Author Archives: bobdillon33@gmail.com

THE BEADY EYE ASK’S. WILL CLIMATE CHANGE LEAD TO MORE WARS?

08 Tuesday Aug 2023

Posted by in 2023 the year of disconnection., Arms Trade., Carbon Emissions., Climate Change., Climate refugees., CO2 emissions, Collective stupidity., Fourth Industrial Revolution., Human Collective Stupidity., HUMAN INTELLIGENCE, Human values., Humanity., Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Life., Migrants/Refugees., Militarism., MISINFORMATION., Mr Putin., Natural World Disasters, Northern Ireland., PAIN AND SUFFERING IN LIFE, Palestinian- Israel., Reality., RUSSIA/ UKRAINE/ US/ NATO/ EU, State of the world, Survival., Sustaniability, Telling the truth., The common good., The cost of war., The essence of our humanity., The Obvious., The state of the World., The world to day., THE WORLD YOU LIVE IN., THIS IS THE STATE OF THE WORLD.  , Ukraine/ Russia., Unanswered Questions., VALUES, War., Wars, What Needs to change in the World, Where's the Global Outrage., World Organisations.

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( Six minute read)

It’s one of the most important questions of the 21st century:

You always have a higher potential for violent conflict when the survival conditions of groups of people are threatened.  This is a very basic principle.

Will climate change provide the extra spark that pushes two otherwise peaceful nations into war?

The obvious answer is yes.

You can see this when you look at events that are already happening, like land conflicts due to desertification, or various resource conflicts around the world.

There are currently 27 ongoing conflicts worldwide. A quarter of the entire global population lives in conflict-affected areas. This year, it is estimated that at least 274 million people will need humanitarian assistance. But it’s important to remember that the causal links between climate and conflict are rarely direct.

However there has always been an empirical connection between violence and climate change which has persists across 12,000 years of human history.

We now  live on a planet expecting changes to temperature or rainfall in the coming decades—which will come faster and stronger than the many natural climate changes of the past.

This is the situation the world finds itself in today.

Conflict is on the rise. Millions are displaced. International law is disregarded with impunity, as criminal and terrorist networks profit from the division and violence.

The reasons for the outbreak of conflict range from territorial disputes and regional tensions, to corruption and dwindling resources due to climate change.

Take the Syrian war for example.

Nearly 11 years after it started, the Syrian refugee crisis remains the largest displacement crisis worldwide (13.2 million, including 6.6 million refugees and more than 6 million internally displaced people). At least 2 million people are living in tented camps with limited access to basic services.

Lasting more than 60 years, the conflict in Myanmar (previously called Burma) remains the longest ongoing civil war in the world.

The cost of war is almost unfathomable with conflicts driving 80% of humanitarian needs.

In 2016, the cost of conflict globally stood at an astonishing $14 trillion. That’s enough to end world hunger 42 times over.

For the seventh year in a row, global military spending is increasing, exceeding trillions’ for the first time.

Just imagine what the world could do with that money if conflicts were to end worldwide.

——-

If you’re looking for the causes of climate change, it’s us—the overconsuming, fossil-fuel-burning North and West.

If you want to get serious about climate change, worrying about the small-scale details of conflicts in Africa is missing the point.  It’s us.

Twentieth-century wars were fought over land, religion, and economics. But the wars of the 21st century will be fought over something quite different: climate change, and the shortages of water and food that will come from it with mass migration leading to social disruption and potentially violent conflict.

I think this will become more apparent over the next decade or so. You can see it already in Europe.

I suspect we’re going to see more nativism, more xenophobia, and more talk of building walls on our borders.

If you look deeply at the source of future conflicts, I think you’ll see a basic resource conflict at the bottom of it all.

The thin veneer of civilization.

‘ Overwhelmed by the disaster, people could not see what was to become of them and started losing respect for laws of god and man alike,” Thucydides wrote.

Do we have the institutions, the structures, the systems of cooperation we need to deal with this problem?

I don’t think we have an existing structure of peacekeeping that can hold up under these conditions — or at least I’m not encouraged by what we’ve seen so far.

Can Western democratic society, which is built on a system of limitless growth and productivity, change its destructive relationship with nature?

No, modern liberal democratic societies are successful at improving the lives and freedoms of people who live in them but the problem is that their systems are based on the exploitation of nature and our environment, and we’re sort of trapped in this paradigm.

Climate change is a threat multiplier, which means it amplifies problems already facing the world.

Stressors such as poverty, political instability, and crime are magnified by increased droughts, floods, or heat waves. Of the 25 countries deemed most vulnerable to climate change, 14 are mired in conflict.

The climate crisis is altering the nature and severity of humanitarian crises.

As the world gets hotter, mayhem could spread.

Humanitarian organizations are already struggling to respond and will not be able to meet exponentially growing needs resulting from unmitigated climate change.

I think one of the things that clearly exacerbates matters is when the issues become politicized.

It’s going to take a combination of both personal action and systemic change to combat climate change. One is not a substitute for the other, and doing one without the other won’t solve the issues we face.

How civilized will we remain?

Climate change will be a small hole through which we glimpsed what always lies below the thin crust we lay across the seething magma of nature, including human nature.

Recycle. Fly less. Eat less meat.

These are some of the ways that we’ve been told can slow climate change.

But the inordinate emphasis on individual behaviour is the result of a marketing campaign that has succeeded in placing the responsibility for fixing climate change squarely on the shoulders of individuals.

With immensely powerful vested interests aligned in defence of the fossil fuel status quo, the societal tipping point won’t happen without the active participation of citizens everywhere aiding in the collective push forward.

