Sea Change – The Pacific's Perilous Turn

At this point in time I'm more interested in the experiences of living and learning. I don't care enough about "ultimate" questions or answers to accept or reject them. I don't need to be right about this; tomorrow I might decide to be a hardcore fundamentalist X, for any value of X. When I talk to friends and family who have beliefs (or not) of any sort, I try to emphasize the good parts of their systems: those parts that seem the most likely to help them in the ways they need help. I also critique those concepts that don't seem likely to help, but only for that reason, not because they're "true" or not.

I've probably said too much; this is really off-topic for HN.

1. Your language ("sin", "evil", "believe") indicates a major subjective component in what you're saying. As with everything subjective, you're probably aware that it's not provable with cold facts and logic, and it might justifiably be rejected by others' own subjectivity and take on facts.

2. A pervading feeling that the world is going to hell in a handbasket has proven seductive many times in history. Does any of this sound familiar:

"[They] claim that the current society and its rulers are corrupt, unjust, or otherwise wrong. They therefore believe they will be destroyed soon by a powerful force. The harmful nature of the status quo is considered intractable without the anticipated dramatic change"

Such world views have occurred often enough that there's a consecrated term for them: [1]. Sure, the different groups that held such beliefs differed from you in how they thought it would come to pass. But they differed from each other as well.

3. There's nothing necessarily theistic about millenarian beliefs. ("Official" churches have more often than not fought against them [3].) E.g. a lot of people in the 60s thought the apocalypse was due within two decades due to overpopulation.

4. Climate models have a simple, persuasive logic behind them. But that doesn't make them necessarily right. Malthusianism also had a seemingly bulletproof logic, yet the facts did not keep pace with it [4]. When the climate models turn out lacking precision [5], they also lose the force of scientific certainty. All we're left with is "the world is warming, we can't say how fast"; which is, of course, not a falsifiable belief [6].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millenarianism#Theology

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_bomb

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennialism#Reformation_and_b...

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon%E2%80%93Ehrlich_wager

[5] http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/capital-weather-gang/wp/...

[6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability

What happens then is that more CO2 is added, and it seems to be clear at this point that the plants are not keeping up - even losing ground due to land use change and deforestation.

Main carbon sinks are ocean uptake (the problem discussed in the article), weathering and the small amounts of organic matter that sink below the ground/sea/lakes without rotting (and which will create new coal and oil in time).

Apart from the first point, these processes happen on geologic time scales. (Also, shells of small sea animals, but again a miniscule factor. Those will be the next lime rocks.)

What you suggest is a new sink for carbon. However, it would probably cost more energy than can be gotten from fossil fuels because gravity. (Sry, too tired to run the calculations right now.)

This doesn't take the Population Paradox into account. I'm not saying such measures shouldn't be pursued. To do otherwise would be to abandon democratic principles and the uncontroversial advantages of education.

But it won't make any difference. When medical researchers discovered antibiotics, they believed that marked the end of bacterial infectious diseases. But that was not to be -- natural selection reacted to these new measures by choosing the tiny minority of bacteria that proved resistant to antibiotics, and we now face bacterial strains that are completely resistant to any available remedies (MRSA, tuberculosis and others).

In the same way, natural selection will react by these new measures by choosing the tiny minority of people that prove resistant to education and gender equality, and we will face human strains that are completely resistant to any available remedies.

In case anyone thinks this is some kind of veiled racist rant, I personally think the resistant strain will turn out to be white people of European descent. The reason? We can and do rationalize anything to ourselves -- for example, that environmental projects will save either us or the planet, in the face of uncontrolled population growth.

See, in the Population Paradox, it's not the people who get it that are the problem -- it's the people who don't, who can't, get it. And history proves that there's no political solution that doesn't turn out to be much worse than the problem itself.

"We have met the enemy, and he is us." -- Pogo

More here: http://arachnoid.com/evolution