Climate Change

Science and Technology
605

[quote=“michaelmckinney1951, post:603, topic:7916”]

Presently however, every new human being is a consumer of resources and in the current system we use to procure and deliver these needed resources demand is outstripping the means of supply. As a result the natural world is suffering. Yes I agree, too many people.

There is a potential up-side. If we clean up our dirty habits and could invent a non-polluting life-style, nature would allow greater numbers and we could increase the human bio-mass.

There are organisms with a much greater biomass than humans, but they are symbiotic to the environment and allowed to procreate. Their contribution is “necessary” for keeping the system in balance. (the Earth’s homeostatic control mechanism)

Tree forests are a perfect example. Enormous numbers of bio-mass, but forests help maintain the entire natural ecosystem in balance and large numbers of trees is desirable and naturally permitted, if not encouraged.

It comes down to this.
Can humans learn to live in symbiosis with the natural environment, or will we always be toxic to our environment? Time will tell!

606

Thomas Malthus wrote the “essay” (book) in 1798: “An Essay on the Principle of Population”

  • Doesn’t that work belong to humanity at this point?

  • I thought it was worth making clear that it’s actually a very complex and deeply thoughtful essay and that it can’t be dismissed with a simplistic soundbite.

  • Considering, that I imagine I’ve had that warning coming, in context of some other stuff I’ve shared, I’ll assure you, it hasn’t fallen on deft ears.

607

I’m not sure, but it’s clear not even the higher ups want us to use more than fair use quoting.

Maybe just saying it’s a complex and deep essay, adding a link, and quoting a much smaller amount, if quoting anything.

I’m glad it hasn’t fallen on deaf ears. Keep in mind, the rules weren’t made by mods alone years ago when Doug, McKenzie, Jerry, and I first began to be modes. The rules that were created were by the higher ups too and posted by them on this forum too, under the FAQs section. It also seems they may have added some with the new forum, last I looked. I find it prudent to just quote only what is necessary or the bare minimum to get my point across and not the whole thing, so there is no question about any rule violations.

608

I don’t mean to drag this out, but for the record:

An Essay on the Principle of Population [1798, 1st ed.]

There are two versions of Thomas Robert Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population. The first, published anonymously in 1798, was so successful that Malthus soon elaborated on it under his real name. The rewrite, culminating in the sixth edition of 1826, was a scholarly expansion and generalization of the first. In this work Malthus argues that there is a disparity between the rate of growth of population (which increases geometrically) and the rate of growth of agriculture (which increases only arithmetically). He then explores how populations have historically been kept in check.

Copyright:

The text is in the public domain.

(Saying something is complex, doesn’t hold near the impact as delineating that complexity. Nothing delineates the complexity as simply as sharing the index.)

609

The ultimate end of population growth in any environment is when that population reaches a subsistence level of life. Subsistence means that everyone is perpetually hungry. At subsistence, there is no excess production, no supply greater than demand and prices are at a maximum.

The values we place on things, everything from food, transportation and entertainment, to national parks and clean air and clean water depend on the degree to which we see them as necessary to continuation of life. We seem to be the only life form on Earth which can choose subsistence or something we might call “better”. There is both subsistence and “better” among the human population today. The trend seems to be towards more subsistence. I accept the old saying that we cannot share wealth, we can only share poverty.

I am convinced that a finite resource such as the Earth cannot perpetually support an infinitely increasing population. I doubt that we will ever be able to colonize another planet, except possibly by broadcasting our DNA into the cosmos. Science tells us the Earth will not continue forever, so ultimately we do face extinction. Since we cannot increase the resource we must match demand to supply, by control of our population, if we want to avoid subsistence or extinction while the Earth is available to maintain us.

610

[quote=“citizenschallengev4, post:608, topic:7916”]

In this work Malthus argues that there is a disparity between the rate of growth of population (which increases geometrically) and the rate of growth of agriculture (which increases only arithmetically).

Malthus is wrong in that respect. Anything physical with a steady growth rate multiplies exponentially, both geometrically and arithmetically.

Agriculture is a geometrical practice.

