Mysteries, Chemtrails, Aerosols :: Mysterious NZ

[Crakka]

This article is garnering some obviously strong commentary and rightly so. For those that haven't seen it already prepare to be absolutely disgusted. Notice ALL the usual language used not least of which lumps ALL humans collectively as "we" as in "we" are all responsible, sigh, how tiresome... and as for that old chesnut of "theirs", Climate-change deniers, well what can you say, they're trying their hardest despite public opinion I suppose. I'm pretty sure by now that arrogance is bred into these "people" (if you can call them that) as the primary trait! However, there really are some great comments to follow amongst the large number there, a sample of which is posted after the article. Go to the source to read the rest.

Geo-engineering, nuclear power and climate change: playing God is good for the planet

We have the power and the technology to save the world, says Mark Lynas – but first we must put aside our doubts about nuclear energy and geo-engineering.

By Mark Lynas
8:31AM BST 12 Jul 2011

In May 2010, for only the second time in 3.7 billion years, a life form was created with no biological parent, out of a collection of inanimate chemicals. This transformation took place not in some primordial soup, still less the Garden of Eden, but in a Californian laboratory. And the Divine Creator was J Craig Venter, a world-renowned biologist, highly successful entrepreneur and one of the first sequencers of the human genome.

The Book of Genesis is full of instances of Man being punished for his attempts to become like God – yet with the primacy of science, God's power is now increasingly being exercised by us. It is not just the dawn of Venter's "synthetic biology" that gives humanity the potential to design and create life from scratch. On a planetary scale, humans now assert unchallenged dominion over all living things. Our collective power already threatens or overwhelms most of the major forces of nature, from the water cycle to the circulation of major elements like nitrogen and carbon.

We have levelled forests, ploughed up the great grasslands and transformed the continents to serve our demands. Our detritus gets everywhere, from the highest mountains to the deepest oceans. The productive capacity of a major part of the planet's terrestrial surface is now dedicated to satisfying our demands for food, fuel and fibre, whilst the oceans are trawled around the clock for the fishy fats and proteins our brains and bodies demand. Somewhere between a quarter and a third of the "net primary productivity" of the planet – everything produced by plants using the power of the Sun – is devoted to sustaining this one species.

Human beings have, therefore, clearly been an unprecedented evolutionary success story. Yet there is a dark side to this momentous achievement. For the biosphere as a whole, the Age of Humans has been a catastrophe. Our domestication of the planet's surface to provide food and fuel has displaced all competing species to the margins. The Earth is now in the throes of its sixth mass extinction, the worst since the ecological calamity that wiped out the dinosaurs. No other species can control our numbers and return balance to the system.

And most amazing of all is how blissfully unaware of this colossal transformation we remain. Even most Greens – ever hopeful that vanished wild nature can one day be restored – still recoil from the real truth about our role. Climate-change deniers are successful partly because they tap into a powerful cultural undercurrent that insists we are small and the planet is big, ergo nothing we do – not even in our collective billions – can have a planet-scale impact. "It's an act of egotism for humans to think we're a primary source of climate change," said Newt Gingrich last year. "Look at what happened recently with the Icelandic volcano. The natural systems are so much bigger than man-made systems."

True, we may not be able to stop earthquakes or tsunamis. But the idea of perennial human victimhood is now somewhat out of date. We need to recognise that we are now in charge – whether for good or ill – and to take conscious and collective decisions about how far we interfere with the planet's natural cycles and how we manage our global-scale impacts. For the overwhelming weight of scientific evidence suggests that we are fast approaching the point where our interference in the planet's great bio-geochemical cycles is threatening to endanger the system itself, and hence our own survival as a species.

My moment of revelation came two years ago in Sweden, when I was invited to join a group of scientists to discuss the concept of "planetary boundaries", a term coined by the Swedish director of the Stockholm Resilience Centre, Professor Johan Rockström. The scientists were trying to nail down which parts of the Earth system were being most affected by humans, and what the implied limits might be to human activities in these areas. Some, like climate change and biodiversity loss, were familiar and obvious contenders. Others, like ocean acidification and the accumulation of environmental toxins, were newer and less well understood.

