Comments

1. #1 darwinsdog

   August 3, 2010

   ..why on earth would we not use our wits to ensure that changes are minimised or directed in a way that best suits us?

   She answered her own question:

   ..we’re fools..

   We haven’t ceased to make war against ourselves, either, have we?

2. #2 adelady

   August 3, 2010

   Wars? Wars generally start because of discontent. Megalomaniacs have a hard time rousing a comfortable, well-fed population busily occupied in making a living and maintaining healthy families. Had the advanced industrial part of the world taken the path of power generation by technologies like wind and solar, the currently impoverished regions of the world would have had a better chance of pulling themselves up by their own efforts. They would have, or aid agencies could have, been able to instal village scale power systems independent of non-existent power grids.

   Anyhoo, I don’t have a tardis, so I can’t go back and order anyone around and make them do things better.

   But all of us can do better now.

3. #3 Jack Savage

   August 8, 2010

   It was that kind of thinking that built the Maginot Line.
   Environmentalist thinking has crystallised into an obsession with CO2 driven catastrophic warming to the practical exclusion of all else.
   And when we have spent trillions of dollars and destroyed a lot of our civilisation and it proves not to be the case, what then?
   Wait and see. By all means make sensible and affordable adjustments to our lifestyles, and this particularly applies to you Americans with your absurd motor cars, air conditioning, short haul flying and general profligacy.

4. #4 darwinsdog

   August 9, 2010

   I don’t think your assessment of “environmentalist thinking” is at all correct, Jack. I consider myself to be an “environmentalist” and to my way of thinking, anthropogenic global warming is just one of the serious environmental problems driving the collapse of biodiversity and mass extinction of species worldwide. To my mind, the real problem is that human overpopulation is causing decline in ecosystem integrity and the outright collapse of ecosystems, in turn causing the diversity crisis that is the real overall problem. AGW is just one of the specific drivers of the extinction crisis that in the long run, threatens even our own species. I can’t think of many scientifically informed environmentalists so “obsessed” with AGW that they exclude all other environmental problems from consideration. Of course, many environmentalists focus attention on specific problems but even those who specialize in climate change issues don’t discount or dismiss the seriousness of other problems facing the biosphere.

5. #5 crakar24

   August 9, 2010

   Darwinsdog,

   You like all tree huggers believe depopulation is the magic bullet, less people (useless eaters) equals less carbon pollution.

   Example of a tree hugger

   We need to get rid of coal fired power stations because AGW will kill the animals, but we cant replace them with Hydro because the damming of rivers kills the animals and we cant replace them with nuke because the radiation will kill the animals.

   We can build 27 sq kilometers of solar panels to replace coal power as this obviously does not kill the animals and we can build millions of wind mills because this does not kill the animals either, well except for the birds it decapitates.

   Of course it is hard to hold a conversation with a tree hugger because their mobile phone is constantly interrupting you so it is best to communicate via twitter or skype. Of course you must catch them before they go on holidays using jet aircraft as their preferred method of transportation.

   Dont ever forget even though they use modern heating and cooling, transport powered via internal combustion engines or drink cool refreshments using the miracles of modern refridgeration techniques whilst watching the game on massive plasma TV’s in their home theatre, their primary concern is with the animals.

   So in summary when people like Mandas and yourself start decided who can live and who can die from a cave thats when i will take what you have to say seriously.

6. #6 mandas

   August 9, 2010

   crakar

   You win! I have decided who lives and who dies! Guess who is the first to go!!

7. #7 Jack Savage

   August 10, 2010

   “Had the advanced industrial part of the world taken the path of power generation by technologies like wind and solar..”

   Well, we did build windmills and sailing ships…so I guess you could say we did take that path as far as wind was concerned. We used the sun to evaporate our salt pans and to find our position on the high seas…Then we moved on.
   Please think it through and tell me how we could have come to the technology of PV solar panels and wind turbines without having gone through a fossil fuel driven industrial revolution? Even having gone through a couple of centuries of industrial revolution and with technology that can build the Large Hadron Collider,nuclear power stations and a two billion transistor silicon chip we are still struggling to make PV and windturbines a practical proposition.
   As for the developing countries, there are plenty out there still lacking a wood stove, basic health care and sanitation, clean drinking water and enough food so perhaps we ought to worry more about those needs first rather than equipping them with a wind turbine to power their macbooks, TV’s and refrigerators.
   P.S. What was it about your plan of aid agencies installing their power systems that constitutes “pulling themselves up” by their own efforts? Pulling themselves up to where?
   I do wonder if you have ever spent any time in a third world country. (I do not consider two weeks in Bali or a weekend in Acapulco or a trip to Macchu Picchu would qualify)
   Sorry but for a thread which started out lauding “our” amazing intelligence I do consider your thinking to be rather off-beam.

8. #8 Chris S.

   August 10, 2010

   Jack: “…perhaps we ought to worry more about those needs first rather than equipping them with a wind turbine…”

   Why can’t we do both?

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

   Oh, does 9 months working as a volunteer in Zambia + more than a year in Thailand qualify as enough time in a third world country?