Bizarre stuff from The Atlantic, though it seems even Bill McKibben is panning him and when you can’t sell Bill McKibben on crazy, well, you’ve entered a whole new plane of crazy. Me? I welcome our new smaller climate optmized green cat-like overlords. – Anthony
How Engineering the Human Body Could Combat Climate Change
By Ross Andersen The Atlantic
From drugs to help you avoid eating meat to genetically engineered cat-like eyes to reduce the need for lighting, a wild interview about changes humans could make to themselves to battle climate change.
…
One human engineering strategy you mention is a kind of pharmacologically induced meat intolerance. You suggest that humans could be given meat alongside a medication that triggers extreme nausea, which would then cause a long-lasting aversion to meat eating. Why is it that you expect this could have such a dramatic impact on climate change?
Liao: There is a widely cited U.N. Food and Agricultural Organization report that estimates that 18% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions and CO2 equivalents come from livestock farming, which is actually a much higher share than from transportation. More recently it’s been suggested that livestock farming accounts for as much as 51% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. And then there are estimates that as much as 9% of human emissions occur as a result of deforestation for the expansion of pastures for livestock. And that doesn’t even to take into account the emissions that arise from manure, or from the livestock directly. Since a large portion of these cows and other grazing animals are raised for consumption, it seems obvious that reducing the consumption of these meats could have considerable environmental benefits.
…
Your paper also discusses the use of human engineering to make humans smaller. Why would this be a powerful technique in the fight against climate change?
Liao: Well one of the things that we noticed is that human ecological footprints are partly correlated with size. Each kilogram of body mass requires a certain amount of food and nutrients and so, other things being equal, the larger person is the more food and energy they are going to soak up over the course of a lifetime. There are also other, less obvious ways in which larger people consume more energy than smaller people—for example a car uses more fuel per mile to carry a heavier person, more fabric is needed to clothe larger people, and heavier people wear out shoes, carpets and furniture at a quicker rate than lighter people, and so on.
And so size reduction could be one way to reduce a person’s ecological footprint. For instance if you reduce the average U.S. height by just 15cm, you could reduce body mass by 21% for men and 25% for women, with a corresponding reduction in metabolic rates by some 15% to 18%, because less tissue means lower energy and nutrient needs.
…
In your paper you suggest that some human engineering solutions may actually be liberty enhancing. How so?
Liao: That’s right. It’s been suggested that, given the seriousness of climate change, we ought to adopt something like China’s one child policy. There was a group of doctors in Britain who recently advocated a two-child maximum. But at the end of the day those are crude prescriptions—what we really care about is some kind of fixed allocation of greenhouse gas emissions per family. If that’s the case, given certain fixed allocations of greenhouse gas emissions, human engineering could give families the choice between two medium sized children, or three small sized children. From our perspective that would be more liberty enhancing than a policy that says “you can only have one or two children.” A family might want a really good basketball player, and so they could use human engineering to have one really large child.
“We figured that if everyone had cat eyes, you wouldn’t need so much lighting”
Read the whole bizarre thing here: How Engineering the Human Body Could Combat Climate Change
Kate at Small Dead Animals has a poll
This is futuristic prognostication which should have no place in current policy making.
Nothing wrong with futuristic prognostication in the right places, of course…….
I’m six foot three. Should I find some way to “ungrow” to satisfy these misanthropic nutcases?
Cat’s eyes!!! Now the last time I saw a being with eyes like a cat it was licking a rear portion of its anatomy. I wonder, would it be catching?
“Climate optimized human engineering”? Isn’t that what nature has been doing with us for millennia? – And here we are, in generous quantities. We’d probably be doing quite well if only we could get rid of the parasitic, self-styled “élite” which feeds so greedily off the rest of us.
Eugenics proponents should be subjected to the same test as the population reduction people, namely: I’ll believe they’re serious when they start applying their degenerate policies to themselves, and not a minute before. Until then, they’re just enemies of humanity, no more, no less.
The problem is humanity ! We are, or becoming to many, we need to reduce our world population, now if the nerds from ” The Atlantic ” could come up with a solution and then demonstrate how it works ?
Forget GHG’s, I think drastic reductions in University funding are in order.
It’s probably a good thing that these ‘studies’ are brought to a wider audience, now everyone can see exactly where their tax money is going.
Phd – Probably hallucinogenic drugs
Why is anyone surprised that the insane CAGW zealot religion wants to practice eugenics? It’s merely the next step from Carbon Capture and Storage.
