Polar Collapse

Global Warming Accelerates

Enormous Ice Sheets Disintegrating

Collapse of the Larsen B Ice Shelf (above)

Arctic Ice In Serious Decline, April 2008

Alarming new data showing the extent of Arctic comes from the Canadian coast guard.

The long 4,400 mile coast of Ellesmere Island in Canada's Arctic, which in 1900 was completely ringed with ice, now claims merely five remaining shelves. Among these the largest, the Ward Ice Shelf shows signs of immanent break-up as deep fissures many miles in length grow at an alarming rate. These notable Arctic changes are of course augmented by the better known Antarctic shifts which were fully covered by Historacle in 2002.

Larsen B Ice Shelf Collapses, February 2002 (reprinted).
Is global catastrophy just around the corner? Alarming, recent satellite imagery shows the collapse of a gigantiic Antarctic ice shelf, the largest such event of last 30 years. The shattered ice has formed a plume of thousands of icebergs adrift in the Weddell Sea, east of the Antarctic Peninsula. Nearly 1,250 square miles, of shelf area has collapsed during February of this year. Over the last five years, the four hundred year old Larsen B shelf has lost a total of 2,200 square miles; but 40% of its traditional area remains.
Scientists are now forced to reasses the stablity of Antarctic ice. Supported by glaciologists, climatologists confirm that we are closer to the limit than we thought" Experts attribute the retreats to strong regional climate warming. Antarctic temperatures have increased about 2.5 degrees Celsius since the late 1940s. Since 1974 ice shelf extent in the Antarctic Peninsula has declined by 5,200 square miles.
Once melt water appears on the surface of ice shelves, the rate of ice disintegration increases. Regions of the giant "Ross Ice Shelf are just a few degrees celsius away
from being overtaken by the same processes that have destroyed the Larsen." Like ice cubes in a glass, once the first signs of visible melting appears, melting then cascades at an ever accelerating pace. The loss of the West Antarctic ice sheet alone would yield an immediate 20 foot rise in sea level.
While the breakup of peninsular ice shelves has limited, direct consequence for sea-level rise; it is a harbinger of a broader meltdown of worldwide alpine and continental glaciers as well as Antarctica continent itself. The melting of polar ice caps would account for an over 200 foot rise in sea levels submerging most of the world's largest cities. The attendant global warming and climatic changes will see the spread of deserts take over the temperate zones, eliminating most agricultural regions of the world.
The scenario is now commonplace. Fresh water will fall into critical short supply. Competition for habitable land will become intense. While their citzens within them compete for depleted resources, nations will increasingly resort to warfare to secure their survival. Civilization as we know it will be ground to its knees. The very existence of the human race, as well as the ecosystem itself, will be in jeaporady.
Lest we be complacent, prehistory confronts us with many mass extinctions in the past. The collapse of the Larsen ice shelf suggests a broad catastrophy is imminent. It is not too late to avoid demise. Our formal understanding and technology are capable. As we have seen consumptive lifestyle, comfortable old habits and myths about necessity of sustaining high economic growth rates all die hard. Will society accept the challenge before it is too late or will we, by default, choose to join the dinosaur and the mastadon.
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Last Global Warming Created Our World Will This One Destroy It?
Those who discount the significance of global warming tend to be bound to corporate interest. They lag the public in support of action. U.S. government resistance to the Kyoto Accords for example is a case in point. The last great global warming occurred during the Late Pleistocene between about 15,000 and 10,000 years ago. Then as now, the climate and biosystem were changing rapidly. Temperatures were rising; seasonal differences, increasing; rain- fall patterns, shifting and glaciers, melting. Climate changes caused fundamental changes in the Earth's ecosystems. Plants and animals were moved out of areas they had lived in and into new areas. Across the world the same pattern of species shifting northward forcing many species to extirpation is fully evident today. The World Wildlife Federation confirms animal and plant extinctions are occurring at alarming rates. The transformation in the Late Pleistocene was immeasurable. Like the obvious signs represented by the collapse of Antarctic Ice Shelves; glaciers retreated and many species like the Mammoth, Mastadon, Sabre- Tooth Tiger slid into oblivion. The more temperate climates which emerged set the stage for agriculture across Asia, Europe, and North America. With a burgeoning pop- ulation, Civilization and the world as we have come to know it, blossom- ed from about 3,000 B.C. onward. Will the global warming we face today be so kind to mankind? Not likely, for it stands upon the previous warmings making the inhabited areas of the world just too hot and dry to sustain the enormous human population of the earth today.
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EXTINCTION And The Laws of Nature

