Kissing our arses goodbye?

Too late for many species, though. And bad luck, third world. But we’ll be okay.

If necessary, the border patrols would stop them. Fear will produce violence, and our ability to detect boats and deal with them violently will be exponentially increased over the next 20 to 30 years.

We can replace bees with microbots if necessary. We are on the verge of having that technology now. Other solutions are available, too.

With a crash in biodiversity in Australia, there will be less competition for water from plants and animals and fewer areas worth protecting from an environmental perspective. Thus, we could farm and mine the shit out of them even if they were relatively marginal.

Humans are not immune to big environmental changes. But we are much better equipped than any other species.

The clathrate gun stuff, yes. But even if that occurred, as disastrous as it would be, it would not happen for about 50 years or so under the worst climate change predictions over that period. And by then our carbon emissions will be effectively zero.

Methane also has such a short time in the air compared to carbon that it would be only a problem for 20 years or so. And again, technology would save the wealthy west.

Don’t be too sure about that DG. If we lose a third of our Australian biodiversity, then how sustainable will this fragile continent be for long term human habitation?

Sure, we can ‘hang on’ with massive extinctions worldwide, but we may just find it impossible to support ourselves in such huge numbers. It’s the stuff that can disappear which people don’t notice that can really make it VERY hard for us. (Try and imagine the planet without bees for example! Or, the more probable loss of ocean biodiversity with acidification. No crustaceans will cope well, and the whole food chain depends on them.)

This problem is more than just about us, and if we view it that way then the imperative to act is that much greater.

But those who put us on the verge of collapse are also reducing the problem to a set of numbers. Remember the Club of Rome predictions? Remember the book ‘The Population Bomb’? Statistics were used to ‘prove’ that the world was on the verge of a disastrous population collapse.

The problem is, these statistical predictions did not take into account many other factors, the main one being human ingenuity. The speed of technological advance in the last 40 years has been absolutely unprecedented. And we have pushed much further in the last 20 years than we have in the last 2000 in many, many areas.

They also do not take into account the fact that human socieities can and do act rapidly to changing circumstance (by ‘rapidly’ I mean within one generation).

All such predictions have been proven wrong.

As to it being a possible reality, sure. But it is an extremely unlikely possible reality – so extremely unlikely that it is as worth bothering about as the notion that we are living in the end times with an eternity in Hell looming down upon us.

This is why I say that we in the west have nothing really to worry about beyond a short-term rise in energy prices (assuming that we do not care about animals or those in the third world).