Category Archives: UK

Margaret Thatcher, RIP

Posted on by

margaret-thatcher

A friend on Facebook said it best:

watches with amusement as people who think history is the result of transpersonal economic forces that determine individual consciousness get hung up on the supposed moral evil of one woman

I am personally entirely neutral and indifferent to her. I have British acquaintances who are her fans, as well as those who are very hostile to her. I think both sides overstate her real significance. The coal mines were dead men walking by the 1980′s, and any British Premier would have defended the Falklands. Friendships with dictators who like you and support your policies are entirely normal and within the national interest. Nor did she (or Reagan) have any influence whatsoever on the fall of the “evil empire,” which was governed by almost entirely internal developments.

She was of course no friend of Russia, and associated with some people whom I loathe, like Gorbachev. But as a British PM she of course had no obligation whatsoever to be a friend to anyone or anything but the British national interest – and at that, it has to be said, she was successful.

The Farewell To Alms Theory – Older Than We Think

Posted on by

I am currently (re)reading The National System of Political Economy by Friedrich List (published in 1841), and this jumped out at me:

In no European kingdom is the institution of an aristocracy more judiciously designed than in England for securing to the nobility, in their relation to the Crown and the commonalty, individual independence, dignity, and stability; to give them a Parliamentary training and position; to direct their energies to patriotic and national aims; to induce them to attract to their own body the élite of the commonalty, to include in their ranks every commoner who earns distinction, whether by mental gifts, exceptional wealth, or great achievements; and, on the other hand, to cast back again amongst the commons the surplus progeny of aristocratic descent, thus leading to the amalgamation of the nobility and the commonalty in future generations. By this process the nobility is ever receiving from the Commons fresh accessions of civic and patriotic energy, of science, learning, intellectual and material resources, while it is ever restoring to the people a portion of the culture and of the spirit of independence peculiarly its own, leaving its own children to trust to their own resources, and supplying the commonalty with incentives to renewed exertion. In the case of the English lord, however large may be the number of his descendants, only one can hold the title at a time. The other members of the family are commoners, who gain a livelihood either in one of the learned professions, or in the Civil Service, in commerce, industry, or agriculture. The story goes that some time ago one of the first dukes in England conceived the idea of inviting all the blood relations of his house to a banquet, but he was fain to abandon the design because their name was legion, notwithstanding that the family pedigree had not reached farther back than for a few centuries. It would require a whole volume to show the effect of this institution upon the spirit of enterprise, the colonisation, the might and the liberties, and especially upon the forces of production of this nation.

So perhaps Gregory Clark wasn’t quite as original as many make him out to be.

PS. I myself am quite skeptical about the theory. As Ron Unz summarized it, “And I agree that Clark’s evolutionary model for England suffers from similar problems, namely that he’s produced an interesting theory explaining why the English are smarter and longer-time oriented than all the other Europeans. Except they aren’t.”

Minorities’ Cognitive Performance In The UK

Posted on by

Here is data from the Cognitive Abilities Test for UK students in 2009/10 via Ambiguous.

Some interesting things to take away here:

(1) The sample is very large. Verbal IQ has the highest correlation with academic performance in most subjects, followed by Quantitative IQ, and then Non-Verbal Reasoning (recognizing patterns and such, I imagine).

(2) Indians do almost as well as Whites, although the structure of their cognitive abilities are a bit different: About 4 points lower than Whites in Verbal, but almost 2 points better in Quantitative. As rec1man said, “The Patels and Sikhs are Upper-Shudra / Vaishya and this is 80% of the diaspora in UK.” So this is highly encouraging for India’s eventual prospects; in indicates that the broad middle can in principle build a reasonably wealthy, middle-class society.

(3) The Pakistanis and Bangladeshis also don’t do too badly – certainly better than I would have expected (I visited a Pakistani school once in the UK and it was horrific).

(4) This might imply we are actually looking at the following average-IQ groups in India: Lower 40% – 93; Middle 40% – 99; Top 20% – 105, for an overall average of 98 (once Flynn Effect is done with them). That’s better than Greece today and certainly good enough  to have a developed society. But there’s tons of challenges: Malnutrition, slums, poor education, widespread vegetarianism (both voluntary and involuntary – due to poverty) that have to be sorted out for India to perform to its potential.

Continue reading →

Do Drivers Make Way In Your Country?

