Showing posts with label tipping point. Show all posts
Showing posts with label tipping point. Show all posts

Friday, June 8, 2012

NATURE survey confirms LIBERTARIAN GREED is humanity's dominant ideology

      Okay, okay, who uses gallows humour to describe our terrestrial spiral downwards into total disaster?
      But I just couldn't resist the opportunity to make a pun and a serious point about the just-published, highly depressing, BARNOSKY SURVEY.

     On June 6 2012, two dozen scientists led by Professor Barnosky issued a survey style report in the science journal NATURE, on whether the Earth is approaching another 'biological global tipping point' similar to past disasters caused by oxygen-emitting microbes, asteroids, massive volcanic eruptions or ice ages.
    Those massive die-offs of biodiversity led to the killing of from 50 to 95% of all species in a very short time in geological terms.
    They usually happened when 50 to 90% of the various individual, smaller, biosphere regions were disrupted.
    So how is MAN-THE-TAKER stacking up ?
    As disaster-causers go, pretty good, thank you very much.
    Currently 7 billion of us, most of us relatively poor in North American terms, have converted 43% of all the Earth's surface to agriculture or urban use.
     Soon, by 2050, we will be 9.3 billion - and that is 9.3 billion ambitious humanoids all striving to use resources 'just like a Canadian' : if they and their governments succeed, make that to be a 300% increase over what we consume today.
    Since we already directly consume, just our one species, 20% of the primary terrestrial bio production, I see that as putting us well past a dreadful tipping point ----60% will be consumed by us.
    Not enough food left for the bees that make our crops grow, to let our trees give us oxygen and get rid of CO2, not enough ocean microbes to kickstart the entire food cycle and other vital 're-cycle cycles'.
    In addition, we have broken up and separated large swaths of similar terrain by our human settlements and roads - this will prevent many species from steadily moving north or south within similar terrain, to gradual adjust to a rapidly changing climate.
    Stuck in their old habitat, now not right for their kind, they won't adjust quick enough in most cases - they will simply die.
   Movement, not mutations, is how most species - humans too - have always adjusted to rapid deadly changes in their own little biosphere.
    Now here , at last, is where the pun comes in : this was a survey published in NATURE but also a survey of Nature -Nature as in  all that stuff outside our air-conditioned little computer rooms.
    It says its hurting and it says it is because one species - ours - is too greedy, too individualistic, too self-centred, too egotistic - to share the earth's wealth or to even put a little in.
    Nature says it knows what ideology drives humanity
and it is Isobel Paterson,Rose Wilder Lane and Ayn Rand's Libertarianism.
    The Three Harpies From Hell : hellbent on killing Mother Nature and Mankind. Female Serial killers.
    Greed is not Good : we need to develop a set of moral values that sees greed as evil as we today see murder as.
    Global Commensality is the Matter to Libertarianism's Anti-Matter, our cheese to their chalk, our water to their oil.
   It does not say "let us take, take, take and never give anything back". It says "we will only take some of the world's resources and protect all of it -- we will share with all lifeforms the only lifeboat we can see in this vast hostile Universe".
   So which side are you on ?  Its a line in the sand : either for skygod libertarian greed -----or------for earthling commensality with all other lifeforms.....
  

Thursday, June 7, 2012

As Earth approaches tipping point of disaster, SPACERS head for "PLANET B" : Mars

   Yesterday, June 6th 2012 should have marked the 68th anniversary of a famous 'invasion' of Earth : D-Day, the invasion of Nazi-held Europe.
   That invasion seems ( but only seems) to have gone un-noticed in the general gloom of a report released in NATURE that same day.

   A group of about two dozen scientists from a wide variety of disciplines had gathered to see if there were signs that the Earth's biosphere had ,or was , approaching the tipping point into non-stop disaster.
   They knew that stable flexible systems ( biological,mechanical, financial, political, etc ) can withstand short term, small, assaults by adjusting.
       But under large and prolonged assaults they can suddenly go into chaotic behavior until they return to relative, long term, stability at a very different set of arrangements --- at possibly a higher or possibly lower level of activity.
    In terms of the entire Earth ,we can study the remains of such past dramatic topping points : distant mass extinctions as well as relatively recent sudden shifts into and out of near global glaciation.
   The scientists in the NATURE report say we are close to disaster by pointing out how much of the Earth's surface and bio product is under the sway of just one species: us.
   It is close to 50% now and going to hit 65% soon, as humanity goes from 6 billion mostly poor people to 9 billion hungry want-to-be-rich people.
    We are takers ,not givers, and failing to share the world with the ultimate primary producers who actually give us all our oxygen, all of our food, all of the carefully balanced atmosphere.
   Past tipping point disasters have come from similarly unbalancing of hitherto balanced systems : the danger figure quoted is 50% - 90% etc.
   They freely admit that they could be right or they could be wrong.
    It is Russian Roulette, but for 9 billion.
    But on balance, these scientists say the disaster gun is fully loaded.
     So we believe them and  prepare, at great cost, to reduce the disaster.
     But when we pull the trigger 50 years from now - nothing happens - no disaster.
   False scare. "We was right,waste of money", exalts the DENIERS.
    Or perhaps, and more likely, the Deniers win today's battle : they say don't fear, the environmental gun isn't loaded - relax - and we believe them and do nothing.
    But 50 years from now, when we do pull the trigger, it does go off and 6 billion out of 9 billion die starvation deaths.
    I would, personally, prefer to prepare for disaster and be proven wrong by my survival, than to do nothing and be proven wrong---- by my own death.
    In other words, the "disaster" of good news, to me, is no disaster at all.
    But not everybody took the new news of disaster as gloomily as Earthlings did, or as derisively as the Deniers did.
    The deniers' fellow travellers ( for once, not a metaphor at all) the SPACERS, were taking the impending doom of Planet Earth very seriously.
   They have a Plan B, or more accurately, a Planet B : Mars.
    Soon they see all of humanity, or at least all of humanity with a spare million bucks under the mattress, living in Mars colonies.
   They don't see any need to worry about reducing this upcoming disaster for a planet they already see as filthy and clapped-out of mineral and energy wealth .
     Instead the science and technology of the godless scientists is about to rapture-up the wealthy 1% into a grand new secular heaven.
    We, or at least the wealthy 1% of we, were talking about invasions after all ,on the 68th anniversary of the D-Day invasion: not "The Invasion from Mars" of H G Wells, but rather "The Invasion of Mars".
    Ironic - no ????????