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Published on Thursday, June 10, 2010 by On the Earth Productions
Noam Chomsky and Bill McKibben on Global Warming
Listen to Noam and Bill speak to the consequence of Global Warming. Then go to 350.org and learn about the action on 10-10-10
© 2010 On the Earth Productions
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25 Comments so far
Show AllWe currently have 6,500,000,000 to 7,000,000,000 people on the earth.
To have sustainable environment for all the species, the earth can probably tolerate 5,000,000 human beings, which was the population as earth got out of the Ice Age 10,000 years ago and started cultivating grains.
It is very doubtful that human beings will reduce their population voluntarily.
KILL ALL 6,500,000,000... as long as the 500,000,000 left are 'Murikans.
Isn't that the way Sweet Cheesus wants it??? After all HE's on our money, in our anthems and pledges - what more proof do you need that HE luvs US.
Mother Earth considers all homo sapiens to be of the same species.
The earth can certainly support more than 5 million humans.
And, at any rate, under capitalism, ways would be found for those 5 million to consume the same resources as 6 billion do now. And, under sustainable and just non-capitalist economics that apply technology to human need rather than profit, 9 billion (the UN-projected peak) could live perfectly fulfilling lives on far less resource consumption than now. If you don't understand why, you have some very basic musunderstandings of the workings of capitalist economics.
Calls for population control invariably come from the privleged liberal bourgeois class. Throw your old well-worn copies of "The Population Bomb" away. Erlich has been long discredited.
People have forgotten they are really just part of nature.
They are destroying the nature on which our lives depend.
They do not know it, but they are losing nature.
They don't see that they are going to perish.
The most important things for human beings are clean air and clean water and the trees and grass that produce them.
Earth maybe able to support 7 billion people over the short term, say few hundred years, but not over the long term. It has nothing to do with Erlich.
SC,
i'm afraid you have some very basic misunderstandings of the workings of the living Earth.
i'm not by any means defending capitalism. But there has never in the history of life on Earth been anything remotely close to the vast overpopulation of any large animal as is now occurring with humans. Not REMOTELY close. We are vastly out of balance, even if we revert to roaming bands of subsistence hunters and gatherers. Even if we convert to a population strictly of dedicated Permaculture practitioners.
The only way we have gotten to this vast overpopulation is precisely through the distortions of capitalism, with a splurge of fossil fuel energy. Agriculture was the foundation upon which capitalism and fossil-fueled industrialism enabled this.
Whatever thought construct you may adopt, this many big hungry omnivores is hugely out of balance for this living Earth. You can dismiss Erlich, or as so many do try to make this about Malthus, but the living systems of the Earth don't read books or debate theories.
Some wishful thinking here.
We are going the way of Easter Island and the corporate elite are hoping that somehow they will weather the storm.
Didn't the UN put out a report some years ago estimating that the number of people the Earth could sustain depended on whether they consumed like Americans, or like Third World villagers in extreme poverty? I think the number they came up with was about 2 billion American style consumers, or about 10 billion Third World type consumers.
I think it all depends on what we used our productive capacities for..in a conflict free world without a need for militaries what could we do? And that is the type of world we have to imagine and work for if we are ever going to survive. But that would be commune...ism.
RR
Chomsky mentions the 'interesting controversy' that made the front page of the NY Times, between climatologists, and meteorologists. If they differ, and they often do, then how much harder is it for the ordinary citizen to figure out what to do? Meteorology is applied fluid mechanics, climatology is applied thermodynamics. The energy equation is important to meteorology, but it isn't solved alone, it is solved with the momentum equation (Newton's second law), and this equation incurs the nonlinearities and chaotic solutions that meteorology is so well-known for. Climatologists, on the other hand, need only solve the relatively well-behaved energy equation, along with some coded, annecdotal evidence about how energy flows around the planet seasonally or monthly. This isn't easy, of course, but the solutions are at least relatively stable. And radiative energy balances are almost trivially easy to do, which is how climatologists in the 1950s did such a good job predicting todays climate under Global Warming. A meterologist doesn't do a radiative energy balance, since their time scales are much shorter, radiative imbalance doesn't matter to them.
I'm just saying: its a measure of how corrupt the MSM is, in its reportage of Global Warming, that anyone would be asking a meteorologist's opinion on the topic, much less the NY Times. A meteorologist knows as much about climate as a crop scientist. He's had an introductory course in it, and never saw it again. He spends all his time trying to linearize the momentum equation so it'll behave itself when integrated over a weeks time and a hemisphere. And that's quite enough on his plate.
The ignorance of the people who work in the MSM on matters of scinece and technology is probably not a matter of their corruption (their corruption causes the other, better known problems). It is simply that US reporters, like USAn's in general, are very ignorant in matters of science and mathematics. It seems to arise becasue the the business "community" so depreciates sceince and have made the study of scinece very unfashionable.
Face it, science, and scientific curiosity and the language of science and mathematics is rather uncool and ridiculed in US society. Science is considered vaguely, or not-so vagely "un-American" - they spend too much time around foreigners and even use the un-american metric syatem!
