Jan 25 2008The World Is Doomed, Head For The Hills

no need to worry. the highlander will invent a shield to protect the earth from harmful UV way before then. of course, then world will be dark, and Sean Connery will have to come back from the dead to fix everything. THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE!!!!

Don't worry, Xenu will save us!

Lots of love,
Tom Cruise

(P.S. Send Money)

damn luddites: nice references. I was more so distracted by the Maxim ad right before the comment section...vavoom! bow chicka wow wow (sp?).

Oh, the post, that's right...um *shrug* As I had mentioned, living in other areas where people don't currently live (desserts, both hot and cold)...there you go. 'nuff said.

FN nice. I back this Dan guy 100%. Maybe he is wrong and we all get to point and laugh at him. Maybe he is right and I will be able to say that I backed him up 100% on a public forum, now let me in. People are dying out here.

Reminds me of Logan's Run.
If that's the case it all free love and drug mist rooms and glowing hand crystals and voluntary death by 30.
Crap - I'm living on borrowed time.

BTW - that habitrail is flippin' sweet.

This idea of bubblizing our lives makes me think of a hampster cage.

Well, that little shelter he made is interesting, but if the world does end I believe it will be god willing so, that has no use.

http://pcillu101.blogspot.com

Thanks for comments guys ...and yes, Jenny, u are in!

DAN BLOOM

There's more here. Good news story re polar cities.

http://polarcity.org/Welcome_to_PolarCity.org.html

CLIMATE CHANGE: Northward Ho?

By Stephen Leahy

BROOKLIN, Canada, Jan. 2, 3007 (IPS) -

Dan Bloom thinks it's time to figure out how to build self-sustaining cities in the polar regions because climate change will eventually make most of Earth uninhabitable.

These polar cities may be "humankind's only chance for survival if global warming really turns into a worldwide catastrophe in the far distant future," Bloom told IPS.

Bloom isn't a scientist or any other kind of expert. A U.S. citizen in his late fifties living in Taiwan teaching English, he's lived all over the world as a reporter-editor, teacher-translator and author. And now Bloom wants to shake people out their everyday indifference to the great emergency of our age: climate change.

"Life goes on as usual here in Taiwan. No one is doing anything and they don't want to talk about it," he says.

And sadly inaction begets inaction.

"The inactions of others can make us underestimate threats to our own safety," writes Camilla Cavendish in a recent issue of the Times of London newspaper.

Cavendish cites studies that suggest a kind of herd mentality. If climate change is a problem, then people would be doing something about it. Since they're not, then there is no problem. However, once people are aware of this dangerous tendency to follow the herd over the cliff, we can break away and forge our own more sensible path, she says.

Bloom wants people to realise that the world is on a path that could possibly lead to a future where just a few hundred million people survive in specially-designed cities in the Arctic. Originally he imagined this might happen 500 years from now. But scientists tell him it could happen far sooner than that.

Bloom has contacted scientists, experts, reporters, and many others around the world about his polar cities idea. A few months ago, a Google keyword search for "polar cities" would have produced no results. Today, there are nearly 3,000 sites that feature or offer comment on Bloom's idea, including one with a series of polar cities illustrations.

Plenty of the comments are from Bloom himself, in a one-man-who-doesn't own-a-computer attempt to spread the word. Suffice to say he spends a lot of time in Tawianese internet cafes.

His Quixotic quest began less than a year ago. Having heard various conflicting news reports about climate change, Bloom decided to research the subject as thoroughly as he could. The genesis of the polar cities idea came from a dire op-ed by the eminent British scientist James Lovelock in January 2006 in the Independent newspaper.

Lovelock wrote that the Earth will heat up far faster than any scientist expects due to many positive feedbacks such as melting of Arctic and Antarctic ice. "... Before this century is over billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable," he wrote.

Lovelock's viewpoint was widely criticised as excessively pessimistic fear-mongering by many experts. No stranger to controversy, Lovelock first proposed the "Gaia Hypothesis" of Earth as a single highly complex organism in the 1970s. Last October, with many leading scientists listening, he reiterated his claim that "global heating" is progressing very fast and was likely to produce an apocalyptic six-degree C. rise in the global average temperature before the end of this century.

"At first I was depressed, but I am an optimist," Bloom says.

If catastrophic climate change was a very real possibility, why not start now to prepare sustainable polar retreats just in case. More importantly, simply imagining that polar cities may be needed one day for the very survival of the human race might wake people to the threat climate change poses, he says.

"We're really in an emergency -- we can't go on normally," Bloom argues.

But polar cities is an idea that many climate change experts refuse to consider. Most of the climate scientists IPS contacted for this story declined to comment. Those who did respond said imagining such a future was not productive when humanity needs to focus on "how the world can drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions".

"It's silly to think 200 or 300 years into future, it's more useful to think 20 or 30 years out," said Ross Gelbspan, a former Washington Post-Boston Globe reporter and author of several books on climate change.

