Re: Why Gaia is wreaking revenge on our abuse of the environment
- From: "PennyB" <pence234@xxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 17 Jan 2006 11:01:50 -0800
"jonathan" <Write@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:R4Zyf.3737$so1.1587@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>
> "Alan" <alan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
> news:memo.20060116100731.228F@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>> http://news.independent.co.uk/environment/article338879.ece
>>
>> By Michael McCarthy
>> Published: 16 January 2006
>>
>> With anyone else, you would not really take it seriously: the proposition
> that
>> because of climate change, human society as we know it on this planet may
>> already be condemned, whatever we do. It would seem not just radical, but
>> outlandish, mere hyperbole. And we react against it instinctively: it
> seems
>> simply too sombre to be countenanced.
>
>
>
> It'a quite possible for climate change to set off a sudden
> ice age. And with it the extinction of a good portion of
> life on earth.
>
> My hobby is all about studying the behavior of systems pushed
> far from equilibrium. And two things, only two things, happen
> when a self organized system is driven close to the
> breaking point.
>
> It either gently bounces off the breaking point and returns some
> of the way to it's previous equilibrium. Or it snaps, and enters
> into a chaotic state with large unpredictable swings in behavior.
> Generally from one extreme to the other. In the chaotic event the
> climate would go to steam, then suddenly to ice. Or the
> reverse, doesn't matter.
>
> The determining factor, simply put, is in the number and
> frequency of the iterations of the force driving the system
> from equilibrium. A large number of small perturbations
> away from equilibrium generally means the gentle bounce
> back towards the previous state, recovering some, but
> not all, of the change.
>
> A single large event, or a few large ones, will tend to drive
> the system through the breaking point and into chaos.
>
> The character of the change is crucial, the rate of change and sizes.
> More so than the absolute amount of change.
>
> Man made change should create the 'good' result, driven
> near the edge and gently returning to a new but warmer
> equilibrium.
>
> While, say, single large events such as impacts from space
> or a sudden onset of world wide volcanism etc would tend
> to produce the chaotic swings and disaster.
>
> Is man-made climate change the first or second type?
> I'm not sure, it certainly is change caused by countless
> small iterations. In that regard it would be the 'good'
> kind of perturbation. But it's happening so fast relative
> the age of the biosphere it could essentially act as one
> large disturbance and send us all to hell.
>
> I'm just not sure, have to observe and see if either of the
> two pre-images appears. As which future will occur will
> be seen /in advance/ of it actually occuring.
>
> I play these two behaviors almost every week in the stock
> market, I know them like the back of my hand.
> Here's what will happen to tell us our future.
>
> For the chaotic future of mass extinction.
>
> We will observe small scale examples of the chaotic behavior.
> Opposite and equal extremes will pop-up out of nowhere.
> Such as one section of the earth suddenly changing to cold
> while another similar portion of the earth does just the opposite
> at the same time, suddenly getting very hot. Or other such
> bizarre and opposite extreme changes. The system is steadily
> degenerating to extremes as it flys towards and past the edge.
>
> For the stable future of continuing evolution.
>
> We will observe just as we approach the edge a 'lightning bolt', and
> from out of the blue. A large single event that galvanizes the entire
> world into acting at once to dramatically slow climate change.
>
> I'm pretty sure the second will happen though, I have infinite faith in
> Nature. But as we approach the edge, we become more
> vulnerable to a big event that sends us over the edge
> and into the fossil record.
>
> As to the 'lightning bolt', when will it happen and how?
> I'm thinking we have twenty of thirty years, when the
> third world really gets going and industrialized, pumping
> ten times the greenhouse gasses we are now.
> And without any real pollution controls.
>
> We need to spread democracy and free markets as fast
> as we can. Only through such internal feed back mechanisms
> will the changes be moderated.
>
>
>
> Jonathan
>
> s
>
>
>
>
>
>>
>> But James Lovelock, the celebrated environmental scientist, has a unique
>> perspective on the fate of the Earth. Thirty years ago he conceived the
> idea
>> that the planet was special in a way no one had ever considered before:
> that it
>> regulated itself, chemically and atmospherically, to keep itself fit for
> life,
>> as if it were a great super-organism; as if, in fact, it were alive.
>>
>> The complex mechanism he put forward for this might have remained in the
> pages
>> of arcane geophysical journals had he continued to refer to it as "the
>> biocybernetic universal system tendency".
>>
>> But his neighbour in the village of Bowerchalke, Wiltshire, the Nobel
>> Prize-winning novelist William Golding (who wroteLord of The Flies),
> suggested
>> he christen it after the Greek goddess of the Earth; and Gaia was born.
>>
>> Gaia has made Professor Lovelock world famous, but at first his fame was
> in an
>> entirely unexpected quarter. Research scientists, who were his original
> target
>> audience, virtually ignored his theory.
>>
>> To his surprise, it was the burgeoning New Age and environmental
>> movements
> who
>> took it up - the generation who had just seen the first pictures of the
> Earth
>> taken by the Apollo astronauts, the shimmering pastel-blue sphere hanging
> in
>> infinite black space, fragile and vulnerable, but our only home. They
> seized on
>> his metaphor of a reinvented Mother Earth, who needed to be revered and
>> respected - or else.
