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Part of the problem with getting people to act is that we typically do not act until something bad happens. Do you think countries would be abandoning, shutting, or otherwise hardening nuclear power plants if Fukushima didn't happen?
Would New Orleans have ever gotten a better flood control system had Katrina not taken it out?
We "knew" these things could happen, but chose to play the odds it wouldn't - and we were wrong. There are many other examples as well. BTW, I am glad that peak oil prediction was wrong. But there will be peak oil at one point.
So we have a good idea that the odds are that the Earth is changing - historically it always has. So, what are we going to do about it and how are we going to adapt? Are we going to wait until a big change hits and we get blindsided?
Extremism sells books. Imagine if the "Vampire Diaries" turned out to be about a guy who gave hickies. Do you think it would stand a chance of being read by more than a few people? The extremists are closer to cult members than realists or pragmatists or scientists.
The oceans literally CANNOT rise that fast, have not risen that fast. Something called physics and the heat required to make the phase change from solid to liquid water don't bother to read trashy scare tactic books. Moving industry from the U.S. to China, where the pollution is greater than it was in the U.S. in the 1950s does NOTHING to reduce emissions except add the costs and effects of massive transportation. The extremists are probably MORE of a problem to real progress along these fronts than any industry that operated in the U.S.
The same people that predict the ends are the same people that lobby the administration that boasts how much oil this country now exports.
Here some are proclaiming the benefits of electric cars, solar power, wind and other alternatives all the time the very people they support go about ramping up oil production, not for domestic use so that perhaps here so it could be used to fuel the development of better systems that in the end reduce the need for oil to start with, no, it is exported.
There is big money in predicting the ends. Gore made untold millions. Moderator cut: inflammatory. The rest predicting time is short? Follow the money.
Last edited by MissingAll4Seasons; 02-21-2014 at 04:05 PM..
Part of the problem with getting people to act is that we typically do not act until something bad happens. Do you think countries would be abandoning, shutting, or otherwise hardening nuclear power plants if Fukushima didn't happen?
Would New Orleans have ever gotten a better flood control system had Katrina not taken it out?
We "knew" these things could happen, but chose to play the odds it wouldn't - and we were wrong. There are many other examples as well. BTW, I am glad that peak oil prediction was wrong. But there will be peak oil at one point.
So we have a good idea that the odds are that the Earth is changing - historically it always has. So, what are we going to do about it and how are we going to adapt? Are we going to wait until a big change hits and we get blindsided?
The event that is so significant it affects a greater part of the planet or even this country isn't something anyone can do anything about.
It is human arrogance that gets us to think we can control much of the future. In the USA a few hundred people are killed and it is a disaster of disasters. Anywhere else in the world, hundreds of thousands are killed and in a few short weeks all if forgotten as far as we are concerned.
Katrina? Compare that to almost any other natural disaster and it doesn't even register.
According to FEMA, Katrina is, " the single most catastrophic natural disaster in U.S. history."
According to FEMA, the total estimate damage for Katrina is $108 billion. This makes it the "costliest hurricane in U.S. history."
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I still fail to see your point? If anything you made mine, we prepared for Katrina (we could have done better though) and a larger loss of life was avoided. So we could prepare for sea level rise and climate change.
I think we should all do everything we can do even if it doesn't seem like too much. We should also continue to support space exploration for the sake of the continuation of the species.
To recycle something you must buy something, to buy something you must earn "credits", you earn credits by making yourself useful to the civilization machine that produced stuff you may recycle to feel better about yourself. Simple act of proving your worth to the machine by jumping through the right hoops from the ripe age of 3, through 12 years of containment in HS, 4 years of college and possibly 3 years + of grad school generates enormous damage and mountains of waste. Once you've got all the labels the machine requires, the environmental damage you generate as a tiny part of the machine dwarfs anything you can damage as an individual consumer having limited quantity of "credits" to your name and/or very limited property rights.
He's right. Only a "warp" drive can preserve technological civilization by spreading humans elsewhere. There is none. Even assuming that "the end in 20 years" is overly pessimistic, doing the same thing for over 10,000 years (controlling environment) and expecting different survival outcomes just because our control methods are semi-scientific, unlike those 150 years ago, is a definition of insanity and hubris. Human science must be nothing short of divine to control environment in a way that would preserve and perpetuate fundamentally self-destructive concept of civilization, i.e. forever more complex, forever mushrooming, forever more controlling entity limited to a single planet. It's either a "warp" drive, mass "paradigm" shift or virtually assured mass die off, gradual or abrupt. Al Gorish green capitalism and "green" activist futility is just that - futile. I would bet a "warp" drive is more realistic option than "paradigm" shift despite lack of physics. That's what the best brains should work on.
Last edited by RememberMee; 02-26-2014 at 08:08 PM..
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