Are You a Wizard or a Prophet?

The term “GMO” can be a Rorschach test. It makes some people see potential for plants that can grow in any ecosystem, resist drought and disease, and yield massive amounts of food and prosperity for all. Human innovation, this camp says, can get us out of any jam.

But many environmentalists see a racket that will give mega-corporations control over the world’s food supply and encourage thoughtless consumption. We are part of the Earth’s global ecosystem, the second group contends, we can’t “bio-hack” our way out of every problem.

In his latest book, The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow’s World, journalist Charles C. Mann traces current incarnations of these world views to two 20th-century figures — agronomist Norman Borlaug and ecologist/activist William Vogt. Both men were unlikely scientists, and both have left their fingerprints all over environmental thought.

Read the story by Diana Crow form Neo.Life - “Are You a Wizard or a Prophet?”

Great Barrier Reef will be dead by 2100, says David Attenborough's Blue Planet II

London: Coral reefs – including Australia's Great Barrier Reef – will be dead by 2100 due to human "maltreatment of the oceans", David Attenborough's Blue Planet II has declared.

Sir David Attenborough - he says the Great Barrier Reef
will be dead by 2100 due to our maltreatment of the oceans.  

Attenborough's follow-up documentary series, which took four years to film and produce, finished airing in Britain on Sunday night (local time). It ended with his grim warning about the state of our oceans, which Attenborough said were "under threat now as never before.”

He said climate change, plastic pollution and over-fishing were all contributing to the demise of coral reefs.

Blue Planet II has been Britain's most-watched show of 2017, with 14 million tuning into the first episode of the wildlife series. Nine will air the seven-part series on free-to-air television in Australia in 2018.

Read Latika Bourke’s story in today’s Melbourne Age - “Great Barrier Reef will be dead by 2100, says David Attenborough's Blue Planet II.”

From irrelevant slowness to lightning speed

Climate change is moving at a human time scale that makes it almost irrelevant to most people.

The reality, which they can’t see in a way that people understand and so judge most things, is moving, in a geological sense, like lightning.

That creates manifest difficulties, not the least being the bringing to the public findings from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The need for even-handedness, fairness, agreement on complicated wordings, and the constant review and revision of findings takes so long, a delay worsened by procrastination and debate, can make reality and the actual report seem like only remote relations.

A story published by the World Resources Institute headed: “9 Significant Scientific Findings too Recent to Be Included in the New IPCC Report” highlights that difficulty.

Have we made geological history?

This is natural, but it is it? Humans have
 changed the atmosphere and so does
this growth continue to be "natural".

Have we, that is you, me and along with our fellows, made genuine geological history in that our efforts have resulted in the “Anthropocene”?

Scientists from around the world met this week to decide whether to call time on the Holocene epoch after 11,700 years and begin a new geological age called the Anthropocene - to reflect humankind's deep impact on the planet.

A story headed: “Scientists Mull Change Of Epoch To Reflect Human Impact On The Planet” discusses that idea that the Holocene epoch if finally over after 11,700 years.

Advice from Chomsky which we should all listen to

Noam Chomsky.

When Noam Chomsky speaks, we should all listen.

Writing his piece entitled” “On the Edge” he said: “When I hear the phrase ‘on the edge,’ the irresistible image is the proverbial lemmings marching resolutely to the cliff.”

Chomsky writes: “For the first time in history, human are now poised to destroy prospects for decent existence, and much of life. The rate of species destruction today is at about the level of 65 million years ago, when a major catastrophe, probably a huge asteroid, ended the age of dinosaurs, opening the way for mammals to proliferate.

“The difference is that today we are the asteroid, and way will very likely be opened to beetle and bacteria when we have done our work,” Chomsky wrote.

The figures speak for themselves

The figures speak for themselves – climate change is costing $billions.

It has been argued in a story on Climate Progress headed: “The $188 billion price tag from U.S extreme weather from 2011 to 2012” that damage from floods, drought, storms, and wildfires has produced an alarming and measurable cost.

The prediction in the story by Daniel J. Weiss and Jackie Weidman is that these costs will only grow over time.

Climate change, of course, has no respect for human constructs such as national boundaries and the world-wide damage from our rather sorry treatment of our atmosphere can only get worse, including in Australia.