COMPILATION OF COMPLEMENTARY MATERIAL

SUPPORTING THE NEED FOR A GLOBAL PACT

Humanity is just two-and-a-half minutes from the apocalypse because of Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock scientists say  (26 January 2017)
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/doomsday-clock-minutes-to-midnight-bulletin-of-the-atomic-scientists-trump-a7547626.html

The election of Donald Trump is driving the planet towards oblivion, the elite organisation said.

Humanity is now just two-and-a-half minutes from midnight, when the world ends, according to the Doomsday Clock. The change means that Earth is closer to oblivion than it has been since 1953. That’s according to the experts who make up the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and set the time of the clock, which indicates the danger that humanity finds itself in.Lawrence Krauss and David Titley, who lead the organisation, said that the adjustment by half a minute towards midnight had been made because the international community had failed to deal with humanity’s two most pressing threats: nuclear weapons and climate change. But it said that the danger had been amplified because "the United States now has a President who has promised to impede progress on both of those fronts". Scientists to oppose Donald Trump in huge ‘March for Science’ "Never before has the Bulletin decided to advance the clock largely because of the statements of a single person," the two scientists wrote. "But when that person is the new President of the United States, his words matter." CLIP

Donald Trump could be about to trigger the apocalypse, elite Doomsday Clock scientists conclude
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/donald-trump-doomsday-clock-bulletin-atomic-scientists-nuclear-war-apocalypse-a7547761.html

It is the first time the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has ever made a decision based on the words of one person. 

"Over the course of 2016, the global security landscape darkened as the international community failed to come effectively to grips with humanity’s most pressing existential threats, nuclear weapons and climate change," the Bulletin's Science and Security Board noted in its statement. "This already-threatening world situation was the backdrop for a rise in strident nationalism worldwide in 2016, including in a US presidential campaign during which the eventual victor, Donald Trump, made disturbing comments about the use and proliferation of nuclear weapons and expressed disbelief in the overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change." The board’s decision to move the clock less than a full minute — something it has never before done — reflects a simple reality: As this statement is issued, Donald Trump has been the US president only a matter of days … Despite that, the new President has indicated potentially world-ending positions on the world's biggest problems, the Bulletin wrote. "Just the same, words matter, and President Trump has had plenty to say over the last year," the same statement read. "Both his statements and his actions as President-elect have broken with historical precedent in unsettling ways. He has made ill-considered comments about expanding the US nuclear arsenal. He has shown a troubling propensity to discount or outright reject expert advice related to international security, including the conclusions of intelligence experts. "And his nominees to head the Energy Department, and the Environmental Protection Agency dispute the basics of climate science. In short, even though he has just now taken office, the president’s intemperate statements, lack of openness to expert advice, and questionable cabinet nominations have already made a bad international security situation worse." CLIP

To read the whole statement by the atomic scientists, go HERE and to see at what times this clock was previously set, go at http://thebulletin.org/timeline

Scientists to oppose Donald Trump in huge ‘March for Science’ in Washington
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/donald-trump-science-march-washington-climate-change-global-warming-a7547206.html

The demonstration will be in opposition to the administration’s plans to delete climate change data and gag scientists. To find out more: MARCH FOR SCIENCE - EARTH DAY - APRIL 22, 2017
According to https://www.marchforscience.com/satellite-marches, as of Feb 12, there are already 226 marches scheduled around the world.

Donald Trump will cause US power to collapse, says man who correctly predicted fall of USSR
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/donald-trump-us-power-to-collapse-predicted-ussr-fall-johan-galtung-a7460516.html

A sociologist credited with predicting the fall of the Soviet Union has warned that US global power is in a phase of accelerated decline under the leadership of Donald Trump — and will collapse while the property mogul is the White House. Norwegian professor Johan Galtung is known as the "founding father" of peace studies as a scientific subject and is recognised for correctly predicting numerous historical events, among them the Tiananmen Square uprising in China and the September 11 attacks. CLIP

