07:05 am - Human Bio-Impact
Technorati Tags: global_warming, un, debate, capitalism
Australia's a keen place. One of its keenest exports is Tim Blair, who writes:
CNN explains Australia Day:
January 26 marks the day in 1788 when a fleet of settlers and convicts from Britain arrived in what was to become Sydney to begin the new colony of New South Wales.
But among Aboriginal people, the original inhabitants of the land, the day is known as “Invasion Day."
And the day the original inhabitants arrived is known as Burn Everything Day:
Settlers who came to Australia 50,000 years ago and set fires that burned off natural flora and fauna may have triggered a cataclysmic weather change that turned the continent’s interior into the dry desert it is today, United States and Australian researchers say.
Their study, reported in the latest issue of the journal, Geology, supports arguments that early settlers literally changed the landscape of the continent with fire.
People are also blamed for killing off 85 per cent of Australia’s huge animals, including an ostrich-sized bird, 19 species of marsupials, a 7.5m lizard and a Volkswagen-sized tortoise.
These practices have become known as “living in harmony with the environment” and “maintaining a balance with nature”.
Which really kind of begs the question, ultimately, of what, exactly, is supposed to be bad about life-forms changing the environment? Its somehow just and noble for beavers to dam streams, choking off downstream water resources of other animals and flooding out the homes of others, and likewise "harmonious" for the original Aborginials, widely proclaimed by the worst of those infected with Little Brown Brother-ism as the pinnacle to which we all should aspire, to surface-burn Australia to ash and dust. Both change the environment at large to better survive themselves.
Hell, let's not forget that the first instance of humanity modifying the environment at large for its own purposes was 8,000 years ago, at the beginning of agriculture. Probably the most important means of environmental molding, responsible for us even possessing a modern world, and people ignore its impact in favour of poking sticks at things more clearly mechanical and, as such, better exemplars of what they see as "capitalism."
Make no mistake, the folks decrying Humanity's impact on nature, fearing the inevitable immense thermal death of the planet, have as their enemy not just factories and SUVs, but the very assumption that humanity deserves to exist.
The Diplomiad has an excellent bit on the recent UN study of global warming:
Now the part that has gotten the most media attention,
On the basis of an extensive review of the relevant scientific literature, we propose a long-term objective of preventing average global surface temperature from rising by more than 2°C (3.6°F) above its pre-industrial level (taken as the level in 1750, when carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations first began to rise appreciably as a result of human activities). (footnote#10)Interesting. Let's go see what footnote number 10 says. You'll find it on page 15,
Other influences on climate were much more important than the rising greenhouse gas concentrations for at least the next hundred years, and the global average surface temperature in 1850 was probably a bit cooler than in 1750. But thermometer measurements – which first became widespread enough to directly determine the global average temperature only around 1860–show that between then and 2004 the temperature has risen by about 0.8°C or 1.4°F, and is expected to rise further still due to climatic inertia.
There appears to be no scientific rhyme or reason for picking 1750 as the base year -- political, yes, scientific, no. Apparently, according to the report, nobody knows what the temperature was in 1750, but whatever it was, after 100 years of "human activity," by 1850 the world was COOLER. Why? "Other influences" is the cryptic answer. So are those "other influences" now gone? What were they and what happened to them? If they're not gone, wouldn't they act to cool the earth again rather than let it warm up?
Just as I was getting warmed up to continue my assault on the report (sigh), I ran across this from Tim Worstall,
Allow me to translate <...> We have decided to take an arbitrary number, 2°C, set the baseline at the bottom of the Little Ice Age, immediately after the Maunder Minimum, mix in every scare story we can think of to scare the fecal matter out of you rubes and if you don't listen carefully to us important people we'll hold our breaths until we turn blue. (We might also note that no one, no one at all, thinks that human influence on the climate started in 1750 AD. Try 8,000 BC with the invention of agriculture.) <...>
Allow me just to recapitulate this argument. A modest number of the international great and the good get together to bemoan the way the world is running to rack and ruin, identifying the beginning of the Industrial Revolution (and not coincidentally, the beginning of capitalism) as when our forefathers began to cause our problems, come up with a series of recommendations on how to reduce carbon emissions, lots of international action, international aid, international spending, international regulation, in short, lots for the international great and good to do, and in the process they take no position on nuclear energy? None at all? Not even a "Tsk, tsk, that will allow capitalism to survive?"
Sheesh. Who cares what they think?Darn. He ruined that for me. He demolished the whole thing.
OK, seems someone remembered humanity first transitioned from a hunter-gatherer culture to a settled agricultural structure as a result of accursed tampering in the affairs of the Most Sacred Gaia.
The phrasing "Most Sacred Gaia" is deliberate. As far as I can tell, the supporters of global warming are the worst kind of pseudo-scientists: religious zealots. Its just that they don't venerate Allah or JHVH, but Holy Gaia and the Martyr Marx. Capitalism and progress of the individual are their Lucifers and Baals, and thinking at all differently, especially when backed with facts, is an act of heretical evil. Not disagreement, or even stupidity, but evil. Their arguments are couched in exactly that rhetoric. Rape, pillage, destroy, murder, these are the words they bring to bear when challenged.
"You're raping the Earth."
Sure I am. The bitch was asking for it.
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