Grauniad: President "has four years to save Earth"

hemoh

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According to this dude, we're all gonna die in 2012 unless Obama stops the climate change. And after all this time I thought global warming would magically go away once Bush left office.

Christ, death sounds like a pretty good option if I have to listen to four more years of ecomentalist rantings.
 
All he has to do is jizz on the sun. Get Al Gore some lube!
 
Without looking at the article, let me guess. Was it written by George Monbiot?

edit: No, but it's another of those Obama cash-ins written by an armchair eco-mentalist who is long on talk but short on ideas.
 
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What utter rubbish, even assuming climate change is taking place (which I believe it is) and that man made emissions are worsening the situation (which they probably are but the almost certainly are not the whole cause), there will be no point where the world suddenly becomes uninhabitable or the effects irreversible. The worst case scenario is that the world keeps heating at a few degrees a year and gradually areas already on the edge have to adapt, or in some cases small areas be lost - e.g. low lying countries more prone to flooding and maybe coastlines moving in, areas of desert in the Australian outback, Africa or continental America etc growing and forcing people into smaller areas.

I found this bit quite amusing:
Cap-and-trade schemes, in which emission permits are bought and sold, have failed, he said, and must now be replaced by a carbon tax that will imposed on all producers of fossil fuels. At the same time, there must be a moratorium on new power plants that burn coal - the world's worst carbon emitter.
So the answer to one solution that isn't working is to replace it with another solution that won't work other than by either pricing the poorest in society off the grid or by losing power to everybody with rolling blackouts as current plants are not replaced. As it is my (limited) knowledge leads me to believe that "clean coal" and carbon capture technologies mean that coal isn't always the dirtiest anyway.
 
obama-cartoon-mad-magazine-cover-12908-1.jpg


Poor guy, the weight of the world resting on his shoulders...
 
Well, Prof. Hansen, bad news for you: The Earth is not in danger. If anything, current forms of life on Earth are in danger. Assuming that man could destroy Earth, is megalomania.

But the Earth will get over it, it has a couple of billion years to live. Enough time to develop and kill off intelligent life a 100 times or so. I honestly wonder if we are really the first ones or just the "next try" in a row.

Even if 99,999 % of all life is destroyed on this world, nature will eventually recover and set a new evolution in motion. If life ends on this planet some time in the future, it will definitely not be our fault.

We cannot destroy life on Earth, we can only destroy our own living space. And I doubt that this will happen because of something like global warming.
 
people have been saying that the world will end in 2012 for thousands of years... this is nothing new really

Have they? They've been saying the end is nigh, of course, but the date has always been changing. It used to be 2000, October 1, 1997, some year before that (Valentine's day one year) and so on. But 2012 is a new thing, not even the Mayans believed that one.
 
Well, Prof. Hansen, bad news for you: The Earth is not in danger. If anything, current forms of life on Earth are in danger. Assuming that man could destroy Earth, is megalomania.

But the Earth will get over it, it has a couple of billion years to live. Enough time to develop and kill off intelligent life a 100 times or so. I honestly wonder if we are really the first ones or just the "next try" in a row.

Even if 99,999 % of all life is destroyed on this world, nature will eventually recover and set a new evolution in motion. If life ends on this planet some time in the future, it will definitely not be our fault.

We cannot destroy life on Earth, we can only destroy our own living space. And I doubt that this will happen because of something like global warming.

Exactly. It bothers me when environmentalists pretend they're saving "the planet" or even other creatures really- most of them, when you get right down to it are worried about saving their own arse from whatever threat they perceive, or sometimes just worried about their standard of living decreasing. Sure, there are a few active environmentalists who legitimately care for other humans, and other animals- but most of it seems selfish to me, or at least seems to have a selfish underlying motive.
 
We cannot destroy life on Earth, we can only destroy our own living space. And I doubt that this will happen because of something like global warming.

Your arguments are far too logical in the global ecology debate; since his holiness AlGore has deemed the debate is over, do not disagree with him.
Instead, use sensationalism and quasi religious fundamentalism for your one sided and biased arguments next time, and for goodness sake, do not think things through.

Exactly. It bothers me when environmentalists pretend they're saving "the planet" or even other creatures really- most of them, when you get right down to it are worried about saving their own arse from whatever threat they perceive, or sometimes just worried about their standard of living decreasing.