Hundreds of Thousands Sign Petition to Impeach Trump for Violating Constitution over Biz Interests
https://www.democracynow.org/2017/1/27/hundreds_of_thousands_sign_petition_to

Nearly 900,000 Americans have already signed at https://impeachdonaldtrumpnow.org

[Incidentally, no former US president has ever been successfully impeached - Nixon resigned just before being impeached. But if an impeachment were to succeed against Trump, and if he was convicted, which is also necessary to remove him, it is vice-president Mike Pence who would get the job, which isn’t really a better option. Apparently, he supported the Iraq War and the Patriot Act, he believes global warming is a myth and doesn’t believe in evolution. He is "the most far-right pick Donald Trump could have made" according to http://bit.ly/2l9TTvl.]

Mental Health Professionals Declare Trump is Mentally Ill And Must Be Removed (over 22,000 Health Professionals have signed so far)
https://www.change.org/p/trump-is-mentally-ill-and-must-be-removed

Al Franken Says A Few of Republicans Are Questioning Trump’s Mental Health
http://www.politicususa.com/2017/02/12/al-franken-republicans-questioning-trumps-mental-health.html

A Psychological Portrait of Donald Trump
http://www.counterpunch.org/2017/02/10/a-psychological-portrait-of-donald-trump/

(…) Although many psychologists and psychiatrists accept that their work could never be done without direct contact with the subject of their analysis, there are enough manifestations of Trump’s public persona and character to allow for his psychological characterization, one that is of a deep concern for everyone. In that regard, one could say that Trump’s psychological characteristics are consistent with a person with Antisocial Personality Disorder (ASPD), which is characterized by a pattern of disregard for, or violation of, the rights of others. Also apparent in this disorder is a history of legal problems and of impulsive and aggressive behavior.

(…) What makes this disorder particularly dangerous is that among its other characteristics those who have it are often reckless and impulsive, and fail to consider the consequences of their actions. In addition, they are often aggressive and manifest a lopsided temper, lashing out with violence to what they perceive is a provocation.

(…) What we have is a situation where the most powerful person in the world is tainted by personality characteristics that can be of serious harm to world peace. The extent to which these harmful characteristics can be controlled may well decide the future of the world.

Donald Trump’s Narcissism Got Him Elected. It Won’t Get Him Impeached
http://fortune.com/2017/02/08/trump-narcissism-impeachment/

Republican Congressman Hints At Trump Impeachment If Flynn Lied For The President
http://www.politicususa.com/2017/02/12/republican-congressman-impeachment-trump.html

White House Trashes The Constitution With Claim Trump Has Unquestioned Presidential Power
http://www.politicususa.com/2017/02/12/trump-senior-adviser-claims-trumps-power-questioned.html

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The following scientifically-based article gives us such an ominous warning of what will soon happen – which is so damn serious – that it deserves to be reproduced here in its entirety and read by everyone… especially more so that words of such a calamitous, imminent event has not yet got the public exposure it deserves…

From http://www.counterpunch.org/2017/02/10/looming-climate-catastrophe-extinction-in-nine-years/

Looming Climate Catastrophe: Extinction in Nine Years?

by DAVE LINDORFF - February 10, 2017

Reports from the Arctic are getting pretty grim.

The latest, from a blog called Arctic News, warns that by 2026 — that’s just nine years from now — warming above the Arctic Circle could be so extreme that a massively disrupted and weakened jet stream could lead to global temperature rises so severe that a massive extinction event, including humans, could result.

This latest blog post, written by Arctic News editor Sam Carana, draws on research by a number of scientists (linked in his article), who report on various feedback loops that will result from a dramatically warmer north polar region. But the critical concern, he says, is methane already starting to be released in huge quantities from the shallow sea floor of the continental shelves north of Siberia and North America. That methane, produced by bacteria acting on biological material that sinks to the sea floor, for the most part, is currently lying frozen in a form of ice that is naturally created over millions of years by a mixing of methane and water, called a methane hydrate. Methane hydrate is a type of molecular structure called a clathrate. Clathrates are a kind of cage, in this case made of water ice, which traps another chemical, in this case methane. At normal temperatures, above the freezing temperature of water, these clathrates can only form under high pressures, such as a 500 meters or more under the ocean, and indeed such clathrates can be found under the sea floor even in places like the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, where the temperature is 8-10 degrees above freezing. But in colder waters, they can exist and remain stable at much shallower levels, such as a in a few hundred feet of water off the coast of Alaska or Siberia.