All knowledge is tentative, but here was something very tangible: for the first time, experts were not just listing our problems, but putting numbers on how we should approach and solve them. Of course, the planetary boundaries concept builds on past work conducted by experts in different fields, from geo-chemistry to marine biology. But its global approach is actually very new and potentially revolutionary.

Unlike, say, the 1972 report by the Club of Rome, the planetary boundaries concept does not necessarily imply any limit to human economic growth or productivity. Instead, it seeks to identify a safe space in the planetary system within which humans can operate and flourish indefinitely. Certainly, this will require limiting our disturbance to key Earth-system processes – from the carbon cycle to the circulation of fresh water – but in my view this need constrain neither humanity's potential nor its ambition. Nor does it necessarily mean ditching capitalism or the market.

Many will find my analysis rather unsettling – not least my colleagues in the Green movement, many of whose current preoccupations are shown to be ecologically wrong. Until now, environmentalism has been mostly about reducing our interference with nature. Central to the standard Green creed is the idea that playing God is dangerous: hence the reflexive opposition to new technologies from splitting the atom to cloning cattle. My thesis is the reverse: playing God is essential, if creation is not to be irreparably damaged or even destroyed by humanity unwittingly deploying its new-found powers in disastrous ways. At this late stage, false humility is a more urgent danger than hubris.

This means jettisoning some sacred cows. Nuclear power is, as many Greens are belatedly realising, almost completely benign environmentally – so anyone who still marches against nuclear today is just as bad for the climate as textbook eco-villains like the big oil companies. The same goes for genetic engineering. The genetic manipulation of plants is a powerful technology that can help humanity limit its environmental impact and feed itself better in the process. I campaigned against it in the past: a well-intentioned but ignorant mistake. The potential of synthetic biology I can only begin to guess at. But the lesson is clear: we cannot afford to foreclose such powerful technological options because of Luddite prejudice and ideological inertia.

Indeed, if we apply the metric of planetary boundaries to the campaigns being run by the big environmental groups, we find that many of them are irrelevant or even counterproductive. Carbon offsetting is a useful short-term palliative that the Green movement has discredited without good reason. Some Green groups have also made it very difficult to use the climate-change negotiations as a way to save the world's forests by insisting that rainforest protection should not be eligible for carbon credits. In addition, environmental and development NGOs have been much too easy on rapidly emerging carbon emitters like China and India, whose governments need to be pressed or assisted to eschew coal in favour of cleaner alternatives.

Most Greens also emphatically object to geo-engineering – the idea that we could consciously alter the atmosphere to counteract climate change, for example by spraying sulphates high in the stratosphere to act as a sunscreen. But the objectors seem to forget that we are already carrying out massive geo-engineering every day, as a hundred million people step into their cars, a billion farmers dig their ploughs into the soil and 10 million fishermen cast their nets.

Certainly, deciding on something as epochal as intentional climatic geo-engineering would involve us in some awesome collective decisions, which we have only just begun to evolve the international governance structures to manage. But if we want the world of tomorrow to resemble the world of today, we will need to act fast. On climate change, meeting the proposed planetary boundary means being carbon-neutral worldwide by mid-century, and carbon-negative thereafter. The former will not be possible without nuclear new-build on a large scale, and the latter will need the deployment of air-capture technologies to reduce the concentration of ambient CO2.

On biodiversity loss, we need rapidly to scale up "payments for ecosystem services", schemes that use private and public-sector approaches to make planetary assets such as rainforests and coral reefs worth more alive than dead. To meet the other boundaries, we will need to deploy genetically engineered nitrogen and water-efficient plants, remove unnecessary dams from rivers, eliminate the spread of environmental toxins and get much better at making and respecting international treaties.

Most importantly, environmentalists need to remind themselves that humans are not all bad. We evolved within this living biosphere, and we have as much right to be here as any other species. The Age of Humans does not have to be an era of hardship and misery for other species; we can nurture and protect as well as dominate and conquer. But the first responsibility of a conquering army is always to govern.

'The God Species' by Mark Lynas is available... blah blah blah...

Source - http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/8631604/Geo-engineering-nuclear-power-and-climate-change-playing-God-is-good-for-the-planet.html

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Just a random sample of the many great follow-up comments (amongst the usual "tow the line don't rock the boat i am a well-programmed robot" ones)...

