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“Terra” Painting TERRA – our Planet, the Earth - is under acute threat from Climate Criminals threatening the Third World with Climate Genocide and the Biosphere with Terracide (the killing of our Planet). Words are failing to persuade people to act urgently to save the Planet in a Bush-ite Western world in a morass of Mainstream media lying and spin. As one alternative approach to convince people to act I have painted a huge painting (1.3 x 2.9 meters) called “Terra” that attempts to show the beauty of the Earth and its uniqueness in the solar system and, maybe, the Universe. If one assumes that the Probability (P) of life arising de novo on a planet like the Earth (Terra) is 1.0 (i.e. 100%, a dead cert) then there will certainly be Life elsewhere in the Universe. However at present Life on Earth is an example of what is called a Singularity in Science – it is the ONLY Planet we presently know of that carries Life. Accordingly decent, sensible people regard Life and Terra as Singular and Precious. However the very process of Darwinian Natural Selection (Evolution) that gave rise to Man’s Intelligence and his ability to predict and manage Risk has also given rise to greed. Man has evolved to maximize comfort and survivability but, as illustrated by Western profligacy and the lives of the Rich and Famous, Man just doesn’t know where to stop. Further, while Altruism has been hard-wired into humans (through natural selection of DNA-based genes), such love of one’s fellow man is largely confined in practice to one’s immediate family. Thus one can readily see how Altruism towards one’s family members would favor survival to breed and pass on the genes concerned (see Richard Dawkins’ seminal book “The Selfish Gene”). However there is no strong mechanism favoring natural selection of Altruism for people in the next valley – people who are competing with your tribe for food and resources. Indeed one reads of horrendous atrocities committed by our social Great Ape cousins the Chimpanzees (genus Pan) – young males will patrol the boundaries of their territory and if they encounter a non-tribe chimpanzee will rip off his arms and legs and leave him to die in screaming agony. This weakness in our hard-wiring (genes) can of course be overcome by what Richard Dawkins called “memes”, ideas that are selected for socially and passed on by word of mouth, by learned behaviour and in writing. Thus decent people around the world came to a general realization in the 20th century that racism was wrong and acted to stop the vile manifestations of this pathology e.g. colonialism, imperialism, genocide and racial discrimination (as in Apartheid South Africa and America). This morality was impelled by the writings of great humanitarians and perhaps the most powerful single sentences were “love thy neighbour” (Jesus) and Thomas Jefferson’s powerful “meme” in the American Declaration of Independence: “All men are created equal and have an inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”. Unfortunately this outpouring of human decency hasn’t lasted very long. Thus Racist Zionism has exploited world sympathy over the Jewish Holocaust and has grossly perverted Western values in relation to racism, colonialism, imperialism and ethnic cleansing – Racist Zionist propaganda has been extraordinarily successful in persuading Mainstream media to variously ignore, accept and support the continuing Racist Zionist crimes in Apartheid Israel (3.8 million Palestinians still imprisoned in what Jewish South African Minister for Intelligence Ronnie Kasrils has described as “a hermetically sealed prison” and “worse than Apartheid” ). Indeed Western ignoring of Racist Zionist atrocities has enabled the same “politically correct racist” (PC racist) ignoring of US atrocities in Iraq and Afghanistan – the post-invasion excess deaths (avoidable deaths, deaths that did to have to happen) in the Occupied Palestinian, Iraqi and Afghan Territories now total (as of March 2007) 0.3 million, 1.0 million and 2.4 million , respectively (see MWC News and also here). However it gets worse. Global warming driven by greenhouse gas pollution (but ultimately by greed, racism and lying) is killing our Planet. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued its Fourth Assessment Report in 2007 which painted a devastating picture of the consequences within the century of failing to act NOW – carbon dioxide concentrations in catastrophic excess of 500 ppm (the level at which there is devastating damage to the critical ocean phytoplankton system and the Greenland ice sheet totally melts; see James Lovelock, “The Revenge of Gaia”), temperature increases of up 4 degrees Centigrade and sea level rises of up to 0.6 metres with a devastating impact on agriculture, flooding of global deltaic regions and an acute threat to the very life of billions of people (see: here ). A recent, very detailed scientific paper published by top a US climate change expert Dr James Hansen and colleagues in the prestigious Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society (see: here) states that the IPCC predictions are under-stated. As stated by former World Bank Chief Economist Nicholas Stern (and echoed by his predecessor and 2001 Economics Nobel Laureate Professor Joseph Stiglitz), we CAN save the Planet if we act NOW and that it will be vastly cheaper for us to do it urgently. A recent expert Chinese-German review to be published in 2007 in the Annual Review of Environment and Resources states this of achivabilty: “By 2020, many targets and scenarios show 20-35% share of electricity from renewables, increasing to 50-80% by 2050 under the highest scenarios”. The real cost of coal-based electricity (i.e. taking into account its negative impact on the environment and humanity) is about 4 times higher than the current price. At this corrected pricing, appropriately scaled, located and employed exsiting technologies for wind, solar, geothermal, biomass and wave energy are cheaper than coal-based electricity (the nuclear option beloved of power-obsessed Bush-ites is about 3 times more expensive than coal-based electricity and the full nuclear cycle involves major greenhouse gas pollution). However rational approaches to save the Planet are resolutely opposed by racist, greedy Bush America (the world’s worst greenhouse gas polluter) and Bush-ite Australia (the world’s big country with the worst annual per capita greenhouse gas pollution and the world’s biggest coal exporter). Thus “annual per capita fossil fuel-derived CO2 pollution” in tonnes CO2/person is 19.2 (for Australia; 40 if you include Australia’s coal exports), 19.7 (the US), 18.4 (Canada), 4.3 (the World (4.2), 3.6 (China), 1.0 ( India) and 0.25 (for Bangladesh). Neither Bush America nor Bush-ite Australia will sign Kyoto nor cut greenhouse gas pollution – the countries facing devastation from global warming are the below-World-average polluting countries of China, India and Bangladesh. In a 2007 address Dr John Holdren, president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), identified the 3 major acute risks facing humanity as nuclear weapons, global warming and poverty. Dealing with risk involves Rational Risk Management that successively involves (a) accurate data (b) scientific analysis and (c) systemic change to minimize risk. The Bush-ites of the Western world, including Australia, regularly pervert this process by (a) lying and censorship, (b) anti-science spin and (c) counterproductive blaming and shaming of suitable victims without sensible systemic change. Indeed in my detailed book “Body Count” (G.M. Polya, Melbourne, 2007) I blame a deadly quartet of violence, deprivation, disease and LYING for the current global avoidable mortality holocaust associated with 16 million avoidable deaths annually (see “Body Count. Global avoidable mortality since 1950”). Science, technology, economics and reason can save the Planet – but reason is being defied by the lying of corrupt, greedy, racist, Bush-ite Climate Criminals on a path that will see horrendous Climate Genocide and indeed Terracide in relation to the biosphere. Silence kills and silence is complicity. We are obliged to protect our children and our grandchildren by countering the Bush-ite lying. If you agree with this message and share the love of our unique Planet that I have tried to convey in my painting “Terra” then spread the message and send this article and the “Terra” image to everyone you know.
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 Dr Gideon Polya, MWC News Chief political editor, published some 130 works in a 4 decade scientific career, most recently a huge pharmacological reference text "Biochemical Targets of Plant Bioactive Compounds" (CRC Press/Taylor & Francis, New York & London, 2003), and is currently writing a book on global mortality ---
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