'Further, we fail to recognize that science is merely a tool, and it's (sic) ability to uncover "truths" depends utterly on the skill and integrity of its' (sic) users. '

I agree with the basic content of your article.

But for me, when an author mis-uses the apostrophe, it is difficult to take you seriously.

Very simply: Possessive pronouns never (That's Never Ever) use apostrophes.

"It's" means "It is." "Its" is the possessive form of "it." No apostrophe for possessive pronouns: Yours, mine ours, theirs its.

Your use of "Its'"--with the apostrophe after the s--is utterly meaningless.

These are grammar-school level issues. No serious journalist, or blogger, or scientist who publishes or any other person who purports to use language professionally would make that mistake, never mind twice in one paragraph.

Spell checkers don't work, either: "The rapist" flies right by, even if "Therapist" was intended, to give one of literally millions of examples.

So, next time I see your byline, I'll read.

But if I see a silly mistake as basic as this, I will thereafter avoid your efforts as a waste of time.

Good article. Now we have to worry about 'geoengineering'--the human legacy shall be extinction and the last geoengineer can carve the tombstone epitaph:

Quickly we came,
Quickly we went.
Dumb and dumber
through our world we went.
Never deterred, never wise;
we geoengineered
our own demise.

from the article:

"Among the advocates are some, like Bjorn Lomberg the "Skeptical Envrionmentalist", who have denied global warming is even real."

you know, fuck global warming...

deny chemical and industrial devastation, asshole...the products of business...

the best man can do is stop messing (and the shit these people are discussing is messing), and start cleaning and planting, and hope there is time...

Global Start Date: September 22, 2012...the unanimous rejection of the modern world by all the planet's citizens...local living, local governing...

let's stop turning this place into garbage! let's bring it back to life...

glorious, luscious, vibrant and thriving life...

Let's get those gardens growing! We're gonna need food...

thank you, ms. smolker, for the excellent article. i've just written one with very similar sentiments, published yesterday at truthout.org: http://www.truthout.org/change-is-dead-long-live-change57879

This all speaks about the arrogance of capitalistic technology that refuses to recognize the absolute harmony and divine intelligence of creation.

I'm STILL waiting for my jet-packs !!

Knowing the history of Man . Nature will be far more merciful than Man in allowing us to adjust to the changes that will be asked of us to suffer. We should be wise not be trapped by man made disaster from both sides ( pollution and fix for the pollution ).

It is clear that Man knows enough to be dangerous.

Use of technology should be limited to which that help us live with natural changes of our environment.

Could it be that Thomas Friedman is wrong? No. It can't be. He's never been wrong, not even about invading Iraq. Or Stephen Leavitt? No. Even Jon Stewart thinks they're both right about inventing and mass-producing our way out of disaster. Attention, Wal-Mart shoppers -- how could it be that they're all wrong? :-)

There's something Rachel should have mentioned but I will add. Today's younger generation has been trained to think selfishly and live selfishly as if condos and apartments along with all those tiny gizmos didn't spoil the kids' minds enough. I am fortunate to have neighbors who are ready to put aside our differences and help one another out from gardening to emergency health care when someone is not doing well and there's no ambulance in the hour of need. Online training and discussions are a great blessing but no technology can help people build self-confidence, willingness to team up, and the ability to build and sustain team confidence. There is no need to discard technology but taking it for granted is also wrong.

Proposed "Geoengineering" projects represent the pinacle of Disaster Capitalism. There is no stopping Global Warming as it's already happening and accelerating. There is only mitigating or slowing it down which can only be done by drastic cuts in the activities that cause the pollutants driving the process--something very inconvenient for industrialists, their bankers, and the politicians they own.

My own interpretation of the available data and knowledge of the human animal informs me that we are already too late, that the time for aggressive action was 20 years ago at Kyoto. Each year Business as Usual continues generates decades of additional Global Warming, a fact most seem to be blind to. And lets be clear that us humans are not going to kill the planet and its life. What is happening is Genocide in very slow motion.

"Geoengineering" and similar interventionist technologies share the disease profit-based expansionism: let's not solve the problem, but sell a treatment instead.

However, we have no cause to leave technology per se behind: tech need not mean adding gizmos, but revamping gizmos and reducing gizmos.

Retrofitting communities requires an appreciation of housing, transport, communication, and power generation technologies.

It's great to see all these ideas; we just have to reject the scams.

Cicero: "Freedom is participation in power."

