The prediction is that in approximately 2030, if nothing substantial changes, and human beings continue to consume more than nature was capable of providing, global economic collapse and population decline would be the likely result.

We’re seeing some of the foreshocks of this event. We’ve had limited economic collapse, and collapse of such things as housing markets, the banking crisis, crop failures from weather-related causes, famines in certain areas, and political upheaval in some areas. The thing is that we haven’t seen anything yet. The “worst” is certainly not behind us!

With this 2030 anticipated date when “it all falls apart”, it behoves people to think carefully about that. Perhaps we can slow it down by consuming less and using resources more intelligently, and put it off by a few years. At the current population and size of the global economy, it can only be changed or moved a little within the next 18 years. It appears too late to stave this off. This is the 7 billion-person sized elephant in the living room, which no one wants to touch.

Please read the article in Smithsonian Magazine, “Looking Back on the Limits of Growth”. The issue is discussed in depth in The Chile Forum.

The good news is that if you’re over about 50, you need not worry about your retirement. It flat-out is unlikely to exist at all, and no investment you could possibly make is likely to survive this. The bad news is if you are considering having children, please consider the ethics of putting another person into such a collapse, and denying them an adulthood, or ensuring them of a very difficult life if they do manage to survive this collapse. If you’re under 50 you are unlikely to reach your “old age”.

This is a global collapse. Blaming US or other national politicians, or even an international organization is completely useless.

In that article are some alarming facts and figures. The earth is losing mass at the rate of 50,000 metric tons each year. To get an idea, this is about half the gross weight of the Costa Concordia, the Italian cruise liner which had its catastrophe earlier this year.

The recent mishap with the Russian spacecraft Phobos-Grunt has called attention to the amount of debris left in orbit around the planet, but that’s not the bulk of the loss. In fact, most of the material which is blasted off of the planet in association with any nation’s space program eventually returns. The net loss is more than offset by the number of meteorites which hit earth. In fact 40,000 metric tons of space dust enters the atmosphere, and falls to earth, as a net gain.

The earth loses a small amount of mass from the cooling of its core. However, that is dwarfed by the amount of hydrogen gas and helium gas – very light gasses, which rise into the very top layer of the atmosphere and drift out of the atmosphere out into deep space. In the article, all told, Dr Chris Smith, a medical microbiologist, figures that the earth is losing 50,000 metric tons of mass per year.

At this rate, 0.000000000000001%, in several trillion more years, the earth will completely evaporate. Before that happens though, the first elements to go are going to be hydrogen then helium. Will it speed up at some point in the future? That question remains unanswered.

Hydrogen is extremely important. Without it, life could not exist. We depend approximately twice as much on hydrogen as we do oxygen!

Hydrogen is being used for “fuel cells”, to create energy to meet the needs of human kind beyond the current peak oil situation, and the upcoming peak coal situation. It is difficult to calculate when we will reach peak hydrogen, but that will have devistating effects for our energy needs, as well as for all life on earth.

Indeed they will appear in nature! Spanish flu became much more lethal between 1917 when it first appeared and 1918 when it produced a global pandemic killing about 40 million people that effectively prematurely ended World War 1, making room for World War 2 to happen. There were more lethal strains of Spanish Flu in 1918, such as the extremely deadly strain that appeared in Keota, Colorado that year. With more global travel, and more people living in close proximity of one another, such a lethal mutation would be unlikely to be contained as it was in Keota, Colorado, by having Army units enforcing a quarantine preventing anyone from leaving. Cruel, yes. But not nearly as cruel as letting the deadly flu out, to infect millions. Now, there won’t be time to resort to such draconian quarantines. If a particularly transmissible and deadly strain of Bird Flu are to appear in nature, millions will die. In fact, H5N1 appears deadlier than Spanish flu! It kills approximately 60% of those infected, although to date that is only about 350 people. Once it becomes transmissible between humans, it could be a nightmare scenario! If it kills 60% of the current population of a little over 7 billion, that means it would kill about 4.2 billion, leaving the world population about where it was around the start of World War 2. However, that large of a die-off at one time, particularly with a lot of the rest of the population ill, would lead to many other health problems, including dysentery, cholera, tuberculosis, and hepatitis/

Dawn, a Pakistani News Service, reports that bird flu has re-emerged and has killed a toddler. WHO is reportedly very concerned about Bird Flu and its potential to mutate into an easily human-transmissible strain.

