Climate Change

Ernie,
Have fun planting. Looks like rain is on the way. I dont see the large scale death and starvation Rick envisions. The earth is too big and variable to have crop failure everywhere at once.

John

John,

I agree exactly, and i think temperatures will continue to fluctuate as it has in the past. Lots of things may happen, even the Magnetic poles shifting again, but worrying about it does not help, and bankrupting the country to forestall one potential disaster does not guarantee other catastrophes will not happen. That is why i have been debating him on it, but he sincerely believes it.

It is very humid this morning, already, so I hope this rain forecast is true.

Ernie

Rain? What is rain?

Tears of the gods. Down here, the gods cry a lot!

Rain is hard to describe, but if you do not believe in God, it also resembles the Tears of a good Liberal crying about Coal mines killing the Earth.

But now, we have another reason to worry. I have never supported bankrupting our economy to slow down the temperature fluctuations, because of the comparable danger of Earth being struck by another Dinosaur killing Asteroid.

This morning on TV, as they were discussing the recent unexpected asteroid that struck the moon, the Scientist said that while they previously thought they knew where most of the Asteroids are, they have recently discovered there may be ten times as many of them flying around as previously believed.

So today we are in ten times as much danger of being struck by an Asteroid as we were a month ago. Earth is becoming more dangerous every year, and we will be very lucky to ever get out of here alive.

Ernie

Funny, Ernie

Ken

Hey ya Ernie; Nobody ever gets past here (this planet called Earth) Alive ..

Don't forget; Extra terrestrial invasion , the Yellowstone Caldera , California sliding into (or under the ocean) because of the great pacific ring Volcanic faults ,(the most likely). or the New Madrid fault breaking the continent in half , flooding the western half of the continent , during plant flip or tumble , while North America , takes the Place of South America ..
Does that mean business should no longer be allowed at Yellowstone area Lets all introduce a Bill .. California should unpopulated , and the fault ring makes all the Harbors Unsafe for commerce ,, lets introduce a Bill
About being silly , Lets introduce a Bill.

You all know who is paying for this .. in the end ,, and the outcome , don't you ..
I think I get the Economic re-verb ,, pew this is B-A-D

Global Warming ,, caused it all to happen previously though , you know it to be true also don't you , lol
Had to edit ,, Ernie ,, I will bet that makes you feel really safe , doesn't it ? lol


This message was edited Feb 26, 2014 6:03 PM

I think maybe we are all like the blind men trying to describe an elephant. One had the tail and said the elephant was a long leathery thing with hair on one end. One was feeling of the leg and said that an elephant is like a tree with rough bark. One said the elephant was a wide thin flat thing possibly used to fly. Someone earlier mentioned how impossible it is now to know everything. Many professions are realizing this weakness and promoting more communication and collaboration in order to get better solutions to problems. I think we all know a little bit and none of us know the whole picture. A college student remarked to me once that each piece of information we get, just helps us have another piece of the puzzle adding to our "whole" picture. It is very difficult or impossible for any one of us to have the whole picture. I think that makes it very hard for us to dicuss these things.

Steady ; One true seriousness , this entire thread ,
Climate does change , Everything here can be replied to with
UNPREDICTABLE !!!
I believe you said that as have a few others ,
Agreed ,?

Ernie,

Thanks for mentioning the Moon-hitting asteroid! I used to be pretty worried about "Near Earth Objects" but I thought that SkyWatch was well on its way to spotting most of the biggies.

"NO" you say? "They didn't even see the recent one coming until after it hit"? Now I can go back to worrying about another dinosaur-killer. At least that won;'t be our own fault if it happens. And the odds are pretty clearly against it, whereas we just don't know about the effect of all this CO2.

- - -

Thanks for making the points about serious malnutrition decreasing general health, even to the point of suppressing the ability to reproduce. I had forgotten that, and I'm certain you are right about how it works in deer herds and even farming.

I tended (incorrectly) to lump that together in my mind with "famine" and "starving to death". You are right, they are different. I should have been saying all along, not "starving to death", but "starving, becoming malnourished, having much worse or slightly worse health due to malnutrition, and becoming unable to conceive or bear a child to term due to malnutrition or starvation".

Those are ALL bad things in my mind, things that we should seek to avoid as far as possible as matters of public policy.

I'm not sure whether "ribs sticking out" and "increased childhood deaths through weakness and illness" occur before or after reproductive rate suppression as food supply shrinks gradually.