While humongous industries continue to shirk responsibility, lobbying against change and top-down regulation. Nothing decivilizes more quickly and surely than war.

All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.

Contact: bobdillon33@gmail.com

So watch the video, learn the facts, and form your own conclusions.

. https://youtu.be/RnWoFJmqCF8

THE BEADY EYE ASK’S: WILL A QUANTUM COMPUTER SOLVE THE WORLD PROBLEMS?

31 Monday Jul 2023

Posted by in #whatif.com, Quantum computers., State of the world, Sustaniability, Technology v Humanity, The Future, THE WORLD YOU LIVE IN., THIS IS THE STATE OF THE WORLD.  , WHAT IS TRUTH

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( Five minute read)

We have very limited ability at this stage to imagine the applications of quantum computing, but down the road in the near term they could solve countless problems – and create a lot of new ones.

In order to prepare for what is coming.

Educate ourselves on the reality of Quantum Computers, and the impacts they could have around the world is now paramount if we wish to keep the values we place on life.

Soon will come a time when trusting a quantum computer will require a leap of faith.

Every year, new computers are being developed that are faster and smarter than ever before. But if you really want to take things to the next level, you’ve got to go quantum.

This new frontier of humanity could open hitherto unfathomable frontiers in mathematics and science.

Quantum’s industrial uses are boundless.

In the future, we will rely on everywhere in the world having access to quantum technology, but with risks, to national-security migraine. Its problem-solving capacity will soon render all existing cryptography obsolete, jeopardizing communications, financial transactions, and even military defences.

Modern warfare and national–security mechanisms are grounded in the speed and precision of decision making. If your computer is faster than theirs, you win.

The digital devices in our everyday lives – from laptop computers to smartphones – are all based on 0s and 1s: so-called ‘bits’. But quantum computers are based on ‘qubits’ – the quantum 0s and 1s that are altogether stranger, but also more powerful. (So-called quantum particles can be in two places at the same time and also strangely connected even though they are millions of miles apart.)

They will pave the way for systems that can solve complex real world problems that the best computers we have today are incapable of.Entanglement

Currently, computers solve problems in a simple linear way, one calculation at a time.

A quantum computers could do multiple calculations all at the same time, millions of miles apart, mirroring each other’s actions instantaneously, transporting information from one chip to another with a reliability of 99.999993% at record speeds.

——-

Now that we understand what AI is capable of we also need to know its limits.

Before long, much of the material on the internet will have been written, or at least co-written, by AIs.

What will happen when AIs are being trained on texts they have written themselves?

The amount of data consumed in this way keeps going up and up.

What happens when data runs out?

——-

Generative AI is in a Cambrian explosion of capability.

Generative Ai, is now creating art, make music, generate synthetic humans, birth artificial influencers and celebrities, literally generate video from text, and threaten to upend our notions of creativity, art, public domain, copyright, and the nature of reality itself.

This is just the beginning, the ultimate thing for AI to create is more of itself.

When maybe AI is also at the point where it can start writing the code that will make its own AI even better.  And that’s like where the true singularity is … when it can kind of set itself to improve itself, when it can start to improve itself better than what a human can.

It’s impossible to speculate what society could truly look like in such a situation.

But I think in most of our lifetimes we’re going to experience that. Exciting is one word for that.

Another is terrifying.  Machines that can outthink humans. Your brain is the most intelligent learning algorithm in the universe that we know so far. The truth is that for now, AGI remains a fantasy.

Even if AGI is never achieved, the self-teaching approach may still change what sorts of AI are created.

The rapid development of AI that can train itself also raises questions about how well we can control its growth. If AI starts to generate intelligence by itself, there’s no guarantee that it will be human-like.

Whether this will happen, and how it will progress if it does is impossible to know, but there’s no guarantee that humanity as we know it would survive such a time, or that the vast AI entities potentially created by such an explosion would be benevolent to life as we know it.

I think that really where AI can be empowering is in that long tail when there’s like non-consumption with the alternative, where you could not afford to create that content in the first place.

And you can imagine that with like these very obscure topics.

You could even imagine that for news where maybe there’s something that happened in your local neighbourhood where only 20 people want to read that article and then it doesn’t make sense for a human to write it.

Generating artificial intelligence is all ready producing images like a photographer, creating music like an artist, selling like a sales rep, diagnosing disease like a doctor, and (gulp!) writing text like a human.

The technology could potentially also be used to design drugs more quickly by accurately simulating their chemical reactions, a calculation too difficult for current supercomputers. They could also provide even more accurate systems to forecast weather and project the impact of climate change.

Rather than humans teaching machines to think like humans, machines might teach humans new ways of thinking.

All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.

Contact: bobdillon33@gmail.com

THE BEADY EYE SAY’S: WHEN IT COMES TO CLIMATE CHANGE THE ENTIRE INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY NOW ACCEPT THE PHYSICAL SCIENCE BASIS FOR CLIMATE CHANGE.

29 Saturday Jul 2023

Posted by in Climate Change.

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( Seven minute read)

Scientists have made climate change appear difficult but it’s not difficult to understand.

All living things respond to climate and changes in the climate, even if these changes are subtle and temporary. Our own experience of climate throughout our lifetimes, along with scientific records, also proves that climate change is happening. Weather is simply the set of atmospheric conditions at one location at one limited period of time. Climate, however, involves the average condition of the atmosphere over a long period of time (such as across a few decades or more) at a given location.

At timescales of thousands of years beyond human lifetimes, climate responds to the precession (slow rotation or “wobble”) of Earth’s axis, the planet’s tilt (obliquity), and the changes to the elliptical shape (eccentricity) of Earth’s orbit.