I'm with Rachel Smolker re: the rights of mother earth as their basis, BUT neither side of the argument she presents honestly addresses the central problems: Artificial degradation of the biosphere and human overpopulations accelerating that degradation.

There is no substantive economic literature devoted to the planned "downgrowth" of capitalist economies. This is because capitalism relies upon several core myths to continue to operate, one of them being the myth of "endless economic growth." But what planet earth needs right now is a very CAREFULLY planned, globally interrelated, and objectively, scientifically elaborated economic & humane human population down-growth over at least the next seven (7) decades.

Neither the back-to-nature folks nor the techno-fixies have the right to try to suddenly convert the present global economic system to one which will shove billions of human beings crammed into densely overpopulated urban centers off a resource (food, potable water & energy) cliff--let alone to expect them to go quietly or idiotically pretend they don't exist.

Those massive urban population centers are, in fact, all ticking ecological, economic, political and cultural time bombs of the largest and most complicated kind. They have to be carefully defused over the next 3 to 7 decades--and this situation should be treated as an ongoing global emergency. Billions of people who know nothing about creating and distributing healthy food and who have been de-linked from the natural world for a century by industrialized farming, transportation, far-flung distribution routes, etc., will have to be taught not to rely on those ecologically failed fossil fuel dependent systems any longer for their food supply. As many as possible of them must be taught how to grow their own food and be more self-reliant for food AND energy production. Arable land will have to be gradually (at first) redistributed around the world away from giant collective corporate agri-businesses and back into the hands of family & communal/tribal self-sufficient farmers relying on more organic methods. This is just the beginning.

Arable habitats including remnant wilderness areas must be simultaneously preserved so that human, animal and plant species don't put too few biodiversity survival eggs in one basket. The Irish Potato Famine is the cautionary tale here: Reliance on one monoculture that crashed when a plant disease spore was brought in on a sailing vessel resulting in the starvation deaths of a million people and an enormous forced human population exodus. So habitats and remnant wilderness areas must be HARMONIZED with SUSTAINABLE human populations and these are not subjective economic or political decisions that must be made to achieve this but, global, democratic, objective scientific decisions.

Technology has encouraged the human species to overpopulate itself into an ecological resource corner on a global scale. This has created an existential situation where, despite obsolete pre-high tech cultural & economic beliefs ("the more children I have the richer I am"), or equally obsolete superstitious nonsense ("it is my religious duty to have as many children as I can"), the entire world can no longer afford for the ability of human beings to procreate to be treated as a freely exploitable right, but an earned and limited privilege. That's IF we want to preserve of technology what we can sustainably preserve and not fully revert to a stone age species.

Without sterilization,

We are going to go extinct.

With sterilization,

we are going to go extinct (but at a later date).

I base this on the geologic record that inarguably reveals that 99 percent of all species on this Earth have gone extinct. Homo sapiens is not going to be the first to escape these odds.

The next creature that rules the earth will be a mutant bug or reptile who breathes methane. There's a small chance for a while for descendants of Bill Gates who have locked up the worlds seeds in a nuclear vault in the arctic. This Dr Strangelove activity says to me, his elite club are probably intent on wiping the rest of us out while preserving themselves with a covert vaccine.

I think it is fairly pointless to waste effort on a magic bullet when by 2100 there will be so many tailpipes on the planet no mammal could possibly breathe.

I agree with Karlof that the only option is to declare war on the internal combustion engine and use the military to take out any pollution smoke stack that disregards this order.

We'll be sitting in the dark like a bunch of mushrooms, and the birthrate is sure to shoot up if we don't plan for that, but at least we can gauge the effects of a zero-emission year.

But, dipshit stuff like band-aids on top of a cancer patient is not going to cure this global disease. Stupid cons like dumping Metal in the Ocean or spraying salt water in the sky is not going to overcome the fact that two billion chinese and a billion Indians are now are in line for a new automobile. A new coal plant is going on-line in China every week now.

We've got to use some common sense, and try to overcome mindless religion and destructive commerce.

I'm not sure we can do it.

Oh well, pass the bong as somebody said...

TJ

The probability that any of these "fixes" will have any positive effect is exactly zero. In order for any potential fix to work, one would need to know so many things we don't know. We would have to understand in some detail the sensitivity of all sorts of mutually dependent variables in response to any suggested changes, a very challenging effort in its own right, as the large uncertainty in the IPCC models demonstrates. My understanding is that the smaller-scale experiments that have been tried either didn't work at all, or had unintended consequences - a completely predictable outcome of messing with a system we don't understand.