Flu pandemics have occurred in the past, and they will most likely occur in the future. H5N1 Bird flu is the most likely to be the next one.

The picture of the sun during the solar flare is especially alarming. The flares are pretty normal, but the southern part of the sun is dark. Why is it dark? Is it going out? Stars are not supposed to go out! They have a life cycle, which doesn’t include parts of them going dark. Will this make it cooler or colder on earth? Or, could this be a precursor to an ice age? This could be what’s behind Global dimming, the discussion of the sun blowing itself to bits last summer that NASA officially denied as being harmful, or the discussion of it on this blog under Peak Energy.

Solar flare - January 2012 - look at the black on bottom

http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/alerts/warnings_timeline.html

But that’s not all! This solar flare is predicted to trigger a massive solar storm, which will effect all sorts of things, including weather on earth and satelites. It could cause a lot of havoc!

Beth-the-Cynic

North Korea has a number of public health problems and issues. These include widespread malnutrition which lowers immune systems making people more vulnerable to TB and other diseases, problems obtaining a steady source of medications. Amnesty International reports in their 2010 report The Crumbling State of Health Care in North Korea that “Hospitals in North Korea no longer have medicines. Medical personnel either don’t receive any or if they do, they sell them in the markets.” Doctors write down what medicines to give the patient, and the patient or their family must figure out how to procure them. Often the hospital or clinic doesn’t have any to give. In North Korea, officially, medication cannot be purchased in a pharmacy. It is officially freely provided in hospitals, but they may not have any, or they may require a “gift” of cigarettes or alcohol to get them, or the healthcare providers sold what they have to vendors at the market. So, often they are purchased in the markets. However, these markets are filled with counterfeit drugs along with real ones. Sometimes, if they have a family member who has left North Korea, and is in China or some such place, their family member may send them through the mail – which takes time and is subject to confiscation . Or, they do not have the money to get drugs at some point, and may stop them. Sometimes, due to side effects – and the drugs used to treat MDR TB have severe side effects, they may decide to let the patient’s body “rest” for a month or longer before resuming medication. Or, in the absence of any clear directions from a medical provider, may take them wrong – like without food instead of with food, with food rather than without food. Of course, this is compounded by the fact that many people in North Korea can only afford or obtain one meal per day. In any event, this involves taking the drug for an insufficient period of time, stopping the drug, then restarting it.

This is an instant way of creating a drug resistant strain! If it’s done with an already resistant strain with another medication that the strain is not yet resistant toward, this will give it resistance to the new drug as well – creating the XDR type of TB strain – which is mostly untreatable. According to Doctors Without Borders:

“Resistance can also develop if the bacteria are underexposed to drugs, because of under-dosing or if the treatment is interrupted or not continued for long enough. In all of these cases, treatment is likely to fail and the disease will re-emerge in a more resistant form, meaning that fewer drugs will be effective against the bacteria.”

Since the end of the Korean war in 1954, North Korea has very effectively closed its borders to the outside world.In effect, they have quarantined themselves to everyone outside of North Korea.  During the 1960s and 1970s, they had state manufacturers of pharmaceutical products. North Korea made big inroads in the number of tuberculosis cases during that time. However, “it “lost momentum” during the economic crisis of the 1990s when pharmaceutical and medical equipment factories shut down”  See more in The Crumbling State of Health Care in North Korea from Amnesty International.

To compound this problem, the North Korean Military, which has the largest standing army in the world, treats its soldiers who are discovered to be ill with tuberculosis by giving them the drugs for a few weeks or a few months until they are feeling better, discontinues treatment, and sends the soldier back to his unit. This not only makes drug-resistant strains come into being, but army life in any army is an effective way to spread tuberculosis.

Indeed, health care has crumbled to the point that it’s no longer useful or usable, nor effective at treating or preventing these types of diseases.

