I myself was unable to access this link. Others may have better luck. But I was able to get a summary from the comment that linkied this article.
My comment is that all geo engineering will bring will the burning of even more fossil fuels because geo engineeering will be seen as an excuse to justify the burning of more fossil fuels. Then once we lose the capacity to geo engineer, which we will, we won’t be baked, we will be char broiled instead. https://www.bostonglobe.com/2024/11/12/opinion/climate-change-geoengineering/
The Ukraine War continues its crumbling stalemate, the Russians inching forward steadily at many points across the vast “front”, with the pace of the Russian advances seeming to accelerate as the Russians probe for opportunities to flank Ukrainian fortifications and threaten Ukrainian supply routes in such a way as to force the Ukrainians to withdraw.
It seems to the more realistic observers like this war must end in negotiations and a territorial settlement that concedes much to Russia, but the proponents of the war remain righteous and unbending. The propaganda is especially curious.
The alleged participation of North Korean troops somewhere — allegations differ on whether the Koreans were in Ukraine proper or the Kursk region of Russia — became a major provocation for South Korea and for Germany, without ever being confirmed by objective evidence. Ukrainian propaganda did produce a vaguely Korean-looking Ukrainian speaker in a cringe video.
A phone call from Trump to Putin was widely reported and the basis of speculation while never being confirmed by Trump’s people and while being actively denied by Putin’s.
It is easy to calculate that Russia has the advantage of Ukraine, despite Western economic sanctions, given Russia’s greater population, resource-base, wealth and productivity. It is not necessarily easy to see why it chooses to prosecute the war on the ground in slow motion, grinding a few places to dust over months. In what respects its self-restraint is a cautious aversion to risk in service to a strategy of attrition is difficult to work out, especially in an information environment polluted with so many improbable assertions, especially by the Ukrainians.
For those in the West who advocate for sponsoring this conflict as a proxy war against Russia, aimed at the grand strategic goal of depleting Russia military capacity or de-stabilizing Putin’s regime, freeing Russia resources to be consumed by the neoliberal golem, things have not gone well to date. The Gas Station with Nukes, once said to be trailing Italy, has now surpassed Japan in PPP GDP rankings and its previously dilapidated military and largely moribund military-industrial base is rapidly advancing in capability.
Does realism — moral or pragmatic — in U.S. or European foreign policy stand a chance of emerging? It does not seem imminent to me. And, though, Putin claims that the war will continue until Russia’s goals are achieved by force, it is hard to see any mechanism by which the Russians can “force” an outcome favorable to themselves without a revolution in foreign policy thinking in the U.S. and Western Europe.
Maybe there’s some event in the Middle East — the sinking of an aircraft carrier? — that would jar the geo-political calculations going on in Teh Blob(tm) enough to radically change the potential of a realignment of politics in Ukraine (not to mention Georgia, Armenia, Moldova, Romania, Poland, France, Germany, the UK) to organize a post-war Ukrainian government or draw a stable boundary/armistice line.
I see a few people arguing for instituting still another frozen conflict, which seems to my naive understanding to be designing for prolonged conflict. That seems to be the way political specialists in these things, “think” very often: in terms of compromises that prolong pain and risk.
Geoengineering is increasingly being pushed by billionaires as “the solution to climate change,” but as with everything that comes out of that group, it’s a scam. At best geoengineering might be able to buy us a little bit of time, but we don’t have any idea what the long-term impact on the climate or on human health will be. And it’s a dangerous idea because it carries the appeal of an easy solution to a massive problem, and it also plays to our collective egos–“there’s nothing humans can’t do” after all.
I’d be interested to see Ian do a post on geoengineering. It’s getting enough traction as an idea that I think it would be a worthy topic to cover.
India and China won’t let themselves die of global warming. If they think no – one else is helping get anything achieved in that regard, they will do geo-engineering on their own and dare the rest of the world to try and stop them. They would probably do the Stratospheric Shroud of Sulfates and also maybe Seed the Open Oceans with Algae Bloomogenic Iron.
Here is a little video of an old-ish man digging turves of peat for stacking for drying for fuel. It is from the OddlySatisfying subreddit and is titled . . . This old guy’s digging technique.
