Here is a good example

http://www.thenewsroom.com/details/299883/Health?c_id=kg

Its a video clip of a sustanability project where they are using hydroponic farming on the hudson river. Food without the emissions caused by farming equipment, and the chance to educate people. Not to shabby.

The key is to ensure that what we do we don’t jeapordize our future anymore than we have now!

And I don’t see the value of me starting a blog, because if I have something to say, I contact the specific “extinction threat community” in question. Mostly I suspect they ignore my advice… for instance, I’m realizing the importance of cutting edge agriculuture research in mitigating global warming, so two strategies have come to mind so far:
1) Change my e-mail signature to a charity web browser (www.everyclick.com) and suggest an apiculture journal (IBRA). Annoy the bee-keepers of the world with a friendly suggestion to do likewise.

2) A small component of the cancelled CAM (for the ISS) was to characterize plant growth under varying gee conditions, analogous to the surfaces and interiors of all the 0.01g-2g objects in our Solar System. Managing payload is key to Exo-Earth industry; plants save the weight of some chemical processing infrastructures. Now I’m taking a crash course in trying to have CAM deployed before the Space Shuttles retire. BTW the CAM is far more important for H+ research than for agriculture, but I’m concerned about the Wheat Physiology component chiefly.
In both cases, running blogs doesn’t help me effect real world change, I don’t think.

I will likely open up a geocities page to publish the contents of any essay ideas I have, rather than waste time to find references to materials I already know and have memorized. A blog? Why? I just want my views to be Google-able. I know you guys don’t like my political positions, but they represent humanity’s best chance.

My specific concern above is that there appears to be an underlying Homeland Security agenda. This is fine but if it is not explicitly stated, it is confusing to people who assume a news article designed to shed light on potential terrorists plans is actually an existential risk.

I’m in the process of trying to equate existential risks with regressive world events, and I think I’d much rather see terrorist events regularly befall a world city, than to see regressive economic events such as curbing immigration and ramping up military spending occur. I say let the terrorists into the world’s economy along with the skilled professionals. In my view of things, existential risks are primarily propogated by large economic players, even Osama looks puny by comparison.

I like your idea of Lifeboat posting links to the distributed environmental simulations, btw. I’ll see if I can dig that up and post it myself.

1) Futurists are predisposed to invent physics for works of fiction. This is fine in itself (I’m sure many great engineers were motivated by reading Tom Swift and Asimov stories), but too often the fiction context is taken out of context.

2) People who reject existing government and societal solutions are predisposed to be at least middle-class. This is rational from a personal finances standpoint: government keep your hands off my moolah I earned/lucked-out-being-born-Western. But it also means one will not acknowledge simple statist solutions to problems like Global Warming, solutions such as increasing gasoline taxes (much cheaper and safer than Terraforming) or cutting big-oil tax-breaks.
I don’t expect people to change their own belief systems right away (and it isn’t necessary unless you are a politician or billionaire or former World Bank president)and it takes time to learn stuff, but if there is not that progressive improvement, why even pretend to be altruistic if your own actions directly bolster neocapitalism?

You’re right. Your pet definition of global warming traces its cause to the big bang. All respectable scientists define Global Warming as the temperature spike that has occured in lock-step with the Industrial Revolution. We use satellites and nearby human observers and airplanes to confirm volcanic eruptions and their effects (for the big ones) on global temperatures are traceable as temperature declines and agriculture yield drops (and most likely the ends of some civiliazations potentially including our own). Oceans *absorb* about 1/2 the extra CO2 we add to the atmosphere presently along with the breakeven add-substract CO2 recycling process oceans naturally facilitate; they are net CO2 sinks not contributors.

For the record (not in response to any comment on this blog), suggesting land surface temperatures are unaffected by solar output variations is to say their is no difference in surface temps between day and night. Oceans do act as heat sinks and moderate the world’s weather/climate by releasing this heat. It is the reason Continental climates are so extremely cold and hot in the winter and summer, and why port cities always have little temperature variation.
Whenever I see Global Warming questioned in any forum, I immediately lose a little respect for that forum; whatever “reality filters” should be in place (such as the composition political, educational, or otherwise, of one’s audience), aren’t. It wastes people’s time.

H+ interests and existential risk analysts should ditch the Neocons rather than affiliate closer with them, else doing more harm than good.

Thanks for the link. Unfortunately that site is a perfect example of what I mean. It’s seems more of a discussion about the problem instead of solutions towards the problem.

Thus far, I’ve only seen two solutions proposed, and a third possible one that will work, although it will produce nasty side effects.

The first solution involves putting some type of “huge sunshade lens” that would tint the suns rays just dark enough to relieve our planet from some of its heat.

Unfortunately, this is not only too expensive (as it would drain the entire world’s economy putting tens of thousands of these in orbit) but would take too long with our current technology to be of any use.

The second is scattering moon dust to help shade the Earth. The idea is brilliant, but the dust tends to love gravity, and it would either end of floating away or collecting near an Lagrange point, thus heating the Earth and shading it every so often.

The last result is a nuclear war, which would certainly cool down our planet. Although if that was the only solution, I would rather burn to death slowly than freeze my wazoo off within a week from others mistakes.

So those are the only solutions that I’ve heard thus far. Has anyone else heard anything better?