Major Report Prompts Warnings That the Arctic Is Unraveling
scientificamerican.com
scientificamerican.com
The new base is almost right in line with the Northwest Passage so I assume it's meant to police it just in time for the big melt.
I wonder what all of this will portend.
Now if they get invaded that's a different story, but other than China I don't see anyone else invading them. If China retakes Siberia, then get ready for nuclear winters.
As Napoleon said the army marches in its stomach, and Russia has a limited amount of money. Russia is behind Canada when it comes to GDP. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi... Granted they have a history of weapon production and can squeeze more out of a dollar, but if it looks like war is coming, you'll see everyone spending and catching up.
Everyone seems to ignore it.
Vladivostok was developed heavily, as Russia's only ice-free ocean port, but most of the rest of that region is far too sparsely populated. It's telling that, in modern times, Russia is quite paranoid that China is planning an invasion and takeover of that area.
More important problems than global warming. Skip to minute 6:
https://www.ted.com/talks/bjorn_lomborg_sets_global_prioriti...
The first would could do commensurate good by spending its enormous resources accelerating the reliance on renewable resources. So this argument against Kyoto (which is indeed a proposal that is more a gesture than a solution) is basically used to dismiss other things.
For example, Trump's proposed to wipe out the EV tax credit (please don't, I want my tax credit!) in the US. It'd reclaim less than a billion dollars but substantially deter the uptake of EV cars.
Similarly, the US is facing a grim truth that even it cannot maintain its entire massive infrastructure in the face of modern economic challenges. Renewable resource generation offers an alternative, distributed power grid. Between this and modern manufacturing techniques, we see a glimpse of a future where socialists, centralists and anarchists all see a world resembling more of what they want, with regional control and generation of power resources and control over economics, but a framework left in place for a top down government to govern things that are advantageous overall (central planning for scarce resources & conservation, rights and health care, etc).
Resistance to the topic on the grounds that Kyoto is bad is over-applied to all attempts to grapple with climate change, even when they actually have huge positive effects only tangentially related.
The US could easily maintain its infrastructure; we just need to stop wasting our money on useless war equipnent. There are something like 2,000 tanks sitting in Arizona collecting dust for an outdated style of warfare. https://www.google.com/amp/www.military.com/daily-news/2014/...
Then on top of that we have the dumb F35 program, which is so clearly a waste of money as drones have become so much more important.
It's so frustrating that congress wastes all this money to line the pockets of the military industrial complex. This money would be better used by investing directly in the US infrastructure and supporting the economy.
As in cities, where poor districts often subsidize rich district services.
Yes, which is why I am so keen to find a path to a decentralized infrastructure while retaining the key benefits of a centralized state (rights guarantees, pooling resources and scare resource management).
Hmmm. I guess you don't understand that many Republicans don't like the idea of government subsidies. If it comes down to subsidies, we aren't going to solve the problem, according to this economist:
What they dislike is competition. Weirdly, the Democrats morphed into a weirdly lightweight party on regulation of markets and the Republicans continue to grow towards something that incrementally becomes a planned economy.
And let's just reiterate: less than a decade of subsidizing renewables kicked it over an economic hump and we've accelerated it to the point where it's actually radically changing first world economies. So anyone saying that subsidies "don't solve problems" is clearly using a different definition of "solve", "problem", and maybe even "doesn't."
This is worth repeating twice, in case people missed it. The irony would be funny if it weren't so damn catastrophic.
This is ironic because much of their apparent hatred for socialism/communism stems from the idea that these lead to planned (i.e. non-free) economies.
> the IMF says America is the world’s second biggest culprit, spending $669 billion this year—but mostly by “post-tax” systems which fail to factor the costs of environmental damage into prices.
http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2015/07/ec...
That recent rule change where coal mining companies are once again allowed to dump their waste into streams? That was Republicans passing a subsidy for coal mining. Every time Republicans block or roll back environmental regulations, that's subsidizing polluting industries.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6UMniZqC7k
This guy's main argument is that the money would be better spent on research to make green energy cheaper.
29 years constitutes a baseline.
I agree with you that it does not. However, the article (and climate reporting in general) implies that it does.
Was the temperature and CO2 level stable before the Industrial Revolution?
The question remains, how 29 years can constitute a baseline from which to claim that the arctic is "unraveling."