EnviroGlobal: Theory: Science of Doomsday Apocalyptic?

I'm rather skeptical about doomsday scenarios, especially when all garbed up in the religion of the age (the spirit of the age, the zeitgeist) — which nowadays is scientism and vampirism, the hyper-rational devoted to its polar opposite the biting irrationalism in movies, on TV, in goth culture and styles of fashion.  Yet I'm not dismissive of science in its various disciplines, either.  So, the thesis of a new book and its tradition of scientific doomsdism now nearing the tipping point does get my interest.  Nevertheless, my l+f has been so impacted by a personal sense of doom — my father had a deadly stroke when I was 3 1/2 and my brother just born, he was killed by lightning when 18 (I was 21), my mother committed suicide when she was in her early fifties and I was 30 — that the doomsday threateners (echoing the apocryphal book, I Enoch), even their threats from the lock-step phalances of marching scientios, is often way off somewhere in the emotional distance for me personally.

Well, dear reader, I thawt nevertheless I shoud pass on to you a few paragraphs from Scientific American, written by, appropriately named, Madhusree Mukerjee.  You  can click the link just below to go to the full online article "Apocalypse Soon:  Has civilization passed the environmental point of no return?"  I recommend it as an excellent version of the type "science journalism" that dominates much science discourse to which the public is exposed these latter days.

One specific from Mad's text:  "Population will increase, albeit slowly, to a maximum of about eight billion near 2040. Eventually, however, floods and desertification will start reducing farmland and therefore the availability of grain."  Actually the process of reduction of the topsoil on planet Earth has been continuing apace for a very long time, and with it the destruction of the farming peasantry thru-out the globe.  I'm not in favour of permanentizing the peasant class (Marx hated them, I don't at all).  But change does come, and they are being pushed from the land they tilled, planted, and harvested — from time immemorial.  Where do they go?  To favelas, to urban-garbage dumps, and (in the cases of some) to upward mobility as plantation day-labourers, or as industrial factory workers, or as migrants to massive mining operations, etc.  It's not so much doomsday that speaks to me (no matter how scientifically garbed), rather it's the human pain, confusion, casualities, and fear-ridden psyches of "all ye who labour and are heavy-laden."  It's these people to whom Jesus extended his invitation "Come unto me.  And I will give you rest" (Matthew 11:28).  


A first responder to Mad's doomdism is Harry Dale Huffman.  His comment is:

This article is insane. As I have noted on my own blog today (May23,2k12), "...in fact, the 'debate' on both sides is insane, and everyone knows why–1) the emotional (not scientific) intransigence of the individual ego, multiplied over the millions of individuals who are invested in the consensus, 2) the ideological (not scientific) linking of the idea of 'runaway global warming' with a reasonable concern for the environment, and 3) the political (not scientific) assumption of tight control over the people of the world, on the basis of fraudulent, wrong-headed 'scientific consensus'."

Now there's a nay-sayer for you.  But his nay-saying against the doomdists seems to be in the tradition of Immanuel Velikovsky's World's in Collision (in some respects), while (in other respects) he seems to draw on his own version of Intelligent Design (Earth, he seems to say, is designed).  Do I hear also some thematics of Mormonism's scifi religious mythology?  of Isaac Asimov's scifi?  of Scientology's David Hubbard's scifi religious mythology?   Let's stick to science/s, yet not get stuck.  Theories and speculations, becawz facts don't interpret themselves.  They, all of them, require presupposed points of view that ask the questions which, according to the l+ts of each, bring facts into view always in one or another certain way.  Thank God, Jews and we Christians have our respective Bibles and canons and traditions of interpretation to give us a rudder in this mad age of simultaneous uncertainties, bringing upon us hyper-rationalism and hyper-irrationalism at one and the same t+m.

— Owlb, refWrite Frontpage enviro columnist

Scientific American (May23,2k12)

Some paragraphs by Madhusree Mukerjee:

Remember how Wile E. Coyote, in his obsessive pursuit of the Road Runner, would fall off a cliff? The hapless predator ran straight out off the edge, stopped in midair as only an animated character could, looked beneath him in an eye-popping moment of truth, and plummeted straight down into a puff of dust. Splat! Four decades ago, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology computer model called World3 warned of such a possible course for human civilization in the 21st century. In Limits to Growth, a bitterly disputed 1972 book that explicated these findings, researchers argued that the global industrial system has so much inertia that it cannot readily correct course in response to signals of planetary stress. But unless economic growth skidded to a halt before reaching the edge, they warned, society was headed for overshoot—and a splat that could kill billions.

Don't look now but we are running in midair, a new book asserts. In 2052: A Global Forecast for the Next Forty Years(Chelsea Green Publishing), Jorgen Randers of the BI Norwegian Business School in Oslo, and one of the original World3 modelers, argues that the second half of the 21st century will bring us near apocalypse in the form of severe global warming. Dennis Meadows, professor emeritus of systems policy at the University of New Hampshire who headed the original M.I.T. team and revisited World3 in 1994 and 2004, has an even darker view. The 1970s program had yielded a variety of scenarios, in some of which humanity manages to control production and population to live within planetary limits (described as Limits to Growth). Meadows contends that the model's sustainable pathways are no longer within reach because humanity has failed to act accordingly.

Instead, the latest global data are tracking one of the most alarming scenarios, in which these variables increase steadily to reach a peak and then suddenly drop in a process called collapse. In fact, "I see collapse happening already," he says. "Food per capita is going down, energy is becoming more scarce, groundwater is being depleted." Most worrisome, Randers notes, greenhouse gases are being emitted twice as fast as oceans and forests can absorb them. Whereas in 1972 humans were using 85 percent of the regenerative capacity of the biosphere to support economic activities such as growing food, producing goods and assimilating pollutants, the figure is now at 150 percent—and growing.