Simonodon
SabreToothed Tiger
While we are prone to think of the extinction of the mighty dinosaurs caused by the accidental impact of a collosal asteroid as an exceptionalevent history shows that it was not. Ninety-seven percent of all species which have ever lived are extinct today. Fossil Mammoth As powerful and well adapted as they were neither the sabre tooth tiger nor the mastodon could avoid extinction during the last global warming in the


Late Pleistocene, between 15,000 and 10,000 years ago when faced with drastic environmental change. As the fossil record and the ruins of ancient civilizations attest, "Extinction", far from being an exception in history is the rule in history and the law of science.

. Athabaska Glacier

Guantanamo

"When in the course of human events a state sets itself above the law ...a decent respect for the opinions of mankind requires," that good men act. .


Haunted by the words of its own Declaration of Independence, the United States proceeds on a shameful course of action. As the twenteth century has drawn to a close and the twenty first begun, freed from the constraints of Cold War detente, the United States stands as an unrivaled super power. Increasingly, its actions have contravened the very

Guantanamo POW Campfinest moral and ethical canons of human experience. International law, the Geneva Conventions and the spirit (at least) of the United Nations are among the highest expressions of 5,000 years of civilization. If not perfect they still remain among the noblest achievements of mankind, grander than the pyramids, the great wall of China, symphonic music, the harnessing of the atom or the unravelling of the genetic code. While self evident, it is because of the difficulty of achievement that the democratic rule of law with its inherent wisdom represents the very essence of civilization and the epitome of human spiritual development. Yet in the face of a limited threat, the United States and its unwittiing followers have scurriously turned their backs on the rule of law and international human rights.
The lessons of Nuhrmeburg have been forgotten: The violation of the Geneva Conventions over prisoners of war denied numerous basic rights at the Guantanamo Bay concentration camp. The unecessary massacre of several hundred Taliban prisoners in the Qala-e-Jhangi fort, near the Afghan city of Mazar-e-Sharif. Only 82 emerged from a basement after American's opted for bombing to quell the uprising. The morality of a super-power conducting warfare against comparatively unarmed opponents as we have witnessed not only in Afghanistan but also Iraq and Yugoslavia, while incuring negligible (virtually zero) casualties while slaughtering hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians --"collateral damage" in American terms. These developments point to a the demise of American values.

Draconian Laws

Draconian Laws Threaten Fr (Originally published in October 2001)

Western nations have embarked on dangerous Draconian proscriptions of civil and human rights following the disasters of September 11th. Regretably, anti-terrorist legislation may pose a greater threat to freedom throughout the world than the terrorist threat itself.
We need to learn from a long history of over- reaction and protect our hard won freedoms and the democracy that is the bedrock of our culture.
DRACONIAN LEGISLATION PROSCRIBES FREEDOM
Britain, the European Union, Canada and the United States among many others have embarked on ill-considered, Draconian proscriptions of civil and even human rights

Security Chief Tom Ridge

following the disastrous attack on the World Trade Center in New York. Horrified and traumatized by the graphic immediacy of the tragedy, society and its leaders have been stampeded to overreaction. Anti-terrorist legislation in the west now imperils freedom throughout the world.
Governments have struggled with omnibus legislation that goes much too far. Recent erosions include such provsions as:

