"It's going too fast... We will burn."

[Rosco T.]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/01/AR2006090101800_pf.html

The End of Eden
By Michael Powell
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, September 2, 2006; C01

ST. GILES-ON-THE-HEATH, England

Through a deep and tangled wood lies a glade so lovely and wet and lush as to call to mind a hobbit's sanctuary. A lichen-covered statue rises in a garden of native grasses, and a misting rain drips off a slate roof. At the yard's edge a plump muskrat waddles into the brush.

(snip)


"It's going too fast," he says softly. "We will burn."

(snip)

"Our global furnace is out of control. By 2020, 2025, you will be able to sail a sailboat to the North Pole. The Amazon will become a desert, and the forests of Siberia will burn and release more methane and plagues will return."

Sulfurous musings are not Lovelock's characteristic style; he's no Book of Revelation apocalyptic. In his 88th year, he remains one of the world's most inventive scientists, an Englishman of humor and erudition, with an oenophile's taste for delicious controversy. Four decades ago, his discovery that ozone-destroying chemicals were piling up in the atmosphere started the world's governments down a path toward repair. Not long after that, Lovelock proposed the theory known as Gaia, which holds that Earth acts like a living organism, a self-regulating system balanced to allow life to flourish.

(more)

[silverweb]

1. *sigh*

I wish he was wrong, but I believe he's probably right. We'll have cooked ourselves.

[Bluebear]

2. For this I quit smoking.

;(

[pitohui]

3. yeah it's like why bother?

i don't see the point of spreading negativity, is it that important to him that after we're all dead "the breeding pairs" left at the poles read about how he predicted it all?

crap, shut up, mr lovelock, give people hope, people w.out hope don't change anything, they just shovel up their nose all they can shovel because what's the point?

[Mnemosyne]

4. KnR n/t

[Deja Q]

5. One way or another, we're dooooooooooooooooomed.

So enjoy life now. There's nothing we CAN do.


People for 30+ years have been pointing out this shit and nobody has done a thing. Except profit off of concerns and false promises.

[Fovea]

18. When Florida is half under water,

the netherlands is gone, and louisiana is no longer a swamp, but a bay, I hope to see
the captains of industry swinging from lightpoles.

Is that bad of me?

[CrispyQ]

6. "The Amazon will become a desert..."

And with desert will come famine.

I agree with the poster above who said people without hope do nothing. I think we are seeing that now. People are screwing anyone & everyone they have to, to get their share of the gettin' while there's still any gettin' to be got. Our leaders have no vision & clearly no desire to address our most serious problems. Instead, they loot & hoard resources to see them through their lives.

Does someone like Cheney have it in his heart to mourn the loss of something unique like a species of beautiful bird with a lovely song, or a high altitude mountain meadow of colorful wildflowers? Does he? Do those things hold any value to him? I don't think so. I think he has turned off that part of his humanity. I think all the PNAC-ers have. They are all that is total crap about our species. There is nothing redeemable in any of them.

[SlavesandBulldozers]

14. the only way to get to Uncle Dick on environmental concerns

is tell him that there's a possibility his grandchildren won't be able to shoot a particular kind of wildlife if this keeps up.

[Joanne98]

7. The people responsible will have to pay for this.

They made money KILLING the world. Justice matters.

[undergroundpanther]

8. They haven't paid yet..

But we pay and pay..we never get the guts to disobey and bite the masters grabby hands.we moan oh the economy our lifestyles JOBS! Shortsighted fools relying on even bigger fools who don't care.
I fear these wealthy thugs will just hide underground or jettison to another planet.Leave us all to die.

[The2ndWheel]

12. Aren't we all responsible?

If we all didn't want a better life for our children, we wouldn't profit from the system that they set up to make money killing the world. That's why those responsible don't pay for crap. We all like it.

[pscot]

16. And we'll all pay

Nobody will escape what's coming.

[Deja Q]

21. Well, where are the world leaders holding the US accountable?

Until they actually do something, it's all one big two-faced joke as far as I'm concerned.