Gelbspan has done a great deal of thinking about the near future as the impacts of climate change take hold. There is no stopping the future deaths of millions of people from climate change, he believes. The only question is how many millions. His future scenarios range from a totalitarian nightmare in response to climate-driven mass migrations and social chaos to real world peace. His best guess today is we will see those extremes, and everything in between.

"We need to start talking about the kind future we want to have," Gelbspan told IPS.

Talking to young people is especially important, since it is their future. And it's important to offer alternatives and solutions. Wind farms, for example, could easily replace all of the U.S. energy produced by coal and oil, he says.

"What's the resistance to widespread use of renewables?" Gelbspan wonders.

In the U.S., he says the answer is to get the money out of politics. Oil, coal and other industries make major financial contributions in a country where presidential candidates spend tens of millions of dollars to get elected. As a result, the next U.S. president is unlikely to make the necessary drastic cuts in greenhouse gas emissions.

Dan Bloom doesn't have answers. He knows there is a serious problem that we aren't addressing.

"Life on Earth is very fragile but we're screwing things up," he told IPS. "I'm going to spend the last years of my life pushing this idea of polar cities to wake people up."

Model Polar City Resident List

As news spreads far and wide about polar cities -- for possible survivors of global warming in the far distant future, say year 2121 or year 2399 -- many people have written to ask if they can join the experiment as volunteer residents of the first Model Polar City in Longyearbyen, Norway in 2012. Here are some of the team members:

http://mpcrl101.blogspot.com/

For more info on becoming a volunteer resident of the first Model Polar City: email to: reporter.bloom@gmail.com

Completely serious.

By the way, this was a great post, above, loved the humor, and you know, there must be something going around, because you are the second blog to mention the concept of Habi-trails and gerbils in relation to our polar cities blueprints. One blogger called his post Gerbil City." Humor is important in all this, and I appreciate a good laugh. Thanks again.

But I am very serious about the polar cities idea. And very serious about doing all we can NOW to fight global warming NOW so that we never need polar cities. But just in case......

http://kiriath-arba.blogspot.com/2008/01/after-end-we-will-live-like-gerbils.html

Check this Gerbil City vs Polar City post.....FUNNY!

i've always wanted an underground home. but i don't want it to come at the cost of the whole environment. this scared me.

vDear Poop, When you wrote: "I've always wanted an underground home. but i don't want it to come at the cost of the whole environment. this scared me."....I understand. I didn't and don't mean to scare you. This is not intended to be scaremongering. But it is intended to be a kind of wake up call, a sounding of the alarm, not so much about what the future will be like, we can only speculate, but to tell people via the images that global warming is for real, and we need to fight it in all the ways we can, including changing our lifestyles, cutting the global carbon footprint, and many other things. POLAR CITIES is just a last option. Let's hope it never comes to that.

Do you feel better now? Now get to work on doing YOUR part to mitigate the impact of global warming.

Cheers

Danny

A blogger wrote: "This is an interesting idea. The challenge, of course is a business challenge. Here goes:

1) Initial investment. I’m going to guess that setting up such a city is going to cost at least $50 million. It’s hard to get that kind of cash together these days, especially when there are so many other investments that yield returns much sooner with a lot less money.

2) Getting people to move to these cities will be horribly difficult. If the Ontario (Canada) government cannot convince doctors to move to Thunder Bay, Ontario (a northern cold city) with plenty of guaranteed work, then it will be a very difficult challenge to get anybody to move to this polar city.

3) Return on investment. Getting such a city to a state of self-sustaining viability will be very difficult without decades of ongoing investment. Because of this it will be hard to get generations of governments or investors to continue footing the bill.

Investing in a proof-of-concept polar city may have some benefit because I’m sure that there are many spin-off technologies that can get a return on investment in a few years.

Time will tell. "

- J.

this is the kind of email i am getting:

"Dear Sir
I want to be part of your experimental model polar city. I'm not a
scientist, but I've spent most of my life in the military
guarding nuclear missiles in the USA. Living in the Arctic has always been an
interest of mine, and I've always believed the Inuit had the right idea. Your
updated igloo concept of a model polar city interests me as well as
the reaction of people living in
an isolated environment.....Most people, unfortunately, can't or won't
handle life in polar cities very well.

For me, after all
this time in the US military, some peace and quiet sounds good to me.
Please sign me up as a volunteer resident of Polar City One, and maybe
I can work in the security department, guarding the polar city from
pirates and marauders. Or I can also be useful is helping to develop
ways that people can endure in these cities in the future, and leisure
activities that keep people positive and life-affirming will be
important in those dark times....."

another blogjoker wrote: "O S%^T....
The gerbil trail does look like the Polar City. Maybe Danny will have to pay a license fee for using the idea. Hope it wasn't registered."

faith in humanity means no faith in yourself, mr Doom Bloom.

draw up some plans on that thought.

Hello Groonk,
I tried to email you but no email listed on your blog. How can i chat with you offline? gmail? hotmail? aol? email me at danbloom GmAIL

RE: "faith in humanity means no faith in yourself, mr Doom Bloom.
draw up some plans on that thought."

