I grew up in Hungary in the '60s and we were also told that the biggest threat to humanity will be overpopulation. That we will need to destroy and eventually use up all of the natural resorces to not only strive but to simply survive. Also, we were warned that it will lead to wars for resources, mainly water and oil and to untold misery to people in the developing world. And if such things were told in the evil communist system in the '60s, why was it not hammered home in the enlightened western societies?

and my stand: nysa, only at the end of virginia... where lost souls converge

Just one last thing: I have consciously chosen to have only one child and he has chosen - so far - not to procreate. Of my friends when growing up in Budapest, all were only children, myself included. If being brought up atheist had something to do with it, or the fact that pessimism about everything was a national hobby, don't know.

You could call it Malthus' revenge.

One could, but Malthus ignores the political side of the issue, like the current administration's refusal to provide contraceptives to Third World nations as well as pharma's refusal to subsidize them. It's not just biology, its politics, too.

looking for poem finding none
april

the sky is blown blue,
the mountains too
even as the
far away static
drone of the freeway
promises in each breath
to do what it can
to thicken the haze.

i am trying to understand
where the news
of the world
and the fate of the
earth converge
for the purpose of
poems
for the purpose of
making things
right.

like many
i've imagined that
i've needed to
purify my heart
were i to write
poems of
perfect beauty -
as the true arc
of a young eagle circling
the cut field,
looking for a thermal
or looking
for a meal
not waiting for some
new awakening -
is without flaw.

take these things of our time.
we call it global warming -
the war in iraq -
we call it a bitter pill -
such horror! - see the child with
a bullet in her neck
the price of freedom
say they
who once were the court -
who once were the king -
who once were the church
who once were the priests
they who believe
that this is their world
to harvest however
they please -

the news of the day
cannot be verified -
meanwhile, from this meadow,
i sit in the grass and
watch glaciers retreat and
dream of a time
when my grandson and i
walk through these fine
afternoons beneath the blown
trees
in the world we call sky -
in the world we call tooth-
we call this world
hallowed bone -
dream of this world
without engines.

stand with me on this rock.
the canadian coastal range,
so clear and blue and
white, back of the refinery and
the cluster of houses
across the mouth of lummi
bay at sandy point.
that's a cold wind blowing in
from the west and the sun
slips behind
what comes.
we are not going to get
through this
in one piece and i
am torn.
i want
what it will be
that puts these fires
out.

Agreed, but politics itself is part of our biology, that is; an activity that defines humanity as a social animal.

I could not imagine that I would live to hear that economy of growth is bad economy. Yet, here we are and even American Congress listen to a strange idea that growth should be stopped and even reversed before stabilizing at some sustainable level. Alas, Capitalism of private interests under private control cannot stop growing by definition. Ergo, the new environment of scarcity will inevitably force Capitalism under social control for societal interests. The next thing to do with such Capitalism is to rename it into Socialism. This will be new only for Joe Public, for Robber Barons had always socialized their risks, privatizing only profits as all robbers do.

What a great article! It is quite difficult to counter the minimizers of global warming because of the complexity of the issues. This puts it right in its proper context as an urgent problem for the whole world. Thanks!

I could not imagine that I would live to hear that economy of growth is bad economy.

this is hardly news - in recent times consult Diet for a small Planet, and Small is Beautiful.

"Place a few colonies of bacteria in the center of a Petri dish and they will grow to the edge of the dish and die."

Well the die-off has begun but we tend to call it other things. Recently we have had food riots in Mexico due to the rising cost of tortillas as americans are using the corn to fuel their SUV's.

In africa people are forced to choose between buying grain to eat or the fuel to cook the grain; they cannot afford both. In Nigeria poverty strickin people drill into gasoline pipelines for cooking fuel and regularly die by the hundreds when the gas ignites. In Peru climate change is causing new pests to climb up to farmers feilds and infest potatoes that never had pest problems before.

Meanwhile in the US we still use 8,000 lb. SUV's to drive children 1 mile to school. We haven't noticed that 1/3 of our population lives in the path of hurricanes.

Nature bats last.

Interesting that in the face of rabid Christianity no one dares utter the words "Population Control". It is a truth that there are too damn many humans on this planet, with no leaders couragous enough to help us back from the edge. When I read Jered Diamond's 'Collapse', he points out the evidence of what happens when a people outbreed their food source. Those who follow dig up bones with 'pot marks'...bones who's ends have evidence of being in a cook pot. Global Warming, coupled with uncontroled breeding will doubtless lead to many backyard BBQ's serving 'Long Pig'. We may be unable to do much about Global Warming, but surely a committment to having the world population shrink by a few billion in the next 50 years would have a positive effect. I'm not all that big on BBQ anyhow.