I was unable to find the actual infection rate of TB in North Korea. According to The Crumbling State of Health Care in North Korea , 5% of the population have currently-active tuberculosis, and many more are infected. That is a HUGE number! Furthermore, they also state that among those previously-treated for tuberculosis, a whopping 23% of them have TB-MDR! It is held by Voice of America and Global Security to be just under the rate found in sub-Saharan Africa. The World Health Organization states that approximately 1/3 of the earth’s living inhabitants are currently infected with tuberculosis. It is reasonable to believe that the rate in North Korea is much higher. 23% of all previously-treated cases of TB in North Korea currently have Multiple Drug Resistant TB.

Currently, as of this writing, there are some huge issues going on regarding North Korea. For one thing, the populace is starving. A desperate, hungry population will do almost anything, or take any risk, to feed themselves. They literally have nothing to lose. People from North Korea sometimes get across the demilitarized zone into South Korea, which takes them in and assimilates them into their society. China and Russia get immigrants across their borders from North Korea, even though it is an arduous trip over some rugged mountains. If they are discovered in those countries, they are returned to North Korea, with the migrant being imprisoned in North Korea. China gets the most migrants, and is North Korea’s closest political ally.

However, if a lot of such people begin pouring over the borders at once, especially if a significant portion of them are carrying drug resistant, multiple drug resistant, extensively drug resistant, and poly drug resistant strains of TB – the latter two being nearly impossible to treat and being effectively a death sentence for anyone who contracts these, they are going to do everything they can to keep carriers of such airborne communicable, expensive-to-treat or untreatable deadly diseases out of their country. It is no accident that Global Security, a private organization giving information and opinion about world military concerns, has this issue on their Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) page. Indeed, the North Korean populace – as well as their armies – are weapons of mass destruction in and of themselves! Even if they don’t intend to be, and no one deliberately put them up to it. They are carrying a deadly disease. TB would not make a good bioweapon, in the conventional sense, because it takes too long to make someone ill or to kill them.

The Chinese, Russians, and South Koreans – with United Nations aid, can effectively guard their borders from the few people who try to cross. A few get through anyway. If, things change, as it appears that they might, and millions of people come pouring across their borders, there is no way their conventional border patrols and military units on those borders can combat it. Russia and China may have to use weapons to kill everyone in some zones – including some of their own military – to keep these infected people from entering their country. South Korea, with it’s 50,000 troops and 3,000 UN troups, would be quickly overwhelmed by millions of unarmed people flooding at them.. plus the gigantic North Korean army. They could only machine-gun down so many, and grenades would only stop some. These are desperate people, without food or other requirements for life.

Assuming that everyone in the world agrees it’s a good idea to stop the spread of widespread DR, MDR, XDR, and PDR Tuberculosis from North Korea, and to go to any lengths we have to in order to protect ourselves from this threat endangering lives throughout the world, this would still not be simple. With that many people pouring out, there may not be enough conventional weapons which could be deployed in the immediate timeframe. Many more military personnel and equipment could be brought there with all of the aircraft carriers and ships belonging to everyone nearby, but with millions of people, that might not be enough to stop it. Of course, getting everyone to agree on anything is nearly impossible, especially in light that the majority of these people would not be the Korean military, but Korean refugees seeking food and medical care. Even if their disease is likely to be deadly to much of the world, there is the ethical dilemma over killing civilians.

Tuberculosis is an “orphan disease” – one which is not seen as effecting the wealthy of the world, and not being particularly profitable for a pharmaceutical company to develop, test, manufacture, and market a new drug – e.g., antibiotic – that would treat these drug-resistant strains of tuberculosis. The customers for these drugs are typically governmental entities and charitable entities with limited funds. The profit motive has prevented such a thing from being marketed, and it probably cannot be after TB-MDR, TB-XDR, or TB-PDR start effecting the masses.

Of note, the Korean War has never been declared officially over. We’ve merely been in a cease-fire since 1954. If this happens, the Korean War is back ON. Seoul, the capital of South Korea, is only 30 KM (~20 miles) from the demilitarized zone. Other countries might not be able to offer their assistance to the Koreans. The US nearly always has an aircraft carrier nearby, or often more. The end of the Korean-War cease-fire, in effect since 1954, could be jeopardized further from the fact that North Korea pulled out of that armistice in 2010…. Were they planning to leave North Korea in search of the necessities of life?

