Oceans Rising Fast

[amber]

Originally Posted by Richard B

That's just it. It isn't fact. You say will rise, the articles clearly state may rise. I agree with you though, no big. Just another filler article to keep people from the reality outside their front door: war, gangs, drugs, violence, poverty, illiteracy, racism...

Actually, the most important reality to me outside my front door is the environmental devastation. Perhaps that's why I didn't get what you meant.

[Richard B]

Originally Posted by amber

Actually, the most important reality to me outside my front door is the environmental devastation. Perhaps that's why I didn't get what you meant.

I understand. There needs to be both people like us, one for the environment and animal welfare and the other for human rights, and current human affairs.

My cuz is like you, for disaster relief her and her side of the family always send money to support the animals. I on the other hand, think humans are more important. No need to challenge me with the "we're all connected" thing, I get that, but sorry, humans first, always. I'll always save a human before a drowning cat (even if humans can be less likeable than felines).

I do love animals and nature though!

[ragandbone]

Originally Posted by Richard B

I understand. There needs to be both people like us, one for the environment and animal welfare and the other for human rights, and current human affairs.
...I on the other hand, think humans are more important. No need to challenge me with the "we're all connected" thing, I get that, but sorry, humans first, always...

But environmental issues such as clean water that can sustain life, and breathable air that can sustain life, really affect all, whether one is talking about housepets or wild animals wealthy humans or poor humans.
You are right, though, that there need to be people working on environmental issues and social issues both, and there are many areas of overlap.
*edited to include portions I missed in the quote*

[amber]

Originally Posted by ragandbone

But environmental issues such as clean water that can sustain life, and breathable air that can sustain life, really affect all, whether one is talking about housepets or wild animals wealthy humans or poor humans.
You are right, though, that there need to be people working on environmental issues and social issues both, and there are many areas of overlap.

Yeah, some people don't realize it directly affects us and our food. Did you know that one in five women have mercury levels in their blood that would be dangerous to the fetus were they to get pregnant? Talk about direct affect. Did you know they considered stopping salmon fishing (have they? I haven't read the latest) this season? Think of it, there could be a time in the near future where there will be whole previously depended upon sources of food that will either be gone or unconsumable. And you know the massive levels of pesticides used for agribusiness to grow our veggies. A large percentage of soil is contaminated even though there is no longer harmful activities taking place on it. There are bazillions of allowed hazardous emissions into ocean and drinking water every year, and has been since industrialization. Even some black people are starting to get skin cancer because of the ozone holes. Kids die of severe asthma caused by particle pollution.
It's clear to me that if humans are important to someone, environmentalism should be, too.
It's definitely good that some people work more for each specific area, because as much as they overlap now, the overlap will expotentially increase with the coming globalization of everything.
I'm not really talking about the difference between saving a pet and a human. I mean, I wouldn't necessarily save a pet first.

[Richard B]

Originally Posted by ragandbone

But environmental issues such as clean water that can sustain life, and breathable air that can sustain life, really affect all, whether one is talking about housepets or wild animals wealthy humans or poor humans.
You are right, though, that there need to be people working on environmental issues and social issues both, and there are many areas of overlap.

Yes, you edited the comment out where I mentioned we're all connected, I get that. For certain.

[ragandbone]

Originally Posted by Richard B

Yes, you edited the comment out where I mentioned we're all connected, I get that. For certain.

I know saw that, and I meant to include it and the sentence that followed, so I added those to my original post.

[irishgrl]

I just want to say that in the past few days, a perusal of the Yahoo Science News revealed that frogs are dying in unheard of numbers, Vesuvius is threatening to become active, the Antarctic ice sheet is melting too fast to be replaced by seasonal snowfall, Tornadoes are expected to increase in frequency
and in each one of these articles, MAN is to blame, either by commission or omission.

If we dont wake up, we'll all sleep permanently.

Vesuvius is alarming to me personally because a prediction by Ruth Montgomery said that the Earth would shift its axis after Vesuvius erupted. Im not sure what a shift of the axis would actually do....but Im very nervous about this prospect...

[DavidMn]

Originally Posted by irishgrl

I just want to say that in the past few days, a perusal of the Yahoo Science News revealed that frogs are dying in unheard of numbers, Vesuvius is threatening to become active, the Antarctic ice sheet is melting too fast to be replaced by seasonal snowfall, Tornadoes are expected to increase in frequency
and in each one of these articles, MAN is to blame, either by commission or omission.

If we dont wake up, we'll all sleep permanently.

Vesuvius is alarming to me personally because a prediction by Ruth Montgomery said that the Earth would shift its axis after Vesuvius erupted. Im not sure what a shift of the axis would actually do....but Im very nervous about this prospect...

