Comments on: “We’re Toast…

by: Dan Staley

Fri, 27 Jun 2008 21:25:09 +0000

Will governments be strong enough to leave this coal in the ground, rather than reaping the profits from digging it up and burning it? It takes a lot of optimism and perhaps a blind eye toward history to say yes.

As Dan’l may remember, I was a weatherman in the Air Force, and began reading the climate journals in the early ’80s. Naomi Oreskes has an excellent history of the man-made climate change science - well worth the time, IMHO - and tells us that we knew this a generation ago but our “leaders” didn’t want to hear. Anyway, I’ve known this for two decades and have gnashed my teeth for this long at humanity’s denial and inaction.

My phrase is: I’m a glass half-full guy, but in this instance its half-full of tainted groundwater from Big Ag.

In any case, I see my job as creating resilient places for others to learn from. If the rest catch on, great. But I can’t do it all. I can only do what I can.

by: Matt the Engineer

Fri, 27 Jun 2008 19:38:04 +0000

The question isn’t whether it will happen (it’s started already), but to what extent. I see it as a positive sign that we’re running out of oil - at least there’s one source of carbon we’ll soon be forced to stop dumping into the air. But if we start replacing it with our abundant coal instead of finding renewable ways of living, then we’re doomed to the worst-case scenerios.

by: Andrew

Fri, 27 Jun 2008 18:19:53 +0000

A couple of decades might be an exaggeration, but we’re doomed I think because we can’t seem to agree to reductions

by: old timer

Fri, 27 Jun 2008 17:50:36 +0000

IMO, the really tough part of all this is that The Planet couldn’t care less. It’s ‘been there done that’ hundreds, maybe thousands of times in it’s life.
Hot cycles, cold cycles, asteroid collisions, mass extinctions, wipe out of human civilizations; sure, all that and more.
The Planet will endure.
So, where do we fit in? Where do we even begin to cope with what is, for most of us, a completely unimaginable set of problems?
Will a ’society’ that annually STILL throws hundreds of tons of trash out of it’s vehicle windows somehow come to a spontaneous awakening? I don’t think so.
Food plain dwellers, and earthquake zone people at least have a historical basis for their personal risk assessment, and they take the risk. This kind of stuff has no precedent, and is therefore easy to minimize or disregard.
I think we will, as a species, wait, day after night, until the water is lapping at the door before we try to figure out how and where we will spend the next day into night. Moment to moment; some may make it and many will not.
There will be no way out of this.
The Planet does not care one whit.