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James Lovelock Suggests Suspending Democracy To Save the World
mosb1000 writes "Climate scientist James Lovelock claims it may be necessary to put democracy on hold to prevent a global climate catastrophe. He goes on to say that the best remedies may be adaptation techniques such as building sea defenses."
Lovelock is famously the creator of the Gaia hypothesis.
That was foreign entanglements and factionalism we were to avoid. Parties had begun to form DURING the Washington administration, so he was clearly both aware of them and not directly opposed to them, just the power that they often tend to accumulate to themselves. Wiki Article George_Washington's_Farewell_Address and the text itself.
Behold, this dreamer cometh. Come now, and let us slay him... and we shall see what will become of his dreams.
Lovelock is being taken out of context. A more full quote:
But it can't happen in a modern democracy. This is one of the problems. What's the alternative to democracy? There isn't one. But even the best democracies agree that when a major war approaches, democracy must be put on hold for the time being. I have a feeling that climate change may be an issue as severe as a war. It may be necessary to put democracy on hold for a while.
From the slightly-less-badly-edited interview at:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2010/mar/29/james-lovelock
In other words, he's not calling for putting democracy on hold. He's predicting that it's going to reach a point where it's an obvious, impending crisis, like a war, and people aren't going to respond democratically to it.
He doesn't believe people are going to take climate change seriously until it's too late. Or at least, not enough people. There will continue to be arguments and finger-pointing until it finally becomes obvious. Not that it's a good thing, just a thing he expects.
Read the rest of the interview, and Lovelock sounds less like a monster than the article is trying to make him out to be. He's still elitist, proudly so:
Science was always elitist and has to be elitist. The very idea of diluting it down [to be more egalitarian] is crazy. We're paying the price for it now.
but he's not calling for an end to democracy. He's simply telling everybody they'll be sorry if they don't listen to him.
Capitalism and Democracy (direct or representative) go hand-in-hand, and it's very difficult to separate the two. How can you have true political freedom if you don't have economic freedom too?
Thanks for the links. You can find a summary of Washington's views on the dangers of political parties in the appropriately titled section of the Wiki Article you linked us to. He warned us to avoid them, just as the GP says.
SIGSEGV caught, terminating
wait... not that kind of sig.
Except that US hasn't ever had a war on its on land besides Independence war.
And the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, and the Civil War. During none of these were elections canceled.
It's possible we might have if we were a European country in WWII, but frankly I find it doubtful.
The enemies of Democracy are
Strangely enough this is the kinda crazy talk that my very very far right leaning stepfather has been saying they were trying to make happen with the whole global warming debate.
There is a war going on for your mind.
I just want to take this opportunity to remind you all that the "American Third Position" that the above poster is endorsing is a nativist, racist organization. You don't have to take my word for it. If you want to give them hits, you can click through to the link he so helpfully provides and see for yourself that these are just nazis without the cool uniforms, pushing an agenda of "returning America to it's "European" (white) roots" and racial purity.
They're just very polite about it and use very careful, if transparent, language. Here's an example from an article on their site called "US - Ours Much Longer?"
"Americans of European descent must awaken to the very real occurrence of our political and territorial dispossession. Unless our people band together at some point in the near future, children born of our kin, today, will live to see a time when their fair skin is a rarity and civilized society only the phantom of a bygone era." ...blah blah blah, you get the idea. God forbid "fair skin" should become a rarity. You know what that leads to? Rhythm music right from the jungle. Next thing you know, our children will be doing all sorts of wild dances and having relations with Jews and Negros.
They're concerned with maintaining America's "ethnic proportionality". Real nice bunch of fellas.
"Third Position" I can't stop you from posting here, but I'll be damned if I'm going to let you take off your uniform and try to blend into a community I care about. Like Lt. Aldo "The Apache" Rain, I like to be able recognize my nazis.
-PR
It's interesting that you link to the "Climategate" Wikipedia entry with the words "suspect at best" when the article seems to indicate that most reviews of the "climategate" situation indicate that the "massaging" was required to get sets of disparate data to use the same scale of units
What you think the words he uses to link the page represent a reasoned analysis and a sincere attempt to understand what he linked to? Ha! Not a chance. It's "Climategate" and the name alone proves it's all a fraud, that's all he needs to know, contrary facts need not apply.
It's why he says that the last decade showed cooling when that's patently false, and only appears to be true if you just compare 1998 (a record year) with 2008 (a cool year compared to recent trends though still one of the hotter years ever). If you instead compared 1999 (a much cooler year than 1998) and 2009 (the 2nd hottest year recorded) you could say ZOMG Epic Warming! But climatologists don't do that, because that's disingenuous. Yet he's the one who supposedly knows what's up. See the trend here?
One flood in Australia does not refute global warming science.
Yes it does, if you're the kind of person who thinks "Global Warming? Ha! We had record snow here in New England!" and "Climate Change - Ha! The climate has always been changing!" are reasonable arguments. Of course they had already decided global warming science was false from the get-go, and thus only seek out the arguments that confirm that bias and never attempt to discover if the argument has any merit.
