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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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I like two of the arguments particularly:
1 – “It’s proven difficult to get people to agree to carbon trading schemes…”
So you think it will be easier to get them to agree to modify their bodies and minds?
2 – “Providing people with will-power increasing drugs will help them decide to donate to Oxfam…”
Umm… tell you what, I had thought of invading Poland, but I couldn’t really be bothered. With your drug regime, however…
I don’t believe any sane researcher would produce these thoughts. What this is is an activists’ wet dream. I want to know why a journalist thinks that this is worth publishing. It says more about the complete lack of journalistic values than any problem with researchers…
Liao.
There was a time when Americans had a pretty good immune system. If a Russian “visiting scientist” wrote an article about re-engineering humans, we’d correctly recognize the Stalinist impulse and we’d deport him as an Agent of Influence.
Now, of course, we have ideological lupus. We’ve been completely infected and effectively killed by Stalinists in the media, cultural organizations, education system, and ruling class. Any attempt at rejecting the infection will be met by the same fierce immune response that formerly fought the infection itself.
It’s WAY too late to cure it; we passed the point of no return in 1954.
Grapefruit they don’t want to “engineer” but people……is ok.
Fans of TV sci-fi show Firefly will recall the ending to Serenity, and the shocking discovery of the dark secret which the clean and noble (but totalitarian) regime was trying to hide.
Life imitates art.
“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.”
This fellow has no clear definition of ‘liberty’ from which to dangle that amazing departure from it.
Another great efficiency add-on would be genes to limit human lifetime. In the US the goal might be to restore the original Social Security design of providing support for on average something like three or four years. One big advantage would be improve people’s ability to plan the end of their lives. Another would be the huge medical savings of knowing when prostate cancer should be treated or safely left ignored and reducing money spent to support Alzheimer patients.
Of course, there should be small populations left unaffected to permit future study. In the US, I suggest that those of Swedish descent be forced into that group.
“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.”
WTF! What drugs have these people been smoking? I suppose this is to get us ready for a “human creature tax =HCT ” Based on your height to weight ratio, a percentage (2.2%?) going to people smaller than you. Crazy!
A more lucid treatment of this subject can be found under Tips and Notes:
http://www.happyplace.com/14697/the-most-insane-letter-ever-written-by-a-child-to-a-tv-weatherman.
The significance of the letter is clearer when the original addressee, Dr. Hansen, and author, Lil’ Al, are acknowledged.
I am easily convinced these are people of extreme intellect. How else to explain that leaders of this group such as Erlich and Schneider ended up at or near Stanford, Ca. I recall buying an original copy of The Population Bomb back in the late 1960s or early 1970s and wondering if I would live long enough to see some of its expectations proved one way or the other.
On cat eyes – they (and a cat’s visual cortex) are optimized for detecting motion across the visual field, possibly one reason my cats hated car trips (even if most were not going to the vet).
So this might also induce people to spend less time driving cars.
There there was a science fiction book about hearing being restored to someone by getting a transplant of a bat’s hearing system. The story traced how the recipient became a night “owl” able to determine the distances by sound and eventually started sleeping while hanging upside down.
Do we really want cat-eyed people carousing all night, feasting on rodents, and singing from any convenient perch? College town lifestyles would spread far beyond the large colleges!
Yes true, if you wish to see the” Green Brave New World” the warmists have in store for us, I suggest you do some reading on North Korea. Start with this one:
http://www.amazon.com/Nothing-Envy-Ordinary-Lives-ebook/dp/B002ZB26AO/ref=pd_sim_kstore_1?ie=UTF8&m=A1FFE6UIJNJA4Q
Thank god for the internet and people like Anthony Watts, or these crazy bastards would have won.
I thought for a moment I was reading a chapter of “Tuf Voyaging” by George R. R. Martin.
Bioengineering the population to solve some imaginary problem?
Some of these papers should be nominated for a Hugo Award (The best science fiction or fantasy works and achievements of the previous calendar year).
MewGenics.
(Cat eyes, keen–sign me up!)
It’s a brave new world? What is it about these sorts of people who take the warnings from fiction about where we can go wrong and then decide, hey, this sounds like a grand idea?
