RSPB and renewable energy

[biffvernon]

Oh, that game was great. It's based on a very simple recursive algorithm, well known to biologists. It contains a constant function that, if tweeked a tiny amount, sends the populations into a chaoticly varying future - or extinct.

 

[worms]

positively Malthusian...!

 

[FamilyWiggs]

positively Malthusian...!

Yep - the catastrophe is coming..... the only question is timescale (Malthusian or subsistence theory - at 35 I'm banking on the latter!)

We're doomed, I tell ye, doomed! :roll:

 

[Penners]

No limits whatever are placed to the productions of the earth; they may increase forever.

Clearly, Mr Malthus didn't know about Peak Oil.

 

[Flyfisher]

Isn't the more fundamental problem here that we have 6-7bn of us on this planet, within finite resource levels. Population estimates show a 50%-100% rise in the next few decades. Strikes me that whatever we do in terms of energy efficiency, carbon emmissions, etc, a population of 6bn isn't sustainable in the long term - particularly if we want a more comfortable existance than subsistence farmers living in the dark, without medcine & toasted-sandwich makers.

Spot on! Population must surely be the 'elephant in the room' yet, for some strange reason, it seems to be one of those unmentionable subjects.

We're doomed, I tell ye, doomed! :roll:

Well, probably not in an extinction sense, but very possibly in a 'life as we know it' sense.

 

[biffvernon]

Spot on! Population must surely be the 'elephant in the room' yet, for some strange reason, it seems to be one of those unmentionable subjects.

Hard to do anything about it in the short term. Suicide and murder are the only options. In the longer term, women's education seems to be the most effective strategy particularly when combined with basic health and social security services. If we succeed in tackling poverty, population will stabilize.

(Fat chance, the chorus cried.)

 

[Nemesis]

In the longer term, women's education seems to be the most effective strategy

Nah. The onus should be on men.

Cut their goolies off.

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=RP2xarcSEW8

The only way.

Two birds, one stone. (Ouch.)

 

[Flyfisher]

If we succeed in tackling poverty, . . . . .

Then we'd have 6 billion people consuming as much energy as we are currently privileged to do, which would hardly help the global climate concerns.
Harsh perhaps, but true.

 

[biffvernon]

For those interested in the melting of ice, here is some recent news from the Antarctic and Greenland.

 

[FamilyWiggs]

If we succeed in tackling poverty, . . . . .

Then we'd have 6 billion people consuming as much energy as we are currently privileged to do, which would hardly help the global climate concerns.
Harsh perhaps, but true.

Quite true. Whilst eradicating global poverty is prima facie a good thing to do, it actually makes our current population and resource usage pattern even more unsustainable. And don't think that a "developed" Africa, Brazil, India, & China will be more technologically advanced/energy efficient - they will be massive consumers of energy, water, space and food.

Simple choice is:

Lower population and roughly the same living standard (although quite who will make our cheap Western consumer goods would be a problem)

or

Broadly similar population with a much lower standard of living.

Alternatively we could continue with the comforting artificial third choice we have created - to naively trust in as yet undeveloped energy efficiency technologies coupled with meaningless undelivered pollution reduction targets.

We're still doomed, I tell ye, doomed. It's simply a matter of time.

 

[biffvernon]

I don't accept that erradicating poverty is harmful. It's about getting away from the situation where child mortality is so high and social security so poor that folk have lots of babies in the hope that some will survive, to a situation where mothers are confident to limit families to one or two children. Eradicating poverty is not about living unsustainable energy profligate lifestyles (like wot we do in Britain).

 

[FamilyWiggs]

Like I said at the beginning, I'm no expert, but...

It seems to me that the sort of developed society that reduces child mortality and puts in place decent social security, is one that has a resource consumption profile similar to ours, and that is unsustainable for a population of 6bn plus. So we are back to my two choices above.

The timescale of human life (40-80yrs) is just too short, and the personal evolutionary drive to reproduce too great, to facilitate us taking long term decisions and actions that would guarantee the greatest long-term benefit to to maximum number of as yet unborn members of our species. To do so, would require those of us that have already won the genetic/geographical/economic lottery of life to trade the advantages that our families enjoy for unseen and unknown future families across the globe.

