[LINK] Scientists offered cash to dispute climate study

[Richard Archer]

At 12:02 PM +1100 5/2/07, Karl Auer wrote:

>> Droughts: we have the knowledge to completely drought-proof
>> Australia and even to reclaim deserts.
>
>Nope. Not without oil.

I've seen footage of Vietnamese villages installing a permaculture
food forest using hand tools. They dug kilometres of contour banks
and dams using shovels. And a whacker-packer, but that could have
been replaced with manual labour too.

But the resulting forest produces an order of magnitude more food
than a dryland wheat monocrop. And that sort of system can be
established across tens or even hundreds of thousands of square
kilometres of Australia.

The production from that land would be so enormous that we would
never ever even be able to harvest it all, let alone consume it!

And it's drought-proof. In fact, if done on a massive scale it's
better than drought-proof. The extra transpiration from the trees
actively creates more rain downwind. It's a drought-defeating
system. But to establish the system on that scale does require
fossil fuels. Or absolutely massive amounts of manpower.


>In any case, when the oil runs out the devastation
>will be incredible. Think six billion starving people. They'll erase
>almost everything on the land surface of the planet as they go.

The earth CAN sustainably produce enough food and resources
for 6 billion people. That is, 6 billion Vietnamese, not
6 billion Australians or Americans.

The problem is, we in developed countries don't want to live
the Vietnamese lifestyle. We don't want to be self-sufficient
and sustainable.

We want to gorge and gorge until we explode.

And when we do explode, you're probably right. We might just
almost erase life from the planet as we go.

 ...R.