611

ibelieveinlogic has it right when he says “We will never be able to colonize another planet,” because evolution has so intimately matched us to the highly specific conditions of this world that we are locked in to living out our biological destiny here on sweet mother Earth and no where else.
Pondering the dire eventualities that humanity is heading toward can be a hopeless and even depressing activity especially for the informed and motivated citizen who wants to do what’s needed to prevent the disaster. The problem is this; it’s too late. This gigantic boulder called “global warming” is perfectly round and it’s already started rolling downhill. Nothing will stop it now from going where ever it wants to go.
However there’s another way to consider this seemingly intractable dilemma. Let’s assume the worst which is indeed completely warranted, and grant that the climate will break down making life untenable for tens of thousands of species. It seems hopeless, but if Mother Earth could speak and we asked her “aren’t you worried about the climate changing so drastically?” she would shrug her shoulders and say “not in the least.” Why not we might ask, and her reply would sound something like this; “I’ve seen it all before and much worse. Time is on my side and it will eventually erase all the toxins and pollutants that humans have carelessly generated. The world will be pristine again and life will vibrantly flourish in abundance.”
There’s only one problem with this comforting scenario, it will take the earth hundreds of thousands of years to reestablish this natural equilibrium. Before this happens a protracted age of interminable pain and suffering for countless animal species must be slowly and agonizingly endured. The heat of global warming won’t afflict the rocks and land masses of our world, it will torment millions of animals who will die as a result and yet, if every polar bear, if every lion, tiger, every grazing herbivore on this planet died in this apocalypse, they would eventually return in huge numbers. As long as a small number of breeding populations are alive they will re-inherit their former place in the natural world. A polar bear is just a bear with a gene for “whiteness” turned on. If all large predatory cats died off, our domestic cats would evolve into animals very much like them. If the huge herds of grazers now alive passed away, mountain goats living in remote places would in time take their place. Evolutionary biologists use the term “adaptive radiation” in describing this slow inexorable process. It will in the distant future make our world whole and healthy again. I know this is little solace for the pain and death that’s imminent for the creatures of this world, but we and every other creature owes nature one death and only one. That death may be pointless, painful and premature but it ends all suffering.

It may take 500,00 years for our world to completely heal because carbon is sequestered at a glacially slow pace but 500,00 years in the life of the earth is roughly by comparison one or two days in the life of a man.
Sorry for the lengthy explication but the point required detailed treatment.

Thank you to CFI for this important First Amendment platform.

612

As the Hellstrom Chronicle predicts. The insect will inherit the earth.

It is the only macro-species that is able to adapt to any environment. They have done so for billions of years . Where the mighty dinosaur fell, the insect just adapted .

613

And, for things that are alive now, and don’t understand what is happening, it is hopeless. I’m not sure what “hope” looks like for an animal that doesn’t think like we do though. But, same result, they die in a fire, or due to loss of habitat, instead of whatever other cause they would have. Your post is just one long, “well, we’re all going to die”. It’s a terrible way to look at something that we were smart enough to see coming for hundreds of years and will most likely, collectively, not do much about for hundreds of years to come. It doesn’t matter to me that life will be better for some creatures a half million years from now. There is only a minuscule impact I can have on that. I can have a slightly more than minuscule impact on next year, which is what we should be discussing here.

614

True enough, but given the news coming at us from around the globe isn’t this what we’re going to have to deal with? I mean as much as I like disagreeing with ibelieveinlogic his post made plenty of sense, as did michaelmckinney1951.

But yeah, it does come down to how we’re living our life right now.

But our lives are going to be challenged by these destructive weather incidents slamming into our lives. We experienced some incredible downpours driving through Tennesse Saturday on the last leg, I think five different times the flow of traffic on I24 went down to 40ish. We arrived at Nashville and heard that the same storm system pretty much took out a small town, Waverly, TN. We’re fine, young couple, proud first time home owners, ready to start their adventure, and this town get demolished. There but for the Grace of Chance.

Thing is, it’s our new normal.
And now we’re going to have to figure out how to deal with it, knowing full well that all this will only get worse and we can’t escape the new game in town - Climate Russian Roulette for the rest of our days.

615

Thank you for your reply Mr. Lausten.
I assure you I’m more than a little sensitive to the plight of all wildlife around the world. I don’t consume red meat. I don’t eat chicken. I don’t use air travel. I drive sparingly. I don’t use air conditioning here in Florida. I never buy new clothes, My electric bill is never more than 60 dollars a month. and so I presently and for a considerable amount of time have maintained a small carbon footprint.
This is all any of us can do to make sure we’re not needlessly adding to the severity of the crisis.
You say in your post and I’ll use your words,
"Your post is just one long, (“well we’re all going to die.”)
I never said those words and yet you used quotation marks suggesting that I did. Can you please point out where that specific phrase was used in my post?

