From: [email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of [email protected]
Sent: Monday, March 17, 2014 8:58 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: New NASA study predicts high probability of collapse of
industrial civilization
Personally, I am more in fear of nuclear war then I am about environmental
devastation. This is not to say the natural world is not in big trouble
because of human encroachment, but for Maslows hierarchy of needs, my fear
is that humans disappear, and the weeds and rats and insects take over, and
a great silence descends on the radio waves emanating from the spiral galaxy
we inhabit. My fear is that so many greens seem attuned with die-off so as
to preserve the natural order, which humans disrupt. This is not something
this primate can tolerate.
That last sentence doesn't even make sense. What can you possibly be trying
to say - or perhaps imply - by stating that "so many greens seem attuned
with die-off to preserve the natural order"? Are they somehow advocating
for genocide in order to restore some kind of natural order? That is a
potentially very serious charge you seem to be making. If you are going to
slander a whole swath of society you had better have some pretty darn
compelling evidence - and real factual evidence, not political argument - to
back it up.
-----Original Message-----
From: Alberto G. Corona <[email protected]>
To: everything-list <[email protected]>
Sent: Mon, Mar 17, 2014 11:48 am
Subject: Re: New NASA study predicts high probability of collapse of
industrial civilization
An excellent piece of postmarxist (marxism rephrased as sociological
"science") by the church of progressivism.
Unless the budget of the NASA and specially these "experts" is increased and
a change in global politics and another international bureau of world
engineers is created overcoming democratic control. Of course it must be
headed by these "experts"
2014-03-15 13:46 GMT+01:00 Edgar L. Owen <[email protected]>:
All, this seems like a very reasonable scenario and is in line with my
thinking...... Edgar
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/mar/14/nasa-civili
sation-irreversible-collapse-study-scientists
NASA-funded study: industrial civilisation headed for 'irreversible
collapse'?
Natural and social scientists develop new model of how 'perfect storm' of
crises could unravel global system
This NASA Earth Observatory released on
<http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/About/General/2010/11/1/128864
1509988/This-NASA-Earth-Observato-006.jpg>
This Nasa Earth Observatory image shows a storm system circling around an
area of extreme low pressure in 2010, which many scientists attribute to
climate change. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images
A new study sponsored by Nasa's Goddard Space Flight Center has highlighted
the prospect that global industrial civilisation could collapse in coming
decades due to unsustainable resource exploitation and increasingly unequal
wealth distribution.
Noting that warnings of 'collapse' are often seen to be fringe or
controversial, the study attempts to make sense of compelling historical
data showing that "the process of rise-and-collapse is actually a recurrent
cycle found throughout history." Cases of severe civilisational disruption
due to "precipitous collapse - often lasting centuries - have been quite
common."
The research project is based on a new cross-disciplinary 'Human And Nature
DYnamical' (HANDY) model, led by applied mathematician Safa Motesharri of
the US National Science Foundation-supported <http://www.sesync.org/>
National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center, in association with a team of
natural and social scientists. The study based on the HANDY model has been
accepted for publication in the peer-reviewed Elsevier journal, Ecological
Economics.
It finds that according to the historical record even advanced, complex
civilisations are susceptible to collapse, raising questions about the
sustainability of modern civilisation:
"The fall of the Roman Empire, and the equally (if not more) advanced Han,
Mauryan, and Gupta Empires, as well as so many advanced Mesopotamian
Empires, are all testimony to the fact that advanced, sophisticated,
complex, and creative civilizations can be both fragile and impermanent."
By investigating the human-nature dynamics of these past cases of collapse,
the project identifies the most salient interrelated factors which explain
civilisational decline, and which may help determine the risk of collapse
today: namely, Population, Climate, Water, Agriculture, and
<http://www.theguardian.com/environment/energy> Energy.
These factors can lead to collapse when they converge to generate two
crucial social features: "the stretching of resources due to the strain
placed on the ecological carrying capacity"; and "the economic
stratification of society into Elites [rich] and Masses (or "Commoners")
[poor]" These social phenomena have played "a central role in the character
or in the process of the collapse," in all such cases over "the last five
thousand years."