The North Korean government, although it’s down to nearly nothing as far as resources, does indeed have enough stocks of food and weapons to supply their army for several months. Additionally, it’s got short-range and medium-range missiles, and it is working on or may even have, intercontinental missiles. They also have a dirty nuclear bomb. As the North Korean government is likely desperate for its own survival as are its individual people, and as unstable as their government leadership is, they would likely to have few qualms about deploying these weapons – at South Korea, Chinese cities, Japan, or possibly the United States if they actually do have intercontinental missiles. That would be a huge nuclear disaster! No matter who sets off a nuclear device in Korea, it will not sit well with Japan which is set to get their fallout… they had “their share” of nuclear fallout at the end of World War 2!

Depending on how this is handled, this could become World War 3 with a “quick and dirty” end involving weapons of mass destruction, or it could be a slow destruction of mankind through pandemic and bleeding all worldwide money available to provide healthcare dry shortly with much of the world being suddenly exposed to, then infected with, these drug resistant strains of tuberculosis. Neither way is good.

In 1951, President Harry Truman fired General Douglas Macarthur because General Macarthur wanted to keep fighting the North Koreans until North Korea was completely defeated. President Harry Truman wanted to keep it a “limited” war, so fired General Macarthur. This was unpopular among US citizens. In retrospect, didn’t perhaps General Macarthur have the right idea, and if this scenario, or anything like it happens, Harry Truman, a “folk hero president”, might end up being the cause of world destruction decades after his death?

There is good news: No one from any worldwide health organization has reported any incidence of AIDS in North Korea. They haven’t let their citizens leave North Korea since 1954 – well before AIDS was on the scene. Homosexuality and drug abuse carry the death penalty in North Korea. People who are allowed to leave North Korea, as are foreigners who are allowed to enter North Korea have government minders with them at all times – they are not going to abuse drugs or have gay sex under those conditions! The North Koreans have proven that quarantine works.

However, tuberculosis is now considered an AIDS-defining disease – if you’ve got TB, it’s AIDS, along with numerous other diseases – common and uncommon, regardless of the results of an HIV test or the absence of such test results. Maybe it seems more palatable to people to gun-down hoards of people coming your way with AIDS, than it is to gun down starving refugees with tuberculosis.

On September 24, 2011 a bus-sized US satellite plunged to earth, scattering its debris “harmlessly” near Calgary in Canada. On October 23, 2011, a car-sized German spacecraft fell uncontrollably to earth, hitting Asia “somewhere”. . In March, 2011, a hiker in Northwestern Colorado encountered some space junk and a crater, and reported it – first to military aerospace officials, who told him to call the local sheriff. He eventually got through to NASA after getting quite a run-around. It turned out to be part of a Russian Zenit-3 rocket launched about 2 months earlier.

This seems to be becoming a regular event.

The latest event is that a Russian spacecraft headed for Mars did not go off properly. It is orbiting the wrong planet. Instead of orbiting Mars and its moons, as planned, it’s orbiting earth, in a decaying orbit. As if having this large object coming crashing to earth “in a couple of weeks” is not enough, there is concern over its fuel – whether it will remain liquid or if it will freeze. If it remains liquid, it will probably explode high in the atmosphere. “Harmlessly”, but then again what will it leave in the atmosphere, and how will that effect such things as the ozone layer? If it freezes, this fuel which is extremely toxic, could hit the ground.

Yes, it is most likely to hit the oceans, simply because 4/5th of the earth is covered in oceans. But, oceans are not “desolate” or “vacant”. There are islands in oceans, there are ships on oceans, and there is marine life. If something large enough hits an ocean at a high enough velocity, it can lead to tidal waves, and if large enough at a high enough velocity, could stir up enough debris into the atmosphere to cause an extinction event, such as what happened to the dinosaurs 65 million years ago when a meteorite hit near the Yucatan or , although this theory is not without its detractors, including a different asteroid or comet strike off the coast of India that may have caused the same sort of problem.

