Are you willing to go to war with Russia over Ukraine?

Yes.

Ukraine should invite a handful of troops each from as many countries as possible, to camp along the border. If Putin breaks any of their toes then the answer to your question is yes. Putin should be well informed that every country will consider that an act of war, and that they will all immediately mobilize all forces necessary. Don't waste anyone's time explaining consequences to me, I'm not stupid. Putin is an uncivilized psychopath, but he is not stupid. If he somehow WERE that stupid, there's no point in putting that off 'til tomorrow.

23 August 1939 Russia formed a treaty with the Nazis, dividing territories of Romania, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Finland into German and Soviet "spheres of influence", anticipating potential "territorial and political rearrangements" of these countries. Less than a month later Russia invaded Poland, and proceeding with annexation of Finnish, Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, and Romanian territories.

Putin grew up as Soviet KGB, and he still thinks in archaic cold war terms. He wants to violently rebuild the Soviet Empire - if he thinks he can get away with it.

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There is a certain irony to the fact that a U.S. billionaire is paying to handle a bridge here in the Netherlands (for his half a billion yacht), while in his home country bridges are collapsing. Seems priorities towards taxation and maintenance of common infrastructure are somehow unbalanced.

It is not "survival of the fittest" Never has been. It is "survival of those who are fit enough to procreate".

I live in The Netherlands. No troubles here. Building materials have risen in price, but that is a global thing. No problems with petrol, no empty shelves in supermarkets. No bad news coming in from France or Germany, only bad stuff about the UK.

I should not have taken a sip of my beer while reading your reply. Combining laughing and drinking makes for an uncomfortable reminder that beer should not be expelled through the nose.

A old friend of mine is a climate scientist (Ph.D. in mathematics and weather modeling.) He spent many a year at some of the advanced arctic and antarctic research bases doing climate research.

He left the field some years ago over the politics in the scientific community: too much infighting and not enough science. That's a problem throughout the scientific community, really. The less your proposed research is perceived to fit in with the prevailing ideas the more other scientists will try to stymie your work, and the less your chances of gaining any funding.

His comment to me once was that climate science is an inexact science, that there is an incredible amount of noise in the system, and thus it's very difficult to achieve a theoretical basis that has any significant predictive ability.

That's not how it's portrayed in the media though, they tend to speak in absolutes. Not that American science reporters have ever done anything but an abysmal job informing the public. It's more sensationalism and the art of manipulation than actual reporting. I remember watching some Fox News program where a panel was discussing how untrustworthy scientists are because they're always changing things (thereby evincing a complete lack of understanding of the iterative nature of scientific research, that it is a process of continual refinement) and the token black guy says "I think it's important to just pick a study that supports what you believe" and everyone else just nodded and smiled.

Dafuq?

I think that was why Google's G+ social network had to go. It was connecting too many ordinary citizens with actual scientists and other highly-educated people, allowing them to completely bypass mainstream media on important issues such as climate change. What also impressed me was how many of those researchers and professional people of all stripes were more than willing to answer questions from lay people and answer them in understandable terms. I will never forgive Google for terminating that platform, and doing so with the lame excuse of "we had a security problem." They did us a disservice by doing so.

That presented a problem for those in power however. People began to perceive the difference between official narratives and what the people doing the actual research were saying. I often wonder how different the pandemic response would have been had G+ still been in full operation.

They correctly point out nothing in that context: the West wasn't "allowed" to industrialize and pollute (as if China or anyone else could have stopped that process) it just did what it wanted within its own territories, as did everyone else. The West just figured out how to do it over a century before anyone else, and China and India are simply playing off of the West's initial advantage. One could argue, however, that China, India and other regional powers are being "allowed" to pollute because both were enabled by Western corporatism and its willingness to sell out its own citizenry and shift its manufacturing base to the third-world.

The elephant in the room here is not actually that human civilization and concomitant industrialization cause pollution. No, in fact it is overpopulation, and that is the sole province of the third world. Not that I see many willing to talk about that: no, it's always the United States that is the source of all the world's ills, even when that's just not the case. Were it not for the flood of illegal aliens crossing our southern border, the U.S. would be in a population decline (as is much of Europe.)

That said, you are absolutely correct about poorer nations having little vision of the future, other than trying to achieve a high-energy, high-resource-utilization Western lifestyle for as many of their citizens as possible, even if the collapse of human civilization is brought that much closer.

That's hysterical. I just made a similar comment about that particular Roland Emmerich film but calling it a documentary is genius.

Great. So you're telling me that Roland Emmerich was right? Oh well ... I always figured one of his end-of-civilization-as-we-know-it scenarios would come true sooner or later.

Wait until Alexandria Occasionally-Cortical hears about this.

The problem is, if you kill off too many of the right people (that is, those that develop and maintain the technology that the plebs need to survive) everyone dies anyway. What we need is a good selective plague.

I hope you don't live in New York City.

I'm not sure that China's numbers are accurate: they lie about pretty much everything to do with internal statistics so they're not to be trusted.

Regardless, the civilized West is losing population, indeed many European nations are in a population decline, as is the United States (or would be, were it not for illegal migration.) China currently has almost five times America's population, more people than the U.S. and Europe combined. Worse yet, they have a burgeoning middle class that wants all the cool stuff they can get, from gigatons of fresh seafood stolen from other nation's territorial waters to air conditioning to the very latest i-thing from Apple. China may (or may not) be able to reduce their climate emissions, but they sure as Hell aren't going to be able to reduce their resource consumption. Not if the CCP wants to stay in power.

Face facts: North America and Europe can make all the cute little "accords" they want, but that won't make any difference.

China (and now India, the other rising industrial power) couldn't care less about global environmental concerns. They want a high-energy, resource-intensive Western lifestyle for as many of their people as they can manage, and they don't care about the cost or the damage they're doing. China especially, because China isn't limiting its hunger for more resources to its own territory, and is building more and more coal-fired power plants.

I've long stated that a correction needs to be applied and that it would be best if we were to do it collectively as a species. It doesn't matter though. If we don't stop consuming and reproducing at an ever-accelerating pace (and we won't) Mother Nature will cheerfully make that correction for us. Just remember one thing:

Mother Nature is a bitch.

As an aside, if we bungle it and civilization collapses completely, that may well spell the end. We've already used up all of the easy-to-access raw materials (coal, oil, natural gas, minerals of all kinds) with the remainder requiring more and more sophisticated technology to access. There won't be anything left for the next budding civilization to build on.

What happens when they find the ideal location and that location contains an ark-like structure with millions of eggs, spores, and whatever in it?