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Who Will Survive?
Topic Started: Mar 7 2013, 05:51 AM (693 Views)
Brewster
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This piece was written not by a Climate Scientist per se, but by someone who has worked on environmental projects for many years. Maybe his explanation will help people understand our situation:

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I've noticed a new and interesting subset of deniers lately. There seems to be an increasing number of people who believe that climate change is real and will 'decimate' the global human population, but not substantially affect themselves. Decimate, by definition, means to kill or remove 1 in 10 of the group. These deniers somehow have convinced themselves that climate change will kill off a few million or billion people, but the victims will largely be poor and be in the third world. They smugly contend that it is 'nature's way to thin the herd' and that we in America or other developed nations will certainly not be so greatly affected since we have lots of clean water, lots of food, lots of open space to repopulate.

And, of course, this line of reasoning is correct. To a point. What they fail to realize is the long-term nature of climate change and the initial rapidity of the cascading effects it will cause. They somehow think that after a few million people die off, we will 'fix' the problem and rescue the rich and developed nations of the world. They believe that like a pandemic, GCC will affect a percentage of the village while leaving the other inhabitants to survive with increased access to resources like food and housing. That like a plague of insects, GCC will devour a portion of the crops, starving a portion of the population before it dies off or nature corrects itself. Or similar to a global war scenario, the mass of people will be killed, but the smarter or luckier will have found shelter and again, emerge to survive and rebuild with all the now-unshared resources at their disposal.

These deniers think they will 'live off the land', or shelter in underground bunkers, or even find pockets of self-sufficient communities which will welcome them and humankind will, like in all our history, rebound.

But in reality, when climate change reaches the level of effect that millions of people are dying there will simply be no 'fix'; no reverses, no pockets of self-sufficiency. What we will be faced with is a climate and an environment that no longer nourishes nor even tolerates human survival. Climate change will not simply go away after the deaths of a percentage, no matter how large that percentage is. The effects of climate change will not be local, will not be repairable, will not be something that can be hidden from nor survived during a few hard years or even decades.

We are not talking about resources which make life possible 'just having a hard time' for a while. The ecosystems of earth will not simply be 'stressed', or reduced to pre-industrial levels. What we ARE talking about is collapse. Fisheries will totally collapse as the ocean warms and acidifies. Agriculture will collapse as crops stunt and wither with higher temperatures or drought. Water sources will collapse as surface reservoirs dry up or become unfit. Populations of plants and wildlife will collapse. All these things and more will not diminish, but rather will COLLAPSE. If you have an underground bunker stocked with a decade's worth of food and water, you will still emerge to several centuries or millenia in an environment which does not contain any of the things you need to survive. Like each and all of the events which shaped our evolution, humans will give way to other species which may or may not evolve to the dictates of their particular environment.

The lesson geologic history teaches us is that populations can collapse overnight, while evolution of new species takes new eons. Climate change, like the impact of a 'planet-killer' asteroid, is fully capable of forcing the extinction of life and the very long chain of experimentation which is evolution.

So the question is, that should 98% of the world's scientists tell us that an earth-killing asteroid is on a certain collision course with our planet, what would we then do? Would we find a gym teacher somewhere who says differently and then just claim that it is all a hoax of global scientists? Would we listen to a group of very wealthy individuals who wish it wasn't so, and dedicate much of their wealth to somehow promote their hope otherwise? Would we turn to religion and declare that God loves us and will miraculously change the asteroid's course? Or would we DEMAND that our government, our society, our global civilization do whatever was possible to prevent our certain extinction?

Today, we have 98% of the scientists the world over, predicting exactly what I have described above. Yet, we deny. We pretend we individually are more educated, more informed, more involved than the very people we, as a civilization, have prepared to warn us of such events. We look away. We whistle past the graveyard. Like every person, everywhere, every day, who boards an airplane or steps into a train, or seats themselves in their car, we think 'not me, not today.'

Perhaps we should realize it is all of us, and it is today.
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Neutral
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Dooooom and Glooooom. You alarmists better worry about the USA going down the tubes and let Mother Nature take care of our climate.
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Brewster
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So you see doom and gloom for your country, not the whole world? And that's better?
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Neutral
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My country hurts the entire world will hurt. You should understand that with your life spent commenting on it.
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Corky52
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Take a picture of the offenders pointed out in the article and who would you see?


:smoker:
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Brewster
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Unfortunately, D*mn near all of us, Corky.
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Corky52
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Brew,
You do what you can and hope others do the same, all you can do. Ignorance you can fix, stupidity is usually terminal. Turning the herd takes time and energy, in this case there isn't even a herd leader, just a milling mob.

I expect the bottleneck to be in the 80% range, maybe worse.


:smoker:
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Banandangees
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It's hard for me to understand how so many Canadians can be so concerned about the world's global warming when 25% of their GDP depends on the very thing that contributes to that global warming and nothing is done about it.
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Neutral
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They just want to bash the USA.
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Berton
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Quote:
 
I've noticed a new and interesting subset of deniers lately. There seems to be an increasing number of people who believe that climate change is real and will 'decimate' the global human population, but not substantially affect themselves.


I have never heard of such people. Sounds like another baseless accusation from the left to me.

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