Interesting viewpoint...

I've often wondered about some past epochs on this world: say, the Carboniferous Era when atmospheric pressure was higher; oxygen content of the atmosphere was perhaps as high as 30-35%; some bugs were the size of ponies; dragonflies with 3 foot wing spans; and global warming (presumably from vast volcanism) had warmed the planet so much that it was tropical all the way to the poles. Why didn't Earth become the oven baked hell that Venus is? Why didn't we get a runaway greenhouse then? I don't know, but life not only didn't end, it flourished!

I think Earth exists in various states of equillibrium--over time, this equilibrium naturally changes: whether by solar activity, asteroid impacts, or by humans burning fossile fuels, the Earths' climate equillibrium will eventually shift. We will eventually get more supervolcanic eruptions; and who knows when a big rock is going to smack us all again...

I agree that we should reduce or eliminate our dependence upon foreign oil; I don't necessarily agree that gobal warming is going to 'kill us all' like some of the alarmists make it out.

It seems that he has come to the conclusion that I had some time back that if the climate situation is as bad as the alarmists say, then we are doomed!  Of course I doubt that it is that bad. 

I like the following quote:

Scientists, he says, have moved from investigating nature as a vocation, to being caught in a career path where it makes sense to "fudge the data".

I have been reading a lot about James Lovelock and I think that a lot of his statements are meant to be provocative and cynical in order to employ a reverse psychology. James will make a statement like humans are too stupid to find a solution to the problem of global warming or that since we are all going to die in a Venus like inferno we might as well buy a big gas guzzling carbon polluting Sports Utility Vehicle and live life to the fullest. Its like a Physician telling a fat man or a chain smoker to keep enjoying his cigaretes and his fattening food because he is going to die anyways.

The problem with the Environmental movement is that environmentalists do not want high technology solutions to the problem of pollution because the environmentalist thinks that high technology is the problem. Before the environmentalists championed the electric car but now they oppose the electric car because they believe that in reality the electric cars will use nuclear power plants to generate the electricity.

And if it is true what the environmentalists say that billions of people will die because of runaway global warming then the environmentalists should embrace nuclear power even if nuclear is as dangerous as they say it is for no other reason than the fact that nuclear is the far lesser evil. However an environmentalist would rather have billions die because of global warming than one person die due to a nuclear accident.

Environmentalism is like a religion and to an environmentalists techno fixes are like immoral prostitutes using condems. What an environmentalist wants is a lifestyle change and if you do not go along with their system of ethics of putting Earth First then they want you to bear the consequences which is what they call personal responsibility.

I know it's preaching to the quire here but:

by embracing high technology, and actually leveraging it, I can see in a couple of thousand years or so a ring station built around the planet with relatively modest elevators reaching all the way to the ground. Utilizing beamed microwave power stations intercepting beams on a tangent and then hardlining it directly to loads on the ground, the ring station becomes a planetary backbone for the grid. Tangential linear traction motors on the outer surface of the ring can accelerate vehicles and payloads to orbital velocities or better with little or no cost. Billions of people could comfortably live and work in the ring, and the entire Earth could even be allowed to become a nature preserve.


Now if that isn't 'saving' the planet, I don't know what the **** it is?

By becoming a truly advanced species we could, someday, take representative samples of nearly everthing alive on Earth and transplant them on other suitable worlds as we find them. Or by then, we could perhaps engineer a planet from a dead world as the 'terraforming' crowd is fond of. When the time comes and the Sun is about to kill the Earth (in as little as 500 or 600 million years,) we could, by then if we chose to, save the Earth by moving it away from the Sun. We could, if we were advanced enough, build enormous fusion plants on the moon to beam artificial Sunlight onto the Earth, and move both on an interstellar trajectory to find a new sun to orbit.

There is no limit really to what we could do. Perhaps one day we may find a way to escape the 'entropy death' of the Universe itself, if we as a race live long enough and are wise enough. Perhaps this is how our universe came to be in the first place!

Once the usual conceptual limitations of energy and resources are exceeded, economic limitations slough away, and infact the whole concept of 'economy' [limited resources divided amongst unlimited demand] transforms into something else entirely.

Wow...I guess I'd better go back to bed. I'm home sick from work, and obviously the NyQuill is talking!

:)


-- Edited by GoogleNaut on Monday 24th of May 2010 03:13:09 PM