Aging: cured and reversed

huh, you are talking to me again.

In my experience, not-racist people don't spend a lot of time fretting about what the skin-colour balance of Earth might be several hundred years from now.

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I don't really care about the skin color as such. I just think it's pretty sad to see the race that was, let's face it, the most culturally and technologically advanced for hundreda of years, the race that basically shaped the modern world as we know it - to perish away. It's sad.

It's not about the skin color. It's about the society, the white race as a community of western/european family. It was the most advanced and powerful ones, and now with current cultural and sociological atmosphere - it's slowly swallowed up. Because despite all the riches and advances - whites just don't reproduce as good as before, while Indians and Africans are okay with having ten, fifteen children.

I would be equally sad if it were Chinese who were diminishing or fading away. Or any other race, really.

And the bad thing is that this slow extinction and assimilation is not happening because of bad living conditions or the lack of food. it's happening because there is so much artificial stuff in our society, so many strange rules and customs, that it becomes a hard choice to make even a single child. Let along having five or six of them - they will just be taken away from you when social service deems that you can't provide them with good enough living conditions. The westerners simply "can't afford" so many children, even despite the fact that they have bigger houses and more food than your average family in India or Africa.
Meanwhile, "less developed" nations are fine about having 10 people live in one small room, and that's why in the end they will overtake the europeans. It'll probably be peaceful assimilation, but it'll just so happen that this branch of culture and genome will be lost in time, no matter how successful it used to be.
That's what makes me sad.

I'm not saying other races are scary, or that they shouldn't be on top. I'm saying that on a basic level they ended up being more healthy and sane than white societies. They may have less money, but funnily enough - they are slowly winning the one battle that's important - spreading your genes and making sure your line persists. All tat despite the fact that whites basically used to rule the world for some time.
I would be okay if the races blended together over time, which would result in people with overally darker skin and such. But as things stand, the "blending" will be much more in favor of other races, other than whites.

Well feel free to suggest a better path that could have been taken. Socialism, so there would have been no rich and poor? Attempted, failed.
Stoping technological progress so that there wouldn't be "climate challenges" (which, by the way, are doubtful according to many respected scientists)? Unrealistic and leads nowhere.

Fear of other thoughts and religions? That'll always be there. That's how out human mind works, I guess. If you are not with us - you are with them, and everybody knows that they are dangerous and unpredictable and can do anything, and also they wear this perverted headwear that looks stupid and also they have their barbaric rituals that they perform, and so on and so forth.
If it's not religion, it will be people who live on the wrong end of the street. Or vote for the wrong president, support the wrong football theme.
I heard that conflict is the tool of evolution. I wouldn't be surprised if sociological conflicts like that - are just the way evolution pops its head out and shows in such a new and fragile thing as human conscience.

It's good to criticize the bad things. But tell me how you could have avoided them, while also keeping all the good stuff that western culture brought to the world.

Are you aware that one good volcano eruption dishes out dozens of times more greenhouse-effect-gases into atmosphete than all human factories since 1950?

The scale on those things is just insane.

Climat changes. There's no denying that. Human cause - there's lots of denying that, but I'm not Bramblethorn and I will not spend my time looking for reference, and then looking up more reference in case you disagree with me.

Want to believe that mankind is a special snowflake that can change the climate of an entire planet? Fine.

p.s. Oh, that's not to say that mankind doesn't cause environmental disasters - it does. But global warming? Nah, I'm not buying that.
p.p.s. And by the way, it's the politicians who support the Global Warming debate a lot. Not the scientists - the politicians. So your point is shaky with them.

So, why is it sad when it keeps changing like it always did? What doesn't kill you...

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Just because. I don't like that.

With argument of yours, you could argue that the enslavement of black people was a natural evolutionary thing, and so there wasn't any reason to be sad about that.
So if whites dying out was okay, then the enslavement of weaker cultures would be too.

The rest of your comments are just too stupid to reply to.

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And after saying that, you reply to my other point, lol.

It all starts with acknowledging the problems and accepting that we are still in the process of getting better. We should stop thinking we are perfect now; that we shouldn't change the way we are now living. We need to keep improving our technology, and perhaps we need to get rid of some of the 'good stuff' in order to survive as 'human race'.

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No one ever said we should stop there. But we got HERE because of European people, not because of Chinese or Africans.
You were saying that you was not proud for our achievements, and I'm saying that you should be. Doesn't mean stopping.

Nezhul said:

huh, you are talking to me again.

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I've still got you on ignore, but unfortunately that doesn't work when I'm logged out, so occasionally I see you trying to bullshit other posters and feel like I ought to say something.

