Currently living in the post apocalypse?

[flowerbug]

Canada CO2 may be thawing permafrost/decomposition as now things are heating up again. the lack of the world to form an effective world government has squandered so many resources that i'm not sure there will be a recovery from such sillynesses. i hope so, for the future, but in the meantime it is going to be a rocky road.

there are some good signs here or there, but you have to seek them out.

[reed]

The detectable concentration there in Canada is CO (carbon monoxide) not CO². CO is always high over cities but the only other detectable source is fires. Volcanoes, even big ones are much too small to produce it in detectable amounts unless you zoom way way down to the local spot during an eruption. The CO currently over Canada is visible on the screen when it's zoomed out far enough to display the entire western hemisphere, it's a wild fire. 

Permafrost is releasing CO² of course but it isn't detectable against the background. Typically the northern hemisphere is highest with spikes more and more often over 450 PPM. Southern Hemisphere is less. Last fall and over winter it was possible to still find spots over the Amazon where it was less than 400, as low as 380. The other day though was first time I couldn't find any spots under 400, any where. It generally goes down a little in summer with plant growth in the NH but I suspect if it happens this year it will be the last time a concentration less that 400 will be seen. 

[xdrix]

A studies in Amazon say that the fire stressed the trees and a tree stressed reject more of CO2 than O2 during his photosynthesis. There could to begin a big problem.

[flowerbug]

2 dams taken out by high waters. we are far enough away here that we had only the local flash flooding that is expected after getting 6 inches of rain with most of it happening in one day. the two dams that failed are upstream from where one of my brother's is at but they are on high enough ground, but it was close.

when you remove all of Mother Nature's clothing water will run off faster and cause more flooding. nobody talks about that much...  by clothing i mean green stuff, but also wetlands.

[prairiegardens]

Yeah, in Sask there is an ngoing issue because nobody has a clue about how to handle water...they freak out about too much water in the spring and try to get rid of it however they can, they weep and tend their clothes about drought almost every year.
Absolutely no concept of trying to manage water so it's available later in the season.
I talked the the head of the local watershed administration about my pond and asked about bentonite... he had literally never heard of using it to seal ponds. The head honcho, who might have been expected to know something about all sorts of water management techniques.... all he could offer was that there wasn't much rain last year, which I gently and with great self control told him gently was so much b.s. Even watering the garden heavilly I never managed to empty even one water barrel. Sigh.

[steev]

It's possible to have no comprehension of reality, unfortunaatly. No matter how stupid you think the average person is, half the population is dumber than that.

[flowerbug]

our current world is not at all geared towards reality. in fact it looks to me like it is intentionally being geared towards large heaps of BS because when you have enough people open to believing BS then they are easily sold on all sorts of other things.

personally i'm fine with people who have different beliefs as long as those aren't ending up ruining the planet which gives us all life. this is our only ship we know of, we need to treat it better as if we will be here for thousands upon thousands of years. the current trends really suggest we're not doing that. eventually we will be forced to live within our means or be subjected to the down cycle that comes from having to work to restore some kind of balance. killing off diversity means we have even less available biological beings to harvest and use the energy of the sun. the more gaps you put into the system, the less niches occupied means the system isn't producing as well as it could otherwise.

managing water is managing life.

[xdrix]

In my garden i have make a few parcel the more humid possible with a shadow create by a vegetale covert or a tree i'm note that the plant ar less stressed.when the sunshine is very hot. After a cold night the t° is more high at shadow than at sunshine and she is more bearable than at full sunshine the afternoon.The ground is humid more long at shadow.

[steev]

This may be a tad much, but I think it certainly relates to the current paroxysms of the post apocalypse. When I was at UCB in the 60's, (sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll; I wasn't really into music, but two out of three weren't bad!) there was a student desire for a half-chair of Ethnic Studies (basically non-white social studies; it would have cost ~$5,000 per annum); Governor Reagan pressured the Regents to refuse). One day, a large number of students, etc, gathered in Sproul Plaza to peacefully demonstrate. Living in a Co-op a block off campus, I heard the noise and went to investigate; the protesters were on the west and police in riot gear on the east; I went into the Student Union to go up to the second floor for a good view; no way! Only suits were allowed upstairs. 'Kay; I went to climb to the roof of the Bear's Lair restaurant next door, where I had a good view of the plaza.

