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Politics : The Environmentalist Thread -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (10328)	3/11/2007 6:13:26 PM
From: Wharf Rat	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 36917

From the Sunday Times: GW starts to run-away due to positive feedback loops. timesonline.co.uk However, the author makes statements such as 100 million barrels of oil per day to keep China's newly industrialised rich moving in 2020. The author seems to assume continued growth levels and correspondingly increased use of carbon fuels. So perhaps his model is a bit flawed. Unless of course coal use is ramped up. Either way, GW will screw us all up, if PO doesnt get us first... Long article, but very much worth a read. Shame the maps are not present as in the printed article, but anyway: Here is an excerpt: ‘’..the Hadley team had discovered that carbon-cycle feedbacks could tip the planet into runaway global warming by the middle of this century - much earlier than anyone had expected." Confirmation came from the land itself. Climate models are routinely tested against historical data. In this case, scientists checked 25 years' worth of soil samples from 6,000 sites across the UK. The result was another black joke. "As temperatures gradually rose," says Lynas, "the scientists found that huge amounts of carbon had been released naturally from the soils. They totted it all up and discovered - irony of ironies - that the 13m tonnes of carbon British soils were emitting annually was enough to wipe out all the country's efforts to comply with the Kyoto Protocol." All soils will be affected by the rising heat, but none as badly as the Amazon's. "Catastrophe" is almost too small a word for the loss of the rainforest. Its 7m square kilometres produce 10% of the world's entire photosynthetic output from plants. Drought and heat will cripple it; fire will finish it off. In human terms, the effect on the planet will be like cutting off oxygen during an asthma attack…’’ And another (for all those survivalists out there): "Where no refuge is available," says Lynas, "civil war and a collapse into racial or communal conflict seems the likely outcome." Isolated survivalism, however, may be as impracticable as dialling for room service. "How many of us could really trap or kill enough game to feed a family? Even if large numbers of people did successfully manage to fan out into the countryside, wildlife populations would quickly dwindle under the pressure. Supporting a hunter-gatherer lifestyle takes 10 to 100 times the land per person that a settled agricultural community needs. A large-scale resort to survivalism would turn into a further disaster for biodiversity as hungry humans killed and ate anything that moved." Including, perhaps, each other. "Invaders," says Lynas, "do not take kindly to residents denying them food. History suggests that if a stockpile is discovered, the householder and his family may be tortured and killed. Look for comparison to the experience of present-day Somalia, Sudan or Burundi, where conflicts over scarce land and food are at the root of lingering tribal wars and state collapse."