Mark Lynas is an environmental writer who covers climate science, GMOs, and nuclear power, and wrote the book Six Degrees.
HN commenters link his posts critical of the GMO pig study and his speech on turning from anti-GM activism, and cite Six Degrees for climate science.
The Easter Island story told by Jared Diamond in Collapse is arguably a myth. Do you have any other examples?
An alternate view of Easter Island includes these sorts of points:
- Forests on Easter Island were largely killed by rats (an invasive species) and to (productively!) clear land for agriculture, not to make statues.
- Civilization there grew and persisted and thrived even well after the trees were gone due to human cleverness at finding and making new resources. (The Islanders ate fish and rats and eggs and chickens at that time)
- When their civilization eventually collapsed it was because they were pushed. It was due to war and diseases brought by outside invaders who sold a lot of the locals into slavery.
Mark Lynas sums up the situation here: http://www.marklynas.org/2011/09/the-myth-of-easter-islands-ecocide/
Jared Diamond, sticking to his guns, responds to Mark: http://www.marklynas.org/2011/09/the-myths-of-easter-island-jared-diamond-responds/
Lipo and Hunt in turn respond to Jared's response filling in lots more detail: http://www.evobeach.com/2011/10/diamond-attempts-to-defend-myths-of.html
Leading quote: "Diamond would have readers believe that the majority of archeologists who have studied Easter Island support his thesis. It is simply not true. The new evidence that we and other serious scholars have provided over the past decade not only contradicts the old story that Diamond has so heavily invested in, but has led to a new consensus among the…
The first well-done climate models by Manabe and Wethereld in 1975 found that a 2% reduction in solar radiation would cancel the effect of a doubling in atmospheric CO2 levels.[0,1] This problem has an engineering solution that should be implemented as soon as possible.
Stop beating up people with guilt as a “solution” to reversing use of a resource has has become as essential as water. This tactic is as cynical as the bottle industry funded “Make America Beautiful” campaign. Simple blame shifting.
As Mark Laynas summarized in his book Six Degrees of Climate Emergency, 4 degrees of warming means Alaska is climatically equivalent to Florida, and population collapse ensues from crop failure. This will occur between 2050 and 2100, and perhaps sooner, if nothing is done. Look at the graph made by Exxon in 1982 in the opening pages of Michael Mann’s book The New Climate War. They knew this 40 years ago, even with the more limited computing power available then.[2,3]
But there is a solution in a solar shield to reduce insolation 2% while we transition to sustainability. Ironically, stopping burning hydrocarbons suddenly (for example as a result of a global depression) would hasten the problem as SO2 levels partly suppresses the full effects of elevated CO2 levels.[0,1]
I am as tired of denialists as the “reduce reuse recycle” crowd looking for behavioral change solutions because they are more “natural.” Let’s do what works: engineering and carbon market-based solutions that…
I might be wrong, but I'm sure I read a detailed discussion somewhere about how they analyzed burial pits and found large amounts of cuts as if the flesh had been flayed and so on. Apparently they did detailed DNA analysis and even found human bone fragments in waste pits.
I can't seem to find that discussion online right now. However I did find a rebuttal by Jared Diamond on the same site to this argument;
http://www.marklynas.org/2011/09/the-myths-of-easter-island-jared-diamond-responds/
On a side note I think that it is uncomfortable for us to think about the demise of everything we cherish in this way, and that's why we tend to shy away from discussing this more openly and rigorously.
It's interesting to see how the blog post I cited ended with the same note;
>>>The islanders did inadvertently destroy the environmental underpinnings of their society. They did so, not because they were especially evil or deprived of foresight, but because they were ordinary people, living in a fragile environment, and subject to the usual human problems of clashes between group interests, clashes between individual and group interests, selfishness, and limited ability to predict the future. Does that remind you of any problems that we ourselves face today? That’s why we find Easter’s story so gripping, and why it may offer us lessons. You’ll find good coverage in Bahn’s and Flenley’s new book.<<<
I'm not a patent lawyer, so maybe I'm wrong and someone can correct me, but all this "how can you patent a seed" whining is bullshit.
The Monsanto patents are for the method of using a particular herbicide in combination with the modified plant seeds. If you innocently get some Monsanto genes into your organic soybean seeds, then you would almost certainly not be infringing the patent any more than I could be infringing DVD patents by using a stack of DVDs to prop up a wobbly table.
Has Monsanto ever sued anyone who was not trying to use the combination of the GMO crops and the herbicide they are tolerant to? I have never heard of such a situation.
I've yet to meet anyone who claims to think it's bad for Monsanto to have a legal monopoly (patent) on this process who doesn't also think that no one should be using it, because it's either screwing with nature to use gene splicing to feed the world, or maybe just because not having our crops ruined by pests makes us soft and unworthy or some crap.
Read Mark Lynas's post explaining "I am also sorry that I helped to start the anti-GM movement back in the mid 1990s, and that I thereby assisted in demonising an important technological option which can be used to benefit the environment."
http://www.marklynas.org/2013/01/lecture-to-oxford-farming-conference-3-january-2013/
Sure, why not? According to data from Wikipedia and e.g. this[0] compared to the handy reference chart[1], I should expect 2-3 times the background radiation, and at worst (at ~110 mSv/year), I'm barely hitting the lowest rate linked to increased cancer risk. Assuming I avoid the hottest spots, I should be entirely fine.
(That does not take into account the possibility of suffering extra radiation damage and chemical poisoning from ingesting radioactive elements, but this becomes manageable through thoroughly washing the living area and possibly not growing any food on contaminated soil.)
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[0] - http://www.marklynas.org/2011/08/how-dangerous-is-the-fukushima-exclusion-zone/, 2011
[1] - https://xkcd.com/radiation/
The descriptive comments here look like they come out of the "Two Degrees" chapter of Mark Lynas's 2007 book, Six Degrees.[1]
Lynas summarized climate science as it was in about 2005, and organised the summary by temperature increase. Each chapter is named after its upper bound, so "Two Degrees" describes changes expected with the global temperature increase between 1 and 2 degrees. Lynas gives up after six degrees.
Let me repeat the 2007 bit, in case you missed it. We knew this would happen. People were told. If you think actions will be taken now, ask yourself what's different from 2008.
1. https://marklynas.org/books/six-degrees-our-future-on-a-hotter-planet/