"The capacity for self-deception is the most frightening propensity of our species."

This is my lie and I deny I ever said it.  
Yes, we live based on deception and delusion.  

The rocket culture may be entering its spore stage before it can jettison its manifest destiny, before it can become native.  Aliens from around the world flock to an alien culture, adrift without roots.  

Many thanks, Joe Romm,

Perhaps climate change is not more than a recognizable symptom of the unbridled and skyrocketing growth of absolute global human population numbers as well as the seemingly endless, soon to become patently unsustainable expansion of the globalization of big business activities now over spreading the Earth.

Each culture presents its membership with much that is real and also much less that is illusory. From the standpoint of a psychologist, because humans are shaped early and pervasively by cultural transmissions in our perception of reality, it looks like an evolutionary challenge for humankind to see the world as it is.  Whatsoever is is, is it not?

According to Russell P. Hopfenberg and David I. Pimentel, culture may at times mesmerize human beings in that it gives rise to illusions of the world as it is. This research, like some evidence before it, seems to fundamentally disturb (because it comes into conflict with) certain culturally derived notions held by members of a culture about what it means to be human and about the "place" of Homo sapiens in the natural order of living things. Scientific facts of this particular kind are uniformly difficult for people to see, I suppose, because such data have a way of undercutting the pedestal from which we prefer to look upon our fellow creatures, nature itself and the universe. We humans may introject culturally biased and scientifically unsupported transmissions (i.e., memes) that confuse human reasoning and promote a certain cortical conceitedness which is not helpful when trying to see what is real or to recognize certain requirements of practical reality. For a very long time mistaken cultural transmissions or memes appear occasionally to permeate interpersonal communications and to be passed from generation to generation, distorting human perceptions and making it difficult for us to see a scientific fact for what it is real about it.

When a psychological practitioner like myself thinks a patient is suffering from a mental illness, that determination is a matter of evidence-based clinical judgment. However, general standards of what is normal are not clinical judgments (and sometimes do not objectively correlate with reality), but are often unverified understandings based upon cultural norms and social conventions that are full of scientifically validated perceptions of reality alongside some misperceptions of what is real. Because some misperceptions are valued by those who share them, these memes get passed along and shared pervasively AS IF THEY REPRESENTED REALITY.

In the cases of deeply disturbed mental patients, they are inclined to distort reality so drastically that their distortions are not widely shared and held by other people. Instead, these mistaken impressions are labeled as examples of `craziness'. By contrast, governments, social organizations and cultures appear not to misperceive reality so sharply, yet distortions of what people in a culture perceive do remain.

A term of art in psychology is useful here, folie a deux. The term means that two people share an identical distortion of reality. This understanding leads to other terms, folie a deux million for a social order or folie a deux billion for a culture. These terms refer to misperceived aspects of reality commonly shared and held by many people of a government, a society, a culture. One way to define the highest standard of what is normal for the individual and for people in a particular socio-cultural aggregate is in terms of being able to see what is free of illusion, what is in scientific fact real. Hence, in taking note of the process of humankind becoming evermore aware of reality by means of the acquisition of valid scientific data through time, Homo sapiens can track the evolution of science.

From this perspective, the natural world God blesses us to inhabit is a perfected, self-regulating and self-sustaining system that has worked for millions of years, without human presence or input, and will likely continue for millions of years with or without human activities. Ancestors of Homo sapiens survived successfully on Earth for the past few hundred thousand years, and then some more. In all that time humankind presumably did not endanger itself, nor did we oddly expunge other creatures, massively degrade the environment or recklessly dissipate its limited resources upon which our lives, other forms of life and even the global economy depend for their very existence.

In this context it is worth noting that something happened several thousand years ago. At some point not long after the end of the Ice Age, Homo sapiens appear to have turned to growing and storing food and treating it as a commodity. As humans produced more food than the population needed for its immediate survival, our population numbers began going up, up, up and not up and down as do the population numbers of other species on Earth. Instead of continuing to exist as hunter-gatherers and collect food necessary for survival, Homo sapiens produced, stored and sold more and more food. This (agri)culture economy, that appears to have grown over the last 8,000 to 11,000 years, is forthrightly man-made, ever expanding, seemingly limitless and, just now, soon to become patently unsustainable at its current huge scale and its fully anticipated growth rate, and, therefore, in its present form. As this artificially designed economy has grown, human population numbers appear to have stopped fluctuating in a natural cycle as they likely did through unrecorded time. During the past few thousand years human numbers began to increase in an ultimately unhealthful, nearly exponential manner. For the past several hundred years global human population numbers have skyrocketed.

The longstanding and generally accepted theory of the "demographic transition" is descriptive not deterministic. The widely shared and consensually validated current evidence related to the automatic occurrence of a so-called demographic transition at 9.2 billion people around 2050 appears to be preternatural, culturally skewed and, therefore, scientifically unsound.

Looking only at regions where population is increasing at a decreasing rate or at a country like Italy and with its decreasing population numbers may be distracting us -- and need not necessarily blind us -- from the apparently unforeseen knowledge of our continuously increasing absolute global human numbers and their potentially profound implications. We wish to look at trees, but need to see the forest.

According to the unchallenged and virtually irrefutable research from Hopfenberg and Pimentel, human population numbers are continuing to increase worldwide as a result of the production of food in greater and greater quantities. These food resources are then made ever more available by sale and delivery into areas on the planet with low human carrying capacity, where human life in large numbers and other life cannot simultaneously be sustained.

Could it be that we are not making hunger go away by means of maximally expanding the food supply, but instead giving rise to billions of hungry people, extirpating biodiversity, and undermining the integrity of global ecosystems?

Please note that 3.7 billion people exist these days in our planetary home on resources valued at less than $2 per day. That number of people is greater than the total number of people on Earth in the year 1950!

Certainly human beings have sophisticated, forward-planning cultures and a progressive world economy. And for all the wonders of our pyramid-like global economic scheme, still there is apparently not a scientific basis for concluding human beings have broken the bonds of our placement among the creatures of the world. Nor have the conditions of the natural world likely been suspended somehow for human benefit. No, the Hopfenberg/Pimentel evidence indicate that certain biological and physical laws of nature likely apply to all creatures of Earth, including human ones.

Yep, jabailo, I'm sure global warming is just a semantic misunderstanding. What a good Deconstructionist you are! The world as text.

As for the OP, this was an interesting insight:

"It would also be a great irony if conservative Deniers -- who are blocking serious mitigation today because they don't like (a certain kind of) government intervention in our lives -- ended up forcing the country into far more government intervention in the near future."

Indeed.

While I agree with the above article that carbon feedbacks (i.e. carbon sinks becoming carbon emitters faster as their emissions warm the planet) will dramatically increase greenhouse gas levels, I disagree that once runaway global warming begins all hope ends.

Dr Hansen of NASA says that even now, any feasible planetary rescue strategy must include a method of removing the CO2 from the air.

I suggest biosequestion, a low cost, highly scalable, and technically feasible method of removing the excess CO2 from the air.

Removing the CO2 from the air mechanically would be very energy consuming, hard to do on a large enough scale, and would be very expensive to build and maintain enough machines.

I suggest engineering a GMO and seed it into the ocean.  In my opinion, just operating our current energy infrastructure until it wears out would make us cross the tipping point into runaway global warming.  The vast expense of completely rebuilding our energy infrastructure is causing political gridlock, delaying emission reductions.

Biosequestration could save billions of lives, and trillions of dollars.  I predict that it will be used, but I don't know if it will be too late to prevent our current mild climate from abruptly switching to a hot state with our eco-systems going into death spirals.