Wake up call....or what?

[woodbloke]

The news from Paris last night was depressing to say the least, if not unexpected and I'm left wondering where we go from here and what to do about it all. The current predictions show that by the end of the century there will be a 4deg or so rise in global temperature with all the consequences to follow and this rise appears set to continue exponentially as the time passes. A century in human evolutionary terms is a mere blink of an eye and in geological time is equivalent to something like a nanosecond.
During the last century we went through two global wars and are currently engaged in another couple in the Middle East...my own view is that all the wars in the last 100 years pale into insignificance compared to the potential havoc which may be upon us and which may have already started.
To me there is one chink of light in an otherwise fairly black picture and that is that fossil fuels only have a finite time..oil reserves will last about another 30 odd years and coal about 200. After that other technologies will have to be developed to accommodate our energy needs.
My question is this though...without this thread taking on any sort of political bias of any sort.... if you could sit in HG Well's Time Machine and set the clock for 3000AD, what sort of world would you find when the wheel stop spinning?

 

[Paul Chapman]

One of the really scary things is the amount of flooding most of the experts are predicting. This looks like it will be on a scale that is quite difficult for us to imagine, with enormous land masses disappearing. This is bound to result in deaths on a massive scale as well as the remaining land struggling to support the population. All quite hard to visualise.

On a lighter note, with all the fuel problems there will no doubt be lots of hand-tool advocates going around saying "Told you so" :wink:

Cheers :wink:

Paul

 

[RogerS]

The grey snow fell in a never-ending stream. Chan looked nervously out from the cave where the remains of his tribe huddled around the dregs of the last remaining wood, glowing feebly in the lower reaches of the cave. The warmth from the embers hardly dissipating the numbing cold in the air or warming the torpid, listless last remaining survivors of the human race.

Chan's night had been disturbed by the sounds of the night. The blood-curdling screams as some poor animal fell to the slavering packs of dog-bots..the results of one thousand years of in-breeding, spawned from the experiments of the early twenty-fifth century. An attempt at combining the faithfulness of mans' best friend with modern nanobot technology but subverted by the Hackers Horde... a dissolute renegade group finally exterminated to extinction once the world had woken up to the extent of their crimes and the irreversible damage they had set loose on the planet.

The early concerns of the twenty-first century, global warming, the Christian-Muslim factional wars....all long gone, lost in the mists of time, stories passed down from father to son over the centuries. But soon all that too would be gone. Chan could hear the circling dogbots getting ever-closer, picking up the scent of Chan and his tribe. The last remaining humans on the planet.

 

[mambo]

anyone remember the hole in the ozone layer? :twisted:

 

[BrianD]

On a positive note,

Perhaps now, for once, all mankind will have to set their differences aside and co-operate with each other as we all realise we are intra-dependent on the performance and behaviour of each other; otherwise we all will become extinct never mind the animals species!

There may be a dawning of self-less sharing and and a sense of benevolence rather than the power and greed prevalent at present.

There's always hope!

Mankind does not have much choice here except making this ultimate choice of survival.

'nuff said.

 

[woodbloke]

Brian - I too would like to see that happen too but I think what's required and fairly rapidly, is a global change of attitude, a complete rethink and revaluation of the way that we go about our business. Changing an individuals attitude is difficult enough.....how do you go about convincing an entire planet? :shock: :? - Rob

 

[chiba]

Every societal structure in human history has collapsed eventually. Ours is the first truly global one, so we can probably expect the biggest readjustment yet. We'll probably survive as a species, although if we die out, then we die out. There's nothing special about humans - we're just an advanced breed of monkey after all. Species go extinct all the time; that's not to say we will, but it should come as no surprise if we do.

 

[MrJay]

I'm quite looking forward to it.

Ok, not the flooding and disease and droughts and local species extinctions and whatnot.

But I am looking forward to the whole going green thing. The challenges/problem solving involved in reducing one's carbon footprint in quite a huge way sounds like a fun game. And yeah, the hand tool experience shows quite nicely that not consuming oodles of energy every time you want to do something really doesn't need to be painful.

 

[StevieB]

By 3000 AD? for some of us I reckon life will have gone in silico. People already spend huge oodles of time on the internet and with computers, how long before someone rigs up one that is wired directly to you? Your eyes believe what they see, your senses believe what they percieve. If a probe can be wired into the brain to tell the brain its just experienced a touch, sight or smell for cheaper than that experience can be got in real life it will happen.

A cross between bladerunner (remember the snake being genetically engineered at a fraction of the cost of the real thing) and total recall (memories of a holiday on Mars - cheaper than the real thing) if you will. All provided you have the money to pay. Perhaps a better analogy is the despair squid episode of Red Dwarf..... I watch too much TV and trash sci fi don't I :roll:

Steve.

