what about polar cities? please check the wikipedia entry for “polar cities” and get back to me on this. thanks. DANNY

climatechange3000.blogspot.com

see my blog too. thanks

do you think we might need them? say year 2500?

email me at

danbloom
AT
gmail

Polar cities are proposed sustainable polar retreats designed to house
human beings in the future, in the event that global warming causes
the central and middle regions of the Earth to become uninhabitable
for a long period of time. Although they have not been built yet, some
futurists have been giving considerable thought to the concepts
involved.

I know, I know, the very thought of “polar cities” sounds like some
science-fiction movie you don’t want to see. But it might be
instructive to think about such sustainable Artic and Antartic
communities for the future of humankind. If worse come to worse, and
things fall apart, perhaps by the year 2500 or the year 3000, we must
might need polar cities. And perhaps the time to start thinking about
them, and designing and planning them (and maybe even building, or
pre-building them), is now.

Here is more food for thought, from an entry in Wikipedia:
“High-population-density cities, to be built in the polar regions,
with sustainable energy and transportation infrastructures, will
require substantial nearby agriculture. Boreal soils are largely poor
in key nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus, but nitrogen-fixing
plants (such as the various alders in the Artic region) with the
proper symbiotic microbes and mycorrhizal fungi can likely remedy such
poverty without the need for petroleum-derived fertilizers. Regional
probiotic soil improvement should perhaps rank high on any polar
cities priority list. James Lovelock’s notion of a widely distributed
almanac of science knowledge and post-industrial survival skills also
appears to have value.”

Oh, I know it’s fashionable to mock global warming alarmists and doom
and gloom futurists with no credentials except a keyboard and a blog,
but there’s a method to the madness of thinking about polar cities.
Maybe, just maybe, if enough people hear about the concept of polar
cities and realize how serious such a possibility is, maybe, just
maybe, they will get off their tuches and start thinking hard and fast
about how we humans are causing climate change by our lifestyles and
inventions and gadgets and need for cars and airplanes and trains and
ships and factories and coal-burning plants across the globe — and
then maybe it won’t be fashionable to mock global warming alarmists
anymore.

The future does not look good. But we can do something now. No, not
building polar cities now. That’s for the future to decide. What we
can do now is stop what we are doing now and start planning in a more
sane way for the future of the species. If we even care. I do. We must
stop all human acitivity that is responsible for emitting carbon
dioxide into the Earth’s atmosphere. Now. It’s getting later earlier
and earlier, I tell you.

…The Secret is not only drivel—it’s pernicious drivel.

Absurd optimism can be the death of you. Take the medical profession, for instance. As the Creative Loafing article you mentioned relates,

…initial-care personnel have been trained to study data and look for treatment and prevention failures that, once remedied, have reduced the death rate among wounded soldiers from 25 percent during the first Persian Gulf War to 10 percent now.

Cliff Bostock has a really interesting article in the Loaf recently.

“it would be unhealthy to look for failure in all areas of one’s life. But, in many cases, it’s essential. Indeed, one could reasonably argue that it was George Bush’s blind optimism and reliance on his “gut” that allowed him to invade Iraq without listening to those who anticipated failure. The refusal to consider the negative has mired us more deeply than ever in the negative.”

http://atlanta.creativeloafing.com/gyrobase/Content?oid=oid%3A241549

“A man traveling across a field encountered a tiger. He fled, the tiger after him. Coming to a precipice, he caught hold of the root of a wild vine and swung himself down over the edge. The tiger sniffed at him from above. Trembling, the man looked down to where, far below another tiger was waiting to eat him. Only the vine sustained him.”
“Two mice, one white and one black, little by little started to gnaw away the vine. The man saw a luscious strawberry near him. Grasping the vine with one hand, he plucked the strawberry with the other. How sweet it tasted!”

I believe that this translation originally appeared in “Zen Flesh, Zen Bones” by Paul Reps. My current favorite version of this philosophy is by Warren Zevon who gave us a nice reply to the question of what facing certain death by inoperable cancer had taught him: “Enjoy every sandwich!”

I like zen but I love sandwiches!