Currently, high levels of economic stratification are linked directly to
overconsumption of resources, with "Elites" based largely in industrialised
countries responsible for both:
"... accumulated surplus is not evenly distributed throughout society, but
rather has been controlled by an elite. The mass of the population, while
producing the wealth, is only allocated a small portion of it by elites,
usually at or just above subsistence levels."
The study challenges those who argue that technology will resolve these
challenges by increasing efficiency:
"Technological change can raise the efficiency of resource use, but it also
tends to raise both per capita resource consumption and the scale of
resource extraction, so that, absent policy effects, the increases in
consumption often compensate for the increased efficiency of resource use."
Productivity increases in agriculture and industry over the last two
centuries has come from "increased (rather than decreased) resource
throughput," despite dramatic efficiency gains over the same period.
Modelling a range of different scenarios, Motesharri and his colleagues
conclude that under conditions "closely reflecting the reality of the world
today... we find that collapse is difficult to avoid." In the first of these
scenarios, civilisation:
".... appears to be on a sustainable path for quite a long time, but even
using an optimal depletion rate and starting with a very small number of
Elites, the Elites eventually consume too much, resulting in a famine among
Commoners that eventually causes the collapse of society. It is important to
note that this Type-L collapse is due to an inequality-induced famine that
causes a loss of workers, rather than a collapse of Nature."
Another scenario focuses on the role of continued resource exploitation,
finding that "with a larger depletion rate, the decline of the Commoners
occurs faster, while the Elites are still thriving, but eventually the
Commoners collapse completely, followed by the Elites."
In both scenarios, Elite wealth monopolies mean that they are buffered from
the most "detrimental effects of the environmental collapse until much later
than the Commoners", allowing them to "continue 'business as usual' despite
the impending catastrophe." The same mechanism, they argue, could explain
how "historical collapses were allowed to occur by elites who appear to be
oblivious to the catastrophic trajectory (most clearly apparent in the Roman
and Mayan cases)."
Applying this lesson to our contemporary predicament, the study warns that:
"While some members of society might raise the alarm that the system is
moving towards an impending collapse and therefore advocate structural
changes to society in order to avoid it, Elites and their supporters, who
opposed making these changes, could point to the long sustainable trajectory
'so far' in support of doing nothing."
However, the scientists point out that the worst-case scenarios are by no
means inevitable, and suggest that appropriate policy and structural changes
could avoid collapse, if not pave the way toward a more stable civilisation.
The two key solutions are to reduce economic inequality so as to ensure
fairer distribution of resources, and to dramatically reduce resource
consumption by relying on less intensive renewable resources and reducing
population growth:
"Collapse can be avoided and population can reach equilibrium if the per
capita rate of depletion of nature is reduced to a sustainable level, and if
resources are distributed in a reasonably equitable fashion."
The NASA-funded HANDY model offers a highly credible wake-up call to
governments, corporations and business - and consumers - to recognise that
'business as usual' cannot be sustained, and that policy and structural
changes are required immediately.
Although the study is largely theoretical, a number of other more
empirically-focused studies - by
<http://www.kpmg.com/global/en/issuesandinsights/articlespublications/future
-state-government/pages/resource-stress.aspx> KPMG and the
<http://www.bis.gov.uk/assets/goscience/docs/p/perfect-storm-paper.pdf> UK
Government Office of Science for instance - have warned that the convergence
of food, water and energy crises could create a 'perfect storm' within about
fifteen years. But these 'business as usual' forecasts could be
<http://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/the-end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it-the-rise-
of-the-post-carbon-era/> very conservative.
<http://www.nafeezahmed.com/> Dr Nafeez Ahmed is executive director of the
<http://www.iprd.org.uk/> Institute for Policy Research & Development and
author of <http://www.crisisofcivilization.com/> A User's Guide to the
Crisis of Civilisation: And How to Save It among other books. Follow him on
Twitter @nafeezahmed <https://twitter.com/NafeezAhmed>
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Alberto.
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