patrick.net

anonymous says

Maybe. But there is also a perfectly rational explanation for what's happening. Imagine that you are part of the elite of the Maldives. And imagine that you are smart enough to understand what's going on with the Earth's climate. As things stand today, it is clear that it is too late to stop a burst of global warming that will push temperatures so high that nothing will save the Maldives islands. Maybe not next year but in a few decades, it is nearly certain.

So, given the situation, what is the rational thing for you to do? Of course, it is to sell what you can sell as long as you can find a sucker who will buy. Then you can say good riddance to those who remain.

I'll see your Seneca and raise you a Spinosa: “What Paul says about Peter tells us more about Paul than about Peter”

What if they planning to use the money which will flow from the tourism economy to build dams? Just like in Netherlands which have a substantial chunk of the country below sea level has been building and maintaining dams ans levies for centuries. But no, we won't even entertain this possibility and will go straight to projection or ideologically convenient answer.

What's their alternatives if oceans do raise far and fast enough to make it a problem: sit on their hands, continue to be poor and beg for relief from "international organizations" or develop a tourism economy, earn money and be able to afford some kind of a solution?

I had written this to reply to that thread about Trump getting out of the Paris Accords, then forgot to post it--your mention of the Limits to Growth reminded me!

This Paris Accord is something that had its beginning nearly 50 years ago during the great cultural upheavals that began in the West in the late 60's--it wasn't just our country. Again, in Paris, Spain and Germany there were riots of self-righteous "students". The Club of Rome was founded in 1968 within this doomsday context and the tenets of the Paris Accords could almost be taken ver batim from its playbook. It published The Limits to Growth in 1972 at the beginning of a decade that would be remembered as the worst one economically during the last half of the 20th century. Its philosophy was one of no-growth, which actually the 70's were pretty much good at with all the inflation. There was no question we were running out of oil which OPEC cheerfully exacerbated with the 1973 embargo and filling stations full-filled the prophecy by running out of their 80% government-mandated allocations which only caused panic and made people fill up when their tanks were still 3/4 full--probably the closest we've eve come to a communist type situation. If anyone had predicted while sitting in one of those gas lines in 1977 that in 40 years there would be so much product on the market prices would have fallen 50% and OPEC would be impotent would be considered insane. Not to be outdone, Paul Ehrlich published The Population Bomb, also in 1968, with this gem:

"The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate..."

Others in the same genre were The Late, Great Planet Earth (1970) and The Greening of America (surprise! 1970). All these impulses have waxed and waned to one extent or another but somehow we always seem to muddle through.

You know how the "Boy who cried Wolf" ends, right?

It's OK to be skeptical, but dumb to ignore real warnings.