Right now, the leaders, right down to China, have no qualms over the US. Which is a pity, China now puts out more pollution and garbage than the US.

http://visibleearth.nasa.gov/view_rec.php?id=1036

And at 33 cents per liter for gas over there, nobody should be shocked Beijing is under a big filthy cloud. (now ask Europeans how much gas costs per liter and translate it to the dollar and wince.)

More to hunt through here:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=china+pollution&btnG=Google+Search

[Straight Shooter]

9. It's things like this I think of whenever I see young children and babies.

I wonder if any of them will have children, for fear their daughters and sons will never reach adulthood before the ecosystem collapses. I worry for the children and babies I look upon now, wondering if the world will be hostile to their very presence.

Al Gore is spreading the message better than anybody. People are paying attention. We can never go back to what the earth should have been by now if we'd taken care of it, but we can mitigate the damage and help Gaia to heal. If not, Earth may well shrug off humanity as if it were a bad infection, in order to survive herself.

[bdamomma]

10. we have to change our mindset to possibly reverse this ecological

nightmare, if not for us for the many generations to come, or we are giving them a toxic dump, we should be treating our earth much better it's the only one we have.

[The2ndWheel]

11. Not ours to take care of

That's the kind of thinking that got us here.

[MountainLaurel]

13. I need to go buy this one today

It's been on my list since I saw it in a bookstore display of books about climate change.

[smoogatz]

15. Well, there's also the alternate theory

that the melting of the Greenland ice cap will shut down the Gulf Stream and precipitate a new Ice Age, starting in Europe. Basically, either way we're screwed. We have to stop producing CO2 now to have any hope of diverting massive ecological disaster, and that ain't gonna happen.

[greenman3610]

17. I've said it before, Pessimism..

is a luxury at this point, that only tenured professors
and sophomore philosophy majors can afford.

[Jcrowley]

19. Food Security Will Become A Major Issue

amongst all nations rather than the usual nations who have had their land destroyed or denuded. A tremendous feedback loop is upon us and there is at the present only discussions around the margins as to how all-encompassing are the changes that would actually have any significant impact. I have read that if all of the changes that Al Gore was recommending in his movie came to pass we would still see only a 22% reduction in global greenhouse gasses when what is necessary is deemed to be at least 75% reduction. I think it's hard to really know and harder to come to terms with.

EXPERTS SAY GLOBAL WARMING MAY EXACERBATE WORLD FOOD SHORTAGES

The IPCC Working Group III Subgroup on Agriculture, Forestry and Other Systems (AFOS) report concludes: The anticipated rise in global average temperature of about 2 to 3 oC over the next century will most likely lead to severe impacts on agriculture and forestry such as:

- a shift of the climatic zones by several hundred kilometres towards the poles, enlarging the arid zones in the tropical and subtropical regions, and reducing the land available for agriculture.

- a rise in sea level of about 0.3 metres, inundating valuable land in coastal areas, especially in tropical and subtropical zones.

- a gradual breakdown of many ecosystems like forests in temperate and boreal regions, leading to additional CO2 emissions and thus to further greenhouse warming.

- potentially increased effects from pests and weeds.

Marine and land food species may also be affected by the increasing levels of ultraviolet radiation reaching the earth as a result of unavoidable ongoing depletion of stratospheric ozone. This could lead to a reduced production of biomass and photosynthesis, thus again enhancing the CO2 content of the atmosphere.

http://archive.greenpeace.org/climate/database/records/zgpz0207.html

[Deja Q]

22. Yet we grow food in greenhouses, to accelerate its growth

All we can really do is speculate right now. A lot of predictions will be real, many will not.

And, in the end, who's going to care? In 1975, an episode of "All in the Family" - entitled "Gloria's Shock" went big-time into pollution and overpopulation. It forecasted its sums right, but nobody in real life bothered to care after watching.

[savemefromdumbya]

20. I guess humans will be replaced by robots

robots survive all this (humans and other living things won't)

[Deja Q]

23. The popular media has been suggesting that for decades.

And given how more and more technology is replacing peoples' jobs; what are people to do? Except for popular media forgot to mention, we need money. And no job = no income. No income = no money. No money = no living. No living = no life. no life = death.