The Oil Drum

For those interested in hearing a scientist speak about the future of humankind and life on the Earth in a serious fashion with an appropriate mixture of doomsday and naive techno-salvationism, visit the Princeton University Webmedia page:

http://www.princeton.edu/WebMedia/lectures/

Listen to Peter Ward's lecture series, "The Undesigned Universe", and in particular the first two lectures (January 9 and 10). Peter Ward also presents a substantial argument against human space exploration in these lectures, too, so we pretty much can forget about any sort of Star Tredk-type future for our species.

For another scientist's view on the approaching catastrophes facing humankind, there is the eminent Tim Flannery. He advocates:

To avert biological disaster, Flannery's suggestions are radical: the coal industry should be shunted aside, traditional methods of producing power junked, and a desert metropolis established and placed at the centre of Australia's electricity grid. "We need to 'decarbonise' the economy extremely rapidly - which we could do if we were on a raw footing," he says. "We could just close down the coal-fired power plants. We could. We could mandate we are going to have electricity rationing, we are going to close things down, we are going to build a new infrastructure as quick as we can."

Flannery is unmoved by the possibility that this approach might cripple the country's economy - currently riding a commodities boom thanks to north Asia's hunger for Australian resources. "Won't the Australian economy collapse if climate change continues? There are a lot of ways to make electricity. Burning coal is just one of the more antique and stupid ways of doing it. We've got solar, we've got wind, we've got geothermal."

Ending the coal industry is an excellent idea but these alternatives won't provide the energy-intensive lifestyle that prosperous people demand. Too bad for the consumers, or (more accurately) too bad for the environment because that means that humans will keep on burning coal until civilization itself collapses.

How could civilization collapse? Tim Flannery provides a chilling scenario:

Flannery, who later this year will take up a post at Macquarie University in Sydney to research climate change, has sobering predictions for the future. "Let's project ourselves 50 years out and imagine that the rate of melt has continued so that the sea level has come up three or four metres. What that would mean is that there's barely a functioning port facility on the planet.

"So how do we go about international trade which is actually the centre of our global civilisation? Every coastal city is under enormous threat. People would be spending trillions just trying to keep their cities going. You've got refugees on a scale that is unimaginable. The stresses on peace would be enormous. Does that sound like a stable situation? That's just projecting what we've seen so far. That's just saying if we continue as we are, that's where we will end up."
http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/node/987

But no one should imagine that humankind is wise or honorable enough to cease all of these self-destructive activities until the oceans actually do rise and take away the world's coasts. At that point the climate change skeptics will concede that the climate has changed but they probably will still deny that humans bear any responsibility for the change.

The destruction of the Earth continues ...

David Mathews
http://www.geocities.com/dmathew1