The modern extinction crisis.

[Workingman]

Today the world is 40 years in to an extinction period, with plants and animals being lost at a rate not seen since the time of the dinosaurs. The dinosaurs were unlucky as their extinction was caused by a thumping great rock hitting the Earth, and it was almost instant. The modern extinction is a form of lingering death creeping up on us almost unseen....

Since the 1970s the planet has lost millions of sq/km of rain forests, heathlands and jungle and according to the WWF global wildlife populations have dropped more than half. The only mammal top have grown its population by any degree is Homo Sapiens sapiens - us. Up from 3.5bn to 7.7bn in the same period.

In the 70s James Lovelock came up with the Gaia principle. It proposed that all life interacted with its surroundings in a synergistic and self-regulating system. This helped to maintain and perpetuate the conditions for life on the planet.

It does not quite work as expected because the planet is too big, but it is spot-on at more local levels. If a lot of these local problems are added together we do get one big problem. This is where we are today.

We have become our own lingering death

[Workingman]

I hate this sort of thing and it might be one of the reasons people look, then shrug their shoulders and move on.

The 2015 Paris agreement is stalling so delegates from nearly 200 countries are gathering in Poland for talks to try to kick start it back into life. Let's see, thbat would be a couple of delegates plus support staff plus local journalistic reporters, say 10 per country = 2000 bodies from all over the place, and these clever people have offered us some tips before they begin: fabulous!

To whit: "The IPCC says we need to: buy less meat, milk, cheese and butter; eat more locally sourced seasonal food - and throw less of it away; drive electric cars but walk or cycle short distances; take trains and buses instead of planes; use videoconferencing instead of business travel; use a washing line instead of a tumble dryer; insulate homes; demand low carbon in every consumer product."

Do as we say, not as we do.

[TheOstrich]

use videoconferencing instead of business travel

Says it all, really. And literally coming straight after the G20 in Argentina as well - how many decamped from there straight to Poland?

[Suff]

Do as we say, not as we do.

Indeed. Worthless idiots. However the climate lobby don't help themselves. Most of them are environmentalists who would scream blue bloody murder if you moved all the factories back into the cities. Yet they don't want the countryside reduced any more and they don't want us to travel to work.

So let me sum that up. They want us to live close to factories but they don't want the factories close to where we live and they don't want any more houses close to where the workplaces are. They want us to use EV, except there aren't EV's enough for more than a few elite to buy and, even then, we don't have clean power for them so we'd just be burning carbon ay another means.

I keep telling them we need more choices to consume in a carbon neutral fashion, not endless remonstrations to do the impossible without the ability to do it.

The climate lobby should be driving governments to give us carbon free transport and homes as an option. Then they can make the alternative financially prohibitive to use. They cannot just punish us with costs and not give us an alternative.

So the middle of the road punter just nods their head and carries on, ignoring all the hot air. After all, if the Government were "Serious" they would have done something about it, right??

[Workingman]

Two of the biggest problems] are the global economic fantasy of growth, growth and more growth for ever; and global population. The two go hand-in-hand and nobody in a position to do anything about them dare go against either.

[Suff]

Two of the biggest problems] are the global economic fantasy of growth, growth and more growth for ever; and global population. The two go hand-in-hand and nobody in a position to do anything about them dare go against either.

Well of course that never makes the news does it. More people, more agriculture, more animals, more forest decimated, more oil used, more power to use, more coal burned...

The very interesting thing I have seen is that the one thing which is driving down populations in places like India is wealth. Just as the wealth and the NHS reduced family sizes in the UK.

It is quite interesting. Because to create that wealth in the 3rd world we are going to have to consume MORE. But to consume MORE we're going to need to have that consumption sustainable and low carbon and low waste.

There's a thought for you!

[Workingman]

Something else intrigues me with all this.

The general public seems to place the environment, climate change, the global economy and global population in their own separate bubbles, as though they are unconnected. That is fine when they are looked at as individual subjects, but dangerous when people forget they are part of a whole.

All of these bubbles are floating round in a bigger bubble - the Earth. As they expand they increase the pressure in the big bubble, but that can only go so far. The pressure inside the big bubble prevents the little bubbles from bursting, but when it gets too great the big bubble goes 'pop'. The 'pop' releases all the pressure and the little bubbles under their own pressure also burst.

We are fast approaching bursting point.

[AliasAggers]

As I see it, the greatest threat to future generations is population growth, and, if that problem is not solved,
then, in my humble opinion, prospects for life here for the human race seem exceedingly brief indeed, and
their very existence on Planet Earth might be as little as 100 years.

What I cannot understand is that the people in authority throughout the world do not seem to recognise this.