Suppose you were the head of a family, and that you lived in a house at the base of a steep hill. You had lived here happily for many years, raising your children. Then you began to notice that the hillside was deteriorating. Grassy ground cover was disappearing, and gullies were eroding. During a couple of torrential rainstorms, some small mudslides had cascaded down, almost reaching your property. You began to worry that if a big mudslide happened, it might destroy your house, even kill you and your family. What should you do?
I can think of three possible responses. You can ignore the problem, thinking that the hillside was there before you built your house, and will probably be there long after you are gone, and that there is nothing you can do about it anyway. Nature will do whatever it is going to do. Or, you can try to take some corrective actions…plant grasses and ground covers to absorb the runoff, and trees shrubs to hold the soil and prevent further erosion. You could even build a barrier to divert a mudslide if it should occur. As a last resort, you could move your house…or sell it to an unsuspecting rube and buy another house further from the hill.
Now expand this scenario to include the entire earth and the global warming and pollution problems. And instead of a family, think of the "family" of the human race. The "hillside" that may come careening down on us all is runaway heating of the ecosphere, or some catastrophic synergistic effect of atmospheric pollution…or maybe a combination of the two.
The current attitude of our government is denial. Do nothing, continue with business as usual. They claim that we need "more studies" to determine how much of the clearly measurable global warming is caused by human activities.
I think a wiser course would be to heed the overwhelming scientific consensus that says human activities have contributed to the problem, and to take some prudent corrective measures now, before it is too late.
Of course we could take the third alternative and move. Maybe Star Trek will loan us the Enterprise.
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Comments: 31
{/sarcasm}
aw, who am i kidding? there is no end to the sarcasm.
got us thinking, don't they bert?
And the sad thing about your 'rapture' comment is that I think there are people on the Religious Right who aren't worried about environmental problems. They plan to be outta here real soon, so why bother?
I think there isn't much in this world that infuriates me more than that attitude...that this life on earth is just a temporary interlude leading to the 'real' one up there in the sky with the Lord. It devalues life, the earth and everything on it.
I think it's far easier to cling to the belief that we are all helpless, and that every action we take would result in total futility. The Right hasn't done much to prove to the rest of Optimistic America that they, for the most part, are full of pessimism and that they espouse extremist, harmful ideologies. Which is, ironies of all ironies, contradictory to what the Scriptures have to tell us about labor and the fruits that can be gleaned from it.
My Bible says, in Luke 19:13, "... occupy until I come..." (in a passage about what people should be doing while they wait for Jesus to return). I'm quite familiar with Rapture theology, and most of the other Christians I know (hundreds) adhere to that, but I don't know any of them that believe in just laying back and irresponsibly or lazily waiting for Jesus to return.
As for what they believe about global warming, they're probably split about 50-50 on how serious it is. But in Genesis 1:28, God puts Man in a stewardship or management role over the earth. Perhaps many Christians are still finding out what that means, but I for one believe that it requires us to clean it up and treat it as a precious resource, not to be squandered. I'm fully in favor of green technology and doing whatever is necessary to stem global warming.
Personally, I don't think there's going to be a Rapture, but that's a different subject.
A question that comes to mind is; what is the impact of coming peak oil and the decline of oil availability? How will this impact global warming as a concept? We heard in last night's speech that even this administration is willing to give voice (if nothing else) to the energy issue. Are we, in the long term, basically safe from this issue provided we can live through what seems to be set in motion already?
I have noticed the effects of global warming. The melting away of the glaciers, the odd weather patterns that are changing for the worse. How many hurricanes have to wipe out entire cities before the government has all the studies it needs? In the last twenty years I've noticed that inthe winter it is warmer than it is supposed to be most years or to the extreme on being cold. The snow is less than it used to be and so is the rain. It seems to hit in the south and California who used to be described as having very little rain is flooded on a regular basis then fried by extreme drought and fires. Strange isn't it?
"...there are people on the Religious Right..."
I certainly did not mean that everyone in that category was being irresponsible about the environment. In fact, I think it is probably a small minority. Most people...Christian or not...share a concern about what is happening to the earth right now.
