Since the start of the industrial revolution, mankind has been burning fossil fuel (coal, oil, etc.) and adding its carbon to the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. In 50 years or so this process, says Director Roger Revelle of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, may have a violent effect on the earth’s climate Dr. [more]
Many people improving the environment think only in terms of the air they breathe in their hometown and the water in the aquifer under their hometown. My guess is very few are thinking centuries ahead or thousand of years ahead, but that’s what we have to do.Pete Seeger (via Adam)
“Maybe we’ll be smacked by an asteroid we’re not looking at and it will offset the CO2 we’re not looking at.” -Bruce Sterling, via Twitter
we do not share the view of many of our economics colleagues that growth will solve the economic problem, that narrow self-interest is the only dependable human motive, that technology will always find a substitute for any depleted resource, that the market can efficiently allocate all types of goods, that free markets always lead to an equilibrium balancing supply and demand, or that the laws of thermodynamics are irrelevant to economics. [more]
If evolution was real, it would still be happening; apes would be turning into humans today. Lousiana schoolteacher
“Global warming, huh? By pure coincidence every scientist was right” Homer Simpson
We hold the future still timidly, but perceive it for the first time, as a function of our own action. Having seen it, are we to turn away from something that offends the very nature of our earliest desires, or is the recognition of our new powers sufficient to change those desires into the service of the future which they will have to bring about?. [more]
Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency. Hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth’s treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal… To hope is to give yourself to the future – and that commitment to the future is what makes the present inhabitable. [more]
The problems of the world cannot possibly be solved by skeptics or cynics, whose horizons are limited by the obvious realities. We need men who can dream of things that never were and ask, why not?John F. Kennedy
“We don’t need more dead clutter to entomb in landfills. We need more options.”Bruce Sterling
Here is the IPCC message: We are as certain that humans are radically changing the planet’s climate as we are that tobacco causes cancer. Peter Gleick
We are plagued by grumpy nostalgists — mystics on both wings who preach hostility to science and technology, who yearn for the past. Our only route is forward. The answer to the problems generated by science is… more science. Open science, innovative, reciprocally critical, transparent, searching for positive sum games, able to detect potential errors. [more]
“If you’re talking to someone who isn’t following the climate change discussion very closely, they may not understand the difference between technical and political difficulty. It does them no favors to talk about inevitability and the fall of civilization. They’re either going to think you’re nuts or they’re going to join you in despondency. [more]
Aliens might be surprised to learn that in a cosmos with unlimited starlight, humans kill for energy buried in sand.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
“There is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening.”
Marshall McLuhan
