<html><head><style type="text/css"><!-- DIV {margin:0px;} --></style></head><body><div style="font-family:'bookman old style', 'new york', times, serif;font-size:10pt"><div>The problem has never been that people cannot adapt. It's that ecosystems can adapt in ways that are extremely unfriendly to people. No matter how well-deserved your estimation of your own genes is, your kids are not going to grow gills or derive nutrition from sand. Catastrophic global warming won't kill by heat stroke. It'll kill by war, disease and famine.</div><div><br></div><div style="font-family:bookman old style, new york, times, serif;font-size:10pt"><div style="font-family:bookman old style, new york, times, serif;font-size:10pt"><font size="2" face="Tahoma"><hr size="1"><b><span style="font-weight: bold;">From:</span></b> Mike Dougherty <msd001@gmail.com><br><b><span style="font-weight: bold;">To:</span></b> ExI chat list
<extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org><br><b><span style="font-weight: bold;">Sent:</span></b> Mon, March 1, 2010 8:22:16 PM<br><b><span style="font-weight: bold;">Subject:</span></b> Re: [ExI] Phil Jones acknowledging that climate science isn'tsettled<br></font><br>
On Mon, Mar 1, 2010 at 10:45 PM, spike <<a ymailto="mailto:spike66@att.net" href="mailto:spike66@att.net">spike66@att.net</a>> wrote:<br>> I often see stuff like this, but it is always puzzling. Can someone explain<br>> why the average temperature increasing by a degree or two or half a degree<br>> in a human lifetime would bring civilization to its knees? Are we really<br>> that delicate and non-adaptable?<br><br>My theory supposes linear growth of 1 degree per year wouldn't be so<br>bad if not for the anecdote about boiling a frog to death. So if we<br>don't get wildly concerned today, we may find ourselves evolving<br>perfectly comfortably into lizards to accommodate our new ecology.<br>There may be a few people who are OK with this but they're more than<br>two deviations from the top of the curve (which everybody knows is the<br>safety-in-numbers best place to be)<br><br>Conversely at >1 degree per year as input
to my weather model, we<br>notice hypertetration of temperature increase. This threatens to<br>overcome the mere exponential growth in technological ability to adapt<br>to temperature change. If we don't act immediately to rectify Earth's<br>runaway temperature increase, we might find ourselves within a few<br>short months having an average temperature in excess of the surface of<br>the sun.<br><br>The observation of <1 degree per year of temperature increase to this<br>weather model would indicate an unknown dampening of hypertetration.<br>Unknown variables could later be discovered to have disastrous<br>consequences, perhaps leading to a complete re-examination of the data<br>and possibly the invalidation of the theory. People generally view a<br>complete restart after years of emotional investment to be<br>unimaginable and therefor inherently wrong.<br><br>To answer that last question quite seriously: No, we are not
that<br>delicate - we only think that we are.<br>_______________________________________________<br>extropy-chat mailing list<br><a ymailto="mailto:extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org" href="mailto:extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org">extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org</a><br><span><a target="_blank" href="http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat">http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat</a></span><br></div></div><div style="position:fixed"></div>
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