On Avatar: I thought the cinematography was fabulous, and the engineering of the story to have the audience cheer when the Americans were killed to be tiresome.
Technically, it was a gorgeous movie, but peoplewise, Avatar left a lot to be desired. And there really wasn't anything absolutely identifying the terrestrials as Americans or anything else. The Corporation could have been multinational, and in fact, given the trouble Earth was in (implied in the movie), it probably was. I did cheer when that odious mercenary bastard leading the military side of things got his, but besides him, the only other terri I really didn't like was the slimy little Corporation executive, and, unfortunately, he lived to go back to Earth.
A great film for the visual effects, though. And the amateur biology and systematics person in me was looking for patterns among the various life forms. The Na'vi seem rather freakish, and not fitting many of the patterns established by other life. (Note: By "freakish" I don't mean unattractive, just that they do not follow the body plan established by the other neck-breathing hexapods shown. Even the "primate" analog visible when Na'vi Jake first sets foot in the jungle is a hexapod. Perhaps forewarned is four-armed, after all.)
They communicated, and had a Universal Socketed Biology (USB), but were they really more interdependent than is the case here?
Of course something like 99.999999% of all species that have ever existed are gone now; this is a regular feature of evolution. The impacts spike this from time to time.
And Man has an effect as well; this will be the first year in a while that Man has caused more oil leaks than naturally occur. (The usual man-caused contribution is something like 10%, but I'd guess that this year will be more than ten times that.) It's certainly unfortunate, but the doomsayers are a bit hasty to announce the collapse of all life.
They communicated, and had a Universal Socketed Biology (USB), but were they really more interdependent than is the case here?
The socketing couldn't have been natural -- you wouldn't get such a thing evolving in so many lineages that clearly had to have been widely divergent originally, genetically speaking. And the way that all organisms participated in the one biosphere, and that the biosphere responded directly to them, shows strong interdependence of a sort that flatly goes against the natural trends of Darwinian selection, which is pretty much an "every man for himself!" affair. You could force such strong interdependence, but it wouldn't arise naturally. But that also opens up fascinating possibilities. Who did the bioengineering, and when, and why?
Of course something like 99.999999% of all species that have ever existed are gone now; this is a regular feature of evolution. The impacts spike this from time to time.
And Man has an effect as well; this will be the first year in a while that Man has caused more oil leaks than naturally occur. (The usual man-caused contribution is something like 10%, but I'd guess that this year will be more than ten times that.) It's certainly unfortunate, but the doomsayers are a bit hasty to announce the collapse of all life.
We're running a planet-wide experiment whose outcome is simply unknown. We do know that eventually we will either run out of petroleum, find/make a dependenable substitute for it, or ace ourselves out of it, or mostly out of it, via nuclear war or something of the sort. Once petroleum burning ceases, however that happens, our world will inexorably return to the relentless cooling phase it was in before our numbers began to swell and our constant burning of everything flammable started raising greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere well above normal. That will continue for another 5 million years or so, until continental drift so changes the configuration of the continents and oceans on our world that Earth returns to another Endless Summer of the sort that dinosaurs enjoyed.
Estimates of current extinction rates are highly suspect, in my opinion. We are aware of something like 1.25 million species in existence now (though the estimates are all over the map) and this is orders of magnitude more than the individual species we can document for past times. Yet no one thinks (so far as I know) that we have a thousand times as many species now as, say, at the end of the Cretaceous.
No one was around to document individual species extinctions, or multiply them by modeled factors over actual observations. The work I've read on this seems bent on making things look as bad as possible, and the assumptions I've seen look unwarranted to me.
"5 million year" -- Are you suggesting that our roughly 100 kiloyear glaciation cycle is over? It's possible, but doesn't seem likely to me. The current cycle was apparently triggered by the volcanic construction of a land bridge between North and South America, rerouting the ocean; I don't think we're likely to expand the Panama Canal that much. ];-)
And it seems to me that CO2 concentrations are finally, at long last, beginning to creep up to something approaching normal. Plants are happy about it, certainly. We don't know of it ever being as low as recent times anywhere in paleontologic history, but of course our resolution is poor (much like with species).
I'd guess that we're feeding about one billion people every day with the extra CO2; it's not something I'd like to see go away.
Estimates of current extinction rates are highly suspect, in my opinion. We are aware of something like 1.25 million species in existence now (though the estimates are all over the map) and this is orders of magnitude more than the individual species we can document for past times. Yet no one thinks (so far as I know) that we have a thousand times as many species now as, say, at the end of the Cretaceous.
