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Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.
This entire website is a private effort of free information.
There are no cookies, no advertisements, and nothing for sale.
Alert! All this content is moving to my new site: http://neilrieck.net/
Historically, Earth's natural CO2 levels
oscillate between 180 and 280 ppm
oscillate between 180 and 280 ppm
Down
on the turkey farm, the Scottish and Irish birds noticed that
the smiling man in the festive costume was holding a hatchet
behind his back, and hid. The Welsh turkeys looked confused and
huddled together squawking. But the English turkeys marched
bravely up to the chopping block, confident that this would be a
Christmas to remember. Boris Johnson's big victory in Thursday's
'Brexit' election was achieved almost entirely with English
votes. Only 20 of the 364 seats won by the Conservative Party
were in the other three 'nations' of the United Kingdom. The
United Kingdom will continue to be called that for several
years, but this election has actually sounded its death knell.
It was the votes of English nationalists that gave Johnson his
victory, and they don't really care if the UK survives. Just as
well, because it won't. The English have been nationalists for
around five centuries, but they were also content to share a
broader 'British' identity so long as it gave them bragging
rights on the world's biggest empire. Once that was gone, a
specifically English nationalism was bound to resurface
eventually. The resurgence of nationalism in Scotland and Wales
was also inevitable, and in Northern Ireland it had never gone
away. All those nationalisms largely defined themselves by
challenging the domination of the English majority (83 per cent)
in the UK, but English nationalists obviously needed a bigger
opponent to push against. They found it, inevitably, in the
European Union. Three-fifths of Conservative Party members now
believe that the breakup of the UK would be an acceptable price
to pay for leaving the EU. A smaller majority would even accept
the demise of their own party if that were the price of leaving.
(The pollsters neglected to ask them if they were willing to
sacrifice their first-born sons, but presumably their answer
would have been the same.) This unhinged English nationalism
will hasten the departure of Scotland from the UK. Scotland will
leave to get away from the English crazies and to stay in the
EU, its path to the latter goal made easier because in 2017
Spain withdrew its long-standing threat to veto Scottish
membership of the EU. A second and successful Scottish
independence referendum is probably only two years away. This
election also revealed a majority for 'Remain' in Northern
Ireland, and the shortest route to that goal would be via union
with the Republic of Ireland (which remains an EU member). That
risks reigniting 'The Troubles' that ended 20 years ago, but the
Protestant loyalists have been betrayed and abandoned by Boris
Johnson, so it might work. All the options are now dangerous,
and this one not necessarily more so than others. And what about
England's future? It will formally leave the EU by the end of
January, but this is just the start of Brexit Part II, the
negotiation of a trade agreement with the EU. That would
normally take many years, but Boris Johnson swears that he will
end the negotiation with or without a trade deal by the end of
2020. Maybe he's bluffing again: he didn't die in a ditch the
last time he promised to do so if he didn't get a deal in time.
Besides, crashing out without a deal would be catastrophic for
the British economy: half of all UK trade is with the EU. So
many people think Johnson will make another sweetheart deal with
the EU to save his skin, just like he did last October. Not
necessarily. Johnson pretends to be an amiable, scatterbrained
clown, but he is actually a highly skilled political operator
with close ties to hard-right British and American ideologues
like Donald Trump. If he really shares their goal of opening the
British economy up for asset-stripping, then crashing out is a
way to achieve that goal. On the other hand, Johnson is a man
without fixed principles or ideology. His sole goal is the
acquisition and retention of personal power, and that might
require him to pay attention to the interests of the
disillusioned former Labour voters who gave him this victory. He
may not dismantle the British welfare state as far and as fast
as his backers expect.
Children
born now could live to see the oceans rise well over 1 m (3.2 ft)
by 2100. Even conservative forecasts of sea level by 2100 are now
rising above the meter mark for high emission scenarios. The last
report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2013
concluded that sea level could rise 
In
1873, while investigating infrared radiation and the element thallium,
the eminent Victorian experimenter Sir William Crookes developed
a special kind of
'Eagle
Lander 3d' Activities
Apple-2
Forever
Humanity's coming
