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Darashii
Joined: 08 Jan 2008
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 Posted: Tue Feb 26, 2008 2:44 am Post subject: |
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| cbclark4 wrote: |
| I do not think Civilization can survive religion. |
What makes you think they're so antithetic as to not co-exist for all time? Hell, which do you REALLY think came first?
Just sayin...  |
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pharflung
Joined: 29 Mar 2007
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| Posted: Wed Feb 27, 2008 3:36 pm Post subject: |
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Here's an interesting follow up story from the New York Times:
http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/02/26/buried-seed-vault-opens-in-arctic/index.html
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The new repository is intended to be an insurance policy for individual countries and also for humanity more generally, should larger-scale disaster strike (anything from pestilence to an asteroid impact).
The Norwegian government put up more than $7 million for construction. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is providing money to help developing countries package and ship seed samples, as part of a broader $30-million project to protect the genetic diversity of the world�s main food crops. |
Norway deserves a lot of credit for their generosity. I don't seen any angle of personal gain here, the "what's in it for me?" attitude.
We face a lot of challenges in the century ahead, and longer. We don't know what the future holds, but we can make an educated guess. We need desperately to change our attitudes and take steps to anticipate disasters before they strike.
Here's an excellent piece from the New York Times that highlights this need in the U.S. regarding levees and flood control:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/27/opinion/27prudhomme.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
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February 27, 2008
Op-Ed Contributor
There Will Be Floods
By ALEX PRUD�HOMME
LAST month, a 30-foot section of levee ruptured in Fernley, Nev. While the cause of the breach, which swamped 450 homes and forced dozens of people to evacuate, is unknown, anyone familiar with the drowning of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina will tell you this: Levees fail.
Indeed, there are more than 100 antiquated earthen berms across the country in danger of collapsing. What happened in Nevada is a harbinger of a much larger problem nationwide.
In Texas City, Tex., for instance, levees protect 50,000 residents and $6 billion worth of property, including almost 5 percent of the nation�s oil-refining capacity. Imagine the consequences, in this day of $100-a-barrel oil, if those defenses fail.
Even more vulnerable are the 1,100 miles of levees in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, north of San Francisco. Cobbled together 150 years ago to provide farmland, they are now part of an intricate, fragile system that supplies fresh water to California, the eighth-largest economy in the world....
But water is an inexorable force that, sooner or later, will assert itself. This is a lesson others have taken to heart. In 1953, a hurricane in the North Sea breached dikes and flooded the Netherlands, setting off a period of national soul-searching. Realizing that they had suffered from poor engineering and communication, the Dutch spent billions of dollars to create a world-class flood control system and are now armed for a once-in-10,000-year event.
The United States isn�t even prepared for a once-in-100-year event. In light of climate change, we need to emulate the Netherlands and make flood protection a national priority.
more.... |
In the United States we are seeing a perfect storm of the consequences of a series of economic and political mistakes threatening the country's economy.
In the world we are seeing a perfect storm of centuries of environmental mistakes leading to global warming and pollution.
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Park-Contamination.html?scp=1&sq=denali+pollution&st=nyt
And if anyone thinks the U.S. is mainly to blame, they have their eyes closed. I could never have imagined a country so profligate in its waste of energy than Korea, and so casual in its use of pesticides.
Regardless of who is at fault, we are all likely to pay the price, unless we all work together to correct the problems. I'm afraid we are moving into an era where if it can go wrong, it probably will. |
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mindmetoo
Joined: 02 Feb 2004
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| Posted: Wed Feb 27, 2008 4:17 pm Post subject: |
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| nicholas_chiasson wrote: |
| nature is self correcting. dinosaurs died out...very very quickly...ice ages occur. at best global warming speeds up a normal process. granted a normal process that kills millions of people in worse case, but one that will self correct. If one believes in the old earth theory, of the billions of years man has been a factor for only 60 million or so. I think we exagerate our influence. |
Yeah, 90% of all life has been wiped out 2 or 3 times already. When niches are absent, life quickly radiates to fill those niches. Check out Mt. Saint Helens. Everything was wiped out but life quickly returned.
