New at Reason

November 27, 2006

Brian Doherty takes a whirlwind tour of end-of-the-world theories while trying to slowly, slowly back away from his tour guide.

Comments

Larry A|11.27.06 @ 10:45AM|#

On second thought, maybe the war on drugs is a good thing.

|11.27.06 @ 10:53AM|#

"The richest culture on Earth includes a substantial minority who despise its economic basis even as they benefit from it."

Not quite. They want to have the benefits themselves. They despise the results they perceive from EVERYONE ELSE who has those benefits. Most of these preachers of environmental apocalypse live lifestyles that 99% of Americans would envy.

|11.27.06 @ 11:19AM|#

The world ends in 2012?

Fuck it.

I'm buying a Hummer.

|11.27.06 @ 12:33PM|#

"although the planet's overall forest land area has hardly changed in the last 60 years"

I think I would need a citation on that assertion.

|11.27.06 @ 12:37PM|#

"At the global level, the net loss in forest area during the 1990s was an estimated 9.4 million ha (equivalent to 2.4 per cent of total forests). This was the combined effect of a deforestation rate of 14.6 million ha per year and a rate of forest increase of 5.2 million ha per year. Deforestation of tropical forests is almost 1 per cent per year."

http://www.unep.org/GEO/geo3/english/178.htm

Brian Doherty|11.27.06 @ 2:56PM|#

Mainstream Man--My source was a chart (Figure 60) on page 111 of Bjorn Lomberg's SKEPTICAL ENVIRONMENTALIST, dervied from FAO data, showing in by one of the three definitional trend lines forested area in billions globally of hectartes of around 4 in 1950, and what looks like 3.8 in 2000--percent of forested land area similarly only down by a percentage point or two, from 30 or so to 28 or so. (All the vagueness comes from reading a chart that had specific markings only for every half billion or five percentage points.) That seemed to me fairly within the realm of "hardly changed" especially given all the deforestation talk of past 30 or so years.

|11.27.06 @ 3:46PM|#

Brian,
Thanks.
For those interested in the complete FAO report...

http://www.fao.org/forestry/foris/webview/forestry2/index.jsp?siteId=101&sitetreeId=1191&langId=1&geoId=0

or key findings
http://www.fao.org/forestry/foris/webview/forestry2/index.jsp?siteId=6839&sitetreeId=32246&langId=1&geoId=0

"The net change in forest area in the period 2000-2005 is estimated at -7.3 million hectares per year (an area about the size of Sierra Leone or Panama), down from -8.9 million hectares per year in the period 1990-2000."

|11.27.06 @ 3:58PM|#

Of course, if you're a gold bug, you know that in 2012 the US currency will collapse, thus ushering in a new Dark Age. It's a little alarming to see all the doomsday theories converging. Harmonizing, if you will.

Tell me...do Mayan computers have obsolete code that will cause their operating system to crash when they reach the year 2012?

|11.27.06 @ 5:59PM|#

Way back in the 1970s, friends and I often consumed mind altering substances, including hallucinogens. Being of sound mind prior to ingesting said hallucinogens, we never saw God, divined the future or had life changing self awareness revelations. We just laughed a lot. It's a hallucination, dumbass! It's not real! That leads back to "being of sound mind..."

|11.27.06 @ 9:00PM|#

James,

Well, not 2012, but on Jan. 18, 2038, some old programs will think it's Dec. 13, 1901.

|11.27.06 @ 11:57PM|#

The world has to end in 2012 so that we have a century to get to the world forseen by Dr. Peart

"I was overwhelmed by both wonder and understanding as I saw a completely different way to life, a way that had been crushed by the Federation long ago. I saw now how meaningless life had become with the loss of all these things ...""

Deep.

|11.28.06 @ 6:29PM|#

...the one that's always finding new reasons everyone else deserves to get it good and hard.

I don't know why, but I just found that sentence to be really funny.