9 Comments

1. DeAnander:

   Lovelock: Drastic Climate Therapy Could Make Things Worse
   

   Geoengineering implies that we have an ailing planet that needs a cure. But our ignorance of the Earth system is great; we know little more than an early 19th-century physician knew about the body. Geoengineering is like trying to cure pneumonia by immersing the patient in a bath of icy water; the fever would be cured but not the disease.

   Many of us feel a sense of unease about using geoengineering to escape global heating. Most of the planetary therapies have side effects, potentially as severe as the disease itself. We know that the cooling by Pinatubo was accompanied by droughts; cooling alone does nothing to prevent the ocean growing ever more acid as the carbon dioxide dissolves in the water. [...]

   We have, as yet, no comprehensive Earth system science; in such ignorance I cannot help feeling that attempts by us to regulate the Earth’s climate and chemistry would condemn humanity to a Kafkaesque fate from which there may be no escape. Better, perhaps, to learn from the wiser physicians of the early 19th century; they knew no cure for common diseases but also knew that by letting nature take its course, the patient often recovered.

   We Cannot ‘Techno-Fix’ Our Way to a Sustainable Future
   

   Given the failure of Copenhagen, the sellout of US Congress to special interests and the stalemated international negotiations, the “last resort” of geoengineering is gaining support. This is especially true as many are either in a state of panic or paralysis following recent announcements of methane seeping from the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, on top of the ongoing reports of emissions rising, ice melting, and temperatures reaching all time highs.

   There are good reasons to be quite worried. But there may be good reasons to be even MORE worried by the climate geoengineering proponents and what is going on at Asilomar this week.

   The conference holds as its intent to develop “voluntary guidelines” for further research on climate geoengineering technologies. Voluntary guidelines are most often designed to fend off “involuntary” regulation. The conference is organized by Margaret Leinen, who happens to be the mother of Dan Whaley, founder and CEO of Climos, a company with patents currently pending for methods to profit by selling carbon offsets from ocean fertilization, one proposed geoengineering technology. Other major players in geoengineering, some of whom will be at Asilomar, similarly have vested interests in ensuring cash flows for funding, experimentation and commercialization of their pet technologies.

   We can pretty well guess that whatever “voluntary guidelines” they come up with for themselves will be designed with “don’t take no for an answer” as their underlying mantra.

   [...] These technologies are virtually all extremely risky, expensive and/or downright nuts. But, frighteningly, they are gaining mainstream acceptability! Among the advocates are some, like Bjorn Lomberg the “Skeptical Envrionmentalist”, who have denied global warming is even real. Some claim that these approaches are prefereable to reducing emissions [...]

   [...] our faith in science and technology seems to be teetering precipitously. On the one hand, we appear shocked when scientists err, as if we somehow expect the scientific method and its practitioners to be godlike in their ability to predict the future of global systems and dynamics. On the other hand, many are prepared to deny the validity of literally thousand of studies all converging towards the conclusion that global warming is in fact a reality.

   Seems pretty obvious that this is a snake-oil moment. Fear as a high-pressure marketing tool. Vast profits to be made! Huge featherbed contracts from panicking governments, funded by disempowered taxpayers. And one last, stupid, futile attempt to prove [masculinist] hyper-dominance over the entire planetary climate/life system of which we are still, as Lovelock points out, pathetically ignorant.

   Bill Gates has always been a profit-driven man (and a spoilt child of moneyed Anglo privilege),
   

   William Henry Gates III was born in Seattle, Washington on October 28, 1955 to wealthy parents. He was the fourth of his name in his family but was known as William Gates III or “Trey” because his father had dropped his own “III” suffix.

   Bill Gates’ father is prominent attorney William H. Gates, Sr., a founding partner of the law firm Preston Gates & Ellis (aka K&L Gates).

   His mother, Mary Maxwell Gates (1929-1994), was the daughter of J.W. Maxwell, a national bank president. A former schoolteacher, she later became “the first female president of King County’s United Way, the first woman to chair the national United Way’s executive committee where she served most notably with IBM’s CEO, John Akers, and the first woman on the First Interstate Bank of Washington’s board of directors.” Mary Gates also served eighteen years on the University of Washington board of regents

   and now with his ill-gotten wealth [his business practises skate on the borderline of legality, monopoly is MS's corporate goal, and there are persistent Internet/geekland rumours that even in the beginning, he pirated (or at least did some pretty sharp and shady dealings with) Dave Kildorf's code as the basis for the first Microsoft OS]. I wouldn’t trust him, or his money, any further than they could throw us (which is a long, long way).

   BTW, Gates is a significant investor in Monsanto.

   30 April 2010, 11:46 am

2. Marcilla Elizabeth Smith:

   If you are reading this on a PC running M$ Windoze, please, PLEASE look into installing another OS. We switched to the Debian and now the Ubuntu distribution of Linux. It has not cost us anything and was not difficult. We have MORE and BETTER software available than we did before, NO viruses, and we know we are contributing to an M$-free world. There were even ways for us to leave Windoze on our machine until we felt comfortable flying without “training wheels” (if I may be allowed to mix my metaphors). If you don’t feel confident, try finding a local LUG (Linux Users Group) where folks will prolly be able to help you. I have also found the online community very supportive =-)

   As for geo-engineering, you know that part in the movie where the guy says, “this won’t stop it, but it should buy us some time,” then the exact OPPOSITE happens???