The concern is that if the Arctic Ocean waters, particularly nearer to shore, were to warm even slightly, as they will do as the ice cap vanishes in summer and becomes much thinner in winter, at some point the clathrates there will suddenly dissolve releasing tens of thousands of gigatons of methane in huge bursts. Already, scientists are reporting that portions of the ocean, as well as shallow lakes in the far north, look as though they are boiling, as released methane bubbles to the surface, sometimes in such concentrations that they can be lit on fire with a match as they surface.

As Carana writes:

"As the temperature of the Arctic Ocean keeps rising, it seems inevitable that more and more methane will rise from its seafloor and enter the atmosphere, at first strongly warming up the atmosphere over the Arctic Ocean itself – thus causing further methane eruptions – and eventually warming up the atmosphere across the globe."

That is scary enough, as a sufficient burst of methane, a global warming gas 86 times more powerful than CO2, could lead to a rapid rise in global temperatures by 3 degrees Celsius or more, enough to actually reverse the carbon cycle, so that plants would end up releasing more carbon into the atmosphere rather than absorbing it.

Is this scenario or a giant methane "burp" from the Arctic sea floor just a scare story?

Not according to many scientists who study the earth’s long history of global warming periods and of evolution and periodic mass extinction events.

As Harold Wanless, a Professor of Geology and a specialist in sea level rise at the University of Miami explains, prior warming periods have often proceeded in dramatic pulses, not smoothly over drawn-out periods.

"We don’t know how this period of warming is going to develop," he said. "That’s the problem. The warming Arctic Ocean is just ice melting, but the melting permafrost in Siberia, and the methane hydrates under the shallow waters of the continental shelf can happen suddenly. Every model gets the trend, but they don’t give you the rate that it happens or when something sudden happens."

Wanless, who has for some time been predicting ice melting rates and resulting sea level rises that are far in excess of what the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been predicting — as much as 10 feet by 2050 and 15 or 20 feet by the end of this century, vs. just three feet for the IPCC — says, "Scientists tend to be pretty conservative. We don’t like to scare people, and we don’t like to step out of our little predictable boxes. But I suspect the situation is going to spin out of hand pretty quickly." He says, "If you look at the history of warming periods, things can move pretty fast, and when that happens that’s when you get extinction events."

He adds, "I would not discount the possibility that it could happen in the next ten years."

Making matters worse, Wanless adds, is the fact that a large enough methane eruption in the arctic, besides contributing to accelerated global warming, could also lead to a significant reduction of the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere (currently about 21%). This is because methane in the atmosphere breaks down fairly quickly, over the course of a decade or so, into water vapor and CO2, but in doing do, it requires oxygen atoms, which it would pull out of the atmosphere. That reduction in oxygen would lead to reduced viability and growth rates of plants and animals, as well as to a significant reduction in crop productivity. This dire trend would be enhanced by a second threat to atmospheric oxygen, which is the oxygen-producing plankton in the ocean. If sea temperatures rise much, and increased acidification of the ocean continues apace as the oceans absorb more CO2, plankton, the earth’s main producers of new oxygen, could shut down that source of new free oxygen.

So there you have it my fellow humans: it’s at least possible that we could be looking at an epic extinction event, caused by ourselves, which could include exterminating our own species, or at least what we call "civilization," in as little as nine years.

What is particularly galling, in thinking about this, is the prospect that eight of those last years might find us living in a country led by Donald Trump, a climate-change denier who seems hell-bent on promoting measures, like extracting more oil from the Canadian tar sands, the North Dakota Bakkan shale fields and the Arctic sea floor, as well as re-opening coal mines, that will just make such a dystopian future even more likely than it already is.

