> What is fascinating to me is how easily we have been brought along to
accept as completely normal that there is indeed global warming, that
polar ice caps are melting, sea levels are rising, and nobody
cares. That is pretty astonishing, if you really consider it.
*************
Uh, Christianity?
> All those issues are now routinely dismissed and the only question is
managing responses that are cost effective and as painless as
possible, regardless of whether such responses are adequate. In other
words, the question is how far can we allow global climate to
deteriorate and still live with it? ********* Fewer people know the answer to this than the # of those who know the mass of the Higgs boson. I suggest we'll know different when suggestions are made to move the US Capital out of that swamp called DC and move it to North Dakota.
>This kind of reduced expectations
mentality assumes that climatic conditions are a smooth continuum. In
other words we can post-pone going to hell with the installment plan.
***********
The frog in the pot of about to boil water. We're just as Sorites stupid as the frog.
>I suspect, but don't know, that climate is a balanced set of dynamic
interdependencies that do not behave smoothly under perturbations. The
implication is simply that managed responses that do not absolutely
stop and then reverse CO2 increases, will be completely
ineffective. The idea is that balanced cycles can reach un-recoverable
perturbations, after which there is no return to previous optimal
states, no matter what is done. In a sense this is an implicit
prerequisite of evolution.
Chuck Grimes
**************
Nothing to recover as thermodynamic irreversibility= informational irreversibility [see the work of Prigogine and others on non-linear thermodynamics and irreversible computable functions]. There are no optimal states. Just the "dancing landscapes" dynamics of organisms/environments. Implications of the paradoxes of predictability are also paradoxical.
With the evidence that old growth sequesters CO2 better than young forests, tree huggers are getting more militant. Expect to see whats going on in Oregon, Washington and California catch on amongst forest activists all across the globe [hopefully]. Also targeting of banks that finance deforestation. Meanwhile, start tree planting clubs and hook into Arbor Day rituals.
Art is the word light writes in Space.
Ian