|
Korean Job Discussion Forums
"The Internet's Meeting Place for ESL/EFL Teachers from Around the World!"
|
| View previous topic :: View next topic |
| Author |
Message |
endofthewor1d
Joined: 01 Apr 2003
Location: the end of the wor1d.
|
 Posted: Sat Sep 22, 2007 9:29 am Post subject: |
 |
|
| dutchy pink wrote: |
Most species that live/have ever lived, live on average of 5 million years.
We are approaching that quickly.
Are we different than the rest of life on this planet? |
i think we're different enough to the extent that we can do something about it. give credit where it's due, dude. i'm not saying this in a religious sense, like a god created us in his image and we've got that on our side or anything. i'm just saying that humans have pretty much proven themselves as being able to look out for themselves over the long haul.
do you honestly think our time is coming to an end? |
|
| Back to top |
|
 |
Big_Bird
Joined: 31 Jan 2003
Location: Sometimes here sometimes there...
|
| Posted: Sat Sep 22, 2007 9:38 am Post subject: |
|
|
| dutchy pink wrote: |
Ideas of 'tipping points" etc.... are human constructs. This is a human-centric worldview and I think it does more damage to the global warming debate than good.
It's only "tipping" out of our favor.
The Earth and Life ain't going nowhere.
IMO the global warming debate should be about the short term suffering that humans will experience due to desertification, flooding, etc...
This will garner far more sympathy from the middle-of-the-roaders than such things as habitat-loss for the rhesus monkey and artic caribou migrating patterns.
Most species that live/have ever lived, live on average of 5 million years.
We are approaching that quickly.
Are we different than the rest of life on this planet? |
It may be human centric, but we are humans! Humans matter very much to humans. Our first concern is ourselves. Naturally! The rest of the universe won't give a shyte, but we will.  |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
endofthewor1d
Joined: 01 Apr 2003
Location: the end of the wor1d.
|
| Posted: Sat Sep 22, 2007 9:40 am Post subject: |
|
|
| Big_Bird wrote: |
| endofthewor1d wrote: |
1. how much time do you think we as a species have left on the planet? |
I'm just a lay person, and anyone making an estimate would have to take so many variables into consideration. I agree with Julius that things could become so dire, that although we may continue as a species, our present civilisation would be in ruins and many of us will be sloughed from existence, with those of us left returning to a more primitive life-style. That's not an entirely unbelievable scenario, frankly. But it would take far too much typing on my part to explain why that is.
|
i could live with that. that would, in a sense, be kind of refreshing.
| Big_Bird wrote: |
| Quote: |
| 2. how much time do you think it would take for us to develop the technology to find and colonize another planet? |
I'll treat this as a serious question. We would have to find a way of colonising planets that at present do not sustain life as we know it. That means creating artificial environments. That would take extraordinary resources and technological discovery. Suitable planets are impossibly far away. If we do colonise planets, there will not be enough transport to take billions with us. It would only be a tiny branch of the human race that benefitted. All this is still in the realms of science fiction. It would be far more feasible to adapt certain parts of this planet for habitation. However, again, this will probably mean only a minority benefit.
Your plan of action is a kin to a young guy saying well, I know that smoking could cause me cancer in the future, but I believe doctors will have found a cure for it by then. So I'll continue anyway. Surely they will have solved the problem before *I* die. |
[/quote]
yikes... i'm actually kind of counting on that cancer thing.
anyway... i don't think that the end of humanity is anywhere near the horizon. but i've witnessed technology explode in my lifetime. it's not slowing down either.
i, too, am a lay person. but i honestly believe that if humanity was backed against the wall, it has what it takes to perservere. if that means a bunch of us living on some mobile space colony until we can find some other planet to inhabit, so be it.
it sounds like science fiction. but really, the idea of the earth being void of life in the next thousand years because of 'global warming' sounds at least as far fetched to me. |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
dutchy pink
Joined: 06 Feb 2007
Location: Incheon
|
| Posted: Sat Sep 22, 2007 9:40 am Post subject: |
|
|
I know where you are coming from.
