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Is it too late to prevent ‘civilization-threatening climate disruption’?

As noted elsewhere on truthalyzer.com, Sir James Lovelock, perhaps best known for his Gaia Theory of Earth as a living system, was one of the first to say, in his books, lectures, and interviews, that Earth’s climate is past the point of no return and destined for runaway “global heating,” as he prefers to call [...]

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Are humans smarter than yeast?

Are humans smarter than yeast? This question, once posed in jest, is increasingly asked in earnest by those concerned about population growth and diminishing natural resources. It’s the title of an eight minute YouTube video by Dan Chay, but Dave Bice explains its meaning more concisely: “Yeast growing in grape juice provide a good example [...]

RECENT ASIDES

• "Did you know that the US Networks (ABC, NBC and CBS) devoted a grand total of 32 MINUTES and 14 news stories for all of 2011 to the single most important story of this century last year. It's true. Despite all the evidence, despite all the extreme weather events in the world, despite the study by a climate change skeptic (funded in part by the Koch Brothers) that concluded climate researchers had it right all along when they concluded that climate change was caused by all the giga-tons of greenhouse gases human beings are pumping into the atmosphere, 32 minutes of coverage on the US Television networks was all they deemed fit to broadcast." (From an AlterNet report about a Climate Progress study.) #
• "Each of the global problems we face today is the result of too many people using too much of our planet's finite, non-renewable resources and filling its waste repositories of land, water and air to overflowing." Business Insider quotes Paul Chefurka (Population: The Elephant in the Room). "The true danger posed by our exploding population is not our absolute numbers but the inability of our environment to cope with so many of us doing what we do. It is becoming clearer every day, as crises like global warming, water, soil and food depletion, biodiversity loss and the degradation of our oceans constantly worsen, that the human situation is not sustainable. Bringing about a sustainable balance between ourselves and the planet we depend on will require us, in very short order, to reduce our population, our level of activity, or both.... Populations in serious overshoot always decline. This is seen in wine vats when the yeast cells die after consuming all the sugar from the grapes and bathing themselves in their own poisonous alcoholic wastes. It's seen in predator-prey relations in the animal world, where the depletion of the prey species results in a die-back of the predators. Actually, it's a bit worse than that. The population may actually fall to a lower level than was sustainable before the overshoot. The reason is that unsustainable consumption while in overshoot allowed the species to use more non-renewable resources and to further poison their environment with excessive wastes. In the case of humanity, our use of oil has allowed us to perform prodigious feats of resource extraction and waste production that would simply have been inconceivable before the oil age. If our oil supply declined, the lower available energy might be insufficient to let us extract and use the lower grade resources that remain. A similar case can be made for a lessened ability to deal with wastes in our environment." #
• America's war against Iraq, justified because Iraq was in league with Al-Qaeda, and when that was disproven justified because Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, and when that was disproven justified because Saddam Hussein was a ruthless dictator (apparently worse than Kim Jong-il or any of the world's other ruthless dictators), is officially over. American dead total 4,484 soldiers and another 1,487 "contractors" (you don't hear much about them, do you?) for a total of 5,971. The US government reports that 33,186 soldiers were wounded, many of them in ways that would have killed them in previous wars and that left them horribly disfigured and disabled, but government statistics have been challenged, so perhaps as many as 100,000 were wounded. Estimates of Iraqi combatant and civilian deaths range as high as a million. The US bill for war expenses is at least $1 trillion. But America can be proud that after nine years of generous expenditures of lives and treasure in Iraq, the country is finally free to fully implement its constitution, which gives Islamic clerics the right to overrule secular courts, and to resume ethnic cleansing and civil war between Sunnis, Shiites, Kurds, and other groups whose beliefs differ. Meanwhile, America's war against Afghanistan continues, as do covert operations and overt propaganda against Iran. Makes one wonder if there has ever been a time when mankind was not preparing for, or actually engaged in, warfare. (Click here for info about the warlike nature of the human ape.) #
• "Dramatic and unprecedented plumes of methane – a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide – have been seen bubbling to the surface of the Arctic Ocean by scientists undertaking an extensive survey of the region," reports Steve Connor in UK's Independent. "The scale and volume of the methane release has astonished the head of the Russian research team who has been surveying the seabed of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf off northern Russia for nearly 20 years.... Scientists estimate that there are hundreds of millions of tonnes of methane gas locked away beneath the Arctic permafrost, which extends from the mainland into the seabed of the relatively shallow sea of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf. One of the greatest fears is that with the disappearance of the Arctic sea-ice in summer, and rapidly rising temperatures across the entire region, which are already melting the Siberian permafrost, the trapped methane could be suddenly released into the atmosphere leading to rapid and severe climate change.... [quoting Igor Semiletov, leader of the research team] 'We carried out checks at about 115 stationary points and discovered methane fields of a fantastic scale – I think on a scale not seen before. Some plumes were a kilometre or more wide and the emissions went directly into the atmosphere – the concentration was a hundred times higher than normal.'... Dr Semiletov released his findings for the first time last week at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco." #
• "Long-term structures," such as the Roman Empire, the medieval world, and the modern capitalist system, have finite lifespans, writes Morris Berman. During this century, "the 'arc' of capitalism" will end its 600 year run, he explains, citing several sources, including Naomi Klein, author of "Capitalism vs. the Climate." He summarizes Klein: "Everything is related to everything else. Psychology, the economy, the environmental crisis, our daily mode of living, the dumbing down of America, the pathetic fetish over cell phones and electronic gadgets, the crushing debt of student loans, the inanities (and popularity) of Ann Coulter and Ayn Rand, the farce of electoral politics, the box office sales of violent movies, the epidemics of depression and obesity—these are ultimately not separate spheres of human or natural activity. They are interconnected, and this means that things will not get fixed piecemeal." Rather, there will be a "new civilizational paradigm . . . . It’s all or nothing; there really is no in-between, no diet cheesecake to be had. As Naomi says, it’s not about single 'issues' anymore. What then, can we expect, as the arc of capitalism comes to a close? This is where Naomi shifts from unlikely recommendations to hard-nosed reality: 'The corporate quest for scarce resources will become more rapacious, more violent. Arable land in Africa will continue to be grabbed to provide food and fuel to wealthier nations. Drought and famine will continue to be used as a pretext to push genetically modified seeds, driving farmers further into debt. We will attempt to transcend peak oil and gas by using increasingly risky technologies to extract the last drops, turning ever larger swaths of our globe into sacrifice zones. We will fortress our borders and intervene in foreign conflicts over resources, or start those conflicts ourselves. Free-market climate solutions, as they are called, will be a magnet for speculation, fraud and crony capitalism, as we are already seeing with carbon trading and the use of forests as carbon offsets. And as climate change begins to affect not just the poor but the wealthy as well, we will increasingly look for techno-fixes to turn down the temperature, with massive and unknowable risks. As the world warms, the reigning ideology that tells us it’s everyone for themselves, that victims deserve their fate, that we can master nature, will take us to a very cold place indeed.' To put it bluntly, the scale of change required cannot happen without a massive implosion of the system. This was true at the end of the Roman Empire, at the end of the Middle Ages, and it is true today." But historic precedent is that "as the old way of life dies, a new way of life comes into being." #