No one was around to document individual species extinctions, or multiply them by modeled factors over actual observations. The work I've read on this seems bent on making things look as bad as possible, and the assumptions I've seen look unwarranted to me.
Actually, we can make intelligent estimates of species levels and species extinction rates based on such things as the normal ratios of carnivores to herbivores in an ecosystem vs. ratios of fossils of carnivores to herbivores in given periods in the past. We can also make such estimates in the present based on destruction of habitats known to be essential to various types of organisms; i.e., as such habitats are destroyed, the creatures that require them for survival must go extinct, so . . . We can also measure numbers of species found in given rock strata relative to other strata below and above them; strata particularly poor in fossils, such as are found right at the boundary between the Triassic and the Permian, signify a very high extinction rate over a geological short interval. Paleontologists, geologists, and paleobiologists don't just pull those numbers out of a hat. Their disciplines have been refining the ways they make such estimates for two hundred years, and they've got rather good at it. For an expert's observations on mass extinctions, I recommend Peter D. Ward's
"5 million year" -- Are you suggesting that our roughly 100 kiloyear glaciation cycle is over? It's possible, but doesn't seem likely to me. The current cycle was apparently triggered by the volcanic construction of a land bridge between North and South America, rerouting the ocean
No. The current cycle of glaciation is the result of, among other things, the closing of the Tethys Seaway after the end of the Mesozoic. That Seaway allowed warm water to circulate around the globe and keep temperatures warm everywhere save at extreme north and south latitudes. Other factors came into play, too, but once that global circulation of warm water was gone, the Cretaceous Greenhouse was definitely over.
And it seems to me that CO2 concentrations are finally, at long last, beginning to creep up to something approaching normal.
There is no such thing as "normal" in the long haul, geologically speaking. Carbon dioxide levels have fluctuated widely over geological time. Another good book by Dr. Ward that goes into that is Out of Thin Air: Dinosaurs, Birds, and Earth's Ancient Atmosphere. And in The Medea Hypothesis: Is Life on Earth Ultimately Self-Destructive?, he analyzes the Gaia Hypothesis and shows that in many ways it fails to account for the actual history of life on Earth; as others have said, the Gaia Hypothesis has always been more metaphor than anything else, not a scientifically testable hypothesis. For more on such things, you should check out Dr. Ward's other books, as well as anything by Lynne Margulis, James Lovelock, and the McMenamins.
I'd guess that we're feeding about one billion people every day with the extra CO2; it's not something I'd like to see go away.
That won't last. It can't last. For one thing, we're already outstripping our need for safe, clean water, and eventually, between disease and water wars, our numbers are going to go way down -- and so will anthropogenic burning of all kinds, along with atmospheric CO2 levels. Please read those books I've cited. They give details I can't, and they are very convincing. Especially Dr. Ward's. I was also trained in systems theory and biological systems, and he brings up important points about how they work that Lovelock and Margulis have missed. You might also want to google Dr. Ward on the Web, because there are a number of sites out there where he discusses such things, though not in the detail that he does in his books.
For one thing, we're already outstripping our need for safe, clean water,
We can make fresh water from seawater, abundantly. The only requirement is energy. Eventually, space solar power will supply this without limit.
and eventually, between disease and water wars, our numbers are going to go way down
That's a guess, isn't it? It assumes that jihadists are not a problem, and killing billions of people will happen as a result of water.
Disease is not doing it. As much as AIDS is a massive killer in Africa, Africa remains the fastest population growth center on the planet.
-- and so will anthropogenic burning of all kinds,
It would certainly be nice to see a shift toward fossil fuels in countries currently clearing and burning rainforest, wouldn't it?
along with atmospheric CO2 levels.
Atmospheric CO2 levels are going to kill billions? (i.e. bring population levels way down?) It hardly seems likely. It is not clear that this has killed anyone to date, and I don't see a large threat.
Please read the books by the authors I've cited. As I said, they're experts in their fields, and they also cite more experts in the bibliographies to their books. Until you read those, you'll have no idea of which models and data-bases I'm working from.
Pick the best one. I've read many dozens of books and hundreds of papers in this general area over the past several decades, and the net synthesis of all of these is not compelling. The current craze about "acidification" of the oceans is a good example of poor modeling showing a gigantic effect when the reality is not only smaller, it appears to be in the opposite direction.
The US still hasn't reached its temperature peak from the 1930s, though adjusted numbers moved two later years higher after the fact. That doesn't impress me. In 1975, temperature had dropped 2.75 degress F (not quite 2 degrees C) in three decades. Now our revised numbers say it was only a 0.2 degree drop. But seeing how the numbers get fudged, I've no confidence in such assertions.
