Why Some People Deny Global Warming

Or Peak Oil, or anything that might happen in the near or distance future. It’s all about the “discount rate.” No, not the financial kind, but the human kind. Tremendously interesting post on The Oil Drum that lays it all out.

Australian biologist Tim Flannery has called the human species “The Future Eaters”. Indeed, paleo-anthropology suggests many historical societies collapsed due to resource depletion even though they must have been aware of it. The example made famous by Jared Diamond is ‘what was that Easter Islander thinking that chopped down the last tree’? The best documented recent mass extinctions of flightless birds and other large mammals from New Zealand and Madagascar show that humans were to blame. Though Neandertals and early Homo Sapiens did hunt game without hunting it out, upper Paleolithic hunters were more numerous and better equipped for mass slaughter – 100,000 horses killed at one site, a thousand mammoths at another. Given the millions of years of shaping of our neural circuitry, it is hard to imagine that our mental structure has changed that much in the last few thousand years.

What’s great about this post is that the comments are as engaging, intelligent and thought-provoking as the article. Read and save.

Global Warming – A Disaster Epic (in Slo-Mo)

The New York Times has an excellent read on the true implications of the recent scientific assurance that global warming is being accelerated by human activity.

In essence, the debate over characterizing the near-term rise in seas is akin to arguing whether a car starting to roll down a hill toward a cliff is going 1 mile per hour or 2.

Scientists were left wondering if the public would grasp this as disaster.

How quickly does the water have to move toward your neck before you panic (especially if, like Leonardo DiCaprio in “Titanic,” you’re handcuffed to the ship)?

How quickly, indeed?

Read more »