But, we obviously haven't proven ourselves, (if what you say is true,) since we are on the verge of destroying ourselves. And we haven't been in it for the long haul. Humans, in our generally speaking, modern apperance, have been around about 4 million years. That's 20% less than the average ant, bug, bird, that has ever existed. So if we do kill ourselves in the next 2000 years, that means we fall on the dumb side of species and survival. We didn't even last the average.
A poor showing in my opinion. |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
Julius
Joined: 27 Jul 2006
|
| Posted: Sat Sep 22, 2007 10:43 pm Post subject: |
|
|
| endofthewor1d wrote: |
julius never gave me a clear estimate as to what he thinks...
1. how much time do you think we as a species have left on the planet? |
thats hard to answer, even scientists have no real idea because they don't know how the different factors will play out against eachother. This unfolding climate change is a new un-studied phenomenon.
First you have to look at the causes, and their recent history:
1) carbon emmisions:
"The pre-industrial level was 280 ppm CO2e and the anthropogenic impact (emissions as a consequence of human activity) has pushed this level now to 430 ppm CO2e. The world is now annually producing double the atmospheric carbon that the biosphere's carbon sinks can absorb."
Temperature:
"a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide from the the pre-industrial level of 280 ppm to 560 ppm will produce an increase of around 3 degree. Each year the level of level of greenhouse gases increases about 2�2.5 ppm, so that every four�five years the temperature is being pushed up 0.1 degree, but but this may rise to 3-4 ppm by mid-century if the world continues produces emissions "business as usual", ultimately resulting in a one degree temperature increase every 25 years."
http://www.carbonequity.info/science.html
However, the above does not factor in increases in emmissions from thawing permafrost and tundra, etc.
"The annual carbon dioxide concentration growth-rate was larger during the last 10 years (1995-2005 average: 1.9 ppm per year), than it has been since the beginning of continuous direct atmospheric measurements (1960)"
http://www.hoptechno.com/global-warming.htm
"If today is a typical day on planet Earth, we will lose 116 square miles of rainforest, or about an acre a second. We will lose another 72 square miles to encroaching deserts, as a result of human mismanagement and overpopulation. We will lose 40 to 100 species, and no one knows whether the number is 40 or 100. Today the human population will increase by 250,000. And today we will add 2,700 tons of chlorofluorocarbons to the atmosphere and 15 million tons of carbon. Tonight the Earth will be a little hotter, its waters more acidic, and the fabric of life more threadbare." ...... David Orr (1991), " What is Education For?".
http://www.dbc.uci.edu/~sustain/bio65/lec01/b65lec01.htm
How long do we have left?
Figuring in:
a) Collapse of ecosystems (eg arctic food chain), fish stocks, agricultural areas due to aridification
b) political instability and increasing chaos due to mass human migration, & possible conflicts.
c) Rising sea levels threatening many of the worlds poulation centres - coastal cities etc
d) feedback loop: ever accelerating warming and climate change and resultant effects.
e) Mismanaged, polluted and dwindling resources: water, air, etc.
f) Cost to governments of increasing "natural" disasters- flooding, hurricanes, drought, tsunami
g) Stripping of protective ecosystems and their ability to buffer humans from the worst effects of natural disasters- eg loss of carbon sinks, loss of upland forests, loss of wetlands "*louisiana*, bleaching and dying of coral reefs, etc etc
h) loss of biodiversity and the balance of the food chain- food
i) Increasing world population, and strain on ecosystems and resources
My guestimate? Less than 30 years before it goes out of control and life has become very uncomfortable for most people. The final end of civilisation as we know it in a mixture of nuclear exchanges and collapsed environment? 40-50 years. |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
Big_Bird
Joined: 31 Jan 2003
Location: Sometimes here sometimes there...
|
| Posted: Sat Sep 22, 2007 11:12 pm Post subject: |
|
|
| Bloody hell Julius! Your posts remind me of the joke: What's the definition of a pessimist? A pessimist is a well-informed optimist. |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
Julius
Joined: 27 Jul 2006
|
| Posted: Sat Sep 22, 2007 11:35 pm Post subject: |
|
|
| Big_Bird wrote: |
| Bloody hell Julius! Your posts remind me of the joke: What's the definition of a pessimist? A pessimist is a well-informed optimist. |
 I know!
Thing is though..all those points (a-i) have already started happening. I coulod post a hundred news stories on here to show this.
