On Sun, Mar 31, 2024 at 12:09:25PM -0400, John Clark wrote:
> On Sun, Mar 31, 2024 at 10:05 AM William Flynn Wallace <foozle...@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>
> > John, you are judging all environmentalists by a tiny group of
> extremists.
>
>
>
> Tiny? I didn't see a larger group of environmentalists lobbying in favor of
> SCoPEx or The Thirty Meter Telescope! I am judging environmentalists by those
> who manage to get things done, or rather those who are successful in making
> sure that nothing ever gets done. They'd rather cry about global warming than
> do anything to try to fix the problem, unless of course the solution
> involves
> a vast amount of suffering, then fixing it would be OK. Otherwise they'd
> prefer
> the problem remain unsolved.
>
"Environmentalists" are not one united group of people. Probably one
of the biggest movements is Avaaz, which takes on environmental
concerns as well as humanitarian ones. I'm subscribed to that group,
but SCoPEx didn't rate a mention. So this most likely was a small group
opposing it, and nobody else knew about it.
But...
The most compelling argument to opposing geoengineering is that it is
a distraction from the real task, which is to reduce CO2
emissions. Some people (I don't think anyone in this company would be
that stupid) seem to think it is OK to continue burning fossil fuels
if the effects can be mitagated by climate geoengineering, or carbon
capture sequestration. Some in the environmental movement are
suspicious that fossil fuel companies will hold out mitigations
methods as a "get out of gaol free" card, to allow business as usual.
This is all entirely political, and as far as I'm concerned total
bullshit. We need all and every possible means to counteract climate
change. That means decarbonise the economy as soon as possible, it
also means geoengineering to mitigate the worst effects, and it also
means adapting to the changing climate by, for example developing
drought resistent crops. It was already too late for just doing
massively decarbonisation when I first became aware of the issue in
the 1980s, let alone getting started now some 30+ years later with
more than a decade of ostrich-like behaviour by the conservative mob
(that's in Australia, to say nothing of the rest of the
world). Nothing should be off the table, at least as far as
researching different options to figure out what interventions work
and how cost efective they will be.
Humanity is already locked in for a very bumpy century - there will be
mass migration, plagues, famine, infrastructure - what we need to
focus on is what we need to do to save civilisation.
--
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Dr Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile)
Principal, High Performance Coders hpco...@hpcoders.com.au
http://www.hpcoders.com.au
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