I read a few of the posts here and it looks like a few things are going on.
The media overdramatizes nuanced and boring scientific information. We digest it and become either:
a/ Excited/fearful about the dire warning
b/ skeptical about the dire warning because we’ve heard it all before
I was an Environmental Resources Sciences student at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario Canada back in the day. Back then we were told that by the year 2000 maple syrup would cost its weight in gold because acid rain is killing the forests in northern Ontario and Quebec.
It never happened.
I read Gwynne Dyer’s book Climate Wars (written about 06/08?). He relayed dire predictions from specific scientists with the IPCC that said Mexico would be uninhabitable due to global warming by 2010.
Nope.
But the there’s no denying the planet is warming in key places like the Arctic, where temps can be gleaned for hundreds even thousands of years.
What do we do about it?
That’s where it gets annoying because the most vocal on both sides are just annoying people.
Let’s face it, neo-hippy “Occupy” kids and their patchouli-oiled ‘return to nature’ solutions are about as interesting as fist-pounding right-wingers who comically deny reality in their button-down efforts to flog some faux-Ayn-Randian, free market dead-horse solution.
Both are wrong.
The hippies ‘naturalist’ solutions, besides pulling tokes of solar-powered vaporizers - necessarily require us (and them) to die.
Organics, non-GMO, absolutism in energy conservation requires a majority of the population of Earth to die-off.
In this way the “peace-and-love” hippy solution is even more abhorrent and violent than anything right-wing.
Although the right doesn’t need to come up with solutions, they’re satisfied sticking their heads in the sand while parroting random quotes from Atlas Shrugged and Wealth of Nations.
The solutions start with identifying the problem in bold terms.
1/ We need to continue to consume energy at present levels and more.
2/ We need the planet to remain habitable to humans long enough for us to leave begin colonizing space.
Those solutions aren’t going to be found in the 20th Century-style, back-to-nature script calling for non-GMO organics.
GMO will play a vital role because our energy and food production solutions will not be found in the science of the very large ie. Wind, geothermal, solar … but in the very small.
There are projects already underway where scientists have developed (ahem – genetically modifyed) bacteria to be used as microscopic super-batteries.
These batteries will one-day deliver as much power as we need and will never run out because it will be it’s own self-contained eco-system.
Eventually we humans will leave this planet. We will do so on spaceships that produce food and oxygen from machines out of substances found nearly anywhere in the universe.
In the far future the entire universe will eventually be drained of energy, except what we make. We will survive the end of the universe too.
If Nikolai Kardeshev and Freeman Dyson are to be believed; “humans” will board a kind-of spaceship that takes our future species through a kind-of quantum rift to a new parallel universe that has only recently undergone the big-bang.
And perhaps the cycle begins anew.
Woa… shouldn’t have taken so deep a toke from that solar powered vape