My personal feeling is that most of the problems are related to overpopulation. I have read that the "sustainable" level is around 2-3 billion, and we are now at 6 and climbing. The term scientists use is "population overshoot" implying that it will eventually settle back to sustainable levels. Imagine the chaos...famines, wars, political and economic upheaval that will happen in the course of 3 or 4 billion people dying!
i also don't think (m)any of these political leaders today are christians, either - they are professional liars.
they are not doing the job of representing their voters, they are doing the work of those that brung 'em to the party, so to speak.
"Our government, I believe, responds to what the people "demand" of them through their spending habits, actions and to some degree their voting. As usual with me, I feel that the majority of people must change their actions, not simply their rhetoric, if there is to be real change in how this country is managed."
i don't believe that's the case anymore. we are a manipulated society. for instance, before bush 'took' office back in 2000, were you thinking, "well, i feel as a nation that we need to undertake the mission of transforming the middle east into a democracy - one that uses AT&T telephones, and drives Ford SUVs and eats at McDonald's.
i don't think we were, no. of course, that little terrorist attack came along and changed our way of thinking, didn't it - or did it? i seem to recall right after 9/11 that the world stopped in its tracks for a moment, and the whole world "felt like Americans" for a few days there.
now, did we as a nation decide that we should form a grand coalition of the willing and start dropping bombs everywhere? no, i believe our politicians made that suggestion. i recall that we were all feeling that the world should come together for peaceful reactions to deal with a 'post 9/11 world' (again, a phrase made up by politicians with good reason and used to good effect).
iraq was not the war on terror.
$237 billion later - and we're still being told that another terrorist attack is inevitable. it's all manipulation - forced reality.
i believe that true public and transparent campaign financing is the lynchpin to this whole mess of a machine. our "democracy" is a facade; millions upon millions of dollars are spent every year on public relations and campaigning. laws have been written by these career politicians to insulate them from responsibility and to keep them in office for years at a time.
just look at how many incumbents there are in office right now. politicians aren't in denial, bert - they are actively taking us down this road. there is an effort right now in california to "reform" the CEQA law. that's the california environmental quality act, which regulates reviews before development projects can move forward.
guess who thinks the law needs reforming. hint: it's not the voters.
it's a matter of how we use our resources. again - a guy delivering a pizza to me in a huge suv is an indication of awareness/concern/reality at this time in our country.
And the current path is for countries like China to emulate us, the great wastrels! The Chinese people all want a refrigerator, and a TV and maybe even an SUV, and their diet is higher in beef and chicken.
Agree. Sitting around and studying the situation is what I often hear "liberals" accused of.
Let's be candid about this. The major source of pollution is, in addition to our cars and plans, is big industry. The current powers that be are pro-business to the point of ignoring human casualties (look at the loosening of the Clear Air Act, the inaction of major manufacturers with finding cleaner solutions, the gutting of the EPA). If coal mining could be used as an example, haven't we had several instances recently of disasters in mines? And, has anyone taken a clear look at how regulations have been loosened (some on the books for over 30 years) to benefit mine operators at the expense of lives?
I would think that people of conscience (I'll include the Religious Right here) would insist that our apparent role as major destroyers of planet Earth runs against most, if not all, of what benefits humanity and the rest of the inhabitants of this planet.
i have stated my position ad nauseum in this thread:
http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.jsp?articleId=281474976726366
You make some very positive statements here:
a) We can't do anything about global warming.
b) We can't do anything about hurricanes
Those are opinions that are not shared by many in the scientific community.
We have debated this here and in other threads. Your response is generally a "not good enough" when I present any scientific data. I am reminded of discussions I have had on the creation/evolution controversy. I will paraphrase the dialogue that usually results:
The creationist says, "God created the earth and all things on it about six thousand years ago, and everything today is just as he created it then. Evolution does not exist."
The evolutionist says, "What about the dinosaur fossils that are 65 million years old? What about the carbon-dated bones of humans that are two hundred thousand years old? What the evidence TODAY that evolution is proceeding as we speak?
