A new US-led study, featuring research by Tasmanian scientists, has concluded that warming ocean temperatures over the past 50 years are largely a man-made phenomenon.

Researchers from America, India, Japan and Australia say the study is the most comprehensive look at how the oceans have warmed.

The study, published today in the journal Nature Climate Change, examined a dozen different models used to project climate change, and compared them with observations of ocean warming over the past 50 years.

It found natural variations accounted for about 10 per cent of rising temperatures, but man-made greenhouse gases were the major cause.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-06-11/research-taps-into-ocean-temperatures/4063886

--------------------------

But the era of abundant cheap resources is drawing to an end, for reasons equally straightforward.

The global population currently stands at seven billion people, and is predicted to rise to more than nine billion by 2050 - that's roughly the population of the UK being added to the planet every year.

More importantly, there could be up to three billion new middle-class consumers, mainly in China and India, according to McKinsey. They will drive demand for meat, consumer goods and urban infrastructure, not to mention the energy needed to produce them, to levels unheard of in human history. For example, McKinsey expects the number of cars in the world to double by 2030.

And while demand for resources from an exploding and wealthier population soars, finding and extracting new sources of supply is becoming increasingly difficult and expensive.

For example, oil companies have to look further and drill deeper to find dwindling reserves of oil, meaning the cost of an average well has doubled in the past ten years, while new mining discoveries have been largely flat despite a fourfold increase in exploration costs.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-16391040

-----------------------------

“It really started with Silent Spring,” Dr. Gilbert Ross, medical director of the lobbying group the American Council on Science and Health, told me in 2010.  “Rachel Carson’s polemic – more of an epic poem than a scientific work.” When Ross, who has published pro-DDT articles in numerous outlets, was promoted to medical director of the organization in 1999, his medical license had been revoked on account of his former participation in a fraud scheme that relieved New York’s Medicaid program of roughly $8 million.  His license was reinstated in 2004. The group has received substantial funding from dozens of major corporations, including the American Cyanide Corporation, the chemical giants Du Pont and Union Carbide, Monsanto and the National Agricultural Chemicals Association.

Ross features as one of the experts interviewed in the documentary film, 3 Billion and Counting, which investigates the global consequences of the DDT ban, laying bare “the greatest ecological genocide in the known history of man.” Produced, written and directed by Dr. D. Rutledge Taylor, the film embarks on a “trek from R. Carson’s Silent Spring to the dead silence of millions of corpses and billions of suffering ones.” Rutledge describes his film as a depiction “of the greatest crime against humanity that this world has ever known. It is about the greatest human death toll in known history, far greater than the Holocaust and all wars combined.”

The centennial of Carson’s birth in 2007 summoned forth all manner of celebratory gestures.  Conferences were held to discuss her significance, proposals sought to name streets, college programs and even a bridge in her honor.  This latter gesture was stymied by Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK), who objected to naming a bridge after someone he describes as responsible for millions of unnecessary deaths.  Coburn had received substantial campaign contributions from a member of the board of the pro-DDT think tank, the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2012/06/11/50-years-on-and-the-ddt-debates-continue/

Britain has for the first time raised the spectre of al-Qaida operating in Syria, while at the same time accusing Damascus of brutally targeting specific communities and driving Syrians to take up arms.

The foreign secretary, William Hague, said regime forces were bombarding neighbourhoods then unleashing militia groups to murder civilians in their homes. He said more sanctions against the regime were likely if the UN-brokered peace plan continued to fail, and again appeared to leave open an option for some sort of intervention in the rapidly deteriorating situation in Syria.

Hague said security assessments had indicated the presence in Syria of al-Qaida, a group disavowed by the main opposition force, the Free Syria Army, but who regime officials insist are at the vanguard of a now raging insurgency.

"We … have reason to believe that terrorist groups affiliated to al-Qaida have committed attacks designed to exacerbate the violence, with serious implications for international security," said Hague in a speech to the Commons.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jun/11/al-qaida-syria-william-hague

EMMA ALBERICI: Now - so I guess we can sum it up by saying there are two sides of our thinking: system one and system two, as you describe them in your book. The fast and the slow or the intuitive and the deliberate. Which is more reliable when it comes to making the right decisions?

DANIEL KAHNEMAN: Well it really depends on the circumstances. When - in most routine situations system one, the fast, automatic system, does perfectly well. I mean, most of the time, you know, we do very well in life. Occasionally there are decisions that require more reflective thought and then you have to invoke the slow system, the system of slow thinking and it tends to do better.

EMMA ALBERICI: But when you talk about that second system, the slow system, that mode of thinking, you also describe as the lazy part of our mind. What do you mean by that?

DANIEL KAHNEMAN: Well what I mean is that in general it turns out that people don't like to work mentally. They don't like to put a lot of effort. And so we have a very strong tendency to do what comes naturally, to say what comes to mind. And much of the time actually our thoughts and our beliefs are derived from an automatic process in memory. And then we tend to - with slow thinking, with system two, we tend to generate arguments for conclusions that we already hold, for beliefs that we already have.

http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2012/s3522882.htm

-------------------------

I did not win a Nobel Prize but I more or less wrote the same thing more than 20 years ago... though to be fair, someone called Aristotle might have formulated the process back then in B.C.:

All human actions have one or more of these seven causes: chance, nature, compulsions, habit, reason, passion, desire.

Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/a/aristotle.html#SFlpgXLgdFpBfdvA.99

And we often refer to the "short term" and the "long term" in defining the purpose of our actions... Of which many of them are "knee-jerk reactions" or "reflexed" following a process of fast reactivity — most learned from pain and the elimination thereof... I have also mentioned before that by nature our brain is "lazy" or "reluctant" in accepting new things, especially when these new things conflict with our stack of already accepted beliefs...

to which Aristotle also adds:

Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.
Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/a/aristotle_2.html#xA7oEZyt1IDWCf0c.99