So we're all fucked

[Schmeltz]

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fourth Assessment Report (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPCC_Fourth_Assessment_Report): Planet's broken with no way to fix it.

One can only wonder what impact this will have on global society in the next thousand years if it's really going to take that long for natural systems to make up for all the disruption caused by human activity. What will become of all the port facilities if water levels rise dramatically in the next century - and keep on rising? How will more severe weather impact agriculture? And will the people in charge right now be remembered as innovative leaders who took immediate steps to reduce the potentially enormous effects of these changes, or as muleheaded fools who continued to resist calls for caps on emissions and changes in fossil fuel consumption and other such practices?

I think I already know the answer to the last one.

[EN[i]GMA]

Hey, if the American Enterprise Institute calls this report bullshit, that's good enough for me, you know?

[freetibet]

That's just eco-ghanda. :mad:

But seriously, I'm startin' to feel a bit uncomfortable... There was this report 'Limits to Growth' or sth like that 30 years ago and then the same report but re-visited 20 years later. As far as I know, nobody gave a damn about it, so I guess You do know the [correct] answer, Schmeltz.

[Schmeltz]

You've completely missed the point, not that that's a surprise or anything. This is not sinister propaganda designed by evil commies for the sole purpose of malevolently crippling American capitalism, this is the conclusion of hundreds of the planet's top minds and specialists from dozens of countries who have devoted their careers to the analysis of these phenomena. Nor is this speculatory prognostication like the reports of previous generations, which at any rate were concerned largely with measuring known stocks of resources (which turns out to be a variable quantity) against levels of consumption. These findings are not concerned with the level or amount of resources that remain to be consumed, but with the effects of the practice of consumption on the planet's environment. And the end result is not that we're going to run out of oil and whatever will we do because we can't drive our SUVs anymore, but that our activities have altered the biosphere to an extent that may radically redefine our interaction with it and with each other for centuries to come.

To return to a more serious level of discussion - I find it tough to imagine that this problem can be dealt with in a way free of some kind of terribly violent cataclysm or severe cultural disruption. There have been prior instances in history where large-scale climate change has prompted very violent shifts between populations, leading to dramatic regression in the quality (and quantity) of life in major centers of civilization. If radical changes of this kind are going to be prevented, then we have to start working on this now. Like today. I don't think it too far-fetched to consider that scientific findings like these could herald very drastic negative changes in the conduct of human relations as we understand them.

[yeahwho]

Each generation is tasked with a great war, it looks as if this generation's war is with it's own consumption.

I do not subscribe to the apocalyptic thought when it comes to our environment. It is about time the some fucking body in a world leadership role seriously shines the light on the elephant in the living room.

The whales are trying to take our land.

[SobaViolence]

the earth's got feelings, too. and it's fighting back.

Present levels of carbon dioxide - which continue to rise inexorably each year - are unprecedented for the long period of geological history that scientists are able to analyse from gas samples trapped in the frozen bubbles of deep ice cores.

However, the IPCC points to a potentially more sinister development: the rate of increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is beginning to accelerate. Between 1960 and 2005 the average rate at which carbon dioxide concentrations increased was 1.4 ppm per year. But when the figures are analysed more closely, it becomes apparent that there has been a recent rise in this rate of increase to 1.9 ppm per year between 1995 and 2005.

we're making this planet our own Hell (http://www.commondreams.org/headlines07/0203-03.htm)

[freetibet]

Eco-ghanda was a joke, Schmeltz :)

I recently read in an Economic Geography student's book that Earth could be inhabited by even 15-25 billion people but if they all lived like peeps from California ["californian life style"] - there would be enough place only for 2 billion ;]

[Schmeltz]

If we get burned down to two billion people shit's gonna go downhill real quick.