Posted on by

Alexey Kovalev, a moderate Russian liberal, writes:

“When I left [Russia], each time I crossed the road could have been my last. But now almost everybody makes way. So things are changing.”

You don’t often hear such positive sentiments from liberals, who tend to be negative and critical (which is not always a bad or wrong thing). But that is besides the point.

I think that in general having its drivers make way for pedestrians is a pretty good gauge of a country’s overall levels of civility and even social cohesion. Here is what I noticed:

(1) The Brits almost always make way; the Americans make way about 75% of the time; the Russians made way (last time I was there) about 10% of the time.

(2) That said, road civility was definitely on the decline in Britain when I was there, albeit from a very high base. Young people and immigrants just aren’t the same psychologically as older Brits. As for the US I have definitely noticed a majorly downhill trend even during the few years I’ve been here. It is good to hear from Kovalev that Russia is heading in the opposite direction, albeit from a very low base.

(3) Obviously, there are geographic factors too. People in America are definitely a lot more civil in small towns than in metropolises. I also suspect that Americans inland are somewhat more civil than on the coasts, although I haven’t really spent near enough time in the former to make any definitive judgments.

The Evolution Of Chinese IQ

Posted on by

In the discussion at the previous post, in which I took exception to Ron Unz’s theory of the East Asian Exception, he alerted me to so additional work on the matter he’d done as a Harvard freshman on Chinese IQ. You can read his summary of Social Darwinism and Rural China as well as Steve Sailer’s commentary on it.

Ron Unz’s Theory of Social Darwinism in Rural China

According to Ron Unz, Chinese peasants lived close to their Malthusian limits for millennia on end. That is correct. Furthermore, Chinese rural life was ”remarkably sophisticated in its financial and business arrangements”, far more so even than in England. I do not have the comparative knowledge to offer informed commentary on this, though I would stop to note that such a system may not have been so much a generator of “selective pressure for those able to prosper” under complexity as a reflection of already high IQ’s. After all on most social, economic, and technological metrics China was far ahead of Europe until the 18th century or so (though there were important exceptions). Furthermore, “virtually all Chinese were on an equal legal footing”, with far fewer of the feudalistic or caste distinctions that proliferate in India and pre-Enlightenment Europe. This is also correct.

This environment included a number of mechanisms that promoted a highly eugenic development path for the Chinese population. Ron Unz says that only the relative affluent could afford their wives for their children. This is not quite correct, or should I say permanently correct, as this issue only heavily manifested itself during times of Malthusian stress, when families opted to kill baby daughters resulting in skewed sex ratios. Otherwise, we should note that Europeans within the Hajnal Line married late and that the poor sometimes didn’t marry at all, so this particular eugenic effect was if anything stronger in Europe.

Continue reading →

Assange Should Have Picked The Russian Embassy

Posted on by

UK police descend on Assange’s embassy refuge.

According to the Ecuadorians, their Embassy was threatened with a revocation of its status as Ecuadorian sovereign territory in the case that President Rafael Correa offers Julian Assange political asylum. This would clear the way for PC Plod could go in and fish out Assange. Presumably this is to avoid breaking one of the cornerstones of international law, satisfying its letter while raping its spirit. Truly fascinating the lengths and lows to which Britain is prepared to go to satisfy its puppet masters.

My initial thoughts are:

(1) Assange should have chosen the Russian Embassy. Ecuador is small and doesn’t have clout. Russia (or China, for that matter) wouldn’t have handed over Assange either, for the propaganda coup if little other reason, and even as cringingly obsequious a country as the UK would have hesitated to take them on so directly.

(2) A timely reminder that Assange is wanted for questioning (not charged) on a crime that it is not even a crime in the UK itself. I wonder if there is anybody, anybody at all, who is still willing to argue that his case is not entirely political?

(3) One would hope that Ecuador does not tolerate any British violation of its sovereignty and mounts a like response – and that countries like Venezuela, Argentina, and (preferably, though highly improbable) Russia and China join them in solidarity. But either way one of the good things about this is that it will make clear to any lingering doubters in non-puppet countries like Russia that Western rhetoric on human rights and international law only goes as far as it benefits them.

EDIT 8/16: And asylum was granted.