Keep an eye open for the next scholarly movement toward mass euthanasia, aka genocide.
Sooo essentially this nutter wants to devolve humans into owl monkeys ? They tick al the boxes small , nocturnal , vegan , built in insulation so no enviromental impact for clothing and shelter , limited tool use so no industry , smaller brains so they don`t ask their green overlords awkward questions . Sheeesh , I know most greenies are misanthropic malthusians but this sets a whole new levels of batsh*t crazy
So the proposals include a meat aversion drug and engineering cats eyes, neither of which we know how to do. If you’re going to use stuff we don’t know how to do, there are better solutions already in the literature. Stasis units! Everyone gets one day a week out of stasis, the rest of the time in stasis for a net reduction of human demands on the environment by 6/7ths! (Philip José Farmer’s “The Sliced-Crosswise Only-On-Tuesday World”)
Of course, what he really wants is people genetically engineered to be unquestioning and obedient to their oh-so-wise masters.
Come on Anthony, do you think we are all stupid or something? This was obviously a post you inteded to run on April 1st wasn’t it. Wasn’t it?
tonyb
It is a political trick as old as time to overstate a position then pull back, giving the impression of compromise and reasonableness. For instance, announce a fifty per-cent tax rise, to general outrage, then actually implement a ten per-cent rise to everyone’s relief. The EU are always floating outrageous ideas that they never implement – gives them something to do and takes everyone’s eye off what they actually ARE doing. Maybe this is in a similar vein – or maybe they really are barking mad.
Why don’t these people just be honest. “We are superior to everyone else, we know what is good for everyone else. We want to rule the world, we want to distribute wealth as we see fit. We want to save fossil fuels for our future needs as we need the gas to exterminate 6,500,000,000 people to reduce the population to 500,000,000 which we know for a fact is all Gaia can support, & besides it’s a smaller number to control with our new Global Standing Army/Navy/Airforce. We are the New World Order. We will decide who will live & who will die, because we know best, not you plebians who are so intellectually beneath us!” At this stage the men in white coats should be called. Do they actually live on this planet or are there really aliens orbiting above from where they get there intelligence? Beats me!
Actually, there is an obvious genetic engineering solution to CAGW! Selectively remove all Leftie genes: voila, noone will believe in CAGW any more!
Remember the discovery on the island of Flores in Indonesia a few years ago of the skeletons of what is believed to be an extent species of humans, homo floresiensis or the Hobbit as it was nicknamed? They were tiny and therefore if the world were populated by homo florensiensis instead of by homo sapiens the strain on the environment would be less.
The obvious solution to a fanatical Greenie (a “final solution”?) would be to try and extract DNA from the remains of the hobbits and recreate the species while banning homo sapiens from breeding so that we would eventually be replaced by our tiny very distant cousins.
What a load of (self-snip).
The main reason I am sitting here is because Humans are already adaptable to change.
We got though the last Ice-Age and the extreme Global warming that ended it.
We also, somehow, managed to survive the Holocene Thermal Anomaly (it used to be called the “Optimum” before post-normal “science” redefined it).
I respectfully suggest that Professor Liao reads up on Human history and pre-history before engaging his massive intellect.
Dear Mr. Liao, it is imperative that whatever your taking, REDUCE THE DOSAGE NOW!
DJA said on March 13, 2012 at 2:10 am:
This is The Internet. There are pictures here. Humans don’t need cat eyes, just sufficient flexibility, it is already possible and occurring. BTW, you’ll have to Google your own proof of that, I recommend you don’t do it at work.
CAGW does let the kooks out of the woodwork. Total madness
May I suggest to you Mat that you direct your powers of philosophic thought to FIRST examine whether or not there actually is any ‘problem’ before you advance solutions for it?
As with ANY scientific debate to address ‘problems’ it is best to begin with a concise statement stating exactly what the ‘the problem’ is and some honest empirical data to support its existence. I contend that none exists- prove me wrong.
True or false Mat – “The climate has ALWAYS changed.” True you will say but never so fast.
But then I will point to satellite data showing that earth’s temperature has changed rapidly in BOTH directions. While your theory attempts to explain times of rapid upward rate it is totally incapable of explaining periods of rapid downward rate. Given that the NET change from about 1980 has been roughly ZERO; earth’s temperature has gone equally both up AND DOWN over that time with various rates of change. I contend the existence of a number of identifiable downward rates that are in fact GREATER than near-by upward rates within that data – please attempt to disprove my contention.