>>
>> It has been only gradually that the scientific establishment has become
>> convinced of the essential truth of the theory, that the Earth possesses
>> a
>> planetary control system, founded on the interaction of living organisms
> with
>> their environment, which has operated for billions of years to allow life
> to
>> exist, by regulating the temperature, the chemical composition of the
>> atmosphere, even the salinity of the seas.
>>
>> But accepted it is, and now (under the term Earth System Science) it has
> been
>> subsumed into the scientific mainstream; two years ago, for example,
> Nature, the
>> world's premier scientific journal, gave Professor Lovelock two pages to
> sum up
>> recent developments in it.
>>
>> Yet now too, by a savage irony, it is Gaia that lies behind his profound
>> pessimism about how climate change will affect us all. For the planetary
> control
>> system, he believes, which has always worked in our favour, will now work
>> against us. It has been made up of a host of positive feedback
>> mechanisms;
> now,
>> as the temperature starts to rise abnormally because of human activity,
> these
>> will turn harmful in their effect, and put the situation beyond our
> control.
>>
>> To give just a single example out of very many: the ice of the Arctic
> Ocean is
>> now melting so fast it is likely to be gone in a few decades at most.
> Concerns
>> are already acute about, for example, what that will mean for polar
>> bears,
> who
>> need the ice to live and hunt.
>>
>> But there is more. For when the ice has vanished, there will be a dark
> ocean
>> that absorbs the sun's heat, instead of an icy surface that reflects 90
> per cent
>> of it back into space; and so the planet will get even hotter still.
>>
>> Professor Lovelock visualises it all in the title of his new book, The
> Revenge
>> of Gaia. Now 86, but looking and sounding 20 years younger, he is by
> nature an
>> optimistic man with a ready grin, and it felt somewhat unreal to talk
> calmly to
>> him in his Cornish mill house last week, with a coffee cup to hand and
> birds on
>> the feeder outside the study window, about such a dark future. You had to
> pinch
>> yourself.
>>
>> He too saw the strangeness of it. "I'm usually a cheerful sod, so I'm not
> happy
>> about writing doom books," he said. "But I don't see any easy way out."
>>
>> His predictions are simply based on the inevitable nature of the Gaian
> system.
>>
>> "If on Mars, which is a dead planet, you doubled the CO2, you could
> predict
>> accurately what the temperature would rise to," he said.
>>
>> "On the Earth, you can't do it, because the biota [the ensemble of life
> forms]
>> reacts. As soon as you pump up the temperature, everything changes. And
>> at
> the
>> moment the system is amplifying change. "So our problem is that anything
> we do,
>> like increasing the carbon dioxide, mucking about with the land,
> destroying
>> forests, farming too much, things like that - they don't just produce a
> linear
>> increase in temperature, they produce an amplified increase in
> temperature.
>>
>> "And it's worse than that. Because as you approach one of the tipping
> points,
>> the thresholds, the extent of amplification rapidly increases and tends
> towards
>> infinity.
>>
>> "The analogy I use is, it's as if we were in a pleasure boat above the
> Niagara
>> Falls. You're all right as long as the engines are going, and you can get
> out of
>> it. But if the engines fail, you're drawn towards the edge faster and
> faster,
>> and there's no hope of getting back once you've gone over - then you're
> going
>> down.
>>
>> "And the uprise is just like that, the steep jump of temperature on
>> Earth.
> It is
>> exactly like the drop in the Falls."
>>
>> Professor Lovelock's unique viewpoint is that he is just not looking at
> this or
>> that aspect of the Earth's climate, as are other scientists; he is
>> looking
> at
>> the whole planet in terms of a different discipline, control theory.
>>
>> "Most scientists are not trained in control theory. They follow
>> Descartes,
> and
>> they think that everything can be explained if you take it down to its
> atoms,
>> and then build it up again.
>>
>> "Control theory looks at it in a very different way. You look at whole
> systems
>> and how do they work. Gaia is very much about control theory. And that's
> why I
>> spot all these positive feedbacks."
>>
>> I asked him how he would sum up the message of his new book. He said
> simply:
>> "It's a wake-up call.''
>>
>> http://comment.independent.co.uk/commentators/article338830.ece
>>
>> http://news.independent.co.uk/environment/article338878.ece
>>
>> And we, who believe in the Goddess Nemesis, wholeheartedly agree with
>> him.
>>
>> Alan
>>
>> "Can't you see we're still here,
>> Can't you see we're still here,
>> Singing loud; Singing clear,
>> We shall not go under,
>> We're still here."
>>
>> Nemesis Peace Centre
>>
>> http://www.veloceraptor.free-online.co.uk/protector.html
>>
>> Abuse of Women and Children
>>
>> http://theoriginalfirebird.blogspot.com/
>>
>> Nemesis News
>>
>> http://lordcerneabbas.blogspot.com/
>>
>> Absolute Anarchy
>>
>> http://lordcerneabbastoo.blogspot.com/
>>
>
We may well be the first species to die from our own stupidity and
arrogance.
PennyB
.
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