Do you think there is a need for cooperation between governments to deal
with these issues? Also there are the huge frozen methane deposits in
the ocean that are thawing as the oceans are warming. It's particularly
bad in the shallow parts of the ocean like the Gulf of Mexico. The
science says that it is likely that the thawing Methane is giving us the
phenomenon of the sinking ships and falling airplanes in the Bermuda
Triangle.
The problem of methane transportation across distances seems beyond the
private sector's capabilities. But a government/private cooperation could
probably produce a solution rather quickly except for the short term
necessity of the private sector to create scarcity for the purpose of
profit. There is a LOT of Methane in the planet.
Instead of government/private cooperation, the private sector is like the
monkey whose hand is trapped in the jar holding on to the banana. The
private sector wants to kill off the government (Grover Norquist) in a kind
of Oedipal relationship that makes no sense other than as a groupthink
psycho-pathology. If corporations are, as the Supreme Court says,
individuals, then what kind of Individuals are they? What age category
of individual does their actions represent? Ten or Eleven years old or are
they simply psychopathological with no morality about self interest?
Today we are about to elect a businessman who is a Bishop from a secretive
religion whose beliefs we have no idea about and who says that states and
government employees can expect no cooperation or help from him. His
willingness to turn his morals on a dime certainly fits the person who will
do whatever he thinks he can get away with for his own purposes. His only
record is one of alienation and personal profit which he calls "business"
and all of that secrecy. There are no observable core moral values
because his church hides their foundational premises and rituals behind a
code of secrecy except for the "elect."
There seems to be no logical negotiation around these issues, like the
methane deposits, that could simply kill the human population off.
Instead they would rather frack for gas and destroy the water table because
they can stimulate both gas and water business as a result. This system
is not unlike the window guy that goes down the street breaking store
windows and leaving his card to fix them or a Doctor who stimulates business
by making his patients addicted to drugs they don't need because of
kickbacks from a drug company. (Anyone checked Lipitor lately and what's
happening to the generics?)
I don't see how anyone who knows anything about this could be for the
insurance companies as healthcare providers. None of this makes sense.
The only option is governmental action for the good of both the patient and
the doctors because that's the purpose of a Democratic government. The
good and value of every citizen and not just the one's who chose a rich
parent in the heavenly lottery. The private sector has a built in
incentive to keep you sick because you don't pay unless you're sick.
That's no healthcare plan. It's also a lousy upkeep plan for
automobilies. My Honda years ago had a monthly upkeep and service plan
that was far cheaper than the "drive it until it stops" plan of the American
companies. But the Japanese have an old culture that plans ahead even
though the West insisted upon claiming their lack of innovation. The same
charge now aimed at the Chinese.
What makes anyone believe that an International corporate private sector
would be good for the general population of the planet when that sector's
sole purpose is wealth creation for their own small groups at any cost
including a morality built on zero-sum i.e. Winner/Loser morality. How
is that not a psychopathology?
Family Feudalism in the 19th century seems more responsible than these
folks. That's why the New World version of Feudalism was different and
was called "Robber" Aristocracy with nothing more than "barbarian culture"
as their motives. That is also why it took the Marshall Plan to convince
Europe that America was a better role model than communism. We bought them
off. Americans had been so bad with poverty and the casino mentality,
that war torn Europe was about to go Communist. So America stood up and
behaved and paid Europe to rebuild. Frankly without Communism as a
competitor they are now bad again. Anyone ridden an American airliner
lately compared to the cleanliness of the Cold War? How about American
hospitals? How does capitalism deal with its business with "Communist
China?" Well they rename it and downplay communism and give it all
kinds of cultural claptrap to explain why they won't succeed until they are
at the gate and then we will all be Rome.
But there is a bigger question than these local National issues. How can
the moral people in economics today justify what is going on as good for the
whole system if the planet ignites as methane is released in great gulps?
And they complain about Indians being immoral for our casinos.
REH
Ed Weick published:
As the Earth warms, forest floors add greenhouse gases to the air
By Brian Vastag
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/brian-vastag/2011/06/02/AGMEARHH_pag
e.html> , Published: June 11
Huge amounts of carbon trapped in the soils of U.S. forests will be released
into the air as the planet heats up, contributing to a "vicious cycle" that
could accelerate climate change, a new study
<http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/06/07/1120603109.abstract>
concluded.
"As the Earth warms, there will be more carbon released from soils, and that
will make the Earth warm even faster," said Eric Davidson, who studies soil
carbon at the Woods Hole Research Center <http://www.whrc.org/> in
Massachusetts but was not involved in the new study.
Forests are an important buffer against climate change, absorbing some of
the carbon-dioxide pollution released from burning fossil fuels. Fallen
leaves and dead trees return carbon to the soil, which takes its brown color
from the element.
But scientists have disagreed about how much of this huge store of locked-in
carbon is at risk for release into the atmosphere.
"Young carbon" - such as that stored in leaves -rapidly returns to the air
as microbes decompose plant matter. As the air warms, the decomposition
speeds up, releasing more carbon. That process is well-known.
But deeper in the soil, older carbon is locked away as "humus" - the soft,
brown material that makes forest floors spongy. Some scientists have
asserted that this carbon will stay locked away even as the planet warms.
To test this idea, scientists took advantage of experimental forests
maintained by the U.S. Energy Department and U.S. Forest Service in
Wisconsin <http://aspenface.mtu.edu/> and North Carolina
<http://face.env.duke.edu/main.cfm> .
Since the late 1990s, scientists have blown carbon dioxide from large tanks
into these forests; the gas carries a specific radioactive carbon signature,
which can be easily traced.
Francesca Hopkins <http://www.ess.uci.edu/celebrate20/reception/hopkins> of
the University of California-Irvine collected soil from the two forests in
jars and then measured how much carbon dioxide the soil emitted as she
warmed the containers. She also measured how much of the carbon dioxide was
more than a decade old- meaning it had been locked away in humus for years.
She found that about one-third of the released carbon dioxide came from
soils at least a decade old. As the soil heated up, that ratio stayed about
the same, meaning that the older carbon was just as vulnerable to rising
temperatures as the younger carbon.
"We now know for the top 15 centimeters [about six inches] of topsoil, most
of that is going to be vulnerable to warming," Hopkins said. "It's going to
increase its respiration rate as global temperatures warm."
Hopkins called this accelerated release of carbon dioxide a contributor to a
"vicious cycle" in which soil carbon dioxide triggers additional atmospheric
warming, which in turn pushes the soil to release even more carbon dioxide.
"While that older material is not going to decompose really fast, there's an
awful lot of it," said Susan Trumbore <http://www.ess.uci.edu/%7Etrumbore/>
, the scientist who led the study.
The study increases concerns that temperate forests will flip from net
absorbers of carbon dioxide to net emitters of the air-warming gas sooner
rather than later, said Trumbore of the University of California-Irvine and
the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry in Germany.
The average surface temperature of the Earth has increased by 1.3 degrees
Fahrenheit since 1900. In 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change <http://www.ipcc.ch/> called for limiting global warming to 3.6
degrees, a goal that looks increasingly difficult to reach as forests,
melting permafrost in Arctic regions and the warming oceans absorb less and
less of the greenhouse gas.
Hopkins said her results should focus attention on reducing carbon-dioxide
pollution from burning fossil fuels. "We can control how much gasoline we
burn and how much coal we burn, but we don't have control over how much
carbon the soil will release once this gets going," she said.
The study was published online Monday by the Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences.
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