Global warming activists responded by pretending that their shoes were untied.
update: James Delingpole weighs in.
New edicts will be issued by world leaders including President Ryan of the US, Prime Minister Farage of Great Britain and Aussie premier Plimer, scrapping High Speed Rail, abandoning all renewable energy schemes (apart from, maybe, hydroelectric) and making the ownership of 4 x 4s or similar gas-guzzling vehicles compulsory by 2015. Stringent punishments to be introduced for those whose carbon footprint falls below a certain agreed minimum level.
17 comments:
No, the eco-socialists will just do what they did when Time Magazine was screaming about a "New Ice Age" in 1978;
They'll demand that we move to a "rational" agrarian-socialist culture operating at Bronze Age levels. With them in charge. Just as they do today to "save Gaia from global warming".
The "threats" constantly change. The "solution" is always the same. A feudal-primitivist state with the "enlightened elite'" as the nobility, and everyone else as the serfs. French-style, that is; the idea of the "stout English yeoman" with a Welsh longbow in his kip horrifies this lot. (My Gaia, he might shoot a... DEER!)
Or put a gray-goose shaft into the "enlightened one's" butt. (And I don't mean the one full of straw with a bull's-eye painted on the cover.)
The fact that such a culture would virtually guarantee the death of about 99.4% of the human race due to pestilence, starvation, etc., bothers them not. In their not-so-humble opinion, that is a feature, not a bug.
The "enlightened ones" today are still using the Club of Rome's 1970 figures for the "carrying capacity" of "Holy Mother Gaia", which they figure at about 50 million humans, total. If there are about 1 million of the "true believers", that works out to about 9 armed overseers and 40 slaves (excuse me, I mean "happy proletarian laborers for the common good") per "leader".
As always, the other 7.45 billion humans get to be fertilizer.
No matter how things change, the "Friends of Gaias'" song remains the same.
cheers
eon
A vast and scaly dragon has clearly been chomping on the Sun. We must beat drums at it to make it go away. Also, you know, sacrifice a few of our less popular tribesmen to any appropriate god or gods. Only then will the Blessed Algore come back, riding on his magical polar bear, Snowflake, and bring once more the gift of Warming to the Globe.
Another reason never to revere scientists as the representants of Supreme Absolute Truth on Earth.
The Omnipotent Science is, after all, just as fallible as any human constructions. The more variables in a equation system, the more chaotic and uncontrollable it is.
I think I know what a fallout shelter is.
What would you call the fortress the Alphas would hide in while civilization collapses and 95% of the population dies?
Has that ever worked in literature/cinema?
(Todays Capcha word: bleve.
Nice videos of those on YouTube!)
Eon, as usual you have distilled the issue down to its essentials. In the small, benighted world of the ecofascisti, there's always a Crisis (only the type gets recycled between global warming or global cooling), and there's always one Answer: Get rid of all the Gaia-blighting human scum.
In the "green" continuum, people who utilize Earth's resources and make life better for themselves and others, those who create and build, are the Evil That Must Be Eliminated. Yet even as they enjoy the benefits of the societies they wish to destroy, they never look at their beliefs and follow them through to their logical conclusion, as you concisely did. Maybe they are intellectually lazy, or maybe they're incapable of rational analysis, or both; but in their belief system, they are the pure saviors who can do no wrong, and only their perceived needs and desires are important. For what it's worth, there's a psychiatric diagnosis for that. Such people are called sociopaths.
Sergej, don't forget the Beneficent BHO who will be riding his mystical Energy Unicorn Sunspeck. You know, the one who outgases Amazing Clean Energy for All.
Wesley;
Thanks. But I think at least some of them actually have thought it through, at least to the point of calculating the "shrinkage", so to speak.
After all, some of The Self-Exalted One's mentors spent the Seventies planning the "reeducation camps" where they would "educate" at least 25-30 million Americans not to oppose their plans for a Glorious Socialist Agrarian Future- by just exterminating the lot of them.
We must consider the possibility that many of theses people, whom you correctly identify as sociopaths, may simply like the idea of erasing large numbers of humans in job lots.
One more reason to never let them get within arm's reach of the "football", in my estimation.
cheers
eon
jayessell;
And the answer is...
Biosphere IV, or V, or VI, or Eleventy-Seven-Hundred-Billion-Gazillion.