I think you misread my intentions with this polar city idea and i want to explain to you. and also, sir, i did not completely understand what you meant. "draw up some plans on that thought"....explain to me more

cheers

db

oh don't worry about that last 'draw up plans' remark. it was just knee-jerk snark on my part.

i try to control it but the evil in me takes over.

http://nostropolar101.blogspot.com/

Nostradamus predicted many things that came true, and it has recently come to our attention, via am Internet link, that Nostradamus predicted the coming of polar cities in the far distant future. Below are two texts: one is in English, a translation from the French Latin, and the other text is the original French Latin.

"And lo, in yonder northern climes

Sustainable Population Retreats

For Olde and Young Will Ensure

Survival of the Humand Kind

in Habitrail compartements."

"Et Voila, a la terra polaris

Les retraits de populatione sustenable

Pour Les Enfants et Les Sages

Wini, Wene, Wicti."

--------------------------------------------

For more information, see "polar cities" at :

http://pcillu101.blogspot.com

*NOSTRADAMUS LINK:

http://www.nostradamus.org/

A good followup report by Sci Fi writer Nina Muneanu in Canada is here:

http://sfgirl-thealiennextdoor.blogspot.com/2008/02/polar-citiesfriday-feature.html

In ''The Revenge of Gaia'' (2006), James Lovelock describes a dark future when heating suddenly escalates because of positive feedback.

Says reviewer, Richard Mabey of the Times: “At the current rate, global temperatures will rise by nearly three degrees in the next 50 years. At this point, the rainforests begin to die, releasing vast new amounts of carbon dioxide. Algae fail in the ocean and stop generating cooling clouds and absorbing carbon. The Greenland glacier goes into meltdown, releasing enough water to flood many of the world’s cities. Crop failures, human migrations, the emergence of “brutal war-lords” follow. We know the story, but not in our “real world” minds. Global heating is not yet part of our collective unconscious in the way the bomb was.” At some point in his dissertation, Lovelock describes the ragtag journey to and survival of a few humans in the Arctic, the last hospitable place on the planet.

But, as they make their journey there, what do they see? Clusters of modular Polar Cities, designed for this very catastrophe, nestled in the natural fabric of the arctic’s environment. Someone was prepared!

For my Friday Feature, I explore the concept of “Polar Cities” with Dan Bloom, founder of Polar Cities Research Institute. In January, 2008, Bloom’s assembled a team of architects, civil engineers, industrial engineers, urban planners and scientists set up the Model Polar City Project to design and build a model polar city. The city will be built in Longyearbyen, Norway, in 2012 (interesting choice of year; see my previous post) and will be ready for its first volunteer residents by 2015. The project will house up to 100 volunteer residents with the ability to expand.

Bloom lives in Taiwan, where he teaches English and has served as a reporter, editor and author. He credits his idea for polar cities on the writings of James Lovelock, who claimed that global heating was likely to produce an apocalyptic six-degree C. rise in the global average temperature before the end of the century. “Life goes on as usual here in Taiwan,” Bloom contends. “No one is doing anything and they don’t want to talk about it.” Fired with a mission to educate at the least and prepare us at the most, Bloom assembled his team and began to design in earnest, commissioning some interesting illustrations of various aspects such as living quarters, recreational centre, eateries, etc., pictured throughout this post.

Bloom was lately featured in Gizmodo, one of the top 10 blogs (by Technorati authority), who called Bloom a “visionary futurist” then went on to say that it all sounded a little Dr. Evil or just plain far-fetched. Polar cities is an idea many climate change experts refuse to consider, saying that to imagine such a future was not productive when humanity needs to focus on “how the world can drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”
Bloom insists that he is not a doomsayer or a gloom-and-doom survivalist, but rather “an eternal optimist who cares about the future of humankind.” Bloom confided in Stephen Leahy at IPSNews that “I’m going to spend the last years of my life pushing this idea of polar cities to wake people up. I don’t care if people call me crazy.”

One of those people might be Franklyn Griffiths, Professor Emeritus of Political Science and George Ignatieff Chair of Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Toronto. Referring to Lovelock’s Revenge of Gaia (2006), Griffiths laments the use of clever technology and new-science to solve global warming without an associated paradigm change: “To think of [preserving] civilization [as we know it] in the Arctic is to have learned nothing. It is to dwell on hard science when it is humanity, its practices, and how to alter them that should have first claim on our attention. The new prevailing narrative ought to be one … in which we treat nature with renewed respect and, in so doing, see whether we might reinvent what it means to be civilized.”

Bloom wasn’t the first person to conceive of polar cities. In January 25, 1959 the Chicago Tribune ran this picture of the “Polar City of the Future” as part of the Closer Than We Think! Series. Said the Tribune: “…How would isolated polar cities ringed by icebergs and mountains be supplied? Our armed forces have a solution—the dirigible. Recently the Navy told how its blimp Z PG-2 successfully flew food and other supplies to an ice island team of scientists only 500 miles from the North Pole.” Now this is the stuff of good old fashioned science fiction! I noticed that the next installment in the series was entitled: “electronic home library”