Nor do I see the need for the US to subject itself to "world governance," as Al Gore and President Obama and others are suggesting, simply to address a problem that is largely exaggeration. (I HAVE read Lovelock, who is a classic in the exaggeration department.)
It's not that humans are having no effect. We are responsible for a significant portion of the increased CO2; much of the rest has come from oceans. But I do not see the horrific bad effects of this CO2. It isn't a large temperature factor, as history has shown. It has some effect, but cloud feedbacks are larger yet.
The programming code used to calculate come of the temperature and related numbers would be hilarious if it weren't for so many trillions of dollars (and forms of government!) riding on it.
I've read various government reports on the coming doom, and these without exception use very dishonest methods to make their cases.
And, of course, I've been following the IPCC business since its inception years ago; the more of that mess that is exposed, the better.
This has been a topic of at least mild interest for me for four decades--since back when global cooling was going to make it impossible to grow food in ten years or less, according to a group of climatologists gathered in San Diego at the behest of the FBI.
Just because they were wrong is not, itself, a reason that similar folks are wrong again; that's a fallacious argument. But it does tend to invite caution. And digging into the current situation shows not just guessing wrong, but quite disreputable fudging in order to keep a Clear Message.
Many people really, honestly believe that we're all going to be killed by global warming. Lovelock gives strong evidence that he believes it, and probably this is true of Ward as well.
I'll read him, and let him make his case--for I never stop learning. But if he repeats the same long-disproven anecdotes--much like the "spitting" and "N-word 15 times" by Tea Party members--it won't help his credibility. It won't necessarily mean that he's dishonest, but that he's assuming good faith in others who haven't earned it.
Conservation is good. But the green movement is causing pollution, right now, by forcing older, dirtier coal plants to stay in business since they won't let new cleaner ones be built. I am against pollution, but by lumping carbon dioxide into "pollution," it makes the word nearly meaningless, and takes the focus away from real problems. I oppose this notion.
You should read all those by Dr. Ward I've cited. And also Stephen J. Pyne's Cycle of Fire series of books on the natural history of fire, including anthropogenic fire (after all, we are just as natural as any other creature Earth has given rise to). Pyne is our premier fire-scientist, fire-historian, and fire-anthropologist. His book Fire: A Brief History gives a concise and very informative overview of the subject. For observations by Dr. Pyne on fire and our long love-affair with it, go here.
These subjects aren't nearly as simple as many think they are, and they are worth learning about in depth, because only then do many of the answers to questions like yours start to come to light in a dependable fashion. Ward and Pyne are hard scientists who work with models that can be objectively tested, and reject those models that don't stand up to the tests. Both also have had extensive field experience, Pyne in forestry (he fought fires with fire crews at the Grand Canyon when he was young, traveled to Antarctica to scope it out, etc.), and Ward in doing survey after survey after survey of fossil beds around the world as well as doing his own diving to get up close and personal with the forms of sea life he was studying as well as to check out the remains of ancient life found in and around the world's oceans himself. They're both excellent writers, and their books are a treat to read. Worth investing in.
Okay, I just thought of a way to make clear how complex these subjects are:
Suppose you were one of the CEOs in a gigantic multinational corporation. This corporation manufactures widgets, thingamajigs, whatcamacallums, thingamabobs, and a host of other things; some are electronics, others are mostly mechanical, e.g., farm equipment, work vehicles, etc. The corporation does a lot of its own distributing via shipping and trucking lines in which it has considerable monetary investment. It does a lot of its own marketing, as well, though it also handles corporate advertising accounts for highly specialized companies that pay for its expertise in that area. It has a huge investment in information and communications technology, and some departments within it actually design some of that technology, as well. And so on and on and on. Now: a friend of yours who doesn't know much about your corporation comes to you and asks you to describe its history, the day-to-day running of it, its position in the world economy, and other things pertinent in a few pithy sentences that will shed instant illumination on all these things. He's not a businessman, and doesn't share the language of business with you, which makes it even harder to answer him honestly or informatively.
