Greenland is as big as ...

Having an accurate worldview doesn't happen automatically.  In the Mercator projection map here, the world is warped to match the European view at the time it was created.  Although grossly inaccurate, it's the one still used in classrooms and textbooks.

The equal area projection shows relative land area accurately.  Among the errors made visible, South America and Africa are appropriately larger than formerly presented.  India is correctly bigger than Alaska, and Africa is almost twice the size of Russia.

The view from directly above the equator gives a better

perspective; Brazil is the world's 5th largest country.

The Brazilian ecosystem is larger than most countries, and it contains perhaps greater biodiversity than any other place on earth. Studies suggest it has greater significance in planetary atmospherics than that of any other country in the world.

Curious what difference it makes?

Rainforests are often called the lungs of the planet for their role in absorbing carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, and producing oxygen, upon which all animals depend for survival. Rainforests also stabilize climate, house incredible amounts of plants and wildlife, and produce nourishing rainfall all around the planet.  The Amazon basin contains 60% of the world's remaining rainforests.  And when you realize the actual size, you see the difference it makes, perhaps.

There are bigger and more important things than reality tv.  😎 Some of the Kardashians have been to Brazil, but probably not for the eco-stuff.

Wall Street 2017

How much blood can you suck out of an entire country?

University of Missouri economic historian and former Wall Street economist Michael Hudson explains, his job on Wall Street was to be the balance and payments economist for Chase Manhattan Bank. His first job there was to calculate how much debt third world countries could pay, and the answer was, "‘Well, how much do they earn?’ And whatever they earned, that’s what they could afford to pay in interest. And our objective was to take the entire earnings of a third world country and say, ‘Ideally, that would be all paid as interest to us.’” 

National and international trade have had benefited many albeit with a few problems well worth our attention.  With deregulation and globalization, however, the finance industry has become deadly, reminiscent of the death toll of wars and plagues.

Today, Wall Street is less constrained.  In terms of harm done and number affected, our finance industry leads the continuing war of conquest.

With this year's regime change, what should we be watching for in emerging government policy?

In Defense of Inequality

In Congress on the defense of inequality -- 

"This is not the proper occasion, but, if it were, it would not be difficult to trace the various devices by which the wealth of all civilized communities has been so unequally divided, and to show by what means so small a share has been allotted to those by whose labor it was produced, and so large a share given to the non-producing classes. The devices are almost innumerable, from the brute force and gross superstition of ancient times, to the subtle and artful fiscal contrivances of modern." ~Senator John Calhoun on the legitimacy of slavery, 1837

The senator's argument in favor of slavery is much like the current arguments in favor of unregulated business, unregulated wages, and unregulated trade.  Ethically, they're identical.  We've changed some laws since 1837, of course, but not the problem.  Nothing trickled down below the top 10%, and the rising tide only lifted the rich merchant ships.  Inequality continues in the developed world at the insistence of the privileged.  One wonders if we see what's in front of us.

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In the world's richest country, why would 20% of the children live in poverty?

Inaccessible to Modern Science

Science: we depend on it for answers.  Are there areas inaccessible to scientific inquiry?  If you ask a scientist, the answer is no.

So ask them what their favorite music might be and how they arrived at that preference.  And why.  Surprisingly, there's no scientific answer.  (Give it a try yourself, if you like.*)

Similarly, that freedom of speech which we so sincerely defend is scientifically unexplainable.  It suggests an underlying independence of thought which requires free choice and will, all of which are unsupportable concepts.  The deeper we delve into neuroscience, the more conclusive the argument that we are just programs running on a bio-computer.  No soul, nothing original, just processing data with predictable results.

There is agreement now in the scientific community that the firing of neurons determines not just some or most but all of our thoughts, hopes, memories, and dreams.

That's the best that hard science offers.

In 1924, Max Wertheimer gave a now-famous talk about Gestalt Theory, “Über Gestalttheorie.”  ('Gestalt' is a whole, greater than the sum of the parts, for those of us who might wonder.)  His interesting speculation, that when we pursue a scientific answer exclusively, it can leave us without the whole of what we were looking for.


*What's your favorite music?  Why?  How do you feel when you hear it?

