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Showing posts from June, 2013

The Earth's plants produce exactly what others eat

In this blog and other blogs that will follow, I will show you how laws of nature limit human expectations borne from ignorance and arrogance.  First, I would like to remind those readers who might be scientifically-challenged that the laws of physics, chemistry, and biology are called "laws," because we, scientists, have found no exceptions to them in as many experiments as have been carried out for as long as these laws have been on the books.  I repeat: As opposed to legal laws, the laws of nature do not allow exceptions, do not listen to lobbyists, shrug off presidents, and dispatch ignorant scientists to the trash bin of history. Just like ignorance of the law cannot be a legal excuse, ignorance of the laws of nature is a crime, not an oops. But, because most societies do not care much about nature, this crime generally goes unpunished by human laws.  In the long run, however, trespassing against the laws of nature has only one outcome: We perish by one means or anoth

The Ghost of Julian Simon

The essence of my unchanging argument is as follows: An exponential growth of human population can be supported for a while by a similarly exponential increase of production of power as primary energy per unit time and food we must eat each day. After a certain time interval , whose length depends on the rate of population growth and technology, both the population and the means of its survival must stabilize or collapse.  The elapsed time to collapse depends strongly on the rate of deterioration of environmental services of the Earth: abundance of clean air, water, good soil, large healthy forests, and biodiversity in general, as well as on the healthy oceans. Please note the two key phrases: "for a while" and "a certain time interval."  My argument is generally  rejected, because most people focus on the here and now, and forget that a few decades are less than a blink of an eye in history of humanity.  In the more sophisticated circles of "main-stream&

Human Foibles

I am on a short vacation with my wife.  We are staying in my daughter boyfriend's family summer house in Casadero, 9 miles west from Guerneville, CA.  It is a very nice house in the middle of a majestic redwood forest, separated by a long forest driveway from the road. In the house, I find five white document boxes that hold an archive of old LA Times newspapers.  I open the first box and pick up at random the business section for LA Times dated May 21, 1992.  In it, my eyes lock immediately on a report bemoaning President Bush's handling of the Savings and Loans debacle, and how the government loan pools favor big S&Ls relative to ordinary people.  Then I see an article stating that people will never again look the same at investing into houses. (In May 1992, we were in the second year of a major housing slump.)   Does this sound familiar, or what?   Why have we forgotten?  I take it back: Why have most people forgotten? I have not forgotten, and this is my curse. We a