National Foresight, Or: Why Russia Needs A Strong Hand

Posted on by

In a 2010 paper on time preferences*, the authors Mei Wang et al. conducted an experiment in which participants could choose either $3400 now or $3800 a month later. Now I would choose the latter option but maybe it’s just because I’m intelligent and have been living in the West for quite a while. In other countries this is not the obvious choice however.

We see the usual correlates. Countries that are richer; more Germanic; less corrupt; more intelligent – they all have more future time orientation. In countries that have a Communist legacy future time orientations are perhaps lower than we might expect them to be otherwise.

This all of not insubstantial relevance because time preference can have an impact on economic structure and social life. For instance, as the paper notes, societies with higher future time  orientation are likely to devote more attention to the environment. They are also likely to devote a greater share of their GDP to R&D.

Continue reading →

Olympic Observations

Posted on by

Now that the Olympics are drawing to an end, it’s now time for me to weigh in with my HBD / game perspective.

(1) What is up with India? Only 5 medals. Record-setting (3 in Beijing, 0-2 in all previous Olympics) but that’s still atrocious for a country of 1.2 billion people – even a poor and malnourished one. Michael Phelps alone has won almost as many Gold medals as India has done as a nation for as long as the Olympics existed. Why? Ryan G. will be along to lecture me soon enough on my Indophobia :) , but I think it’s due to a perfect storm of negative HBD, economic and cultural reasons. Indians like East Asians have low testosterone; they are malnourished, and it doesn’t help that many are follow an inferior diet i.e. vegetarianism; the Commonwealth Games showed them to be pretty disorganized which doesn’t bode well for athlete training programs; and finally it appears that many Indians disdain sport and physical activity (their love of cricket actually proves this: Not exactly the most physically intense sport out there). I’m sure as India gets richer they’ll start earning more medals but I doubt they’ll ever do much better than 10th or so.

(2) Russia didn’t perform badly, contrary to popular opinion. Vancouver was a disaster. This wasn’t. As of the time of writing, its total medal count (78) exceeds Beijing 2008 (73) and Atlanta 1996 (63) and isn’t far from Sydney 2000 (89) and 2004 Athens (92). It’s still third overall and given the population and commitment of China, and the advanced training facilities and Black population (let’s be realistic) of America, coming third on total medal counts is entirely respectable. This time it was overtaken by Britain in the gold medals tally, but this reflects an astoundingly good British performance rather than Russian under-achievement.

Continue reading →

Modern Britain In Four Extradition Cases

Posted on by

Imagine you’re a British extraditions judge and you are asked to rule on the following cases.

(1) An oligarch exile who came from a country where he might well have ordered contract murders and is now loudly and implacably opposed to its new President who dispossessed him of his political influence. Although the British establishment considers said country, Russia, a geopolitical competitor, the exile has more delusions than power, and is unable to inflict any damage on it.

(2) A British computer science student who made $230,000 through a website that offered hyperlinks to films and TV shows online; nothing cardinally differentiates it from Google. The US demands his extradition where he can be imprisoned for up to 10 years. What he did is not even a crime in the UK.

(3) A celebrity Australian citizen wanted on sexual molestation charges in Sweden that are not even a crime in the UK, and which were, in fact, previously dismissed – only to be brought up again soon after Cablegate on the initiative of a Swedish prosecutor who happens to have a rich history of radical feminist advocacy. The opacity of Sweden’s judicial system on sexual crimes means said Australian citizen can easily be renditioned to the US where a grand jury has already been convened and issued a secret indictment against him.

(4) A serial pedophile who is an American citizen who is wanted by the US.

Berezovsky lives a happy life in Moscow on the Thames. Richard O’Dwyer was ruled eligible for extradition by the Home Office. Assange’s bail conditions were more stringent than that of a suspected murderer from South Africa, and his extradition has recently been ruled eligible causing him to seek refuge in the Ecuadorian Embassy. Shawn Sullivan is protected from extradition by the High Court because imprisonment is a violation of pedophiles’ human rights.

No further comment is necessary on my part. Take from this what you will.

Global Highs

Posted on by

Via Economist:

This makes sense to me. While cannabis is well-known in Russia, attitudes towards it are mostly disparaging where not hostile even in relatively enlightened Moscow. The druggies there tend to be more hardcore anyway. It is a large part of the conversation in the UK – see the debates over what classification it should get – but actually getting hold of it wasn’t easy (I never managed to at any rate, though in fairness I didn’t try; nor did I ever see a weed circle).