I do lump those together in my mind as valid reasons for trying to reverse (or prevent, if melting glaciers, sea level rise and sea surface warning are not convincing that we are already doing it to ourselves) human-caused unprecedented climate change.

I mostly stand by my doubt that famine-induced reproductive suppression in humans would act fast enough to change the outcome during rapid climate change. If the die-off would have occurred over 50 years or more, maybe SOME of the population decline would be from rail-thin mothers unable to conceive, instead of the expected mega-deaths.

>>>>"But i only think it would occur under very intense starvation over a very prolonged period."

>> Those are exactly the conditions Rick foresees and to which i was basing my comments on.

A little quibble: people being what they are, and countries, and politicians, I don't actually expect a lot of countries to starve to death peacefully and slowly.

First, they will attempt to migrate, demand diversion of water sources and relief shipments of grain, and blame developed countries for the climate change.

Then they'll find ways to stumble into big wars (if they have the weapons), or smaller wars with their neighbors, or seriously-state-sponsored, large-scale terrorism to enforce their demands related to wide-scale famines caused by CO2 emissions.

Remember that chemical weapons are cheap and ideal for terrorists, Biological weapons are ever-easier to make more dangerous. You can now buy genetic engineering toolkits for a few hundred dollars, and they work on plants, animals, humans and presumably human pathogens equally well. There is no regulatory expense related to releasing bio-weapons.

Or, if there is a large disparity in which developed regions suffer soonest from climate change, the worst-hurt major nations will want to put teeth and RAPID deadlines into treaties much more burdensome than the Kyoto Protocols. Suppose the USA had a huge dust bowl where we used to have wheat and corn and soybeans, but China wants to keep burning more and more coal?

I know this sounds like pulling another boogey-man out of the closet, and feel free to ignore it if you disagree. It might be more of my cynicism that many people (or governments) would rather fight than see everyone around them starve slowly or rapidly when "the indudtrialized world" is an easy and obvious scapegoat.


(P.S. I hope to write something soon along the lines of devil's-advocating my more alarmist speculations. That may reconcile our opinions enough that we don't need to debate issues like directly-starving-to-death vs. miscarriages and amenorrhea.)

(I would rather speculate about global bio-geo-chemical cycles, geoengineering, GMOs, and ways in which we might "get lucky" as a species if nature has a trick up her sleeve where the "tipping point" is actually something like a previously-unknown algae that appears out of nowhere and turns all the excess CO2 in the ocean and air into powdered diamonds. I wish!)

Steady, Maybe the most concise way to say what you said, which is somthing i agree with, is this: We each live in our own reallities, and what we take away frow whatever we see is truth to us.

But i think our expressing our different opinions and beleifs helps everyone learn new angles and insights whether anyone totally converts or not.

Juhur says it all with one word, Unpredictable, so all we have really been doing here is discussing all the different detailsof things that are unpredictable. Whichever Catastrophe gets here first will settle it, and no one knows when, or even if, any of them are ever going to happen.

But it has been a very good discussion, and i have enjoyed reading everyone's posts.

Ernie

Rick,

Maybe some of that previous chemical exposure did take a toll on you.

John

Well to all that , and before , I only understand one Scientific fact , (realizing no one was asking for my opinion , which this is not , it is fact )
The MOON is moving away from the Earth , causing gravity fluctuations , That control Everything !!!

I did read enough previously possibly , if any of you mentioned that , I miss things , still it is .
The Stromatolites Win !!! With Cycads , They were here when the Moon was the only visible object in the sky ,,

Rick

I did not see the full segment about the Asteroid striking the moon. I did see the title, and heard the Scientist say what i quoted but i missed the first part of the segment.

I read your post and generally concur, especially with the idea that when food becomes scarce or a country lacks enough resources they will try to take from weaker countries, But that has happened, and was the reason both Japan attacked China in the 1930s and that Hitler started WW2.

If you are proven right, it may well be even worse than you say, but Juhur is correct in that it is all Unpredictable.

Ernie

There are many so-called Sci -Fi answers to many questions that could be used .That are not ,
There is history of grain , being grown as crops near the great Pyramids ,
The lake was gone by that time , the description was documented ,
They probably used that 5th grade experiment from science class to grow water , Remember the water jar that would fill and then stop after say 72 hrs ,
If you put that in a dark place , that is warm, add a few gemstones , the water goes on replicating forever , There was a large temple , with large hollow squares for a mile or so with pillars ,that existed at that time , from that; reed and bamboo pipe traces have , only rarely , been found there ,
We can't drink the water that way (like replicating cave water )But plants and animals can ,
I have seen remnants in dry land Texas , where the same had been done ..
Starvation happens for many reasons , but lost ideas , and demand are prominent , While looking for more ways to grow food , (begins with water) and peace to do so ,
It's only a thought..

