So sayeth the soothsayers and doomsayers in describing a global warming future over the next 30 generations of man: some choice quotes worth quoting....
1. “WATER is already commodified and fought over; about how in Colorado it’s illegal to collect rainwater because, according to the doctrine of prior appropriation, that water is already owned by agricultural users; about how corporations like Nestle go into parts of the developing world, buy up water rights, drain aquifers, bottle the water they’ve mined and sell it back to the locals.”
2. “The landscape around us will change and we will have no say in that change.
What we grow and what we eat will have to change. There won’t be the vast prairie landscapes, there won’t be the fruit belts. Areas will be diminished or flooded. We’ll have to make shifts to deal with food shortages and changing diets. Our kids may not be able to afford the kinds of things we do now, [like] having lots of cattle. A good steak, that may be something we can’t afford in the future.
It’s going to be a shift in the basic biology that’s around us. Even the animals that are around us. They’re already changing. There’ll still be lots of life but it will just be different. And it will be taking advantage of what we’ve done to the world. And it may not be what we want. Actually, I’m sure it won’t be. We’ll get invasive species, things coming up. Malaria up north. All these things are going to happen with climate change.”
3. “Geoengineering? America thinks it can engineer its way out of these problems whenever they present themselves. We saw with Katrina how woefully unprepared the U.S. is to deal with a single city with a climate-based disaster.
And when it’s essentially coast to coast different disasters — sea level on the coast, land being baked to un-farmable degrees in the interior — they have nothing even approaching the infrastructure to deal with the damage.
I think there will be a huge technological collapse. The least important thing is advanced technology when it’s survival time. You can’t eat Facebook. All of that stuff falls by the wayside. What becomes principally important is food production , clean water supply, living space. Everything else becomes secondary.
In terms of this incredible standard of living, our hermetically sealed, air-conditioned, high-tech standard of living we enjoy right now? Forget it.
It’s over if we allow this ecological collapse to be upon us.”
4. “Many scientists fear that maybe it’s too late for us to reverse course on the carbon economy and we’re already headed for out-of-control global warming. And that has inspired some people to consider some very drastic solutions.
There are people who really believe macro-engineering projects, such as trying to shield the amount of sunlight that actually hit the Earth, might be viable solutions.
The reality is we’ve never pulled one of these things off properly. That goes back to introducing rabbits to Australia or whatever it is. We have never successfully predicted the consequences of any sort of attempt to re-engineer even a limited environment. And these macro engineering solutions where we think we understand the interplay of solar energy and hydrothermal energy and ocean currents and atmospheric currents enough that, ‘Oh yes, we just do this. What could possibly go wrong?’ Well, the answer is, almost anything could go wrong. We just don’t know.
We keep saying, ‘I keep shitting everywhere, what should I do?’ The answer should be, stop shitting everywhere, not ‘let’s put up discrete parasols or give everybody nose plugs so they don’t have to smell it anymore.’ No. The answer is to solve the problem at source. And that’s what we have to find the will to do.”
5. “CAN WE DO IT? Remember the Manhattan Project? Remember the moon shot? Just throw money at us and we’ll solve it.’ Ugh. Those were peanuts compared to planetary engineering.”
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