Ecology is all about how organisms do business. It deals with how they make their living, the organisms and biological/ecological systems that benefit from the output of the way they do business, how they fit into the biological economy of the planet as a whole as well as the living systems making up the biosphere of which they are part, the raw materials (energy and matter) used up as organisms do business, the finished materials (gases, liquids, solids, infrared (heat) energy, visible and ultraviolet light, rearrangement of landscape, materials processed into other types of materials, etc.), and everything related to that. The living world overall can be usefully compared to that giant multinational corporation, though, unlike that of such a corporation, its history goes back more than 4 billion years, and it spans everthing from the top of the troposphere to subsurface layers of the crust (the deep, hot biosphere) and the oceans' deepest abysses. There is no way to boil that all down in just a few sentences in any meaningful way. Hence my recommendation about books to read to get expert, careful, thoughtful presentation of the nuts and bolts of the whole thing, because I'm just an amateur and student, not a deservedly recognized expert myself.
You and I are both avid students of the material. I didn't reach my opinion through ignorance.
If you have a particular Ward book that you think presents the best argument that we're all gonna die from global warming--or more carefully stated, that global warming is going to have catastrophic consequences (even Lovelock thinks that only 98% of us or so will be killed)--then I will read it.
I've got a pretty good selection of such materials now. Gore's book was horrifying ... in the sense that someone that crazy was actually already vice president of the United States (at the time I first read it).
He might have been well-meaning at one time. But his communist setups--he cutely calls this "Capitalism 3.0"--have him massively invested in the scare; and he has proposed getting 20% of the income of every person on the planet so that he can spend it in ways that you and I are not smart enough to do.
Of course it's paying off--and BP has been pushing the green movement for a long time, which is how they were allowed to get the record that they have. BP pushed Kyoto, and is (so far as I know) the largest college donor in history to Berkeley to the tune of some $500 million. Tainted money? Berkeley has already decided that it's not too tainted to keep. You see, it's a lot of money.
If global warming is a serious problem, it would be an amazing coincidence--as it happens to have a cadre of massively crooked and evil people pushing it and positioned to benefit from the resulting government changes.
Global warming and pollution are two completely different issues in my mind. One of the most disappointing aspects of the current ecological craze is to conflate the two, then diffuse the efforts to deal with the real problems.
I mentioned his Out of Thin Air. It goes into great detail about the way in which the chemistry and other aspects of Earth's atmosphere has changed over the last 600 million years, the extinctions associated with its more radical, rapid changes, and the way life has adapted and evolved in response to its evolution. The Life and Death of Planet Earth: How the New Science of Astrobiology Charts the Ultimate Fate of our World, by Ward and Donald Brownlee, who is a professional astronomer, as the title says, how Earth's various systems -- hydrological and lithic as well as atmospheric will change in the future, and how life will be forced to adapt to those changes. Ward's Amazon.com: Rivers in Time: The Search for Clues to Earth's Mass Extinctions discusses the mass extinctions that have occurred on our world since the Neoproterozoic Era, and their likely causes, including, in some cases, changes in the atmosphere that made for too much or too little oxygen or carbon dioxide for then-existing forms of life. Each book goes into great detail about its subject; each has a different emphasis and thus some different details and different foci than the others. Take your pick.
If you have a particular Ward book that you think presents the best argument that we're all gonna die from global warming--or more carefully stated, that global warming is going to have catastrophic consequences (even Lovelock thinks that only 98% of us or so will be killed)--then I will read it.
Ward may be alarmed, but he is not an alarmist. He's a highly intelligent and well-educated polymath; in addition to extensive training in geology, astrobiology, paleobiology, and related fields, he also has his own department at NASA (thought that may have changed, and damn Obama to hell) concerned with meteorology and atmospheric science. His books therefore cover a wide range of topics, and each one goes into great detail on its subject, drawing on an enormous database and wealth of field experience to be able to present highly complex subjects as comprehensively as possible. He uses these as textbooks in the classes he teaches, as well. And he is not happy at how stupid and ignorant so many of those students are, thanks to our modern "educational" system and media influence. Anyway, I linked reviews of three of his books because each has a different focus and I don't know which one you want to try first.
I've got a pretty good selection of such materials now. Gore's book was horrifying ... in the sense that someone that crazy was actually already vice president of the United States (at the time I first read it).
Oh, hell, Gore's a drama queen, playing to an audience of highly ignorant people -- he misses being Vice President, and regrets not becoming President, and digs on the substitute attention. I have heard him described, quite accurately, as "even stupider than his daddy," who was a Senator himself. It's also an open secret that his family has been part of the "Tennessee Mafai" for several generations, and that they are also Communists -- which he himself is. One of their closest family friends was the late and unlamented Armand Hammer, head of the Arm&Hammer company (guess what that logo celebrates) while he was alive.
Hammer wasn't just a friend--he owned the Gores, essentially. Because of his permanently paid-for ticket, he was the only non-government person invited to various State events--a bit like Kenneth Lay and his 28 trips with Clinton trade junkets, a practice that ended abruptly when Bush took over.