This is not the first time, nor is it expected to be the last time that manmade objects have hit earth. Some of them just hit the earth, and some left such things as toxic or radioactive debris or dust. For five of these events over the past few decades, see

Objects directly hitting earth are only part of this risk. In 2008, the Russian Mars-96 spacecraft crashed in the Andes Mountains and sprinkled some nuclear material. The risk could be nuclear, could be toxic, and could be reduced to dust and spread anywhere on earth through weather patterns.

The articles proudly state that no one has ever been injured by a piece of falling space debris. A few erroneously claim that no one has been hit by such a piece of falling space debris. Lottie Williams of Oklahoma was indeed hit by such a piece of debris from a Delta II rocket in 1997.

There are many many such objects, which will eventually come plunging to earth. It’s a matter of probability about whether they fall over sea, land, in remote, or in a populated area. Even hitting in the ocean or in a remote area simply means that fewer people are at risk from that piece of debris: People exist in remote areas. In a populated area, it’s just that more people are going to be hit. There was fear while the German spacecraft was flying over Asia – and radar lost track of it for awhile – on whether it might hit Hong Kong, or any of several other cities in China near the Pacific coast. Or, possibly a city on the Pacific coast of the United States. This one didn’t. It’s a matter of time. We’re playing a sort of planetary-wide game of “Russian Roulette” with these large pieces of “space junk”, or derelict spacecraft. There are international treaties to make future objects launched into space less durable for a re-entry, but that only applies to future launches, and only to countries which have signed the treaty.

It’s a matter of time. It is noted that this space junk needs to be cleaned up, about 30% of it attributable to the United States, but no “tried and true” method to do this currently exists. See and

Is it possible to clean this junk up, and to ensure that no further “junk” goes up into orbit with potentially cataclysmic consequences, without a complete ban on putting objects into orbit, which may be impractical with today’s dependence on technology?

Some of the experiments and data offered seemed to show unrealistic optimism among the optimists, who, incidentally are a majority of the population. As I’ve said on this blog before, pessimists are realists – we observe what is really out there, live life on life’s own terms, and have a realistic set of expectations. When we are told by an authority we respect, or have data shown to us that shows that our data is faulty, we will adjust our expectations accordingly. Not so the optimists! If they are shown there is a lower probability of an adverse event, they act as if it’s a much lower probability or an insignificant probability.

Nonetheless, cynicism, pessimism, or realism – depending on which term you prefer – lowers life expectancy. Cynicism is “bad for you” much like smoking is bad for you. There is a significant difference though – smoking is something that you can choose to stop doing. As the scientists cited in the BBC article referenced above discovered, there is a fundamental difference in the functioning of the brain. The frontal lobe shows more activity when confronted with negative information in pessimists than it does in optimists. With positive information, everyone shows more activity in the frontal lobes. To me, not being a neuro scientist, and reading this article, optimists’ brains just filter out the bad information. They don’t see it, don’t remember it, and sometimes it just doesn’t register as “having happened”.

At the same time, there are dangers from filtering out all or most negative information. They also determined that messages like “Smoking Kills” brought out a reaction in pessimists, but not in optimists. Extrapolated, an optimist might be more likely to engage in risky behaviors. Now, there are benefits from risk-taking behavior in some aspects of business under certain conditions. There may be subjective benefits from “extreme sports”, such as bungee jumping or rock climbing (especially when done without all proper equipment). However, one who is unrealistically looking at the risks is likely to die of some of them – when taken to a large group.

Still, even though pessimists tend to live “safer” lives, with a lookout to the risks, we still live shorter lives. I don’t see any data that shows just how. Perhaps it’s the cynical thing – that we could eat right, quit smoking, take our medicine, get checked out by doctors – and we’re sure that it won’t help. Nothing will help. Nothing can help.

Ah well. Once again, the optimists are shown to be delusional and are physiologically having their brains filter out negative information. They don’t think the risks are as high as they are. So, for them, maybe they’re not? Does the world really work like cartoons – such as when Wiley Coyote can walk off a cliff, but does not fall until he realizes that there is no ground under him, then falls immediately – but doesn’t die. Wiley seems to be an optimist. A pessimist would watch where he is going and be less likely to fall off the cliff in the first place. Perhaps it’s our caution that keeps us from doing everything we’d like to in all cases and worry that we might do something dangerous that causes us to live less long?

