Global Warming's New Math

[David Morris]

It is unlikely that we humans will extinct ourselves.  More likely
human civilization will recede to remote pockets of the most habitable
portions of the planet, but not before countless human deaths as well
as countless extinctions of less adaptable/mobile species, a tragedy
of great proportions.  For the future viability and evolution of
Earth's non-human inhabitants, it would be better if humans did
vanish.  Maybe another sentient species would arise, probably to F-up
everything all over again.

David Morris

On Tue, Jul 24, 2012 at 12:05 PM,  <kelber at mindspring.com> wrote:
>
> What you say makes a lot of sense, Ian.  I'll admit I'm an urbanist in
> outlook and values.  I don't romanticize the wild - it scares the shit out
> of me.  It's that place with animals that bite you and weird bugs and you
> have to drive everywhere.  Seriously, I need to live in a city because I
> never learned to drive, having always lived within several blocks of the
> subway.  You're absolutely right in saying that our respective habitats
> shape our views on this issue (issue?  debate?).  I think we can both agree
> that we want something between the human-less world where plankton frolic,
> but no human is there to right sonnets or haiku about it; and the foul
> nuclear soup we're making of it, in which no one and nothing will frolic
> ever again.  But as Joseph says, there's no easy route to the middle ground.
>
> Laura
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Ian Livingston
> Sent: Jul 23, 2012 9:30 PM
> To: kelber at mindspring.com
> Cc: pynchon-l at waste.org
> Subject: Re: Global Warming's New Math
>
>> I'm amazed at how many people fall for this easy notion that "we" are
>> destroying what would otherwise be a
>> "beautiful" and, somehow, moral planet by our evil human machinations.
>> The tragedy of global warming is that
>> we're fucking ourselves over, not that we're destroying a planet that
>> would have no  attributes, positive or
>> negative, if we attribute-applying humans weren't here.
>
> Well, this may be where I part tracks with you on this topic, Laura. I don't
> do Gaian, know nothing or next to nothing about Gaia, except as one name of
> a pagan goddess of primitive tribes. I have, however, lived a significant
> portion of my life studying and living in wilderness and / or working in the
> interface between humans and non-humans, primarily as a miner, forester,
> logger, and arborist. My years living in wild places have seen me in camps
> in Alaska, Wyoming, and Washington, and living in remote places off the grid
> in Wisconsin, Washington, and California. I have spent very few of my years
> within the city limits, and I do not incline to see the world through the
> anthropocentric perspective without considering other possible perspectives.
> I have witnessed the intelligence of wild animals. They can exhibit crafty,
> playful, curious, gentle, fierce, voracious, and a whole slew of other
> qualified attributes. We humans, in this case we English-speaking humans,
> apply those labels, but the behaviors just are evident in the animal world.
> Good and evil are irrelevant, but good and bad are not. Most wild animals
> know good from bad, only not in human terms. Some things produce happiness,
> others do not, and still others cause weakness, pain, sickness, or death.
>
> Although I apply the label, the world remains beautiful without me. And the
> tragedy, qua tragedy, in the human decimation of the what is pristine in the
> world is that we in our hubris are destroying not only ourselves and our
> future, but that we are, in fact, destroying scores of species every year.
> It is impossible to know the long-term effects of the human plunder of the
> planet. Hell, there could be some less than devastating results of our
> craving for safety, comfort, and esteemed status, I don't know. But from my
> first-hand observations, we aren't doing the biosphere many favors.
>
> It's a question of values. Do we value humans more than the biosphere? Is
> our comfort more important than the survival of plankton in the Pacific
> Ocean? For my part, because they contribute to the continued diversity and
> health of life on Earth, I think the plankton have a much greater value than
> do humans. We *can* live harmoniously in the biosphere, we have done in the
> past, and there may come a time when humans are able to apply their
> technological genius to harboring rather than harming other species, as we
> do on small scales already, but for that to happen on a large scale will
> require a significant shift in values. Capitalist economics be damned, we
> need restraint, not oil, not fracking, not coal, uranium, or any of the
> other toxins we so eagerly unearth or enearth, to coin a term. City folk
> have a remarkable talent for distancing themselves from these truths, but
> city folk have only romantic associations with the wild, derived from media,
> a few camping or backpacking trips, or a season on somebody's farm.
>
>
> On Mon, Jul 23, 2012 at 3:27 PM, <kelber at mindspring.com> wrote:
>>
>> Exactly.  Those judgments don't exist.  I emphasized the negative
>> attributes just to counter the beatific Gaian view of a pristine, human-free