John said:
>> Oh Rick!, you mean Miley Cyrus!

>> Other than her name you got incorrect you seem to know a lot about her...even her songs lol

You got me. I plead guilty. After I saw part of her infamous "twerking" video I felt I had to do some research ... ummm ... in the interests of science!

(And feminists may well scold me for watching her "wrecking ball' video all the way through but not remembering her name afterwards. Either she, or I, or both of us objectified her.)

===================

Great Wall of Kansas ...
Tornado Tax ...
PETT ...

Hilarious.

But you are opening the door to "geoengineering" schemes with their own dedicated armies pro and con.

(And I have seen, in some of those debates, BS like "but even if it worked, you would just make it possible for people to continue driving big cars instead of curtailing their emissions and other things I don't want them to do!")

I did take some liberties with how they expressed their opposition.

Ernie said:

>> I assume, since you are a scientist too, you respect Charles Darwin, and the work he did, so the idea that every human, even the very weakest, should live forever goes completely against what he documented about the birds and animals that adapted to changes in their environment were the strongest and fittest.


I think Darwin described "survival of the fittest" and theorized on how that affected evolution, and also collected some evidence supporting his theory about how things work out in nature.

I don't know of any way to deduce "should", which is a moral or value judgment from scientific observation. Darwin did not, and could not have, "proved scientifically" that we "should" let poor people die unnecessarily, or proven any significant correlation between "fitness" and wealth or poverty.

People who made the mistake of abusing scientific theories to support perverse moral judgments came up with charming ideas like "Social Darwinism", where the poor "should" be allowed to die young, and "Master Race" eugenics schemes.

I like to keep science separate from that kind of justification for inhumane social engineering.

I also don’t want to read more into what you've said than you want to say - are you saying that allowing climate to change in ways that would cause widespread famine is "OK" or even "desirable" because you would expect "the weakest" to die off faster than "fit" people and that would be "a good thing"?

I assume you are not saying that, exactly, but I can't really comment on those paragraphs unless you clarify how you want to apply them to the climate change discussion.

But I will mention that it is not "the weak" or "the unfit" that will die first. It will be people in poor countries where the climate destroys the most crops the soonest.

Richer countries with early rapid climate change will just become less obese and spend a higher proportion of their wealth on food. The very poorest people in those countries will become more malnourished and perhaps revolt before they starve or become too weak to bear children.

Thus it won't be like Darwinism where "the most fit individuals tend to survive", it will be like Social Darwinism, where callous well-to-do people don't care how many poor people starve as long as they keep their comforts, privilege and power.

>> I agree as climate changes to either hotter or colder, there will be changes severe enough that not everyone will survive, but every one is going to die sooner or later anyway.

Again, I'm not sure what your intended line of argument is, but I would not agree with "it doesn't matter how many people are killed by XYZ because everyone dies sooner or later anyway".

That line of argument would support stopping all medical research, letting blind people drive airplanes, removing all regulations about pollution or product safety, storing nuclear waste on street corners and selling hydrogen bombs to terrorists "because everyone dies eventually anyway".

If climate change will reduce obesity maybe its not such a bad thing after all.

Rick,
I just wrote two full pages on Word, correcting your misunderstanding of what i wrote, clarifying, counterpointing etc., but i then decided to dump it,

You have a right to your fears, beliefs, and feelings just as i have a right to mine, and pinpointing the differences are not worth the risk of straining our friendship over something as unlikely to happen as what we are debating.

I look forward to more debates with you on down the road.

Highest regards,
Ernie

John.

If it really worked that way, it would be good for sure, but the Climate has been changeing all my life and i have been gaining weight all that time.

Ernie

Hi Ernie
I already assume you aren't indifferent to human suffering, and I'll focus on your not wanting to spend other peoples' money on risks that only some people believe are severe and probable.

And that most of what you meant is that "the species will survive no matter what", and that "people adapt to hard times" and "sometimes hard times cause death and hardship".