The short time frame is because scientists have already been startled at the speed of climate change acceleration- and even the ppm levels of atmospheric CO2- which is faster than any of them were predicting. |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
endofthewor1d
Joined: 01 Apr 2003
Location: the end of the wor1d.
|
| Posted: Sat Sep 22, 2007 11:38 pm Post subject: |
|
|
| Julius wrote: |
| My guestimate? Less than 30 years before it goes out of control and life has become very uncomfortable for most people. The final end of civilisation as we know it in a mixture of nuclear exchanges and collapsed environment? 40-50 years. |
that's what i was hoping you'd say. no offense intended, but you sound like just another doomsdayer to me. maybe we can have this conversation again in fifty years, and you can tell me that CO2 readings have changed and whatever, and i'll tell you to have a look at the earth from space, and it still looks pretty much the same, and that we still aren't living in a 'mad max' scenerio. and you'll say something along the lines of 'just you wait fifty years! the end is nigh!!'
maybe i'm wrong, and we're on the edge of extinction. but i haven't yet seen anything that's making me panic. |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
Julius
Joined: 27 Jul 2006
|
| Posted: Sun Sep 23, 2007 12:31 am Post subject: |
|
|
| endofthewor1d wrote: |
| but i haven't yet seen anything that's making me panic. |
I've been following this topic with close interest for years now. I've seen plenty to make me shudder. Not much makes the popular media because people don't want to read it, and they're mostly ignorant to anything except soap operas and sport.
off the top of my head..exhibit a:
Collapsing food web
"You just can't grasp how different things were 10 years ago," Estes said during a recent expedition. "No one has ever seen a decline of this magnitude in such a short period of time over such a large geographic area."
Piece by piece, over the last three years, scientists have started to solve the puzzle. Clues point toward something almost imperceptible that happened in the ocean in 1977. But the answers are more disturbing than satisfying, more elusive than conclusive. It seems the ocean's chain of life is actually a fragile silken web. If you remove a strand, the whole thing unravels. And it may never be whole again.
"I have not come across any other example of such a total flip- flop," of an ocean environment, said Bruce Wright, a division chief at the National Marine Fisheries Service in Alaska.
Ecological shifts as sudden and sweeping as the ones in the Aleutians usually can come only from human interference, said David Lindberg, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Berkeley.
http://www.biologicaldiversity.org/swcbd/species/otter/worldcatch.html
shutting down of ocean currents that bring warm weather from the tropics
The dramatic finding comes from a study of ocean circulation in the North Atlantic, which found a 30% reduction in the warm currents that carry water north from the Gulf Stream.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn8398.html
Less sunlight reaching earth, less evaporation.
"In 1995, scientists found on average that there was less water evaporation in Russia and the U.S. compared to 50 years ago, and people didn't know why," he said. "Then in 1996, another group of scientists in Russia published a paper showing that there had been a large decrease in sunlight over the last 50 years.
http://www.abc.net.au/science/news/stories/s727003.htm
Destroyed ecosystems.
The first comprehensive map of our planet's reefs indicates that they... (are) about half the size that scientists had estimated.
If temperature increases seen in the past decade continue, Hoegh-Guldberg predicts that in 50 years coral reefs as we know them will be gone.
http://discovermagazine.com/2001/dec/breakcoral
Today, more than 20% of the Amazon rainforest has been destroyed and is gone forever. At the current rate of destruction, it is estimated that the last remaining rainforests could be destroyed in less than 40 years.
http://www.blueplanetbiomes.org/amazon.htm
Since 1983, Drs. Smol and Douglas have been regularly sampling the water quality and biota of about 40 ponds on Cape Herschel, east-central Ellesmere Island, in the Canadian High Arctic. Polar ecosystems such as these are very sensitive to the effects of climatic and other environmental changes, they note in their paper. �In many respects, they are like the �miner�s canaries� of the planet, showing the first signs of warming.�
But this new discovery by the Canadian researchers has surprised even them.In the 1990s they were alarmed when they began to recognize a trend of declining water levels and changes in water chemistry. When they arrived to begin another field season in July of 2006 (the warmest year on record for that portion of the Arctic), some of the ponds were dry, and others had dramatically reduced water levels.