1. It's a style I enjoy or a particular song or preformance. 
2. It really speaks to me, it transports me to ____.
3. So how do the mechanics of this music (but not that other music) transform my feelings? 
4. In my brain, do I hear and choose to enjoy this but not that?
5. Or is it an unconscious process?  A program running in my brain?  And another running in the brain of the composer and performers?
6. Neuroscience maps the brain activity, and science insists it's a bio-computer process, not a 'self'.
7. So I'm not an autonomous individual, just a helpless passenger in an automatic vehicle.  Hmmm.
8. Do my choices come from me or from the brain program?  Science says it's just neurons following specific processes, all deterministic.  All.  Composer, performer, listener, ... all.
9. So why my music preference?  According to modern science, I'm just an electro-bio-machine that follows its programming.  Apparently 'I' don't exist.  😃  And the jazz I like just randomly happened.

Modern science can disassemble and explain the parts, but it can, on occasion, miss the greater whole.  This is just one of hundreds of such examples.  Read the references for a beginning point.  It's a fascinating inquiry.  Do 'we' even exist?

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So, does 2+2=4?  Of course it does, but I'm not a number, and neither, I suspect, are you.

In case you were wondering ...

You'll notice in the graphic that the richer a country becomes, the greater their CO2 emissions per person. The richest 10% of folks produce about half of the CO2, and the rest of the world produces much less per person.

As we address quality of life issues worldwide, the increase in emissions for all is projected to rise to the common levels we see in the developed countries.

The remaining question is the degree of impact our CO2 emissions will have on the world climate system. While the debate continues, the evidence accumulates.  You might appreciate Modeling Sustainability by an objective group focused more on facts than interpretation.  Do your own research of the facts.

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False.  
Fake science.  A friend offered this

as a rebuttal.  😃  Lack of information,

lack of inquiry, lack of understanding.

False.
Mount Aetna does not produce 10,000 times more CO2 than all of mankind, despite the fake memes. All the world's volcanoes produce about 200 million tons of emissions each year which seems like a lot until you see that humans produce more than a hundred times that amount.  

Actual measurement: volcanoes vs. humans

An indication that human emissions dwarf those of volcanoes is the fact that atmospheric CO2 levels, as measured by sampling stations around the world set up by the federally funded Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center, have gone up consistently year after year regardless of whether or not there have been major volcanic eruptions in specific years. “If it were true that individual volcanic eruptions dominated human emissions and were causing the rise in carbon dioxide concentrations, then these carbon dioxide records would be full of spikes—one for each eruption.  Instead, such records show a smooth and regular trend.” ~Coby Beck, writing for Grist.org.

Interestingly, CO₂ levels and climate have been closely linked for thousands of years, and now we're contributing more than the volcanoes. Much more.  See the USGS.gov report.

Fifty Million Tons

Fifty million tons of warm tropical sea water would make a spectacular gift, especially if it included sea life.  That's the gift the Kuroshio current gives Japan.  Every second.

Fifty million tons of warm water arrive every second in the seas surrounding Japan, bringing warmth and rain and fertile grounds for sea life.  The current makes the region viable for agriculture and limits the severity of winters, much like the Gulf Stream that provides warmth to the eastern U.S and to the U.K.

Did you know such currents are tied to climate?  And they vary from year to year. Imagine the complex physics of such a machine. Equatorial warmth, rising and expanding water, deeper waters drawn upward, planetary rotation distributing the upwelling, flow toward cooler climes where, as temperature falls, increasing density causes descent to the depths, and the cycle repeats.  El Niño and La Niña are complex weather patterns resulting from variations in ocean temperatures in the Equatorial Pacific.  They affect continental weather patterns and the deep ocean current cycles as well.

Dead coral reef, bleached by increasing ocean acidity and warming waters.

Sea life and biomass go with the flow, great quantities of gases are absorbed and processed, and the chemistry of the sea water fluctuates over the millennia.

Recent changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide are contributing to the ocean's dramatic acidification.  A third or so of our fossil fuel CO2 emissions are absorbed by the oceans; that's around 10 billion tons per year added to the ocean chemistry.  The changing aquatic environment is killing the coral reefs, and not slowly. The current rate of change is now 100 times faster than any changes in ocean acidity in the last 20 million years, raising questions of whether all marine life can adapt to the changes.  The scope of impact is under continuing study.

The severity of the issue has prompted suggestions of deliberate climate engineering as a mitigation.  What machine might we engineer that could process 50 million tons of water per second and deal with 10,000 million tons of CO2 each year?  Curious?  Take a look for yourself.

Ref. Ref. Ref.