Someone, Anyone, PLEASE Tell Me This Guy is Crazy!

[leftchick]

Environment in crisis: 'We are past the point of no return'

Thirty years ago, the scientist James Lovelock worked out that the Earth possessed a planetary-scale control system which kept the environment fit for life. He called it Gaia, and the theory has become widely accepted. Now, he believes mankind's abuse of the environment is making that mechanism work against us. His astonishing conclusion - that climate change is already insoluble, and life on Earth will never be the same again.

http://news.independent.co.uk/environment/article338878.ece

<snip>

In a profoundly pessimistic new assessment, published in today's Independent, Professor Lovelock suggests that efforts to counter global warming cannot succeed, and that, in effect, it is already too late.

The world and human society face disaster to a worse extent, and on a faster timescale, than almost anybody realises, he believes. He writes: " Before this century is over, billions of us will die, and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable."

...Please?? :(

[bigscott]

1. sorry can't help you

:wow:

[MsAnthropy]

2. The sky is falling! The sky is falling! The sky is falling!

This alarmist crap is not helpful.

[rooboy]

7. Alarmism is helpful when the alarm needs to be raised. n/t

[leftofthedial]

10. the sky is falling! ha ha ha! that's funny!

until the day the sky falls.

if you aren't alarmed, you are nuts.

[Richard D]

3. He's not crazy . . .

. . . but he's hopefully not totally accurate. There is another article in the Independent today that (sort-of) offers a ray of hope:

http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0117-24.htm

[leftchick]

4. The fact that he is seems so well respected is what scares me

I am hoping this is his desperate attempt to rouse the US. Thank you for the link.

[joefree1]

5. He has his critics

Gaia
While the Gaia Hypothesis was readily accepted by many in the environmentalist community, it has not been fully accepted within the scientific community. Among its more famous critics are Richard Dawkins and Ford Doolittle, and a detailed description of disputes surrounding it can be found here. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia_theory_%28science%29#Critical_analysis

Briefly, critics point out that since natural selection operates on individuals, it is not obvious how planetary-scale homeostasis can evolve. Lovelock has countered with models such as Daisyworld, which illustrate how individual-level effects can translate to planetary homeostasis. However, as Earth science is still in its infancy, it is not yet clear how the lessons from Daisyworld apply to the full complexity of the Earth's biosphere and climate.

Nuclear Power
Lovelock was among the first researchers to sound the alarm about the threat of global warming from the greenhouse effect. In 2004 he caused a media sensation when he broke with many fellow environmentalists by pronouncing that "Only nuclear power can now halt global warming". In his view, nuclear energy is the only realistic alternative to fossil fuels that has the capacity to both fulfill the large scale energy needs of mankind while also reducing greenhouse emissions.
In 2005, against the backdrop of renewed UK government interest in nuclear power, Lovelock again publicly announced his support for nuclear energy, stating, "I am a Green, and I entreat my friends in the movement to drop their wrongheaded objection to nuclear energy".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Lovelock

[MnFats]

6. "Professor Lovelock?"

hate to be crude but at my school that guy would have gotten teased.
if that's any consolation.

[MercutioATC]

8. Planet Earth will be just fine...

...our continued existance on Earth is at issue, not the fate of the planet.

Just trying to keep things in perspective. Life will go on although human life might not.

[SledDriver]

9. In the words of George Carlin...

"The planet is fine... the PEOPLE are fucked! We're going away folks..."

[MercutioATC]

11. That's the quote I always think of...(more below)

"This planet has put up with much worse than us. It’s been through earthquakes, volcanoes, plate tectonics, solar flares, sunspots, magnetic storms, pole reversals, planetary floods, worldwide fires, tidal waves, wind and water erosion, ice ages and hundreds of thousands of years of bombardment by comets, asteroids, and meteors. You think a few plastic bags and aluminum cans are going to make a difference?

The planet isn’t going anywhere, folks, we are! We’re going away. Pack your shit – we won’t leave much of a trace. Thank God for that. Nothing left. Maybe just a little Styrofoam. The planet will be here, and we’ll be gone. Another failed mutation; another closed-end biological mistake.

The planet will shake us off like a bad case of fleas. And it will heal itself, because that what it does; it’s a self-correcting system. The air and water and earth will recover and be renewed. And if plastic isn’t really degradable, most likely the planet will incorporate it into a new paradigm: The Earth Plus Plastic."

[KyuzoGator]

13. "If we throw plastic away, it'll just become Earth Plus Plastic"

Yup, the planet's just fine. We're the ones who need to be saved.

[G_j]

17. however you left out the fate of countless other species

there are mass extictions going on right now!

[MercutioATC]

18. ...and the planet will STILL be just fine.