These phenomena interact with one another to determine the amount of sunlight (and thus solar heating) different parts of Earth’s surface receive during different seasons of the year.

Global and regional climates are changing too quickly for many forms of life to adapt and survive.

But this is not the whole story.

There is unequivocal evidence that Earth is warming at an unprecedented rate. Human activity is the principal cause.

Earth’s climate is on a path to warm beyond the range of what has been experienced over the past millions of years.

The range of uncertainty for the warming along the current emissions path is wide enough to encompass massively disruptive consequences to societies and ecosystems: as global temperatures rise, there is a real risk, however small, that one or more critical parts of the Earth’s climate system will experience abrupt, unpredictable and potentially irreversible changes. Disturbingly, scientists do not know how much warming is required to trigger such changes to the climate system.

When people are confronted with a difficult problem, they tend to disengage. In addition to that, beginning in the mid-eighties, Big Oil began a concerted campaign to sow doubt in the public’s mind; is the climate really changing, or is this just more variations in the weather?

The current warming is happening at a rate not seen in the past 10,000 years. It is undeniable that human activities have produced the atmospheric gases that have trapped more of the Sun’s energy in the Earth system. This extra energy has warmed the atmosphere, ocean, and land, and widespread and rapid changes in the atmosphere, ocean, cryosphere, and biosphere have occurred.

Most of the warming occurred in the past 40 years, with the seven most recent years being the warmest. The years 2016 and 2020 are tied for the warmest year on record.

This is why our planet is in trouble.

Why are our leaders, in government and industry, not telling us the truth about climate change?

The answer is simple:

Because they can’t. What is happening to the climate is bad news, and bad news does not get votes, or increase profits.

There is no need to inflate the magnitude of what is happening. It is time for us all to face the “cruel truth” that has been overlooked for too long.

The reality is confronting enough. If humans put too much carbon back in the atmosphere, there’s only one thing that can happen. The Earth will get hotter, maybe too hot.

It is not possible for modern man to combust fossil fuels, put the carbon back in the atmosphere, and still expect the current lifestyle to continue.

In order to counteract climate misinformation.

1200 'Scientists' Claim That Climate Change Is Not Real. Here's The Truth

The list of records broken is itself unprecedented.

200 million people in the world, more than three times the UK population, will live below the tideline by the end of this century if levels continue to rise.

In the Hollywood blockbuster ‘The Day After Tomorrow’, ocean currents around the world stop as a result of global warming, triggering a new Ice Age on Earth. That may have been science fiction but scientists say the terrifying prophecy could soon become a reality.

The heat in the northern Atlantic Ocean has now pushed beyond what climate models predicted. The Atlantic Ocean current which drives the Gulf Stream could collapse at ‘any time’ from 2025 thanks to climate change.

A study published this week gives a further insight into what this might mean.

It suggests the climate system known as the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation could shut down faster than previously thought – by about 2050, or possibly as soon as this decade – if emissions are not cut soon. The risk of an earlier ocean circulation breakdown has increased, with potentially disastrous and rapid ramifications for temperatures, rainfall and sea level rise. Similarly, the amount of sea ice around Antarctica continues to be far below previous record lows.

The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation last collapsed 12,000 years ago.

The Gulf Stream system could collapse as soon as 2025, the impact would be devastating. Such a scenario is ’95 per cent certain.

This is not actually worse than we expected. It is the brutal reality of what scientists told us would happen.

Heat waves kill more people than fires, floods and cyclones. A study found extreme heat killed more than 61,000 in Europe alone last year.

Imagine the headlines if we knew about that in real time.

Human emissions are permanently adding the equivalent of an El Niño to the global system every five to 10 years.

The good news from scientists is that rapid action can still make a significant difference and limit future damage.

It would mean ruling a line under new fossil fuel developments where there are alternatives – that is, virtually all of them – and taking a war-footing approach that genuinely prioritised accelerating the transition that every major scientific body and government agrees is necessary.

It wouldn’t mean pretending the gas industry is a climate solution, or that nuclear energy is a serious climate solution. Nor is carbon capture and storage on track to be more than a niche technology, and paying for carbon offsets can’t justify fossil fuel use.

It would mean leaders acting as though they could persuade the public of what’s required, rather than living in fear of how they might respond.

Polls suggest a majority in many countries are open to action. Now’s our chance.

Alternatively, politicians could continue not delivering on the commitments made in Paris eight years ago and wait for another month as devastating as July 2023 before doing more. One thing we can say with confidence: It is likely to come around soon enough.

America’s Independence Day was celebrated on July 4th. That is the same day the Earth’s temperature was hotter than it has been at any time in history.Sea ice melts from white into turquoise pools off Baffin Island, Nunavut, Canada. Between 1979 and ...

I don’t think it’s going to be anything that we can do as man to influence that to any great degree.

But I will tell you, again, looking at the past 4,000 or 5,000 years of human history, there’s a strong correlation between the rise and fall of temperature and the rise and fall of civilizations. And it’s just opposite of what we’re being told.

Going forward, who are you going to believe?

One only has to look at both major parties in the UK, currently diluting their plans to combat the climate crisis.

It’s hard to believe (due to politicians chopping and changing of their views and actions) that a new oil field ( Rosebank) where operation emission alone (not counting any emissions from burning the oil and gas it is likely to produce) – are likely to reach 5.6m tonnes of carbon dioxide, driving a coach and horses through any climate commitments.

Are there really people at the top of either of the main parties calling for abandonment of green policies.

You can bet your nannie that there are.