Here is the link. https://www.reddit.com/r/oddlysatisfying/comments/1gswenr/this_old_guys_digging_technique/
Note especially the tool he is using. That tool seems specially designed for this purpose.
I once saw a video of an analogously-designed toolhead on the end of a hugely long shaft made for getting vast amounts of snow off of roofs in Norway. That could be very relevant to anyone whose roof gets weighted down with 2 or 3 or 5 feet of snow at a time in the global warming super snowdumps of tomorrow. That much snow could cave in a roof. Maybe one would want to make, have or get a snow remover made on the principle of this tool, which I gather is called a sleán or slane as seen on the video: ” Turf cutting with a sleán or slane is a traditional method of harvesting peat or turf from bogs”
And here is the video where I found the name of the tool from. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-tSV76I1Nc
( I dimly remembered the word “slain” as a peat cutting tool from years ago so I hunted for it on the Yahoo All The Web search engine under the search term “slain for cutting peat”. I found it. If you remember an exact word, the search engines can sometimes still help.)
Entrepreneurs often have an experience of success from moving forward aggressively and finding solutions to problems that that reckless aggression creates, later. It can become a pattern if you become rich: the confidence that you can solve problems by throwing money at them as they arise. Oh, it is getting hotter? Simple: more air conditioning. And, that often goes with an entrepreneurial habit of externalizing costs, too: make it someone else’s problem is a solution, if you can get away with it.
The predictable stupidity of smart but self-centered, powerful, rich people.
Bruce Wilder, Right now NATO and Western Europe seem so disjointed and without coherent goals that a response to a Russian forced settlement seems unlikely. There will be anger but will there be an organized response?
The promoters of transhumance, GMO, geoengineering and AI among other destructive and wonky concepts share a lack of knowledge about the order of the universe and how the phenomenal world works along with shit loads of hubris and money.
One can only pray for their self destruction before it’s visited upon the rest of us.
Not that I wish anyone any harm, it’s just that some ideas and movements should be tossed in a dumpster fire before gaining ascendency and burning us all.
Cockroaches and rats thrive in the dark on refuse—not to be enigmatic or anything.
“Ukrainian propaganda did produce a vaguely Korean-looking Ukrainian speaker in a cringe video.”
“Foreigners, whether from Eurasia or from Eastasia, were a kind of strange animal. One literally never saw them except in the guise of prisoners, and even as prisoners one never got more than a momentary glimpse of them. Nor did one know what became of them, apart from the few who were hanged as war-criminals: the others simply vanished, presumably into forced-labour camps. The round Mongol faces had given way to faces of a more European type, dirty, bearded and exhausted.”
Huh. I guess we are further along than I thought. Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia.
I have a feeling that the US will get into a war with China within the next five or six years if not sooner, (and with Iran as well; i.e., the US will be at war with China, Russia and Iran in one form or another.)
The war between China and the US will probably be fought through a proxy or proxies, i.e., the Philippines or Japan. I do not think Taiwan will last in a war with China, and I am not sure if South Korea will want to get into a war with China even if South Korea is a vassal and pressured by the US.
For various reasons, I am fairly confident that China will come out ahead in a regional war with the US, especially in a war of attrition (due to China’s overwhelming industrial power.) China will perform badly in the first year of the war, due to the lack of experience. However, after the first year, China will have acquired enough experiences to turn the tide. The US and/or its vassals will suffer serious losses after/in the second year.
My biggest worry is that the US will resort to the nuclear option when the war goes sour for America. If the US uses nuke, then China will have to respond with nuke. The US has this sheer hubris and arrogant attitude: we can do whatever we want, but you can’t. It is a mindset that has, unfortunately, also cripple the US in strategic thinking: nowadays the US always assumes its adversary will not retaliate because they can’t think beyond this mindset of “they can’t” or “we are America, they would not dare.”
China needs to get into an agreement to manage this coming future war: i.e., both sides agree to keep the war between them conventional and regional, and not expand the war — and, regardless of who wins or loses the war, both sides will accept the outcome and will NOT escalate to or use nuke.
And what do you know . . . here is an actual video of snow removal from a roof in Norway showing the tool designed and made to do that. And it allows the tool to be seen clearly enough that anyone with some skill and materials could make one themself. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kB8rArIgEq4
RE: Ukraine
Dave: will there be an organized response?