I'm not sure. That is very interesting about the axis shift.

[irishgrl]

Originally Posted by DavidMn

I'm not sure. That is very interesting about the axis shift.

apparently scientists have deduced that the earth has shifted its axis 14 other times thru an analysis of magnetic core samples....

here is an article excerpt from the NY Times 1/05:

Will Compasses Point South? NY Times - January 2005

The collapse of the Earth's magnetic field, which both guards the planet and guides many of its creatures, appears to have started in earnest about 150 years ago. The field's strength has waned 10 to 15 percent, and the deterioration has accelerated of late, increasing debate over whether it portends a reversal of the lines of magnetic force that normally envelop the Earth.

During a reversal, the main field weakens, almost vanishes, then reappears with opposite polarity. Afterward, compass needles that normally point north would point south, and during the thousands of years of transition, much in the heavens and Earth would go askew.

A reversal could knock out power grids, hurt astronauts and satellites, widen atmospheric ozone holes, send polar auroras flashing to the equator and confuse birds, fish and migratory animals that rely on the steadiness of the magnetic field as a navigation aid. Although a total flip may be hundreds or thousands of years away, the rapid decline in magnetic strength is already damaging satellites.

some people predict the year 2012 (December in fact) to be the time of the next shift....I have NO IDEA what to expect but this prospect has chilled me since I first read about it...

I found an excerpt from Ruth Montgomery:

Psychic Ruth Montgomery also foresaw a pole shift. In her book Strangers Among Us, The Shift, she wrote about what certain spirit guides had told her: “If the Guides are correct, the survivors of the axial shift... will number in the millions, rather than the billions. The shift will have its warnings. The weather will become increasingly violent. Eruptions of ancient volcanoes, earth tremors of major proportions, and tidal waves of monumental scope. Some will recognize this as the time to remove themselves from the seacoasts. Some will remain, disbelieving that a shift will occur, and some will refuse to leave their homes”

[madformac]

Originally Posted by irishgrl

some people predict the year 2012 (December in fact) to be the time of the next shift....I have NO IDEA what to expect but this prospect has chilled me since I first read about it...

Isn't that year the most common prediction for the end of the world?

Doesn't look good does it???
As long as we all go together I won't feel cheated.

* Here's one I found earlier.

2012 : Mayan Calendar

The Mayan calendar is divided into months of 20 days, years of 360 days, katun of 7200 days and a baktun of 144,000 days. According to this ancient civilization the world will last for exactly 13 baktun cycles. Their calendar started on 3114-AUG-13 BCE with the birth of Venus and they expected the world to end during the Winter Solstice of 2012.

But don't worry too much because I found lots of different dates for the end of the world on the glorious internet. Not all of them are in 2012. Some are 2006, others 2008 and one or two in 2009

Oh dear

[irishgrl]

Originally Posted by madformac

Isn't that year the most common prediction for the end of the world?

Doesn't look good does it???
As long as we all go together I won't feel cheated.

* Here's one I found earlier.

2012 : Mayan Calendar

The Mayan calendar is divided into months of 20 days, years of 360 days, katun of 7200 days and a baktun of 144,000 days. According to this ancient civilization the world will last for exactly 13 baktun cycles. Their calendar started on 3114-AUG-13 BCE with the birth of Venus and they expected the world to end during the Winter Solstice of 2012.

But don't worry too much because I found lots of different dates for the end of the world on the glorious internet. Not all of them are in 2012. Some are 2006, others 2008 and one or two in 2009

Oh dear

Apparently the year 2012 was indicated in the long gallery of the Great Pyramid, the Mayan Calendar, and Nostradamus. All very "fringe" I grant you, but then I read that the Sun is expected to undergo a very severe magnetic event in that year as well....Edgar Cayce predicted 2000 or 2001, and nothing happened.....that said, Scientists are at least willing to acknowledge that the Earth DOES shift magnetic polarity and has apparently shifted (flipped) on its axis several times in the past, most recently at the end of the last ice age.

[irishgrl]

here is a recent article about the phenomenon:
Geomagnetic flip may not be random after all
21 March 2006

One of the most fascinating natural phenomena on Earth is the flipping of its magnetic field, which has occurred hundreds of times in the last 160 million years. When the magnetic field flips, the North Pole becomes the South Pole and vice versa. The last time this happened was some 780,000 years ago, so we could be heading for another reversal soon. Now, physicists in Italy have found that the frequency of these polarity reversals is not random as previously thought but occurs in clusters, revealing some kind of "memory" of previous events (physics/0603086).

