Global Warming's New Math

[Prashant Kumar]

Wonderful points all round.

This conversation has evolved to an interesting place. Taken as a whole, it
seems to contradict points made by individual people. And yet, reading the
whole thing, you come away with a definite ... feel.

I think of the GW debate in a similar way. Sure, we can get bogged down in
details (and I love to), but we miss the forest for the trees that way, and
we end up bulldozing the whole damn nature reserve and building a shopping
mall instead.

Sometimes you might hear a physicist talking about "large-scale structure"
or "macro" this and "micro" that; basically contrasting scales. This is the
distinction they are making.

prashant

On Wednesday, 25 July 2012,  <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
>
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