These comments are far superior to its corresponding article for the simple fact that the commentors have actually DONE their homework...whereas, the actual narrative seems to be nothing more than a mouth-piece for the scientific dictatorship and geo-politicians whom are touting their achievements as a reason to outlive subhuman-cockroachs! However, their plan is based on lies and deception but they rely on these lies to achieve their restructured world-order while having the consent of the population. Aldous Houxley, author of "Brave New World" was quoted to say, "It's the objective of the controlling Oligarchy to have the consent of the people and for them to be made to love & enjoy their state of affairs...affairs that normal human beings ought not enjoy by any conceivable measure." This is their method to gain our acceptance of what they have planned. Thankfully, there are a lot of people waking-up to who "they" are and what they're trying to do!

A better solution than playing God? Just one idea but hey, it seems to have worked for HUGE spans of time for people who controllers slaughtered in their "out of control" thirst for power...

...The only solution would be to have localised sustainable farming communities that are fully autonomous and preserve knowledge. That way there is no contagion. No central government, no oligarchs, no profiteering, no exploitation of resources, etc, as all these things are a giant house of cards that will take everything in the collapse.

Much, much more where that came from...

[Crakka]

As for well-paid scientists & "experts" simply towing the line on all this technological "ability" because their science tells them it can/might work? It's never too late for them to "snap out of it" - they just need to look their children/grandchildren in the eye and ask themselves what or who they're REALLY doing all this for and to start looking at much more back-to-basics solutions for everything. There's way more hope in that than trying to play god or tinker with the essence of nature itself and that's a certainty each of us really knows at a deeper than physical level - some just choose to ignore or bury it methinks...

[steve clougher]

Well said, Crakka
Puts me in mind of the huge and vastly destructive fires in American national parks, which followed over-zealous fire-control practices, allowing the secondary growth to get too big, and leading to crown fires
People with university degrees made this rather silly little fundamental error
Now they're asking us to entrust them with weather control?
I say, go back to university for a few more millennia, first, and after that, probably not

[Crakka]

After secondary school I had the choice of going to University and doing a science degree in my chosen field or looking at other options. I chose to do a trade apprenticeship and learn theory whilst engaging in hands-on work & experience - to me even back then this appeared to be the "holistic" approach for better REAL knowledge AND experience and for simply "staying in touch".

Years later whilst working for a large local governent outfit at both field & corporate level it became clearer than ever how people with real intimate knowledge & experience with the "product" and close ties with the community were being "gotten rid of" in favour of mostly young & upwardly mobile yes-men & women with either the right "I'll tell them what they want to hear" line or piece of paper from a University. Now we have the so-called Super City in Auckland - I saw it coming 50 miles off! (I wasn't one of them being "gotten rid of" in case you were thinking that! I was in a very unique position in that employment & surprised everyone by resigning when they least expected it because I saw what was going on!).

If the lowest tier management in a large local government outfit are supremely out-of-touch with their "customers", think how exponentially out-of-touch management with no "field experience" are further up the chain and then times that by 100+ for private corporations. I watched a young corporate whore from Telecom on TV recently trying to cover their a-r-s-e by talking as if she was Telecom itself and "we" would do everything in our power to fix this problem - I imagined at the time a boardroom full of fat, rich old men laughing as they watched their whore say whatever she was paid to say. I was almost embarrassed for her but mostly she just made me feel sick to my stomach to see someone publicly allowing themselves to become this pathetic servantile excuse for a human being

[Crakka]

Forgot to mention a rather key thing in that last post! While I was in the latter part of my apprenticeship finishing "my time" and then later whilst employed elsewhere I had the distinct "pleasure" (?) of showing the ropes to new recruits fresh from university who had done uni courses that I looked at before leaving secondary school. I virtually had to completely retrain them from scratch as they had next to no practical knowledge of how to do even most of the basic procedures. Their "classroom" tuition had really taught them nothing about applying what they had learned in an actual physical work environment! Keep in mind that they were being employed in the field that they had just been educated/trained for! This was quite an eye opener but definitely one that confirmed my suspicions :wink:

[steve clougher]

Old Mao Tse Tung had the right idea; let them all work in the fields, a couple of days a week
And burn all the books except I Ching, Tao Te Ching and , I think, three others
No doubt about Mao, he didn't mess around

[Crakka]

What a horrible analogy Steve! But I get your point :wink: