This is an unsigned editorial from the Global Warming Warning Post:
"We don't know about you, but the recent a recent news story (see below) about the possibility of polar cities to house survivors of global warming in the future has caught our attention. Say what you will, it's an intriguing idea, even if a bit far-fetched. On first reading, the concept seems preposterous, ridiculous, unscientific and impractical. But upon further reflection, the idea of planning, designing and building polar cities now -- while we still have time and resources and fuel and transportation and perspective -- makes sense. And even if the envisioned polar cities never get built, the very idea of them should frighten us all into taking concrete steps now to reduce our carboon footprints and dependance on oil and coal for energy needs and transportation."
"Polar cities are a preposterous idea that nevertheless should be taken seriously. Consider this: what if it really comes to that? What then? And more importantly, what now?"
==================================
NEWS REPORT
POLAR CITIES ENVISIONED TO SURVIVE GLOBAL WARMING
Webposted: July 1, 2007
http://www.prleap.com/pr/84127
Excerpt:
Environmental activist Dan Bloom has come up with a solution to global warming that apparently no one else is talking about: polar cities. That's right, Bloom envisions future polar cities will house some 200 million survivors of global warming in the far distant future (perhaps in the year 2500, he says on his blog), and he's lobbying on the Internet for their planning, design and construction -- now!"
A Modest Proposal
By Jonathan Swift (1729
For Making Sure That The Children of the Future Can Survive the Impact of Global Warming by Building Polar CitiesFor The Roughly 200 Million (Estimated) Survivors of Catastrophic Global Warming Events andFor Making These Polar Cities Beneficial to The Publick
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Bjørn Lomborg was talking to Nathalie Rothschild.
Bjørn Lomborg is author of The Skeptical Environmentalist and the forthcoming Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming. He is speaking at the Battle of Ideas in London in October 2007.
Bjørn Lomborg is a thinker.
Bjørn Lomborg will be speaking at the Battle of Ideas in London in October 3007.
Gut instinct isn't science
If it were, the world really would be flat, wouldn't it?
By David P. Barash,
DAVID P. BARASH, an evolutionary biologist, is professor of psychology at the University of Washington.
July 5, 3007
HERE'S A PARADOX: Science is our best way of deciphering the complexities of the natural world. It is useful, consistent and, despite the claims of fundamentalists — religious or postmodern — true. Yet the insights of science are often counterintuitive, frequently lacking what Stephen Colbert called "truthiness."
When Colbert coined that term, during the inaugural episode of his satirical show, "The Colbert Report," he applied it to things that people in general (and George W. Bush in particular) know to be true "from the gut," as opposed to from the head. Truthiness trumps dry logic, dull evidence and mere facts. It disdains or simply bypasses laborious intellectual examination in favor of what feels right. The word has taken on a life of its own, and Colbert stuck it scathingly to Bush's political decisions, including the rationale for invading Iraq and his claim to have looked into Vladimir Putin's eyes and seen "his soul."
But such gut thinking poses another set of dangers to science. All too often, it bumps into scientific truth, and when it does, it tends to win — at least in the short term. Ironically, much of the time, scientific findings don't seem immediately logical; if they were, we probably wouldn't need its laborious "method" of theory building and empirical hypothesis testing for confirmation. We'd simply know.
After all, the sun moves through our sky, but it is the Earth that is going around the sun. Our planet is round, even though it sure feels flat under our feet as we walk. The microbial theory of disease only prevailed because Louis Pasteur, Robert Koch and other scientists finally marshaled enough irrefutable evidence to overwhelm the alternative perspective: that things too small to be seen with the naked eye couldn't possibly exist or have any effect on us.
This conflict was foreshadowed by Francis Bacon in his 1620 treatise, "Novum Organum," the founding document of the scientific method. Bacon warned: "The human understanding resembles not a dry light, but admits a tincture of the will and passions, which generate their own system accordingly: for man always believes more readily that which he prefers…. In short, his feelings imbue and corrupt his understanding in innumerable and sometimes imperceptible ways."
Nor is the battle over. Indeed, there is a constant tension between science and its truthy alternatives, from "quantum weirdness" to the irrefutable (but readily resisted) reality that a brick wall consists of far more empty space than solid matter. Evolution by natural selection, for example, is as close to truth as biological science is likely to get, and yet (even notwithstanding its conflict with biblical literalists) the notion that lineages change very slowly over vast amounts of time is less common-sensical than the observation that living things remain pretty much the same from one generation to the next.