It seems to me that “the Collective West” have been thoroughly organized so far, but their principle of organization specifically excludes anything that could be recognized as negotiation between states. That’s kind of the point of “the rules-based international order” after all.
But, your point is still well-taken. Without counterparties representing Europe, the U.S. or Ukraine itself able and willing to make an offer or accept a settlement — and the framework of the rules-based international order as conceived by EU and NATO leadership excludes this — it is difficult to see a military end-game that arrives at any state of affairs that would allow Russia to declare victory and begin building a post-war relationship with the bulk of Ukraine — its territory or people.
Biden giving permission to Ukraine to use long-range missiles (ATACMS) to strike inside Russia is being widely reported. Russian propaganda on this point seeks to amplify supposed ambivalence about this decision among figures in the incoming Trump Administration, while the Russians themselves and their partisans warn of the risks of escalation. Some in the Biden Administration have hinted that the permission is less broad than is being reported — relating specifically to defense of Ukraine’s Kursk incursion. Ukraine, to defend their need to use these missiles, has come close to admitting that Russia’s salvo against electrical infrastructure was especially devastating.
The information vacuum makes it very hard to feel any confidence in any assessment of the war situation.
Pro-Ukrainian sources claim that the Russians are suffering very high rates of casualties in their broad offensive by inches. There is no real evidence of this. A reason offered for Biden’s change-of-heart is the presence of North Korean troops somewhere in Russian battlespace — a “fact” that has never been believable let alone proven. The central importance of Sudzha in Ukraine’s Kursk incursion is rarely mentioned let alone analyzed in news media reports — Sudzha houses the pipeline junction where Russian natural gas flowing thru Ukraine to central Europe is metered.
Curt Kastens
I myself was unable to access this link. Others may have better luck. But I was able to get a summary from the comment that linkied this article.
My comment is that all geo engineering will bring will the burning of even more fossil fuels because geo engineeering will be seen as an excuse to justify the burning of more fossil fuels. Then once we lose the capacity to geo engineer, which we will, we won’t be baked, we will be char broiled instead.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2024/11/12/opinion/climate-change-geoengineering/
bruce wilder
The Ukraine War continues its crumbling stalemate, the Russians inching forward steadily at many points across the vast “front”, with the pace of the Russian advances seeming to accelerate as the Russians probe for opportunities to flank Ukrainian fortifications and threaten Ukrainian supply routes in such a way as to force the Ukrainians to withdraw.
It seems to the more realistic observers like this war must end in negotiations and a territorial settlement that concedes much to Russia, but the proponents of the war remain righteous and unbending. The propaganda is especially curious.
The alleged participation of North Korean troops somewhere — allegations differ on whether the Koreans were in Ukraine proper or the Kursk region of Russia — became a major provocation for South Korea and for Germany, without ever being confirmed by objective evidence. Ukrainian propaganda did produce a vaguely Korean-looking Ukrainian speaker in a cringe video.
A phone call from Trump to Putin was widely reported and the basis of speculation while never being confirmed by Trump’s people and while being actively denied by Putin’s.
It is easy to calculate that Russia has the advantage of Ukraine, despite Western economic sanctions, given Russia’s greater population, resource-base, wealth and productivity. It is not necessarily easy to see why it chooses to prosecute the war on the ground in slow motion, grinding a few places to dust over months. In what respects its self-restraint is a cautious aversion to risk in service to a strategy of attrition is difficult to work out, especially in an information environment polluted with so many improbable assertions, especially by the Ukrainians.
For those in the West who advocate for sponsoring this conflict as a proxy war against Russia, aimed at the grand strategic goal of depleting Russia military capacity or de-stabilizing Putin’s regime, freeing Russia resources to be consumed by the neoliberal golem, things have not gone well to date. The Gas Station with Nukes, once said to be trailing Italy, has now surpassed Japan in PPP GDP rankings and its previously dilapidated military and largely moribund military-industrial base is rapidly advancing in capability.