The only "bright side" to this picture is that it may not matter that much what Trump does, because we’ve already, during the last eight Obama years and the last eight Bush years before that, dithered away so much time that the carbon already in the atmosphere — about 405 ppm — has long since passed the 380 ppm level at which, during the last warming period of the earth, sea levels were 100 feet higher than they are today.

That is to say, we’re already past the point of no return and it’s just the lag being caused by the time it takes for ice sheets to melt and for the huge ocean heat sinks to warm in response to the higher carbon levels in the atmosphere that is saving us from facing this disaster right now.

It is at this stage of the game either too late to stop, or we should be embarking on a global crash program to reduce carbon emissions the likes of which humanity has never known or contemplated.

Hard to imagine that happening though, particularly here in a country where half the people don’t even think climate change is happening, or if they do notice things getting warmer, think that’s just a peachy thing that will reduce their heating bills.

TO GET ALL THE SCIENTIFIC DATA READ…

Warning of mass extinction of species, including humans, within one decade
http://arctic-news.blogspot.ca/2017/02/warning-of-mass-extinction-of-species-including-humans-within-one-decade.html

(…) Without action, we are facing extinction at unprecedented scale. In many respects, we are already in the sixth mass extinction of Earth's history. Up to 96% of all marine species and 70% of terrestrial vertebrate species became extinct when temperatures rose by 8 °C (14 °F) during the Permian-Triassic extinction, or the Great Dying, 252 million years ago. During the Palaeocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), which occurred 55 million years ago, global temperatures rose as rapidly as by 5°C in ~13 years, according to a study by Wright et al. A recent study by researchers led by Zebee concludes that the present anthropogenic carbon release rate is unprecedented during the past 66 million years. Back in history, the highest carbon release rates of the past 66 million years occurred during the PETM. Yet, the maximum sustained PETM carbon release rate was less than 1.1 Pg C per year, the study by Zebee et al. found. By contrast, a recent annual carbon release rate from anthropogenic sources was ~10 Pg C (2014). The study by Zebee et al. therefore concludes that future ecosystem disruptions are likely to exceed the - by comparison - relatively limited extinctions observed at the PETM. An earlier study by researchers led by De Vos had already concluded that current extinction rates are 1,000 times higher than natural background rates of extinction and future rates are likely to be 10,000 times higher.

Among the comments to this post above:

"This article is the most important for me. People don't realize how fast the Earth system is going south and they just assume there will be no tipping point but a gradual change eternally... and the fossil record shows us that sudden changes in Earth's capability to support life extinguished species that had reproduction cycles as short as 2 months. So something that prevents a species to fulfill its reproductive cycle in 2 months is really a big game-changer in the whole system.We're going to learn this the hard way...... but I'm all Guy Mcpherson on this one. Lets live a fulfilling life and be good to one another while it lasts. In the end, only kindness matters."

"Thank you so much for your work. This allows us to know what we are facing, and arrange our lives around the rather truncated span that we now know it to be. I very sincerely hope you're wrong, but fear that you are correct. After all, you and Guy Mcpherson are just working with facts on record, not making this stuff up. It's so annoying that a large number of people think they can wave all this away with a sentence of two of dismissal - I've argued with them often. I need to "grasp", apparently, that CO2 is a "harmless gas". Don't I know that "live thrives in warmer climes"? We couldn't possibly be making any substantial difference, little old us, and so on. The denial industry has certainly earned its money."

The 97 Percent Scientific Consensus on Climate Change Is Wrong—It's Even Higher

(...) "The 97 percent is wrong, period," Powell said. "Look at it this way: If someone says that 97 percent of publishing climate scientists accept anthropogenic [human-caused] global warming, your natural inference is that 3 percent reject it. But I found only 0.006 percent who reject it. That is a difference of 500 times."

For a description of what will happen as the Earth warms up, check...

A degree by degree explanation of what will happen when the earth warms
http://globalwarming.berrens.nl/globalwarming.htm