It only has to be pleasant for 1 percent of the population. That's why we vote for republicans.

The planet has had bigger catastrophes than this in the last 4.5 billion years. It will be the second time the dominant species has caused an ecological disaster. The first one was when the methane breathers poisoned themselves with their waste product-oxygen.

These predictions seem to shed light on why we have stopped building power plants and repairing roads and bridges -- the population will start to drop through drought, famine and disease. The ecological "life boats" will be sold to the highest bidders.

The best analogy I've seen is asking people to picture the earth (8,000 miles across) shrunk to the size of a basketball (more like 8 inches across). The oceans are so shallow that the ball wouldn't even feel wet. The mountains are so short that the ball would feel smooth, not bumpy. We live on a very, very thin layer.

Don't believe the analogy? Do the math. Oceans are at most 7 miles deep. They would be 0.007 inches deep on the basketball. Mountains are at most 6 miles above sea level. Mount Everest would be a mere 0.006 inches above the average level on the basketball. It's hard to machine a sphere to be that smooth.

Earth's radius is about 6,371,000 meters. The radius of a basketball is about 0.119 meters.

So 1000 meters * 0.119 / 6371000 = 18.7 micrometers.

Life is a very thin film, sort of like the film if you breathe on a cold mirror.

We have a very tiny window of time in which to avert pan-extinctions, including our own.

And the clock is ticking.

And wasn't Lovelock one of the original creators of the Gaia hypothesis? I'll stick with that, thank you, doom-and-gloom isn't helping anyone on our side of the fence.

Yes, Lovelock and Lynn Margulis independently formulated what Lovelock popularised as the "Gaia hypothesis". The name was suggested to Lovelock, I believe, by the guy who wrote The Princess Bride.

Lovelock predicts that the human population in 2100 will be at most 20% of what it is today. The late microbiologist Frank Fenner believed that the human population will be at 0% because of plagues that Lovelock believes will be stopped at geographic boundaries.

I'm sorry, but this is the kind of stuff that makes people turn away from the very real evidence that proves the existence of anthropogenic climate change.

saying privately that there was no point in his getting people all upset because it was obvious that the politicians weren't going to do anything anyway, so people might as well enjoy themselves while they could.

Iirc, he likened it to the "big asteroid dilemma": if a big asteroid is absolutely going to hit Earth and wipe out all life in 5 years, and there is nothing at all that can be done to prevent it, should scientists tell people about it so that they spend the 5 years in misery and madness, or keep quiet and at least let them enjoy what's left of their lives.

Where animals can be bred and slaughtered.

Fire and Ice

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

**************

It will be no great loss to the universe, the galaxy, the solar system, or even the planet if the human race through its own shitty-assed behavior renders itself extinct. Sure, we'll lose out on future Beethovens, Shakespeares and Einsteins, but we'll also not have to endure future Bushes, Reagans or Romneys. It's a wash, imho. Hope the dolphins make it through.

but I honestly cannot agree with you that it would be in any way a wash. If we humans are too lazy to save ourselves, all other high-order species -including dolphins, who cannot survive in acidified oceans bereft of fish- will go with us.

Last edited Fri Jun 8, 2012, 02:22 AM - Edit history (1)

ignominy as the Holocaust and Operation Shocking and Awful). But I will be sad for dolphins and other higher-order mammals who did nothing to deserve this.

Makes you wonder who the real eco-terrorists are, Earth First or Monsanto\Dow Chemical.

When I find myself wallowing these days, it's usually about the
animal kingdom that we'll be taking down with the ship. Really
saddens me. Shit, I need a vacation!!

I thought that OWS had a shot, but now it feels less clear.

But I do believe that it won't be long before something, perhaps OWS or an offshoot, will appear that will serve as an effective machine for real change.

Then it'll be our decision, each of us: will we be among those giving up a piece of their lives to operate the machine and solve the problems; those trying to maintain the status quo regardless of cost; or those trying to pretend they're not shameless duds.

All them preachers are sayin' that gawd will take care of us humans forever as long as we belive in Jeebus and follow their instructions (and send them lotsa money). They know what's best cuz they got themselves a direct line to Jebus. I know cuz they told me so and they'd never lie....



In all seriousness, the feces are rapidly approaching the impeller blades and if we don't start listening to, and acting on the prescriptions of, people with real scientific knowledge the million-ton shithammer is gonna come down on the human race in a big way. The human race can choose rationality or supersition. Only one gives people a chance at survival over the long run.

Or maybe Lars von Trier was right in Melancholia, in which case we are pretty much fked anyway.

Thanks for the thread, cynatnite.

Even then if it is the poor they won't care.

The beauty of climate change is once it gets to that point it may not be reversible. The 1% will be screwed too.

Maybe next time Earth will evolve a more intelligent species.

Unfortunately, the only choices we have are: a few centuries if we do nothing and civilization does possibly collapse to an extent, or a few decades if we act soon and ignore both the doom-and-gloom fearmongerers(some of whom I fear may be infiltrators put there by associates of the Establishment), and continue to debunk the deniers to the point where people finally wake up and realize, "Hey, the human race isn't going to extinct. But we will be in a lot of trouble if we give up now, so we must act quickly to prevent as much additional damage as possible."

Goes hand in hand with something else I just read ... will see if I can find it.

I was just remembering the other day when I first came to southern California in 1970. The town of Santa Ana was surrounded by farms and corn fields as far as the eye could see. After that, there were miles of orange groves that smelled wonderful and there were miles of small two-lane roads winding between them. Along the Pacific Coast highway, there was only the blue Pacific on one side and dry deserted hills on the other side in the scenic drive of about 15 miles between Corona del Mar and Laguna Beach. Now, you can barely see any square footage anywhere that isn't built up with housing developments, strip malls, or freeways. And that once beautiful drive from Corona to Laguna now has mass planned communities along its length, like Newport Coast, with its mausoleum-like entry arches and green grass in a once beautiful and natural desert environment.

If we

- enforce human population reduction by mandatory post-partum sterilisation (0.5 live birth per person, any male concurrently impregnating 2 or more women except by bona-fide accident loses his dangly bits)

- complete a crash program of global reforestation and no-GMO multicropping

- create enough nuclear-powered transport ships to supply people in other countries with food etc so that they don't have to rely on their traditional overpopulation practices

- end Capitalism and its focus on flooding Earth with "stuff", switching back to the pre-WW2 emphasis on durability and repair rather than replacement.

To do that, we'd have to act in solidarity to put non-psychopaths into at least every US federal government office within the next few years.

But if we can, and can start pop reduction in 2020, then we're in with a good chance of reversing climate change and stabilising the global human population at the 17th-c. level (500M humans) by 2140.

And if we work selflessly, we can probably even do it without the wars, famines, and plagues that will otherwise catastrophically reduce the populations of all high-order species.

We have advanced enough to genetically alter a couple hundred million test subjects for deep spaceflight and build the generation ships to spread our seed to the stars!


It
is
our
destiny

Humans will flame out and the next species will dominate. I'm thinking insects. It's their turn.