The Warning to Humanity Statement.

Scientist Statement
World Scientists' Warning to Humanity (1992)

Some 1,700 of the world's leading scientists, including the majority of Nobel laureates in the sciences, issued this appeal in November 1992. The World Scientists' Warning to Humanity was written and spearheaded by the late Henry Kendall, former chair of UCS's board of directors.

INTRODUCTION

Human beings and the natural world are on a collision course. Human activities inflict harsh and often irreversible damage on the environment and on critical resources. If not checked, many of our current practices put at serious risk the future that we wish for human society and the plant and animal kingdoms, and may so alter the living world that it will be unable to sustain life in the manner that we know. Fundamental changes are urgent if we are to avoid the collision our present course will bring about.


The Warning to Humanity Statement 1992

Can we take these scientists seriously?

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

Why shouldn't we?

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

We have people denying global warming despite the IPCC'S 2500 scientists asserting it and the NAS considering AGW as a scientific principle, so for whatever reason some people are retarded.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

Until someone sees global warming written in the Bible or predicted by Nostradamus, nothing will be done until it's too late. More personal matters have to be delt with, by the politicians in power, than getting a jump start in saving the world and humanity: wars..elections..maintaining wealth..adhearing to political party agendas..living in the name of religion.

Try to be happy with the notion you won't be alive when humanity will screw itself so deeply, it can't claw itself out. Or just wish/pray for it to be true.

I think the scientific community has a different way of looking at the world, and their perspective should be heavily considered, especially with a matter that is more scientific than political at the moment. There are some politicians who don't believe global warming exists or that their country is majorily contributing to it.

Do you think the Hollywood celebrities that protested going to war in Iraq had more influence that these 2500 scientists? I do.

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

 

Can't say I like this comment, even though it's probable that humanity is going to screw itself, I'd rather at least make an effort and hope that continually degrading ecosystems force us to adopt sustainable principles of living.

The facts are that laws of ecology exist, no species is immune...and all that anyone can ask is that the scientists be as truthful and objective as possible.

The major causes of GW are co2 emissions, and specifically electricity generation and auto-smog, and as the energy companies are among the richest in the world, they OWN politicians until people organize and act upon the best scientific assessmnet by our elite scientists.

Probably, but this problem isn't going away.
Each time we add consumers, we accelerate towards ecological breakdown, eco-breakdown can have a variety of meanings, but capitalism will collapse before we reach it.
So if you believe that we are heading for it, perhaps you should be doing your part rather than hoping for extinction or whatever you want.

 

Uh... why not? It's fairly obvious that humans are pretty ineffective when it comes to long-term understanding of the effects of their behavior on... well about anything.

In business, we are rarely able to think more than a year or two ahead; real five year business plans are a scarce as dark folk at a World Church of the Creator convention.

In personal relationships, we are rarely able to see beyond immediate gratification of sexual or emotional needs.

The list goes on and on... lets face it, we are piss poor when it comes to connecting the dots and having any sort of long-term vision.

So why is anyone surprised that we will "permanently damage the environment"? Secondly, why does anyone think this is "unnatural"? That's a bit arrogant. We are performing exactly as evolution has led us to perform; controlling resources to beter protect and prosper the fragile mammalian organisms.

In the end, big brains and high intelligence may very well prove to be a poor adaptation and will simply be eradicated as another evolutionary dead end. The emergence of human beings on the planet is an infinitesimally short event, much less significant in the gelogical time scale than the appearance of mildew in the shower stall - in our time scale.

Imagine the VERY worst; imagine that human beings manage to irradiate the entire planet in a typical H. Sapiens self-destructive act of nuclear psychosis. Even in THAT instance, life would bloom back given a million years or so. Even if it didn't and the planet remained lifeless until obliterated when our sun becomes a red giant in a few billion years - life would continue to evolve, somewhere in the universe. Life is tenacious and it is strange to think that we have any long-term effect on it other than in a VERY short and extremely limited way,

My point?