616

Thank you so much for checking my grammar. Proper communication skills are important in this online world. My use of quotations marks was along the lines of “scare” quotes. I made the mistake of assuming that the context made this clear. If you’d like to learn more about quotes, see

This is a quote from that webpage:

Scare quotes are sort of like air quotes, and if you know anything about air quotes, you know that they should be used in moderation. The same applies to scare quotes.

617

michaelmckinney1951,

Nice job giving your thoughts. Like your views on Mother Nature. Got a long response, sorry.

Don’t you think that our governments have created much of the population problems? Costs for 88% of all the children are going to get payments by the taxpayers – Treasury.gov. 100% of the children are a tax write off – IRS. Children in many countries are understood to be the retirement system for the parents. Change these items and expect the population to slow way down. Switzerland was not having enough children to cover the death rate. They had to offer housing and monthly payments for people to increase the birth rate.

I like to use datum points in history. The Toba Eruption 74K yrs ago put mankind on the endangered species list. Maybe 2,500 humans left on earth. Go from the human bottle neck to the Age of Domestication and the overpopulation problem should have come up many times. I have not found any answers yet.

If we go back to the creation of modern man, 12,400 years ago and move to 5K ago. We are told the world got noisy seven times. There were mass die offs and each time the world was quite again. From 5K to today, we have several area die offs. And a lot more data. The bones show that in the modern die offs the people were malnourished. After the die offs the people were healthy again. Of course, that does not include the die offs in the New World caused by diseases.

On earth today we have two types of life. The natural life and the created life. 90% of everything we eat is not natural. It was created by mankind. Wheat for example was created so long ago that it’s DNA is unable to lead scientists to the natural grass it was domesticated from.

My fears are not overpopulation. It is that mother nature did not protect the evolution process. Didn’t need to. What I am talking about is that evolution changes have been measured. For one species it may be 200K yrs of changed environment. The chicken is 50K for example. What I am suggesting is that we have the nature pathway and have added the creation pathway.

How is the evolution changing process working in the creation pathway? I am not taking about the creation of high protein plants. Which has been fantastic. I am talking about evolution change. That is still in both pathways. We should have all this figured out before we start talking about going to other planets.

The scientists assume that the evolution changing is the same in both pathways. We could take the chickens which evolved from tree birds and watch them for 50K years and confirm its still the same. Could not find any scientists really working on this question. I figured it would be worked upon in biological world. Nothing so far. I did find the longest research in the states was taking place in Pennsylvania for over fifty years. And they were not looking for evolution. They were looking for bigger and faster growing chickens. But they have seen three evolutions of the chicken in 50 yrs time and made note of this because it was unexpected.

This means Nature’s evolution is not the same in the creation pathway. To me, that is a much bigger problem than Climate Change and over population combined. The Covid-19 evolution was done in the lab. Nature does billion of changes every day. Only the littlest will take place. Nature seems to protect from nonhelpful changes. Creation may have more changes happening and we don’t know what kind of changes it will allow. The wrong change and its all over for mankind.

618

Don’t you think that’s a rather superficial division? One of convenience and story telling?

Sure breeding animals and crops is manipulating nature’s evolutionary processes, but how does that make humans intervening, or even highjacking, the evolutionary process different from ants and their fungal farms, or wasps with their brain controlling babies taking over the behavior of crickets and such? How would you categorize those behaviors and results? “Creation’s pathway” or “Nature’s pathway”?

It’s incredibly irritating having you make such pronouncements without offering real references. I’ve tried various permutations of your sentence and come up with zip, though this reminded of your three evolutions meme:

800×463 19.6 KB

source, Chickens have gotten ridiculously large since the 1950s | Vox

What is an evolution, once around the merry-go-round?

Why? How? Can you explain? Or, better can you offer an authoritative trustworthy source, where we might learn something useful regarding your claim? Cause you’re simply confusing.

