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128 comments on Is Sustainable Development sustainable?
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128 comments on Is Sustainable Development sustainable?
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"You have not specified a timeline when such things will reach their tipping points. They could be tomorrow, next century or never for all you know. Doomers tend to ignore the timing believing doom is in the near term. When will the last tuna die? When will the last piece of coral blanch? When will the last bumble bee be photographed? When will there be no more downstream water from the melting glacier? When will 10% of the ice slide off of Antarctica into the ocean raising sea level? Will any of these happen during your lifetime?"
When did the 90th percentile of Atlantic cod or Pacific bluefin tuna get taken from the sea?
When did the last Somali fisherman pull up his empty nets, empty because EU and Asian countries' supertanker sized trawlers had taken all his catch?
When did the last dodo bird die?
When did the last carrier pigeon die?
When did the last woolly mammoth die?
When did the last Neanderthal die?
When did the last Ohlone Indian die?
When did Lehman Brothers go belly up?
When did Chrysler and GM go bankrupt?
When did the USSR, Spanish empire, Ottoman empire, British empire, Roman empire, Khmer Rhouge and Nazi Germany disappear?
When was the last chariot raced in ancient Rome?
When did Mono Lake north of Los Angeles start receding?
When did you become a global warming denier who rejects proof of reduced polar ice volumes?
When did Michael Jackson die?
When will you die? (it will happen in your lifetime)
Ken1,
When did Chrysler and GM go bankrupt?
Which times, GM has been bankrupt three times in the last 100years, I think Chrysler only twice?
The view in hindsight is not the doomer's forte.
I am not an AGW skeptic. I accept the science behind anthropic climate change. The Arctic ice cap is melting while both the Antarctic sea ice and land ice are increasing. Even the climate models project this due to increased precipitation at the poles caused by global warming. The Arctic sea ice is melting from beneath due to increased sea temperature. You can study the data at Cryosphere Today.
I agree that an human caused extinction event is in progress, that humans are consuming natural resources at an unsustainable rate and that humans are polluting the environment in numerous ways. My arguments are against doomerism: there is no solution, don't ever bother because we can't fix it, there are no such things as sustainable, renewable and environmentally friendly human behaviors.... Ideas that are not sustainable with a human population of 6.7 billion will become so once the human population is reduced sufficiently (and I do not mean reduced to zero).
This is good, but you have some out-of-date info or misunderstandings.
Incorrect. The Antarctic is a net loser WRT the Ice Cap, with warming occurring happening across the continent, but much more precipitously on the WAIS. Accumulations in the center of the continent are no longer overriding losses.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/01/state-of-antarctic...
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/01/warm-reception-to-...
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/02/antarctic-warming-...
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/06/on-overfitting/
Yes, but as the deniers like to say, the models were wrong. That is, they underestimated the rate of change.
As for time, either you or someone else derided the idea that time may be short. Anyone who claims to not be a skeptic on climate, but thinks there is plenty of time, still doesn't get it 100%. Rapid Climate Change is a real threat because these things happen in chaotic, non-linear ways. The record shows temperature changes of up to 7C in time periods of less than a decade. Assuming this won't happen is short-sighted, IMO, and even dangerous - particularly since we know we are adding to atmospheric CO2 and CO2e at a rate faster than most, if not all, of the climate record. Pushing a system to its limits makes it that much more likely they will be exceeded catastrophically.
Cheers
Hmmmm ...
What and where is the line between acceptance (of AGW) and denial?
The important question is why? It all seems so ... lemming- like to me!
(BTW, lemmings don't commit mass suicide, they are too smart to do so.)
As for the doomers; John Maynard Keynes had is right; "In the long run, we are all dead." How can this not drive all human behavior? If I die ... who gives a shit about anyone else?
I suppose the brink and various tipping points will be pulled away from us by economic collapse. Thank god or Yahweh or Jehovah for the mortality of economies! In the long run, economic systems are all dead. Taking away profits means taking away factory smokestacks and the puffs of CO2 that emerge from them. Even though the Chinese and the Indians and whatnot are frantically attempting to ape the USA consumer lifestyle, they cannot know that the whole idea of 'lifestyle' is kaput, replaced by the more old- school 'hard labor'. Hard labor is usually a fatal illness. Again, the human race's reach exceeds its grasp.
Demonstrating again the principal that in most ways it is better to be lucky than good.
Our stupid luck will save us from our own desperate self- immolation. It is impossible to be more lucky than this. Or ... will it? Who knows?
How does all this effect 'sustainability'? It doesn't, in fact nothing does. Sustainability is a conceit, it cannot exist anywhere because the ground rules that nature constantly adapts to are in themselves constantly changing. Since change is constant - in fact the only constant - the only iota of sustainability is effective un- sustainability. It's best to be flexible.
And prepared for disappointment.
Now ... when all in a particular market are calling for some thing ... like growth ... this signifies the end of the market for that thing. Call it a 'turning point' if you will. The existance of growth itself destroys growth because the costs of it are always higher than receipts. Our fantasy charade is we can collect some of those returns ahead of the onrushing costs which grow ever larger.
But, don't worry yourselves. Like all problems the growth issue solves itself by the simple expedient of us doing nothing or also doing something active to solve the growth problem or by outside means destroying the matrix for growth. Hmmmm ... growth is outnumbered by solutions. So is climate change. Climate change does not affect the Earth since the climate has changed over and over and will do so whether we sequester carbon or pump it up the asses of deniers and businessmen and politicians. It won't effect humans since we are all dead in the long run so who cares about our successor humans? Or, other species ... who wants to care about those losers?
(What's a 'species', again?)
It does effect our cars which we love to pieces and are defending literally to the death. If we don't care about ourselves, cannot we care about our dogs and cats?