I don't really care about the skin color as such. I just think it's pretty sad to see the race that was, let's face it, the most culturally and technologically advanced for hundreda of years, the race that basically shaped the modern world as we know it - to perish away. It's sad.

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If I started talking about the horrors of slavery as perpetrated by white people on blacks, I guarantee there'd be a chorus of white dudes lining up to tell me that it's nothing to do with them because they weren't even born and nobody alive was enslaved in that system so why are we still talking about it? (Even those who've inherited land and money from people who did build their fortunes on slavery.)

If I started talking about the millions killed by Nazis or by Stalin, that same chorus of white dudes would be falling over themselves to describe it as the acts of a political ideology, and maybe start telling me how their grandpa fought in WWII. They wouldn't dream of framing it as "people killed by White Guys".

If I started talking about the Belgian Congo... I would get blank, uncomprehending looks.

But some white dude writes a symphony or invents a piece of technology and these guys are swarming over one another to claim collective credit.

It's ego-stroking for mediocre white dudes who've never achieved anything impressive in their own lives, who think that by collectivising the achievements of "the white race" they can somehow claim a share of the glory earned by some completely different person.

Mediocre white dudes want collective credit for famous white thinker dude Alan Turing but don't want collective blame for the white dudes who hounded Turing to death for being homosexual. They want collective credit for the white people who got to the moon (let's ignore the black mathematicians who did vital work on that project) but don't want collective guilt for the people killed by Werner von Braun's toys. They want to skite about Europe and America's economic successes but don't want to talk about how much of that was built on looting the rest of the world and enslaving non-white people. Et cetera et cetera. It's pathetic.

I'm white. But I'm not trying to be mediocre. So I'm content to claim credit for my own work instead of acting like "the white race" gives me a share of anybody else's achievements.

It's not about the skin color. It's about the society, the white race as a community of western/european family. It was the most advanced and powerful ones,

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Side note: the definition of "white" is very flexible. A couple of hundred years ago, my Irish ancestors wouldn't have been considered truly white; a lot of the White Identity fucks still view Slavs as a distinct, inferior race. Jews sometimes get honorary whiteness if they've done something worth claiming.

Because despite all the riches and advances - whites just don't reproduce as good as before,

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This is not "despite all the riches and advances", it's BECAUSE of them. Large family sizes are a response to economic and medical insecurity and to lack of education. (In particular, women's education). As prosperity improves, family sizes go down; if you can count on a pension and adequate social services to support you in your old age, then you don't need children as insurance.

while Indians and Africans are okay with having ten, fifteen children.

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This is about as true as if I claimed "Russians are okay with murdering elderly people with hammers". Which is to say: I'm sure you can find an example somewhere, but it's hardly typical.

The TFR for India is 2.5, which is significantly less than 10. TFR for sub-Saharan Africa is about 5, and falling; that's still large enough to be an issue, but it's nowhere near your "ten or fifteen".

Nezhul said:

Are you aware that one good volcano eruption dishes out dozens of times more greenhouse-effect-gases into atmosphete than all human factories since 1950?

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...and more bullshit. But even by your usual standards, this is quite a massive lie.

Volcanic eruptions contribute about 1% of the CO2 released by human activity. We measure atmospheric CO2 levels and they show smooth increase, not the pattern you'd get if it really was dominated by occasional eruptions.

Pinatubo and Mount Saint Helens each released CO2 at rates comparable to total human production... for a few hours, while they were erupting. Then they stopped, and human activity continued. (Also, they released significant amounts of ash and SO2 that seem to have resulted in net short-term cooling effects.)

p.p.s. And by the way, it's the politicians who support the Global Warming debate a lot. Not the scientists - the politicians. So your point is shaky with them.

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And more bullshit. Scientists who study climate overwhelmingly agree that anthropogenic climate change is real and very very dangerous.

Bramblethorn said:

Pinatubo and Mount Saint Helens each released CO2 at rates comparable to total human production... for a few hours, while they were erupting. Then they stopped, and human activity continued. (Also, they released significant amounts of ash and SO2 that seem to have resulted in net short-term cooling effects.

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Wait, what? Doesn't that single statement kind of argue in favour of "big volcano and a few hours of production" = "Mankind, last 200 hundred years total production", thus man's production is fuck all in the grand scheme of things and the long look?

That's what you have just said...

