Heartland

markfiend wrote:

andymackem wrote:I'm happy to stay quite a long way from nature because it's rather less interesting than my selfish planet-destroying hobbies.

Well yeah. Who'd volunteer to swap places with a stone-age nomad?

there have been times where i've seriously considered ditching IT and moving to nepal to herd yaks

much less stressful, and leand is pretty cheap in nepal...

It's a bit bl**dy cold in Nepal though!

I'm too fond of my creature comforts

markfiend wrote: It's a bit bl**dy cold in Nepal though!

I'm too fond of my creature comforts

you could always sleep warapped up next to the yaks... think han & luke on hoth, just not on the INSIDE of one

Have you ever smelled a yak?

markfiend wrote:Have you ever smelled a yak?

Have you?

Marsden Fields wrote:

markfiend wrote:Have you ever smelled a yak?

Have you?

No. But I seem to recall hearing that they don't smell too nice.

From here...

paint it black wrote:ho hum... brave new world or too much medlling

reduced female birth one would have thought (knowing peer pressure attributed to keeping the family name going)

i'm really not into any of the proposals, but might be swung if you can convince me

To here...

markfiend wrote:Have you ever smelled a yak?

In just over 24 hours.

This must be a new record even for us lot.

Blimey, I go to work, come back, take a nap, and all that's needed to be said has been said.

Especially regarding yaks

I have to admit to getting strangely concerned about the state of the planet recently. Which is unusual for me as generally I can't see past my next bottle of Stella. Are we really going to run out of fossil fuels in the next 50 years? Will the effects of global warming really be irreversible if we don't take drastic measures within the next 30 years? Or will the planet heal itself as some scientist (including my Uncle, apparently) claim? I have children and a grandson for goodness sake. These things will affect them if they're true. But even assuming we can reign in our own excesses, how do we convince the emerging economies like India and China that our lifestyle isn't worth the damage to the planet?

Francis wrote:But even assuming we can reign in our own excesses, how do we convince the emerging economies like India and China that our lifestyle isn't worth the damage to the planet?

This to me is really the key issue. We have no right to say they shouldn't do what we've done already, however much we know about its impact.

Or we can say it, but they have no need to listen.

Kind of getting back to the original point (I know I shouldn't..) I wonder what will happen in those countries/cultures which already exercise gender choice by means of abandonment or abortion? Generally they seem to favour boys...

There goes your population problem then...

The fossil fuel will probably last a bit longer than 50 years, working on the assumption that some new reserves will be found. However, world use is increasing, and the rate of increase is also increasing...

Global warming? I think it's too early to tell. There may be some feedback involving quicker deposition of limestones removing CO2 from the atmosphere, but AFAIK geologists, climatologists and meteorologists are retty evenly split on the issue; there's not really enough data yet. But if it is irreversible, we don't really have time to wait and see And there are arguments that the increasing sea-temperatures will mean that methane ice-hydrides (I think they're called) on the sea-bed will melt, releasing methane into the atmosphere. And methane is a greenhouse gas with (IIRC) of the order of 10 times the heat-trapping ability of CO2 weight-for-weight.

And of course the emerging Asian economies, as you quite rightly say, will look at the USA's refusal to sign Kyoto, and say "if you won't cut CO2 emissions, why the should we?"

There's always the possibility that we could find a technology that will reverse global warming I suppose...

*Edited for spelling and added clarity... I hope

global dimming, kondratiev, and yaks.my this thread has done well

Francis wrote:Or will the planet heal itself as some scientist (including my Uncle, apparently) claim?

i wouldnt want to be around when decides to fight back

(if that isnt whats happening already...?)

But nature will balance itself. It's part of the natural order of things *ahem*

Maybe it reflects our species ego that we can't see a world without ourselves on it, but at some stage humanity will fall. Maybe by our own hands, maybe not, be we will fall. In the overall scheme of things global warming and environmental decay won't add up to Jack.

If you take the long view, humanity is just a recent blip on the Earth's great long history.

If you condense the Earth's age to 46 years, then by about the age of 5 there were bacteria. And nothing but bacteria until it was about 30. Fish started to crawl onto the land about 4 years ago. The dinosaurs flourished between 2-and-a-half years ago and 6 months ago, the first ape-men evolved maybe a week ago, and all of human history from the pyramids down to the present fits into the last half-hour.

Life will survive; it always has. Maybe we won't...

But surely our concern for the planet is only due to our concern for its ability to sustain human life?

Well, yes.

I just mean that when people go on about "destroying the planet" they're taking rather a human-centric view

nah, i just think its a rather pretty green, blue, white and golden bit of rock. seems a shame for its own sake to turn it into a smoking, charred, festering land-fill

and yeah, ok, if we attempt to live in harmony with the planet and keep it in some kind of life-sustaining condition, maybe just maybe we as a species will survive a little longer on it?

but really i just think its a rather nice rock and it seems a shame to trash it

But if we hadn't trashed it, we'd never have noticed it was rather nice. A kind of ecological Schroedinger's Cat, if you will.

If the dodo still lived, we'd never have heard of it.

Quiff Boy wrote:there have been times where i've seriously considered ditching IT and moving to nepal to herd yaks

Your mid-life crisis seems rather premature.

andymackem wrote:But if we hadn't trashed it, we'd never have noticed it was rather nice. A kind of ecological Schroedinger's Cat, if you will.

If the dodo still lived, we'd never have heard of it.

sorry, i'm struggling with this, the earth in two places at the same time

More in terms of the observation changing the thing which is observed.