So . . . Lovelock thinks he’s right because (like Galileo) they call him a crackpot?
Did you really think that’s what I meant?
And was my question rude, or you just don’t want to answer it?
The problem with any message board is that it has the illusion of a conversation without the benefit of seeing anyone’s expression or hearing tone of voice. There is no give and take in an actual discussion, but instead these dry words to be taken out of context or in ways not intended by the writer.
And sure, I am poorly communicating some major things. I’m not an expert in anything, let alone global heating, but it does strike me as a more important issue with more lasting ill-effects than the current nonsense we are currently willing to go to war over.
Here are some simplistic thoughts on solutions, which is what I had hoped this thread would become instead what it mutated into. Most likely all my fault. anyway:
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Out of the suburbs and back to the city: time to stop the sprawl and the need to drive in rush hour traffic by moving closer to work. Time to stop drainiing wet lands to build suburbs.
Time to stop building roads and malls to service the suburbs. -
Live where it is liveable. that Las Vegas has a yatch club is obscene. That Phoneix has a mold problem and golf courses is madness. Let the desert be desert. Let the swamps be swamps. If you are in a spot where it’s 111 degrees, and need to have AC, then you shouldn’t be there in the first place. If you can’t take the heat, get out of Arizona.
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Commute to work. I live in Chicago and more people than one would imagine are horrified by having to take the bus. Touch cookies. Just about everything downtown can be reached by train or bus. If you can afford a taxi, fine. But there’s no reason to drive downtown. None.
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Eat less meat. We currently toss out 40% of all food. We are pigs. Be aware of this and try not to be a pig.
If Lovelock is right, we have roughly 20 years to carry on as we are today and then things fall apart. Rapidly. Painfully. If he is wrong, is there any reason we shouldn’t be demanding bullet trains and better food in schools and to get off foreign oil?
Peace
Why? Because that’s how our Euro buddies do things? And how will you accomplish this? Force people to abandon their horrid (IYHO) suburbs and crowd into the cities?
Again, how do you propose to do this? Even assuming it’s a good idea (which I’m not convinced of…abandon a whole state? There isn’t enough scorn I can heap on such a silly pie in the sky notion), how are you going to convince millions of people to move away from places you don’t approve of? Where will they all go? Where will the businesses that reside there go? And most importantly…who is going to pay for it? You going to relocate millions of people and all the businesses on the governments dime?
Seriously, you have to live in the real world, and any proposals you give have to be realistic. Suggesting we all move back to the cities and basically abandon all of the places where we do ecological damage is silly. Do you realize that Washington DC was built on a wetlands? And that, by your definitions we’d have to abandon most of the South West AND California, and a lot of the Pacific coast? And much of the South, plus a large percentage of the Eastern Seaboard??
It’s nice to feel superior, but seriously, some people don’t happen to work near a mass transit stop…or live near where they work. I know, I know…you want to move all the people from the suburbs into the cities. Want to hazard a guess how many folks are in suburbs around Chicago that would have to move in with you? Where would you put them all? How would that effect the use of mass transit, do you suppose?
Um…the first sentence doesn’t really go with the rest of your statement. Not unless you can explain how eating less meat would save on the 40% of the food we toss out…or how that does or doesn’t make us pigs.
And of course, back here in the real universe, how are you going to get people to eat less meat? Why should they, for that matter? Because you don’t approve of meat? I could see a point (sort of) if you had said ‘eat less sea food, since we are destroying the fisheries’, but ‘eat less meat’?!?
This hippy dippy BS probably makes you feel good, and you can feel all superior and junk, but if you are SERIOUS about the environment then here is something real you can do…become rabidly pro-nuclear energy. Live, eat, sleep and shit the cause to get the OTHER silly hippy dippy types the hell out of the way so we can start developing our nuclear energy program and building new, safe, clean (no CO2) energy.
After that, get together with other like minded souls and form a consumer advocacy group to DEMAND low/no emissions vehicles. If you ask for it, and if you have sufficient numbers, companies will happily deliver the goods. If not US companies than Japanese, Korean, Euro or some other will do it, because here is a secret they never told you about in tree hugger school…companies are in the business of making money! That’s right…and if they see a really big market for something they will fall all over themselves to build it for you! Those little green pieces of paper you scorn are a valuable tool in getting them to do so. Thus far, sadly, there simply hasn’t been a real demand at the grass roots for such vehicles. Or, I should say, there has been a building demand for them…but it has built fairly slowly. Right now, green type vehicles are more for the yuppy crowd, so that they can feel good about themselves. But if you can get Joe Sixpack to WANT to buy a green car or truck you’ve won…because when companies see that ole Joe wants something they will fall all over themselves developing it and getting it to market.
A couple of final things you can do, if you are REALLY wanting to save the planet. Buy American (or European) and avoid Chinese and India products. The Chinese are building (dirty) coal fired plants like crazy to try and keep up with demand for their cheaper goods and services…and the India’s are doing the same thing. China has become the number one CO2 emitter in the last few years in part because of this. Even if you get the US and Europe to cut their emissions to a reasonable (read, Real World) level, China and India are just starting their climb up. As their standards of living improve it will climb even higher, while ours goes down, with a net effect that we are pretty much right where we started, CO2 levels wise.
