Of Sealand, corp, and country [was: nation-state]

[Cathal Garvey]

 > excursions in geologic time scales -- "snowball earth" vs.
 > the Cretaceous (when there was no ice at the poles)
 > ...
 > push the climate to a place it has not been before,

Yea..even the places it's been before are pretty awful, for a human. I 
don't think this is a local unstable point, far from it; our current 
climate seems very stable. But, over those epochs, we've built up a huge 
store of high-energy carbon, and as the CO2 left the atmosphere since 
those epochs, the ecosystems we have right now are not accustomed to 
high-greenhouse climates. So, the fact that we're now suddenly digging 
up what amounts to eons of free solar energy, and are burning them all 
at once, is a problem.

Will the earth burn? No, that's an unlikely outcome. Venus is Venus 
because it never developed life. Will the Earth burn *us*? Maybe. 
Totally plausible possibility, though still unlikely. Will the Earth 
burn the ecosystems that civilisation (rather than humanity, per se) 
depends on? At this rate, probably.

We have fallbacks; go all-in on solar & nuclear for energy and biotech 
for efficient, lower impact food/med production, and use nuclear/biotech 
to cook up some hyperefficient carbon-capture system to try and roll 
back as much as we can.

I'll just point at this, then, as an example of what I find exciting in 
this space: 
http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi/10.1371/journal.pone.0109935 - 
That's some staple elemental inputs, CO2, and electricity ONLY, and a 
massive sequestration effect per volt/meter using bacteria. Outputs are 
hydrogen and acetate, useful energy/industrial chemicals.

Anyways, just to say doom and gloom is rarely useful, but ostrich-heads 
are worse than useless. Action can be beneficial, and action need not be 
"live like a peasant", it can be "change your tech and culture to live 
comfortably or even abundantly with less impact".

As to on/off topic-ness, it's off topic. But this list has seen people 
bitching about who is and isn't a real native American, so I find this 
at least engaging and interesting.

On 24/10/14 14:40, dan at geer.org wrote:
> For the purpose of this note, I'll stipulate that global
> warming is happening without arguing why.  The question
> for science would be whether it has a positive feedback
> loop, as it would if rising temperature releases, say, 10%
> of the carbon locked in permafrost.  Given the wild temp
> excursions in geologic time scales -- "snowball earth" vs.
> the Cretaceous (when there was no ice at the poles) -- it
> is reasonable to imagine that some excursions have a phase
> where the feedback is positive and thus if the temp heads
> either north or south its velociity will, for natural reasons,
> accelerate as the excursion grows more extreme.  That implies
> that the present time is an unstable equilibrium, thus our
> imapct, whatever it is, seems likely to be an initiator or
> a potentiator but not a cause in the classical sense of,
> say, a dose-response curve.
>
> Put differently, I don't believe that we (humans) can push
> the climate to a place it has not been before, but we can
> change the clock.  One might then ask what government has
> your confidence in its being capable of managing a comprehensive
> program of compensatory global cooling and what powers would
> be required to enforce same?
>
> What this topic has to do with this list is unobvious.
>
> --dan
>