Vocal Voices

... no desert to hot, no ice cap too cold, to keep us from raping the planet.

The Arctic is said to hold up to 13 percent of the world's undiscovered oil reserves, and 30 percent of undiscovered gas deposits; though how anyone can put limit figures on unknowns is anybody's guess. The race is on to get at these riches.

Licences are being awarded to mine the ocean beds. A five million sq km area of the Pacific known as the Clarion-Clipperton Zone is thought to have more than 27 billion tonnes of nodules lying on the sand - nodules that contain nickel, copper, manganese and cobalt. Nobody has any idea of how destructive gathering them will be, but we will do it anyway.

Gold. copper and silver have been found under the Gobi desert - nearly 5 billion tonnes of it. The mining of it will last for decades. Meanwhile, due to deforestation and overgrazing, the Gobi is advancing southwards and eating up 3,600 sq km of good agricultural land every year.

Over in the high Andes large deposits of coal, oil and natural gas, iron ore, gold, silver, tin, copper, phosphates and nitrates and aluminium (bauxite) are found. Peru's Yanacocha gold mine is the largest in the world. This open cast mine has its rocks containing gold blasted with dynamite. The pulverised rock is then sprayed with cyanide and the gold extracted from the solution. This can, and does, contaminate water supplies.

With all of these projects as potential money spinners is it any wonder that climate change is not really being tackled seriously?

Not at all WM. Simple greed on this one. There are alternatives for the energy side but Oil and Gas are firmly entrenched with massive infrastructures to protect and feed.

The one you missed is that they are now looking at methane clathrates. Not just in the Arctic but around the world. It is estimated that the methane clathrate deposits around the world outnumber our Oil and gas reserves by either 10 or 100 to one. I don't remember but the number is HUGE. Enough to turn the planet back to the Cretaceous. And they are talking about mining the underground methane deposits on the Arctic continental shelves and the Asia/American submerged land bridge.

Nobody cares about balance. Nobody cares that the climate has already been overwhelmed. Well except for a "few" crackpots who, like us, bang on about it all the time....

However we'll shortly be losing all the Arctic ice in summer. That should provide a wake up call. Until, of course, it becomes a normal event and the world doesn't end immediately. Then it will be dismissed as an irrelevance.

Greenland lost more than 500 cubic kilometres of ice in 2012. Net. So what say the oil mongers. There's 2.8 million cubic kilometres up there, why bother about 500.... Except that in 1990, the entire net loss of ice in the world was less than Greenland saw in 2012. Oh yes, they said it's a 1 in 150 year event, normal, so what? What about when it happens again 20 years from now?

Destabilisation has already begun and all we hear is how we can go harder, faster, more power, more coal, more oil, more people to feed. That is constant. What is not constant is: More drought, more storms, more fires, more crop destruction, less harvests, more inundation, more climate instability, more temperature rise, more anoxic events in the oceans.

We are the frog, sitting in the pot. The heat is slowly turning up but we don't notice and don't jump out. It's similar to the guy who jumps off the office building 40 stories up. He's saying something. Someone opens the window and hears "looking good so far".

Except this is not correct. What is happening now is like humanity being blindfolded and thrown off the office building and everybody inside the building shouting out of the windows "looking good so far".

It will not be us who hits the bottom. But it will be our grandchildren or great grandchildren.

The reason I mentioned those four Suff, is that they have all recently made it to the less visible pages of newspapers, journals and websites. They are all local stories but with global implications, and they give numbers that we can all understand and imagine.

There are hundreds, if not thousands, of smaller but no less harmful projects going on that we never get to hear about.

Workingman wrote:The reason I mentioned those four Suff, is that they have all recently made it to the less visible pages of newspapers, journals and websites. They are all local stories but with global implications, and they give numbers that we can all understand and imagine.

There are hundreds, if not thousands, of smaller but no less harmful projects going on that we never get to hear about.

We can understand and imagine 2 billion too. Like the populations of the EU, USA, and China stuck on top, as the number of people who are likely to die from the secondary effects of Global warming (lack of food, war, social order collapse etc).

I assume that the local papers are not talking about Shale Oil fracking and the contamination of the water table from it??? It's one thing in the US, who's population density is massively lower than the UK. Quite another thing to do this in the UK...

Workingman wrote:The reason I mentioned those four Suff, is that they have all recently made it to the less visible pages of newspapers, journals and websites. They are all local stories but with global implications, and they give numbers that we can all understand and imagine.

There are hundreds, if not thousands, of smaller but no less harmful projects going on that we never get to hear about.

We can understand and imagine 2 billion too. Like the populations of the EU, USA, and China stuck on top, as the number of people who are likely to die from the secondary effects of Global warming (lack of food, war, social order collapse etc).

I assume that the local papers are not talking about Shale Oil fracking and the contamination of the water table from it??? It's one thing in the US, who's population density is massively lower than the UK. Quite another thing to do this in the UK...