Evolution (Introduction)

by xeno6696 , Sonoran Desert, Tuesday, July 28, 2009, 21:48 (5595 days ago) @ David Turell

The coming climate change will cause a tremendous shift towards "noncomplexity" as it were. The coming shift will be the bulge of the mass extinction brought about by yours truly, and all my ancestors. We'll call it an "ecological downturn."
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> Matt: You were worried in a recent post that I would pounce on you. The above is very pounceable. What coming climate change? Are you believing the world media frenzy, or Al gore? You are a good skeptic. Bring it forward to modern times. There are a number of important scientists who think it is all hogwash. Kyoto is gone. The G8 just put off any important action for years. In the last 10 years global temperatures have dropped, arctic ice is increasing again, but the common media don't tell us about that. Cap and trade is economic disaster. Europe is currently leaving it, while our nutty President wants it.
> - Lets remove the UN reports, as I suspect you won't accept them anyway. - You cannot find a single U.S. science organization that refutes climate change. Not NASA, not USGS, not any lesser organization that I'm not recalling. - A handful of scientists does not make a consensus. The work done in Greenland on the ice cores is pretty damn conclusive to me. There is a correlation between environmental C02 and warming. (Doesn't prove causation.) But the fact that at no time that they can find have CO2 levels gone this high, this fast. THAT is irrefutable as its cause; burning of fossil fuels + the institution of monocultures. - A climate change is occuring, I find it hard to believe you deny it. What is debatable is whether or not we are the cause. Most of the best competing explanations for the climate change (such as sunspots, cosmic rays) have been debunked. I don't know what the most recent competing theories are but the most compelling is "we have no idea if this is part of the normal cycle." Still, I see nothing wrong with creating a market and an economy based around technologies that will help us moderate our environmental impact. Furthermore technologies to "terraform" our own world would be beneficial in the future as we move on to new worlds. - It's not just climate change though. The act of agriculture itself enforces a monocultural environment that puts "natural" systems in some level of stress. The type of farming we have now in the US is drastically different than 100 years ago. Ignoring the impact we have on the environment is not acceptable, and while the climate change isn't preventable, our agricultural techniques ARE. - - - > Please understand H.L. Mencken's observation that "The urge to save humanity is always a false front for the urge to rule it." Every supposed disaster allows for more central governmental control.
> - Though here you are talking to someone who tends to favor dictatorships. Aristotle was right in saying that democracies are simply another tyranny. The essay "Was Democracy just a Moment?" forces any decent skeptic to consider if democracy is the best thing, all the time. (I am of the opinion that it is not.) - My two biggest political heroes are King Leonidas of Sparta and Octavian Caesar. Both of them knew how to excercise their power and will to force historical changes above and beyond the constraints of a democratic system of government. - > And now this very recent article by Robert Lindzen. If you don't recognize that name, you should: 
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> http://www.quadrant.org.au/blogs/doomed-planet/2009/07/resisting-climate-hysteria - The climate change is going to force major changes in coastal areas and funnel millions of dollars on "saving" those areas. New Orleans should have been relocated 20-50 miles inland after Katrina. If our leaders had any sense they would cut off federal aid to that city until its residents come to their senses. I wasn't familiar with Lindzen, but he's more or less preaching to the choir here. - Actually, I'm more interested in what we'll find if the Antarctic cap melts. Think of the ancient plants and microbes buried under there...

--
\"Why is it, Master, that ascetics fight with ascetics?\"

\"It is, brahmin, because of attachment to views, adherence to views, fixation on views, addiction to views, obsession with views, holding firmly to views that ascetics fight with ascetics.\"