I would like to add they despise humans beings in general; loathe them really. These are the same people who are all for population control, conveniently forgetting they also exist or take themselves out of the equation, and have never lived in true poverty.
Think about that the next time you think the world is overcrowded; what makes a person so special that they should exist over someone else? What, because they were born somewhere that is free of poverty, the struggle of life and they are entitled to dictate how others should live?
 
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I know that the world is overcrowded; and I don't exist "over" anyone else. I will not have children, and if I do find a partner and we eventually decide otherwise, I will have no more than one child on principle. Forced population control is another story; I honestly think people are too stupid to kerb the population explosion, and humanity will either drastically shift it's social norms, become extremely dependent on technology such as GM crops, etc, and/or implode on itself eventually as a result. The difference between me and the Al Gore fans in this respect is, I don't think these problems are fixable and honestly, I don't care about the future of my species.

Whatever happens, happens; what annoys me is both the environmentalist proposition that we will all most certainly die an agonising death if we continue using 4x4s, and the non-environmentalist arguments that technology will make up for it, etc or some other version of "everything's gonna be all right". Both, to me, are bullshit.
 
Your arguments are far too logical in the global ecology debate; since his holiness AlGore has deemed the debate is over, do not disagree with him.
Instead, use sensationalism and quasi religious fundamentalism for your one sided and biased arguments next time, and for goodness sake, do not think things through.

We humans are far too fixated on keeping the status quo. We are posessed by the desire to preserve our world as it is now -- because that's all we know and therefore want to keep it. But on a larger scale it is completely irrelevant, if most life on Earth dies or not. On the contrary: If 90 % of the world's animal life wouldn't have died 65 million years ago in a meteor crash, the world we know wouldn't even exist. Maybe man wouldn't even exist.

We probably owe our existence to most of all life on Earth dying some time ago.

It is completely useless and pointless to even try preserving it all, because sooner or later our world will change anyway: The buildings we build now -- all the houses, skycrapers, tunnels, bridges and monuments -- won't last for more than a couple of centuries at best anyway.

Cities will disappear, new ones will be built. Paris won't exist forever, neither will London or New York. Some day it will all be gone and something new will have replaced it. Our culture will change, too. And I don't mean Shakespeare or Beethoven or such things. No, in 2000 years or so nobody will know anymore, what "Star Wars" or "Star Trek" were. They won't know what "Windows" was or an "iPod". And if they find records of it, they'll look at it with puzzlement. They will find plastic bags from different supermarkets and will ask themselves, what strange religious cults we had.

If we build a bridge between Europe and Africa across the Strait of Gibraltar, it will be an amazing achievement - but not forever, because Africa ist still moving northward towards Europe a couple of centimeters a year and the Mediterranean will eventually be an inland sea again (it already used to be in Earth history).

All the money and power we invest in new things now, will eventually have been in vain. Why make an exception for life as it exists now? All the preserving we try now, will eventually have been in vain, too.

The alps are still growing, India will disappear underneath the Himalayas in time, everything is still in motion. Who are we to decide that we must save the Earth? All we can do, is trying to save ourselves.

If we accept, that no matter what we do, the Earth will change its shape and climate anyway, that no matter what we do, life will survive and evolution will develop new lifeforms over and over again and that we still have no more influence on our future, than the ancient Egypts had, then why don't we simply relax, lay back, try improving our living standards as much as possible and enjoy the good times, as long as they last?

Why are we so obsessed with keeping it all as it is, even though we perfectly know, that nothing will last forever? Who said we have been chosen to be the guardians of this world? Chosen by who? A God? Give me a break...

What comes up, must go down. Humanity has to learn to accept, that we merely exist in the blink of an eye in the lifespan of our solar system and that it is highly unlikely, that our offspring will someday look at our sun turning into a red giant from their spaceships, saying "If our ancestors in the 20th century could only see that"...

I think it's safe to say, that our existence on this planet won't be long enough to create any serious damage. Even if we strip this planet of all its natural resources, these resources will eventually recover, because nothing leaves this planet and the remains of organic life will turn into coal and oil again over the next couple of million years.

So why bother? The survival of this planet is not in our hands. We should concentrate on getting as comfortable as possible, while we're still inhabiting this world.
 
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