It is not my role to tell people what they should do or must believe about the rising threat of climate change but the consequences will devastate economies, infrastructure and political stability. We face risks of abrupt, unpredictable and potentially irreversible changes, and responding now will lower the risk and cost of taking action.

The verbal is over.

Its time to pour trillions/ trillions into providing non repayable grants before the lights go out.

( See previous posts. Placing 0.05% World Aid commission on all activities that are not sustainable )

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Contact: bobdillon33@gmail.com

THE BEADY EYE SAY’S. YOU MIGHT NOT BE BLAMED TO WONDER (WITH THE STATE OF THE WORLD) WHAT IS THE WEBB TELESCOPE GOING TO DO FOR US BACK HERE ON EARTH.

28 Friday Jul 2023

Posted by in James Webb Telescope

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( Ten minute read) 

The name Earth is a Germanic word, which simply means “the ground”

It’s formation remains a strange, scientific mystery, the third planet from the Sun, and the only place we know of so far that’s inhabited by living things.

Our planet began as part of a cloud of dust and gas.

But Earth did not always exist within this expansive universe, and it was not always a hospitable haven for life.Artist illustration of the James Webb Space Telescope

To answer this question one has only has to look at what the Webb telescope is showing us.

Looking back through billions of years of the history of the universe to the creation of stars it is not just showing us where we are, but what can be achieved when we corporate with each other.

The lifetime cost to NASA will be approximately $10.8 billion.

The European Space Agency provided the Ariane 5 launch vehicle and two of the four science instruments for an estimated cost of €700 million. The Canadian Space Agency contributed sensors and scientific instrumentation, which cost approximately CA$200 million.

This places the James Webb Space Telescope among the most expensive scientific platforms in history. The telescope was not always planned to be a megaproject. It was originally estimated to cost $4.96 billion and launch in 2014.

To quantify this, the United States government will spend, in total, approximately $101 trillion.

The James Webb Space Telescope accounts for a mere 0.0095% of all U.S. spending during its building  — the equivalent of setting aside a single penny out of a 100 dollars to answer fundamental questions about our cosmos.

The dollars and cents it took to create this technological marvel will look paltry compared to the priceless insights it provides into our cosmos.

The James Webb Space Telescope is not in orbit around the Earth, like the Hubble Space Telescope is – it actually orbits the Sun, 1.5 million kilometres (1 million miles) away from the Earth. The telescope itself operates at about 225 degrees below zero Celsius (minus 370 Fahrenheit). The temperature difference between the hot and cold sides of the telescope is huge – you could almost boil water on the hot side, and freeze nitrogen on the cold side!  It is actually similar in size to the Moon’s orbit around the Earth!

This orbit (which takes Webb about 6 months to complete once) keeps the telescope out of the shadows of both the Earth and Moon. Unlike Hubble, which goes in and out of Earth shadow every 90 minutes, Webb has an unimpeded view that allows science operations 24/7.

We have continuous communications with it as the Earth rotates through the Deep Space Network (DSN), using three large antennas on the ground located in Australia, Spain and California. Webb uplinks command sequences and downlinks data up to twice per day, through the DSN. It uploads a full week’s worth of commands at a time, and makes updates daily as needed.

Webb will study every phase in the history of our universe, ranging from the first luminous glows after the big bang, to the formation of solar systems capable of supporting life on planets like Earth, to the evolution of our own solar system.

To be able to send and receive data over such a distance is mind boggling.  In order to carry out its mission, several innovative and powerful new technologies ranging from optics to detectors to thermal control systems have been developed. It has six major subsystems:

  • Electrical Power Subsystem
  • Attitude Control Subsystem
  • Communication Subsystem
  • Command and Data Handling Subsystem
  • Propulsion Subsystem
  • Thermal Control Subsystem

The first step toward understanding how AI can contribute to this area of science and knowledge is, once again, drawing a comparison between an AI and a human. There is a lot of uncertainty that comes with adopting such high-end technologies, but one thing is for sure:

It raises the question: Is Artificial Intelligence The New Guardian Of The Galaxy?

Should we be spending vast amounts on the exploration of the Universe where none of us will ever go or understand, without Quantum computers.

Why?

Because, Quantum computers are expected to be powerful enough to break modern-day ‘unbreakable’ encryption, accelerate medicine discover, re-shape how the global economy transports goods, explore the stars, and pretty much revolutionise anything involving massive number crunching.

The problem is, quantum computers are immensely difficult to make, and maybe even more difficult to run but God help us if we are relying on the human brain to function, as so far it appears to be designed for self destroying the earth never mind the universe.   

———-

Artificial intelligences are promising in future societies, and neural networks are typical technologies with the advantages such as self-organization, self-learning, parallel distributed computing, and fault tolerance, but their size and power consumption are large. It’ll take some time before we entirely replace AI accelerators with something that resembles a brain.

Yet experiential attempts have already begun to replace classical computing as we know it.

Don’t worry as we’re only scratching the surface of AI’s uses today, and to unlock those deeper, more impactful uses there’s a whole new type of chip in the works, a neuromorphic computer/chip is any device that uses physical artificial neurons to do computations.

What is an Neuromorphic chip/ computer?

The answers in the name, neuro, meaning related to the nervous system. A neuromorphic computer aims to imitate the greatest computer, and most complex creation, ever known to man: The brain.

If a neuromorphic processor were to be developed and implemented in a GPU, the amount of processing power would surpass any of the existing products with just a fraction of the energy.

Neuromorphic computing is an approach to computing that is inspired by the structure and function of the human brain.

