On Oct 25, 7:39 pm, Alastair <[email protected]> wrote:
> I dropped in yesterday for the first time in quite a while and saw my
> name mentioned so I can't resist responding :-) Moreover, how the
> sceptics would react when the shit hits the fan was something I had
> been curious about. The answer I came to was that it would be no
> different from now!
>
> All men, and probably all women, will not admit that they are wrong.
> The earliest citation I have found for that fact is in Dale Carnegie's
> "How to Win Friends and Influence People." The driving force behind
> all people is prestige. As Milton wrote "Fame is the spur that the
> clear spirit doth raise (That last infirmity of noble mind)".
> Therefor they cannot admit that they are wrong because they will "lose
> face", and so lose prestige. Carnegie says that even if you win an
> argument, your opponent will still believe that he is right, and would
> have won if only he was better at arguing or had thought of the killer
> argument which is ther if only he could think of it.
>
> So the situation is that we have already passed the tipping point, but
> people in general are still saying the same things. Here is Clive
> James, an Australian by birth, now a British Broadcaster, praising
> scepticismhttp://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/8322513.stm
> yet the scientists are saying that "three of these boundaries [leading
> to abrupt global environmental change](climate change, biological
> diversity and nitrogen input to the biosphere) may already have been
> transgressed."http://www.stockholmresilience.org/planetary-boundaries
>
> Ten years ago I was told by a friend of Wally Broecker that they
> thought we had twenty years to put thing right. Two years later he
> told me that some scientists believed that Greenland had already
> passed the point of no return. In other words the effects of climate
> change are happening much faster than it was believed before. Within
> the last ten to fifteen years the live expectancy of the Greenland ice
> sheet has change from thousands to hundreds of years, and of the
> Arctic sea ice from 100 years to only 10.
>
> But nobody is speaking out, except for Gordon Brown, who having seen
> Al Gore's Nobel Prize, is obviously hoping he will be rewarded in that
> way when he too is rejected by the voters in the forthcoming general
> election.
>
> There is a right wing mentality that we all share to some extent,
> which says that disaster won't happen to me, and any one who warns
> about it is just chicken. They are not the sort of people who change
> their minds, so if they do suffer disaster it will not be their fault,
> just a freak of nature or due to the scientists speaking with forked
> tongue. See Clive James.
>
> > I doubt that I will live to see the disaster, but this interesting
> > turn in the political dialog should be just around the corner. Right?
>
> Wrong, the disaster is only a few years away. You will see it. Abrupt
> changes happen with little warning by definition. Think of the Boxing
> Day tsunami. So when the Arctic sea ice vanishes that will be the
> global air conditioning system broke, and we can't fix that! But then
> nobody could have predicted that, or at least that is the cry that
> will go up.
>
> Cheers, Alastair.
I was beginning to think I had mentioned your name in vain :-)
There is apparently not a single popular book or article on exceeding
the nitrogen input boundary. We the people did not even notice. We
didn't even have a chance to be apathetic or go into denial about
reaching a global change tipping point. Kinda breathtaking. Could that
be?
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