Make people aware of the fact that THEY CAN SAVE MONEY (those green things again) if they optimize their homes with insulation, weather stripping, green appliances, bulbs, etc. Myself, I was amazed at how much we saved when we did this…it cut our energy bill (the only thing most people ACTUALLY care about) in half. More than half some months. If they live in the South West (after you fail to evict them), then ALSO make them aware that THEY CAN SAVE MONEY if they optimize their water usage, xeriscape or use artificial grass instead of the real stuff, etc etc. Again, I was amazed at how much we saved in our water bill by doing this. Between that and our roof mounted solar system we have saved an astounding amount of money.
There are lots of other things of course…real things you can do that will make a real difference in the real world. Our power infrastructure is old and we could start selective upgrades that will save us in energy loss during transmission (something like half the energy produced is lost during transmission…you can’t do much about a lot of that, but you could make the loss less). Lots of things…but if you want people to take you seriously you need to keep it real.
-XT
As I understand it, insurance companies are not reacting to expected changes due to global warming, but increased housing density in hurricane regions. A particular hurricane damages many more homes than it would have a few decades ago. Insurance companies are concerned that they wouldn’t be able to cover all the claims a big hurricane could generate.
It appears so.
Saving the planet --Made Easy!
COP15 proved that there is no way to break the chains of corporate control. We need other solutions. CO2 build up is a direct result of people consuming and wanting goods. Therefore, the major problem on the planet is too many people. Way too many. Certainly way too many Americans. It has been mentioned previously that the planet simply cannot afford 300 million Americans. We are big pigs.
The populations of Africa and India will sort themselves out, primarily through the time honored methods of starvation and war, but not enough people actually die from those causes to make it worth while. And not great number of Africans or Indians are driving cars to the mall to buy cheap shit in an effort to prove to their neighbors that they love their children. We can ignore them for the most part.
What is needed is a major curtailing of consumerism in the First World and realistically the only way that’s going to happen is with a huge, population reducing plague. Bird flu failed to live up to its promise, SARS doesn’t seem to be nearly as serious as first reported and the Swine flu has been a major disappointment as well.
We need to stop pussyfooting around and release small pox back into the general population. Small pox should be able to get our numbers down rapidly. This would not only cut down the population and thus our green house gas emissions, but greatly reduce the levels of unemployment, solve the problems of prison overcrowding as well as ease traffic congestion during rush hours.
A major small pox outbreak would automatically produce better school scores as the overall pool of students testing would be smaller allowing for more one on one instruction and grades rewarded for children who have lost one or both parents could be taken into account.
Less people would mean entire Congressional districts could be shut down, thus shrinking the House of Representatives and the number of lobbyists required to write legislation for them. Universal health care would seem more desirable and easier to pass if we were only concerned with covering 100 million people as opposed to the current 304 million Americans.
Further reductions in green house gases would result by a corresponding reduction in the consumption of livestock, primarily pigs and cows. It would no longer be cost effective to warehouse livestock in tight pens, but make more sense for there to be fewer of them foraging on their own.
Water consumption would also be cut back, as suburbs would be abandoned, allowing for river systems to recover, some rivers would be allowed to reclaim floodplains, thus benefiting the habitat of several birds and other animals. The need for smaller crop yields, would reduce the amount of fertilizer considerably and this in turn might lead to the recovery of the ‘dead zone’ in the Gulf of Mexico and in other parts of the ocean as well.
A dramatic decrease in human activity might buy us the time we need to seriously address global heating. The CO2 is already in the atmosphere and some heating cannot be avoided, but we might be able to avoid total destruction and have the time to find the energy needs we require that won’t smother us.
Write your Senator and Representative today, requesting the US government release as much weaponized small pox to the world population as soon as possible. Like a sci fi movie from the 1950s, the Pentagon can actually save the planet, but only if they are willing to destroy it.Or we could just build a bunch of nuclear reactors and live nicely. But that would be too easy a solution for the big cause to save the planet.
Well then, I guess just go with it. It’s obvious that you have enough self superiority for 2…hell, maybe 3. Or, perhaps you are just crazy. I mean, anyone seriously advocating the deaths of billions of people probably doesn’t have all their oars in the water. Or were you being serious there? I always thought that the goats were trying to cross the bridge…maybe the story is backwards.
-XT
Or we could acknowledge that it is getting cooler and the summer Arctic ice has grown considerably since 2007 despite predictions to the contrary. While they’re getting the computer models fixed we can continue to work on actual solutions instead of playing co2 shuffleboard.
But how much data does one need to observe before it becomes reasonable to consider it? I have the national weather service page for my area bookmarked because I use it to keep track of snowfall amounts, and they also give monthly summaries about things such as temperature dev. from normal. It only goes back to 1/05 but these are the averages for the years here:
2005: +0.33
2006: +2.45
2007: +0.325
2008: +0.25
2009: -0.69
2006’s numbers do look alarming, but that’s one year. The rest of the numbers haven’t moved much at all, so it’s easy to see why one might look out their window over the past five years and think “seems like normal weather to me, what’s the fuss all about?” How much longer do they need to track trends before their observations become valid? Five more years? Ten? Twenty?
Yes, but these Asian glaciers are the primary source for rivers such as the Indus, Ganges, Brahmaputra, Mekong, etc, that billions of people rely on for irrigation and drinking. A bit different than losing the snows of Kilimanjaro.
There will always be natural changes in environment that affect some people. The historic progression of central Africa desert areas is affected by the tectonic rise of the Himalayan Mountains.
“soylent green is peeeeee-pullllllll!”
2 things to consider, and they are on the video BTW:
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The national weather service deals mostly with just 1.6% of the surface of the earth (The USA)
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That is not Climate, but Weather.
Climate researchers look at more than 15 (researchers also mention up to 20) years of yearly data to establish trends.