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To: Gib Bogle who wrote (33201)	2/18/2007 3:17:46 AM
From: AuBug	Respond to of 78410

I highly recommend The Revenge of Gaia: Earth's Climate Crisis and the Fate of Humanity by James Lovelock. His breath of knowledge is very impressive. The thing I had not appreciated before reading this book was the ocean deserts that rising temperatures will create. Also, someone on SI posted a link to plant growth rate vs CO2 concentration and if memory serves it takes 1,200 ppm atmospheric CO2 to double the growth rate. We're at about 300 ppm CO2 now and I believe the ocean deserts will create far greater problems than any minor increase in plant growth rates could alleviate. amazon.com

To: Gib Bogle who wrote (33201)	2/18/2007 3:29:14 AM
From: E. Charters	Respond to of 78410

The more I see the warm and fuzzy attitudes of the complacent majority the more I worry. The wars will get grottier and grottier, the plagues ever and ever more dangerous. Penicillin is fading fast. Germs are evolving. Flesh eating disease and c-.difficile, aids, are tips of a very nasty germ-berg. On the other hand bacterial illness and viral illness while formidable killers historically are (usually) only checks, not wipeout threats. Even aids as deadly as it is and as long term and insidious, only really threatens large segments of the African population. Perhaps 200 million will die in the next ten years in Africa. In fact that will positively benefit the remaining population iff the remainder is more disease free. Penetration rates of 25 to 35% for aids worries me. How long can a population survive with that high a high-mortality group? Only three per cent in North America and Europe are immune to aids. Is the plague likely to stabilize? or suddenly increase, as it has in Africa? Its insidious inexorable spread amongst old and young in that continent solely in the rainy regions of Africa point to a possible insect vector. So far the vector is only weakly attested to as being sexual in nature. In fact the epidemiology is far to pervasive for it to be that. Some villages are healthy one year and everybody is dead the next. This is suspicious. Everybody in the village cannot be having sex with everybody else. It does not happen. You could not force me to have sex with that many people. I have tried it. I ran out of cigarettes. There is no question man will all die. When the continents collide again (100 million years) the food supply will dwindle to zero. Climate extremes will go to double Siberia. Crops will die, animals will die. The population of 200 billion will go to 10,000,000 in 10,000 years of the continents meeting. In another 100 years they will all be dead. Nobody can stand Antarctic winters and summers of 150 above. No crop, no animal except burrowing lizards and miniature penguins who feed on radioactive plankton. With war and famine and pestilence, I believe man will be dead anyway in 1000 years. The last tribe standing will be baked in a micro-nuke house to house terrorista war, fighting over the last barrels of coal-oil and refried hothouse tacos in a haze of blinding smog. Koan's descendants will be hunted down by starving eskimos, who will prize their spectacles for starting fires from driftwood. Yours will freeze to death and starve in caves in mts of Rura-Bonga. EC<:-}

To: Gib Bogle who wrote (33201)	2/18/2007 1:44:48 PM
From: koan	Respond to of 78410

Extinction of humans: I am on EC's side on this one. As a gambler, and man of odds Gib, I will predict a nuclear war somewhere within 20 years with attendant radiation. I do not expect the human species to make it until the next century and nuclear wars will be the cause. 90% chance it is a nuclear war and 10% chance it is something else, like an ebola virus spread by air, or some cause I cannot foresee.

To: Gib Bogle who wrote (33201)	2/18/2007 2:16:41 PM
From: roto	Respond to of 78410

a few years ago I spent some time in New Zealand. it was just after the French sunk the Rainbow Warrior and the Kiwi's reaction to their state of affairs in the world became Green. the disturbing thing at that time was on visit to Russell in the North Island, the Japanese were allowed to commercially harvest a lot of coastal bill fish & the Saudi's wanted to buy some South Island (around Greysmouth I think) glacier fresh- water run off (w/ a guarantee of a half dozen jobs, whoopee!). I do not know what is the current political clime in New Zealand but I only hope it is not politically condensing to foreign demands. in a visit to Costa Rico just a year later I was amazed at the Costa Rican approach to natural resources management. they were using the satellite system EOS to monitor their land mass activity, the threat being 'slash & burn' logging to favor cattle grazing...the culprit being large corporations such as McDonalds trying to save 1/2c per lb of burger, wherever that can be had. also, foreign commercial fleets were not allowed to harvest any fish on their coast & needless to say the sport fishing is excellent! what got my attention was the Costa Ricans express intent to save for posterity 1/4 to 1/3 of their land mass, not allowing any commercial development whatsoever. this radical idea I found extremely appealing in that this little nation of Costa Rica has such a vision of the future it puts our greed to shame. I only hope they stayed the course.