Aaaaand of course always accuses climatologists of having the faults they themselves exhibit with every sentence. Wait for it, no really.
The enemies of Democracy are
Everyone, be aware, "Third Position" is an American Neo-Nazi group that calls for "preservation of the European heritage" of the American population.
They're concerned that in a few generations our children won't still have such fair skin.
When you see this guy acting all normal, like one of the gang, bear in mind you're just dealing with Colonel Hans Landa with his uniform packed neatly away in storage.
I aim to make sure that as long as he posts here, the swastika on his forehead shines brightly. I'm just sorry I've already modded in this discussion, or I'd sign this little warning label, as I have done before.
It takes a criminal mind to want to be a tyrant. And anybody who says such things as this moron, in their secret heart, wants to BE the absolute tyrant...
A 90-year-old man doesn't have time to be a tyrant. If you take the trouble to read the article, Lovelock isn't advocating the suspension of democracy as a Good Thing(TM), be is making the point that people are too fucking stupid and inert to put aside their petty little squabbles for long enough do anything about bigger issues.
And what have you to say about the change in CO2 levels? Currently 380 ppm, and climbing, versus 280 ppm for millions of years.
You do realize that a billion years ago CO2 made up 20%(ish) of the atmosphere, and O2 was almost non-existent, right? Where did all that CO2 go? It had to go somewhere, and something had to put it there. Hmmm... lets think about that for a minute.
It was integral for the formation of life on this planet. The original bacteria that all life began as may not have formed at all if the earth's atmosphere were rich in oxygen. They make up the largest bio-mass on the planet by a large margin. They are extremely industrious too, in fact they were pivotal in taking our atmospheric CO2 levels down and raising the O2 levels that are necessary for more complex life to evolve. Where the hell do you think all that oil we've been burning comes from? Bacteria put it there, over and over and continuously. I can tell you they are still doing it, because I work on an oil field and hydrogen-sulfide gas - which is produced by live bacteria is extremely deadly - comes up with the oil, and builds up in oil storage containers because of the bacteria. These bacteria are still performing the same processes that put the oil in the ground millennia ago.
Furthermore, warming trends have always been a boon for life on the earth. Life has thrived the most when it was warmest, and on a geological time scale we are in a warm, but not peak, period.
Steady for millions of years, then a climb starting around 1750, the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution.
The Mann "hockey stick" study was debunked a decade ago, originally by a pair of Canadian statisticians, but others who have tried to reproduce his results have failed (he has refused to release his raw data, as well). It has only stayed in usage for political reasons - it is the only study that shows a pronounced spike for the current time period while showing . Mann's methodology was seriously flawed - in fact, 90% of his data came from a single tree ring (which covered up to 1850), the rest was from various weather station reports from 1850 onwards. Furthermore, he smoothed his data. That's not uncommon for data coming from multiple sources, you throw out the extremes and take the mean, but it is uncommon when your data comes from a single source, like Mann's. When other tree cores are taken from the surrounding area are added to the study the picture changes, and when you take cores from around the globe the picture becomes even clearer.
The Mann "hockey-stick" graph absurdly unrepresentative of the truth. In fact, other more comprehensive studies have shown that about 1,000 years ago temperatures were on par with what they are now, with some decades being even warmer than now - particularly just before the "Little Ice Age" that started in the 1300's and ended around 1750.
Go back about about 16,000 years ago (primarily ice core data and sea floor sedimentary rock cores) and you see a sudden, massive spike in temperatures over the course of about 50 years or so as the earth came out of an ice age. The global temperature rose about 20 times higher than it has in the last 150 years, and it did so in 1/3 the time. It also peaked at a higher global temperature than it is now, and on average over the last 15,000 years the temperature has been slowly dropping. There have been several surges back up and a couple significant drops, but on average it is going down even if you include the current upward trend. There were only about 5 million people on the earth at the time of this great warming period; it could not possibly have been man made. It was part of a natural glacial/intraglacial cycle that has been going on for ages (and I mean that in the literal, millions-of-years sense).
Not many people doubt that the global temperatures are on a current warming trend. What people doubt is the absurd notion that mankind is the sole cause of such war
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
An '-ism' is a belief. Beliefs make you blind to anything which disagrees with your belief. This guy's belief is an idealized fervor for the ecosystem. It's his dogma to help the environment at personal cost. He's blind to the fact that others won't do that.
As pointed out in, of all places the Kevin Smith movie Dogma, "I think it's better to have ideas. You can change an idea. Changing a belief is trickier. Life should malleable and progressive; working from idea to idea permits that. Beliefs anchor you to certain points and limit growth; new ideas can't generate. Life becomes stagnant."
People often think only religions that talk about supernatural beings foster beliefs and blindness to the differences of others. I think any kind of unquestioning blind faith is bad, even if very smart people promote their own variety.