Runaway Global Warming - Scarier than you think

Armageddon

Anybody who disputes global climate change is clueless and is not paying attention. The pattern is warming and this is not debatable, it's fact. Floods, forest fires, extreme weather etc. are all part of it and will continue indefinitely. Plants and animals are changing their behavior to adapt also. When things get out of balance, you are on the verge of disastrous consequences .

Hagakure_Leofman

Cid_Yama

Yes, but it is the likes of them that has brought us to the 'Eve of Destruction'.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Akoukq5DvAE
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In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. - George Orwell

Hagakure_Leofman

personally, I blame bugs bunny.

Cid_Yama · Last edited by Cid_Yama on Mon May 12, 2008 12:26 am; edited 1 time in total

When I was a child the world was literally greener, healthier. When I went ice fishing with my dad, you could see the salamanders on the bottom. Those were among the first to go, also the toads. When I say the world was greener, the plants outside were totally healthy, no brown spots. I mean healthy, vibrant. There were a lot more insects. We used to collect fireflies in jars. There were cloud of them. The night was lit up with their flashing. Butterflies, ladybugs, tons of them.

By the 1970's they were mostly gone. The salamanders were totally gone as well as the toads. The fireflies, there were barely any. Most of the butterflies were gone.

The world was browning. The sky was no longer a clear brilliant blue.

It was obvious that something was wrong. Those that were born after the mid 1950's don't even know what a healthy world looks like.

I was in college in th early '70's. Back then, the university libraries had subscriptions to scientific journals and Abstracts that allowed you to look up a topic and it would tell you what issue of what journal you needed to find the article. A paper version of the internet before there was one.

I lived in the library back then. I knew there was a problem, I wanted to know.

Nothing like we know now, but the greenhouse effect was known back then. The fact that we were warming was known back then.

Overpopulation was a big topic. Pollution was the topic of the day.

Those of us that were alive when the world was fully healthy knew the planet was dying. We didn't have the science, we couldn't point to many articles that supported our position, but we could SEE it. The planet was dying before our eyes.

You don't even know.

I feel like Edward G Robinson talking to Charlton Heston in Soylent Green. I have tears running down my face.

So if I seem a little angry at times, I have good reason. Most of you don't even have a clue.
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In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. - George Orwell

eXpat · Intermediate Crude Joined: Jun 08, 2006 Posts: 971

When I was a kid and I learnt to read I started to read a lot of Sci-Fi (in the 70´s), and so i went trough books like: Concrete Island, The Drowned World, or the The World Inside, and I thought at that time, I hope we never reach that, life is not worth to be lived like that, well, surprise surprise, we actually are on our way to something maybe even worst.
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Stocking up on popcorn Smile

Cid_Yama

If I might suggest, Earth Abides, by George Stewart. The best novel ever written, trust me.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_Abides
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In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. - George Orwell

Hagakure_Leofman

TonyPrep

It's all natural but that doesn't mean it's all beneficial or purposeful. Nature has no purpose and the earth doesn't even need to have what we call life. It doesn't care.

It's only natural for us to care about our own habitat and, theoretically, we have the ability to control our natural tendencies, which are similar to all organisms, to expand, given enough nutrients. Fossil fuels have expanded the carrying capacity of the earth and are now turning it into a place that may not be inhabitable by humans. That bit is up to us (barring catastrophic natural events that we could never have control over). We have the ability to severely limit our emissions and even the ability to halt them altogether. It's unlikely, though, that we have the wisdom to do that.

Hagakure_Leofman

TonyPrep

dohboi · Light Sweet Crude Joined: Dec 05, 2005 Posts: 1271

H-L's "it's all natural" is becoming a common theme for those who (understandably) can't face up to the immensity of our crimes against creation.

It is an interesting turn--the modern world (and much earlier) defined nature as essentially the non-human world. In most modern thought and action, the very purpose of humans was the subjugation and exploitation of this non-human world--it was worse than valueless unless it served our increasingly industrial uses.