The goal of neuromorphic computing ( According to Wikipedia) is not to perfectly mimic the brain and all of its functions, but instead to extract what is known of its structure and operations to be used in a practical computing system. No neuromorphic system will claim nor attempt to reproduce every element of neurons and synapses, but all adhere to the idea that computation is highly distributed throughout a series of small computing elements analogous to a neuron.

Neuromorphic computers are not currently being used in real-world applications but it won’t be long before neuromorphic algorithmic, offer tremendous potential for computing beyond Moore’s law.

There’s more immediate potential for the future of computing in artificial intelligence, it really is a massive and life-changing development for many, and I’m not just talking about that clever-sounding, slightly-too-argumentative chatbot in your browser.

This is the world’s first hybrid chip where neuron elements and synapse devices of different functional semiconductors are integrated.

Neuromorphic computers are well poised to become the artificial intelligence accelerators and co-processors in personal computing devices such as smart phones, laptops and desktops. They will begin to emerge in these technologies in the future, first probably in the edge computing space as specialized processors and later in future heterogeneous computers.

As the Ukrain/ Russian war is the laboratory for drone warfare the Webb is the laboratory of Ai 

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Contact: bobdillon33@gmail.com 

THE BEADY EYE ASK’S. WHAT IS THE FUTURE OF NATO ?

25 Tuesday Jul 2023

Posted by in Nato, Uncategorized

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( Five minute read)

At NATO’s founding on April 4, 1949, President Harry S. Truman described the creation of the Atlantic Alliance as a neighbourly act taken by countries deeply conscious of their shared heritage as democracies that had come together determined to defend their common values and interests from those who threatened them.

After years of fighting disastrous wars, whether in Afghanistan, Iraq or Libya, NATO can now forget about them – whatever the enduring human disasters they leave behind.

Today, NATO has thirty members, including ten countries that used to be members of the Warsaw Pact or were part of the Soviet Union and continues to grow.

Only once in its seventy-one-year history, in the aftermath of the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, has the alliance needed to invoke the mutual defence obligation.

After Russia began its aggression in Ukraine in February 2014, few (including Russian President Vladimir Putin) would have expected NATO to move so quickly from crisis management to a fundamentally new defence posture. But the alliance has done just that, and it took less than six months to get there.

So what exactly will be decided that is so earth-shattering?

It is the biggest strategic shift in NATO’s posture in a quarter century,

NATO is entering a new phase in its history with its reputation now so bound up with the fate of Ukraine that, in the unlikely event that Russia makes substantial military gains in the conflict, Kyiv cannot be allowed to lose. NATO’s future will be rendered hopelessly irrelevant if it loses, as it well might, the fight against the Taliban in Afghanistan.

With the United States now paying for almost 75 percent of its cost, things may look rosy for NATO today, but climate breakdown, not wars, are the biggest threat to global security. The war in the Ukrain is very widely seen as a massive diversion from this much more significant challenge. Spending billions on the military may make for high profitability but is entirely missing the point when it comes to the greatest security challenge facing the entire world. Military alliances like NATO won’t solve our greatest security threat – THE CLIMATE

To make matters even more rosy, military budgets are rising, lots of new weapons are being developed and existing ones produced in huge numbers. Both will lead to more sales for the armourers as countries across the world rush to buy new kit, even if their armed forces have no connection with the war in Ukraine.

Ukraine’s defence minister, Oleksii Resnikov, put it more bluntly: “Our Western allies can actually see if their weapons work, how efficiently they work and if they need to be upgraded. For the military industry of the world, you can’t invent a better testing ground.”

Questioning the need for NATO and America’s role in it isn’t new.  

NATO has been an alliance dedicated to military protection for well over 70 years, but it is a military alliance is unsuited to meeting the world’s greatest security challenge: Climate breakdown. NATO will have to change in order to keep going, that might just lead to a badly needed change in NATOs priorities.

In other words, a continued existence of NATO is essential not only because it allows the US to expand its influence worldwide, but also because NATO is the umbilical cord that militarily connects the US with Europe, keeping the latter dependent on the former. By ensuing a continuing relevance of NATO in the present geo-political context, the US hopes to maintain its own relevance for Europe.

Put it another way, whether in Ukrain or Kosovo or Afghanistan, NATO serves chiefly to camouflage and thereby legitimate what is substantively a unilateral action by the United States.

To my mind the American idea that NATO reinvent itself as the security core of a global club of democracies against China at present, owes more to wishful than to strategic thinking.

Underlying this is the increasingly dominant view that global climate breakdown and the many consequences of that evolving catastrophe, especially for poorer people, are a far greater challenge than the war in Ukraine.

Let me state the obvious:   You don’t have to be a military general to know that climate change is going to bring wars.

The Climate Clock countdown that tracks the deadline to stay below 1.5°C of global warming will flip from 6 years 0 days 00:00:00 to 5 years 364 days 23:59:59 for the first time in history on Saturday 22 July 2023.

Europe must guarantee its security all by itself.

All human comment appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.

Contact: bobdilllon33@gmail.com

THE BEADY EYE SAY’S: Humans have extracted/ pumped and moved so much of the earths material, (sand rock, oil/groundwater etc) that it’s actually caused the planet’s axis to shift.

24 Monday Jul 2023

Posted by in #whatif.com, Climate Change.

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( Three minute read)

We’ve long laid a heavy hand on the planet’s ecosystems, and perhaps now it is time to wield that hand more deliberately and creatively.

The influence of human activity on the Earth’s ecosystems has become so extreme that it now seems to be the central driver of environmental change but is there another contributing reason.

Our planet is constantly trying to balance the flow of energy in and out of Earth’s system. But human activities are throwing that off balance, causing our planet to warm in response.