I don't know if Armand's curious name and the obvious logo is the reason that he was so attracted to communism; that may just be a weird coincidence.
Hammer wasn't just a friend--he owned the Gores, essentially. Because of his permanently paid-for ticket, he was the only non-government person invited to various State events--a bit like Kenneth Lay and his 28 trips with Clinton trade junkets, a practice that ended abruptly when Bush took over.
I've heard that, and I'm not surprised. Compared to Obama, the Clintons are far-right; but by any other measure, they are of the Left, though Bill did move toward the center in some respects while he was in the White House. And Gore is a raving Marxist.
I don't know if Armand's curious name and the obvious logo is the reason that he was so attracted to communism; that may just be a weird coincidence.
Technically, it was a gorgeous movie, but peoplewise, Avatar left a lot to be desired. And there really wasn't anything absolutely identifying the terrestrials as Americans or anything else. The Corporation could have been multinational, and in fact, given the trouble Earth was in (implied in the movie), it probably was. I did cheer when that odious mercenary bastard leading the military side of things got his, but besides him, the only other terri I really didn't like was the slimy little Corporation executive, and, unfortunately, he lived to go back to Earth.
A great film for the visual effects, though. And the amateur biology and systematics person in me was looking for patterns among the various life forms. The Na'vi seem rather freakish, and not fitting many of the patterns established by other life. (Note: By "freakish" I don't mean unattractive, just that they do not follow the body plan established by the other neck-breathing hexapods shown. Even the "primate" analog visible when Na'vi Jake first sets foot in the jungle is a hexapod. Perhaps forewarned is four-armed, after all.)
GROAN (most appreciatively) Anyway, yeah, you're right. That biosphere was clearly not natural; it had to have been engineered at some point in the past. Every life-form native (?) to Pandora was strongly interdependent on all the others, which means that if one species because extinct, or even badly depleted in numbers, several others would, too, and more, and more, and more. That was a very fragile biosphere, ecologically speaking. When the interlinks among species in an ecosystem of any size, including a biosphere, are too tight, too interdependent, that ecosystem is in deadly danger of collapsing at the first halfway solid blow from whatever external cause. My literary partner suggested that there's a backstory there that could provide material for a sequel, one showing that that biosphere was engineered by somebody in the past, and why, and what happened to the engineers.
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Of course something like 99.999999% of all species that have ever existed are gone now; this is a regular feature of evolution. The impacts spike this from time to time.
And Man has an effect as well; this will be the first year in a while that Man has caused more oil leaks than naturally occur. (The usual man-caused contribution is something like 10%, but I'd guess that this year will be more than ten times that.) It's certainly unfortunate, but the doomsayers are a bit hasty to announce the collapse of all life.
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The socketing couldn't have been natural -- you wouldn't get such a thing evolving in so many lineages that clearly had to have been widely divergent originally, genetically speaking. And the way that all organisms participated in the one biosphere, and that the biosphere responded directly to them, shows strong interdependence of a sort that flatly goes against the natural trends of Darwinian selection, which is pretty much an "every man for himself!"
affair. You could force such strong interdependence, but it wouldn't arise naturally. But that also opens up fascinating possibilities. Who did the bioengineering, and when, and why?
Of course something like 99.999999% of all species that have ever existed are gone now; this is a regular feature of evolution. The impacts spike this from time to time.
Yes, but gigantic mass extinctions don't happen very often. Individual species go extinct constantly. The normal background rate for extinctions isn't all that high, though currently rates are 100-1,000 times normal, and have been high throughout the Holocene (since the end of the last Ice Age), mostly as a result of human impact on habitats.
And Man has an effect as well; this will be the first year in a while that Man has caused more oil leaks than naturally occur. (The usual man-caused contribution is something like 10%, but I'd guess that this year will be more than ten times that.) It's certainly unfortunate, but the doomsayers are a bit hasty to announce the collapse of all life.
We're running a planet-wide experiment whose outcome is simply unknown. We do know that eventually we will either run out of petroleum, find/make a dependenable substitute for it, or ace ourselves out of it, or mostly out of it, via nuclear war or something of the sort. Once petroleum burning ceases, however that happens, our world will inexorably return to the relentless cooling phase it was in before our numbers began to swell and our constant burning of everything flammable started raising greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere well above normal. That will continue for another 5 million years or so, until continental drift so changes the configuration of the continents and oceans on our world that Earth returns to another Endless Summer of the sort that dinosaurs enjoyed.
