vote against.

I want more spontaneity in my life. What's the plan?

I'm sorry, that's a feeble joke, but my heart sinks to read such stuff. Always more, always strife, always heading for a goal somewhere else, never content, forever becoming what one is not. It is a capitalist psychology par excellence and it is nothing new, but the same outdated paradigm that has brought us to the age of destruction.

I won't interrupt again, I just wanted to register my personal dissent.

Consider the "thinking self" as a type of system. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yeah, I'm stuck on this first bit. I can see the body as a system, or the brain as a system or subsystem, but the thinking self as I understand it is more like a habit - something a system usually does. But I don't even much favour that way of talking, because to me systems talk is material talk and mind talk is not. It's like playing Monopoly on a Risk board.

I'm not too familiar with systems theory, but I imagine that any boundary between the system and the environment is conceptual and imposed as a matter of analytic convenience. Boundaries have to be permeable and breach-able. I imagine a pendulum clock on the moon keeping a different time; it is convenient to separate clock from Earth in this way, although the gravity of the planet is what sustains and enables the mechanism to function.

as to internal boundaries, I'm not at all clear what you mean. I think there are internal boundaries, but I tend to have a fairly negative view of them, as divisions and conflicts of thought, and the idea of 'self' as the first source of such divisions. But we are going off topic; perhaps another thread sometime.

You might say that it just came to me, "bang!", as insight, but I would say that it is really the product of all those no's, and going around in circles. The solution never would have come to me if I hadn't gone through that process of elimination first. — Metaphysician Undercover

I can accept that - the secret of success is effort and failure, followed by coincidence, or something like that, but the point I would make is that the explanation doesn't produce a method one can employ; it doesn't actually explain anything better than 'magic' or 'a eureka moment' or 'insight', because it is unrepeatable and unverifiable. It's a explanation of last resort, that you would not have thought much of coming from me. "But how does one have a coincidence?" I seem to hear you say.

But that is why monks practice a discipline and work and meditate; to prepare the mind for that unknown thing that might just happen, at least seemingly, of its own accord and without effort. something that they call 'grace' in the christian tradition, or 'liberation'.

Looking at the state of the modern human world, seemingly headed for complete self-destruction guided by secular science, it is apparent to me that the total contempt for religion that is so fashionable may be leading to the neglect of something important. I call it 'insight', and emphasise that it is something one cannot control or produce at will, but something that comes to one perhaps, or does not. It is something personal, but not of the self. This is not a contradiction of science, but it is beyond the scope of the scientific method, which without it becomes inhuman and mechanical and leads to destruction. In the small, it is a sudden understanding of something; in the large, it is a 'road to Damascus' transformation of one's life. It would be a serious mistake, if one has such a moment, to imagine that one has deserved or achieved it; that would be to add to the self when one should subtract.

how is it developed, if not through magic? — Metaphysician Undercover

It becomes more and more difficult to convey. it does not develop. There is no 'how'. Nothing 'happens'.
Have you ever had a puzzle or a problem that you have tried to work out for a long time without success, and then suddenly, without effort, you have the answer, clear and simple? Is that magic?

Do you not see that this exchange is exactly what I have described, that there is an understanding that cannot be conveyed - I say some words, but I cannot make room in you for a new idea. You need to have an insight!

The person who does not have the same insight as another might still have the capacity to have that insight, if the way is shown. — Metaphysician Undercover

'Show me the way, O, great one' says the earnest follower of every religion. But insight is present or it is absent, and there is no method, or training, or process or 'way' towards it. That is mere knowledge that is accumulated over time. Indeed there is an inversion, that the more greedily and earnestly one seeks insight, the less likely one is to attain it - as if one were chasing after stillness, or a dog chasing its tail.

All this is fairly orthodox and widespread - one goes to the church for comfort, but to the monastery for insight, and at the monastery one finds discipline, hard work, and silence, which is no more a path to enlightenment than a hot day is a path to a thunderstorm.

But I still think there must be a way to talk about things — Metaphysician Undercover

He that hath ears to hear, let him hear. — Matthew 11: 15

If we have the same insight, we can talk about it;

There’s a poem which says when two Zen masters meet each other on the road they need no introduction. Thieves recognise one another instantaneously.

https://alanwatts.org/2-2-5-buddhism-as-dialogue-part-1/

But if you have an insight that I do not, then I will always mistake that which is in you for that which is in me when they are not at all the same. I will be like a blind man using the word 'see' and understanding it as a metaphor "I see what you mean", but can only understand "I see a car coming down the road"as some kind of superior directional hearing type thing, or remote touch, or...

In 1896, a seminal paper by Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius first predicted that changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels could substantially alter the surface temperature through the greenhouse effect. In 1938, Guy Callendar connected carbon dioxide increases in Earth's atmosphere to global warming.

https://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/

Scientists first began to worry about climate change toward the end of the 1950s, Spencer Weart, a historian and retired director of the Center for History of Physics at the American Institute of Physics in College Park, Maryland, told Live Science in an email. "It was just a possibility for the 21st century which seemed very far away, but seen as a danger that should be prepared for."

The scientific community began to unite for action on climate change in the 1980s, and the warnings have only escalated since.

https://www.livescience.com/humans-first-warned-about-climate-change.


So everyone is right. Put it on your tombstones for no one to read.