Before I make a comment on the article above I must admit that until about six years ago I was of the opinion that unbridled human progress would keep finding the means to solve issues we all face. Population..no problem. Pollution of various forms ..no problem. Deforestation ..no problem. Free markets will solved them all.

Whatever nature threw at man, somehow we'de come to quick conclusions and tackle all the ills the ail us. After all, the internet is making us all smarter - right? It helps in spreading knowledge and facts more quickly right? Jared Diamond's book "Collapse" came along and it was really an added eye opener to me.

For many years I was also a technology type. I didn't read about biology much: rainforests, fisheries, bird, insect, amphibian, extintion issues? nah - why worry. The earth has millions of species and to think that a few missing here or there was an issue to man was nothing to concern us. That was just something biologists were dreaming up for job security.  As many engineers will tell you, engineers tend to be focused in their technology stovepipes a lot and anything biological (except a good looking girl perhaps) doesn't turn our heads very much. Why should we really fret over these things? Mankind's push for progress will undoubtedly unleash new technologies to solve the ills some scientists were complaining about.

However, the last few years after seeing scientific article after another in the worlds most credible scientific journals about species collapse, failing and falling forests, ocean's litered with mankind's garbage, not to mention warming climate trends (take your pick as to the cause), I've now become a believer that we do indeed face a huge hurdle the next few decades to prevent our own collective demise. After all, if the food chain that we need to live on collapses worldwide, what does that leave for mankind to live on?  

Looked at individually, one might argue as some do, that global warming is debatable as to the exact specifics or the course it will take. But weighing all the environmental evidence collectively, in light of related environmental issues we now face appears to show much more trouble ahead. If you also include the economic issues required to keep a technological society such as ours thriving and growing as we've seen the last two hundred years, things start to look quite daunting indeed. The business models of how we as humans managed the industrial age will not work as the rest of the world starts to massively consume resources like we did this past century.

I think the internet is helping to bring this realization about (finally), after a few hints from lone voices crying out for decades.

I certainly hope we all become quickly educated and use this tremendous tool in much smarter ways.
The internet should be used as a mirror upon which we gaze and reflect upon our progress, goals and needs. If what I see emerging on today's internet is considered any hope, we have much more to learn.

-JChan

yeah, everybody likes to think their team will win. but if you back off enough what you see is this: the plants of the carboniferous pulled a lot of carbon out of the air and buried it, creating a big pile of potential energy. nature abhors potential energy more than it abhors a vacuum (in fact, it only abhors a vacuum when it represents potential energy) so something always comes along to use up that energy. the rock rolls down the hill, sooner or later. then when the potential energy is expended, the mechanism ceases. the rock doesn't keep rolling. humanity's use of fossil fuels is just that mechanism which is releasing the potential energy of fossil fuels. when it's gone, we won't have anything to propel us into the future. oh, maybe we can repeat it for a while with nuclear power or something, but that's just the same thing all over again.

and in the process, we restore the earth to its equilibrium climate, which has usually been hotter, wetter, and more carbon dioxidey than it's been in the brief period since the carboniferous. which doesn't help us any.

whatever will be the next stage for the earth, whatever dominant form of life will have to make use of solar power in one way or another, whether directly, through wind, or plant biomass. It  will be distinctly different from us. Maybe even back to the dominant struggle of life on earth; plants versus insects.

Even if the human species manages to take over that role of our own successors, the culture which emerges will be as different from ours as the aboriginal tribes of America, Africa, and Australia were from the "civilizations" of Europe and Asia. And society forms the persons who grow up in them; a Bantu tribesman from precolonial times was a very different creature from a European, despite their common genetic heritage. So, to sum up, your descendants, if any, will probably have more in common with that Bantu than with yourself.

Here's my take whu Humanity id having a meltdown ...greed and mass consumerism replacing common sense:

We've become a world of consumer capitalists, who are replacing common sense with greed, and  spiritual values with mass consumption of many varieties.  

We've become a nation of credit card manufacturers who don't make anything except debt. A capitalist trading system of pump and dump and how to creatively resell that debt in various forms so that we can purchase products from foreign countries (whom we taught how to manufacture what we used to make and sell), and are now teaching others how to manufacture yet again, what we don't make any more.

All the while, we throw the marketing envelopes away we taught them how to make, and that they are now mailing back to us as junk mail.  

Yep, in many ways we make and sell junk now as a commodity.

And why do we do this?

To massively consume everything left on this planet like a bull dozer clearing the last sacred forest,  leaving nothing for the next generation, but an 'I owe you' to mother Earth.  

Now that's what I call a collateralized debt obligation (CDO) !"

-JChan

-JChan

why in many of these articles despite the thousands of children damaged everyday...people permanently injured...people are writing praise for vaccines...you want more vaccines????? when is enough ..enough???
vaccines  are praised in the same sentence as praise more modern human developements....they are a medical disaster??

Has anyone who writes these article that praise vaccines read a toxicology report or even statistics reports??

at what number of injections will the looney pharma lovers be satisfied...smileing while injecting people with gardisil whilst we drop dead on the floor....???