 

[woodbloke]

StieveB wrote:

By 3000 AD? for some of us I reckon life will have gone in silico

Steivie - I do agree here as well, clearly to me anyway human life forms will develop in hugely different ways as you suggest over the next millennia, but to clarify my original question, if you sat in the time machine right now and got out a thousand years later, what would the environment around you look like? Would you be under water or in some place that looked like the middle of the Sahara with temps too hot to endure with raging winds and dust storms or as Rog suggested be in a situation where grey snow was falling and you were being eyed up for a tasty little snack by 'dogbots' etc, etc - Rob

 

[houtslager]

oh well now I have an excuse for all that teakI have in store -
"BUILD THE ARK" I hear someone tell me






:lol: 8)

 

[mailee]

Yep, I have my name down for a job as a salvage diver at Doncaster Marina! :lol: No seriously though, we must all look to how we can improve our future by alternate fuels and decreasing our carbon footprint or they could be the last footprints on earth. :shock:

 

[brianhabby]

Perhaps now, for once, all mankind will have to set their differences aside and co-operate with each other

Yeah, right...!

Brian

 

[Drew]

I know it looks bleak but think how much of the doom and gloom come from the fashionably converted (the ones who would ride a hobby horse to death and the others who are just looking for a crusade they can feel self righteous about, [and I'm not getting at anyone in this group]).
After all almost two thousand years ago the romans grew wine in this country and then the climate changed, then five hundred years ago they had frost fairs on the Thames when the ice was ten feet thick and had bonfires on the same and then the climate changed.
No, I'm not sticking my head in the sand before anyone says so. What I'm saying is that with so much about to happen as with the reversal of the magnetic poles now being overdue no-one knows anything for certain.

We just don't have the spread of records to be able to say with any certainty this or that will definitely happen or this effect we are suffering is directly attributable to that or whatever.

I just think at the moment its all a bit chicken little and the sky is falling. That goes doubly when we have one group of scientists who come out of the woodwork and tell us that a certain thing is bad for us and two months later another group comes out and refutes the first by saying not only is it not doing harm, it does in moderation have health giving properties.

I shall now climb down from my soapbox and retire to the bar.

Drew

I corrected myself it was nearer two thousand years than one (lack of antifreeze in the blood system). Thanks for getting it right Gill

 

[Gill]

I've lived through so many 'scientific' prophesies of disaster that I really couldn't care less about this one. Remember how all the aeroplanes were going to fall out of the sky and all the computers would seize up because of the Millennium Bug? And according to 'Horizon', we're all going to be overwhelmed by tsunamis, earthquakes, plagues, volcanic eruptions and/or meteorites long before the effects of global warming are noticed. As Drew says, it was quite a bit warmer a couple of thousand years ago anyway when the Romans wouldn't have been fermenting wine up in Carlisle. Climate change is a natural variable that we've always lived with. It's only over the last century or so that scientists have started getting uppity over it.

If the temperature rises another few degrees over the next 50 years, so be it - I won't be around to complain that it's getting too warm. According to another batch of scientists I'm eating too much of the wrong sort of food, drinking far too much alcohol and doing too little exercise whilst indulging in a particularly sedentary lifestyle and it's going to kill me within the next 15 years anyway.

There's nothing that we can do about it as a nation anyway, because the only action that could be effective would take an international consensus. We certainly can't do anything about it as individuals, even those who are concerned. Just don't invest in property in low-laying areas. Perhaps it's just as well the super-casino licence was awarded to Manchester and not Blackpool. In twenty years, Blackpool won't be around any more and Manchester will be a seaside resort with a climate as warm as that of Monte Carlo.

Gill

 

[Scrit]

Perhaps it's just as well the super-casino licence was awarded to Manchester and not Blackpool. In twenty years, Blackpool won't be around any more and Manchester will be a seaside resort with a climate as warm as that of Monte Carlo.

Do you think the politicos know something we don't, then?

Scrit

 

[mambo]

will someone do me a favour and shoot me!

if you all think you can can make a difference by "reducing your carbon footprint" i feel sorry for you!
this is just another load of scientific bullshit created by scientists to justify their £100000 grants for research and the government are loving it as another excuse to raise more taxes

this planet goes through shifts in climate we all know that and if you think your gonna make a difference by fitting a low watt lightbulb while china etc are spewing out all sorts of dung into the air i`m affraid your sadly mistaken

i say roll on the next ice age coz tomorrow the scientists will be telling us its good for us to smoke 20 fags a day :shock:

ok drunken rant over

 

[woodbloke]

Gill wrote:

If the temperature rises another few degrees over the next 50 years, so be it - I won't be around to complain that it's getting too warm.