In contrast, weed is ubiquitous in the US – well, at least in California. There are books on cannabis horticulture openly sold on the streets (some go on to put this knowledge into practice in secluded inland forest glades). There is the 4/20 Festival in which thousands of people gather round the Bay to smoke weed. While it is illegal in theory in practice it is almost never enforced and one can easily find dealers with product. Indeed one can buy a medical certificate proving that you have an ailment that required treatment with marijuana from a doctor for a small fee.

Will Ecuador Protect Assange From The Empire?

Posted on by

So Assange has fled to the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, in scenes reminiscent of what happens to dissidents in truly authoritarian countries. (The parallels keep adding up don’t they).

Let’s recap. His site kept releasing classified documents, from secretive and typically nasty organizations. Too bad that some of them belonged to the Pentagon and the State Department; otherwise, no doubt Assange would still be feted as a heroic whistleblower in the West. Instead, he got an extradition request to Sweden for a rape at about the same time as Cablegate; a “rape” in which the purported victim tweeted about what a great guy he was the morning after (the tweet has since been deleted, of course). One of the supposed victims had posted online tips for girls on filing false rape reports on men who dumped them (this too has since been wiped).

Now Sweden is in Assange’s words “the Saudi Arabia of feminism” and indeed that much is undeniable to any reasonable person who doesn’t derive pleasure from slavishly kowtowing to women. See their recent attempts to ban men from pissing upright because apparently it is an assertion of patriarchy. And which other country could have produced a bestseller like The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo which would have instantly been condemned as misogynist claptrap had the slurs against men in it been instead been directed towards women? So even in the best possible interpretation it is Swedish feminists running amok in Europe, much like their Viking forefathers did a millennium ago. The alternative explanation is that this is politically motivated.

Continue reading →

The Collapse Of Britain In A Few Headlines

Posted on by

Here’s a sampling of recent headlines from the country that loves to lecture others on freedom of speech and rule of law.

Racist Tube rant woman Jacqueline Woodhouse jailed: A London Underground passenger has been jailed for 21 weeks after she admitted hurling racist abuse at fellow passengers. – BBC

Girl gang who kicked woman in the head while yelling ‘kill the white slag’ freed after judge hears ‘they weren’t used to drinking because they’re Muslims’. – Daily Mail

Police misused powers during royal wedding, protesters claim. (AK: on preemptive arrests of republicans) - The Independent

The hijab has liberated me from society’s expectations of women: Wearing the hijab doesn’t have to be about religious dedication. For me, it is political, feminist and empowering. (AK: What’s worse than a feminist, and a radical Islamist? A feminist Islamist) – The Guardian

No 10 guide to changing nappies and baby talk: New parents will be given government advice on changing nappies, breastfeeding and “baby talk” under a multi-million pound initiative to support family life. – The Telegraph

UK economy’s fall into recession deeper than expected: Contraction of 0.3%, coupled with more bad news from the eurozone, increases pressure on government to intervene to boost economic growth. – The Guardian

Is there any reason, any reason whatsoever, for other countries to listen to Britain on absolutely anything? Flee as quickly as you can possibly can! :shock:

Berlin Gets Bad News From PISA

Posted on by

There are several ways to influence national mean IQ levels. One is to improve nutrition and education, but vitally important though they are, they suffer from diminishing returns as populations bump up against their genetic ceilings. Another is to promote eugenic policies, or at least policies to mitigate the dysgenic trends that are typical of modern developed societies, but they tend to be ethically questionable and politically unfeasible. The third major lever is the immigration system, but how can we assess whether it’s doing its job of only letting in the people who would be a net benefit to the host country?

In my wanderings through the interwebs, I found that the NCES has an excellent “International Data Explorer” with all kinds of socio-economic data on the tested students of each country that participated in the PISA standardized tests (which correlate closely with IQ). Of particular interest was data on scores broken down by immigration status (native, 1st generation, 2nd generation), which was frankly stunning in the degree to which it confirms various stereotypes and explains why migrants succeed in some countries and live in lawless ghettos in others. See the graph below (click to enlarge).

Continue reading →

The Endgame Begins

Posted on by

A year ago I predicted that there will be a “decoupling from the unwinding“, as “emerging markets” by and large ride out the temporary shocks of declining Western demand for their exports (China) and the interruption of Western credit intermediation (Russia) before resuming growth. This is one aspect of the trends leading to the imminent demise of Pax Americana, which will be replaced by “the age of scarcity industrialism” / “a world without the West“. We are now entering this Empire’s endgame.