Now, I'm not saying that this is not a desirable thing to do (far from it) - just that I don't think as a species we are capable of that level of altruism. As an example look at the success of the Americans in delivering pollution reduction targets when to do so would mean them giving up their "right" to drive SUVs everywhere. Or our success in persuading the Chinese not to build a new coal-fired power station every week, which we futilely attempt to offset by driving a few wine bottles (Australian Chardonnay flown thousands of miles to our supermarket, by the way) to the local recycling centre.

And incidentally, there isn't much point in trying to "educate" women in developing countries to have the confidence in fewer children, until we address the inherent evil in the position of institutions like the Catholic Church and their position on contraception - particularly condoms. This position (repeatedly maintained by the last pope) has directly led to the death and misery of millions of children and adults in Africa particularly, since it fuels unsustainable population growth and the AIDS epidemic.

Ok - I think I have probably upset and offended enough folk for a Sunday morning! :roll: :roll: :roll:

It is a beautiful day in this part of Wales, sunny and clear and forecast for 16oC. A joy to be alive. Think I'll go and check on the stash of guns, gold and tinned peaches in the outbuildings! Oh and I might tackle a bit of pointing, in the vain hope that even if we don't survive our impending Malthusian catastrophe, at least the house will! :lol:

 

[DaveBrigg]

Those nice people at NASA are working hard on a plan that will allow people to travel to Mars. OK, so it's a bit hot in places, and there aren't many trees at the moment, but it was good to see that the US was taking its responsibility to safeguard the environment seriously.

 

[Flyfisher]

OK, so it's a bit hot in places

Which places are they then?
http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2001/AlbertEydelman.shtml

 

[Edwardia]

The US series of Life on Mars just started and stars Harvey Keitel.

 

[shelli]

When I was a wee snip of a thing, I remember one of the early "games" I had on my ZX Spectrum (which incidentally I played on in the morning having also got dressed in bed and admired Jack Frost on the inside of my bedroom window, despite being a year younger than Shelli) was a Fox vs Rabbit simulation. You input various parameters like numbers of foxes & rabbits, availability of grass etc, and it drew the graphs of fox & rabbit populations over successive generations.

A Spectrum - you lucky thing - I had a VIC 20 - it had a 4kB memory!

Those early games were such fun !! - simply spend an entire morning keying in 400 lines of instructions and you could get the computer to flash the word BUM all over the screen in different colours - time well spent I thought - taught you to be accurate though - one comma out of place and you got that great SYNTAX ERROR message

Ahh, the early days of computers - we were there right at the beginning - not like the youth of today , don't know they're born blah blah, this was all fields blah blah etc.

Shelli XX

 

[MdB]

I see you VIC 20 and raise you a ZX81(+ very wobbly ram pack). I also used a ZX80 prior to that at school which was so powerful it couldn't display anything on the screen whilst running a program.

 

[Penners]

The average recorded temperature on Mars is -63 °C (-81 °F) with a maximum temperature of 20 °C (68 °F) and a minimum of -140 °C (-220 °F).

Roughly equivalent to the temperature in Penners Towers, when Mrs P discovers that I've left the toilet seat up again.

 

[Penners]

I also used a ZX80 prior to that at school

At school? Good grief, you people are young.

I vaguely taught my own kids about computers on a ZX80 (although they were pretty young at the time).

You loaded the software from a cassette tape recorder - it would only work if you got the volume setting j-u-s-t right.

Good old BASIC, eh? Do you remember "If - Then" and "For - Next" loops?

 

[shelli]

The average recorded temperature on Mars is -63 °C (-81 °F) with a maximum temperature of 20 °C (68 °F) and a minimum of -140 °C (-220 °F).

Not much good for us then - as we're mostly water !!

face it - this is the only planet we can survive on - we're just not as big as our dreams - we are limited by our physical bodies and the fact that we have evolved on this planet.

My OH keeps saying useful things like "what we really need is a world war to get the population down " - I suppose this means as long as none of us have to be involved in the dying bit