Global warming "past the point of no return"
... according to James Lovelock, who invented the Gaia Hypothesis: http://news.independent.co.uk/environment/article338878.ece
Earth to experience up to an 8°C rise in temperature, which doesn't sound too bad up here in Glasgow, but would be pretty hairy in, say, Bangladesh. He recommends a "handbook for global warming survivors", including lots of basic scientific knowledge, like the existence of bacteria and the fact that the Earth goes round the Sun. He advises putting it on long-lived paper rather than in a digital form: I'm sure the Long Now folks could come up with some better ideas. But maybe they shouldn't, because it would probably just become the basis of an unpleasant fundamentalist religion.
I dunno. Is he someone we should believe? Holism is all very well, but how good is the evidence for his Gaia-based approach? The chances of my reading the book are slim to none, so can someone help me out here? It's all a bit Pascal's Wager: they could be wrong, but can we afford to take the chance?
[Surprising fact, culled from PJ O'Rourke's All the Trouble in the World: up until about twenty years ago, scientists were worried about global cooling, and using much the same rhetoric to whip up concern.]
Earth to experience up to an 8°C rise in temperature, which doesn't sound too bad up here in Glasgow, but would be pretty hairy in, say, Bangladesh. He recommends a "handbook for global warming survivors", including lots of basic scientific knowledge, like the existence of bacteria and the fact that the Earth goes round the Sun. He advises putting it on long-lived paper rather than in a digital form: I'm sure the Long Now folks could come up with some better ideas. But maybe they shouldn't, because it would probably just become the basis of an unpleasant fundamentalist religion.
I dunno. Is he someone we should believe? Holism is all very well, but how good is the evidence for his Gaia-based approach? The chances of my reading the book are slim to none, so can someone help me out here? It's all a bit Pascal's Wager: they could be wrong, but can we afford to take the chance?
[Surprising fact, culled from PJ O'Rourke's All the Trouble in the World: up until about twenty years ago, scientists were worried about global cooling, and using much the same rhetoric to whip up concern.]