Perhaps it swings back for a true cynic. See, we don’t have to worry that bad things will happen to us – we know they will. It’s sure to happen. That gets rid of the worry, and the associated health risks (e.g., high blood pressure, heart attacks, strokes) that worry causes. At the same time, we’re careful enough not to walk off a cliff or in front of a bus. We can be sure that disaster will strike anyway, so we don’t have to go looking for it – or not looking for it which causes the disaster.

There are enough out there which are unavoidable anyway.

Miles of wind farms can be seen throughout rural areas of the Great Plains region of the United States. Truly, this region has a great deal of wind howling across it. It seems quite reasonable to find a way to harness it and use it, rather than using fossil fuels to create electricity.

Is it really such a good idea though? In addition to the costs in energy of manufacturing and setting up each windmill, which takes from the net energy production of these windmills there may be more long term effects.

In talking with someone while we were near one of these wind farms in a car, we considered some of the ramifications. The obvious one that we realized was the aerial drag each of these puts on the wind. Each of these windmills slows down the wind by a bit. With enough of them, the wind could well slow down. The climatic ramifications are potentially enormous. I cannot predict these, and I do not think anyone else with more knowledge of wind speeds and wind currents and climate has done any research at all into this issue.

Furthermore, it is known that part of what drives winds is the rotation of the earth. If there were more drag on the earth, it could slow down the earth’s rotation. What would that mean? Well, for one thing, it appears that the earth’s rotation was slower in ancient times. According to Harvard Medical School

By recording the daily rhythms of hormones and body temperatures in 24 healthy young and old men and women over a one-month period, the researchers conclude that our internal clocks run on a daily cycle of 24 hours, 11 minutes.

“That’s slightly longer than 24 hours, but significantly shorter than past estimates of 25 hours,” says Charles Czeisler, professor of medicine at the Harvard Medical School. “Researchers previously reported a range of 13 to 65 hours, with a median of 25 hours, 12 minutes. The variation between our subjects, with a 95 percent level of confidence, was no more than plus or minus 16 minutes, a remarkably small range.”

So, apparently, the planetary rotation when and where humans evolved was on a longer day – something between 24 hours, 11 minutes by this recent research, and 25 hours, 12 minutes according to previous research. The earliest fossils of modern humans, or homo sapiens were found dating from 200,000 years ago. So, the planet may have slowed down in just 200,000 years, or perhaps earlier humans from which modern humans such as Cro-Magnon, Homo Erectus, and Neanderthals evolved, such as homo habilis which appeared 2.4 million years ago, had this longer-than-24-hour biological clock too. We just do not know.

However, contradictory information on the length of days exists regarding the earth’s distant past. For instance, The Lunar and Planetary Institute says:

Today’s day length is 24 hours. During the Pennsylvanian Period a day was ~22.4 hours long. In the Devonian Period, a day was ~21.8 hours long. Earth’s rotation appears to be slowing approximately 2 seconds every 100,000 years. Why are Earth’s days getting longer? Some scientists suggest that tidal cycles create a “drag” on Earth, causing it to slow down.

So, perhaps the earth slowed down over several geological periods, but may be speeding-up over the past couple hundred thousand years, or even more recently.

Since the tidal cycles create a drag on the earth, perhaps the existence of the polar caps, which take some of the water out of circulation, have reduced the amount of drag produced by the tidal cycles? The last ice age ended approximately 11,000 years ago. Our human ancestors lived before and during that ice age, and had time to adapt to the planet they lived on. Perhaps it had a somewhat longer day. Would putting this additional drag on the earth via slowing down the wind using windmills cause it to slow down its rotation even faster?

That would be good news for awhile regarding average people’s circadian rhythms, which exceed the current 24 hour day. But, due to the windmills, and the tidal cycle drag or other issues which may be slowing the earth down over geological ages, we would soon exceed humankind’s circadian rhythms. With global warming melting polar ice caps and other glaciers, causing sea levels to rise, the drag on the earth from tides could slow it down much faster than either would alone. This could lead to global catastrophe.

