Lovelock Warns: One Last Chance Or 8 Billion Die

[Master Shake]

Re: Lovelock Warns: One Last Chance Or 8 Billion Die

Lovelock Warns: One Last Chance Or 8 Billion Die

I'll give him this: he realizes that most of the "green" solutions are pure bullshit and that Carbon trading is just a racket for the bankster class and their associates.

Personally, I think AGH is Piltdown Man redux and NASA's Hansen is the Trofim Lysenko of the AGH hucksters.

[charliebrown]

Re: Lovelock Warns: One Last Chance Or 8 Billion Die

Bigno, you hit it.

Global warming based upon some computer of CO2 concentrations vs. Global temp is voodo. Maybe its true, or maybe it isn't. I have done complex computer modeling for the DOE before, and the models can be made to say anything you want. I'm not stating that they are manipulated on purpose, but good studies involving humans are double blind for a reason. This might include figuring out how climate modelers would write create models if they weren't looking for Temp vs. green house gases.

I do think that spaceship earth is in trouble for many of the reasons you outline. Namely we are depleting resources at a faster rate than they are being replaced, and this is not sustainable.

I think the most fundamental question is "is peak energy real?". I dont care where we get out energy from, solar, wind, oil, nuke, coal etc. The fundamental question is how much money / mega joule are we going to have to pay? (note that since money is fiat, it really should be based upon labor per joule? or what percentage of our labor will we need to maintain or enhance our current lifestyle)

If we can keep the price of energy constant then we will be OK. If the price of energy spikes and stays up we are going to be in a lot of trouble.
Note the cheap price of energy makes cheap food, and cheap ore possible. If we have enough cheap energy we can water the dessert with de-salinated water. If we have enough cheap energy we can mine low grade ores.

I hope that if peak energy is upon us, we can handle it in a slow unwind of our modern life style. I can live with having to take a packed bus to work everyday, and setting my thermostat to 60 deg in the winter, but I dont want to see mass starvation, riots, wars etc. I fear for my children.

[tombat1913]

Re: Lovelock Warns: One Last Chance Or 8 Billion Die

No Tombat 1913 - I'd be the one buying. Forget the shocking global temp decline you are referencing this year. That's like taking a mean vehicle velocity reading from a three second time sample and counting it as reliable. Start reading around about what's happening with declining ore grades in multiple mined metals, the reality of water scarcity, the drastically shrinking glaciers in Andes, Alps Himalayas and the studies projecting what a continuation of that trend will do for farming in both India and China. Runaway deforestation of the remaining world old growth forests? Fisheries collapse in oceans worldwide? Read a little about the implications to the world's agri production should we halve it's petroleum consumption. Read something about the number of species becoming extinct each year, vs. the human population projections for mid century. On and on. What is to debate on that front? It is all sitting there, degrading and converging out into a window around 2030-2050. Plain as day.

Oh and don't forget the great pacific trash heap. All the plastics succumbing to solar decomposition spreading all over the entire Pacific Ocean and bioaccumulating in the sea life. good stuff

I wasn't trying to debate the entire subject of human caused destruction of our planet, I simply don't think that the global warming trend statistics are scientifically sound. I'm completely willing to accept that that humans are screwing things up, but also that the environmentalists tend to hurt the situation more than they help. Their answer to the situation is more government, beauracracy and waste. I find that most of the environmentalists I talk to are quite similar to the Obama supporters, clueless bandwagon sheep. I had the opportunity to talk with a woman who is getting her masters specializing in environmental economics and the conversation made me want to pull my hair out. I said "wow that's interesting, what exactly does the study of environmental economics entail?". She said "Well, it's like, basically you can like, make people do certain things depending on where the funding and stuff is going." She is currently finishing up her MASTERS THESIS!

[Rajiv]

Re: Lovelock Warns: One Last Chance Or 8 Billion Die

I don't know about the person you were talking about--you may not have been listening to the erudite environmentalists -- from Bill Rees

1) Human bio-ecology and the ecological basis of civilization

Modern techno-industrial society is a product of the ‘enlightenment project’ and is deeply rooted in what philosophers refer to as ‘Cartesian dualism.’ This perspective sees humans as somehow separate from the biophysical world, assumes we are masters of nature and enables us to act as if society is not subject to serious ecological constraints. Dualism, and its companion expansionary-materialist worldview, are arguably the major source of many of the so-called ‘environmental problems’ confronting humankind today. Much of my work, by contrast, adopts a bio-ecological perspective that recognizes that humans are part of nature (in fact, we are the dominant consumer organism in all major ecosystems on the planet), that we cannot assert effective control over critical ecosystems and that the future development of civilization is seriously constrained by natural limits. My research on the means for achieving sustainability therefore leads to policies and planning that is cognitive of potentially dangerous biophysical trends. My approach argues for managing human demand rather than resource