And the creationist says, "Not good enough."
I think our discussion is no longer one about earth science. It is about science vs. faith. Like creation/evolution discussions, that is a waste of time.
you can stop rebuilding in an area consistently struck by hurricanes.
"i have stated my position ad nauseum"
stubborn denial is nothing to be proud of.
science has shown that there was a massive warming period in the middle ages...a greenhouse effect. this was followed by a mini-ice age, one that some scientists argue we are coming out of or possibly heading into another one. At any rate, there isn't enough data to directly defend that man decreasing greenhouse gases will stop global warming.
bert, your example of wilma is an accurate one. but so is the one of katrina. katrina was a cat 5 as it was approaching new orleans directly. then a small change in air dropped it to a cat 4 and had it strike slightly away from new orleans and into mississippi. weather does some pretty strange things and is not that predictive. i won't deny that global warming is the reason hurricanes are gaining strength. that's not where our disagreement is.
my analogy fits. can man stop an earthquake? you would admit no. can man stop global warming? you would argue yes, i would argue no. i would say that science shows that there are too many factors that go into global warming. that isn't faith or made up mumbo-jumbo. that's fact and science. i have backed it up by the american physical society. so bert, there are physicists that admit that solar flares are causing global warming. there are climatoligists that argue that water vapor naturally produced is a larger greenhouse gas than co2, and that a larger accumulation of water vapor is leading to global warming. how is that faith based? i have shown proof of scientists taking readings on that.
your analogy of the hillside is not applicable to global climate. your premise is that man can control the earth's climate, and that is not based on fact, bert. THAT is what is truly faith-based. i'm not getting my facts from pat robertson here. there are plenty of scientists and physicists who are looking at this from another angle and coming to a different conclusion.
you might say, "what are the motivations of these scientists?" like martin did with the duke university study. but the same can be said of environmentalists who use their position of man-made global warming as a way to launch an economic assault on the US and Europe. offered solutions by the environmental left like the kyoto protocol targets western countries specifically, and leaves third world countries, that have dirtier power plants and environmental standards than the west, off the restrictions of the protocol. can you explain that, bert? what reasoning would there be for that except to try and use co2 emmission reduction agreements as a way to hamstring richer nations and let 3rd world/developing countries "catch up?" it just doesn't seem to me to be a true cause for reducing man-made pollutants, because if it was, the agreement would be for every country...not just targeting the US specifically.
"stubborn denial is nothing to be proud of." - martinchill
neither is blind allegiance to a faulty premise of man-controlled global climate.
"my analogy fits. can man stop an earthquake? you would admit no. can man stop global warming? you would argue yes, i would argue no."
does an earthquake cause global warming?
ah, but does man cause global warming? you still argue no.
that's the difference - we readily admit that temperature is not constant, that nature does its thing.
you seem completely unwilling or unable to admit that people have gotten nastier in the last 100 years and that it doesn't go unnoticed by nature.
come now.
I really like the idea of trading CO2 credits and so forth, as the EU and other places have started doing. It probably needs to be rather more aggressive, but it seems to be working, and it implements exactly what my economics teacher was saying.
Concerning what Lynn was saying: I remember back in the late 70s, when I was still a teenager, I began to notice that the seasons had shifted (I'm from New England). In the 60s, we used to get heavy snow from late October all the way until April. But by the late 70s the snow was reduced to early January through mid-March. Each year that passed, I noticed this pattern, where the extremes became more extreme, and whole seasons shifted by a month or two, or maybe split in half. I remarked about this to various people, and they agreed with me, but none of us knew what was going on. By the late 80s, I was using this pattern to predict the general weather for the coming year, and it was usually right. Finally, by the mid-90s, when I started hearing about global warming, the light bulb went off in my head, as I realized that explained all the weather changes I'd been seeing.