Does realism — moral or pragmatic — in U.S. or European foreign policy stand a chance of emerging? It does not seem imminent to me. And, though, Putin claims that the war will continue until Russia’s goals are achieved by force, it is hard to see any mechanism by which the Russians can “force” an outcome favorable to themselves without a revolution in foreign policy thinking in the U.S. and Western Europe.
Maybe there’s some event in the Middle East — the sinking of an aircraft carrier? — that would jar the geo-political calculations going on in Teh Blob(tm) enough to radically change the potential of a realignment of politics in Ukraine (not to mention Georgia, Armenia, Moldova, Romania, Poland, France, Germany, the UK) to organize a post-war Ukrainian government or draw a stable boundary/armistice line.
I see a few people arguing for instituting still another frozen conflict, which seems to my naive understanding to be designing for prolonged conflict. That seems to be the way political specialists in these things, “think” very often: in terms of compromises that prolong pain and risk.
NR
Geoengineering is increasingly being pushed by billionaires as “the solution to climate change,” but as with everything that comes out of that group, it’s a scam. At best geoengineering might be able to buy us a little bit of time, but we don’t have any idea what the long-term impact on the climate or on human health will be. And it’s a dangerous idea because it carries the appeal of an easy solution to a massive problem, and it also plays to our collective egos–“there’s nothing humans can’t do” after all.
I’d be interested to see Ian do a post on geoengineering. It’s getting enough traction as an idea that I think it would be a worthy topic to cover.
different clue
Here is an uplifting little item on the MadeMeSmile subreddit, about you maybe having a village and being part of it without even knowing.
https://www.reddit.com/r/MadeMeSmile/comments/1gsstsm/you_have_a_village_even_when_you_dont_know_it/
The moral would seem to be ” know your village” and “be a co-contributing part of it when the chance comes up.”
different clue
@NR,
India and China won’t let themselves die of global warming. If they think no – one else is helping get anything achieved in that regard, they will do geo-engineering on their own and dare the rest of the world to try and stop them. They would probably do the Stratospheric Shroud of Sulfates and also maybe Seed the Open Oceans with Algae Bloomogenic Iron.
different clue
Here is a little video of an old-ish man digging turves of peat for stacking for drying for fuel. It is from the OddlySatisfying subreddit and is titled . . . This old guy’s digging technique.
Here is the link.
https://www.reddit.com/r/oddlysatisfying/comments/1gswenr/this_old_guys_digging_technique/
Note especially the tool he is using. That tool seems specially designed for this purpose.
I once saw a video of an analogously-designed toolhead on the end of a hugely long shaft made for getting vast amounts of snow off of roofs in Norway. That could be very relevant to anyone whose roof gets weighted down with 2 or 3 or 5 feet of snow at a time in the global warming super snowdumps of tomorrow. That much snow could cave in a roof. Maybe one would want to make, have or get a snow remover made on the principle of this tool, which I gather is called a sleán or slane as seen on the video: ” Turf cutting with a sleán or slane is a traditional method of harvesting peat or turf from bogs”
And here is the video where I found the name of the tool from.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-tSV76I1Nc
( I dimly remembered the word “slain” as a peat cutting tool from years ago so I hunted for it on the Yahoo All The Web search engine under the search term “slain for cutting peat”. I found it. If you remember an exact word, the search engines can sometimes still help.)
bruce wilder
Entrepreneurs often have an experience of success from moving forward aggressively and finding solutions to problems that that reckless aggression creates, later. It can become a pattern if you become rich: the confidence that you can solve problems by throwing money at them as they arise. Oh, it is getting hotter? Simple: more air conditioning. And, that often goes with an entrepreneurial habit of externalizing costs, too: make it someone else’s problem is a solution, if you can get away with it.
The predictable stupidity of smart but self-centered, powerful, rich people.
Dave
Bruce Wilder, Right now NATO and Western Europe seem so disjointed and without coherent goals that a response to a Russian forced settlement seems unlikely. There will be anger but will there be an organized response?
mago
The promoters of transhumance, GMO, geoengineering and AI among other destructive and wonky concepts share a lack of knowledge about the order of the universe and how the phenomenal world works along with shit loads of hubris and money.
One can only pray for their self destruction before it’s visited upon the rest of us.
