From: Robert J. Bradbury (bradbury@aeiveos.com)
Date: Tue Apr 08 2003 - 09:14:28 MDT
On Tue, 8 Apr 2003, Lee Corbin wrote:
[snip]
> Okay, thanks for the soft toss: here it goes. The whole point
> was never any particular harm that would come from global
> warming, or nuclear energy, or oil seepage, etc., but rather
> from the need for CRISIS, any crisis.
[more snips]
I have to take exception to Lee's reductionist comments.
Global warming *is* a significant concern. Here are three reasons
(and there are probably more) why:
a) It seems that corals are very sensitive to water temperature.
Warm up the water, the corals die off, they don't regrow and
reduce the protection of shorelines causing increased erosion
of many islands around the world. (Why this is a case remains
a mystery to me because given the temperature fluctuations over
many millions of years one would think the corals would have
adapted to this.) So there is likely to be significant erosion
of islands/shorelines with the decline of coral reef protection.
This will in turn force individuals living near those shorelines
to move as well as probably cause greater pollution to nearby
waters, a reduction in fish habitats, a decline in fish
abundance and an increase in the price of fish as a human
nutrient (and this is on top of the many overfished fishery
resources in the world today).
b) There are nations that will probably not surive a rise in sea level.
If the various ice caps and glaciers around the world melt the
ocean level will rise (though as Spike has pointed out this may
take some time). There are nations, e.g. the Maldives,
for whom rising sea levels could prove fatal [1]. Lee may
not care about the rise in ocean levels but the people
living in the Maldives certainly do.
c) A "warmer" planet provides increased energy to weather patterns.
Increased energy to weather patterns will likely increase the
number of hurricanes and typhons and therefore property damage
and loss of life (that is particularly unextropic). It will
also tend to increase your cost of living *Lee Corbin* because
the insurance companies will distribute some of the repair and
replacement costs onto your insurance bill. [Insurance companies
have very complex allocation methods for this -- "Lets see we
have to balance the costs of hurricanes in North Carolina with
the risks of earthquakes in California".]
One of the things that I think extropianism *requires* is that
one needs to pay attention to the consequences of ones actions.
So, one cannot help it much if people choose to live in the
neighborhood of a volcano or an earthquake zone -- we don't
currently have the means to control volcanos or earthquakes.
But if we can reasonably expect that global warming will
raise sea levels and eliminate nations or cause other
widespread disruptions due to shifts in weather patterns
then we *ought* to pay attention to it -- because global
warming (whether it is caused by us or a natural process)
*is* something we can do something about [2].
Robert
1. "Island Superlatives": http://users.erols.com/jcalder/SUPERLATIVESV2.html
2. Bradbury, R. J., "Global Warming is a Red Herring"
http://www.aeiveos.com/~bradbury/Papers/GWiaRH.html
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