The Cycle End How our greed driven lifestyle will lead to mankind ultimate demise 2 Colin Bell
Download As PDF : The Cycle End How our greed driven lifestyle will lead to mankind ultimate demise 2 Colin Bell 
Our 21st century capitalist society, founded upon debt, relies on continuous expansion – of population, wealth and resource usage. Yet we live on a finite planet with strictly limited means. So, however optimistic you may be, perpetual growth simply isn’t possible within this fixed planetary boundary.
Pretty much everything we do is dependent in some way upon one of the three fossil fuels, coal, oil and gas, and allowing for the changing trend in their usage, none is likely to last more than another 50 years. So, if you were to have a child born today, these fuels are unlikely to last that child’s lifetime.
Of course, we may find the holy grail of energy – nuclear fusion dangles that carrot, but having known of that source for decades and never managed to get even close to a working prototype, never mind a power station, it’s not exactly waiting in the wings.
But even if we were to find a cheap, safe and readily available alternative to alleviate this impending energy crisis, other problems loom. Climate change, soil depletion and water shortages threaten the fundamental ecosystems on which all life depends.
OK, so we’ve heard all this before – and yet we’re still here, better off than ever before, and despite the present recession hitch, most people expect to carry on as before. However, now it’s different. Our economic system is built on debt, and debt is a terrible positive feedback system. The trigger to collapse will be the cost of energy, which, for the first time since the industrial revolution began, is now in an endless spiral upwards.
Yet why do we carry on as if everything will be fine? Simply because we’ve been nurtured that way.
The Cycle’s End explains the issue in an uncomplicated manner for everyday people. Easy reading, avoiding countless references and scientific jargon, the author has no allegiance to anyone other than himself and nature. We are on the brink and have to act now, or the human cycle of expansion followed by collapse will be assured.
No past civilisation has endured permanently and our global society will be no different.
The end of this cycle of mankind’s existence is close.
The Cycle End How our greed driven lifestyle will lead to mankind ultimate demise 2 Colin Bell
This (Kindle) book is a series of minimally supported assertions based, apparently, on the thermodynamic argument that by using increasingly more powerful energy sources, our society has become unsustainable, and that only by ignoring the "big picture" (i.e. not balancing the equations) do we fool ourselves that we can keep this up. Anyone familiar with the work of Jeremy Rifkin, for example, will recognize this approach. That's what lured me in, only to find that Bell can't balance the equations himself, and the book degenerates into a rant about greed and how little we all really need to survive - as if he were really qualified to make that call.When I reached the part of the book where Bell begins to discuss climate change it became apparent that his thinking is mired in many of the same misconceptions about water vapor that muck up the assertions of climate change denialists. His credibility was lost and I put the book down in disgust at that point, realizing that Bell is clueless about climate change.
In a nutshell, he seems to believe that the bulk of observed warming results from deforestation, and that all those scientists are wrong about C02. Yeah, all those scientists are wrong but he's got it sussed. Unaware of the solar spectrum (C02 should keep infrared out not just "blanket" it in), and what happens to electromagnetic radiation once it has been absorbed, he claims it is the decrease in energy absorption by plants during photosynthesis due to deforestation that is behind warming. I wonder if he is aware just how little energy is captured by plants, and how little of that is stored in chemical bonds. He doesn't bother to tell us where the rest goes. As an aside, comparing the greenhouse effect to a blanket, although something everyone does, is still wrong.
He seems to be utterly unaware that plants also perform respiration; he blames animals alone for exhaling C02. He then lumps low and high clouds together, stating that scientists are in disagreement about whether clouds are negative or positive feedbacks. Ignorant of latent heat, he claims that water is able to absorb energy without changing temperature, but then never bothers with telling us where that energy goes. Apparently he's never heard of Joseph Black. Or Tyndall. Or Realclimate.org, where his misconceptions about the greenhouse effect might have been corrected before he committed them to posterity in print.
In short, avoid this and look elsewhere for information about sustainability from authors who have a clue about the underlying science. This one's a clunker, and that is a tremendous shame because the message of sustainability is too important to butcher.
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The Cycle End How our greed driven lifestyle will lead to mankind ultimate demise 2 Colin Bell Reviews
Provocative and thoughtful. This book presents the need to build a society oriented to real sustainability.
This is possible only if people understand better the effects of our daily actions and undertake small changes in our daily lives. A courageous witness to the reality that as humankind, we have built.
This () book is a series of minimally supported assertions based, apparently, on the thermodynamic argument that by using increasingly more powerful energy sources, our society has become unsustainable, and that only by ignoring the "big picture" (i.e. not balancing the equations) do we fool ourselves that we can keep this up. Anyone familiar with the work of Jeremy Rifkin, for example, will recognize this approach. That's what lured me in, only to find that Bell can't balance the equations himself, and the book degenerates into a rant about greed and how little we all really need to survive - as if he were really qualified to make that call.
When I reached the part of the book where Bell begins to discuss climate change it became apparent that his thinking is mired in many of the same misconceptions about water vapor that muck up the assertions of climate change denialists. His credibility was lost and I put the book down in disgust at that point, realizing that Bell is clueless about climate change.
In a nutshell, he seems to believe that the bulk of observed warming results from deforestation, and that all those scientists are wrong about C02. Yeah, all those scientists are wrong but he's got it sussed. Unaware of the solar spectrum (C02 should keep infrared out not just "blanket" it in), and what happens to electromagnetic radiation once it has been absorbed, he claims it is the decrease in energy absorption by plants during photosynthesis due to deforestation that is behind warming. I wonder if he is aware just how little energy is captured by plants, and how little of that is stored in chemical bonds. He doesn't bother to tell us where the rest goes. As an aside, comparing the greenhouse effect to a blanket, although something everyone does, is still wrong.
He seems to be utterly unaware that plants also perform respiration; he blames animals alone for exhaling C02. He then lumps low and high clouds together, stating that scientists are in disagreement about whether clouds are negative or positive feedbacks. Ignorant of latent heat, he claims that water is able to absorb energy without changing temperature, but then never bothers with telling us where that energy goes. Apparently he's never heard of Joseph Black. Or Tyndall. Or Realclimate.org, where his misconceptions about the greenhouse effect might have been corrected before he committed them to posterity in print.
In short, avoid this and look elsewhere for information about sustainability from authors who have a clue about the underlying science. This one's a clunker, and that is a tremendous shame because the message of sustainability is too important to butcher.
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