Me, I'm a fan of the long look. Roman Britain, 2000 years ago, growing wine in Kent = warmer back then, overall. Wine grows where I am, very very well, and average temps are a good bit hotter than Kent on a hot summer's day (no matter how Ogg and Handley define "hot" - 42°C is hot, guys, just sayin' - 34°C is not hot)

Anyway, aren't we about overdue for another ice age? My understanding is that the earth's natural state is more ice than we currently have (2 - 5 kilometres thick over a fair chunk of the northern hemisphere) with a few warmer inter regnums in between. Me, I'd be more worried about a few km of ice sitting on my head than sea levels a metre higher - ok, so folk in Sydney have to pay for higher sea walls, but hey, they can afford a bit of concrete, right.?

Coupla years ago I worked with a bunch of environmental scientists who said lookit the drought, it's terrible, everything is running dry. Yes, it was. You got a hundred years' data there, boys? Yeah, why? Looks no different than 13 years ago and 13 years before that. Damn fools had forgotten about the sunspot cycle, every 13 years, the sun blips its energy output, dials it back a few watts. Even old Karl the commo figured that one out - he studied books of account starting back in Florence in the 15th century, and identified the boom and bust economic cycle. Look at that, regular as clockwork, every thirteen years or so. Wonder why? A crap crop year, two or three in a row, that will stuff your economy right up.

There's a school of thought that ties the big economic downturns in recorded history (the Dark Ages, for example, not good economically for a lot of folk) to a big volcano going off somewhere. Bramble touched on it, the nuclear winter theory - you put enough dust in the atmosphere, the albedo rises, the place cools down. Do it long enough, crops fail and folk starve. Anyway, I need this to be so, because I've just written a 3000 word prologue to what will be quite a long yarn, where I have one of my main characters witness a big volcano eruption. No, not Vesuvius.

Nezhul said:

Are you aware that one good volcano eruption dishes out dozens of times more greenhouse-effect-gases into atmosphete than all human factories since 1950?

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Totally false, and this just came up on Snopes: Does a Single Volcanic Eruption Release as Much CO2 As All of Humanity Has to Date? -- "No matter how you look at it, the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by volcanoes is significantly lower than the amount emitted by anthropogenic sources on human timescales."

There is no question that very large volcanic eruptions can inject significant amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens vented approximately 10 million tons of CO2 into the atmosphere in only 9 hours.

However, it currently takes humanity only 2.5 hours to put out the same amount. While large explosive eruptions like this are rare and only occur globally every 10 years or so, humanity’s emissions are ceaseless and increasing every year.

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Research before pontificating, hey?

electricblue66 said:

Wait, what? Doesn't that single statement kind of argue in favour of "big volcano and a few hours of production" = "Mankind, last 200 hundred years total production", thus man's production is fuck all in the grand scheme of things and the long look?

That's what you have just said...

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No, it's not. I think you might've missed the word "rates", which is critical to the meaning of that sentence.

On its own, "total human production" is ambiguous. It can refer either to the total mass of CO2 that's been produced by human activity through all recorded history (which would be measured in tonnes), or it can refer to the rate at which CO2 is being released by all human activity in the world today (which would be measured in tonnes/year, tonnes/day, tonnes/second, etc. etc.)

But when making comparisons, you have to match units. So when I stipulate rate of volcanic CO2 release, that implies that I'm comparing to the rate of human CO2 release.

Comparing volcanic rate (tonnes/time) to human historical aggregate (tonnes) would be meaningless - it'd be like saying "Alice's car goes at 120 km/h but Bob's car has driven 100,000 km so Bob's car must be faster".

I'll leave the original post unedited, but another way to say the same thing would be: Pinatubo and Mount Saint Helens each produced CO2 as quickly as all the humans in the world, for a few hours... and then the volcanoes stopped and the humans kept on burning stuff.

Me, I'm a fan of the long look. Roman Britain, 2000 years ago, growing wine in Kent = warmer back then, overall. Wine grows where I am, very very well, and average temps are a good bit hotter than Kent on a hot summer's day (no matter how Ogg and Handley define "hot" - 42°C is hot, guys, just sayin' - 34°C is not hot)

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Yep, climate has changed considerably in prehistory and even in history through natural causes. But the speed of that change is important; the kind of climate warming we're seeing now is much faster than anything humans have lived through. It takes times for ecosystems to adjust.

Anyway, aren't we about overdue for another ice age?

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Short answer: without human involvement, we'd be heading slowly for a cooler, icier world, which might become a problem in several thousand years' time. But human-driven effects have vastly changed that picture.

Long answer...