http://www.physorg.com/news102615595.html
Well...it goes on. I'm so used to being alarmed by breaking news on the changes in the earths environment..that I'm not even alrmed anymore. Just resigned. When you see how fast changes can happen, have happened, and are happening, then 40-50 more years suddenly does not seem too exxagerated at all. |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
keane
Joined: 09 Jul 2007
|
| Posted: Tue Nov 27, 2007 4:17 am Post subject: |
|
|
| endofthewor1d wrote: |
i don't think so. from the planet's point of view, i think we're just something new. if we ever do create the scary doomsday scenerio and nuke ourselves into oblivion, the planet (and life with it) will keep on going long after we're gone.
i don't even think that's going to be an issue. earth's time is limited to when our sun burns out. i'm confident that by that time we'll have colonized other planets by then, spawning countless generations of people all the while predicting that the end of all life in the universe is 20 years down the line, and that it's all our fault. |
This misrepresents the issue. It is not about the survival of the Earth and those who say it is are either ignorant of science or are being hyberbolic.
What is in question is how well *we* can survive in the cesspool we've created.
NOTE: I missed this thread the first time and ran across the book today. MM2 pointed me here. Sadly, this hasn't been discussed by any of you on the Global Warming thread. That's unfortunate. It is a thread that needs more than just me on it to keep the vampires honest.
I'll peruse this thread later. No time now. |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
shetan
Joined: 24 Apr 2006
Location: In front of my PC.
|
| Posted: Tue Nov 27, 2007 9:38 pm Post subject: |
|
|
| Quote: |
| I'd like to share a revelation that I've had, during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species. I realized that you're not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment, but you humans do not. You move to an area, and you multiply, and multiply, until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet, you are a plague, and we are the cure. |
Love this quote from the Matrix... sad but seemingly true..
I think that we as humans will find a way to reverse the process of destroying our planet. We tend to hear only the bad news, but global awareness is increasing to the point where your average person will take steps if they are available .
Take Korea for example, recycling is in every major fast food chain and coffee shop. It is late in coming yes, but people are making an effort.
Even in the U.S, individual states are suing to in order to see changes made.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/24/nyregion/24emissions.html?ref=nyregion
Anyway, I am not giving up on us yet... even if the Matrix is right!  |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
cbclark4
Joined: 20 Aug 2006
Location: Masan
|
| Posted: Tue Nov 27, 2007 10:17 pm Post subject: |
|
|
"And whether or not it is clear to you,
no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should."
http://marilee.us/desiderata.html |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
twg
Joined: 02 Nov 2006
Location: Getting some fresh air...
|
| Posted: Wed Nov 28, 2007 4:39 am Post subject: |
|
|
| George Carlin wrote: |
The planet is fine...
The PEOPLE are f***ed. |
|
|
| Back to top |
|
|
Rteacher
Joined: 23 May 2005
Location: Western MA, USA
|
| Posted: Wed Nov 28, 2007 5:30 am Post subject: |
|
|
There is a superior consciousness guiding nature. As long as materialistic civilization seeks to conquer, exploit, and kill nature it's sowing the seeds of its own destruction.
The guiding philosophy behind real progress should be to live in harmony with other living beings without unnecessarily killing any of them.
Escaping to other planets or galaxies won't do us any good as long as our consciousness is polluted with various forms of lust, anger, greed, illusion, madness, and envy.
Material solutions are only temporary fixes at best.
Nothing short of a spiritual revolution will save the world from massive destruction ...
Fortunately, bronze statues will be among the survivors:
http://www.prabhupadaconnect.com/Deities193.html
Last edited by Rteacher on Wed Nov 28, 2007 1:11 pm; edited 1 time in total |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
samd
Joined: 03 Jan 2007
|
| Posted: Wed Nov 28, 2007 6:31 am Post subject: |
|
|
| Very interesting. Thanks mindmetoo. |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
|
|
You cannot post new topics in this forum
You cannot reply to topics in this forum
You cannot edit your posts in this forum
You cannot delete your posts in this forum
You cannot vote in polls in this forum
|
|
FAQ
Search
Memberlist
Usergroups
Register
Profile
Log in to check your private messages
Log in