They also mention a movie coming out on this issue produced by “Americans for Mining Based Energy” titled Terminal Gust. They bring up that wind could get into the water supplies of towns and cities, and children could drink it. We do not know all of the effects of wind, although we do know that it can be damaging in some instances. We do not know what wind is. We do not know where it comes from.

Wind power is meddling with forces we do not understand. Shouldn’t we understand it much better before we use these powerful forces? Did we not learn from our use of nuclear energy?

Coal: Energy you can clutch.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/go/em/fr/-/news/health-14234575

This is a frightening concept. These tests give accurate results 50% of the time and false positives and false negatives 50% of the time. They are mainly manufactured in first world countries including the USA and Western Europe, and mainly used in poor third world countries, including both India and China, which have high percentages of TB cases. See World Health Organization TB statistics. Put in simpler terms, they’re no better than a coin flip being used to diagnose TB. “Heads you have TB and need treatment. Tails you do not have TB.” The World Health Organization wants to ban these tests as a threat to health and as unethical.

False positives cause people to be treated with powerful drugs – with risks including death when they do not need it. It also causes the real cause of their feeling ill to not be diagnosed and allowing it to progress. False negatives allow people with active TB to be in the community spreading their disease without realizing it, and with a false belief that they are “safe”.

I’ve written in this blog about pandemics before, and never in human history has anyone prepared for any global pandemic. We won’t be any better prepared for the next one. Fortunately, in the case of such a thing as tuberculosis, the disease-causing organism, its effects, diagnosis, procedures to reduce the spread, and drugs to cure it are already known. Yes, even in the case of drug resistant tuberculosis – it’s just that the drugs are not as old, are more expensive, more dangerous, and take longer. However, even in light of everything that can be used to prevent, diagnose, treat, and cure this disease, I am quite cynical of it being recognized in time… by anyone.

The next pandemic may or may not be tuberculosis. It could be any number of old, well-understood diseases with known effects, diagnostic criteria, diagnostic aids, procedures to reduce the spread, drugs to mitigate or cure, and/or vaccinations. Polio is high up there on my list of possible causes for the next global pandemic. It fits that bill well. It is highly contagious, and kills its victims faster than does tuberculosis – and just as gruesomely. It can be tested for. It can be prevented either by ensuring fecal matter from an infected person does not become someone else’s drinking water without first going through a process to kill the virus. Sewage treatment, water treatment, chlorination, and boiling will all work for this. So will other measures like not getting your water out of a water source that is contaminated with sewage. It is typical to hear communities having “boil orders” after discovery of Fecal Coliform or E. coli in their drinking water. How it got there is often someone upstream not adequately treating their sewage before dumping. E. coli have gotten in other things, like manufactured foods, meat or vegetable handling plants, and even in bean sprouts. If E. coli can get through our sewage treatment plants, our water collection sources, water treatment plants, so can polio. If you think you’re safe if you drink bottled water, think again. The Food Safety Authority has confirmed that a survey in 2007 found that 1% of samples of bottled water had E. coli. Furthermore, it was proven that some bottled water was made merely by a plant bottling tap water from the water system in the city in which they are located according to Corporate Accountability International, a U.S. watchdog group, as reported by CNN.

There are areas in the world where polio has not been eradicated. Two such regions are the oil-rich Niger Delta region of Africa, and Afghanistan. As few people have been vaccinated against polio over the past 25 years or so, partly from complacency partly from that vaccines, including the polio vaccination, cause autism”>false beliefs spread widely by Dr. Wakefield “>that vaccines, including the polio vaccination, cause autism, partly from the false belief in some areas of the world that vaccines are a western plot to sterilize Muslim women and is endemic in such areas as Afghanistan, Tajikistan, and Pakistan With the NATO forces fighting in Afghanistan, and the Taliban pouring over the boarders to surrounding counties, all it will take to get another polio epidemic started is one tourist, military member, refugee, missionary, NGO relief worker, or business person to come back infected, who may not even be showing symptoms, use the toilet as they normally would, and it all takes off again. Another consideration is that people travel both inside and outside the US or other home countries much more often now than they did in the 1950s, the time of the last epidemic. This will just speed things up.