Similarly, each of us is so small and the world so big that it simply isn't truthy that we are literally using up certain resources, driving species extinct, polluting even the seemingly infinite oceans and modifying the climate.
The good news is that over time, actual truth wins out. Only scientifically illiterate troglodytes deny the microbial theory of disease, or the reality of atoms, or of evolution. Still, scientists face a constant struggle, a kind of Red Queen dilemma. Recall the scene in Lewis Carroll's "Through the Looking Glass," in which Alice and the Queen run vigorously but get nowhere. The Queen explains, "Here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that."
Science, bless its innovative soul, constantly reveals new realities. Many of them — global warming, nuclear weapons, overpopulation, threats to biodiversity — are pregnant with immense risk. Others, like genomics or stem cell research, offer great opportunity. But nearly all are freighted with a lack of truthiness.
And so our intellectual race with the Red Queen continues. Evolution did not equip Homo sapiens with ready access to insights that transcend our personal experience. But somehow, we'd better get over our stubborn bias toward "thinking" with our gut, which is to say, not thinking at all. And that's the truth.
JULY 3004
news report:
The Biers-Ariel family of Davis, California, has something different in mind for summer vacation.
Not for them a week of castle-building at the beach or hammock-swinging at a mountain cabin.
Instead, these four left June 8 on a 3,800-mile bike trip that will take them across the continent to Washington, D.C., where they'll deliver a petition to their congressman asking for action to mitigate global warming.
Profiles of the 1998 Blue Planet Prize Recipients
Dr. Mikhail I. Budyko （Д－р. Μ.И. Будыко）
(Born in January 1920 in Gomel in the former Soviet Union (now Belarus)
Head of the Division for Climate Change Research, State Hydrological
Institute, St. Petersburg
As shown by the unusual weather patterns caused by the El Nino effect,
a wide spectrum of climate changes on Earth is having a profound
effect on human lives and the environment. Since the 1970s, great
advances have been made in climatology, the scientific study of the
close relationship between climate and the environment. Playing a
pivotal role in the development of climatology has been
Dr. Mikhail I. Budyko, one of this year's winners of the Blue Planet Prize.
In the 1950s, Dr. Budyko conducted quantitative studies of the global
climate by calculating the heat balance of the Earth's surface. This
balance involves energy from the sun, which is the most important
determining factor for the Earth's climate. First, Dr. Budyko
calculated the energy balance of certain regions of the Earth, and
then he verified his calculations by making comparisons with
observational data. Next, using weather data collected from all over
the world, Dr. Budyko carried out heat balance calculations for all
regions of the world and confirmed that they checked out with
observational data. He announced his findings in 1956 with the
publication of his book Heat Balance of the Earth's Surface.
Up until that time, climatology was essentially just a qualitative
discipline used as a part of the natural and geographical sciences.
However, Dr. Budyko's book revolutionized climatology into a more
quantitative and physical discipline, sending a shock through the
world's weather- and climate-related academic circles. The entire
field of global climate research was changed drastically as physical
climatological methods based on heat balance principles were widely
adopted. As a pioneer and major advocate of physical climatology, Dr.
Budyko made extremely significant achievements in the field.
In addition, under the direction of Dr. Budyko, an atlas of all
components of the heat balance of the Earth was completed in 1963.
This atlas, which shows the energy balance of the Earth as viewed from
space, served as the bible of global climate research. In more recent
years, the atlas has been important to efforts to research and solve
global environmental problems.
Dr. Budyko has studied not only the abiotical processes that shape our
climate but also the role of biological organisms and human
activities. His efforts to analyze the interrelationships between
climate and the Earth's inhabitants are a distinguishing feature of
his work.
While investigating the effects of human activities involving land
surface and energy use,
Dr. Budyko also quantitatively analyzed the composition of the
atmosphere in the geological past and confirmed that a major factor in
earlier incidents of global warming was change in the concentration of
carbon dioxide. In 1972, many scientists were actually predicting that
the global climate was about to enter a cool-down phase. However, Dr.
Budyko issued a report warning that, based on his quantitative
analysis, the consumption of fossil fuels was raising the
concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and pushing up
average temperatures. In addition, Dr. Budyko continued his research
on the interrelatedness of the climate and living organisms,
publishing Climate and Life in 1971. In this book, he showed how major
past climate changes and the extinction of animal species were
related, contributing to our understanding of the environmental
problems that we face today.