After briefly stalling in early 2009, China’s economy roared back to life on the back of massive credit loosening to build (or overbuild) infrastructure and industrial capacity. Though not the most efficient use of resources, it did have the advantage of 1) maintaining growth, 2) forestalling the social unrest that would rise up if it wasn’t, and 3) at least Chinese investments went into building up their real economy (amongst other things, it became the world’s largest producer of wind turbines and photovoltaic panels in 2009), instead of the pork and oligarch welfare programs more characteristic of the US “stimulus”. And though Russia’s GDP contracted by 7.9% in 2009 – far higher than expected by most commentators, largely thanks to the dependence its big corporations acquired on continuous flows of intermediated Western credit – it began to slowly recover from mid-2009, industrial output is now rising at a fast clip, and investment banks are predicting growth of 4-6% for 2010. The other two BRIC’s, Brazil and India, didn’t have too many problems at all since they had neither a big credit nor trade dependence on the submerging Western markets.

In the long-term, I argued that the brunt of the crisis would fall on the “submerging” Anglo-Saxon markets, thanks to their “charades over “quantitative easing” (translation: printing money), transfer of toxic “assets” onto the public account”, and unsustainable fiscal stimuli. Today, the American political system is for all practical purposes broken. Republicans won’t agree to tax increases, Democrats won’t agree to cutting entitlement programs. The legislative process is reverting to that of the 17th century Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, when a single veto could (and did) prevent anything being agreed on in their Sejm, or parliament. (Hint: the ultimate consequences weren’t good for Poland).

The inflated hopes and expectations accompanying Obama’s accession to power were indeed, just as I suggested on his election, “greatly constrained by financial and institutional realities”. He is a weakling President, alternating between meaningless populist rhetoric and pandering to the Wall Street oligarchs; scorned by the left as Bush II with gloss, and condemned by the right as a foreign Marxist Islamofascist: his policies and outreaches failing at home and abroad, rejected in his own heartlands, these outcomes are engendered by and in large part made inevitable by his hopelessly pollyannish belief in his own messianic powers of compromise and persuasion.

Continue reading →

Thinking about Nuclear War

Posted on by

I have always been fascinated by nuclear war. Mountain bunkers, missile gaps, MAD, – what is there not to like? So this post will be devoted to the doomsday weapons which continue tantalizing us with visions of post-nuclear nirvana. Because yes, despite the post-Cold War reduction in the Russian and US arsenals (consisting mostly of warheads being removed from missiles and stored in bunkers), the cessation of live testing, and overall better relations untinged by ideological confrontation, nuclear weapons and their associated delivery systems and C&C systems haven’t gone anywhere. That isn’t going to change any time soon. If anything, in an overpopulated world under increasing pressure from limits to growth, NBC weapons may re-assume their old primacy in strategic thinking.

This post will be divided into the following sections: 1) a partial list of nuclear war scenarios, 2) a description of nuclear weapons basics and the current nuclear balance of power, and 3) myths about nuclear war – the most prominent being that a large-scale nuclear war is an extinction-level event, or even unwinnable (Herman Kahn and the other sons of Strangelove really do make valid points).

Continue reading →

Review of “Kicking Away the Ladder” (Ha-Joon Chang)

Posted on by

Chang, Ha-Joon – Kicking Away the Ladder: Development Strategy in Historical Perspective (2002)
Category: economy; history; industrial policy; Rating: 5/5
Summary: Kicking Away the Ladder:How the Economic and Intellectual Histories of Capitalism Have Been Re-Written to Justify Neo-Liberal Capitalism (Ha-Joon Chang)

Much has been said of the smug arrogance, cultural aloofness and end-of-history conceit characterizing the neoliberal Washington Consensus, the philosophy that a one-size-fits-all set of “good policies” (e.g. privatization, liberalization, deregulation) and “good institutions” (e.g. patent and IP protection system, etc) can – and must – be transplanted onto any country, irrespective of its historical or cultural traditions, if it were to ever join the developed “international community’. The general bankruptcy of this approach is evident from the facts on the growth, with global GDP growth during the 1960-1980 period of “bad policies” substantially higher than during the “good policies” 1980-2000 period. After seeing high growth during the earlier period, Latin America stagnated, and Africa and Eastern Europe declined during the latter; the major exception was mercantilist China.