Suspending the right to Habeus Corpus allowing the arrest and detention of suspects without recourse to the due process of law.
Circumventing procedure and rules of evidence in the trial process to expedite the prosecution of accused terrorists.
Providing special powers to national security and police agencies.
Creating special security policing agencies like the U.S. National Homeland Security Agency.
Erroding privacy rights to enable unfettered surveillance of the public electronic and otherwise.
Requiring individuals to divulge information before a court.
Easing the classification of information (including court proceedings) kept secret in the information of national security.
Creating new offences targeting unlawful disclosure of such information.
Limiting freedom of speech by criminalizing comment deemed propagandistic in cases of purported hate communication. Limited to the fight against bonafide Islamic terrorists these far reaching Consititutional retreats seem acceptable compromises. As history has consistently shown however, mere compromises, they are not. It is our shameful history that constitutions are violated as national crises arise. Indeed, in the twentieth century democracy has known perpetual crisis. Each has spawned its own proscription of rights: The Red Scare and anti-unionism, WWI and civil rights, the Depression and anti-socialism, WWII and Japanese incarceration, The Cold War and McCarthyism. Now in the twenty first century, in the name of protecting the public, freedom is once again sacrificed on the altar of public order. All of this in response to threats and a limited force of men armed with box-cutters no less; hardly tantamount to the nuclear arsenal of the USSR during the Cold War, nor the threat posed by fully militarized states of Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan during the last great war.
Despite alarms sounded by academia, legal bar associatons, civil rights groups and minorities we are assured by public authority that those who have done no wrong need not fear that these misappropriated powers will not be used against them. The record of the past assures us of precisely the opposite.
While clearly a strong response was required; the war on terrorists has targeted the rights of all people to an unwarranted degree. That this is true in the U.S. where an actual attack occurred is not surprising. That it is also true among so many countries untouched by attack, is a measure of how civil authority has reasserted itself for reasons which have little to do with the current terrorist threat. Hiding behind the smoke-screen of the Islamic terrorist issue is a wholesale retreat by frightened “governors” into the comfortable bunkers of the most insidious conservative ideology. Historically, it is of the kind that resulted in the incarceration of Ukranian’s in Canada during the WWI. While it was thoroughly established that Ukranians posed no threat to security, Sir Arthur Meighen (later Canadian Prime Minister) and Sir Hugh Macdonald (Minister of the Interior) discussed “getting rid of undesireable aliens” and the desire to "make an example" of them in a manner that would make it clear to all, that the authorities intended to maintain law and order.
In their haste, legislators have rushed forward sweeping aside hallowed democratic safeguards, running the danger of creating a police state to cope with an entirely manageable threat. The genie is now out of the bottle and will be difficult to contain. The temptation to use such powers to settle the Irish question in the U.K., anarchists in France, Palestinian insurrection in the Middle East, Kurdish nationalism in Turkey, native protest in North America or other legitimate but disfavoured political causes such as labour unionism, environmentalism or anti-globalizationism will not be resisted in the years ahead.
Indeed, Western anti-terrorist legislation sadly poses a greater threat to freedom throughout the world than the terrorist threat itself. Far from safeguarding freedoms, over-reaction sets the cause of justice back years. If their goal was to precipitate fear and escalate Western interference in the Islamic world, as it seems to have been, the terrorists have won the battle, literally, without firing a shot.
What we need of course is to learn from our hard won history. We require a tempered approach, one where: patience replaces haste; calmness, confusion; and reason, expediency. Above all, we need to protect, more than ever, those cardinal values of freedom and democracy which define who we are.

Those who forget the failures of history are doomed to repeat them. -Jose Ortega y Gasset

Quotable Quote:

"For history is to a nation as memory is to the individual. Individuals deprived of memory are disoriented and lost, not knowing where they have been or where they are going.
. Persistence of Memory Salvador Dali
So too a nation, denied a conception of its past will be disabled in dealing with its future." . -Arthur Schlesinger

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Internment of Ukranian's In Canada


Under Guard Banff, Alberta
Unpleasant Reminder of Other Concentraton Camps

Ukranian Internment in Canada . The illegal mistreatment of Afghan soldiers at Guantanamo Bay reminds the world of Japanese internment durng World War II. Less well known is the Ukranian incarceration of the FirstWorld War era. In 1914 some 80,000, mostly Ukranian Canadians, stigmatized as "enemy aliens" fell under the scrutiny of the War Measures Act. Some 8,579 including women and children were shamefully imprisoned in 26 concentration camps. Men were faced with hard labour in the unforgiving Canadian north. Those who attempted escape were shot for their efforts.

Without constitutional protection a simple cabinet order (Order In Council) was all that was required to ruin the lives of Galacian immigrants, whose only crime was to have sought freedom and prosperity in Canada in place of the Austro-Hungarian tyranny they had fled in Europe.


Spirit Lake Concentration Camp, B.C.

