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climate change
December 2009 
The Prophet of Doom, er, Climate Change
Posted on Oct 23rd, 2007
by 
~C4Chaos
~C4Chaos
(Crossposted from www.c4chaos.com)
I'm reading this article on Rolling Stone featuring James Lovelock, aka The Prophet of Climate Change. Here's the good news:
"By the end of the century, according to Lovelock, global warming will cause temperate zones like North America and Europe to heat up by fourteen degrees Fahrenheit, nearly double the likeliest predictions of the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations-sanctioned body that includes the world's top scientists. "Our future," Lovelock writes, "is like that of the passengers on a small pleasure boat sailing quietly above the Niagara Falls, not knowing that the engines are about to fail." And switching to energy-efficient light bulbs won't save us. To Lovelock, cutting greenhouse-gas pollution won't make much difference at this point, and much of what passes for sustainable development is little more than a scam to profit off disaster. "Green," he tells me, only half-joking, "is the color of mold and corruption."
"If such predictions were coming from anyone else, you would laugh them off as the ravings of an old man projecting his own impending death onto the world around him. But Lovelock is not so easily dismissed. As an inventor, he created a device that helped detect the growing hole in the ozone layer and jump-start the environmental movement in the 1970s. And as a scientist, he introduced the revolutionary theory known as Gaia -- the idea that our entire planet is a kind of superorganism that is, in a sense, "alive." Once dismissed as New Age quackery, Lovelock's vision of a self-regulating Earth now underlies virtually all climate science. Lynn Margulis, a pioneering biologist at the University of Massachusetts, calls him "one of the most innovative and mischievous scientific minds of our time." Richard Branson, the British entrepreneur, credits Lovelock with inspiring him to pledge billions of dollars to fight global warming. "Jim is a brilliant scientist who has been right about many things in the past," Branson says. "If he's feeling gloomy about the future, it's important for mankind to pay attention."
"Lovelock knows that predicting the end of civilization is not an exact science. "I could be wrong about all this," he admits as we stroll around the park in Norway. "The trouble is, all those well-intentioned scientists who are arguing that we're not in any imminent danger are basing their arguments on computer models. I'm basing mine on what?s actually happening.""
Read more.
Now, take note that James Lovelock is not a Climate skeptic. So we can't use the How to talk to a Climate Skeptic argument(s) against him. Maybe we need something like, How to talk to Climate Doomsdayers argument or whatever.
So, if Lovelock is right, then we'll just be wasting a ton of money on Climate Change anyway. So how about we start paying attention to Climate (doomsday) skeptics who have more positive things to say about this issue?
Access: Public
Jeez. That's incredibly gloomy. If that were true, there would literally be no point to doing anything at all. Absolutely no point. Of course, Life was always pointless. The 'purpose' was always to make yourself more comfortable and then you die. If you were morally tuned enough to interpret your own comfortability as being contingent on the comfortability of others- hurray for you! But within that there was always this idea that 'great art' would somehow 'pull people together' and 'make us feel less lonely' and that would somehow improve something 'out there' and before you knew it we'd have actually 'made a difference'. If this thing is true, then there is no difference to be made. No reason to do anything above survive, and survive in the most sybaritic fashion at that. Survive in the most grossly debauched, opulent fashion; fall into epicurean decay. Eat, Drink, for Tomorrow We Die.
He'd not be -that- gloomy if he knew that someone is/are working on some very promising systems that could convert CO2 into fuels (not necessary biofuels, though).
It's So weird that people as smart as him do not trust ingenuity and creativity, the -infinite resources- human beings provide.
Besides, even if we did die tomorrow, we could still try our best to see what a life can do… Since that's what life is about…
His meaning of alerting people is cool, but spreading fear might not be so cool… Well, confident people will still focus on finding solutions anyway, instead of waiting for death.
Lingchao
Besides, everything tends toward disorder. The tendency towards chaos is one of Nature's Way… So even if human beings had somehow accelarated that process, it's still -within- Nature's control… If we want to respect Nature, why could not we just Let It Be…
I am with human beings, and nature too.