The Earth’s rotational pole normally changes and wanders by about several meters each year.

Without better management, an estimated 42% to 79% of all watersheds that pump groundwater may no longer be able to maintain healthy ecosystems by 2050. This rate of change has frightening implications for the future.

Below the Earth’s surface lies over a thousand times more water than all the rivers and lakes in the world.

We’ve been extracting so much groundwater that it caused the Earth’s rotational pole to drift by 64.16 degrees east at about 4.36 centimetres per year from 1993 to 2010.

On top of this we have extracted trillions and trillions of litres of oil, moved trillions of tons of sand/rocks, put trillions of tons of concrete on the surface, changing the landscape and its weight distribution for several thousands of years. Resulting in the rotation of the earth on its axis changing, not just in speed but in it’s tilth angle, effecting the Jet stream, the direction of ocean currents, the length of day and night.

Perhaps it is one of the reasons that the climate is changing.

Extracting it unsustainably.

Glaciers are disappearing, melting faster than they can be replenished, like this glacier located in Greenland. Melting is happening faster in Greenland and the rest of the Arctic, which is warming faster than anywhere else on Earth.

It is not possible to predict with any certainty what the coming decades might look like for Earth’s energy budget.

Groundwater is used for about 40% of global irrigation and provides almost half of all drinking water.

To put it simply, groundwater depletion contributes to sea level rise because water is being transferred from the continents to the oceans. This is significant because each millimetre rise in sea level is said to make the shoreline retreat an average of 1.5 meters.

If Earth’s rotation does keep accelerating?

The Earth has rotational kinetic energy associated with going spinning around its axis once a day.

Rotational kinetic energy depends on:

  • How fast the object is spinning (faster spinning means more energy).
  • How much mass the spinning object has (more massive means more energy).

How is the planet going to handle that?  No one knows.

Maybe there will be chaos across the tech industry, or maybe we won’t even notice, as time will be flying by.

All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.

Contact: bobdillon33@gmail.com

THE BEADY EYE SAY’S. WHEN IT COMES TO CLIMATE CHANGE WE NEED TO CUT OUT THE VERBAL BULL SHIT.

23 Sunday Jul 2023

Posted by in #whatif.com, 2023 the year of disconnection., A solution to Climate change., Carbon Emissions., Civilization., Climate Change., Collective stupidity., Cop 29, Enegery, Environment, Green Energy., HUMAN ABILITIES., Humanity., Life., Reality., Renewable Energy., State of the world, Sustaniability, Telling the truth., The common good., The state of the World., The world to day., THE WORLD YOU LIVE IN., Truthfulness., Unanswered Questions., WHAT IS TRUTH, What Needs to change in the World, Where's the Global Outrage.

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( Six minute read)

Although we have been raising public awareness on climate change for years, this is not enough.

Despite the effects of climate change becoming more and more obvious, big polluting corporations – the ones responsible for the majority of carbon emissions – continue to carry on drilling for and burning fossil fuels.

Climate change is happening now, and it’s the most serious threat to life on our planet.

The global temperature increases day by day with much of Southern Europe and Northern Africa already in the grips of back-to-back heatwaves, which have caused wildfires and broken temperature records.

We all know that this warming causes harmful impacts such as the melting of Arctic sea ice, more severe weather events like heatwaves, floods and hurricanes, rising sea levels, spread of disease and the acidification of the ocean.

To date we have had around 26 global conferences  resulting in agreements and promises, with insufficient actions to make any material changes to global temperatures rising.

Unless greenhouse gas emissions and global temperature are reduced within years, the world will face demanding consequences.

While every fraction of a degree making climate tipping points more likely the next UN Climate Change Conference will convene from 30 November to 12 December 2023 in Dubai, United Arab Emirates (UAE).

With signs that some climate tipping points are already approaching / irreversible we will witness once more the who’s the how’s and where while the melting of polar glaciers and sea ice, die-back of the Amazon rainforest and coral reef extinction are all on the edge of tipping over into a feedback loop of self-destruction, whereby their decline itself becomes a source of warming.

We can’t be sure exactly when tipping becomes inevitable.

Because of war in the Ukrain (which is affecting the world food supply) the climate targets will become looser and looser, higher and higher with world governments doing even less in the future.

We don’t have the policies in place, we don’t have the financing in place to reach any of the goals required.

Seven million people are already being killed by climate change around the world – as many as those killed by Covid. Yet progress by world governments has been achingly slow.  it’s never been more important to demand that our leaders act.

Current policies are “totally inadequate” and you may rest assured that world leaders will once again make a “terrible mistake” in prioritising inflation, the pandemic and the Ukraine war over the climate.

We need concrete solutions to make it less uncomplicated to achieve any goals.

The world cannot be at  “positive tipping point” in the fight against climate change without addressing the lack of financing. ( See previous posts)

There are signs that some climate tipping points are already approaching, according to new research.

Many commitments to reduce carbon emissions have been set, but few are binding and targets are often missed.

Climate change isn’t just a scientific problem or a political challenge its a distribution of wealth problem including technologies such as artificial intelligence.

It’s easy to feel overwhelmed, and to feel that climate change is too big to solve. It can be challenging to wrap your head around such a complex issue, These impacts are severe and far-reaching – both now and into the future – with no sign of slowing down unless drastic action is taken.

To work, all of these solutions need strong international cooperation between governments and businesses, including the most polluting sectors.

Many of the world’s biggest challenges, from poverty to wildlife extinction, are made more difficult by climate change.

But we already have the answers, now it’s a question of making them happen.