I SAW a teargas canister dropped from the second floor balcony of the Student Union (only suits, remember?); a guy in the crowd picked it up and lobbed it toward the cops; a phalanx of whom rushed into the protesters; grabbing him; (how did they know exactly who had done it?); they literally carried him bodily across the plaza and up the lawn embankment to a place in full view of the demonstrators, laid him on the lawn, and with three cops kneeling on both sides of him, blocking sight of him, a seventh cop was kneeling between his legs, also blocking sight, jabbing his truncheon repeatedly, forcefully, seemingly into the man's crotch; there had been no truncheon swung at the man's head so I don't think he was knocked out, but his legs never even twitched. Oddly enough, this set the protesters into a riot. What WERE they thinking? That little situation involved CHP overtime of at least $50,000, not to mention a lot of other police pay. Way to go, Ronnie! The chair was eventually funded.

Another incident that came off that one was that days later, I again heard noise and went to check it out; in front of Kerr? Hall, there was a crowd of protesters surrounded by cops in riot gear and gas masks; I noticed that people were being let into the cordon, but not out; decided I'd stay out; shortly there came a 'copter which blew teargas down into the captive crowd. It was ill planned, however, since the prevailing breeze sent the teargas up to Cowell Hospital, making it necessary to evacuate all the patients.

Now, I'm not saying that people who demonstrate may be not need to be managed, but that those doing the managing need to be managed more, sometimes thinking they have the right, or at least the power and excuse, to go off the rails and do STUPID things, for which they should be held accountable, like anyone else who commits assault and battery.

[prairiegardens]

What do you all think about the defunding of the police that is being talked about? I admit my initial reaction was knee jerk what are they thinking? We need the police just need them to behave more responsibly! But then listened to a guy, the Mayor maybe? Of a town in New Jersey that went that route a few years ago and it's been extremely successful I wish these interviews were at least occasionally during the day instead of the middle of the night so I'd remember exactly who what and where but it was absolutely food for thought. On the face of it it sounded absurd to me but now.....if it worked elsewhere as it did there it seems a superb idea. Huge problems sometimes require thinking a little out of the box to fix I guess.

[steev]

Yes; it's often not necessary to send armed agents to situations which really call for people trained in social services or mental health issues, when police are rarely so trained. Also, I find it encouraging that female police are increasingly common, women generally being perceived and oriented differently than men. I'd really like more "protect and serve" and less "control". The current administration, the name of which I won't trumpet, seems to only grasp the "need" for control, which is just more blatant projection.

[steev]

One wonders what the tech-savvy/nature-ignorant are going to do if/when this shit goes down; our cities will be killing zones as people seek food; it won't be pretty. Perhaps I'm pessimistic and people will be all co-operative and rational for once. Right; hell could freeze over.

[flowerbug]

the large majority just want things to go on much the way they always have been, except you know, without the shootings, lootings, starvings and such. i am much in favor of this too.

i'm glad we do not live within a city center itself so all i hear and see now would be if i looked for it on-line. i don't do that. i don't really need to see the horrible stuff that people do to each other in some name of some ideal.

i do agree with protesting police violence and other problems, but i'm not one of those people who does much other than mostly being a garden hermit.

[prairiegardens]

Jul 24, 2020 20:49:37 GMT -5 steev said:

One wonders what the tech-savvy/nature-ignorant are going to do if/when this shit goes down; our cities will be killing zones as people seek food; it won't be pretty. Perhaps I'm pessimistic and people will be all co-operative and rational for once. Right; hell could freeze over.

I followed (on the internet) for a while a guy who was a knowledgeable  permaculturist but really primarily a prepper. At no point did I see any remote hint of him or any of his followers being willing to share if things get bad, the theory apparently being "the signs were all there, you should have prepared, sucks to be you, now go away or you may get shot by  one of my many legal guns. "
Most of the people following also seemed to think that the number of humans on the planet needed to shrink anyway, so a sort of Darwinian disinterest in the welfare of the species, just an interest in the welfare of them and theirs. Also have run across people who engender this attitude by proclaiming that they will simply go into the country and take what they need/want, so they aren't worried at all. 
Of course, that assumes that there aren't a whole lot of people who may or may not beat them to it, that fuel to go anywhere will be available, and/or they won't get shot by the preppers expecting them. As you say, it won't be pretty. Personally, I am really trying to wrap my head around wild foods. It's difficult to learn about them from books, the info is almost always insufficient. If nothing else, there are  lots of bulrushes around, and garden weeds like dandelions and pigweed, and apparently all amaranths are edible. . And I am learning how to dry foods, so much easier to stash a lot of dried food than canned or frozen. Last effort yielded a little over a half gallon of dried cherries. 

[flowerbug]

i prefer those who do vs those who talk, but i'm also willing to teach people who are willing to work at it.

come at me with demands and guns is probably not going to work out well for anyone.

i don't think this current situation goes that far yet and i doubt it will - but i know a lot of people who want to make it worse and keep acting to make it worse so i don't have a very good opinion of them - it is too bad though that their idiocy harms others.