The threat of an asteroid strike is real, and the potential for a life-ending event for the planet is a possibility. Humans have not yet mapped most of the asteroid threats the planet faces, and we do not yet have a defense system that could eliminate a threat even if we detected one. In other words, this doomsday scenario is a real threat that deserves real action.
“The Doomsday Book” by Marshall Brain lays out this scenario in amazing detail and offers solutions to prevent this doomsday scenario from unfolding. You can order the book today on Amazon and other retailers.
The study indicated that climate-related fears for their children’s lives were rooted in a deeply pessimistic view of the future. Of the 400 respondents who offered a vision of the future, 92.3% were negative, 5.6% were mixed or neutral, and just 0.6% were positive.
92% of people surveyed have a negative view of the future. Less than 1% are positive! Unbelievable. But it makes sense when you start adding up the imminent doomsday scenarios that humanity is facing: The many facets of climate change, the economic effects of robots, the destructive power of inequality, terrorism, etc.
Meanwhile, the babies that are born grow up to become terrified young people as described here.
The doomsday book describes all of these problems, and also offers solutions for many of them, if humanity can get organized and unified enough to implement the solutions.
“The Doomsday Book” by Marshall Brain lays out this scenario in amazing detail and offers solutions to prevent this doomsday scenario from unfolding. You can order the book today on Amazon and other retailers.
French lawmakers passed a bill on Tuesday that critics say could make it harder for journalists and human rights advocates to hold police accountable. The Global Security Bill’s most controversial section — Article 24 — which was approved by lawmakers on Friday, forbids the publication of images that allow the identification of a law enforcement officer “with the intent to cause them harm, physically or mentally.”
And:
On Saturday, there were more protests against the bill with an estimated 22,000 people taking part in marches across France. In Paris the crowds included representatives of the media, along with some gilets jaunes (yellow vest) protesters and members of Extinction Rebellion.
The bill has been strongly criticised by journalists and rights groups who argue that it would curtail press freedom and lead to less police accountability. Those opposed to the legislation are concerned that, if it is enacted, it risks endangering journalists and other onlookers who film officers at work, especially during violent protests. They say documenting and sharing the actions of violent officers is essential in stopping future incidents of police brutality.
If police can act without accountability, they are free to do any heinous thing they want to citizens.
According to Cecile Coudriou, president of Amnesty International France: “If people cannot film anything in the streets when the police may sometimes have an illegal use of force it’s a very worrying message to send”
If humanity could turn on a dime and completely stop burning fossil fuels tomorrow, we would definitely be better off. But are we past “the point of no return” already?
The findings of the scientific study are alarming. It shows that irrespective of the reduction of greenhouse gasses, emissions are brought down to zero. It is not sufficient to stall the melting of permafrost.
This would be an example of a positive feedback loop, where melting permafrost releases enough methane to raise temperatures, which releases more methane, and so on. This video describes the problem in stark detail:
Arctic Methane. Has 2020 triggered a tipping point?
If this is the case, then the only hope is to combine the halt of fossil fuels with different forms of geoengineering.
Geoengineering: A Horrible Idea We Might Have to Do
“The Doomsday Book” by Marshall Brain lays out this scenario in amazing detail and offers solutions to prevent this doomsday scenario from unfolding. You can order the book today on Amazon and other retailers.
“If anything, we are rounding the corner into a calamity,” Wen said. “We’re soon going to exceed well more than 2,000 deaths, maybe 3,000, 4,000 deaths every single day here in the US.” That projection has been echoed by other experts including Dr. Jonathan Reiner, a professor of medicine at George Washington University, who predicted Wednesday the country’s daily death toll would likely double in 10 days, and soon see “close to 4,000 deaths a day.”
The spiral begins when people forget that controlling the pandemic means doing many things at once. The virus can spread before symptoms appear, and does so most easily through five P’s: people in prolonged, poorly ventilated, protection-free proximity. To stop that spread, this country could use measures that other nations did, to great effect: close nonessential businesses and spaces that allow crowds to congregate indoors; improve ventilation; encourage mask use; test widely to identify contagious people; trace their contacts; help them isolate themselves; and provide a social safety net so that people can protect others without sacrificing their livelihood. None of these other nations did everything, but all did enough things right—and did them simultaneously. By contrast, the U.S. engaged in …
It is amazing that such an advanced and highly developed nation can behave so poorly in this crisis. But here we are, and 250,000+ deaths is a doomsday situation if there ever was one.
The Dakotas lead the world in COVID-19 deaths per capita
“The Doomsday Book” by Marshall Brain lays out this scenario in amazing detail and offers solutions to prevent this doomsday scenario from unfolding. You can order the book today on Amazon and other retailers.
The Dakotas lead the world in COVID-19 deaths per capita
This video contains so many memorable quotes, such as:
“It is so bad, the Dakotas North and South lead the world right now on a per capita basis when it comes to the number of people who are dying on a daily basis.”
“Politics has affected so much of what is happening here. People will fight you on the facts.”
“If you were grading it, it would be an F, probably and F-. It’s that bad.”
“In South Dakota, the debate over wearing a mask continues statewide… Around 50% of South Dakotans say they do not wear a mask.”