Now Big Business and high finance, and talking the language of Big Business and hight finance is COOL! Look how our super cool young black yuppie president uses business-ese buzzwords in all his speeches.
Yes, its ignorance, but I think its also 'selling the controversy'. Asking a skeptic with a geology degree what he thinks about global warming is the scientific equivalent to the well-known media principle: 'if it bleeds, it leads'. The MSM wants blood in the water to sell ads.
Remember when NASA blew a space flight over calculations, some in metric some continued with now I forget what we used to call it. The American system.
"Blush"
RR
As a good friend of mine likes to paraphrase this paradigm:
"Either you're with us, or you're with the scientists!"
ubrew,
It's worse than you say. Most TV meteorologists have zero training in science, period. If they have any college training at all, it is in English or Political Science or Public Relations. They are hired because they are cute, affable, fluent in everyday English (if not in grammatical English). In short, their opinions are not worth listening to on any number of topics--but in meteorology they daily demonstrate their cluelessness.
The current crop of "weatherpersons" get an Associate degree in TV meteorology, that is, a smattering of introductory science, intro to graphics software, and the rest consists of "presentation." These are the people who were referred to in the NY Times article.
I love the way Chomsky states the issues so clearly. I am astonished at the overwhelming ignorance of the American population which cannot - indeed, WILL not- see this. It is true that on one side we have an astonishing intellectual community which is saying 'fix it and only some of us die badly, don't fix it and we all die badly', and on the other side we have Beck, Limbaugh and the other cretins saying it is all hogwash - and the American population by and large believe the Limbaughs. WTF?
WTF, indeed. It reminds me of the Dark Ages, where attempts to really understand disease took a back seat to eye of newt and lizard stomach.
And anybody advocating scientific principles was imprisoned, or worse.
Redoing the Ali G / Chomsky interview more around Global Warming could possibly ameliorate the situation...
Would we be better off treating Global Warming/Climate Change the same way as they treated the 2 million "insignificant" dead Cambodians?
Maybe I am asking the wrong person. I probably should direct the question to our New soon to become Billionaire, spokesperson for the rich and greedy, Mr. Greenjeans, Al, I never met a dollar I couldn't stuff in my pocket, Gore.
God help us!
"People have forgotten they are really just part of nature.
They are destroying the nature on which our lives depend.
They do not know it, but they are losing nature.
They don't see that they are going to perish.
The most important things for human beings are clean air and clean water and the trees and grass that produce them."
I recognize this dialogue from Kurosawa's "Village of the Watermills", a vignette from one of his last films entitled "Dreams". I have to admit, Kurosawa's vision in this series of "Dreams" is telling, is prophetic. I have a feeling he would hope his art would lead to a good outcome, that people, no matter their political persuasion, would finally get it. But, I guess there's too much money to be made in duping the American public. I still hold a wish that people will smarten up. But, on a grand scale, we're playing a poor role model for the next generation, and they're going to have to smarten up without our help, or they won't. Not something I'd want to wager big bucks on.
The true believer has nothing to fear. God will take care of his flock. The true believer will act to destroy the non-believers that have brought this once great country to ruin. Only by destroying the homosexuals, the lesbians, the communists, the coloreds, the heathens, will God's reign come to mankind. That is why you must detonate your nuclear device in New York City. Your true reward will be with God, in Heaven.
Chomsky's comment about "balanced" treatment reminds me of something I believe Edward R. Murrow once said. Namely, that to the media, the opinions of Judas are equivalent to those of Jesus.
I believe McKibben probablly OK, he probably just
misinformed as everyone else about the climate collapse.
There is no turning it around
There is no bringing the C02ppm down even one pt. , were we
to shut everything down right now.
The climate collapse is going to come on stronger and
stronger.
It is not going to be anything like they have lead us on to
believe. Kind of like the oil spill, all misleading.
The so called pundits, Gore, Hanson, probably McKibbon, have
all found a way to make some bucks out of this.
The powers that be know what I know, they don't want you to
know. It is also what is driving the resource wars, in less
then fifteen years, man is going to be immobile, and extracting oil almost impossible.
Also, we are being mislead on what the actual C02ppm is right
now, once again, kind of like the oil spill volume.
It is no doubt up over 420ppm right now not the 390ppm
that they are public with.
Also it is one the point of the bell curve that goes straight
up, remember, a bell curve is nothing more than a quadratic
equation, or a parabola. The C02ppm on the curve is on that
point of the parabola that shoots to infinity, only time
(and lots of it) and mother nature can bring it down, probably 20,000years before it starts down.
I have followed the C02ppm since the early eighties, and have
been aware of the politics of climate change about the same
amount of time. The cap and trade solution, has been tossed
around since that time, this is not a new phenom, the C02ppm
and its affect on climate has been studied extensively since
the 1960s. By the mid seventies, industry , through NOAA
was controlling all climate studies and infulenced them to
have a favorable outcome for industry. They have had
studies censored, books cencored, ect. Hanson has been apart
of this since the late seventies. SEE YOU LATER, GOOD LUCK.