"If you do not believe in climate change, you should not be allowed to hold public office"

esh dov ets

Well-Known Member
god fucking damn.

human rights issues come way before economic issues. this is basic maslow's hierarchy shit. go ahead and focus on free college or whatever the fuck else you're dreaming of while the graduates of said college still get paid less if they are black, or female, or both.

it's like building on top of a broken foundation. it won't work.
poverty , class inequality, education and racism are all human rights issues. Each one is effected by if not determined by economic politics and other politics.
Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs deals with psychology not politics. Government should protect the whole pyramid or it's no good. If you want to say human rights then other social issues are more important than economic issues.. those issues are not separate issues only different angle of the same problems. mainly economic growth over human wellbeing.
 
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ttystikk

Well-Known Member
NYT Interactive following a team from Columbia University as they study Antarctica and its accelerating rate of ice loss. Three parts, videos, fascinating stuff;

http://nextdraft.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=ed102783e87fee61c1a534a9d&id=5b38d5f72c&e=1413ecadab

Fun facts; without the ice, Antarctica is not a contingent, it's an archipelago. Much of its ice is two MILES thick. This is why it's such a problem if it melts. Much of the warming and accelerating of glacial movement delivering ice to the ocean is suspected to be coming from underneath.

If you live near Miami Beach or anywhere within a few miles of the shore and less than 6 feet above sea level, I recommend selling your property and moving, forthwith.
 

Fogdog

Well-Known Member
They carried a story this morning of that frozen seed vault having its entrance flooded during a massive melt, they never expected or planned for.
I read the article, thanks for the heads up on this. The seeds stored there contain generations of learning taught by the land and the seed crop itself. Knowledge of farmers in the distant past is stored in those seeds. Water never reached the vault and no damage done, whew. It's a bigger deal than the library of Alexandria which was burned more than 2,000 years ago and mankind still regrets the loss.

The part that boggles me is the claim made by the vault caretakers of "forever". Even at -18C, seeds don't last forever. Some last a long time. I guess the outlandish claim was necessary in order to secure funding.

The things that aren't anticipated cause the real pain. The irony draws a snicker is that this impregnable fortress, intended to act as a repository of seed genetics "forever" and without human caretakers, fails due to a design flaw because global warming.
 

ttystikk

Well-Known Member
I read the article, thanks for the heads up on this. The seeds stored there contain generations of learning taught by the land and the seed crop itself. Knowledge of farmers in the distant past is stored in those seeds. Water never reached the vault and no damage done, whew. It's a bigger deal than the library of Alexandria which was burned more than 2,000 years ago and mankind still regrets the loss.

The part that boggles me is the claim made by the vault caretakers of "forever". Even at -18C, seeds don't last forever. Some last a long time. I guess the outlandish claim was necessary in order to secure funding.

The things that aren't anticipated cause the real pain. The irony draws a snicker is that this impregnable fortress, intended to act as a repository of seed genetics "forever" and without human caretakers, fails due to a design flaw because global warming.
There's a big national seed storage laboratory in my city, associated with the agricultural land grant university here. The vaults just hold the seeds, they still need a team of people to periodically germinate the seeds in storage, put them through their life cycle and harvest fresh seed to store again. Different species have different shelf lives.

As is often the case here in the States, the needed funding for the lab workers is lacking and so they're falling behind their schedule. We are so fucking short-sighted in this country it burns my tailfeathers sometimes.
 

Fogdog

Well-Known Member
There's a big national seed storage laboratory in my city, associated with the agricultural land grant university here. The vaults just hold the seeds, they still need a team of people to periodically germinate the seeds in storage, put them through their life cycle and harvest fresh seed to store again. Different species have different shelf lives.

As is often the case here in the States, the needed funding for the lab workers is lacking and so they're falling behind their schedule. We are so fucking short-sighted in this country it burns my tailfeathers sometimes.
I visited a forest service Douglas Fir-tree seed repository. It held best of experiments and testing going back almost 70 years. Also Doug fir native seed collected across the state, tested, cataloged and carefully set aside for use later on. Just walking the aisle and realizing how valuable those seeds were humbled me. That we would short-change future generations because we couldn't see our way to fund these low cost centers infuriates me too.
 

ttystikk

Well-Known Member
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