Sure, we need to be aware of the damage we are causing the environment, and deal with it as best we can, with our limited capacity for planning. But the idea that we are somehow behaving in an "unnatural" way is simply nonsense. The weird self-serving arrogance of some of the environmental preachers hurts their credibility.

 

Watcher

Do you include yourself?{serious question}

Not sure, but one of the problems with ecology is defintions, for instance what is permanent...I often think that those using the words are making assumptions that no radical change will ever occur+ there are some amazing results in terms of ecological rejuvenation that can be achieved,...... this knowledge isn't always in textbooks, it's in books by people like David Suzuki, citing examples of decayed areas being rejuvenated by utilizing techniques such as "biomimickry", ie, copying nature.

Well Sir, we still have to accept that the biosphere is our "life support system", and if we have have evidence that we are jeopardizing that system, then some rather harsh criticism is in order.
Having said that, I think if we replace unnatural with inefficient, then we reach a better understanding.

I'd question whether we're collectively using our brains at all.
I think it's more a question of emotional maturity.

The warning relates more so to OUR lives.

Pardon me but calling the gentlemen of TWTHS eco-preachers lacks any rational foundation, they happen to be some of the worlds most awarded and highly educated people....eco-preachers strikes me as a demonizing label.
They did the right thing, they informed the world, now it's up to us to act accordingly.

 

Re: Watcher

No, I don't think of myself as being all that different from any other human - same anthropoid brain, same evolutionary baggage. And long-range vision ain't one of our sterling attributes.

I never said we should "do nothing" in response to the erudite scientists that produced this report. But really, any thinking person would have reached the same conclusions long, long ago.

As far as your dream that we will "act accordingly" I think that's pretty naive. I don't sit around and bemoan our fate, but history has shown that it is exceedingly unlikely we will change our behavior until some major environmental crisis forces us to do so.

You really didn't address my main point, which was that one of the eco-arguments that is frequently used is that human beings and their interaction with the environment is "unnatural" is some sense.

I don't buy that; stupid or inefficient perhaps, but we are not outside nature in any sense. I think the "unnatural" argument is simply an effort to instill guilt in order to persuade. I reject those sort of arguments - just stick to the facts.

 

No preaching, you say?

Now I recall why I was a bit taken aback by the report that you posted. In the introduction, the authors begin with this statement:

"Human beings and the natural world are on a collision course."

As I stated before, that's so much emotionally laden crap. Human beings with all of their behaviors are part and parcel of the natural world. This idea that we should feel some sort of guilt about being supernatural monsters is a specious argument.

Therefore, this report instantly loses credibility for me. If they had started with:

"Human beings could do a better job of understanding their environment."

or pretty much ANYTHING other than the "collision course" metaphor, which does exactly what you were suggesting that I did to the authors of this report; they are attempting to "demonize" human beings so that we feel guilt and begin fixing all the ecological problems in some sort of masochistic frenzy.

 

Watcher

When and why?

I tend to agree that it's likely going to take a series of crisis for us to develop a sustainable system, however the more people who are informed in advanced, the less likely it is that we need to rely on crisis...having said that, the way things are going, one would tend to believe that we'll cock it up.

"Having said that, I think if we replace unnatural with inefficient, then we reach a better understanding"

This was my response to your statement.

The facts are there for any sane person to evaluate, ie, our most senior and respected scientists are continually warning us that we're approaching a serious eco-mess.
I really think your nit-picking of what you consider as loaded terminology is strange to say the least.

 

It's an important warning but pointless. Nearly everybody is aware of the problem already as a matter of common sense. Nothing will be done about it because no government can get elected arguing for economic slowdown (or a decrease in population, since a continual increase fuels wealth creation). Politicians do not have any power in this respect.

I suspect that disease and genetic malfunction will sort the problem out in the end, the signs are there already, although whether it will happen before or after we destroy our life support system forever who can say.