   Get ready for a brutally memorable lesson in “tempo task.”

   30 April 2010, 2:56 pm

3. Cartman:

   “Gates is a significant investor in Monsanto”

   Of course he is. It is just getting better:

   http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article17644.html

   The eugenics as “science” always has been part of the nation-state a.k.a. capitalistic society and ruling class.

   2 May 2010, 8:31 am

4. HoracioO:

   Err “his own money” ???

   The money “he” made wasn’t by his sweat, it came from the work of many many other people, and some of it stolen from others and he cemented his ill-gotten gain with a good dose of classic monopoly actions—yep he broke the law…

   Ahh Bill can stand next to another great philanthropist, Andrew Carnegie, whose fortune was built of the same stuff—theft.

   Capital punishment I say.

   2 May 2010, 11:52 pm

5. Jangi Kedi:

   Here is an excellent article by Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek:
   Joe Public v the volcano

   The confusion of natural and cultural or economic concerns in the arguments over the prohibition of flights raised the following suspicion: how come the scientific evidence began to suggest it was safe to fly over most of Europe just when the pressure from the airlines became most intense? Is this not further proof that capital is the only real thing in our lives, with even scientific judgements having to bend to its will?

   The problem is that scientists are supposed to know, but they do not. Science is helpless and covers up this helplessness with a deceptive screen of expert assurance. We rely more and more on experts, even in the most intimate domains of our experience (sexuality and religion). As a result, the field of scientific knowledge is transformed into a terrain of conflicting “expert opinions”.
   ………..
   Even if we blame scientific-technological civilisation for global warming, we need the same science not only to define the scope of the threat, but also, often, to perceive it in the first place. The “ozone hole”, for example, can be “seen” in the sky only by scientists. That line from Wagner’s Parsifal – “Die Wunde schliest der Speer nur, der Sie schlug” (“The wound can only be healed by the spear that made it”) – acquires a new relevance here.

   How much can we “safely” pollute our environment? How many fossil fuels can we burn? How much of a poisonous substance does not threaten our health? That our knowledge has limitations does not mean we shouldn’t exaggerate the ecological threat. On the contrary, we should be even more careful about it, given that the situation is extremely unpredictable. The recent uncertainties about global warming signal not that things are not too serious, but that they are even more chaotic than we thought, and that natural and social factors are inextricably linked.

   Either we take the threat of ecological catastrophe seriously and decide today to do things that, if the catastrophe does not occur, will appear ridiculous, or we do nothing and risk losing everything if the catastrophe does take place. The worst response would be to apply a limited range of measures – in that case, we will fail whatever happens.

   3 May 2010, 3:59 am

6. DeAnander:

   The solution to soil and water degradation is not to strip food-producing plants from the landscape only to grow them, deprived of sunlight, in vertical factory farms. Instead, we have to address the Achilles heel of agriculture itself: that it has displaced, on a massive scale, diverse stands of natural perennial vegetation (such as prairies, savannahs, and forests) with monocultures of ephemeral, weakly rooted, soil-damaging annual crops such as corn, soybean, and wheat. So far, the weaknesses of the current food-production system have been compensated for agronomically through greater and greater inputs of fossil fuels and other resources, worsening the ecological impact; vertical farming would extend that trend.

   The landscape can be saved only through what we might call “three-dimensional farming,” a system that is arranged horizontally across the landscape to capture and use sunlight but also puts down, deep, long-lived roots to protect the soil, manage water, nutrients efficiently, and help restore the below-ground ecosystems that agriculture has destroyed. That will require converting cropland to the production of diverse, food-producing, perennial crops. It will mean a reliance on natural processes and cohesive rural communities, not technological fantasies.

   From a very effective and reasonable take-down of the latest technoporn fantasy: “vertical farming” in urban skyscrapers. As with all these Jetsons fantasies from their very inception (nuclear powered cars! a private helicopter for every family! jetpacks!) the energy math doesn’t work.

   Call us the Culture of Mathematical Denialism We keep insisting that 2 minus 2 can somehow be made to equal 5.

   4 May 2010, 12:34 pm

7. DeAnander:

   PS why did I call it technoporn? because it shares the same root and essence as pornography: the fantasy of ultimate command and control, a headlong flight from reciprocity, and a sulky adolescent refusal to acknowledge realistic or ethical limits.

   4 May 2010, 12:36 pm

8. Stan:

   Damn. That’s a formula I can hang a hat on. Fantasy of control. Flight from reciprocity. Refusal of limits. A. B. C. I’m not sure you didn’t just define masculine modernism. Or nihilism. hmmmm

   5 May 2010, 9:03 am

9. Stan:

   Speaking of iatrogenesis!

   For 15 years, Eddie Anderson, a farmer, has
   been a strict adherent of no-till agriculture, an environmentally
   friendly technique that all but eliminates plowing to curb erosion
   and the harmful runoff of fertilizers and pesticides.

   But not this year.

   On a recent afternoon here, Mr. Anderson watched as tractors
   crisscrossed a rolling field — plowing and mixing herbicides into
   the soil to kill weeds where soybeans will soon be planted.

   Just as the heavy use of antibiotics contributed to the rise of
   drug-resistant supergerms, American farmers’ near-ubiquitous use
   of the weedkiller Roundup has led to the rapid growth of tenacious
   new superweeds.

   FULL

   6 May 2010, 1:46 pm

Leave a comment