Mockery of an obviously not very good book that was written for commercial success is simply a form of critique. If you can't stand critique, please don't read my posts. Mr. Homer-Dixon won't care. He's got your money already. He surely won't get mine.

Hi Stoneleigh.

Having InfinitePossibillities repsond to one's comment is like stepping in dog poop: You really don't want it there, but you're obliged to deal with it.

I can't read IP's comments without concluding he doesn't comment in good faith. I read his comments as disrupting, misdirecting and discrediting the discourse at TOD, especially to new visitors. I can't figure out why the editors don't ban him, and similar trolls.

Leannan, where are you? You banned OILCEO recently for foul language, and mc about 18 months ago for persistent antisemitic remarks. What about it?

Stoneleigh,

Do you have some previoius relationship with IP?

He was making a constructive contribution. One of the best, since it was so early.

You need to lighten up. You will never last taking that stance. Look at me. I've had cannonballs pass through my abdomen. Ever wonder how I do that?

Mmmmmmn them Columbian sweeties. That is what I'm saying, dude. It is simply not my fault you made those decisions. I like snow. I like the drifts. And I'll hide your shit. I just don't have time to hide mine. I wanna sneak off and drink some rum with my baby. I'm always on the run. Dick Cheney.

I looked at the first chapter which is the online teaser. After reading that I wouldn't expect to find a serious analysis of anything to follow. If I had seen the book in the store last week and read that chapter, I would have put it down with a smile and walked to the fiction section to see if they have an English translation of Ransmayr's "The Last World". Now that is truly great fiction... (In reality I ended up buying a copy of Mark Twain's "Saint Joan of Arc" which promises a lot of entertainment and insight).

I guess I am simply too much of an engineer with science background to enjoy anything (allegedly) non-fictional that does not burst with data, models and falsifiable/verifiable math. As such I am much more interested in hybrid-sales and solar revenue growth as indicators of changes in consumer behaviour than sociological "analysis" of what is "wrong" with the world. As far as we know nothing is "wrong" with the world in the first place. It simply follows the laws of nature and the reactions we get from it are consequences of our own actions. The reactions are often predictable. The actions are often stupid. So the result of a sociological analysis would have to be that man continues to act stupid. There is nothing new about that. Mark Twain wrote two dozen books on that topic... I bet he would be very amused about PO and GW. And he certainly would write better about it than most anyone does today.

The real question I have (and no doomer has any answers to that) is WHEN will man be FORCED to act rationally by nature? We know that this is inevitable because people can only take so much punishment before they learn and the lessons we are facing will be hard ones. So while doomerism acknowledges that man is stupid, something I will never deny, it neglects that man can also learn. And the fact that we are here at all is my main witness for my case.

I am, by the way, not the first one to criticize the man, as this article shows:

http://www.homerdixon.com/download/Response_to_Gleditsch.pdf

Looks like to me that by the time these masters of sociology will be done with their debates about who made bigger mistakes describing the world, Toyota will have sold approx. 25 million hybrids and the world will get 5% of its energy from solar cells. The OLPC project will have distributed hundreds of millions of Linux devices to children in the developing world and many of these children will know more about computer science than most high school students in the US. What a beautiful world this will be... what a glorious time to be free. Not in Iraq, of course where we will celebrate five million deadths from the raging civil war...

Re: why do you even post this dribble?

That would be drivel, not "dribble". When commenting as you have, I believe it is important to get the words right but, on the other hand, "dribble" is indeed close to what you meant ie. as a noun:

1. Saliva flowing from the mouth
2. Stupid or senseless talk.

As a verb,

1. slobber; drool.


2. To flow like spittle or saliva, to allow to flow from the mouth


3. To talk stupidly or childishly.

However, I do appreciate your intention.

Please forgive this physicist, but I like to use thermodynamics for what it really was invented for: to predict the properties of thermodynamic systems. It is really great for calculating ICE efficiency and the state of the interior of stars or transport of electrons in semiconductors, but it has absolutely nothing to say about how people behave... unless you can tell me what the free energy of a gas made of people at any given temperature is, of course... Or maybe you would prefer to define the Entropy of the inhabitants of Mexico City (hint: units are J/K)? And what happens to them when the temperature approaches 0K? Hint: the entropy of any system at the zero point of the absolute temperature scale is 0 - it's the third law. But what does that mean? That there is no more social conflict because everyone is frozen stiff and dead? And how comes the system is not reversible once you raise the temperature again to 300K? Dead people stay dead but thermodynamics would expect that the system resumes the same state it had before you cooled it down... that is not how a gas behaves... And anyway, what is the critical exponent of a phase transition, e.g. during a revolution? What is the relevant order parameter? Flying bullets/m^3?

Don't get me wrong, but there has been so much abuse of physical terms by people in other disciplines who did not even take the time to read a simple introductory textbook on the stuff they were abusing that the stack of paper would go from here to the moon and back. Much of what has been written sounds great but the intellectual value of it is less than just questionable. Most of it is pure rubbish.

If you want to learn something about thermodynamics and complexity, you will have to read Haken and Prigogine. And while these gentlemen only talk about lasers, boiling water/oil, surface waves and the likes, at least they derive equations of motion which are formally correct and predict things like laser threshold, mode locking and chaos that is in good agreement with experiments. The other books I would put on my reading list are:

Misner, Thorne, Wheeler: Gravitation.
Weinberg: Gravitation and Cosmology.
Jackson: Electromagnetics.
Kittel: Introduction to Solid State Physics.
Feynman: Lectures.
Landau-Lifshitz: all volumes.
Numerical Recipes in C (Fortran, if you really need to torture yourself).
Any book on Classical Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics (they all suck in my opinnion).

Further reading:
ANY book you see in the science section of the university library that you feel like reading.
Regular browsing of Phys. Rev., Phys. Rev. Letters and Rev. Mod. Phys. and any other journal you like.

Once you are done with this stuff, you too will laugh about any attempts to use physics terminology on anything but physics problems.