Climate change could mean the extinction of our species

It should not be surprising to us to understand how Bronze Age societies associated the forces of nature with gods, seeing no clear separation between themselves and the world/cosmos, seeing it as one seamless whole. Science has since evolved to such a stage where we can now separate the natural from the supernatural, which doesn't in fact mean all scientists are atheists, but does offer a different kind of rationality to explain climate change in terms of its varied components. The Bronze Age explanation was rational in its day whereas the 'avengalist' of today is irrational having up-ended the cause: but it is still the fault of human agency and its sinful ways that induces God's anger. By contrast, violations of the commandment, Thou Shalt Not Kill, do not seem to produce the same level of wrath. Most curious.

Perhaps woman seeking abortions should appeal to the Castle Doctrine, something modern bronze-agers seem to "understand."

One point I left out in my previous point. The two modern Bronze-Age theories there mentioned are attempts (albeit failed attempts) to explain the mood swings of our current climate. On the other hand, the theory of energy imbalance (i.e. global warming) came before the current mood swings and predicted them. Note no one drought or storm can be said to be caused by the global energy imbalance. But the growing collection and frequency of such events is evidence that corraborates the hypothesis.

Hmm maybe what happened in the Bronze Age should stay in the Bronze Age...?

Climate change and polar bears:

How to get selfish humans to care about climate change: Polar bears!

It does raise the question -how far can we go to protect animals in their natural environment? In the Indian sub-continent and Africa animals that once had a natural environment all to themselves are now on the margins of expanding urban settlements -but people don't want tigers or baboons in their back yard and the tendency is to kill them, quite apart from the distress living so close to humans causes some primates and wildcats. The same is true for the bears of North America, some of whom have given up foraging for nuts when they forage in a nearby trash can, courtesy of the humans moving into their territory. Many species of bird no longer visit the UK in the summer because the hedgerows that supported them have gone, and the pesticide soaked fields no longer contain nutritious worms -you don't need to go to the Arctic to start a campaign for wild-life.

Polar Bears are doomed, unless they can be taken to zoos or be persuaded to live in Antarctica if it will support them. I am still not sure if climate change will see off sea ice in the Arctic, but over the next 25 years it will become as busy an oil province as the North Sea -and there is nothing we can do to stop it.
If Polar Bears, why not gorillas, tigers, Kangaroos? If all them, then must people stop building homes in environments they share with animals?

http://www.ted.com/talks/george_monb...the_world.html

Monbiot at his articulate best -and politically naive. He is an incurable romantic at heart. Yellowstone is not much of an example as it is not densely populated so it is hard to square with parts of India and Africa where the de-wilding is at its most intense. Re-wilding could only make sense if the people moved somewhere else- there are over a billion in India alone, where will they go? Instead of going to the city, rural dwellers will find the city coming to them; if you want a perfect example of environmental desecration, go to Israel -outside the desert area of the south, the love affair with concrete will probably make this country the most built-over area in the world.
But I am a pessimist on this issue.

I agree. It’s probably unwise to release tigers into the densely populated regions of India. Rewilding seems impossible without setting aside large grants of protected lands. Given political pressures this is difficult enough for wealthy nations to do. The endangerment of pandas, koalas, tigers, snail darters, krill, whales etc. seems frivolous compared to the dangers people are subjected to when under the pressures of politics, poverty, overpopulation and the greed.

I posted the Monbiot clip because it helps us better assess the costs of covering a desert with concrete and the benefits of reintroducing gray wolves into Wyoming. He illuminates such a multitude of unexpected connections, it’s almost enough to make an atheist believe in karma.

Here in the Midwest of the USA, we have deer, muskrats, beavers, raccoon, coyote, squirrels, chipmunks, mice, rats, eagles, hawks and song birds living side by side with people in cities like St. Louis, Chicago, Cincinnati etc. Because of monocultural farming, pesticides and fertilizers, our cities and towns have a greater diversity of microbial fauna in the their soil than the farmland that blankets the region the way concrete and asphalt blankets Manhattan. We are only now discovering the vast variety of biota that once lived in the soil here when the Midwest was prairie land.

Modern extinctions may be bellwethers of our own decline. Here I’m obligated to remind you of the overwrought canary in the coal mine. Of course reviving the canary will not save the miners. What we need somehow to do is figure out how to live in harmony with our planet.

The stoics would perhaps complain that I am in the unhappy state of disharmony with myself. My hopes do not run parallel with my expectations.

I agree with what you say. I think one way to deal with some of these issues is to halt completely the kind of logging going on in Brazil, Indonesia and Russia in particular -the level of deforestation is greater than any natural re-growth or re-forestation can deal with and I would rather leave it as a wilderness than open it up for financial exploitation -but again, as with hydrocarbons, I suspect the lobbying power of the corporations overrides environmental concerns. In fact with the impasse at the COP in Warsaw, the hostility to carbon reduction policies in Australia, an intellectual attempt to undermine climate change science and other sorties, the forward momentum that appeared to be taking place say 10 years ago now looks like being derailed. It's cold.

The latest from James Delingpole on the great hoax...this time using an article that charts deaths from extreme weather events, 1900-2008-

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/ja...opaganda-myth/


the source in the image is tiny and barely readable but I expanded it on my iPad and found it is an article from the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons, Vol 14, no 2009 by Indur Goklany, the link is here:
http://www.jpands.org/vol14no4/goklany.pdf