>> pinpointing the differences

Certainly you won't strain our friendship, and it is tough to convey exact tones and intentions in print when the burden of typing is already taking hours per day!

And the political aspect probably has less place in DG than the climate and crop yield aspects.

I wish you had saved it, though! Maybe for a private email discussion when we both have more time. I think that some of our most interesting discussions are where we disagree a lot (but not 180 degrees).

Part of what I hope to get on paper soon as part of my "on the other hand" or "devil's advocate" comments might be more interesting. Like, "how would THIS climate change scenario affect regional crop yields" and "if climate changed THIS slowly, could breeders and farmers adapt fast enough to mitigate the yield loss"?

Rick,


As i read and replied, it seemed that both of us were becoming contentious, we had covered most of that ground in other ways before, we neither one had anythiing real new, so i just did not feel good about sending it.

I will look forward to some of the other subjects you bring up.

Ernie.,

Smart!

I wish I had anything interesting to say about the carbon cycle diagrams, because they really are "where the rubber meets the road", even more than the (speculative, evolving) academic climate models.

It did give me a chill when is aw how much carbon is in our fragile soil, that I disrupt every time I stick a fork into the ground or double-dig a bed. And now I realize that I'm adding pounds of carbon to the air every time I buy compost or even aged manure for my beds.

And oceans! A 2% change in ocean CO2 is like a 100% change in atmospheric CO2. Maybe that's good, if we can coax the ocean into holding 2% more, without "unintended consequences".

Rick,

How about explaining to me and maybe others that do not know, just how they measure Carbon. it is a gas, but they manage someway to weigh it, and a ton of gas must be a huge volume, but i do not know that.
,?

When you said 2 billion tons were deposited in the ocean last year, did it sink, does it disolve and change its nature or does it remain a separate substance in the water?.'

That will quickly change the PH if it dissolves in significant amounts and salt water fish cannot tolerate much change in the water they get their oxygen from. So have there been fish kills from Carbon yet?

Ernie

You add CO2 to the atmosphere with every breath you take. The O2 comes from what you breathed in and the C comes from what you eat to make CO2. If we didnt eat...the food would naturally decay on its own and contribute the same amount of CO2 to the atmosphere anyways. So humans breathing doesn't add any net gain CO2 to the atmosphere since we are simply decaying what we eat and if we didn't eat it would decay on its own.

Whether you add manure and or compost or not it will decay eventually no matter where its placed. You are right each time we cultivate the soil we provide oxygen to microbes and organic matter decays more quickly which does add CO2 to the atmosphere. This is where no till farming can help to build soil organic matter percent content which sequesters carbon from the air.

One of the best ways to sequester CO2 is to harvest lumber and prevent the wood from decaying.

hugelkultur, to save the world! no, build log cabins to save the world! no, we are sequestering carbon in all the sanitary landfills.
and , if you improve your soil with organic matter, might you then cause MORE plant and soil microbe growth than would have before, thus increasing the carbon trapped there?

walls to keep tornados out sounds like levees to keep floods out, and we know how perfectly THAT system is working.

and how dare we suggest that we want our ocean CO2 to change by 2 percent, I'd be just as worried about effects of that as anything else we've brought up.
So let's stop worrying , just be happy, count your blessings instead of sheep. All of us can be said the be incredibly lucky that we can sit fat and sassy online and talk about all this.

Cheers, guys, I had nothing to contribute, just checking in!

The organic matter in the soil is constantly being consumed and broken down by microbes releasing CO2 into the air. When you cultivate this speeds this process up releasing even more CO2 quicker. Using no till methods and adding organic matter to the soil causes the organic percent of the soil to increase which for a time temporarily sequesters CO2.

Most virgin grassland soils in the Midwest had 5 to 10% organic matter contents. This was a constant amount of carbon as what was added each year as the grass died was similar to what was decomposed by the microbes.

Most Midwest soils have about 2 to 4% organic matter contents after 160 years of tilling. That means more than half of the organic matter has been lost by increased microbial activity due to tillage over that time. These microbes have contributed millions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere.

So the idea with no till farming is to restore higher percent organic matters to the soil. This will help lower atmospheric CO2 levels.

In places where no till farming has been used soil organic matter contents have increased dramatically. Also soil erosion has been reduced, better water percolation and water retention is observed and overall soil nutrients are more abundant.

