Down to the wire : confronting climate collapse / David - Index of

Preface
1. From different perspectives and for different reasons, both Bill Joy (2000)
and Ray Kurzweil (2005) arrive at the conclusion that humans are likely to
lose whatever control we have over our own future. Joy takes no particular
joy in this fact. Kurzweil, like many in the fi eld of artifi cial intelligence, is
strangely euphoric.
2. The apt phrase is the title of James Howard Kunstler’s 2005 book. My use of
it, however, is intended more broadly to include problems of climate destabilization,
the end of the era of cheap oil, ecological degradation, and related
problems. John McHale, similarly, once described the future as a “crisis of
crises,” implying the same convergence of problems, dilemmas, and systems
breakdowns.
3. Solomon et al. (2009) estimate that changes in surface temperature, rainfall,
and sea level are irreversible for more than 1,000 years after carbon dioxide
emissions are completely stopped.
4. See www.climateactionproject.com and Becker (2008).
Introduction
Notes
1. See also Rees (2008), pp. 41–44, and Smil (Global Catastrophes, 2008), who
after surveying things is “deliberately agnostic about civilization’s fortunes”
while acknowledging that “none of us knows which threats and concerns
will soon be forgotten and which will become tragic realities” (p. 251).