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Labels: apocalypse

Read this great little talk by Guy McPherson - The end of civilization and the extinction of humanity. He's quite entertaining.

"As I wrote in one of my recent books, the problem is not that the road to Hell is paved with good intentions -- it's that the road to Hell is paved. We have, to the maximum possible extent allowed by our intellect and never-ending desire, consumed the planet and therefore traded in tomorrow for today. And we keep making these choices, every day, choosing dams over salmon, oil over whales, cars over polar bears, death over life."

Labels: apocalypse, global warming, peak oil

I attempted to record a dream/nightmare I had two nights ago in the form of drawings. Click below to get a glimpse of Paul's typical nighttime experience!

Labels: apocalypse, art, drawing, dream

I just read an excellent article called Climate Change, Sabre Tooth Tigers and Devaluing the Future, which describes the evolutionary reasons our society is unable to properly deal with the growing concerns of climate change and peak oil. It was posted to The Oil Drum, a blog with very well-researched articles about energy and our future. I read it every day.

Here are some snippets from that article:

The debate on the realities of both climate change and Peak Oil has moved from 'are they real?' to questions concerning timing, magnitude and impact. At the same time, expanding research in 'temporal discounting' in economics (called 'impulsivity' in psychology), is shedding light on how steeply we value the present over the future, a trait that has ancient origins. Knowing this tendency, how can we expect factual updates on peak oil and climate change to behaviorally compete with Starbucks, sex, slot machines, and ski trips?

...

Ultimately we are after impact. If we spend 99% of our efforts on educating people on the facts of peak oil, yet nothing happens, it would be better to spend 50% of our efforts on education and 50% by example. For example, researchers attempted to persuade young students not to litter – either by teaching them about ecology and pollution or by telling them they were neat and tidy compared to other students – only the latter had a positive effect.⁽⁴⁾ E.O Wilson suggests, "A stiffer dose of biological realism is in order... The only way to make a conservation ethic work is to ground it in ultimately selfish reasoning. An essential component of this formula is the principle that people will conserve land and species fiercely if they forsee a material gain for themselves their kin or their tribe." All of our past environmental successes (DDT, ozone depletion, unleaded gasoline, etc.) had some sort of smoking gun—an emotional trigger. The problem with climate change/peak oil is when we do get the emotional trigger, it may be a Gatling gun on full bore.

Labels: apocalypse, climate change, eye-opening, global warming, peak oil

This this a killer thriller: Children of Men. It's a really well directed, realistic (and thus scary) sci-fi thriller that takes place 20 years from now, after women have become infertile. You might have bad dreams after you see it. I did (but then my dreams are usually apocalyptic anyway).

Labels: apocalypse, children of men, movies