I need to start by clarifying some terminology that might cause confusion. The scientific meaning of "ice age" isn't the same as the colloquial understanding (glaciers covering much of the planet, etc. etc.) To a climatologist, an "ice age" is a period when there are significant ice sheets at the north and south poles.

Ice ages last for millions and sometimes hundreds of millions of years. But within ice ages we get shorter-term oscillations, on the order of tens of thousands of years. These are driven by reasonably well-understood changes in the Earth's orbit and complex negative/positive feedback relationships. At the cold end of those oscillations you get a "glaciation" or "glacial period", which is what non-scientists usually mean when talking about "ice ages". At the warm end, where you have ice at the poles but most of the rest of the Earth is ice-free, you have an "interglacial".

By climatologists' definitions, Earth is in an ice age now, and has been for the last 2.6 million years. We're in an interglacial period (the Holocene) that has lasted ~ 12000 years, and we're currently a little way past what would normally be the warmest part of that period, so without human intervention we would expect the Earth to be gradually cooling and eventually heading towards another glaciation.

But human intervention has massively changed the picture; even with the Milankovitch cycle in a cooling stage, the planet is warming very very quickly.

My understanding is that the earth's natural state is more ice than we currently have (2 - 5 kilometres thick over a fair chunk of the northern hemisphere) with a few warmer inter regnums in between.

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Depends what time scale you're talking about; we have cycles within cycles within cycles. If you're talking about the last 3 million years, that's an accurate description. Prior to that, we had about 250 million years when the Earth was much warmer than it is now, and even Antarctica would've been mostly ice-free.

Me, I'd be more worried about a few km of ice sitting on my head than sea levels a metre higher - ok, so folk in Sydney have to pay for higher sea walls, but hey, they can afford a bit of concrete, right.?

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First-world cities should mostly be able to cope (though not cheaply, and I wouldn't be investing in Holland or New Orleans) but elsewhere in the world, a 1m sea-level rise is catastrophic, and that's before we get into effects on agriculture.

There's a school of thought that ties the big economic downturns in recorded history (the Dark Ages, for example, not good economically for a lot of folk) to a big volcano going off somewhere. Bramble touched on it, the nuclear winter theory - you put enough dust in the atmosphere, the albedo rises, the place cools down. Do it long enough, crops fail and folk starve.

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Yep, a major eruption can have significant cooling effects for a few years; the Laaki eruption in Iceland caused cooling and poisoning across Europe that's credited as one of the factors leading to the French Revolution. But in a few years the ash and the SO2 come out of the atmosphere and the climate returns to normal. CO2 stays around much, much longer.

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Good clarification of complex stuff - thank you.

I guess my "long look" when I think about this - which can do my head in, admittedly - is human time scales, ie Neanderthal and homo sapiens. That is, when it's conceivable that prehistoric human beings approximately thought the way we think, and applied that thinking to technology, civilisation (rise and fall thereof), agriculture, animal domestication, belief systems etc...

Which is what, the last hundred thousand years or so? A micro-moment in terms of geological time, but enough to go on with, in terms of imagination and wonder. Of that period, I'm thinking most was with a lot of ice and snow about.

My mind boggles when I hear that Australian aboriginals have story and country culture that remembers the last active volcanic eruptions in Australia, and the rising sea levels after the last glaciation - some 25,000 years ago. I'm impressed at that power of song and race memory, that is for sure.

electricblue66 said:

My mind boggles when I hear that Australian aboriginals have story and country culture that remembers the last active volcanic eruptions in Australia, and the rising sea levels after the last glaciation - some 25,000 years ago. I'm impressed at that power of song and race memory, that is for sure.

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Relevant cartoon: http://rebloggy.com/post/australia-...ustralian-history-indigenous-aus/101160309148

and, yeah, Aboriginal historical knowledge is stupendous.

Australia is more volcanic than most people realise. Mount Gambier was erupting around the time Egypt's First Dynasty was formed; it's been quiet since then but in the longer term we average an eruption every ~2k years, so it's quite possible we'll get something in the next few hundred. Still mild by our neighbours' standards, though!

Bramblethorn said:

Mount Gambier was erupting around the time Egypt's First Dynasty was formed; it's been quiet since then but in the longer term we average an eruption every ~2k years, so it's quite possible we'll get something in the next few hundred. Still mild by our neighbours' standards, though!

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Aren't the Mt Gambier volcanoes extinct? I thought they were. Cute little things though, barely a lump on the plain. Maybe it's their last eruption is the songline I'd read about - in which case 25,000 years shortens to 5000 years. Still impressive. Definitely something on the seas rising, though, so that's 10 - 15,000 years ago.