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323 comments on DrumBeat: August 1, 2006

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crazypat on August 1, 2006 - 3:34pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
In the meantime, we'd better get to work drilling for oil in the Gulf of Mexico and the North Slope of Alaska and ramping up production, with apologies to the environmentalists.

Don't apologize to me, apologize to your children. The war against nature is in reality a war of humans against humans: today's generation against all future generations. Our generation is winning big, but only by destroying humanity's life-support systems--clean water, clean air, and food production.

In the big scheme, the Iraq war is insignificant. The question is: "WHERE ARE THE REAL BATTLES?" The actual frontlines are right here in America, all around you: suburban sprawl, petrochemical factories, nuclear + coal power plants, industrial agriculture, and most importantly, the logging/drilling/mining of the few remaining intact ecosystems. Our victory is nearly complete. Soon it will be total, and all future humans can "thrive" in this toxic wasteland we have created for their enjoyment.

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Darwinian on August 1, 2006 - 4:45pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Crazypat, this is the point I have been making for years. We are competing for territory, food and resources with every other species on earth, and we are winning! We are killing off them boogers like there is no tomorrow. There are fewer other great apes on earth, about 200,000, than the human population numbers grow in a single day. Soon there will be none. Soon there will be no forest because we will have cut it all down to grow biofuels.

Soon our victory will be complete. We will have killed off every other species on earth except the rats and vermin that co-exist with us humans. Soon we will have a brown cursted earth all to ourselves. Then we can celebrate.

I guess....

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crazypat on August 1, 2006 - 7:03pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
PARTY DOWN! WE WIN!

yep, not much to celebrate, is there?

I was brushing up on my evolution last night. It's fascinating how the in the last stages of human evolution, the successor species exterminated its still-living ancestor species.

Also, I love how we are the most successful predator of all time. WE CAN EAT ROCKS!!! Literally! And like all extremely successful species, we will be destroyed by our own success. It is the natural order of things: an organism always modifies its environment just by existing, and its excretions are autotoxic. We can dominate, but not control.

Industrial civilization is as doomed as yeast in a wine cask.

The burning question on my mind is this:
Do humans have the power to destroy ALL life on earth?
Will nuclear armageddon do it? Persistent bio-accumulating organic toxins? Radical climate changes? I am still undecided, but I'm studying up on molecular biology. I'm sure we'll manage to cause another mass extinction--but I don't think we can actually destroy all life. Prokaryotes are some damn hardy organisms.

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Agric on August 1, 2006 - 8:06pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
"Do humans have the power to destroy ALL life on earth?"

Yes, but probably with great difficulty as well as great(seemingly innate) stupidity.

Life is pretty resilient and could always re-evolve, though wasting a few million or hundreds of millions of years may be sad. I did a first pass of collapse levels a few years back:
http://theslide.blogspot.com/2006/01/levels-of-collapse-warning-may-be.html

Being humans we are more interested in our own and our economic systems survival, I have bad news: lots die and the economic systems break.

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Dragonfly41 on August 1, 2006 - 8:53pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
"Do humans have the power to destroy ALL life on earth?"

Naahhh...the cockroaches will always survive.  Heck, you can microwave those critters and they just laugh at you.

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Asebius on August 1, 2006 - 9:24pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
"Do humans have the power to destroy ALL life on earth?"

Not a chance.  There are creatures that require temperatures close to the boiling point of water in order to survive. They prefer temperatures above boiling. Some of the latest thinking is that they are very closely related to the first life forms on earth.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperthermophiles

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Asebius on August 1, 2006 - 9:35pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
from the wikipedia article
The most hardy hyperthermophiles thus known live on the superheated walls of deep-sea hydrothermal vents, requiring temperatures of at least 90 °C for survival.

Many hyperthermophiles are also able to withstand other environmental extremes such as high acidity or radiation levels.

Note also that they do not even depend on current energy from the sun as almost all lifeforms do. As long as those deepsea vents remain hot, they have what they need.
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Vintermann on August 2, 2006 - 8:42am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
No way. We like to think of ourselves as the peak of evolution, the most successful species and so on, but the fact is that every single individual alive today lives because all their ancestors survived long enough to be successful in the game. We are equally much winners - so far. Sure, we can look ahead and say the great apes will probably be dead soon, but that's our opinion. Evolution isn't about prescience. It's about what is, not what will come. Whether we will suddenly nuke ourselves has not been decided yet, and nature has, with its characteristic lack of forward planning, not taken that possibility into account one way or the other.

But the real lords of the planets are the microbes. If they could think through some form of emergent behaviour or something, they would probably regard us as mere brownian motion in the tea cup of evolution.

Apropos microbes: here's a link to an appropriately doomerish la times article called "The Rise of Slime".

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totoneila on August 2, 2006 - 6:45am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Hello CrazyPat,

I am assuming you have read my previous postings on Mexico.  Mexico City [pop. approx. 20 million] is an area in extreme Overshoot, and the ongoing election standoff and Cantarell depletion is only adding to the population stress.  Now add in the absolutely mind-boggling water shortages and energy requirements to keep this area minimally supplied--Mexico City is optimally primed for a titanic clash as they go postPeak.  This link is two years old, but my guess is that things have only gotten worse since it was first published.

Excerpts:
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Water Crisis as Mexico City Sinks Faster than Venice

Mexico City's underlying aquifer is now collapsing at a staggering rate beneath the streets. While Venice slips into the Adriatic at a fraction of an inch each year, Mexico City is lurching downwards by as much as a foot a year in some areas. Over the past century, it has dropped 30ft.

The city now has five pumping stations working around the clock to draw water vertically three-quarters of a mile from the neighbouring Cutzamala River basin and from the lower catchment area of the River Lerma. Paying about $50,000 (£28,000) a day in water rights alone, the system consumes the same amount of electricity as Puebla, a city of 1.3 million people to the south-east.

Below street level, the ongoing subsidence is wreaking havoc with the water distribution and drainage systems. The city's 8,300-mile network of water pipes routinely fracture, losing up to 40 per cent of potable water supplies, according to some estimates. The city's sewage used to drain away by gravity towards a far-off outflow in the Gulf of Mexico but now needs to be first pumped uphill before it can be drained.
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The Mayan and Aztecan collapses of yore will be nothing compared to when Mexico City has to be evacuated.

Bob Shaw in Phx,Az  Are Humans Smarter than Yeast?

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