Though always disabused by reality, from 1998 Russia to the 2008 crisis, the neoliberals retain their intellectual underpinnings by continuing to claim, like Marxists, that history itself is ultimately on their side – after all, did not Britain and the United States, the world’s greatest economic successes, rise to global preeminence through the virtues of minimal government and free trade? Not at all, argues Ha-Joon Chang in this excellent book.

Continue reading →

One Nation under CCTV

Posted on by

Now we’ve all known for some time that Britain is degenerating into a neoliberal version of East Germany, with its endemic surveillance and database wet dreams, and few things really surprise me any more, but every so often it manages to plumb an even deeper level of insanity. This time the thieving crooks and totalitarian freaks who run Britain want to install CCTV cameras in people’s homes:

THOUSANDS of the worst families in England are to be put in “sin bins” in a bid to change their bad behaviour, [AK: the aptly named] Ed Balls announced yesterday.

The Children’s Secretary set out £400million plans to put 20,000 problem families under 24-hour CCTV super-vision in their own homes. They will be monitored to ensure that children attend school, go to bed on time and eat proper meals. Private security guards will also be sent round to carry out home checks, while parents will be given help to combat drug and alcohol addiction.

What with all the unprecedented budget deficits, money printing and soaring debt, I’m sure spending more money spying on the population is an excellent idea. I’m not even being sarcastic here. As the government steps up its repressive and unpopular policies, resulting in ever more disillusionment and resentment, this actually constitutes an essential investment in state security. The accompanying expansion of the overgrown nanny state is aimed at making children of the population, incapable of resisting the state’s spreading, suffocating tentacles.

Continue reading →

Notes on “Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet” (M. Lynas)

Posted on by

Lynas, Mark – Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet (2007)
Category: global warming, collapse; Rating: 5/5
Summary: Six Steps to Hell (Mark Lynas) 2007; Six Degrees Review (Real Climate) 2007; What will Climate Change do to our Planet? (Times) 2007

No-one disputes the denier argument that greenhouse gases are essential for life on Earth. But there is such an concept as too much of a good thing. It is ostrich-like to deny that our CO2 emissions, proceeding at rates unprecedented in geological history, will not soon lead to substantial global warming – current atmospheric CO2 levels were last seen during the Pliocene, when average global temperatures were almost 3C hotter. And it is Pollyannish in the extreme to maintain that the effects on human societies will be anything other than deleterious. In this book, Mark Lynas shows us why.

Introduction

Basing his work on the IPCC’s projections of 1.4-5.8C of warming for the 21st century, Lynas reviews the existing scientific literature as to the effects each degree of global temperature rise will have on our biosphere. To appreciate the scale of the upper range of these projections, consider that global temperatures were around 6C lower during the depths of the last Ice Age – when the North Sea was dry land, desiccation affected even the tropics and massive ice sheets descended into central Europe, transforming it into a polar desert blasted by ice dust-laden winds.

In contrast to the conservative IPCC’s conception of climate change as gradual, he shows that there exist numerous positive feedbacks that will reinforce and accelerate global warming after the world warms by 2C – acidifying oceans will cease functioning as carbon sinks; the melting of polar ice will reduce the Earth’s albedo, making it more heat-absorptive; dying vegetation, including a possible Amazonian conflagration, will transform the world’s biomass from a carbon sink to a carbon source; melting Siberian permafrost will release previously trapped methane into the atmosphere, a greenhouse gas twenty times as powerful as CO2. Furthermore, anthropogenic global warming is occuring at rates unmatched in geological history as industrial civilization belches out carbon sequestered over tens of millions of years in decades, even as much of the world’s traditional balancing mechanisms – forests, biodiversity, mangroves, etc – have come under sustained human assault. Nor does it help that both paleo-climate reconstructions and new models taking into account the “dimming” effect of human aerosol emissions indicate that the climate’s sensitivity to CO2 levels is as much as twice higher than previously thought. All this sets the stage for a massive extinction event by the time temperatures rise by 6C, as the world’s oceans turn anoxic, seabed methane hydrates are released and lethal hydrogen sulphide bubbles into the atmosphere from the dead seas, even destroying the ozone layer in the process.

Continue reading →