Although a full geomagnetic polarity reversal can take thousands of years to complete, the implications could be enormous. As well as affecting the migration trajectories of birds and other animals, the disruption to the Earth's magnetic field could expose the Earth to hazardous cosmic rays -- a scenario that some researchers have linked to mass extinction events like the one that wiped out the dinosaurs around 65 million years ago. Geoscientists believe that our planet's internal magnetic dynamo is responsible for pole reversals, but the actual mechanism is not well understood.

Previous analyses assumed that the number of times the poles have reversed over last 160 million years follows a Poisson distribution, implying that the events are random. The Poisson distribution tells you the probability of a number of events occurring in a fixed time if the events are independent and the average rate is known. A good example of the Poisson distribution in physics is the likelihood of unstable radioactive nuclei decaying in a certain period.

Now, a team of physicists led by Vincenzo Carbone of the University of Calabria have discovered that the sequence of polarity reversals can be well described by a Lévy distribution instead. In contrast to Poisson statistics, the Lévy distribution describes stochastic processes that are characterised by the presence of "memory" effects -- or long-range correlations between the events in time. Lévy distributions are widely used to study many critical phenomena, such as earthquakes, and also when analysing financial data. The researchers obtained their results by careful statistical analysis of different sets of paleomagnetic data containing estimates of when the Earth's poles reversed.

"The result means that polarity reversals are not random events that are independent of each other," explains team member Fabio Lepreti. "Instead, there is some degree of memory in the magnetic dynamo processes giving rise to the reversals," he says. "We hope that our work will serve as a useful reference point for models that aim to describe the phenomenon of pole reversal." The Italy team now plans to build new dynamic models to describe the field reversal sequences in a simple way, so that the physical mechanisms that trigger pole reversals can be more easily explained.
About the author

Belle Dumé is science writer at PhysicsWeb

[irishgrl]

here is another article from physics web:

Earth's poles may switch
29 January 1999

The Earth's magnetic field may flip towards the end of the next millennium according to Danish geophysicists, exposing the Earth to harmful cosmic radiation in the process. In the past century, the magnetic north pole has moved over 1000 km towards the geographical north pole, and over the past decade the strength of the magnetic field has fallen by 1%. New measurements made in Greenland by the Danish Meteorological Institute (DMI) show that the magnetic north pole is moving northwards at 20 km a year - 2 km a year faster than 12 months ago.

"This is certainly the quickest movement since we started measurements in Greenland in 1928, " says Torsten Neubert, who heads DMI's Solar-Terrestrial Physics Department. Neubert thinks that this acceleration points to a switching of the magnetic poles, perhaps within the next thousand years, something that could have dire consequences. "In the period up to a reversal, the Earth's magnetic field would lose its strength and would no longer be able to protect the Earth from radiation coming from space - we could be exposed to violent cosmic radiation, " says Neubert. Such radiation would affect navigation as well as the production of semiconductors.

However, not all geophysicists are convinced. "I wouldn't say that the northward movement of the magnetic pole is a sign that the field is about to reverse, " says a sceptical Jeremy Bloxham, an Earth and planetary scientist at Harvard University in the US. He thinks that the pole would have to be travelling towards the equator in order to flip. Neubert admits that the case for a switch in the magnetic field is unproven and says that the field is a chaotic system and therefore difficult to predict.

The new Danish Ørsted satellite may make prediction a little easier by looking at the whole of the Earth's magnetic field, rather than just the poles. Due to be launched in the coming weeks, it should give researchers more accurate data on the orientation and strength of the field. Bloxham, however, believes that more accurate data will not point to a reversal. "I think the chances are that it will not happen, " he says. "It's a highly erratic process - there have been intervals of tens of millions of years without reversals." But Neubert is looking forward to a reversal. "It would be an exciting time, " he says.

[madformac]

Originally Posted by irishgrl

When the magnetic field flips, the North Pole becomes the South Pole and vice versa.

Although a full geomagnetic polarity reversal can take thousands of years to complete, the implications could be enormous.

Enormous for some. It's a good job it takes so long. You know how far the penguins are gonna have to walk?????

[AliceLover]

Originally Posted by Richard B

I read a similiar, more detailed article as well:
CNN: IceMelt!

Thanks to the news media, Hollywood, paranoids and alarmists, people are freaking out. I'm a fatalist, when it's over, no matter what the reason, it's over. I'm not the worry type.

The year 2100??? Good lord I won't even be around to worry about it if it does happen. Besides we should all know that one thing you can count on, is that nothing is permanent, it's all temporary this life as we know it. The poor Dinosaurs found out. Course they don't care, they're dead.

I say all this because if it is true (and it is still specualtion), there is not much we can do about it now can we?

So I say go ahead...Drown in the sea of love...

Richard I have to agree with you. I feel very guilty saying this, but, I am glad I will be dead by then.