Galileo Modern Hero

Beacon in Troubled Times During the challenging times of today we especially need to lean on the heroic "symbols of the past. In the United States and Britain in particular we see a rapid retreat from hard won values by a public easily herded by politicians seizing "terrorism" as a political opportunity and a media concentrated in the hands of a few wealthy actors. Critics of the attacks on freedoms are shamelessly branded as "appeasers", and likened to Chamberlin, Clemenceau and others, who, pursuing policies of expediency and self-interest, foolishly tried to appease Hitler in the 1930's. When misapplied to defenders of civil and human rights today this comparison conspires to silence those, like Galileo, whom we most need to hear from.
Nothing could be more of a distortion than such cheap attempts to silence democratic dissent. A more appropriate analogy would be to see today's advocates of civil rights, due process and democracy as the few who opposed Hitler and his Brownshirts as they marched into the Bundestag in 1933; all with the permission of a German public which was stampeded into accepting an expedient answer to the much milder threats of violence and socialism.
Indeed, in these precipitious times of retrenchment we must guard against the attack on freedom and do well to turn to champions of freedom of thought and expression. As Western societies continue to stuggle to find a satisfactory response to the September attack on the American targets we need to be guided more by the Galileo's, Socrates' and Jefferson's and less by the confused war hawks of our times. Throughout the conflict western response has been largely misguided, mistakiing symptoms for causes. The most serious casualty has been the proscription of democratic freedoms cited previously in Historacle. As always, in addition to strong arguments, powerful symbols are needed to communicate truth effectively. Let us not be too shy to lean on Galileo for his commitment to free inquiry and expression, his fierce independence and confidence which supported a healthy sckepicism of authoritarianism.

Galileo and the Scientific Revolution

The Scientific Revolution which began in the Renaissance and culminated with Newton's synthesis in 1685, would transform the world as only a handful of other hist- orical developments. Of course this new way of looking at & understanding the world has been ongoing ever since.
It has transformed the world: secularizing it, erradicating much disease, mechanizing labour, making slavery obsolete, freeing human thought and expression, liberating women, drastically altering ecology, extending human life span and even threatening the continued survival of life on the planet.
Galileo Galilei, the intellectual martyr, was of course the quintessential pioneer of . His confrontation with the authority of the state and church. his cultivation of scientific methodology, his Renaissance Platonism and imagination, and ultimately, the battery of proofs of Copernicanism and disproofs of Geocentrism which caused the implosion of the hide bound views of authority.
Fulfilling Archimedes dictum, "Give me a place to stand and I can move the Earth"; Galileo shook the earth as no other individual, giving it a place to stand -on the broad back of science and free inquiry.

RETHINKING GALILEO
Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), rightly honoured as a champion of freedom of thought and expression has long been cast as the father of modern science. His actions and ideas are erroneously purported to be those of a replete modern scientist. He was not. This widespread but distorted positivist view exploits Galileo's achievements to serve the econcomic interests of industrial science. . The Thinker, Auguste Rodin.

By ignoring evidence, overstating .... , oversimplifying motives, and mistaking effects for causes positivist historians of science trumpet Galileo a complete modern scientist in 1600. He was not.
He was indeed an early "scientist", still in the mold of a natural philosopher. It would be more exact to say he was a true Renaissance Humanist one with a keen interest in philosophical critique, inquiry and --together with his broad interests-- in science as a tool in reforming natural philosophy.____________________________The Thinker, Rodin

For the complete account examine the upcoming definitive work
Galileo's Musical Background and the Scientific Revolution: Key to a Renaissance Platonist by Frank Anderson.

On Historacle

HISTORIC LAUNCH!
Historacle proudly announces the inauguration of the new HISTORACLE Blog. Historacle presents a virtual lens on history, its study and appreciation; as well as offering illuminating discusson on public policy. Just as the end validation of history has always been the analysis of the past, its use in understanding the present and vitality for more wisely shaping of the future; Historacle adopts the "Janus- headed" view: that of staying rooted in the lessons of history while scanning the horizon of the the future; yet always, with one sobering eye upon the past. Hence our symbolic choice of name and symbol: the twin headed Janus, looking both forward and aft, together with the far-seeing Oracle (of Delphi, if we be permitted the conceit); toward the noble end of making the world a better place.
That there is no substitute for history ought to be unquestioned. Unfortunately, ours is an age too easily seduced by appearances, the new and the lucrative; thus the need for this and other organs like it. No substitute? Certainly not those conventional men of "vision", so commonplace today, that spawn such shortsightedness in government policy and corporate action; who further conspire to manipulate public opinion so effectively. Accordingly, we encourage others to be mindful of the long historical view in reviewing their performance and in charting suitable programs for our collective wellbeing.
The Historacle team welcomes the challenge and bids the reader to hold "steady into the wind" in the pursuit of these worthy goals. Please check back for historical analysis of events and to use the growing list of services we offer.