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No one was around to document individual species extinctions, or multiply them by modeled factors over actual observations. The work I've read on this seems bent on making things look as bad as possible, and the assumptions I've seen look unwarranted to me.
"5 million year" -- Are you suggesting that our roughly 100 kiloyear glaciation cycle is over? It's possible, but doesn't seem likely to me. The current cycle was apparently triggered by the volcanic construction of a land bridge between North and South America, rerouting the ocean; I don't think we're likely to expand the Panama Canal that much. ];-)
And it seems to me that CO2 concentrations are finally, at long last, beginning to creep up to something approaching normal. Plants are happy about it, certainly. We don't know of it ever being as low as recent times anywhere in paleontologic history, but of course our resolution is poor (much like with species).
I'd guess that we're feeding about one billion people every day with the extra CO2; it's not something I'd like to see go away.
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No one was around to document individual species extinctions, or multiply them by modeled factors over actual observations. The work I've read on this seems bent on making things look as bad as possible, and the assumptions I've seen look unwarranted to me.
Actually, we can make intelligent estimates of species levels and species extinction rates based on such things as the normal ratios of carnivores to herbivores in an ecosystem vs. ratios of fossils of carnivores to herbivores in given periods in the past. We can also make such estimates in the present based on destruction of habitats known to be essential to various types of organisms; i.e., as such habitats are destroyed, the creatures that require them for survival must go extinct, so . . . We can also measure numbers of species found in given rock strata relative to other strata below and above them; strata particularly poor in fossils, such as are found right at the boundary between the Triassic and the Permian, signify a very high extinction rate over a geological short interval. Paleontologists, geologists, and paleobiologists don't just pull those numbers out of a hat. Their disciplines have been refining the ways they make such estimates for two hundred years, and they've got rather good at it. For an expert's observations on mass extinctions, I recommend Peter D. Ward's
Under A Green Sky: Global Warming, the Mass Extinctions of the Past, and What They Can Tell Us About Our Future and Rivers in Time: The Search for Clues to Earth's Mass Extinctions. Dr. Ward is one of the most highly regarded scientists in these areas of study, and he lays it all out very well, far better than I could. The books are available for low prices on amazon.com, or may be available in your local library.
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"5 million year" -- Are you suggesting that our roughly 100 kiloyear glaciation cycle is over? It's possible, but doesn't seem likely to me. The current cycle was apparently triggered by the volcanic construction of a land bridge between North and South America, rerouting the ocean
No. The current cycle of glaciation is the result of, among other things, the closing of the Tethys Seaway after the end of the Mesozoic. That Seaway allowed warm water to circulate around the globe and keep temperatures warm everywhere save at extreme north and south latitudes. Other factors came into play, too, but once that global circulation of warm water was gone, the Cretaceous Greenhouse was definitely over.
And it seems to me that CO2 concentrations are finally, at long last, beginning to creep up to something approaching normal.
There is no such thing as "normal" in the long haul, geologically speaking. Carbon dioxide levels have fluctuated widely over geological time. Another good book by Dr. Ward that goes into that is
Out of Thin Air: Dinosaurs, Birds, and Earth's Ancient Atmosphere. And in
The Medea Hypothesis: Is Life on Earth Ultimately Self-Destructive?, he analyzes the Gaia Hypothesis and shows that in many ways it fails to account for the actual history of life on Earth; as others have said, the Gaia Hypothesis has always been more metaphor than anything else, not a scientifically testable hypothesis. For more on such things, you should check out Dr. Ward's other books, as well as anything by Lynne Margulis, James Lovelock, and the McMenamins.
I'd guess that we're feeding about one billion people every day with the extra CO2; it's not something I'd like to see go away.
That won't last. It can't last. For one thing, we're already outstripping our need for safe, clean water, and eventually, between disease and water wars, our numbers are going to go way down -- and so will anthropogenic burning of all kinds, along with atmospheric CO2 levels. Please read those books I've cited. They give details I can't, and they are very convincing. Especially Dr. Ward's. I was also trained in systems theory and biological systems, and he brings up important points about how they work that Lovelock and Margulis have missed. You might also want to google Dr. Ward on the Web, because there are a number of sites out there where he discusses such things, though not in the detail that he does in his books.
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No? Who says?
For one thing, we're already outstripping our need for safe, clean water,
We can make fresh water from seawater, abundantly. The only requirement is energy. Eventually, space solar power will supply this without limit.
and eventually, between disease and water wars, our numbers are going to go way down
That's a guess, isn't it? It assumes that jihadists are not a problem, and killing billions of people will happen as a result of water.