John Freeman.

P.S. When I graduated from High School in 1963, this issue was already apparent. I did not add to the problem.

What a beautiful poem, montemerrick!

"We deceive ourselves when we suggest that we are powerless to change it, when it's we who have changed it."

Pity that the author opened with a poor comparison to Y2K. I was a programmer during Y2K and many people worked many days so that Y2K didn't become "The Morning After". It was hyped, yes, but the threat was very real.

The problem is, the Y2K fix was too much of a success. "Hah, see, told ya so, Martha...it was a hoax and we stocked up on butter 'n bullets fer nuthin'!" Now, people are extremely jaded and unwilling to put themselves in a position to feel duped again.

But...here comes another real problem and this time we've decided not to prepare, not to head the warnings.

Pity.

Re: the Iraq war in general

(also see this post)

Ever since the months prior to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, there have been a few reports in the newspapers that the Central Intelligence Agency was casting aspersions on the intelligence the White House was relying on to justify the war. The CIA has never given a position on whether the war is needed or justified or said that Bush is wrong to go to war. But doesn't it seem much more likely that the CIA is an extremely right wing organization than a left wing one? After all, even if the people working for them and at least a lot of the leadership really wanted a war for their own reasons, there are a lot of reasons for them to not want to tie their credibility to what they know is faulty information. They and their personnel, present and former, could use other means of promoting the Iraq war, and still be motivated to make the statements in the media. If the CIA got behind faulty information, they would have to make a choice between whether they would be involved in scamming the American people and the world once the military had invaded Iraq and no weapons were found- so: 1) Imagine the incredible difficulties involved in pulling off a hoax that weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq. Imagine all the people you would have to be able to show the weapons to- the inspectors from the UN / the international community, the American press, statesmen, etc. Then imagine the difficulties of substantiating that story to people who would examine it- the lack of witnesses to a production plant that made the weapons or to transportation operations or storage of the weapons during Hussein's regime of them. 2) If the story fell apart upon inspection or the CIA tried not to hoax it at all, imagine the loss of credibility they would suffer. The CIA, it is safe to bet, does not want to be known to the American people as a group that lies to them to send them to war. Even within the CIA there could be disagreement among people about how involved they should be in promoting the war or the neo-con agenda more broadly, so the CIA would have to worry about lying to and managing its own people after trying so hard to get them to trust their superiors in the agency, and perhaps there simply might be too many people in the agency who knew enough about what was going on in Iraq to know if someone was deceiving people to promote this war.

So there is a lot of reason to be cautious against being seen as endorsing what they knew was false intelligence even if they were very strong supporters of going to war.

Would you happen to be the trumpeter Jack McGhee of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra?

Like the Earth, the human body is a buffered system, designed to maintain an equilibrium.

I'd like to take a moment here and offer some free education on this point that hopefully will fine-tune all of your thinking processes. The correct term here is homeostasis and not equilibrium. The devil is--as usual--in the details. Perturbations in a homeostatic system can lead to positive and negative feedbacks, which is basically what is happening with polar ice cap degradation: the warmer it gets, the warmer it's gonna get. As the ice cap melts, it is less capable of reflecting heat back to space, which then accelerates the melting. This is positive feedback. This is the free fall. This is the systems analysis science behind the phenomenon known as the "tipping point."

Plainly put, this is the reason why the cyclical nature of climate change needs must be viewed as not a closed system that will "balance" itself (at least not within the lifespan of major species on this planet) in time, but as a superfreighter (please pardon the tasteless analogy) gone off-course. The real problems are the "delayed feedbacks" inherent in such a large and complicated system. It's almost Schroedingeresqe: we struggle to discover whether or not the cat is dead, when at the very outset of our inquiry into the matter it may already be too late.

John Freeman: I went to school at the same time and remember the dire predictions we heard about global population being the biggest problem we would face in our lifetime (as well as being challenged to consider the ramifications of China and India) - guess our teachers and parents were smarter back then - but there wasn't as much TV and advertising. And I didn't know anyone who was afraid of Russia - we were more afraid of our own government, because we had civics lessons back then that told us where the greatest threat really lay - right here at home in the USA. Korean Vets were pretty cynical as well - we should have listened.

we are embryo; the earth our shell

thewonderingyou: thanks for the refresher. Let's also consider the planet Mars. It is now believed that at some point Mars also had an atmosphere and now has none. Homeostasis is a human conceit. The universe, the galaxy, the solar system, and our little rock are all grinding inexorably towards entropy. The heat engine that drives our shifting continents and creates atmospheric elements will eventually stop. The magnetic envelope that shields us from solar radiation has many times reversed, at which times its ability to shield this planet was absent. There is evidence that this reversal is now about to happen again and if this should coincide with a major solar flare event our atmosphere could go the way of Mars'.