See also:
North, South Dakota resist COVID-19 restrictions despite infection rates
“Among the Reddest of Red states, North Dakota largely put individual liberties ahead of collective health initiatives, only requiring masks once hospitals were overwhelmed. Neighboring South Dakota still has not.”
“The Doomsday Book” by Marshall Brain lays out this scenario in amazing detail and offers solutions to prevent this doomsday scenario from unfolding. You can order the book today on Amazon and other retailers.
Back in the U.S., the relief of Donald Trump’s long good-bye will begin yielding to the stark reality that his party remains fundamentally pathological. No issue highlights this depressing reality more clearly than climate change. For more than a decade, the GOP has stood alone among major right-of-center parties in industrialized democracies worldwide in its refusal to endorse climate science. But during the Trump era, the party’s rhetorical emphasis shifted. The major Republican point of agreement is now to insist on fossil-fuel use as an inherent good.
This is a worst-case-scenario when it comes to Climate Change – an entire political party and tens of millions of voters all opposed to solving the problem at the root of the climate change crisis. The only hope we have is to stop burning fossil fuels immediately, and start pulling carbon back out of the atmosphere, and to probably deploy geoengineering measures as well. To have an entire political party opposing these measures is planetary suicide.
Geoengineering: A Horrible Idea We Might Have to Do
Geoengineering May Be the Answer to Climate Change
“The Doomsday Book” by Marshall Brain lays out this scenario in amazing detail and offers solutions to prevent this doomsday scenario from unfolding. You can order the book today on Amazon and other retailers.
The massive wildfires this summer left an unprecedented trail of destruction, burning millions of acres.
it’s impossible to deny the role a warming planet plays in today’s blazes. “Something’s happening to the plumbing of the world,” Newsom said. “And we come from a perspective, humbly, where we submit the science is in and observed evidence is self-evident that climate change is real, and that is exacerbating this.”
The Science of Wildfires: Why They’re Getting Worse | WSJ
Historic heat fuels California wildfires
“The Doomsday Book” by Marshall Brain lays out this scenario in amazing detail and offers solutions to prevent this doomsday scenario from unfolding. You can order the book today on Amazon and other retailers.
We can see the fresh water catastrophe coming, but will we do enough in time to avert it? This video lays out the problem:
Explained | World’s Water Crisis | FULL EPISODE | Netflix
According to the video, these cities are on the brink of a fresh water crisis unless action is taken:
Cape Town, South Africa
Sao Paulo, Brazil
Melbourne, Australia
Jakarta
London
Beijing
Istanbul
Tokyo
Bangalore
Barcelona
Mexico City
Other well known problem areas are dry places like Las Vegas, Saudi Arabia (and many other desert areas in the Middle East and Africa), parts of China and India, etc. These places currently rely on aquifers that are going to soon be empty.
Some of the large urban areas are coastal so they will eventually resort to mass desalination (with its own pollution and energy problems, but better than dying of thirst), but a place like Mexico City or Las Vegas may not be so lucky.
Water shortages are now affecting more than 3 billion people around the world, as the amount of fresh water available for each person has plunged by a fifth over two decades, data has shown. About 1.5 billion people are suffering severe water scarcity or even drought, as a combination of climate breakdown, rising demand and poor management has made agriculture increasingly difficult across swathes of the globe.
With human populations continuing to rise, the problems only get worse unless something causes the human population to crash.
One possible solution is purely economic. Municipal water in a place like Las Vegas might be a penny per gallon today. If it rises to 50 cents or a dollar per gallon, then people will treat water differently. It might mean the end of golf courses and giant artificial lakes in the desert:
This is a fascinating article with a number of real world examples of how misinformation, disinformation and malinformation are destroying civil society:
Online misinformation has been around since the mid-1990s. But in 2016 several events made it broadly clear that darker forces had emerged: automation, microtargeting and coordination were fueling information campaigns designed to manipulate public opinion at scale. Journalists in the Philippines started raising flags as Rodrigo Duterte rose to power, buoyed by intensive Facebook activity. This was followed by unexpected results in the Brexit referendum in June and then the U.S. presidential election in November—all of which sparked researchers to systematically investigate the ways in which information was being used as a weapon.
An example:
Take, for example, the edited video of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi that circulated in May 2019. It was a genuine video, but an agent of disinformation slowed down the video and then posted that clip to make it seem that Pelosi was slurring her words. Just as intended, some viewers immediately began speculating that Pelosi was drunk, and the video spread on social media. Then the mainstream media picked it up, which undoubtedly made many more people aware of the video than would have originally encountered it.
A pair of solutions:
In a healthy information commons, people would still be free to express what they want—but information that is designed to mislead, incite hatred, reinforce tribalism or cause physical harm would not be amplified by algorithms. That means it would not be allowed to trend on Twitter or in the YouTube content recommender. Nor would it be chosen to appear in Facebook feeds, Reddit searches or top Google results.
Until this amplification problem is resolved, it is precisely our willingness to share without thinking that agents of disinformation will use as a weapon. Hence, a disordered information environment requires that every person recognize how he or she, too, can become a vector in the information wars and develop a set of skills to navigate communication online as well as offline.
The ultimate expression of this will be AI that can detect things like hate speech, misinformation, lies, intentionally altered or falsified content, etc. and effectively eliminate them from the public square. When that happens, the world will be a much better place.
A companion website for "The Doomsday Book" by Marshall Brain