I know that most scientists poo-poo the idea that global warming could accelerate to cause a catastrophic global storm and ice age within our lives, as depicted in "The Day After Tomorrow," but I personally think it's a very real possibility. Think in terms of the "Perfect Storm" that happened off the coast of New England back in 1993 or whenever it was. Several of those big hurricanes from 2005 headed up in the direction of the Grand Banks after they were done with the Southeast. If they had done that in December (and there were several hurricanes in December, also unprecedented) while a large snow storm was coming across Labrador, we could've seen a repeat of the "Perfect Storm." Also think about the warm winter weather that the US East has had these last few years, and the terribly cold weather that Europe has had in the winter, along with the horrendous heat during their summers: All that is due to a shift, a weakening, in the Gulf Stream, caused by the Greenland Ice Shelf melting. This meltage is a self-accelerating thing at the Poles. It wouldn't surprise me at all to find, say within 10-15 years, a massive, sudden shift in climate, world wide.
I understand that much of global warming is a natural cycle, but We have made it much worse than what it would normally be. So We must do what we can to reverse it. Ultimately, perhaps in order to avoid a storm like I mentioned, we may need to resort to doing something truly radical, like widening and deeping the Panama Canal to where sea currents can flow through it. That was something I read about one time. I'll let the scientists and politicians argue about that one. I just think it's an intriguing possibility.
Of course we're not yet to the point of being able to do that, and I'm sure there would be political hurdles to overcome as well. But in theory, yes, we can stop an earthquake.
Can we stop a hurricane or tornado? That's trickier. But NOAA and the Air Force have been experimenting with cloud seeding and various things for decades now. There are those who say our experimentation in things weather-related has actually caused global warming, or at least some of the storms. See http://www.haarp.alaska.edu/ and http://www.haarp.net/ for more info about that. Much more is possible than what any of us know about - only the political will is lacking.
On the other hand, tinkering with such things could be opening the latch on Pandora's Box.
I removed an earlier post on solar flares.
i have never said that people haven't gotten "nastier" or worse in the past 100 years. If you can find that statement, please let me know. What i have said over and over again is that whatever impact man does with greenhouse gases, we are not the main cause of global warming. it is much, much bigger than us. our contribution is miniscule. so we can increase our greenhouse gas output and it won't matter. we can stop production tomorrow altogether and it won't matter. because the causes behind global warming are the result of natural instances...just like earthquakes and tsunamis.
i don't see how the ability to predict earthquakes and tsunamis shows that we can halt them from happening. and maybe theoretically we can stop those phenomenon...but that sounds more like theories on time travel. not very realistic. in the same way we can predict global warming and what its effects will be. but that doesn't mean we can stop it.
also, please don't think that i am advocating poor stewardship of our planet's environment. i'm not. i am simply arguing against doomsday prophecies by environmentalists that are just used as fear-mongering and aren't based in reality. I am arguing against the idea that man can control global climate.
Scientific American published a "Special Issue" in September, 2005, entitled "Crossroads for Planet Earth". The theme of the "Special Issue" is that: The human race is at a unique turning point. Will we choose to create the best of all possible worlds?"
I'm not trying to plug this "Special Issue" for remuneration, but rather to suggest that we would all do well to take the time to study its articles .. because taken together they comprise a well-thought-out "Plan for a Bright Future Beyond 2050".
However even should this integrated "Plan" be technologic-ally and economically sound, individual and national selfish interests and traditions virtually assure that it won't be implemented. (Call me a cynic, but I spent many years as a business systems analyst.)
Change is happening too rapidly for innate human resistance to change (the "RC" factor) to adjust to it in a timely way. Thus, for all intents and purposes, homosapiens are in a virtual lockstep to a most uncertain and probably uncomfortable future.
The pivotal question, to me, is: How can humans' resistance to change (or conversely our desire to cling to traditional values) be changed; i.e. to entice us to become more open and embracing of change?
For myself, I have tried to be a "lifetime learner", but I find it too difficult to keep up with many areas of interest. For example, I have had to discontinue investing because I couldn't keep up with even the changes occuring in a few financial and geographic sectors. (I figure, if you don't understand the risks and if you don't know how to manage risks, you don't have any business "investing".)