Every attempt at a "closed environment" on Earth or elsewhere has failed unless it had outside support. Even the ISS would be a deathtrap for its crew without logistics support from the ground.
(What they'll do after the last Shuttle mission, when they're wholly dependent on the Russian space agency, I don't know. If it was me, I'd be on that last Shuttle flight, headed dirtside ASAP.)
Add in the fact that most of the "enlightened ones" are patricians who have never dirtied their hands with such "unnatural" things as plumbing, sewage, electrical wiring, etc., plus the fact that no one in the "select group" is likely to remember to bring a frakking technical manual (let alone a set of open-end/ box-end wrenches), and I'd expect the place to look like Biosphere 1 did after 90 days, except in about two weeks (due to higher population density).
Tom Clancy covered a lot of this ground in his Jack Ryan novel, "Rainbow Six", BTW. Another good one on the same subject in a more "pure" SF milieu' is "Pallas" by L. Neil Smith. Most of it is a libertarian polemic, but under the rugged individualism rhetoric there's a surprisingly clear-eyed analysis of the purely technical problems of a closed environment with a large population. (It doesn't end well for the inhabitants thereof.)
cheers
eon
And Bio-Dome (1996)
Mentioned but not shown in
Dr. Strangelove (ohiltswaltb)
And Alpha Complex.
Whaaat?
Eon, Indeed the calculations have been made. And they treat people as numbers. So much easier and cleaner than getting one's hands dirty with real flesh-and-blood humans, wouldn't you agree? So yes; they have applied "thought" to the "problem", albeit a _very_ narrow definition of "thought". Oh, and as you wrote, "One more reason to never let them get within arm's reach of the "football", in my estimation." Correct in theory, but hasn't it happened now in practice?
Where's that thin, keening whine coming from? Oh wait; it's me! :O
Or, instead of desperately pretending 99% of the world's scientists are conspiring to destroy civilisation, which is what you all seem to be doing here, we could do now what we'll have to do anyway sooner or later, which is to ditch fossil fuels and start using hydrogen and/or batteries as our transport fuel and generating power by nuclear, desert solar and later (if the General Fusion people can pull it off, which they might) fusion. This (along with changing the composition of the concrete we use) would solve global warming. Sure, it's a significant change, but it'd happen because of peak oil eventually anyway. And even if global warming turned out to be bogus we would still have cleaner air and more energy security. That's not so scary, is it?
Yes, fusion power.
Not enough electricity?
Fusion electric power plants.
Not enough oil for gasoline?
Hydrogen fuel cells.
Not enough potable water?
Desalination.
Not enough rare earth metals?
Landfill mining.
Also.... with fusion power...
The return of Russia.
???
Yes. Russia.
If only they had the electricity to make its
northern regions habitable.
It would be as if the USA found 10 more states it wasn't using.
(Today's Capcha word: maybe)
"99% of the world's scientists are conspiring to destroy civilisation": No one even mentioned such a thing. There are well-documented cases of a small number of ambitious,well-connected "scientists" indulging in fraud and in colluding with equally dishonest UN bureaucrats, Greenpeace activists, and Socialist politicians to promote a common agenda, but no one here has asserted what you claim.
As to the sort of Deep Green agenda that eon discusses, that has been a part of the environmentalist movement and the demonstrated attitude of certain members of the political class since 1968: If the Earth is to be saved, mankind must be drastically reduced in numbers and those who remain must live like peasants–except us, of course, who get to keep all the trappings of a modern industrial society.
As to "sooner or later ditching fossil fuels', what's the hurry? A thousand years is a very long time before we have shortages.
Sergej, ever played Paranoia?
antiplato: I don't know what five out of four scientists say, but for my part, I observe that the climate has been warmer, and the climate has been colder. This was the case when humans existed and before (and probably will still be the case when we're gone), before and after we had history, and before and after the Industrial Revolution. I also observe that in human history, warmer epochs were times of plenty, and cooler ones times of famine. Finally, I note (and invite you to do the same), that the last couple eons or so have been a cold time, 100k years under ice, 10k warm, and that the last thaw began... a bit over 10k years ago. I think that if you believe human activity can alter the insulating properties of the atmosphere, you should be burning all the coal you can get your hands on.
Ironmistress: Stay alert, trust no one, keep your laser handy. Words to live by. Or you'll end up burning through yet another clone.
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