Diary Of The Last Age

People don't like being told about future catastrophes.  Actually they become inured by doomsaying religious sects who have been predicting the end of the world every few years for the last two thousand.  Science is different.  If science had been around when the Americas were discovered by Europeans, and there had been scientists studying disease in the New World, we might have been able to predict the tragic decimation of the New World inhabitants to disease, and prevented it.  Science is a better predictor than religion.  For example, the HIV plague.  But science reacted and HIV is now subdued.  Another prediction in the 1960's was the problem of the "population bomb," of being able to feed a soaring population, .  Well science found a way out, the Green Revolution . But we are now onto a new level.  There will be 8 billion people on this planet by 2050.  And we don't know if science is going to come up with another s...

Pope Francis has, of course, made his statement that global warming is anthropogenic and that as a moral act we are required to do something about it. But he is not alone .  Some Evangelicals have been energized .  Still, most Evangelicals are not so convinced Polls suggest that evangelicals are the American religious group least likely to believe that global warming is real or caused by humans. Many of them are politically conservative and are influenced by groups that question established climate science and defend the rising use of fossil fuels. So there is likely some ways to go to get most Christians behind the movement to solve the global warming crisis.  But the support of Pope Francis and the Evangelicals For Climate Action gives us hope.

It just sounds good, more carbon dioxide will mean more plant growth.  CO2 is a kind of plant food, right?  It'll mean more wheat, corn, rice, per acre.  Unfortunately not .  A new study shows that more carbon dioxide reduces the plant's ability to process nitrogen.  This is very unfortunate because we are forecast to have to have enough food every day to feed 8 billion people by 2050.  Mass starvation is in our future unless we figure out how to do that.  And as I've posted before , the anti-GMO people are not helping. 

To preserve their flow of profit, tobacco companies in the 1960's countered the scientific research about cigarettes and lung cancer by producing a war on scientists and their research .  “Merchants of Doubt” is primarily based on the influential 2010 book of the same name by science historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, which traces the strategy and tactics of climate denial back to the tobacco industry’s 50-year propaganda war against clear-cut medical evidence and increased government regulation. “Our product is doubt,” as one infamous internal memo, found amid the reams of tobacco-industry documents pried free from the corporate vaults, put it. Advised by consultants at the P.R. firm Hill & Knowlton never to directly deny the mounting evidence that cigarettes were addictive and deadly, tobacco execs and their hired scientific hands insisted for decades that they simply weren’t sure. Maybe and maybe not! We need more research and more evidence! We don’t personally ...

While all of the attention is on Republican Candidates for President denying global warming, and on the deniers financing their campaigns, the Koch brothers , and oil companies , other companies have working to forestall the consequences predicted by climate scientists: More than 100 CEOs and institutional investors are asking for a strong climate agreement at the 2015 Paris talks. "Ambitious agreement" at the COP in Paris Signed by energy agencies, insurance companies, vehicles and distribution" The 43 signatories – CEOs who manage the companies from 20 economic sectors with a total turnover generated in 2014 of over $1,200 – include Francesco Starace (Enel, the only Italian company), Gérard Mestrallet (GDF SUEZ), Ignacio Galán (Iberdrola), Masashi Muromachi (Toshiba), Olof Persson (Volvo), Peter Agnefjäll (IKEA), Michael Diekmann (Allianz), Nikolaus von Bomhard (Munich RE), Michel Liès (Swiss RE) and Paul Polman (Unilever). This is certainly a favorable trend. ...