The First Rule of Environmental Destruction Club is that you do not talk about Environmental Destruction Club.
I donāt suppose they realize there are also non-Canadian scientists?
Sadly, this probably is a national security issue. Though this isnāt really a fix for it.
The more the cap has melted, the more likely Canadaās north is to be invaded by a country seeking its resources.
The real fix is to be prepared to protect it, of course.
Despite my regular voting and fairly active involvement in politics, I have come to the conclusion that I am out of step with most other Canadians (and most others here in BC as well).
I am now past the point of optimism and more into a sort of despair zone where I will continue to participate, vote, donate, and advocate for better government. But I am through expecting it to actually happen. Millions upon millions of my fellow Canadians continue to support these assholes, and when they change their vote they tend to support the other (slightly less distasteful) party of big business.
Those of us on the margins are likely to stay here until something truly disastrous happens, when the outsiders are the only ones left with any credibility to clean up the mess.
Most importantly, there are Canadians who can vote in the next election.
I got ya a solution, sell the surplus US military equipment to Canada instead the Ferguson police for example, and you kill 2 birds with one stone!
That was their plan all along!
Those crafty Canadians, gobble up a huge patch of dirt no one cares about and then pump greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere. As their southern neighbors swelter under the heat and all the crops die, the arable zone will creep northward making Canada the biggest food producing country on the planet.
Iām thinking we need a sequel to Canadian Bacon to document this.
I think theyāre banking on the fact that they wonāt, even if they canā¦
We need ScienceLeaks, a companion project to Wikileaks.
A possible deniable way of leaking such politically restricted data is mimicking a hack attack - leaving the data on a poorly secured machine or an account with guessable password, then letting somebody with the appropriate skills know off-the-channels where the package is. Incidents happen.
Well lucky for them thereās no chance that anybody will hear about it now eh?
I am sorry that the stupidity in the US has travelled north.
Shit, they call themselves Tories, this stupidity goes straight back to the Mother Country, Cousin.
This sort of helps bring in to focus some ideas Iāve been toying with recently. (Slightly off topic and not an original idea BTW)
Its always puzzled me how we can accept such bat-shit crazy politics the world over, and Iām getting the idea that there is a collusion here between political parties to help keep insane and dangerously stupid ideas alive, and that this done by maintaining a sort of āmutually assured destruction/cold warā feeling hanging over voters heads.
In brief: A political party will be able to promote weird-shit, utterly irrational policies as long as all other parties able to oppose it have at least one policy that is at least as insane/idiotic on the ballot as well.
This insures that you can lie to your voters, betray their trust and present your own agenda as beneficial to the voter base while trusting that you wonāt lose the same voter base because the other party will have a political agenda that is vile to your own supporters, once this system is in place, splitting does the rest.
(The idea is that once youāve identified a political party as evil, the other one must be all good, no questions asked. i.e. some conservatives identify as such and defend the conservative viewpoint to their own detriment because they believe liberals are evil, therefore conservatives are all good. They do it not because they identify as conservative, hating liberals comes first)
Anyway, how do you challenge this? I donāt know, but I do think that you are meant to fall in line with one party or the other or feel despair thereby rendering you neutral. So I would suggest not giving up (I know thats what you said, Iām just patting you on the back and saying āKeep at it!ā)
I am slowly coming to the conclusion that while the goal is the ballot and this is where things should be settled, merely casting your preference does not do anything to disarm a system that is already in place to make sure you lose something no matter what you choose.
So while it looks like voters are clearly doing wrong by choosing leaders that try to do crazy things like control the voters perception of reality so blatantly, the fact that the alternatives are gaming the system as well for their benefit, rather than actually fix anything is the real problem to overcome.
I hear that. The harsh reality of, well, reality is that it is complex in nature. A vote every four or five years by necessity forces us to boil down incredibly complex, variable and nuances issues into a choice between at best 4 or 5 candidates, none of whom can possibly represent a totally ācorrectā position.
We in Canada, and our neighbours to the South as well, are saddled with a political system designed long before the invention of the telephone. At the time it made sense to focus on regional representation and some kind of delegation - there was very little opportunity for a citizen of, say, Vancouver to have a direct say in policy decisions in the federal government otherwise. It made sense to assign a delegate, then hold that person accountable every so often and put someone else in their place. At the time the federal governments were small and barely involved in the lives of everyday people except at the macro level.
Now that structure makes no sense at all. But existing systems that manage to keep functioning despite obvious and growing flaws will keep functioning until they reach a point of crisis. This applies to a car, a human body, a computer, and any political or administrative system. There might be a rattle in my engine, but the car keeps working for a long time as the rattle gets worse - until something breaks and the car is now scrap. Until that point it is possible to keep moving, and maybe even for the driver to pretend there is no problem.
Similarly, our governmental systems are huge, complex, and full of rattling engine parts. Worse, there are people who benefit directly from the inefficiencies and malfunctions of our current government and systems, so do their best to protect that benefit. When things eventually break they will break in a big way, and the ādriversā will lose all credibility. Sadly, many of us will suffer as well.
So we have a badly designed, inflexible system that, like all systems, benefits some at the expense of others. We have political agencies (parties) who have made a science of exploiting the system to their own benefit, some better than others. The griefers of the game of life. And eventually the griefers will break the system by gaming it too much - as in a badly griefed video game, everyone else eventually stops playing and it all falls apart. Until then, I will keep participating and trying to support those who seek to mitigate the damage - knowing all the while that the system is broken and will eventually suffer a catastrophic failure.
I donāt suppose you realise Canada claims sovereignty over the oceans up to 200 nautical miles off its coasts. Thatās an awfully big chunk of the Arctic those non-Canadian scientists canāt study without permission from our federal government.
Screw the govt. Donāt ask for their silly permissions. Use satellite images, Google Earth, citizen science; partner up with locals who can fly drones, take photos, take and send you samples, even do the measurements in situ for you if they are sufficiently skilled. (Citizen science, bitches.)
You donāt even have to leave your lab, wherever in the world it is.
Iām always interested in theories like this: the invasion of a nation like Canada, or the US (I am an American citizen), by unspecified foreign entities, for conquest and control. Melting ice caps do not make traversing the North Pole area a day at the beach. Preparing an invading force, supporting such a body, and actually moving such an organization into place, even before launching an assault, is a considerable, difficult and complex task, presuming a stealth impossible in todayās world of instant communication, and presenting what I strongly suspect would be insurmountable odds against success. Natives of Nebraska also worry about a literal invasion by the Chinese, without ever having laid eyes on either of the oceans lying west and east of their own country. I maintain that the most serious threats facing either nation arise from their own governmentsā inability to sidestep vested economic interests, and to act, for once, as true representatives, for the good of actual people.
Is it impossible for these scientists to take their observations elsewhere, or at least to make sure that their findings are spread as widely as possible throughout any and all available scientific communities? What these researchers are learning impacts not only their own country, but the whole Northern Hemisphere, at the very least. Maybe they could pretend to be going to a conference on, and auction of, oh, I donāt know ā Persian rugs, in Miamiā¦? The availability of lecture halls, microphones and a waiting press crew would only be coincidentalā¦
Perhaps they are afraid that a polar bear army will invade Torontoā¦
Realistically, they are probably protecting those who have a sizable investment in tar sands. A melting arctic is likely to provide much cheaper petroleum resources that would make the sands economically unattractive once again.