I think the seed vault's purpose is less "90% of life has been wiped out, so let's get planting again" and more "oh oh we've really screwed up rice in our breeding a new strain. Oh oh oh oh. Well luckily we have back up seeds." |
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pharflung
Joined: 29 Mar 2007
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| Posted: Fri Feb 29, 2008 6:52 am Post subject: |
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Here is an article from the NY Times on the seed vault that is vastly superior to the CNN piece:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/29/world/europe/29seeds.html?hp=&pagewanted=all
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�We started thinking about this post-9/11 and on the heels of Hurricane Katrina,� said Cary Fowler, president of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, a nonprofit group that runs the vault. �Everyone was saying, why didn�t anyone prepare for a hurricane before? We knew it was going to happen.
�Well, we are losing biodiversity every day � it�s a kind of drip, drip, drip. It�s also inevitable. We need to do something about it.� |
mindmetoo:
| Quote: |
| Check out Mt. Saint Helens. Everything was wiped out but life quickly returned. |
I don't know how you define "life quickly returned."
I was in the ash cloud of Mt. St. Helens more than 500 miles to the east. Six years later I visited Mt. St. Helens and took a look. It was astonishing. All I could see was dead trees knocked down and white pumice rock, from horizon to horizon. I have pictures of it.
Recent pictures don't look like life has returned. And they say it might blow again.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Mt_St_Helens.JPG
The ash from smaller volcanoes can fertilize and acidify soil, provided it is not too deep. Volcanoes are an essential part of our planet's evolution, the creation of our atmosphere and soil. But much of this work was done before there were humans. Now we've got them living on the side of dormant volcanoes.
Also keep in mind that Mt. St. Helens was not a supervolcano. It had a VEI of 5.
Mt. Pinatubo was a supervolcano, with a VEI of 6. It was 10 times stronger than Mt. St. Helens. It had an impact on world weather.
But a VEI 6 is still not enough to produce a worldwide disaster that changes weather enough to cut crop production significantly.
For that you need a VEI 7 or 8.
A VEI 7 eruption occurred in 1815 in Indonesia:
| Quote: |
Mount Tambora (or Tomboro) is an active stratovolcano on Sumbawa island, Indonesia. Sumbawa is flanked both to the north and south by oceanic crust, and Tambora was formed by the active subduction zones beneath it. This raised Mount Tambora as high as 4,300 m (14,000 ft),[2] making it one of the tallest peaks in the Indonesian archipelago, and drained off a large magma chamber inside the mountain. It took centuries to refill the magma chamber, its volcanic activity reaching its peak in April 1815.[3]
Tambora erupted in 1815 with a rating of seven on the Volcanic Explosivity Index; the largest eruption since the Lake Taupo eruption in AD 181.[4] The explosion was heard on Sumatra island (more than 2,000 km or 1,200 mi away).
Heavy volcanic ash falls were observed as far away as Borneo, Sulawesi, Java and Maluku islands. The death toll was at least 71,000 people, of which 11,000�12,000 were killed directly by the eruption;[4] most authors estimated 92,000 people were killed but this figure is based on an overestimated calculation.[5]
The eruption created global climate anomalies; 1816 became known as the Year Without a Summer because of the effect on North American and European weather. Agricultural crops failed and livestock died in much of the Northern Hemisphere, resulting in the worst famine of the 19th century.[4] |
The 1815 eruption released sulfur into the stratosphere, causing a global climate anomaly. Different methods have estimated the ejected sulfur mass during the eruption: the petrological method; an optical depth measurement based on anatomical observations; and the polar ice core sulfate concentration method, using cores from Greenland and Antarctica. The figures vary depending on the method, ranging from 10 Tg S to 120 Tg S.[4]
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In the spring and summer of 1816, a persistent dry fog was observed in the northeastern U.S. The fog reddened and dimmed the sunlight, such that sunspots were visible to the naked eye. Neither wind nor rainfall dispersed the "fog". It was identified as a stratospheric sulfate aerosol veil.[4]
In summer 1816, countries in the Northern Hemisphere suffered extreme weather conditions, dubbed the Year Without a Summer. Average global temperatures decreased about 0.4�0.7 �C (0.7�1.3 �F),[2] enough to cause significant agricultural problems around the globe.