Lots of very valid points here from everyone, the notion of a few degrees temp rise is important as it is expected to be exponential eg, 4 deg by 2100, maybe then 6 deg on top by 2200, possibly 9 deg on top again by 2300 etc. I do agree, we won't be around but our descendents will and this is what worries me somewhat....what sort of world are we going to leave them?

There's nothing that we can do about it as a nation anyway, because the only action that could be effective would take an international consensus.

This is without doubt the stumbling block....how do you obtain 'international consensus', an international change of attitude? For example, China's rampant economy is currently fueled by by burning vast quantities of coal....the country intends to open a new coal fired power station every week for the next five years (according to a recent Beeb documentary) The amount of CO2 that will be generated simply beggars belief :shock:
The Indian Sub-Continent is also going through a period of huge economic change where they are bringing themselves into line with the prosperity achieved by Western nations since the end of WW2, but at what cost?

I also agree that climate change has been a natural cycle over the last 2000 years in the UK and elsewhere, but it is the rate of change, caused by human activity, which disturbs me greatly and which is so perplexing, 'cos I can't see a way to overcome it.

....and we won't mention the CO2 emissions from somewhere across the water :roll:

......climbing down off the soap box and going to finish my vino wot my daughter bought :lol: - Rob

 

[RogerS]

Gill wrote:

There's nothing that we can do about it as a nation anyway, because the only action that could be effective would take an international consensus.

This is without doubt the stumbling block....how do you obtain 'international consensus', an international change of attitude? For example, China's rampant economy is currently fueled by by burning vast quantities of coal....

International consensus....then we need to maybe stop buying stuff Made in China..demand drives supply perhaps.

 

[wrightclan]

....and we won't mention the CO2 emissions from somewhere across the water :roll:

That little mantra is getting just a bit tiresome. Let's put some things into perspective here. There are significant demographic reasons why the U.S. uses more CO2 per capita than much of the world. And it has little to do with the greed and laziness that is usually implied by those who trot out this mantra.

The U.S. (and indeed Canada) is hugely less densely populated than the U.K or even Western Europe. As an example, the state from which I hail is roughly the same size (area) as the U.K. Yet we have roughly 7% of the population. And Minnesota is sort of middle of the road as far as population density goes. States to the west of Minnesota are increasingly more sparse until you get over the Rockies, then they get more populated again.

Now just think for a minute about what that entails. If you live in those areas, you need to be able to travel to work, shopping, entertainment, etc. exponentially more than you do in an urban area (even the 'urban' parts of the Midwest are rather sparse by U.K. standards). You not only have to travel more, but you tend to do alot of your own transport of supplies that may be done for you in a more populated region. That says nothing of the need for infrastructure in these areas. Every small town has a certain level of infrastructure that is necessary, and thus more small towns in need of schools, hospitals, places of business, power plants, etc. will translate into more use of energy of all types.

Here's an anecdotal illustration. My Dad sold metalworking machinery for a living. He had a number of product lines for which he was sole distributor. His region covered 3 states and half of two others That's an area of about 350,000 square miles or almost 4 times the size of the U.K. When he went to the Dakotas, he would have to travel hundreds of miles between individual sales calls. By contrast, he knew distributors in Chicago whose region might be a couple of square miles. (And yet, not far from Chicago, you can find rural Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin which have similar population density to much of Minnesota.)

I also did deliveries and helped with installations in some of these areas. I spent a week on two separate occasions, installing safety equipment in a biggish (biggish for the size of town) factory in Canton, South Dakota. I don't know for a fact, but I suspect the firm in question was the biggest game in town. To me, at the time, Canton was the middle of nowhere. To my wife (who grew up in Glasgow) Elk River, MN where I grew up was the middle of nowhere. It's all relative.

Now, that's not to say that there aren't times when Americans drive their cars when they can walk or cycle. (You're reading the rantings of a cyclist after all; but one who cycles for the love of it rather than because I think I'll singlehandedly save the planet by doing so.) But the amount of wasteful energy consumption in the U.S. pales into insignificance, when you realise the demographic demands for energy.

Now many Americans may recognise some of what I've written about; but until you've lived elsewhere, I don't think many willl recognise the significance in relation to other parts of the world. (I certainly didn't until I had lived over here for some length of time.)

As far as global warming goes. I have no intention of debating it, other than to say that the media will generally indicate that scientific consensus is much more in agreement than it really is.

Brad