[Revi]

Lovelock introduced us to Gaia and now he says she's about to get hopping mad! She's having hot flashes and we're going to feel it. When Mama's not happy, ain't nobody happy!

Seriously, I reccomend this book highly. He really lays it on the line. Gaia is the idea that the world regulates itself to be hospitable to life. The level of 280 ppm of CO2 is perfect. Unfortunately we have it at 380 now and we're headed to 500 ppm which would be a tipping point at which warmer and drier conditions happen that wouldn't end for 100,000 years. Gaia would go to a hotter equilibrium that would not be good for human life, or any life for that matter.

Let's hope he's wrong, but I think he may have Gaia figured out. Peak oil may be the least of our problems.

[quizz]

'she' is not intelligent. 'she' has operational parameters that humans are just finding out. The Creator though has plans ...

[I_Like_Plants]

Revi I also highly recommend that book.

Gaia is complex and self-regulating enough that the term "alive" is not out of place.

I think Lovelock is right - he may be off by a decade or two as to when it happens, and may be off by a scaling factor in how fast it happens, but the guy is THE top guy in this stuff, if you've read his other books and seen that he's worked with NASA etc in earth and space exploration for years and years and years, and that he's been able to predict what would be found etc., you realize his is probably the most accurate prediction of the future we have.

[gg3]

Strictly speaking the Gaia hypothesis is that ecosystems have built-in negative feedback loops to maintain conditions favorable to the organisms that comprise them.

The personification of Earth is a philosophical overlay more along the lines of religion, much as people interpreted Newton's "clockwork universe" as evidence of divine precision. It was not part of Lovelock's hypothesis, though it can be useful as a metaphor as long as one doesn't go overboard.

In its strictly scientific form, the Gaia hypothesis has become the dominant paradigm in the earth sciences.

So let's cut to the chase:

Lovelock's scientific credentials are impeccable.

He says there is a reasonably high probability that we will soon enough see a > 5 degree Celsius rise in average global temperatures, and that this will produce radical changes that render most of the Earth inhospitable to humans.

He says that the few regions that will remain hospitable include the polar regions and the coastal regions far from the equator: in the northern hemisphere, the northern coastal regions, and in the southern hemisphere, the southern coastal regions.

According to a close friend who's read the book (I haven't yet): in the US this means northern New Hampshire and Maine (lucky you, Revi) and the region from northern California up through the border with Canada (so our group (URL below) will be in a viable region also).

Now comes the scary part:

What happens to the rest of the world's current 6.5 billion heading toward 8 or 9...?

Logically, the answer is, a tsunami of migration toward the viable regions. Far beyond the population levels they can sustain.

Work out the implications of that for yourself.

---

www.thefosl.org The Foundation Of Sustainable Living: building community, education, and R&D, for a sustainable northern California.

[Chaparral]

> 5 deg C rise = Zombieworld. Lock n' load. We can only hope there are not enough teratons of C in the remaining accessible coal and unconventional reserves to bring that about. A tacit acknowledgment of this has been a subtext in most of my recent posts here: it really is more than just P.O.

A death by desertification will be like something out of Frank Miller's Sin City: "The Hard Goodbye" where the guy gets his limbs cut off and a dog comes along and chews his intestines out while he sits there in pain.

A full scale thermonuclear exchange combined with H5N1 might be more like a merciful overdose of Ketamine HCl by comparison.

Lets just hope the EROEI turns negative for the remaining coal and unconventional reserves sooner rather then later and we never even get close to the 5 deg nightmare.

[Revi]

Lovelock seems to think that the system will change to a hotter, drier earth. A new equilibrium. 5 degrees celsius is a lot of warming. That's hard to believe. I don't think Maine would get that warm, but I have heard that we could end up with the climate of Virginia. We would save on heating oil, anyway.

Seriously, this book is scary as hell! Makes Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth seem like a bedtime story. I find Lovelock to be completely believable. I don't see how we can get most of humanity to go for the kinds of changes we'll need to make to keep this place habitable. It will have to be in their self interest. We will need new leadership to make it happen.

Here's Lovelock's own short version of the message. He thinks it could heat up to 8 degrees centigrade above normal. That would cook the world for sure. Maybe it is like a fever to cook off organisms like us.

http://comment.independent.co.uk/commen ... 338830.ece

[Ayame]

I just finished reading this book. Some things I agreed with and some things I disagreed with.

I thought he made a good point that techo fixes won't work unless we change our behaviour and that sustainable development and 'just plant a tree and build some wind tubines' eco philosophy is flawed. He also broaches the noramlly taboo subject of limiting human population growth. The book also outlines the parameters of what the earth 'herself' is up against - increasing heat from an aging sun.