Over 90% of the species that have ever existed on this planet are now extinct. That doesn't give us an ethical justification to do whatever we want, but I'm not talking about ethics. I'm talking about practicalities.

Most of the species that have existed are gone. New species arise. That's the way the system works. The Earth will continue to do this long after we're gone.

The planet is fine.

[G_j]

20. so "new species" will just "arise"?

and it will all be just fine.

there are very few lines of reasoning more dangerous than that
better go back to biology class

[KyuzoGator]

12. The Earth is just a closed-loop system seeking equilibrium.

The planet's trying to shake us off like a flu bug.

[G_j]

14. the single biggest challenge facing the planet

---------------
the single biggest challenge facing the planet
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/18616

Volume 53, Number 1 · January 12, 2006

Review
The Coming Meltdown
By Bill McKibben
Thin Ice: Unlocking the Secrets of Climate in the World's Highest Mountains
by Mark Bowen
Henry Holt, 463 pp., $30.00

Dancing at the Dead Sea: Tracking the World's Environmental Hotspots
by Alanna Mitchell
University of Chicago Press, 239 pp., $25.00

The year 2005 has been the hottest year on record for the planet, hotter than 1998, 2002, 2004, and 2003. More importantly, perhaps, this has been the autumn when the planet has shown more clearly than before just what that extra heat means. Consider just a few of the findings published in the major scientific journals during the last three months:

—Arctic sea ice is melting fast. There was 20 percent less of it than normal this summer, and as Dr. Mark Serreze, one of the researchers from Colorado's National Snow and Ice Data Center, told reporters, "the feeling is we are reaching a tipping point or threshold beyond which sea ice will not recover." That is particularly bad news because it creates a potent feedback effect: instead of blinding white ice that bounces sunlight back into space, there is now open blue water that soaks up the sun's heat, amplifying the melting process.

—In the tundra of Siberia, other researchers report that permafrost has begun to melt rapidly, and, as it does, formerly frozen methane—which, like the more prevalent carbon dioxide, acts as a heat-trapping "greenhouse gas"—is escaping into the atmosphere. In some places last winter, the methane bubbled up so steadily that puddles of standing water couldn't freeze even in the depths of the Russian winter.

—British researchers, examining almost six thousand soil borings across the UK, found another feedback effect. Warmer temperatures (growing seasons now last eleven days longer at that latitude) meant that microbial activity had increased dramatically in the soil. This, in turn, meant that much of the carbon long stored in the soil was now being released into the atmosphere. The quantities were large enough to negate all the work that Britain had done to switch away from coal to reduce carbon in the atmosphere. "All the consequences of global warming will occur more rapidly," said Guy Kirk, chief scientist on the study. "That's the scary thing. The amount of time we have got to do something about it is smaller than we thought."


<snip>
But the hurricanes also demonstrated another fact about global warming, this one having nothing to do with chemistry or physics but instead with politics, journalism, and the rituals of science. Climate change somehow seems unable to emerge on the world stage for what it really is: the single biggest challenge facing the planet, the equal in every way to the nuclear threat that transfixed us during the past half-century and a threat we haven't even begun to deal with. The coverage of Katrina's aftermath, for instance, was scathing in depicting the Bush administration's incompetence and cronyism; but the President —and his predecessors—were spared criticism for their far bigger sin of omission, the failure to do anything at all to stanch the flood of carbon that America, above all other nations, pours into the atmosphere and that is the prime cause of the great heating now underway. Though Bush has been egregious in his ignorance about climate change, the failure to do anything about it has been bipartisan; Bill Clinton and Al Gore were grandly rhetorical about the issue, but nonetheless presided over a 13 percent increase in America's carbon emissions.

..more..

=========

[Straight Shooter]

15. If you think the wars for oil are bad, wait until you see the water wars.

I've got a very bad feeling about what the future holds 50 to 75 years from now. x(

[RaleighNCDUer]

16. I am reminded of Asimov's Encyclopedia Galactica from the

Foundation books.

"One of the most striking ideas in his book is that of "a guidebook for global warming survivors" aimed at the humans who would still be struggling to exist after a total societal collapse.

Written, not in electronic form, but "on durable paper with long-lasting print", it would contain the basic accumulated scientific knowledge of humanity, much of it utterly taken for granted by us now,..."

Collapse is entirely possible, but it must be remembered that there is no species as adaptable as the human species. If the overall temperature rises by 15 decrees C., people will figure out how to live with it. People have colonized every environment other than Antarctica for thousands of years, from the Sahara desert to the Greenland ice. Short of the atmosphere itself going toxic, humans will not only survive, but thrive. After losing a few billion, that is.

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

19. "There is no safety in the cosmos." - Alan Watts

Maybe Pat Robertson can float a loan and bribe God to back off.