Disease is not doing it. As much as AIDS is a massive killer in Africa, Africa remains the fastest population growth center on the planet.
-- and so will anthropogenic burning of all kinds,
It would certainly be nice to see a shift toward fossil fuels in countries currently clearing and burning rainforest, wouldn't it?
along with atmospheric CO2 levels.
Atmospheric CO2 levels are going to kill billions? (i.e. bring population levels way down?) It hardly seems likely. It is not clear that this has killed anyone to date, and I don't see a large threat.
===|==============/ Level Head
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Pick the best one. I've read many dozens of books and hundreds of papers in this general area over the past several decades, and the net synthesis of all of these is not compelling. The current craze about "acidification" of the oceans is a good example of poor modeling showing a gigantic effect when the reality is not only smaller, it appears to be in the opposite direction.
The US still hasn't reached its temperature peak from the 1930s, though adjusted numbers moved two later years higher after the fact. That doesn't impress me. In 1975, temperature had dropped 2.75 degress F (not quite 2 degrees C) in three decades. Now our revised numbers say it was only a 0.2 degree drop. But seeing how the numbers get fudged, I've no confidence in such assertions.
Nor do I see the need for the US to subject itself to "world governance," as Al Gore and President Obama and others are suggesting, simply to address a problem that is largely exaggeration. (I HAVE read Lovelock, who is a classic in the exaggeration department.)
It's not that humans are having no effect. We are responsible for a significant portion of the increased CO2; much of the rest has come from oceans. But I do not see the horrific bad effects of this CO2. It isn't a large temperature factor, as history has shown. It has some effect, but cloud feedbacks are larger yet.
The programming code used to calculate come of the temperature and related numbers would be hilarious if it weren't for so many trillions of dollars (and forms of government!) riding on it.
I've read various government reports on the coming doom, and these without exception use very dishonest methods to make their cases.
And, of course, I've been following the IPCC business since its inception years ago; the more of that mess that is exposed, the better.
This has been a topic of at least mild interest for me for four decades--since back when global cooling was going to make it impossible to grow food in ten years or less, according to a group of climatologists gathered in San Diego at the behest of the FBI.
Just because they were wrong is not, itself, a reason that similar folks are wrong again; that's a fallacious argument. But it does tend to invite caution. And digging into the current situation shows not just guessing wrong, but quite disreputable fudging in order to keep a Clear Message.
Many people really, honestly believe that we're all going to be killed by global warming. Lovelock gives strong evidence that he believes it, and probably this is true of Ward as well.
I'll read him, and let him make his case--for I never stop learning. But if he repeats the same long-disproven anecdotes--much like the "spitting" and "N-word 15 times" by Tea Party members--it won't help his credibility. It won't necessarily mean that he's dishonest, but that he's assuming good faith in others who haven't earned it.
Conservation is good. But the green movement is causing pollution, right now, by forcing older, dirtier coal plants to stay in business since they won't let new cleaner ones be built. I am against pollution, but by lumping carbon dioxide into "pollution," it makes the word nearly meaningless, and takes the focus away from real problems. I oppose this notion.
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You should read all those by Dr. Ward I've cited. And also Stephen J. Pyne's Cycle of Fire series of books on the natural history of fire, including anthropogenic fire (after all, we are just as natural as any other creature Earth has given rise to). Pyne is our premier fire-scientist, fire-historian, and fire-anthropologist. His book Fire: A Brief History gives a concise and very informative overview of the subject. For observations by Dr. Pyne on fire and our long love-affair with it, go here.
These subjects aren't nearly as simple as many think they are, and they are worth learning about in depth, because only then do many of the answers to questions like yours start to come to light in a dependable fashion. Ward and Pyne are hard scientists who work with models that can be objectively tested, and reject those models that don't stand up to the tests. Both also have had extensive field experience, Pyne in forestry (he fought fires with fire crews at the Grand Canyon when he was young, traveled to Antarctica to scope it out, etc.), and Ward in doing survey after survey after survey of fossil beds around the world as well as doing his own diving to get up close and personal with the forms of sea life he was studying as well as to check out the remains of ancient life found in and around the world's oceans himself. They're both excellent writers, and their books are a treat to read. Worth investing in.