As more people started to recognize the intrinsic value of the non-human world, nature took on more positive associations than "that which is imperfect, useless, or worse until tamed to serve our needs."

Humans, in this new view, came to be seen in a less positive light.

So now (again, understandably), many want to identify themselves with nature to regain the positive associations now attached to it.

At a deep level, of course, we have to come to a new understanding of our place within the natural world. But having for years (and today, even more) treated nature as something nasty than needs to be beaten into submission, it seems disingenuous at best to flip around at the last moment, now that "nature" again has positive connotations, and say, "All that abuse is ok, because I'm natural."

I don't know if this is clear, but we are dealing with the slipperiness of language and shifting definitions and associations. Language and its use and misuse is ultimately at the root of all of this, of course, so it is not surprising that it continues to provide us with ways of sneakily rationalizing our behavior here once again.

As to the claim that "the earth (or nature) is fine," this again is a subtle way of removing ourselves from responsibility. The follow-up George Carlin line is "it's the humans that are f'ed."

Now Carlin is a very funny and very clever fellow. But his job is to entertain, and how ever dark this comfort is, it is still a way of kind of comforting his audience. You can offend your audience in various ways in comedy, but you can't say that they are absolutely damned in every way imaginable.

But the claim is untrue in various ways, and not provable in others. First, humans are (and have been) doing enormous damage right now while our populations and consumption levels have been exploding. It's not much comfort to the hundreds of thousands of species going extinct every year (and that's above the background rate of about one per year) that some form of life may persist beyond the current anthropocene Great Extinction.

(And this also points out the problem with one of Carlin's other major eco-quips--"99.99...% of species that ever lived have gone extinct." To the extent that this is true, it is morally irrelevant, and to the extent that it excuses the current slaughter, morally repugnant. I could imagine Carlin comforting Custer in his slaughter of Native Americans by pointing out that 99% of Native Americans that ever existed had already died.)

Frankly, we do not know how well life will do in the future. We are already responsible for the sixth great extinction event in the history of life. This is before the full effects of global warming have really gotten under way. In other words, we are the equivalent of at least two dinosaur-extinguishing asteroids.

It took tens of millions of years for life to return to the full, pre-extinction richness of diversity after the Permian-Triassic "Great Dying." It may take an order of magnitude longer for life to recover from the double (at least) wammy human's have dealt and are dealing the living world. Once you get into 100 million year recovery time-scales, you are bumping up against the inevitable swelling of the sun that will make the planet uninhabitable.

While it is unlikely that all life will die soon (living bacteria have been found miles below the earths surface in cracks in rock--it's going to take a lot to kill off those suckers), complex life may well never recover to anything like the complexity that existed before humans (and especially before modern, industrial humans) came on the scene.

And keep in mind that those earlier recoveries happened when the earth was a young, spry thing. It is now a very old an frail lady, not likely to recover as easily to the blows we are inflicting upon her.

If you want to comfort yourself with the probability that a few bacteria buried miles below the surface may survive everything we hurl at the living world...well, I guess we all need to take our comforts where we can get them.

Just keep in mind that almost everything that passes as reason these days is actually thinly disguised rationalization.

Best wishes to all, and sorry for the long post.

Dohboi

eXpat · Intermediate Crude Joined: Jun 08, 2006 Posts: 971

essex

cid_yama your descent to personal abuse just shows hysteria is more important to you than facts.

Actually, it just shows I'm beyond the point of tolerating the likes of you. Since what is going on really IS going on, people like you need to be taken to the wall and shot. Your time will come, trust me. What you are seeing is righteous rage.

Well here we go , first abuse now death threats - all the hall marks of a crank and a fascist. The world just aint boiling off as your doomsday script predicts. Too funny !

BTW one of your looney mates even had the temerity to post Michael Manns' notorious hockey stick graph. Junk science at its " best "
LOL

Cid_Yama

essex,

You must have been dropped on your head as a baby. I feel sorry for you. It's got to be tough going through life that impaired.
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In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. - George Orwell