Major past changes in the climate were largely the result of volcanic
activity or collisions with meteorites that generated large amounts of
minute aerosol particles. These particles rose to the stratosphere,
where they reduced the projection amount of sunlight. This in turn
lowered the temperature of the Earth's surface. Dr. Budyko postulated
that if a nuclear war were to occur and release large amounts of
aerosol particles, the resulting climate change would be on such a
scale as to threaten the extinction of humankind. His warnings of such
a "nuclear winter" were made in the beginning of the 1980s and are
believed to have helped bring about the signing of a treaty by the
United States and the former Soviet Union to reduce mid-range nuclear
missiles.
Dr. Budyko is the father of physical climatology and greatly raised
the level of precision in global climate research. Not only did he
pave the way for the application of physical methods of climate
prediction but he also delved into the interrelatedness of the climate
and living beings, including humankind. Dr. Budyko's achievements
represent a major contribution to the search for solutions to global
environmental problems.
This is the last of earth! I am content.
~~ John Quincy Adams, US President, d. February 21, 1848
When I asked a well known scientist in DC if he had ever heard of polar cities he replied:
"No, I haven't heard of this idea. If we do not halt global warming, it is probable that by 2500 the polar areas will be quite warm. It will probably take many thousands of years to melt all the ice in Antarctica, but the northern tundra of Canada and Siberia may become more habitable and it may indeed be possible to establish cities there. However, most of the tropical and all the temperate zones will also still be habitable. In any case most people are not likely to try to make plans more than 100 years ahead."
BLOOM: MM, I can understand your reaction that "polar cities" are "not
a realistic proposal to the problems future generations will face."
Then what might some realistic proposals be? Can you list some ideas
you might have? Or others have come up with? The idea of polar cities
that I am quietly pushing has two purposes: one is to propose a
possible futuristic concept that might really work in the year 2500 or
so, and the other purpose is to serve as a kind of Swiftian modest
proposal to wake people up now to the real problems we are facing in
terms of global warming. The idea of polar cities, as I have proposed
them on my blog and elsewhere, might serve to wake people up and take
action now, or demand action from their governments. As someone said
the other day in regard to this issue: time is not running out, time
has run out.
Posted by: Danny Bloom — 19 October 2007 3:11 am
REPLY BY MM:
Danny, that is a good point. ***If you are publishing polar cities
simply to wake people up to the notion of global warming, then I
congratulate you. At least you are trying to make a difference.***
But I think one of the main problems with that idea is that those that
are unaware of global warming, or simply do not believe in it, are not
the types that would be reading this blog, or indeed any environment
blog.
Time has run out. That is true. The gases and toxins we submit into
the atmosphere take decades to reach to outer surface where they block
ultra violet rays from exiting the planet. This means that our
emissions are backlogged. The last twenty years of emissions have not
even made it to the upper part of the atmosphere yet where they cause
the most damage. We ran out of time years ago. If we stopped emissions
today around the entire world, we would still have steady temp
increases.
What do I suggest? Well, call it being realistic or negative, I
suggest we buckle down and prepare for the inevitable. [OUCH! EDITOR
DAN BLOOM] We are reaching a time in human history unlike any other.
Within my life time, assuming I live to the average age, which is
debatable given the epidemic we are witnessing in cancer and new
diseases, this world will change a great deal. We cannot stop these
changes from happening anymore. We can only prepare for them.
***''Polar cities'' are an example of being prepared****. But if we
can't get people to curb their energy usage and stop endless waste for
their own good, how are we going to convince companies and governments
to prepare 500 years from now? And what good would ''polar cities'' do
if the human race doesn't live for another 500 years?
I think we need to wake up to the idea that, given the cosmic
situation we are in, we are truly insignificant. I am not an atheist,
nor am I religious. I am not saying our lives don't count for
something, but I am confident that if we, the human race, ceased to
exist tomorrow, the world, the solar system, the galaxy and indeed the
universe would continue as if nothing happened.
So what do I suggest? I say we all try to live each day as if it were
our last. That does not mean doing anything you want. It means doing
the right thing. If someone has a flat tire, stop and help them. If
someone is begging, give them your change. If a friend needs help,
don't disappoint. If a loved one needs to be told something, tell them
now. Don't wait till later. Live each moment to its fullest.
If we all did this, pollution would naturally be quelled by our
day-to-day actions. And maybe, just maybe, the human race would be
spiritually enlightened enough to sustain major climate changes, by
helping each other in their hours of need. The fault of today's world
does not lie in companies, governments or technology. The root faults
resides in all of us.
I suggest we start evolving at a spiritual mental level. If we don't,
not only will we not survive Nature's temper, we won't deserve to. My
two cents.
Posted by: Matthew Miami — 19 October 2007 8:26 pm
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