However the things I found silly were the notion that we must maintain civilisation at all costs including synthesizing food for 8 billion people using chemicals if necessary, the belief that nuclear fusion is the silver bullet to solve all our energy woes and that we need to leave a 'manual' to future generation so they can 'get it right next time' when in all probability, if the future is as catastrophic as Lovelock makes out, furture generations will probably be so preoccupied with surviving that they won't even learn how to read.

[Revi]

The first 100 pages were worth reading, but I agree, his conclusions were weak. I thought the railing against DDT and wind power was particularly off base. What was useful was the information about the new equilibrium that could be caused by global warming. He makes a pretty good case for the possibility of going up 5 degrees centigrade and staying there for 100,000 years. It's happened before, and it could happen again.

[TheDude]

If you have a nuclear power plant he's offered to stash the waste on his property too.
The book Deep Time is about attempting to transmit/save information for people of the future, a nobel endeavor. It won't be a Dark Age without monks scrabbling away copying books, dontcha think? That's the scientist in Lovelock talking, embracing knowledge.

[DrBang]

I found this book useful in a number of aspects. It has its down points though. Lets go for the good points first.

Good Point 1
It put a good summary on the ground with some data to back it up. It allows a technical discussion without requiring the reader to have multiple degrees in biology and climateology.

Good point 2
It really hammers home the point that Earth Systems is probably the best way of thinking about these sorts of things.

Good Point 3
It demostraits quite well how we have completely destabilised the biosphere.

Good Point 4
It demonstrates our complete and utter reliance on the biosphere to live. The idea that the network of plant, animals and climate all inteact, which maintains a steady temperature that allows life to exist on this planet.

Good Point 5
The author really highlights the importance of the human race to wake up to itself or face the consequences.

Now for the bits I didn't agree with.

Down Point 1
Unfortunately it relies on the carbon emission over time J curve (or Hockey Stick). Al Gore also relies on this. It has been convincingly suggested that the J curve is based on faulty mathematics. I have tried to recreate it from the source data. I have found that the source data is really hard to get hold of (if someone has a link, please correct me). Also, there is a warm period in the Medieval time slot which is hotter than now. Again I have not been able to get hold of the data to verify which case is correct. It does suggest though that this line of reasoning is faulty and perhaps we should not rely on it. All attempts to get to the bottom of this have been mired down with people actually talking about it or referencing it. With such an influential idea, the raw data and the analysis to reach that point of conclusion should be readily available.


Down Point 2
Also the link between us and the root mechanims case of global warming has not been made convincingly. What I mean is the carbon activity in the atmosphere being the actual root cause. If we were stop pumping carbon into the atmosphere (a great idea to be sure), would this trend stop? I don't think so, which means our tasks need to address the root causes as well as our environmental footprint.

Yes our civiliastion has increased at a geometric rate. Yes we have fouled our own nest. Yes we are pumping lots of carbon into the atmosphere. Yes global warming is happening. Its also happening on every planet around the solar system at the moment. We could be going through a massive solar system wide cycle.

Enviromentalism (which is so very imortant to our long term survival) has been hijacked and shows lots of signs being an economic weapon. I am a staunch environmentalist but believe we may be focusing our energies on the wrong objective. Kind of like planning for climate change without considering the implications of peak oil.


Down Point 3
Some of the authors ideas about what the human race should do to address these issues are a little impractical with our current population profile. The presented food production and manufacture of energy generation models start to break down once the logistics are examined in context of scale required, time and resources available, and objectives the models are trying to reach.

Down Point 4
His reliance on nuclear energy is not vaiable as a solution. If the whole world went nuclear at current consumption rates, we would run out of uranium in a few short decades (depending on consumption maybe 30 years). Since it takes the better part of 10-15 years to build a nuclear power station, this is a problem. The number of required nuclear power stations required is also a problem. Then there is the enviromental concerns regarding the whole process.

He quotes that uranium is abundant in small grades through vast tracts of rock is true. The logictics and energy cost (let alone the infrsasturcture) to mine and extract it is colossal. The time frame needed for this is simply too long for energy demand. What this means is we should not place our hopes on nuclear as the 'solution' to the coming energy bottleneck.


All in all I found this book to be excellent. It informs you. It challenges you to think. Its tests the resolve of your world view. It demands us to think in terms of environment and our presence here on this planet. It demands we take a good look at ourselves.

[gg3]

Dr. Bang, re. nuclear:

We can extend the lifetime of the uranium supply and at the same time reduce the nuclear waste problem by up to 95%, by recycling spent nuclear fuel using current and emerging technologies.

After uranium becomes uneconomical to extract, there will be thorium reactors. These are already technically viable, they are not quite commercially viable yet but should be soon.

