Forecasting Doomsday

Boccaccio writes "James Lovelock, the planetary scientist famous for his Gaia Theory, writes in today's Independent of his belief that it is already too late to divert an environmental catastrophe which will see much of human civilisation destroyed. Fearing it too late to be green, he instead suggests communities plan for survival in a Mad Max type world with limited resources ruled by violent warlords. "We have to keep in mind the awesome pace of change and realise how little time is left to act, and then each community and nation must find the best use of the resources they have to sustain civilisation for as long as they can." He suggests we should be writing a practical guidebook printed on long lasting paper containing "the basic accumulated scientific knowledge of humanity.""

Comments

Pop Scientist Melodrama

[eldavojohn]

The climate centres around the world, which are the equivalent of the pathology lab of a hospital, have reported the Earth's physical condition, and the climate specialists see it as seriously ill, and soon to pass into a morbid fever that may last as long as 100,000 years. I have to tell you, as members of the Earth's family and an intimate part of it, that you and especially civilisation are in grave danger.

I don't want to start a flamewar but isn't he being a little melodramatic?

First off, the "climate centres" around the world aren't the equivalent to a pathology lab. This is a bad analogy. Pathology is a science that is fairly solid. There is a pathogen or there isn't, we may miss it but we sure are good at diagnosing it if you have it. More importantly, pathologists can agree with each other.

With the status of the environment, no one agrees with anyone else. The world is ending on one end while the U.S. government isn't too concerned with it at the time. James Lovelock is certain we're doomed while Michael Chrichton is giving speeches detailing environmentalism as a religion.

Who do we believe? The physician or the author? I don't think either are adequately qualified to make the call.

I can understand articles urging us to cut back on emissions or asking everyone to support the Kyoto Treaty. What I don't understand is how this article can be constructive. I read it and it tells me to drive to Wal-Mart as fast as possible and buy a gun and five shells so that I can rob said Wal-Mart of all guns and shells for my basement armory.

I'm not sure whether to read this as honest opinion or a hilarious satire reminiscent of Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.

Can anyone please tell me what Mr. Lovelock hoped to gain from this article other than creating hysteria among his fans and receiving "nut job" status from those who disagree with him?

The Revenge of Gaia' is published by Penguin on 2 February.

Oh, I'm sure that will be a fair and unbiased scientific look at the state of the environment that everyone will love. Why must people make such polarizing comments? Can't they see how many people they alienate with one fell swoop? He could have gotten the same message across without the drama.

Re:Pop Scientist Melodrama

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

> The Revenge of Gaia' is published by Penguin on 2 February.

Unless Lovelock sees his shadow, in which case we'll have another six weeks of civilization.

Soon to appear on slashdot:

[Spy der Mann]

After doomsday strikes, who do you want to be?

- Water pirates ****
- Mad Max ***********
- The kids beyond Thunderdome *
- CowboyNeal ***

The world can end for all I care

[palad1]

All I'm asking for is that it ends before tomorrow's deadline.

Obligatory Richard Pryor

[thatguywhoiam]

In regards to climate change, and those who deny it:

"Who are you gonna believe? Me, or your lying eyes?"

Just getting off a week of +5-10C weather, in January, in Toronto. (40-50F for the Americans.) That is really, really atypical.

So is the 28 days of rain the west coast just received.

So is the 13 feet of snow in Japan.

Its unsettling.

Re:Doomsday can come only from governments

[Fordiman]

It's similar to the way things could be nicer worldwide. If, for example, everyone donated $0.25, you could cover the world's landmass with 802.11g WiFi and have enough left over to make it solar/wind powered, impregnable, maintenance free, and, aside from the $0.25, completely free to everyone.

Similarly, if you donate $0.25, you could cover the world's landmass (6km granularity) with solar-powered atmospheric H2O/CO2 reclamation facilities. The would quickly offset the global warming problem; with less CO2, and more importantly, less water vapor in the atmosphere, you have less heat trapped and less H2O being produced to trap it. For that cost (at $0.25 per person, at 6km granularity - 3km radius per unit in a hexagonal array, the possible cost of a unit is about $400), you could rig seasonal fuzzy logic (unit is at lat 45, temp is about 66 deg, it's january. Turn on and start drying the atmo; we're too warm and wet right now.), to maintain the balance after the problem is repaired. Not to mention the possibility that a district could relocate its excess water to more needy places for cash.

'Cept, you'll nevr get it done. Too many people would argue against either ("Free WiFi to all would hurt industry!" or "We have no idea what reducing moisture and CO2 levels could do to the environment!"). That's where it all falls apart, really. Doing such things would require both a full understanding of each project (to quell the naysayers) and an organization willing to actually act in the public interest (unlike government, which acts more on a pluralism of cash-backed interests).

That's where it all falls apart really. To truly understand such projects, you need to actually do them, and there aren't any organizations that act purely in the public interest. Thus, you'd have to find a way to make the projects tangably profitable for all people.

Oh, well.

Re:Doomsday can come only from governments

[mclaincausey]

And people think us Christ followers are bonkers.

I'm not saying you're bonkers, but you contradict yourself several times in this post and put forth some strange ideas. Also, before you call other people "bonkers," consider your faith in a god/man who allegedly, two thousand years ago, according to no official texts, and only to the writings of his followers (don't cite me the fabricated Josephus passage please), brought back dead people, healed the blind and leprous, and walked on water, then resurrected from the dead, each of which are unprecedented events in all of proven, reliable human history. You accept a patently ridiculous story with objectively much less probability of being true than what this guy is positing (at least in terms of the prediction, I'm not to familiar with the underlying Gaia framework), so think twice before you call him out--it kind of sounds silly.

