Ask Jot

Chosen Answer by Gemz L

Who knows? The weather is doing lots of crazy things lately. It could mean an impending ice age, or that the weather is just being weird. However, the current circle of Mayan Calendar ends on 21st December 2012 and after that the world will end. Not literally, but as we know it. The Mayans belived that the time before that would be a time for testing and cleansing before the renewal of the world. Perhaps that is what is going on. Nature is just cleansing herself of all the crap that we humans have created, and we are being tested on our reaction to it.

Chosen Answer by maxine

Because it is the truth. Alot of people don't think so, but it is true. The desert itself used to be a rain forest. Now look at it. If it can destroy a beautiful rain forest, then the United States doesn't have a chance.

Chosen Answer by gcnp58

The reasons why this is probably a bad idea are the same reasons why iron fertilization to stimulate primary poductivity is a bad idea. Here's a non-strident rundown of those objections: http://www.bbm.me.uk/FeFert/safe.htm Furthermore, do not forget that when you bring nutrients up from the deep water, you are also bringing up water that is high in dissolved CO2 already, so the water will outgas CO2 to the atmosphere. This is why the Peruvian upwelling is such a huge source of CO2 to the atmosphere, despite its high primary productivity. Geo-engineering to solve climate change won't work. The solution lies in social engineering and increased energy efficiency. In other words, we all have to use less and produce that smaller amount without producing as much CO2.

Chosen Answer by J S

Genetic scientists tell us that mankind has been challenged for survival at least twice in the past: Genetic evidence suggests that all humans alive today, despite their apparent variety, are descended from a very small population, perhaps between 1,000 to 10,000 breeding pairs about 70,000 years ago. Using the average rates of genetic mutation, some geneticists have estimated that this population lived at a time coinciding with the Toba event. These estimates do not contradict the consensus estimates that Y-chromosomal Adam lived some 60,000 years ago, and that Mitochondrial Eve is estimated to have lived 140,000 years ago, because Toba is not conjectured to be an extreme bottleneck event, where the population is reduced to a small number of breeding pairs. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory It is entirely plausible that a dramatic departure from normal weather could once again challenge our survival, especially now that we are dependent upon a complex social and financial system (which has not been tested under extreme conditions), in addition to the fact that we can't adequately feed billions of people already today. I'm not aware of exactly how Lovelock arrives at any dates for his specific predictions, but it's useful to examine other sources that lead to conclusions related to the timing of likely bad times ahead. The American Southwest is losing its water now. Steven Chu, a Nobel laureate, director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and now President Obama's Energy Secretary, noted that even the most optimistic climate models for the second half of this century suggest that 30 to 70 percent of the snowpack will disappear. “There’s a two-thirds chance there will be a disaster,” Chu said, “and that’s in the best scenario.” http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/21/magazine/21water-t.html?ex=1350619200&en=97dfee317845fff0&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss There is a 50 percent chance Lake Mead will run dry by 2021 and a 10 percent chance it will run out of usable water by 2014... "We were stunned at the magnitude of the problem and how fast it was coming at us," said marine physicist Tim Barnett. http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/02/080213-AP-lake-mead.html Melting glaciers will trigger food shortages http://environment.newscientist.com/article/dn13519-melting-glaciers-will-trigger-food-shortages.html "The world has never faced such a predictably massive threat to food production as that posed by the melting mountain glaciers of Asia" The Ganges, Yellow and Yangtze Rivers in India and China are fed by rains during the monsoon season, but during the dry season they depend heavily on meltwater from glaciers in the Himalayas. The Gangotri Glacier in the Himalayas alone supplies 70% of the flow of the Ganges in the dry season. ....many Himalayan glaciers could disappear by 2035. Unfortunately as you've observed, many of the visible symptoms are accelerating: "warming in the Arctic from 1981 to 2001 is eight times larger than the rate of Arctic warming over the last 100 years. Arctic spring, summer, and autumn have each warmed, lengthening the seasons when sea ice melts from 10 to 17 days per decade." http://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/earthandsun/arctic_changes.html So what kind of planet will many people alive today be living on (including me and my children)? By 2050 Warming to Doom Million Species, Study Says http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/01/0107_040107_extinction.html "According to the researchers' collective results, the predicted range of climate change by 2050 will place 15 to 35 percent of the 1,103 species studied at risk of extinction." The cost of continued inaction will be staggering, and not just in the far distant future. If anyone thinks that a few reckless bank loans are challenging international stock markets and currencies today, wait until you see what happens as hundreds of trillions of dollars in assets become worthless as rising sea levels cause storm damage in coastal cities. The world's largest cities were built port-side on low-lying marshes for oceanic trade! The one-meter sea level rise predicted for the coming decades (again in the lifetimes of the children we know today) will wreak particular havoc on the Gulf Coast and eastern seaboard of the United States: 'No one will be free from this,' said Overpeck, whose maps show that every U.S. East Coast city from Boston to Miami would be swamped." http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/04/0420_040420_earthday_2.html Given this scenario, my expectation is that the initial challenges won't be from direct climate effects or from slightly higher water, but from the collapse of the worldwide financial house of cards. When your money is worthless, you'll have to have access to crops and livestock to subsist on, and you'll have to be able to defend your self-sufficient farm or community from hordes of desperate city dwellers and suburbanites. Here in the United States in our anarchy we'll have a large military protecting the ultra rich, while the rest of us are left with a lot of guns to pursue each others' resources "Lord of the Flies" style. There will probably be organized and heavily armed gangs, analogous to the warlords in Somalia, attacking communities to pursue their resources. The one fast fix we do have available to prevent all of this would be to rapidly and globally reduce black soot, which has up to 60% of the effect of CO2, http://www.physorg.com/news125500721.html In particular, consider black soot, with up to 60% of the effect of CO2, and is the one factor that can be addressed the fastest, at the least cost,and with the greatest short-term and long term benefit (CO2 reduction has only very long term benefits). http://www.igsd.org/docs/BC%20Briefing%20Note%2027Mar08.pdf The blame lies even more squarely on the shoulders of China (note the air quality during the Beijing Olympics) and India, and 500+ additional dirty coal plants they are building at a rate of 2 per week. I'd recommend first educating politicians on the importance of black soot to reduce and push out the date of climate challenges, while identifying rural communities that have safe water supplies and a defensible geography if stuff does start to hit the fan in the 2030 to 2050 timeframe. Develop skills that will make you of use to those communities.

Chosen Answer by fred

James Lovelock does NOT say the world is alive or that it is a living organism - but "sees the Earth behaving AS IF IT WERE alive" http://www.ecolo.org/lovelock/ He states the truism that life has evolved on this planet to interact with it's environment to optimise conditions for life. He didn't rename the planet - Gaia is the term he used for the biosphere system. Please go and read some of his work before you slag him off based on your assumptions or what the knee-jerk media (sponsored by unsustainable business) say to denigrate anything that puts limits on what humans can do; or what other environmentalists might do with the ideas.