The downsides of no till farming include a higher dependence on herbicides, difficulties planting into increased plant residues on the surface of the soil. Higher disease pressure due to all the decaying plant matter and higher insect pressures. ..insects can survive and overwinter well in all the surface compost. Soils are also slower to warm up and dry out in the spring which can delay planting. You also have weed shifts from annual weeds to perrenial weeds.

But even so in places like PA about 80% of the growers use no till practices.

One thing to note is that most organic production cant use no till methods as cultivation is the major way to control weeds. And in organic they cant accept higher disease or insect pressures.

Drobarr,

I have learned a lot from your clear, simple statements of fact. No matter how much we may know about some things, it is surprising how much we do not know about other matters.

Thanks,
Ernie

SURPRISING RESPONSE!!!!!
We are finally expecting a real storm here in CA, so i clicked on MSN Weather to get the full forecast.
There was a box on the screen about a Global Warming report today from National Academy of Science and Royal Society of U K. Stating the usual dire warnings about Greenhouse Gas.

I scrolled down to the comments, expecting to see a lot of agreement, since MSN is certainly not like Fox.
But there were nine comments posted, and all of them were from dis believers, with different levels of intensity.

I am sure the same information will be on the HOME page for MSN email.

Ernie

Do you mean that people actually watch MSN!?

Ken

That's because their worried the UK is about to be under water , The London , Thames river Gate Dam .. The past flooding possibly of the London Subways and London , (that sit below sea level )
Much more polar melt (ice sheet) and say goodbye to London and Miami .
This is not speculative , it has already started to happen ...
Going to be real close ,

Ken,

I do not watch MSNBC, The TV station, I am sorry i was not more clear. I have MSN email program and that is where i checked the weather forecast.

I assume MSN is liberal oriented since they partner with NBC.

I am middle of the road conservative, with a good dose of Libertarian mixed in.

Ernie

London isn't below sea level. Its at 79 feet. The Thames Valley is a flood plain surrounded by gently rolling hills including Parliament Hill, Addington Hills, and Primrose Hill. The Thames was once a much broader, shallower river with extensive marshlands; at high tide, its shores reached five times their present width.

The river has been altered with embankments and parts of it that go underground etc. Flooding has always been a common occurrence there and has nothing to do with climate change. It has to do with its geography and heavy rains. You build a city on a flood plain and marshland...its going to flood.

This message was edited Feb 28, 2014 8:31 AM

New Orleans is below sea level.

Ken

New Orleans is in trouble

"Not been too enjoyable a winter though - it's been the stormiest on record, with repeated hurricane-force winds, and the wettest on record too (in over 240 years of recording), particularly down south, where some areas have had 2½ times their average winter rainfall and apocalyptic flooding."

Read more: http://davesgarden.com/community/forums/t/1347827/#ixzz2udCKwKId

That is from a post from a resident of UK. Don't blame ice cap melt when you see current pix of flooding in UK.

This message was edited Feb 28, 2014 10:35 AM

They always have been. Ask those that went through Hurricane Katrina.

Ken

>> No matter how much we may know about some things, it is surprising how much we do not know about other matters.

I think that the more we learn about science or nature, the more we realize how MUCH more there is still to learn. We just move on to more interesting and more complicated questions.

Like climbing a mountain so that you can "see everything". You just realize that there is much more to see than you ever imagined.



>> just how they measure Carbon. it is a gas, but they manage someway to

I would guess that they measure CO2 in the air by passing light through a clean sample, and measuring how much was absorbed in certain wavelengths (like specific IR wavelengths) where CO2 absorbs but other things don't. They might have to measure several wavelengths to detect other gases that might obscure the CO2 absorption peaks, and then deduct those.

I doubt whether they would have to go to the expense and trouble of doing mass spectrometry, which is more like actually counting the molecules.

>> a ton of gas must be a huge volume,

Well, they would have to allow for the weight of air it displaces, but all the claulations are done "as if in a vacuum".

It's been a while since I took a chemistry class, but one "molar mass" or "mole" of CO2 would weigh 44.012 grams in vacuum. That comes from the atomic average atomic weights of Carbon (12.011) and Oxygen (16). (The "0.011" allows for trace amounts of Carbon isotopes C-13 and C-14).

A "mole" of anything is enough of it to contain "Avogadro's number" of molecules of it. That is 6.022 X 10 ^23 I THINK that is:
602,214,130,000,000,000,000,000 molecules.

(Totally coincidently, that is with 0.37% of 2^79. And I see that they've redefined it from the number of hydrogen atoms in a gram to the number of atoms of C-12 in 12 grams. I doubt if that changes the first 8 digits of it.)