 

Well, no offense, but you give people too much credit+ TWTHS1992 wan't even aired on any of the major networks throughout the US and Canada.
In my travels, very few people have ever heard of THWTHS92.

It's becoming apparent that our "system" is flawed and cracking at this juncture.

My biggest concern{for my lifetime} is war, war as means of acquiring decreasing amounts of raw materials.
I hold the view that as many as possible should know, it couldn't be worse than it sneaking up on us.

 

I have to agree with Canute, "It's an important warning but pointless", which is pretty much what I had been trying to say, just less succinctly.

Maybe a more positive way of looking at it is this... we had a damn good run, anyway!

 

I'm sure you're right. But most people are already perfectly aware that we're destroying our ecosystem, and that we're becoming ever more reliant on finite and non-renewable resources now that we have outgrown the capacity of nature to support our numbers.

 

Perhaps, but in mid 2002, Barney Foran of Australia's CSIRO eco-sustainability unit, spoke to one of Australia's quailty current affairs programs{4 Corners} and made his case for radical change.

But in the other corner you had 2 economists and one politician spouting "technology will fix it", which is arguably true, but fix what?
It seems to me that societies had better start gearing up for eco-sustainablity, this would include phasing out all discretionary polluters such as SUV's and the so-called rational/civil countries helping China and India both with pop restraint and eco-models of development.

It's apparent that GOV and business are largely ignoring our elite scientists on something that's provably true, so it's up to people to change voting and purchasing habits....that's my message no matter how unpalatable.

 

its about -30C in my town today,pretty much the same like every winter,so it makes me wonder just where is that global warming??

 

GW is a global average, regions can stabilize or even get cooler, it's irrelevant as GHG theory explains that it's the excess of radiation that is delayed from leaving the global energy budget that will cause a global increase.

If we have globally averaged temps going up, we have Global warming.

Try reading the scientific evidence presented by the IPCC and WMO and backed by The prestigious United States National Academy of Sciences.

 

Actually the temperature data collected to prove global warming so far is not so compelling. After all, global climate change is observed across millenia or era, not across years or decades.

The more interesting data is the modern increase in atmospheric CO2. There is a lot of evidence that the recent spike in CO2 levels is indeed a result of human activities since the Industrial Revolution. That data should be taken in conjunction with the ice core data, which shows a directly proportional correlation between CO2 levels and global temperature across geologic time scale (tens of thousands of years, not decades).

It's pretty clear, based on the geologic record, that a climate change will result if the CO2 levels remain as high as they are today. However I am not impressed with any of the temperature or weather data that is being used to show that "global warming" is happening in the present. We simply don't have enough data collected over a long enough period of time to prove anything conclusively.

The point? "Global warming" or other climate changes will certainly occur as a result of the increased CO2 levels, which are undoubtedly caused by human activity. Whether it is occuring today or whether it will take 20, 50, 100 or 500 years to become pronounced is a matter of speculation, not science. The modeling of chaotic systems such as the global climate is simply not advanced to the level where long-range climate change predictions are particularly accurate.

Whether global warming will, in the end be a "bad" thing for the plant is also a matter of speculation, not science.

It's worthy of note that many "natural" events (volcanoes, asteroid impact, solar events, etc.) can change the climate far faster than human activity ever will. I use those quotes because I am not one of those that believe the human expansion of applied technologies is "unnatural". That's a biased political viewpoint, not a scientific one.

 

Re: Think universal, not global! Look at the other planets!

The scientific evidence for GW

I think you should do 2 things Fraggle...1, read this thread, and 2, try and find anything that would constitute a consensus on Global cooling.
From memory, there may have been a handful who touted the idea, BUT, that was a long time ago and we now have SATELITE evidence of warming and the actual gases that are contributing to the altering of the atmospheric composition{an internal climate mechanism}

With respect, this specific warning mentions the entire biosphere under threat, GW is one aspect of our eco-problems.

Could you show me any peer-reviewed papers from a respectable scientific journal that has "quantified" the suns influence?