Entries in "environment"
February 22, 2007
Why I found Collapse
so depressing
On Monday, Mano Singham wrote about The odd response to global warming warnings, and this reminded me that I never finished my response to Jared Diamond's Collapse
. I finished reading the book some time ago, and unfortunately continued to be more convinced by the doom-and-gloom side of the argument...than the hopeful side
.
Continue reading "Why I found Collapse
so depressing"
February 12, 2007
Fawwaz Ulaby - How Radar Connects to Carbon Economics
Last Thursday I went to a Electrical Engineering colloquium at the UW. The speaker was Fawwaz Ulaby of the University of Michigan, and he presented a project based on using radar satellites to audit carbon sinks.
Continue reading "Fawwaz Ulaby - How Radar Connects to Carbon Economics"
October 04, 2006
Environmental optimism
I've been reading Collapse by Jared Diamond lately. It's compelling, and also one of the most utterly depressing books I have ever read. It examines a series of historical collapses of societies, along with examples of societies facing similar challenges to those that collapsed but managing to overcome them. I should probably come back to this once I've finished the book, but so far I'm finding myself much more convinced by the doom-and-gloom side of the argument—in short that one society after another has made the same mistakes and we're in danger of doing the same as a globalised society in the 21st Century—than the hopeful side Diamond tries to portray along with it. There are various stories of societies' survival, but I just can't help feeling as I read them that they owe more to luck than judgement.