I would try to take a whack at calculating the volume of one ton of CO2 at one atmosphere of pressure and room temperature, but I realized it is not an "ideal gas" so the equations would not work.

Hmm, density is 0.1150 pounds of mass per cubic foot at NTP (20'C, 1 atm=14.7 psia = 760 torr).
One ton is 2,000 pounds.
Maybe 17,391 cubic feet? = 644 cubic yards?

>> 2 billion tons were deposited in the ocean last year

It dissolves.

Some dissolved CO2 combines covalently with water into "carbonic acid" = H2CO3.
I say "covalently" because it is a real molecular change where CO2 and H20 combine into a new molecule with real covalent bonds (not just ionic ring-around-the-rosey temporary rearrangements).

CO2 + H2O - - > "H2CO3" (neutral carbonic acid)

But the ratio remains "mostly CO2" until some of the carbonic acid ionizes.
Some of the H2CO3 loses one "H+" and becomes the negatively charged bicarbonate ion HCO3-

"H2CO3" - - > HCO3- (bicarbonate ion) plus acidity (H+ or rather H3O+)

BTW, the "H+" that was lost combines ionically with another water molecule to become a "hydronium ion", fancy name for "acid". That's one source of ocean acidification.



A very little of the bicarbonate loses another "H+" and changes to double-negatively-charged carbonate (CO3--)
HCO3- (bicarbonate ion) - - > CO3-- plus acidity

The pH controls how much stays as neutral carbonic acid and how much become negatively charged bicarbonate or carbonate ions.

Higher acidity drives it to stay mostly as carbonic acid and CO2. Adding bases would pull more towards bicarbonate and carbonate.

Scroll half-way down to see the pH / ratios tradeoff.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbonic_acid#Chemical_equilibrium

Thanks for sending me down this route: I thought that netral carbonic acud was a tiny minority, and most CO2 became bicarbonate. NOPE!

So it doesn't all change to bicarbonate and ocean acid as I thought. It only raises the ocean's acidity enough to drive the ratio back in the direction of CO2. Wiki said "0.1 pH unit" so far, but that's a single source.

I would not think that 0.1 pH unit affects many fish, but allegedly coral bleaching may be caused by that. I don't know, your research is as good as mine. The Wikipedia article on ocean acidification expresses some alarm, but I don't know enough yet to evaluate their possible bias.

Wiki says elsewhere that surface ocean pH is now around 8.14 (a little basic), which must encourage more CO2 to convert to bicarbonate and release its acidity into the water. BTW, because pH is logarithmic, the change from 8.25 to 8.14 pH translates into an increase by 30% in the "H+" ion concentration (actually H30+ since you never see a naked proton in water: it is always bound to a water molecule. )

Another unexpected change is that adding CO2 increases the acidity so much that carbonate (CO3--) becomes LESS plentiful, making life more difficult for delicate corals.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_acidification

You might like this tidbit, although the "carbon" referred to here is METHANE , not CO2. (The Keeling curves we've seen on this thread don't go back 56 million years, I think they went back a few hundred thousand years).

" Ocean acidification has occurred previously in Earth's history. The most notable example is the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM),[14] which occurred approximately 56 million years ago. For reasons that are currently uncertain, massive amounts of carbon entered the ocean and atmosphere, and led to the dissolution of carbonate sediments in all ocean basins."

India, Jan. 15 -- Reddit, a popular linksharing website, has banned climate-change deniers from the forum.

Coming from a website which claims to be "passionately dedicated to free speech", the move has been described as nothing short of censorship. Reddit says the decision was taken to filter "uninformed and outspoken opinions" by "contrarians".

Now whenever such comments are posted, the user is issued a warning and repeat offenders are banned. Reddit says the results of the ban are encouraging as discussions are now measured and based on scientific works- in other words, conformist and uncontroversial.

Published by HT Syndication with permission from Down to Earth.

Source Citation (MLA 7th Edition)
"Silencing dissent." Down To Earth 15 Jan. 2014. Environmental Studies and Policy. Web. 8 Mar. 2014.

Sure smacks of censorship to me. I guess India, or at least Reddit, is not big on freedom of speech. Of course, we see much the same thing with our "main-stream" news agencies, whether it be TV, magazine, or newspaper. If the news doesn't meet their philosophical guidelines, they simply don't publish/produce it.

Ken