On 4 June 1816, frosts were reported in Connecticut, and by the following day, most of New England was gripped by the cold front. On 6 June 1816, snow fell in Albany, New York, and Dennysville, Maine.[4]
Such conditions occurred for at least three months and ruined most agricultural crops in North America. Canada experienced extreme cold during that summer. Snow 30 cm (12 in) thick accumulated near Quebec City from 6 to 10 June 1816.....
This pattern of climate anomaly has been blamed for the severity of typhus epidemic in southeast Europe and the eastern Mediterranean between 1816 and 1819.[4] Much livestock died in New England during the winter of 1816�1817.
Cool temperatures and heavy rains resulted in failed harvests in the British Isles. Families in Wales traveled long distances as refugees, begging for food. Famine was prevalent in north and southwest Ireland, following the failure of wheat, oat and potato harvests.
The crisis was severe in Germany, where food prices rose sharply. Due to the unknown cause of the problems, demonstrations in front of grain markets and bakeries, followed by riots, arson and looting, took place in many European cities. It was the worst famine of the 19th century.[4] |
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Tambora
I just watched a National Geographic program called "Vocano - The Ultimate Disaster."
A volcanologist estimated the chances of a VEI 7 eruption happening in this century at one in 100.
But the real danger comes from a VEI 8 eruption. These are of course more rare. But if you have one of these, I'm afraid you aren't going to see life returning so quickly.
The Toba Vocano eruption of about 70,000 years ago was a VEI 8.
| Quote: |
Within the last three to five million years, after human and other ape lineages diverged from the hominid stem-line, the human line produced a variety of species.
According to the Toba catastrophe theory a massive volcanic eruption severely reduced the human population. This may have occurred around 70�75,000 years ago when the Toba caldera in Indonesia underwent an eruption of category 8 (or "mega-colossal") on the Volcanic Explosivity Index. This released energy equivalent to about one gigaton of TNT, which is three thousand times greater than the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens. According to Ambrose, this reduced the average global temperature by 5 degrees Celsius for several years and may have triggered an ice age.
Ambrose postulates that this massive environmental change created population bottlenecks in the various species that existed at the time; this in turn accelerated differentiation of the isolated human populations, eventually leading to the extinction of all the other human species except for the two branches that became Neanderthals and modern humans.
[edit] Evidence
Some geological evidence and computed models support the plausibility of the Toba catastrophe theory. The Greenland ice core data displays an abrupt change around this time, but in the corresponding Antarctic data the change is not easily discernible. Ashes from this eruption of Lake Toba, located near the equator, should have spread all over the world.
Genetic evidence suggests that all humans alive today, despite their apparent variety, are descended from a very small population, perhaps between 1,000 and 10,000 breeding pairs.[3][4]
Using the average rates of genetic mutation, some geneticists have estimated that this population lived at a time coinciding with the Toba event. These estimates do not contradict the consensus estimates that Y-chromosomal Adam lived some 60,000 years ago, and that Mitochondrial Eve is estimated to have lived 140,000 years ago, because Toba is not conjectured to be an extreme bottleneck event, where the population was reduced to one breeding pair.
Gene analysis of some genes shows divergence anywhere from 2 million to 60,000 years ago, but this does not contradict the Toba theory, again because Toba is not conjectured to be a single-pair bottleneck event. The complete picture of gene lineages (including present-day levels of human genetic variation) allows the theory of a Toba-induced human population bottleneck.[5] |
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe
Toba came close to wiping out humanity. I don't know whether it was human ingenuity or luck that kept the remainder alive.
If something even close to that happened today, we wouldn't have enough food to feed all the world's 6 billion people. I don't think we would even have enough to feed 600 million. It would take many years for the skies to clear and the weather to return to normal.
But even a relatively small amount of volcanic ash is enough to knock a jetliner out of the sky. The engines seize up and the windshield becomes opaque. I know because I saw closeup a 747 that almost crashed, only regaining power to its four engines at 10,000 feet. If you get a worldwide dispersal of volcanic ash, jets would be grounded indefinitely. Other modes of transportation could also be affected because ash can destroy internal combustion engines, too. Imagine a world where the transportation system grinds to a halt. That's what a supervolcano would do. |
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