Syphilis is also high on my list for old diseases becoming pandemic. Long nicknamed “The Great Imitator”, it can be mistaken for many other diseases – or it could be mistaken for a new and unknown disease. The NIH still says that congenital syphilis is underdiagnosed and a major problem in other countries. There are some ideas floating about that what we call “AIDS” is actually tertiary syphilis. There may be something to it, in at least some cases. Some of the defining syndromes that are associated with AIDS were first documented in the early 1900s with syphilis patients. Both are said to be spread the same ways. The “HIV causes AIDS” belief has yielded nothing in 30 years in the way of curing the disease, stopping the spread of the disease, preventing death from the disease. Billions, if not trillions of dollars of research money has been used, and it’s been by lots of very bright people in many countries, working with governments, hospitals, Nongovernmental organizations, universities, pharmaceutical companies, and we’ve got nothing for it. Perhaps it’s time to look for something else, but that will be a future blog post.

According to NASA, Alex Young, a solar physicist at the Goddard Space Flight Center is quoted as saying “Half of the sun appeared to be blowing itself to bits.”

One thing we do know is that the sun has not ceased nor exploded in the past 6 weeks. This could be the beginning of the end though. The sun may be older than is commonly thought, and could be heading into its next phase where the sun begins collapsing upon itself, fusing helium atoms into carbon and oxygen atoms. According to accepted theory, this should begin happening in about another 5 billion years, but it could be much later than we think. This will eventually allow it to become a red giant, becoming cooler but much much larger. While the sun is actually cooling, the fact that the sun is expanding toward earth makes it hotter on earth. This will continue, eventually engulfing the planet mercury, venus, and possibly earth before settling down into a white dwarf, and eventually a black dwarf. See or .

The sun appears to be getting warmer from our point of view according to The truth about global warming – it’s the Sun that’s to blame which is in direct contradiction to Global dimming or the discussion of it on this blog under Peak Energy

Yes, the sun is getting dimmer. Along with global warming, we also have global dimming. This would seem to indicate that the global warming phenomenon is much greater than we perceive. Indeed, the average temperature of the earth is higher now than it was during the medieval warming period, while at the same time there the sun is 22% dimmer now than in 1950 in Israel, where this was first noted, 10% dimmer throughout much of the United States of America, 30% dimmer in parts of the former Soviet Union, 16% dimmer in parts of Britain, and even 9% dimmer in Antarctica! http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4171591.stm , http://m.discovermagazine.com/2005/jan/particles-dim-sun http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sun/dimming.html or http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2003/dec/18/science.research1

So, what does this mean? Well, it does not mean, as some global-warming nay-sayers suggest, that global warming does not exist! Global warming is observably true, but then again so is global dimming. Perhaps that the effect of greenhouse gases is much more severe than is typically believed. Or, since evidently we are in a period of low solar activity, as evidenced by few sunspots, the global warming problem will turn quite dramatic when the sun cycles back to a normal level of activity. Incidentally, there are various times throughout geological history where a warming period switched to an ice age nearly instantaneously. See what the American Institute of Physics has to say at http://www.aip.org/history/climate/cycles.htm or in layman’s terms at http://www.howstuffworks.com/question780.htm That could be what’s getting ready to happen now. The effects of an ice age upon civilization, technology, society, and the population would be devastating. Sure, we could hold off the effects to the most wealthy among us, especially in wealthy nations, by using more energy for heat, more energy to transport our food from longer distances, and wearing warmer clothes, but this would only hold out for a couple of years.

One of the stranger ideas about global dimming is that there is a black hole, possibly man made, in the center of the sun “sucking up” a fair portion of its light. I find that idea particularly laughable.

As we know that we get the most reliable news from blogs that do not rely upon such things as press releases or investigative reporting, the sun may burn out as soon as 2014. And, a host of people postulating this as an “end of the world” scenario for December 23, 2012. Or, our current scientific knowledge may have some holes in it, such as in the past it was believed that the sun ran on coal or that it could only possibly last a few thousand years.