Mitigating greenhouse gas emissions requires changes in many areas, namely buildings, transportation, and the energy industry.

Governments want to be re-elected, and  businesses can’t survive without customers. Demanding action from them is a powerful way to make change happen.

Transitioning to a sustainable future comes with a massive price tag, but it isn’t always clear who should foot the bill – or how the money should be spent.

Developing countries will increasingly be stuck with debts to pay for their climate solutions.In the US, the value placed on the social cost of carbon has fluctuated in recent years, with far-reaching effects (Credit: Getty Images)

We are now facing an important crossroads. Make profit out of climate change or see it as a one-off, last-chance opportunity – to restructure economies at the pace and scale that climate science requires by integrating climate action into the economic recovery.

As the impacts of climate change add up, economists are trying to figure out what the true cost of a tonne of carbon really is. ” The most important figure you’ve never heard of”

It is basically a complete denial of climate science that underpinned the social cost of carbon.

Such as the cost of adapting to sea-level rise, or how increased temperatures affect labour productivity, and how crop yields will be affected. The impacts of climate change will be felt over many hundreds of years, whereas cutting emissions costs money now. A high discount rate suggests those alive today are worth more than future generations, whereas a low one suggests the opposite.

It defines how much society should pay to avert future damages caused by climate change. It also accounts for the impact that today’s emissions will have on future generations.

Instead of making assumptions about issues such as the relationship between temperature and human wellbeing at some abstract point in the future, there is now a lot of real-life data.  If we pass certain climate tipping points, such as thawing permafrost and ice sheet disintegration, the runaway damage caused will increase the social cost of carbon. It will certainly affect the actions that people undertake.

It’s overwhelmingly accepted that climate change is a very significant threat to humanity.

We probably underestimated the consequences but every small step we take as individuals contributes.

So why not demand solar panel’s be put on every roof, free of costs, or that villages build solar farm to supply greed energy to their inhabitants, instead of military spending that will be worthless in the fight against rising tempts.

By financing renewable energy, “smart grid” technologies and other green innovations, of course things do not suddenly stabilise at 2030, but at the very least its a concrete step in the right direction.

All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin

Contact: bobdillon33@gmail.com

THE BEADY EYE SAY’S: Misaligned or confused and conflated goals of an AI will be a significant concern of the future.

21 Friday Jul 2023

Posted by in 2023 the year of disconnection., Collective stupidity.

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( Fourteen minute read)

The biggest problem of our world today is not artificial intelligence but natural stupidity!

When it comes to climate change – profit seeking algorithms – and the Military race to send atomist drone killers into the battle field –  Welcome to the perplexing world of collective stupidity!

The Trump campaign and Brexit – where we all woke up the next day astounded that “this could happen” are both prime examples of campaigns that leaned heavily on the emotions of anxiety, fear and tribalism. and collective stupidly.

Since then, there has been much unpacking of “what happened” and talk about “it could only have been “stupid” people” who could have voted that way.

But is this true?

Yes, profound lapses in logic can plague even the smartest mind.

There are intelligent people who are stupid. So why the paradox? Stupidity is not a lack of IQ.

Unconscious emotions drive our decisions –  Intuitive feelings gave us an evolutionary advantage in caveman days, a survival way of dealing with information overload; and can still play a useful role as we on the precipice of a critical moment with AI.

All over the world, we are in the midst of a great shift. The data revolution has given way to the analytics movement. Press our emotional buttons and our judgement is derailed. Hence the temptation to choose the first solution that comes to mind, even if obviously flawed.

It seems that nothing encourages stupidity more than group culture.

An uncritical dependence on set rules often leads to absurd decisions, the-way-we-do-things-here, often not being the most intelligent way.

And the more intelligent someone is, the more disastrous the results of their stupidity.

 ————–

With generative AI technologies data-driven insights are reshaping outcomes without needing to write code, becoming truly intrusive, enabling decision-makers, analysts, data scientists and developers to collaborate and develop analytical insights in real time.

SO, WHAT CAN WE DO TO PROTECT OURSELVES FROM DOING STUPID THINGS?

Knowledge of our foolish nature, can help us escape its grasp.

We can step outside the group of Google algorithms knowledge to question where we are at and going.

and revert to culture-thinking that relies on that “everyone knows the true”

Stupidity is all around us. As long as there have been humans there has been human stupidity,

. —————

Over the past decade, we’ve seen the volume of data available to decision-makers grow exponentially.

In this intelligence era, it’s no longer about how much data one company can generate, it’s about how they use it. Corporate leaders, academics, policymakers, and countless others are looking for ways to harness generative AI technology, which has the potential to transform the way we learn, work, and more.

Generative AI is evolving quickly, but to truly get the most benefits from this ground breaking technology, you need to manage the wide array of risks.

Why?

Because generative AI is so powerful and easy to use, it’s poised to change what is real and what is not.

Unlike earlier disruptions, the reality of the generative AI race is already looking out of control. 

This could be the first “disruptive” new tech in a long time built and controlled largely by giants in the tech world which could entrench, rather than shake up, the status quo.

Right now, only a handful of companies — including Google, Meta, Amazon and Microsoft (through their $10 billion investment in Open-air) — are responsible for the world’s leading large language models.

So what can policymakers do about AI?

Is there a way to prevent the hottest new technology from simply cementing the power of the tech giants? 

Virtual worlds should not become walled gardens. 

It is abundantly clear that leaving it to the market to decide how these powerful technologies are used, and by whom, is a very risky proposition.

———

For decades, many of the great scientific and philosophical minds had conceived of creating collective intelligence in the form of a globally connected space to pool our knowledge.