2) Ecological economics: Biophysical realities in resource allocation and distribution

Mainstream neo-liberal economic theory is rooted in concepts borrowed from Newtonian analytic mechanics. This paradigm fosters the development of simple, reductionist, linear, deterministic, single equilibrium-oriented models that are highly abstracted from biophysical reality. Conventional economists also tend to see the human economy as a distinctly separate system, all but independent of the ecosphere. This frees the discipline to emphasize efficiency and continuous economic growth. By contrast, the emerging ecological economic perspective is derived from political science, ecology, far-from-equilibrium thermodynamics and complex systems theory. Its models are characterized by real-world complexity, including non-linear behaviour (surprise) and multiple equilibria. From their more holistic perspective, ecological economists see the economy as a dependent, growing, fully-contained sub-system of a non-growing finite ecosphere. Ecological economics therefore emphasizes steady state dynamics, biophysical limits and social equity. My major contribution in this domain is the development of ‘ecological footprint analysis’ (EFA), a quantitative tool based on energy and material flows that estimates the area of productive ecosystems required to sustain any specified human population or economic activity. EFA has done much to re-open the debate on human carrying capacity—we’d need four additional Earth-like planets to raise just the present world population to North American levels of consumption—and suggests novel interpretations of key planning ideas such as what constitutes ‘urban’ land.

3) Global change and the dynamics of societal collapse

In 1995, anthropologist Joseph Tainter wrote: “what is perhaps most intriguing in the evolution of human societies is the regularity with which the pattern of increasing complexity is interrupted by collapse…” Ominously, modern, complex global techno-industrial society exhibits many symptoms similar to those that heralded previous societal collapses. More ominous still, contemporary decision-making processes seem incapable of responding creatively to the gathering evidence of potential crisis. While science is advancing a coherent understanding of the proximal conditions and mechanisms that precipitate collapse, I am most interested in the ‘distal’ factors that drive human societies to expand and complexify to the point where implosion seems inevitable. Is the cycle of human society similar to the “never-ending adaptive cycles of growth, accumulation, restructuring [collapse] and renewal” that we find in nature? Most important, is our more knowledge-intensive modern society capable of breaking free of the cycle of collapse that characterized earlier civilizations?

He has some interesting talks as well

You can find other clips if you want.

[tombat1913]

Re: Lovelock Warns: One Last Chance Or 8 Billion Die

Thanks for the post, I'll look into it further.

I know that my story is pretty much irrelevant to any debate, I just get frustrated with the lack critical thinking of these groups. I'm willing to bet that the majority of the people at those protests have very little understanding of the situation.

[cjppjc]

Re: Lovelock Warns: One Last Chance Or 8 Billion Die

Oh and don't forget the great pacific trash heap. All the plastics succumbing to solar decomposition spreading all over the entire Pacific Ocean and bioaccumulating in the sea life. good stuff

I wasn't trying to debate the entire subject of human caused destruction of our planet, I simply don't think that the global warming trend statistics are scientifically sound. I'm completely willing to accept that that humans are screwing things up, but also that the environmentalists tend to hurt the situation more than they help. Their answer to the situation is more government, beauracracy and waste. I find that most of the environmentalists I talk to are quite similar to the Obama supporters, clueless bandwagon sheep. I had the opportunity to talk with a woman who is getting her masters specializing in environmental economics and the conversation made me want to pull my hair out. I said "wow that's interesting, what exactly does the study of environmental economics entail?". She said "Well, it's like, basically you can like, make people do certain things depending on where the funding and stuff is going." She is currently finishing up her MASTERS THESIS!

This got my day off to a bad start.:eek:

[blazespinnaker]

Re: Lovelock Warns: One Last Chance Or 8 Billion Die

Lovelock Warns: One Last Chance Or 8 Billion Die

The solution is to genetically engineer some kind of bio that will sequester the carbon.

Trees, for example, suck in CO2. We're pretty close to being able to do this sort of thing already. Just need to focus more.

I find it hilarious that the guy whines about carbon trading and then in the same breath talks about plans dealing with excess c02. Well that's the whole point of carbon trading, providing incentive for people to come up with plans for dealing with excess c02!

He's some kind of idiot who thinks he has the only good ideas.