There is no shortage of thorium. Nor will there be in the foreseeable future.

It doesn't take ten years to build a nuclear plant. It takes from 3 - 5 years. The rest of the time is regulatory paperwork and dealing with NIMBYs. There won't be many NIMBY problems once the suburbs start experiencing rolling outages to the point where the food in their fridges starts going bad regularly.

As for environmental problems, coal burning releases more radionuclides ("radioactive stuff") into the environment than the entire nuclear fuel cycle, when you compare side by side in terms of energy produced. And this doesn't even begin to count the climate crisis, for which expanded use of nuclear fission is a necessary part of the overall solution

[Revi]

We'd better do something soon. Even Bush is down in Alabama talking about "nuculer" power today. I hate to be on the same side with him about anything, but maybe it's time to give it another look. We may need it just to keep the lights on. I wish we were also thinking about conservation and efficiency at the same time.

It seems like global warming is the big issue nowadays. That's find with me, because it solves the peak oil problem too. Let's hope we have somebody in power with the resolve it will take to get something done about the problem. We need a Roosevelt or a Churchill. Curious George might not be up to the task.

[oiless]

DrBang; do you have a source for the medieval warm period being warmer than the present?

[DrBang]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'D')rBang; do you have a source for the medieval warm period being warmer than the present?

[DrBang]

Arrrghh! I was so comfortable with the idea that nuclear was not viable.

I did my undergrad in physics. Part of the training was to be qualified to work in a nuclear plant. At the time Indonesia was considering comissioning 8 new nuclear power plants. The pronblem with this was their propensity to cut corners in their building code. Also some of the proposed sites were in areas prone to earthquakes. On one hand we (that year of students) like the idea of getting a good job. On the other, the thought of 8 nuclear power plants in dodgy circumstances scared the hell out of us.

Personally I didn't think we were mature enough as a civilisation on a global scale and on a country scale to have wide spread nuclear power plants. This is not so much the tech side by the human admistration side.


$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'W')e can extend the lifetime of the uranium supply and at the same time reduce the nuclear waste problem by up to 95%, by recycling spent nuclear fuel using current and emerging technologies.

[gg3]

Dr.Bang:

Thanks!

Re. recycling spent fuel: Scientific American, December 2005, cover story. I used to be concerned about nuclear waste also but it seems this problem is well on its way to being solved just about completely, and the French have a 20-year track record using existing technology.

Aside from which consider all the dangerous fossil fuel waste (CO2) that's presently being released into the atmosphere with little or no control. That's the biggest danger of our times.

If you're trained to work in a plant, you've got job security, and if you live near one, you've got energy & water security. I suspect that as the dark age descends, towns adjacent to nuclear, wind, solar, hydro, and geothermal, will tend to remain as centers of learned civilization in an otherwise very nasty world.

Re. Indonesia: Yeah I agree. Dodgy construction practices. I've seen pics of things such as concrete pillars that were basically hollow under the rebar; that was in Mexico and after an earthquake it was dust. What's needed here is an international nuclear corporation that is dedicated to doing an absolutely impeccable job, on the premise that longterm shareholder value is best obtained thereby. A corporation of that sort, or for that matter any of the first-rank industrial countries' major engineering firms, could go into a place such as Indonesia and do the job to the right standard.

We as a civilization have to grow up quickly or we're going to be extinct as a species by the end of the next century if not sooner. Unfortunately I think this is going to take a few more "limited nuclear wars" e.g. India/Pakistan, before we get this one right.

Basically it's been 100 years of extended childhood due to effectively unlimited cheap energy. That's come to an end. The only way out is forward.

I don't have the tech details on thorium, i've taken it on the strength of the arguements of people with physics PhDs and suchlike who know this stuff well.

Re. Joe Average and short-term thinking: that's gotten us to where we are at present, and as I said, the only way out is forward. I suspect one thing that's going to happen is an evolutionary shake-out of the human species. To put it bluntly, the stupid ones are in large measure going to get darwinized.

Re. mining industry: excellent; and you've got good uranium reserves to turn 'em loose on.

Re. geothermal: Absolutely, go for it, use it for all it's worth. That will stretch your uranium supply further. Also China is building wind turbines that are apparently competitive with Swedish & German units, so you have nearby supply for those as well. The biggest problem I can see in Australia is water supply, which could be mitigated somewhat with nuclear desalinization using a tertiary coolant loop. And whatever else, conserve as if your lives depend on it. I believe you can succeed. You have relatively low population density and a history of the kinds of smarts & strength it takes to get through adverse conditions. And you don't have a stubborn idiot at the helm, and you don't have a huge anti-science voting bloc, and those are not things to take for granted these days!