Got that from FOX entertainment? Are you implying that COVID mutations, and cross species infections driving or being driven by virus evolution, isn’t an ongoing thing within nature’s biological laboratory?
PS:

The first available sequence data6 placed this novel human pathogen in the Sarbecovirus subgenus of Coronaviridae 7, the same subgenus as the SARS virus that caused a global outbreak of >8,000 cases in 2002–2003. By mid-January 2020, the virus was spreading widely within Hubei province and by early March SARS-CoV-2 was declared a pandemic [8]
nature.com/articles/s41564-020-0771-4#ref-CR8

Meaning, anything, that did or didn’t happen, at the Wuhan Lab, is beside the point to the greater question of ‘creation’s’ virus evolution speeding up in today’s world. We have a warming planet, with nature and species across the board being stressed like never since the last ice age loosened it’s grip.
Mutations happen and in an over-crowded world, they can turn into big trouble in a hurry, if ignored and pretended away. As we have seen dramatically demonstrated over the past couple years. Mike loves supposing a politicized science, but man is he blind to his own political blinders.

Oh yeah, that reminds me you believe in some all powerful God as a personality, don’t you?
It’s all God’s will and all that jazz, eh? You’re incapable of seriously discussing evolution or Earth’ geophysical dynamic, since economics and wealth dominate your reality.

Balderdash. There’s a lot of things we don’t know, but there’s a heck of a lot that we do know about what our actions and interference with Earth’s biosphere means for our future because we have Earth’s history to learn from.
Plus we have the past 50 years that have been thrillingly fearful, evolved into terrifying, for those us who are actually paying attention to what’s been happening throughout our planet’s biosphere and Earth’s global heat and moisture distribution engine.

That’s utter silliness, Nature is not the handmaiden of some God looking down on us. Nature has regulatory systems in place but humanity is overpowering it.

619

Want more evidence of global warming?
One of the not so natural consequences of a warming planet are warmer oceans and one of the consequences of warmer oceans is the relatively new phenomenon of late and rapid strengthening of tropical hurricanes.
And now, …
Meet Ida and she’ll prove to be not nearly as “sweet as apple cida.”
This tropical storm will become muscular in record time and by the time it barrels into the northern gulf it could be a category 4 hurricane. Welcome to water world.
God protect all in it’s course.

620

You have no clue as to what is happening on the earth alone, do you? You talk about creation as a single event that lasted 6 days and involved how many creative actions?

Let me set you straight about the Earths creative abilities.

Did you know that the earth has performed some 2 trillion, quadrillion, quadrillion, quadrillion creative chemical experiments in its short 4.5 billion years.

You think your creator can beat that in 6 days?

621

I think everyone I know believes in global warming. We did just enter the global cooling cycle. But we should be in the Lag of global warming for maybe a couple hundred years or more. Some scientists say that because of the higher Co2 we might just stay warmer for up to 3K years before we start building the mile high ice fields.

Any way you look at the cycles we are leaving the 12K years of the Intermediate Cycle that has always had the best and most stable weather for the earth.

622

If it is not natural, then it was created. Example there are 40 breeds of dogs. Nature has produced no dogs. But the wolf and fox are closely related to the dogs. If mankind did not create the dogs. Nature would not have. So, the wolf and fox are natural, and the dogs are created. You can lose the 6-day stuff.

Most domesticated item are created. That would include most grains, nuts, fruits, vegetables, and domesticated animals. The question is, was man created too? The oldest stories that have been passed down from pre-history says we were. Simply put, during the Age of Domestication mankind started creating the earth for man and not nature. And that is continuing today.

623

No, you are on the wrong track. Dogs are not created, they are evolved from a common ancestor with the wolves. Just as humans have a common ancestry with other great apes.

You must change this notion of creation of irreducibly complex patterns. Evolution is a creative process, via natural selection of advantageous survival mechanisms. If humans breed price chickens or dogs that never before existed, it is still an evolutionary process via human selection for specific traits, not creation and not necessarily for survival skills. In the case of "human selection ", it is not for surviving skills but for human aesthetic pleasure.

Let’s make one thing clear. Natural selection does not create anything.

Natural mating by two parents creates variety from the male/female mixing of DNA . Natural selection selects out those varieties that are weak and not able to survive the hardship. That means, only the strongest specimen are left standing to procreate and pass on on their evolved superior DNA.

It was thought until very recently that dogs were wild until about 12,000 years ago. But DNA analysis published in 1997 suggests a date of about 130,000 years ago for the transformation of wolves to dogs. This means that wolves began to adapt to human society long before humans settled down and began practicing agriculture.

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/library/01/5/l_015_02.html#

624

When MIke talks about domestication, this is most likely where he’s getting it

However, Mike is an expert at taking scientific data and picking out what he likes and making it fit his ideas about gods and history.