World headed for irreversible climate change in five years, IEA warns

[Autumnlicious]

Starting with the lawyers has been suggested before. Willie Shakespeare said in Act 2 King Henry VI "The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers".

I'll be the first to place a gun to your head.

Just saying, if we're going to stick with the fundamentalist reasoning, then I see nothing wrong with putting you to death by the sword you offer.

Some of you have the subtlety of a garbage truck driving through a nitroglycerin plant.

Why thank you!

You may thank National Lampoon for that joke.

Actually, the way to slow population growth is to START with limiting the number of children YOU have. Children are born one at a time, not millions or billions at a time. Anyone with the technology to them where they could possibly read this board are in the upper echelon of consumers, and thus their/our children would use more than children of primitive tribes.

Ok -- the reasonable follow up to this sentence would be "limit the number of children you have to meet zero population growth"... Let's see:

There's something wrong with someone saying, "YOU need to limit the number of children you have.", while the person making that statement has children, they are unlikely to be taken seriously, or be labeled a bigot, or be labeled with supporting eugenics, then compounded with argumentum ad Hitlerum.

Two bricks short of a load. Shame.

If you posess one to two children, then you've bore the replacements for you and your spouse. In this context, then stating to other breeding adults to limit to one/two is reasonable.

I challenge you to seriously explain why having less than or equal to the number of children for something like Zero Population Growth is not reasonable.

The argument that "people are unreasonable" is not a real argument, anymore than the argument offered against the teaching of evolution, where it is documented that researchers and other advocates have been called "bigots", "monsters" and "Hitler supporters" by their opponents. And yet we still teach evolution, regardless of the luddites who fight tooth and nail against it.

You've got the main point. BOTH sides of the debate have a good deal of hypocrisy, which means that essentially nothing happens to stem the tide of population.

Absolute bullshit. You've already gone on record implying that anyone who has kids (Note -- this is a fundamentalist "All or Nothing" paradigm) is a "hypocrite" in advocating against unrestrained population growth.

On the upside, you can remain happy in your disappointment, content that everyone on both sides is a hypocrite.

You've got it. Something should have been done long ago, but everyone was extremely tied up with "us" having to give up more than "you" or "them". In reality, this is a problem for all of us.

Incorrect. There are rich entities that have done more harm. There are rich entities, that by volume alone, disproportionately contribute to this problem.

The only fault of the consumer and Joe Schmoe is letting these entities rise up and corrupt the show.

The egregious fault of the consumer and Joe Schmoe is defending these rich entities, when they have more than a hundred man's resources to defend themselves with and hence do not need some 99%er defending the 1%er.

This absolute crap of "We're all to blame" plays perfectly into the hands of the rich and powerful keeping their power -- after all, if we are ALL to blame, then you can't blame SOME of us.

At this point, continuing to burn fossil fuels - by anybody - for any reason - anywhere, is contributing to a problem, which it might be too late to fix at all.

More fundamentalist rhetoric. You really should take a long hard glance at your local church.

The significance of greenhouse gas output matters in perturbing global climate -- burning gasoline in your lawn mower is paltry compared to the greenhouse gases emitted by the car you drive everywhere. Also, the rate at which GHGs are emitted also matters, as the Earth has a carbon sequestration system (that is being methodically destroyed by immediate for-profit entities for lumber (rainforests), food (ocean) and PCB dumping (ocean)).

So, no. The gross volume and rate matters -- the argument that everyone contributes is also bullshit because powerplant emissions contribute to a significant amount of greenhouse gases along with everyone's car. Technically, decomissioning coal, gas plants in favor of nuclear, solar power along with an overhaul of our power transmission infrastructure to waste as little as possible (and also making solar plants in the Southwest US be viable for serving the Western coast).

In the end run, do you want to blame yourselves or take up the challenge of building the next latest and greatest power plants? Do you want to have the luxury of not having coal plants pollute the local environment and sicken the locals?

More people sicken and die due to the pollution generated by coal burning power plants daily than nuclear power in an entire year. While the nuclear industry is famously secretive and prone to obfuscation (and that must change if nuclear is to be safe and viable), it doesn't have to be.

Suppose something were to happen that would reduce the population by a large amount 90% or 99%. Yeah, nature would take care of all that "rotting flesh", although it would be something of a biohazard for the survivors for a period of time.

It would also be a biohazard for any vector that works in human-like organisms (where human-like means diseases are virulent in target organism).

We've got other problems, especially with chemical and biological waste being contained in some ways, buried in other ways, and it was in hope that somebody in the future could come up with an effective way to handle such waste. The containers won't last forever, and population could be too low or no one will know how to maintain the containers. And, it leaks out creating another problem up the road.

A lot of buried waste (for example - nuclear) is expected to be inactive well before those tanks fail. Also, a lot of contaminants lose potency over time -- you'd have to point out the specific flaws.

Active nuclear plants will also have some major problems, without sufficient people with sufficient tools or abilities to adequately man or control them.

Old 1st and 2nd gens, without maintenance and care, run the risk of overheating and potential meltdown.

But it would give me no end of pleasure, seeing your fundamentalist rhetorical "all-or-nothing" style, to have, in this scenario, a full meltdown of some no-name 2nd gen nuclear plant and utterly poisoning the biosphere.

Note that knowledge won't be lost, assuming this is something that only effects humans - such as a disease. Libraries will exist, information on computer disks will exist (for a period of time), and different people could learn the information.

For more of my upbeat look at the future, see cynics4bettertomorrow.org - or the blog on that.

You're a fucking idiot. A lot of the knowledge from Mercury, Gemini and Apollo never left NASA and never was passed on. So much for books.

Knowledge storage is only as strong as the culture and people that utilize it.

And I assure you, a sudden holocaust of disease would lose a lot of knowledge.

Additional knowledge would be lost as magnetic drives do not last forever and the electronics are always quite sensitive to environmental conditions (as well as the primitive eletrical engineering ability of a survivor), further compounded by a lack of resources (ie power).

But please, let's all circlejerk to this suicide-fantasy. Yeah. That's what it really is, isn't it?

Unless you have some plan of escaping the masque of red death (which would make you the hypocrite that you rail oh so hard against), you will be dead. And boy oh boy, won't the humans of the future be oh-so-sorry for ruining their biosphere and falling victim to calamity. I bet that makes your day. How else would you explain this constant waxing poetic about callously hoping for the deaths of billions?

You're no different than the doomsday Christians and their hope for the rapture.

Well...

Welcome to my rapture.