Every seems to gloss over or ignore one of the most important and easy ways to cut greenhouse gases. STOP EATING MEAT.

madness to think that we are taking our engines and machines into the brave new world, or that we have a right to them.

It never ceases to amaze me how intellegent and thoughtful the posters here at Common Dreams are. Thank you all.

All I have to add is: Anyone remember "The Population Bomb"? I had my tubes tied so I couldn't add to what I saw then as an imminent threat to the U.S. and the children, two, that I had already born. Now I have granddaughters who REFUSE to be breeders. I will not be having great grandchildren. Maybe the next generation gets it!

Mr Bowron,

I am a fomer senior computer consultant to Boeing, Capital One, etc. And quite frankly sir, your comment that Y2K was a hoax is absolutely irresponsible.

It was the scientists that raised the red flag and if not for their persistence in making Y2K a national issue, it would NOT have been addressed in time and this country would have paid the dear consequences.

Now of course we had the uneducated masses back then, as we apparently do in the author of this article, muddying the waters and flapping their lips about something they are not qualified to comment on.

Sir, keep your arrogant prideful comments about Y2K to yourself. They have no basis in reality.

Y2K was a direct result of corporate short-sightedness not unlike global warming. In the case of Y2K, we acted in time and avoided the greatest of catastrophes.

For those arrogant prideful people with attitudes such as your own, Y2K came about because the year was recorded in 2 digits instead of 4. The '19' of the last century was ASSUMED. Much of computer logic is based on compared dates. In the simplest of examples, a birth date is calculated by a computer as the current year minus the year of birth. If you were born in 1960 and it is 1999, the age is simply CURRENT YEAR MINUS BIRTH YEAR: 99 - 60 = 39 years old.

With Y2K and the year 2000 we have 00 - 60 = -60

And of course you cannot be "minus 60" years old.

And when you had computer logic that compared your age to a certain activity, say, determine the medical dosage of a medicine based on age... such logic failed. Computer systems crashed.

This is true of medical systems, military systems, banking systems... you name it. It was a real problem.

Because the computer scientists raised the REAL alarm of a catastrophe, institutions artificially set their computer systems ahead by one or two years and PRO-actively addressed the issue.

But that would NOT have have happened if computer scientists did not raise the alarm. Corporate America was too busy making short term profits to be concerned with what idiots like you said was a hoax.

With Y2K we were successful in avoiding a VERY real catastrophe.

And today scientists are again raising the alarm.

The question today is, are you goint to bring forth these old arrgances again, or are you going to be constructive, realize Y2K was an issue, that it was successfully mitigated, and find the hope for the current situation?

Sir, get your facts straigth before you flap your lips about Y2K.

Ken Boettger
Ellensburg, WA
Wildlanders.com

yes, montemerrick
the brave new world lies across the abyss
there is no other way to it
there is no going back

"It never ceases to amaze me how intelligent and thoughtful the posters here at Common Dreams are. Thank you all."

Rebel Farmer....
I agree and I think it's because only intelligent people come here.

Thanks to Ken Boettger for his clarification of the Y2K issue. There are other reasons why Y2K is used inappropriately in Bowron's article.

Y2K was a technical problem in a manmade system, unlike human induced climate change. Though its full repercussions were unpredictable, there was a much higher level of certainty of the nature of the problem, its likely solutions, and its immediate consequences. Plus it had a precise expiration date; we knew early on Jan 1, 2000 that the problem had been met successfully.

Also, even though the business community had to be dragged kicking and screaming into spending the money to solve the problem, they ultimately did so, realizing that they could be put out of business if they didn't. Climate change offers business owners little reason to care. Why should any particular business sacrifice income for such a vague threat? Writ large, we have the national reaction to the problem: namely, we won't do anything about it because there's nothing in it for us, short term.

As for the early posts implying that a hoax is being perpetrated on the climate change issue, follow the money. Climate change mitigation is never going to make anyone the kind of killing that the oil/industrial complex continues to make under the current way of doing business. With so much to lose, you can instantly discredit virtually any theory that excuses them from changing. Though scientific truth is not determined by majority vote, one must be impressed when an overwhelming majority of scientists support a hypothesis that is so contrary to the biggest economic powers, and suspicious of the small minority of those that continue to enable the status quo.