As an engineer, I know that without proper understanding of a system, it is best left alone. Geoengineering in my mind is roughly analogous to an average person taking off the back of their television set and starting to fiddle with all the internal adjustments, and then expecting it to work. Not going to happen. Period. (Of course, nowadays, very few if any adjustments exist in a television, but the point is still legitimate) If you don't know how a system works, leave it alone. There is usually only one or a small number of ways to fix (or improve?) it, and an almost infinite number of ways to break it.

Gregory Bateson once wrote an essay on roots of the ecological crisis, and noted that it was the combined effect of population, technology, and "hubris" that has led us into what he called "an evolutionary cul-de-sac." We have focused our conscious purpose in ways that we find immediately desirable, rigidly programmed them into the structure of our culture, and now these structures are making all efforts at change in the direction of sustainability impossible.

He thought of hubris as simply errors in how we come to know the world, failures in our epistemology. But unfortunately, he noted that a wrong epistemology can work for a long time before the internal contradictions and limitations become evident. By then, it is too late to undo the changes that have already rippled into the system.

So while I agree with Ms Smolker in that I would like to see much more emphasis on other ways of living - particularly indigenous ways, I think the techno-addicts will never comprehend that their epistemology is wrong. They cling to it like an alcoholic to a bottle. I think the chances are good they will get their opportunity, right or wrong. After all, how many dying people willingly take experimental drugs that they know might kill them? We are indoctrinated from birth that nature is cruel and harsh, and we try to beat her at every turn. The idea of letting things take their natural course has been thoroughly wiped from the mind of almost every American.

Lastly, I think there may be a third option that she doesn't consider: returning to the land voluntarily. For my part, I've given up trying to tell other people they shouldn't screw up the planet. Experience has taught me that most Americans are in flat-out denial, and I don't want to see an even more fascist response to what are really intractable problems. So my solution follows Gandhi's suggestion: Be the change you wish to see in the world. Will it solve the larger problems with the ecosystem? No. But it's a start, and I don't have to brow-beat and guilt-trip people along the way. My goal is to demonstrate that a much lower-energy, less intensive lifestyle is not only possible, but much more emotionally and spiritually fulfilling than the wasteland of consumption and greed called Western culture.

Also see www.dieoff.org

This site presents, among other things, a handy little digest of the entire history of human civilization. Its author has some interesting points to present. His thesis posits that the end of the energy age, and especially the end of the age of oil, will decimate advanced civilization. Though a bit tongue-in-cheek, it is a compelling view.

And the end of cheap energy has begun already, on an already overpopulated planet. And this timeline does not even consider the unmitigated effects of continued global warming. Nor does it take into account the effects of possible nuclear resource wars, and resource wars have already begun as well.

1. Pre Industrial Phase [c. 3 000 000 BC to 1765]

(-----Stone Age-----)

A - Tool making (c. 3 000 000 BC)
B - Fire used (c. 1 000 000 BC)

(-----Stone Age Interrupted-----)

C - Neolithic agricultural revolution (c. 8 000 BC)
D - Watts steam engine of 1765... (proto-industrial phase begins)

2. Industrial Phase [1930 to 2025, estimated ]

E - Per capita energy-use 37% of peak value
F - Peak energy-use
G - Present energy-use
H - Per capita energy-use 37% of peak value

3. Post Industrial Phase [c. 2100 and beyond ]

J, K, and L = Recurring future attempts at industrialization fail.

(-----Stone Age Resumes-----)

the end.

I think most environmentalists are not being realistic.

The great methane release of the 2020s is inevitable.

Even if you stopped human emissions completely right now... 400 gigatons of methane is going to be released soon because of the carbon already in the atmosphere. When that happens look forward to poisoned hydrogen sulfide clouds floating around earth destroying all ozone, and killing all plant/animal-life like 250 million years ago...
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/02/050223130549.htm

I think it's time to build support for techno-fixes. The great thing about techno-fixes is that oil/coal/agribusiness companies won't care if we do them.

I think we need to fund NASA to research sending a giant reflective tarp near Venus in-between the sun and earth so we can block all sunlight in the Arctic.

Just have it there ready to be deployed... just in case methane starts being released exponentially from the arctic and ocean. Despite how much environmentalists have invested in "Plan A" - having a "Plan B" as an option is never a bad idea.