Paper: Scientific Consensus on Maintaining Humanity's Life Support Systems
The following paper was released on May 21 by Stanford University's Millennium Alliance on Humanity and the Biosphere, and is signed by over 500 scientists in different disciplines from around the world:
Scientific Consensus on Maintaining Humanity's Life Support Systems in the 21st Century (PDF)
As members of the scientific community actively involved in assessing the biological and societal impacts of global change, we are sounding the alarm to the world. For humanity's continued health and prosperity, we all - individuals, businesses, political leaders, religious leaders, scientists, and people in every walk of life - must work hard to solve these five global problems, starting today:
1. Climate Disruption
2. Extinctions
3. Loss of Ecosystem Diversity
4. Pollution
5. Human Population Growth and Resource Consumption
We further agree that, based on the best scientific information available, human quality of life will suffer
substantial degradation by the year
2050 if we continue on our current path.
This paper is worth reading from two points of view. One is to see the richness of the presentation of the problem, in all its gory dimensionality. The other is for the poverty of the solution proposals.
I finished reading the paper on the bus this morning. It made me feel like weeping. The
solutionistas seem to have some odd kind of psychological block. They either can't follow the evidence to its logical conclusion, or they don't have the courage to speak the bottom line. All the numbers are there, all the evidence is so clearly laid out. The only thing that's missing is that last scintilla of comprehension. And that makes all the difference to the world.
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