I hate the idea of working as a salaried employee

Even if we did collapse into an chaotic anarchy (opposite of the capitalist anarchy that I promote),

Obviously the two statements are contradictory enough to warrant an explanation. There is no such thing as a "capitalist anarchy." Anarcho-Capitalism is a fabricated ideology that is self-contradictory. All it means as far as I can tell is massive deregulation and civil libertarianism. That looks to me like a recipe for drug warlords, arms dealers, and crooked businessmen running roughshod over everyone. If you applied it to the current system without redistributing wealth, it would be catastrophic and unfair.

Anarchy means the abolition of hierarchy. Capitalism is by definition a hierarchical system. Never the twain shall meet: they are mutually exclusive. You could call yourself a Libertarian (with a capital 'L'), in the sense of the Libertarian party, and perhaps in the sense of personal freedom. But with the former you would be pushing a Social Darwinist ideal, which seems at odds with your Christianity.

creating communities of people who love one another but are no adverse to profit or personal gain

But doesn't profit almost always come at someone else's expense? I understand there is a way that equal parties can exchange equal goods and mutually benefit, but "profit" and "personal gain" were, if anything, discouraged by Jesus. You call yourself a "Christ follower" and then talk about a gold fetish. Jesus was strictly ascetic, and it's supposedly the Christian credo to try to be as much like Christ as possible. That means that "you cannot serve God and wealth" and therefore should give away all your worldly possessions. Christians attempt all sorts of distortions and intellectual wild goose chases to get around this, but wealth and Christianity, and therefore Capitalism, are not just incompatible, but diametrically opposed explicitly by the Gospel's teachings.

Simon showed that more people means more wealth, more innovation and long lives for everyone. Look at China. They were on the verge of overpopulation, but it wasn't the mass numbers that was killing them -- it was government and communism.

This is so outlandishly detached from reality that I don't even know where to begin. China's in a heap of shit right now. Their growth is amazing, but it is also provably unsustainable. They appear to be in an intractable and dangerous situation, all BECAUSE of their massive population quickly transitioning from agrarianism to urban life. Furthermore, when oil starts running out, China and other (artificially) petro-agriculturally-inflated populations in the Third World will start dying by the millions due to starvation and sanitation issues.

Communism offered them shortened lives with no reason to want to live -- freedom gives everyone a reason to work together to try to live longer together.

Chrichton's work was fiction,

[Irvu]

and bad fiction at that. In it he created cardboard "environmentalists" who sought to kill off large swaths of the earth's population as part of a tempter tantrum. One of his characters does nothing after being stabbed in the arm with a needle by some strange man and then dies, and yet he was supposed to be one of the best and brightest. The ringleader of the awful plot is has a man killed in the middle of Tower Bridge (the main bridge in London) at Noon and then stands over the corpse and yet doesn't get caught.

Much has been made of his "references", and the idea that he has backed up his bad fiction. If you peruse them you will see that a) they are not exhaustive, b) they favor unjournaled papers by anti-global-warming researchers (no attempt it made to see the science only the editorializing) and c) they include odd references to books on witchcraft and papers (such as the argument that greenland was once warmer) which do not prove his case at all.

The book was commissioned, bought, and paid for by Rupert Murdoch whose FoxNews network has made much of this money denying the state of the environment. Like Bill O'Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, and Ann Coulter Michael Crichton has made himself a tool of Murdoch. He has a line to sell and won't let the truth stand in his way.

If you want reasonable discussion of global warming go seek real scientists not an editorial hack. If you want a spy/crime novel go read some old Ian Flemming.

Re:Chrichton's work was fiction,

[gnovos]

and bad fiction at that.

Bad? BAD? You insult all bad things by saying this. This book is to bad what bad is to "a little big troubling". It was horrible beyond mesaure. And I don't even give a crap about the politics involved, I mean the story itself is nothing but a CS graduate's thesis on computer-generated books. Every character is as cliched as you could possibly get. The plot was... dear God, did I just say plot? Excuse me, that was uncalled for!

Here's a list of characters, in case you haven't read it yet:

A superman non-environmentalist, who can do everything, speak every language, fly any sort of air-transportation across the globe faster than a cruise missle, decrypt encoded information in his head in real time, has an infinite amout of resources at his disposal, and can fuck your wife just by glancing at her through binoculars, and still leaving you thankful that he did... Oh and he's perfect. And also, perfect, and I love him.

(main character) Naive do-godder yuppie hippie who has to be taught the wrongs of his environmentalist ways through some "tough love" and stern looks by the father figure superman above, but who eventually gets to sleep with women once he figures out how wrong he was.

Retarded actor who literally hugs trees and is eaten alive by friendly natives for his hubris and compassion. Oh and it's funny when he dies, HA HA gotcha you hollywood hippie, you are so stupid for having good looks and lots of money that you don't deserve, die die!

A couple of interchangeable sluts. Sure one has blonde hair and one is a brunette and can do judo, but it is very clear that thier ony REAL job is to fawn madly over complete nitwits and make out with them from time to time, often saving thier lives, of course, and then thanking for the opportunity to do so.

Mu ha ha ha type mad scientist/lawyer who builds very very intricate plans that require millions of dollars, unfounded science that may or may not ever work, and a great deal of effort and yet goes out of his way to publish every step of his detailed plans in places where they are easily found and yet is flummoxed by how the good guys seem to be on to his every step. Has to kill people with octopus juice because a bullet in the head is way harder, I suppose.

Also EVERYONE drives a Prius. I mean, it's a freaking Prius orgy.