Beam me to Planet Gore !
Posted on 09/07/2010 11:20:19 AM PDT by Ernest_at_the_Beach
But you better care. Laughlin pinpoints the key reason a global crisis is coming soon: What he says has everything to do with America's global warming policies, our deficits, hot commodities, investment strategies and how to live in an age of increasing warfare.
The Scholar's editor hammers home Laughlin's warning that "humans have already triggered the sixth great period of species extinction in Earth's history." The what? Yes, we are in an age of species extinction. And it's happening fast. The last extinction was 65 million years ago, at the end of the 250 million year Mesozoic era. But this one is very different. Ask yourself: Will the human species be the new dinosaurs, which vanished long before we arrived?
Your brain needs to shift into a new mindset to think like Laughlin, a physicist who thinks in geologic time, in hundreds of millions of years, about a planet that's been around over five billion years. Yes, geologic time is very long. But get this: The end may catch us by surprise. A sudden accelerating geologic quickie, like the asteroids that wiped out the dinosaurs. Or like the Earth's beginning, a sudden Big Bang.
(Excerpt) Read more at marketwatch.com ...
I think this guy is a closet Commie.
His twist on the usual Gore themes is that he says it is too late top prevent global catastrophe, that humans will be wiped from the planet and that The Earth will ultimately survive.
George Carlin said it better:
We’re so self-important. So self-important. Everybody’s going to save something now. “Save the trees, save the bees, save the whales, save those snails.” And the greatest arrogance of all: save the planet. What? Are these people kidding me? Save the planet, we don’t even know how to take care of ourselves yet. We haven’t learned how to care for one another, we’re gonna save the planet?
I’m getting tired of that ——. Tired of that ——. I’m tired of Earth Day, I’m tired of these self-righteous environmentalists, these white, bourgeois liberals who think the only thing wrong with this country is there aren’t enough bicycle paths. People trying to make the world safe for their Volvos. Besides, environmentalists don’t give a —— about the planet. They don’t care about the planet. Not in the abstract they don’t. Not in the abstract they don’t. You know what they’re interested in? A clean place to live. Their own habitat. They’re worried that some day in the future, they might be personally inconvenienced. Narrow, unenlightened self-interest doesn’t impress me.
Besides, there is nothing wrong with the planet. Nothing wrong with the planet. The planet is fine. The PEOPLE are f——ed. Difference. Difference. The planet is fine. Compared to the people, the planet is doing great. Been here four and a half billion years. Did you ever think about the arithmetic? The planet has been here four and a half billion years. We’ve been here, what, a hundred thousand? Maybe two hundred thousand? And we’ve only been engaged in heavy industry for a little over two hundred years. Two hundred years versus four and a half billion. And we have the CONCEIT to think that somehow we’re a threat? That somehow we’re gonna put in jeopardy this beautiful little blue-green ball that’s just a-floatin’ around the sun?
The planet has been through a lot worse than us. Been through all kinds of things worse than us. Been through earthquakes, volcanoes, plate tectonics, continental drift, solar flares, sun spots, magnetic storms, the magnetic reversal of the poles...hundreds of thousands of years of bombardment by comets and asteroids and meteors, worlwide floods, tidal waves, worldwide fires, erosion, cosmic rays, recurring ice ages...And we think some plastic bags, and some aluminum cans are going to make a difference? The planet...the planet...the planet isn’t going anywhere. WE ARE!
We’re going away. Pack your ——, folks. We’re going away. And we won’t leave much of a trace, either. Thank God for that. Maybe a little styrofoam. Maybe. A little styrofoam. The planet’ll be here and we’ll be long gone. Just another failed mutation. Just another closed-end biological mistake. An evolutionary cul-de-sac. The planet’ll shake us off like a bad case of fleas. A surface nuisance.
You wanna know how the planet’s doing? Ask those people at Pompeii, who are frozen into position from volcanic ash, how the planet’s doing. You wanna know if the planet’s all right, ask those people in Mexico City or Armenia or a hundred other places buried under thousands of tons of earthquake rubble, if they feel like a threat to the planet this week. Or how about those people in Kilowaia, Hawaii, who built their homes right next to an active volcano, and then wonder why they have lava in the living room.
The planet will be here for a long, long, LONG time after we’re gone, and it will heal itself, it will cleanse itself, ‘cause that’s what it does. It’s a self-correcting system. The air and the water will recover, the earth will be renewed, and if it’s true that plastic is not degradable, well, the planet will simply incorporate plastic into a new pardigm: the earth plus plastic. The earth doesn’t share our prejudice towards plastic. Plastic came out of the earth. The earth probably sees plastic as just another one of its children. Could be the only reason the earth allowed us to be spawned from it in the first place. It wanted plastic for itself. Didn’t know how to make it. Needed us. Could be the answer to our age-old egocentric philosophical question, “Why are we here?” Plastic!
The species breaks free of Earth or goes down with her when she goes. That isn’t anything new. The difference here is that so far nobody has blamed the dinosaurs for the asteroid that caused that mass extinction (if it did). Blaming humans for the mass extinction that hasn’t happened yet and whose cause we cannot know is, to be polite, stretching things a bit. IMHO.
But at some point we do need to get off this rock.
Throughout the ages of man, natural disasters have occurred to eliminate large amounts of the population. That will not change. Whether by ravaging storms or raving viruses, I believe that nature will take its course.
Besides, isn’t everything supposed to end December 12, 2012, or sometime during that month/year? Just remember, God is in control.
But, of course, many of us are too chauvinistic to care purely about the earth. Even if the earth survives, damage is felt by us.
Global warming forecasts have the further difficulty that you can’t find much actual global warming in present-day weather observations. [...] In order to test the predictions, you’d have to separate these big effects from subtle, inexorable changes on scales of centuries, and nobody knows how to do that yet.
In one paragraph, the author encapsulates what seems to be beyond so many.
His explanations of geological phenomena are fairly good, albeit not entirely rigorous.
I often have wondered why so many seem so joyous at the prospect that climate change might not be anthropogenic (not using the IPCC definition of Cllimate Change, of course), since that would mean we have limited options for managing the environment in which we live, putting us at the mercy of the elements. To me, it's like being glad to discover that your roof leaks but that you have stayed dry only because it wasn't raining. The next time it rains, wouldn't we rather it had been a leak we could have fixed?
God has also reserved the right to Himself to destroy (and remake) the Earth.
That’s God’s call, not ours. The climate has always changed, Improvise...Adapt...Overcome.
How many species are there anyway, and who counted them all?
Speak for yourself Mr. Homo Sapiens. We like it here.
Thank you for posting that.
I'm thinking strong psychotropic drugs are involved to engender such "brain shifting". It appears to help AlGore release his inner whatever while propositioning random massage therapists for a happy ending.
The fact that the change in the Earth’s temperature is not caused by man is of value.
First, it means we should not tax ourselves into depression to “fix” something like CO2 emissions that is not going to do any good.
Second, we can spend our resources on removing the things that global warming results in, like putting houses on higher ground when you know a flood is coming.
And many people are hoping that we're not able to do that via modifying the climate.
So...you think it's not okay to divert the course of the Nile, I suppose.
Exactly. Whatever happens, it is His will.
If we can impact the climate and we decide that by keeping our economies stronger we can better manage the changes, that seems best to me.
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