« Infochaining the Social Net for Personal Productivity | Main | Technical Maturation of the Smartphone Market »
May 2, 2008
In Search of a Quicker Demise
The industriousness and efficiency of humanity is really, really impressive if you stop to think about it. While lesser species sit around and wait for Nature to "happen," we devise new ways of accelerating our ass-over-teakettle tumble through new realities.
One particularly delicious example of this is global warming. "Oh, yes, we know all about that," you say, but wait...there's a cool twist.
For years, scientists have been telling us that the Earth's climate is changing, largely due to the burning of fossil fuels and other of man's activities that result in a hotter planet. And for years, scientists have been predicting the most dire of outcomes: dramatic loss of coastal land (and the cities that sit on them), increasingly violent and unpredictable weather, a huge decrease in biodiversity as scores of plant and animal species fail to adapt to what is essentially overnight change to their ecosystems, and so on.
One prediction that scared the US Defense Department so much that it put global warming on its list of top national security threats was the likelihood of widespread food shortages. Changing weather patterns, including increased drought and flooding, were going to wreck havoc on food production around the globe. This shortage would then lead to instability in parts of the world that weren't terribly stable to begin with and further fuel the anti-Western backlash that began sometime before this decade. This would generate new threats like terrorism, disruptions to our own food and energy supply chains, and increase the uncertainty in global markets. All told, not a very rosy scenario.
And that was all supposed to happen by the middle of this century.
But, humanity's unfailing inability to leave bad enough alone has created a worldwide food shortage well before global warming could directly. No, global warming (which, remember, is our fault) is motivating us to seek out alternative fuel sources, such as corn-based petroleum substitutes. These biofuels are diminishing the availability of food and driving up costs. This, in turn, is starting to generate unease in the world's poorest communities. And that is precisely the type of situation that the Defense Department warned us about...just about 40 years earlier than predicted.
It is indeed ironic that our efforts to stem global warming are resulting in many of the very same problems that global warming was itself going to cause, just sooner. When your best effort to avoid calamity only hastens its arrival, you have to wonder whether there's any hope of steering clear at all.
Posted by Craig in Cars
and Industry
and Science & Nature