Accelerating Future

Global Village Construction Set in 2 Minutes from Marcin Jakubowski on Vimeo.

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I didn’t know that.

Thank you Half Sigma.

Half Sigma believes veganism is indicative of Gaianism. Prominent vegans have to indicate that they dismiss Gaianism to be taken seriously.

Gaianism is a risk to this planet because it contains so much inconsistency and nonsense. Al Gore, who heats his huge house and flies around everywhere in a huge, fossil-fuel-powered metal tube, is the poster boy for Gaian hypocrisy.

My environmental vision, to increase the total biodiversity and biomass, has been described as “neo-Carboniferous” by Mitchell Porter.

The other part of my environmental vision centers around open ecology and resilient communities.

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In case you hadn’t heard, there is an article by Bill Gates up at Huffington Post, “Why We Need Innovation, Not Just Insulation”. Here’s how it starts:

People often present two timeframes that we should have as goals for CO2 reduction – 30% (off of some baseline) by 2025 and 80% by 2050.

I believe the key one to achieve is 80% by 2050.

But we tend to focus on the first one since it is much more concrete.

We don’t distinguish properly between things that put you on a path to making the 80% goal by 2050 and things that don’t really help.

Most people “concerned” about global warming are caught up in Gaianist nonsense, Al Gore-flavored uneducated alarmism, and eco-bling. They will think whatever a small cadre of politicians and elite academics want them to think.

Stewart Brand, thankfully, has been facing up to the truth that we need nuclear power to permanently lower carbon emissions. Jamais Cascio has been introducing geoengineering to the discussion, and it was recently reported that geoengineering research is being funded by Gates. More radically, J. Storrs Hall has proposed a weather machine which he claims could be built within a few decades.

Unfortunately, even if we ceased all carbon emissions tomorrow, the thermal inertia of the oceans will ensure that warming continues for “a century or more”. Of course, pointing this out at all is considered defeatist in many quarters, but too bad.

As I’ve always said, the easiest ways for people to fight global warming right now are halting meat consumption, traveling less, and moving into smaller houses. Al Gore could do much more to fight global warming if he pushed these lifestyle changes aggressively. Yet Gore keeps living in a big house, traveling all over the place, and eating meat. He sets a bad example and decreases the credibility of the movement as a whole. People concerned about global warming — please spare me your boring essays about the need to reduce emissions. I’m only interested in seeing your latest vegetarian recipes, pictures of your bicycle, and your small, well-insulated apartment. Show, don’t tell.

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For an interesting article at The Register, see “Prehistoric titanic-snake jungles laughed at global warming”. Would environmentalists concerned about global warming not mind it if we could preserve all the threatened species by either finding them new habitats or genetically engineering them ever so slightly to survive in the warmer environment?

To make things easier, we could just eliminate mosquitoes entirely, thus malaria and other mosquito-transmitted diseases would go away.

From a utilitarian perspective, if environmentalists consider nature to be a good thing, they have somewhat of a moral obligation to increase the variety and complexity of biomass. It’s like planting trees, on a larger scale. Therefore we have a moral obligation to eventually increase the temperature of the planet so that Antarctica can be covered with temperate forests filled with animals, like it was for two hundred million years before the Azolla event. After the Azolla event made the world much cooler geologically overnight by causing the CO2 ratio in the atmosphere to “fall from 3500 ppm in the early Eocene to 650 ppm during this event”¹, things got even worse when the Drake Passage opened, creating a frigid Circumpolar Current. Before the Azolla event, the last cool period, with continental glaciers, was the Karoo Ice Age, 260 million years ago. I have proposed attempting to artificially close the Drake Passage as an eventual far-future way of warming the Earth if we chose to.

This is not normal. We are in the middle of a 2.58-million year Ice Age. It’s cold everywhere. Still, it’s fair to say that we currently lack the technology to responsibly engineer a transition between this cold “Icehouse Earth” and a warmer, lusher, “Greenhouse Earth”. Therefore, we have an obligation to fight against global warming for the time being. (To the extent that you regard it as a threat in your personal calculations — while it is generally agreed that anthropogenic gases are warming the Earth, it is uncertain how much the temperature will increase over the next century and whether sea level increases will be measured in millimeters or centimeters.) Still, I hope that some environmentalists would be receptive to warming the Earth if, at some future point, it were better for nature to thrive. The status quo of the cold, barren, grasslands-covered present-day Earth is not necessarily what is best for nature.

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