Thursday, March 30, 2006

the best space ship is the earth, doesn't get much better than what we had. now the question is are we condeming our decendents to a hell created out of greed? what will we do when the polar caps are gone? (move to higher ground if we can). Sounds as if we as a species aren't quite as smart as we tell each other. I'd like to know if the global climate modelers can give us a hint about what we must do if we are to mitigate the comming warming, if we are to avoid some chaotic transition to a climate mode more like venus than our present earth. More likely is a long term reduction in diversity, the loss of entire eco systems, and the eventual reduction in human population to a level less injurious to the rest of the life forms on earth. Maybe we could learn to do the Moses thing, to help species survive the blast of heat that is the delayed response to digging up the dynasaures and their forests and burning them......maybe we better help the forests move north and south, pay more attention to basic watershed management, start moving away from the coasts. What about Bangladesh? What about much of the tropical coral reefs? It's one thing to think about a rise of a foot or two, but 20' would change the california coastline by miles in some places. China is about to release a blast of coal and oil derived co2 that will dwarf the entire world output to date, sealing the wave of heating that's breaking our climate cycle and pushing us into a world that humans haven't experienced since we learned to talk.

We humans should be using the climate modeling to do further studies of how Austrailia could modify the climate, following up on the discovery that a few hundred square miles of forest in the center of the contenient could double the rainflall across the entire land mass..... modeling how we could get there perhaps.

In a similar way folks better begin to cope with what we must do to care for the Pacific forests, the sierra's, the coastal area. I'd plant redwoods as a base activity, millions of acres of new redwood forest, millions of acres of pine and fir, moving species north to adapt to the comming change. Time to get to work to learn how to generate power without co2, how to live in a more sustainable way.