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ID-friendly Telic Thoughts blog takes sardonic view of Darwin’s man Nick Matzke’s Nature paper

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Recently, Sal Cordova noted that one of our commenters, Nick Matzke, co-authored a review article in Nature (here’s more), which seems to be a Left Behind scenario for Darwinists.

Meanwhile, the folk over at ID-friendly Telic Thoughts have some, well, thoughts on “Nick Matzke’s Dystopia”:

Well, ok, Matzke is not as scary as Paul “coastlines will be evacuated because of dead fish” Ehrlich and IPCC Chief “Himalayas will melt” Pauchari. In fact, Matzke’s dystopia of plentiful beef, corn, milk, warm climates and balmy tropical oceans sounds rather pleasant to this skeptic. But obviously, he considers this a dire catastrophe in the making.

(Sounds like a lost agrarian paradise to some.)

So I’ll make a prediction of my own. Matzke will offer a progressive solution to the problem which will include reducing consumption, and population control. Hey look! I was right!

“If humans decide to take appropriate action – conserve natural ecosystems, engage in sustainable agriculture and energy production, flatten out population growth and resource consumption, and halt global warming – there is hope that the state shift could be avoided. It’s up to us.”

Well, even if the predictions of alarmist nut jobs rarely ever come true, it’s comforting to know that the alarmists themselves are completely predictable.

Haven’t the alarmos noticed that birth rates worldwide are in steep decline? Wonder who they think’ll pay their pensions … ?

Anyway, it’s curious that atheists don’t actually come up with new cultural themes. They recast venerable tent revivals with new stars, new props.

Aw, you know. The thundering hooves of the apocalypse always pound out the same message: God’s mad at us. Or Darwin is. Or somebody or other with a big stick is.

Anyway, just don’t expect to finish your coffee or read your mail in peace. Unless you decide to ignore it all.

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Comments
JC: Pardon a brief intervention. The problem is, that we have battling apocalypse scenarios, here. The proposed environmentally motivated clampdowns on resources -- with far greater certainty backed by the current global economic instabilities -- can and most likely will trigger the sort of economic chaos that is a classic precursor to major wars. Apart from being just plain very rough on the people caught up in them. The signs in the ME are already worrying. One of the under-reported trade-offs involved is that a growing economy and associated technological transformation allows for a greater capacity to adapt and/or remediate, as can be seen from the cleanup of rivers over the past half century or so. And, on the climate change scenarios, once we discount the less than credible hype and panic or blindly dismissive suggestions, there are serious questions regarding the credibility of the projections; which are model-based. (It is not even that clear that we can in fact reconstruct the past global temperature average, and insofar as we can measure the global temperature trends, the structure of atmospheric change is significantly different from that which the models suggest; which implies that hey are technically deficient.) There are many who are not so sure that inflicting an all but certain economic catastrophe is the best way to buy maybe 10 years on a trend line when adaptation would be at least as effective and would be much less costly. We need to do some serious re-thinking and do it on a much more sober assessment of the evidence and our limitations. My own thought is that we should make no major, costly change on climate change scenarios that is not prudent on other, more reliable grounds. For instance, energy efficiency efforts easily pass that test, and so does the project of onward research on various relevant themes. A reasonable investment in alternative energy developments such as wind, solar PV, biofuel potential, etc is warranted. But we should be willing to recognise that the biggest potentials lie in hydro at various levels [the Chinese -- cf INSHP -- have turbines that work down to a teacup-sized unit for a farm pond), in geothermal where that is available, and in nukes. (I suggest a follow up on pebble bed modular reactors, and the possibilities of fusion should not be neglected. I favour a serious further look at the Bussard polywell proposals. OTEC may also be feasible at key sites.) KFkairosfocus
June 22, 2012
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I've survived pneumonia, bronchitis, chickenpox, the flu, and a host of other diseases and turned out just fine. Why should I be concerned about HIV? :P I'm going to have to invoke Pascal's wager on this one and go with the safe bet, treading on our environment with caution.JoeCoder
June 21, 2012
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JoeCoder, some of us experienced our first apocalypse in the 1950s, when nuclear weapons annihilated life on Earth. We also went to vacation Bible camps, where preachers held forth about God getting in ahead of that. (No reason to think he couldn't ... ) The population explosion arrived fashionably late, possibly because World War II had had the opposite effect in the areas where it was waged. During the population explosion, we were all packed into cars on the Toronto subway in rush hour and crushed to death. Then we died of fright due to nuclear winter. Now, we are being annihilated by global warming. At present, a mere handful of us are left (only six billion, which is nothing by cosmic standards). Some of us few survivors have decided to pass the rest of our lives in comparative peace by paying no attention whatever to further apocalypses, sponsored either by science or religion. (Many local animal species seem to have done the same.) We recommend apocalypses, apocalyptic behaviour, saviours from apocalypses, etc., as summer feature films for late nite viewing. For the rest, we would say: While alive, live wisely and in harmony with your surroundings.News
June 20, 2012
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It seems like Nick is presenting all the science and statistics, yet it's only being countered with rhetoric from UD and Telic Thoughts. I know next to nothing about global warming/climate change, but isn't it true that: 1. We're undergoing a mass extinction. Plant and animal life interact in very complex relationships (a possible pro-ID point) and just like negative epistasis among mutations, the same may happen among species when one goes extinct. 2. Although we don't know what the limit is, our resource consumption and population growth can't continue increasing forever. The sooner it's curbed, the more we will have left. I'm strongly pro life and anti-eugenics. Vasectomies and male birth control research are viable options. 3. We don't know enough to accurately model our impact on our planet's climate, so a cautionary approach is best, even despite past failed predictions. Just because we (myself included) disagree with Nick on ID, does that mean we have to automatically on everything else?JoeCoder
June 20, 2012
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