So all of those AGW true believers who feign outrage when skeptics point out the similarities between AGW and eugenics are going to have to find a new source of outrage. Or was this article really a Daily Onion routine????
Hmmm…
get rid of all the people
and this planet would be a great place to live.
Believe we’ve heard that one before.
Mr.. Green and his minions still preside over the U.S. government. It is the governments funding that drives this nonsense. These “studies” legitimize the governments actions on “climate change”.
A couple of days ago, on an unrelated topic, I posted at Tallbloke about the history of eugenics and genetic science and how it relates to the current climate brouhahas. Here is an extract:
“It is worth reiterating that eugenics, which led to unspeakable horrors, and not just in the Godwin’s Law sense, was absolutely respectable and mainstream in the 1920s and 30s. The last remnants were still practised in many parts of the Western world well into the 1960s, mainly via forced sterilisation. Eugenics seemed intuitively to make sense, especially to people who bred animals.
The trouble was, apart from the ethical issues, the science it was based on was mostly rubbish. Many of the characteristics identified as being undesirable were not heritable, or no more heritable than not. Others could be prevented, treated or rectified as medicine progressed. Others simply did not exist outside the moral preconceptions of those who named them.
Fast forward to the present day, and we have furious disputes about GM food, about genetic medicine, about the uses of genetic testing of humans and embryos, etc etc. But the thing that most depresses many of the geneticists I have spoken to is the widespread disinformation in the popular press about their work. We have all seen the stories about the x type cancer gene, the gay gene, the Altzheimer’s gene yada yada. There ain’t no such thing. A ‘gene’ is not even a discrete particle in the way it is conceptualised in the popular media. This kind of thinking is, in a way, a legacy of eugenics. More generally, it demonstrates how the lot of a genuine and ethical scientist in a contested field is not a happy one.”
Here is the link, for the full discussion:
http://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2012/03/09/magic-turtle-on-the-wisdom-of-throwing-stones-at-the-greenhouse-theory/#more-5279
It does seem that a few philosophers are trying to raise their profile – we have just had infanticide and now this. People need to keep this stuff in perspective – philosophers (and other academics) come out with extreme stuff all the time. It matters not, except that usually we are paying for it.
The other thing that bugs me is that these onanists pretend that they have come up with something new. Ever heard of Spartans leaving babies on the hillside? Or women in the 1950s being advised that smoking will help them to keep the babies smaller? Or people picking partners that they hope will produce good children?
As we have often seen in climate science, the fact that a person is academically bright says nothing about their judgement. Given the choice of a person of average intelligence with good judgement, and a geek with none, the choice is not difficult IMO.
Huxley’s best novel (artisically) was After Many a Summer Dies the Swan, in which a millionaire extended his life by monkeying with his genes, ending up becoming baboon-like. (He was halfway there to start with.)
Paul Ehrlich was mentioned 6 times in M.Mann’s Hockey Stick book; he says on location 4919 (Kindle) Mann calls Paul Ehrlich a PERSONAL HERO. Yes WHWT readers, a personal hero!!
I would like to punch Mann is the nose.
The mass movements of today are not so much cultural but anti-imperialism, anti-Americanism, anti-Zionism, environmentalism, scientism, and others, are millenarian and apocalyptic. The progression from communism to fascism in the creation of the new world was bridged by Nietzsche which led to an association between ecologists and German nationalists, among whom a number subsequently became Nazis. Certain German “volkish” ideas that were central to fascism: about the organic harmony of the earth, the elevation of animal rights and the denigration of humans as enemies of nature are today presented as the acme of environmentalist progressive thinking. When I point out to warmists that their roots lie in Fascism, hell begins to freeze over. Interestingly the environmentalists are today’s Gnostics. Have a read of the British National Party manifesto and you will see hardly any difference from a socialist manifesto. One needs to be a student of history to see the madness of these people.
Probably gets a decent salary and medical insurance, money well spent America. Do people pay to go to that college?
When I imagine the government required to make Mr. Liao’s dreams come true, I tremble.
Mr Liao, the Nurse Ratchett of climate science
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.
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I’m sure this seems perfectly logical for someone that grew up in a culture of picking and choosing which baby you wanted to keep……………