And because I was raised in underdeveloped countries, I have a natural interest in trying to keep abreast of U S social-economic-political-military hegemony; i.e. to figure out how (and to what extent) it is changing foreign cultural values.
So often, my analysis and synthesis results in ambivalence and indecision. Extrapolate that "worldwide" and you default to massive indecision .. at a time when critical decisions need to be made. No wonder that so many fall back on their religious traditions and political doctrines to explain the complexities of modern life.
which is what humans have been doing for thousands of years, if i'm reading you right.
talk about resistant to change!
tim - the idea of placing a nuclear charge along a fault line to "relieve some pressure" - wouldn't they have to "practice" something like that first?
hmmm.
The article gives me reason to hope that "bottom-line" corporate interests will drive a massive change to favor environmental goals; i.e. even though it may take another generation (or two) for individuals to voluntarily transform their personal lifestyles in favor of environmental goals.
By exposing "top carbon cutters", BusinessWeek does a great service to "green investors" and to those enlightened corporations who have taken environmental initiatives in their own interest. They are the exceptions, of course, but the publicity will chip-away at the diehard majority of our society that resists switching to a "sustainable economy" rather than continuing down the traditional "growth economy" path.
To me, the issue is one of morality or spirituality, not one of legality. Each of us can choose to either pursue the "sacred" path of "sustainable economy" or pursue the "profane" path of a "growth economy".
The pivotal question in my mind is whether 'DEMOCRATIC CAPITALISM, a socio-economic-political-military "system" which now thrives in a "growth economy" can peaceably evolve ... fast enough ... so that it is supplanted by an environmentally-sound "sustainable economy" .. OR .. whether it (along with the global economy)will implode.
We are in a race against time, and right now human beings are losing the race. China and India simply can not grow their economies fast enough to outgrow their population growth! I, for one, am willing to live simply, so that others may live. But the majority of Americans are not.
Dan,
I never thought of the environmental battle as a religious one, but I certainly see your point. Many of the responses here, and in other similar threads have reminded me that the opponents of change have an almost-religious intensity.
And maybe we on the other side have that same intensity.
Is this the New Crusade? (grin)
If environmentalism doesn't assume the nature of a nonviolent "Crusade", time will run out on "evolution" to a "sustainable" economy. I envision the "battle-cry" as being: "Live simply, so that others may simply live."
We aren't talking about leaving enough natural resources for the next generation, or fifty years, but for another century, for eternity. Sunlight is free, and technology is in place to make adequate potable water available even in places like the subsaharan desert. But where is the "will"?
Given adequate potable water and hydroponics, desert areas could be transformed to support life rather than kill it. Spirituality insists that life is "sacred" and that it be allowed to live and flourish. Spirituality recognizes that which degrades and kills life, and labels it "profane"
Yes, humankind is in a "spiritual" battle; not simply an "economic" contest. Either humankind will come to grips with the need to sustain life, or our entire planet will become as unlivable as the subSaharan. You and I are witnessing the desecration of the formerly vast tropical rain forests.
Why should we wait for the next generation to be the one that points the accusing finger? Why did you desacrate? Why did you impoverish and render our environment untenable for human existence?
Earth is the only known viable planet in a universe of sterile celestial spheres. Why are we so cavalier about turning Earth into another sterile celestial sphere? Is it because we subconsciously sense that we are mortal, so subconsciously we say to ourselves: What difference if we also render the Earth to be mortal?
Have we lost the beauty and awe of immortality?
As Pogo once quipped: "We have found the enemy, and it is us!"
Worst of all, some of them have an agonizing choice...destroy another few acres of rain forest.and feed my family, or leave it and let them starve.
Most of the people in our nation do not have that problem at all. Our problem is...give up a little of my wasteful, hedonistic lifestyle to be a responsible citizen of the earth...or continue with business as usual. Even people I have met here in the Gather community are in denial about the extent or seriousness of the problems.
Just think of the rest of the country...or the rest of the world. We need to educate a lot of people if we are to save this earth for the next generation, and the one after, and the one after...