CO2 has never been blamed for rapid global cooling as far as I am aware so … what caused the cooling and cooling faster than the warming in those periods? Let’s take a scientific approach to this Mat and assume there is some sort of a more effective yet undiscovered substance at work; I’ll call it “anti-CO2” and then challenge you to ~prove~ to me that it does not exist.
Respond here to me and others or be a coward – your choice.
This clearly show how much more dangerous avian brains can be than avian flu.
http://www.21stcenturysciencetech.com/Articles%202007/GWHoaxBorn.pdf
All according to plan:
“The North Carolina conference, which
took place Oct. 26-29, 1975, was cosponsored
by two agencies of the U.S.
National Institutes of Health: the John E.
Fogarty International Center for Advanced
Study in the Health Sciences and the
National Institute of Environmental Health
Sciences. (Mead had been a Scholar in
Residence at the Fogarty Center
in 1973.)
It was at this government sponsored
conference, 32 years
ago, that virtually every scare
scenario in today’s climate hoax
took root. Scientists were
charged with coming up with the
“science” to back up the scares,
so that definitive action could be
taken by policy-makers.
Global cooling—the coming
of an ice age—had been in the
headlines in the 1970s, but it
could not easily be used to sell
genocide by getting the citizens
of industrial nations to cut back
on consumption. Something
more drastic and more personal
was needed.
Eugenics and
The Paradigm Shift
Mead’s population-control
policy was firmly based in the
post-Hitler eugenics movement,
which took on the more palatable
names of “conservation”
and “environmentalism” in the
post-World War II period. As
Julian Huxley, the vice president
of Britain’s Eugenics Society
(1937-1944), had announced in
1946, “even though it is quite
true that radical eugenic policy
will be for many years politically
and psychologically impossible,
it will be important for
UNESCO to see that the eugenic
problem is examined with the
greatest care and that the public mind is
informed of the issues at stake so that
much that now is unthinkable may at least
become thinkable.” Huxley was then
director-general of the United Nations
Educational, Scientific, and Cultural
Organization (UNESCO).
By the 1970s, the paradigm shift that
obliterated the optimistic development
policies of Franklin Roosevelt and of
Dwight Eisenhower’s “Atoms for Peace”
program, was in full swing. The Club of
Rome’s Limits to Growth, which
removed the role of scientific advances,
was drummed into the public consciousness.”
“Mead—whose 1928 book on
the sex life of South Pacific
Islanders was later found to be a
fraud—recruited like-minded
anti-population hoaxsters to the
cause: Sow enough fear of mancaused
climate change to force
global cutbacks in industrial
activity and halt Third World
development. Mead’s leading
recruits at the 1975 conference
were climate scare artist Stephen
Schneider, population-freak biologist
George Woodwell, and the
current AAAS president John
Holdren—all three of them disciples
of Malthusian fanatic Paul
Ehrlich, author of The Population
Bomb.1 Guided by luminaries
like these, conference discussion
focussed on the absurd
choice of either feeding people
or “saving the environment.”
The big movers and shakers of the AGW scare are rationally challenged with stunted emotional growth, attracting like minded fanatics is what has kept the momentum going.
The more the green movement is exposed to being what it really is, insane, the quicker the ordinary joe and jane supporting them will see where this anti real progress in science and industry and anti human life comes from and the quicker support will drop – policies created out of this insanity have got to be scrapped.
I recommend that trees be re-engineered to show a temperature increase in their rings, like they’re supposed to do.
“Size reduction”… This will produce the ideal AGW crusader/scientist, just as described by Thomas Hobbes: ignorant, nasty, brutish…and SHORT.
I want to say: “Look this person is not being serious”, but we’ve all come across people like this and climate science has far more than its fair share.
I would like to think this is someone trying to promote a debate about what would be acceptable. I suspect it is someone with a screw loose.
Perhaps the real motive is intended to get a reaction. Either this is a self-publicist just about to release a book etc. etc., or this is someone trying to promote the opposite …. OK, cat’s eyes aren’t acceptable … QED one parent one child policy.
Surely Eugenics is the reason the Global Warming scare is being promulgated in the first place. The re-making of Man in his own image is the ultimate end; the various scare stories, of which Global Warming (or Cooling) is the latest (but not the last) is merely the means to this ungodly end.
All one can do is to reveal the falsehoods inherent in the latest legerdemain employed to facilitate the drive to manipulate us. So well done, those who lay bare the untruths propagated so ruthlessly.