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Suppose you were one of the CEOs in a gigantic multinational corporation. This corporation manufactures widgets, thingamajigs, whatcamacallums, thingamabobs, and a host of other things; some are electronics, others are mostly mechanical, e.g., farm equipment, work vehicles, etc. The corporation does a lot of its own distributing via shipping and trucking lines in which it has considerable monetary investment. It does a lot of its own marketing, as well, though it also handles corporate advertising accounts for highly specialized companies that pay for its expertise in that area. It has a huge investment in information and communications technology, and some departments within it actually design some of that technology, as well. And so on and on and on. Now: a friend of yours who doesn't know much about your corporation comes to you and asks you to describe its history, the day-to-day running of it, its position in the world economy, and other things pertinent in a few pithy sentences that will shed instant illumination on all these things. He's not a businessman, and doesn't share the language of business with you, which makes it even harder to answer him honestly or informatively.
Ecology is all about how organisms do business. It deals with how they make their living, the organisms and biological/ecological systems that benefit from the output of the way they do business, how they fit into the biological economy of the planet as a whole as well as the living systems making up the biosphere of which they are part, the raw materials (energy and matter) used up as organisms do business, the finished materials (gases, liquids, solids, infrared (heat) energy, visible and ultraviolet light, rearrangement of landscape, materials processed into other types of materials, etc.), and everything related to that. The living world overall can be usefully compared to that giant multinational corporation, though, unlike that of such a corporation, its history goes back more than 4 billion years, and it spans everthing from the top of the troposphere to subsurface layers of the crust (the deep, hot biosphere) and the oceans' deepest abysses. There is no way to boil that all down in just a few sentences in any meaningful way. Hence my recommendation about books to read to get expert, careful, thoughtful presentation of the nuts and bolts of the whole thing, because I'm just an amateur and student, not a deservedly recognized expert myself.
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If you have a particular Ward book that you think presents the best argument that we're all gonna die from global warming--or more carefully stated, that global warming is going to have catastrophic consequences (even Lovelock thinks that only 98% of us or so will be killed)--then I will read it.
I've got a pretty good selection of such materials now. Gore's book was horrifying ... in the sense that someone that crazy was actually already vice president of the United States (at the time I first read it).
He might have been well-meaning at one time. But his communist setups--he cutely calls this "Capitalism 3.0"--have him massively invested in the scare; and he has proposed getting 20% of the income of every person on the planet so that he can spend it in ways that you and I are not smart enough to do.
Of course it's paying off--and BP has been pushing the green movement for a long time, which is how they were allowed to get the record that they have. BP pushed Kyoto, and is (so far as I know) the largest college donor in history to Berkeley to the tune of some $500 million. Tainted money? Berkeley has already decided that it's not too tainted to keep. You see, it's a lot of money.
If global warming is a serious problem, it would be an amazing coincidence--as it happens to have a cadre of massively crooked and evil people pushing it and positioned to benefit from the resulting government changes.
Global warming and pollution are two completely different issues in my mind. One of the most disappointing aspects of the current ecological craze is to conflate the two, then diffuse the efforts to deal with the real problems.
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Ward may be alarmed, but he is not an alarmist. He's a highly intelligent and well-educated polymath; in addition to extensive training in geology, astrobiology, paleobiology, and related fields, he also has his own department at NASA (thought that may have changed, and damn Obama to hell) concerned with meteorology and atmospheric science. His books therefore cover a wide range of topics, and each one goes into great detail on its subject, drawing on an enormous database and wealth of field experience to be able to present highly complex subjects as comprehensively as possible. He uses these as textbooks in the classes he teaches, as well. And he is not happy at how stupid and ignorant so many of those students are, thanks to our modern "educational" system and media influence. Anyway, I linked reviews of three of his books because each has a different focus and I don't know which one you want to try first.
I've got a pretty good selection of such materials now. Gore's book was horrifying ... in the sense that someone that crazy was actually already vice president of the United States (at the time I first read it).
Oh, hell, Gore's a drama queen, playing to an audience of highly ignorant people -- he misses being Vice President, and regrets not becoming President, and digs on the substitute attention. I have heard him described, quite accurately, as "even stupider than his daddy," who was a Senator himself. It's also an open secret that his family has been part of the "Tennessee Mafai" for several generations, and that they are also Communists -- which he himself is. One of their closest family friends was the late and unlamented Armand Hammer, head of the Arm&Hammer company (guess what that logo celebrates) while he was alive.
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I don't know if Armand's curious name and the obvious logo is the reason that he was so attracted to communism; that may just be a weird coincidence.
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I've heard that, and I'm not surprised. Compared to Obama, the Clintons are far-right; but by any other measure, they are of the Left, though Bill did move toward the center in some respects while he was in the White House. And Gore is a raving Marxist.
I don't know if Armand's curious name and the obvious logo is the reason that he was so attracted to communism; that may just be a weird coincidence.
His mother named him that, and that's why.
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