Not that I wish anyone any harm, it’s just that some ideas and movements should be tossed in a dumpster fire before gaining ascendency and burning us all.
Cockroaches and rats thrive in the dark on refuse—not to be enigmatic or anything.
GrimJim
“Ukrainian propaganda did produce a vaguely Korean-looking Ukrainian speaker in a cringe video.”
“Foreigners, whether from Eurasia or from Eastasia, were a kind of strange animal. One literally never saw them except in the guise of prisoners, and even as prisoners one never got more than a momentary glimpse of them. Nor did one know what became of them, apart from the few who were hanged as war-criminals: the others simply vanished, presumably into forced-labour camps. The round Mongol faces had given way to faces of a more European type, dirty, bearded and exhausted.”
Huh. I guess we are further along than I thought. Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia.
KT Chong
I have a feeling that the US will get into a war with China within the next five or six years if not sooner, (and with Iran as well; i.e., the US will be at war with China, Russia and Iran in one form or another.)
The war between China and the US will probably be fought through a proxy or proxies, i.e., the Philippines or Japan. I do not think Taiwan will last in a war with China, and I am not sure if South Korea will want to get into a war with China even if South Korea is a vassal and pressured by the US.
For various reasons, I am fairly confident that China will come out ahead in a regional war with the US, especially in a war of attrition (due to China’s overwhelming industrial power.) China will perform badly in the first year of the war, due to the lack of experience. However, after the first year, China will have acquired enough experiences to turn the tide. The US and/or its vassals will suffer serious losses after/in the second year.
My biggest worry is that the US will resort to the nuclear option when the war goes sour for America. If the US uses nuke, then China will have to respond with nuke. The US has this sheer hubris and arrogant attitude: we can do whatever we want, but you can’t. It is a mindset that has, unfortunately, also cripple the US in strategic thinking: nowadays the US always assumes its adversary will not retaliate because they can’t think beyond this mindset of “they can’t” or “we are America, they would not dare.”
China needs to get into an agreement to manage this coming future war: i.e., both sides agree to keep the war between them conventional and regional, and not expand the war — and, regardless of who wins or loses the war, both sides will accept the outcome and will NOT escalate to or use nuke.
different clue
And what do you know . . . here is an actual video of snow removal from a roof in Norway showing the tool designed and made to do that. And it allows the tool to be seen clearly enough that anyone with some skill and materials could make one themself.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kB8rArIgEq4
bruce wilder
RE: Ukraine
Dave: will there be an organized response?
It seems to me that “the Collective West” have been thoroughly organized so far, but their principle of organization specifically excludes anything that could be recognized as negotiation between states. That’s kind of the point of “the rules-based international order” after all.
But, your point is still well-taken. Without counterparties representing Europe, the U.S. or Ukraine itself able and willing to make an offer or accept a settlement — and the framework of the rules-based international order as conceived by EU and NATO leadership excludes this — it is difficult to see a military end-game that arrives at any state of affairs that would allow Russia to declare victory and begin building a post-war relationship with the bulk of Ukraine — its territory or people.
bruce wilder
Biden giving permission to Ukraine to use long-range missiles (ATACMS) to strike inside Russia is being widely reported. Russian propaganda on this point seeks to amplify supposed ambivalence about this decision among figures in the incoming Trump Administration, while the Russians themselves and their partisans warn of the risks of escalation. Some in the Biden Administration have hinted that the permission is less broad than is being reported — relating specifically to defense of Ukraine’s Kursk incursion. Ukraine, to defend their need to use these missiles, has come close to admitting that Russia’s salvo against electrical infrastructure was especially devastating.
The information vacuum makes it very hard to feel any confidence in any assessment of the war situation.
Pro-Ukrainian sources claim that the Russians are suffering very high rates of casualties in their broad offensive by inches. There is no real evidence of this. A reason offered for Biden’s change-of-heart is the presence of North Korean troops somewhere in Russian battlespace — a “fact” that has never been believable let alone proven. The central importance of Sudzha in Ukraine’s Kursk incursion is rarely mentioned let alone analyzed in news media reports — Sudzha houses the pipeline junction where Russian natural gas flowing thru Ukraine to central Europe is metered.
Curt Kastens
Marina Hossengelder
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AagyRrIm2W0