posted
I didn't say that the Russian civil war and cold war were the same thing. I said that the motives of people who fought in the Russian revolution are the same as the motives of those who fought in other marxist revolutions include those that became part of the cold war. Ergo control of resources was a motivating factor for at least one side in all of the cold war conflicts.
I also didn't say that we were "fighting over resources" in the cold war. I was responding to Will B's statement that
quote:It's commonly said that resources are the leading cause of war, but how often does it actually happen?
and I said
quote:Given that, only a fool could argue that resources didn't play a key factor in these wars.
So to summarize. I've claimed that the basis of the cold war was a fundamental disagreement in who and what principles should control the distribution of resources. In my mind, that makes "resources" a leading cause of the cold war.
Posts: 12591 | Registered: Jan 2000
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posted
I would like to add that my comments were made in the context of the doomsday clock.
The contention of the scientists who set the doomsday clock is that growing demand for a shrinking pool of natural resources will lead to more wars.
In that context, I understood Will B's post as an attempt to argue that conflicts over the control of resources haven't actually been important in most recent wars. I continue to maintain that this shows a very limited understanding for the multiple complex causes of these wars.
Although many of these conflicts are likely about more than the control of resources, they are all also about the control of resources at one level or another.
Given that conflicts over the control of resources are one of the causes of virtually every conflict, the proposition that shrinking resources in the face of growing demand will result in more wars is pretty much a no brainer.
Posts: 12591 | Registered: Jan 2000
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posted
This article on the draft of the second of four documents to be released by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change seems to be overly optimistic in the manner that the IPCC's "most probable" estimate of 0.3metres/1foot by the year 2100 is already being exceeded by actual sea-level rise measurements in the 17years since 1990 which show a trend of 0.9metres/3feet per century. ie If the trend found by measurement continues, what the IPCC predicts as "most probable" by 2100 will be exceeded before 2040.
Those measurements of the recent past don't take into account the ever increasing rate of CO2-increase and hence the temperature-rise expectable by 2040. Thus seawater expansion and ice-melting due to increased temperature should cause sea-level to rise even faster in the near future than current measurements indicate.
The IPCC report appears to be similarly pollyannaish on other points.
posted
New support for the GlobalWarming-induced DoomsdayClock scenario.
quote:The Royal United Services Institute said...the world's response to the threats posed by climate change...had so far been "slow and inadequate"..."We're preparing for a car bomb, not for 9/11."
quote:Originally posted by The Rabbit: I didn't say that the Russian civil war and cold war were the same thing. I said that the motives of people who fought in the Russian revolution are the same as the motives of those who fought in other marxist revolutions include those that became part of the cold war. Ergo control of resources was a motivating factor for at least one side in all of the cold war conflicts.
Well, that would make a lot of sense if you believed the motives of the Kremlin elite were even remotely related to the motives of the peasants. Which they weren't, outside of the pages of Pravda.
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