>> Earth.   I'm amazed at how many people fall for this easy notion that "we"
>> are destroying what would otherwise be a "beautiful" and, somehow, moral
>> planet by our evil human machinations.  The tragedy of global warming is
>> that we're fucking ourselves over, not that we're destroying a planet that
>> would have no  attributes, positive or negative, if we attribute-applying
>> humans weren't here.
>>
>> Laura
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: malignd at aol.com
>> Sent: Jul 23, 2012 6:17 PM
>> To: pynchon-l at waste.org
>> Subject: Re: Global Warming's New Math
>>
>> Without us "cold" and "dispassionate" and "ugly" don't exist.  We created
>> the context for understanding those judgements.  Not that I'm voting for my
>> own obliteration ...
>>
>> Nature, without humans, is cold and dispassionate, and just as likely to
>> be ugly.  I vote for us.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: kelber <kelber at mindspring.com>
>> To: pynchon-l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
>> Sent: Sun, Jul 22, 2012 11:38 pm
>> Subject: Re: Global Warming's New Math
>>
>> You know,  a friend asked me that question once, in a slightly different
>> form:  If you were giving the human race a grade, what would it be?  A month
>> or so earlier,  I might have said D or F.  But I said "A."  Why?  I had just
>> finished reading Gravity's Rainbow for the first time.  And it struck me
>> what a wonderful thing human intelligence is, that it could create such a
>> mind-expanding novel, filled with wit and morality and silliness and
>> fascinating connections.  Why do we consider the Hitlers, the Monsantos, the
>> sadists, the criminally greedy the ultimate shapers of the human legacy?
>> Why can't the essence of what it is to be human be defined by the Pynchons,
>> the Oscar Wildes, the cruciverbalists, the non-stop party people, the
>> beekeepers, the folklorists, the loving grandmas, and on and on?
>> Intelligence, even though it sometimes takes an evil turn, is a rarity worth
>> preserving.  Nature, without humans, is cold and dispassionate, and just as
>> likely to be ugly.  I vote for us.
>>
>> Laura
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Rich
>> Sent: Jul 22, 2012 10:02 PM
>> To: David Morris
>> Cc: Monte Davis , Dave Monroe , pynchon -l
>> Subject: Re: Global Warming's New Math
>>
>> Is humanity even worth saving? I'm ever wavering
>>
>> Sent from my iPhone
>>
>> On Jul 22, 2012, at 9:40 PM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> We've (are) lost.  New Orleans and the rest of the world's coastal cities
>> are Atlantas's.  And bye bye to countless species.
>>
>> The 20th/21st Centuries won't be fondly remembered.
>>
>> On Sunday, July 22, 2012, Monte Davis wrote:
>>>
>>> The core argument, without caveats and qualifications:
>>>
>>> 1) From Kyoto through Copenhagen, a 2 degree C. global increase has been
>>> widely accepted as a threshold we really don't wanna cross;
>>> 2) We can calculate how much more fossil-fuel burning will get us there;
>>> 3) Current proven reserves held by energy co's and nation/companies are
>>> about *six times* that  amount;
>>> 4) The stock price of energy companies (and the credit-worthiness of
>>> Saudi
>>> Arabia, Venezuela, USA states fracking their shale, et al) is tightly
>>> correlated with their reserves. Ergo, any combination of policies/actions
>>> that would be effective in keeping the increase under 2 degrees would in
>>> effect say to all those parties: "Five-sixths of that collective asset
>>> just
>>> became worthless." (Yeah, I know, coal & oil & gas are also feedstocks
>>> for
>>> polymers, fertilizers etc, but at this level that's a detail. Yeah,  I
>>> know,
>>> CO2 capture & sequestration is possible -- but do the math, and it would
>>> require infrastructure -- and expenditure -- on the same scale as all
>>> today's pipelines and refineries and tankers and coal trains.)
>>>
>>> Some of you are no doubt saying "duhh," but it snapped my head around
>>> even
>>> though I've been reading McKibben & co for a long time. It's the
>>> difference
>>> between a handwaved "the fossil-fuel industry can't keep growing in
>>> future
>>> decades as it has for the last century or two"... and saying to that
>>> industry, the world's largest: "five-sixths of the biggest asset
>>> investors
>>> recognize in you *right now* is a mirage." That makes it much easier to
>>> understand the fervor of denial.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> -----Original Message-----
>>> From: owner-pynchon-l at waste.org [mailto:owner-pynchon-l at waste.org] On
>>> Behalf
>>> Of Dave Monroe
>>> Sent: Saturday, July 21, 2012 9:35 PM
>>> To: pynchon -l
>>> Subject: Global Warming's New Math
>>>
>>>
>>> http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/global-warmings-terrifying-new-mat
>>> h-20120719
>>>
>
>
>
> --
> "Less than any man have I  excuse for prejudice; and I feel for all creeds
> the warm sympathy of one who has come to learn that even the trust in reason
> is a precarious faith, and that we are all fragments of darkness groping for
> the sun. I know no more about the ultimates than the simplest urchin in the
> streets." -- Will Durant