Social Media -Smart phones – are digitalizing citizens and their resulting emergent behaviour.

This is a phenomenon that occurs in complex adaptive systems. In such systems, simple components interact in such a way that the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts.

Our collective intelligence has now become what can only be referred to as our collective stupidity.

————-

The Dark Side — Collective Stupidity.

Collective stupidity can be perplexing and is often harmless.

How is it possible that a group of smart individuals can sometimes make decisions so perplexing, it feels like the intelligence just evaporated?

How does collective stupidity happen?

Are we are better off by not underestimating the effects of this phenomenon?

A system based on generating clicks and interactions has created an environment for the outlandish and bizarre to flourish, with expertise falling by the wayside.

Broad, anonymous social networks breed collective stupidity.

Top Social Media Statistics And Trends Of 2023

In 2023, an estimated 4.9 billion people use social media across the world this number is expected to jump to approximately 5.85 billion users by 2027.

The driving force.  The increasing global adoption of 5G technology.

These staggering numbers aren’t just statistics, either. They highlight the expansive influence and potential of social media platforms. Right now, 1.9 billion daily users access Facebook’s platform, Twitter has gained 319 new users per minute in 2020, while 500 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube in the same amount of time. Millions of businesses around the world rely on Facebook to connect with people.

The recent new platform Threads Meta’s new social network, had 100 million sign ups in its first five days.

With this much content being generated, how can experts possibly stand out from the crowd?

By emulating the human ability to forget some of the data, psychological AIs will transform algorithmic accuracy.

Machine learning, on the other hand, typically takes a different path: It sees reasoning as a categorization task with a fixed set of predetermined labels. It views the world as a fixed space of possibilities, enumerating and weighing them all.

Social media networks are not very sociable these days. Feeds are algorithmic, which means you see whatever the apps want to show you.

All this has eroded public confidence.

——–

We all have intelligence and expertise to offer, even if the internet leaves us feeling isolated at times.

With so much misguided thought and active disinformation online, it has become difficult for people with insight worth sharing to do so. Behind the anonymity of the web, anyone can claim to be an expert. When everybody is an expert, nobody is.

With online communities, the relationship between experts and their audience becomes a two-way street.

Many of the issues we throw billions of dollars at and attempt to solve with technology could be easily achieved if we were able to better utilize our collective intelligence.

Technology is the means, not the end; its potential is massive, but not as great as our own.

So we wildly overestimate our access to our own mind.

In essence, the same emergent behaviour that typically helps the group survive sometimes leads to collective stupidity and death.

The Internet gave us the ability to connect with people on a global scale.

But its click-baiting algorithms and lack of regulation also brought with them chaos. As social media came to dominate the landscape, it made using the internet for the purpose of collective intelligence increasingly difficult.

You see, with stupidity, or stupid people for that matter, protesting or reasoning doesn’t really work. This is mainly because of their strong prejudice. They simply disbelieve any facts or reasoning we provide. In most cases, they either simply deny the arguments. And if they can’t, then they call them trivial exceptions.

People are often made stupid under certain circumstances. Maybe they allow this to happen to themselves. It is a group phenomenon.

The nature of stupidity has its roots deep in the subconscious. It is largely driven by the fundamental mechanics of our experience. following the herd. It is arguably the most prominent one, and mostly it does make sense. If the information is lacking, doing what others are doing is probably the best bet. But this doesn’t work all the time.

In fact, herd behaviour is among the pre-eminent causes of stupidity.

It is not that intellect suddenly fails. But people are deprived of inner independence, so they give up autonomous positions under the overwhelming impact. We always feel that we are dealing with slogans, signs, buzzwords, and not with the real person. As if they are under the spell of someone or something.

As this happens, we are also creating (unknowingly) various risks to our socio-economic structure, civilization in general, and to some extent, for the human species.

Species-level risks are not evident yet; However, the other two, socio-economic and civilization level risks, are significant enough to be ignored.

So far, several significant building blocks have been developed and are in progress. When we stitch them together, AI’s capability will increase multifold, which should be a more significant concern for us.

It takes the already tiny amount of time we have to change our ways, and save the planet, and practically cuts it in half.

We have less than 27 years to get our collective act together and reshape how our entire civilisation operates. And I’m not sure if we can do that… The more concerning part is about the risks that we have not thought of yet. We may not be able to avoid all of them, but we can understand them to address them.

Our over-enthusiasm for new technologies has somehow colluded our quality expectations. So much so that we have almost stopped demanding the right quality solutions. We are so fond of this newness that we are ignoring flaws in new technologies.

The problem with these low-quality solutions is that subpar techs’ flaws do not surface until it is too late!

In many cases, the damage is already done and maybe be irreversible.

Misalignment between our goals and the machine’s goals could be dangerous. It is easier to correct a team of humans; doing that with a rampant machine could be a very tricky and arduous task.

Achieving a level of alignment with human-level common sense is quite tricky for a computerized system. Without having any balanced approach like a scorecard, this may not be achievable.

Technology is an answer to the “how” of the strategy, but without having the right “why” and “what” in place, it can do more damage than good. When AI systems do not know why, there will always be a lurking risk of discrimination, bias, or an illogical outcome.

Weapon systems equipped with AI are the most vulnerable to the right AI in wrong hand problems and therefore have the greatest risks. The Russian /Ukrain war is now the labourite of drone warfare. The possibility of AI systems being used to overpower others by some group or a country is a significant risk.

Overall, the right AI’s risk in the wrong hands is one of the critical challenges and warrants substantial attention to avoid it.

Extending AI and automation beyond logical limits could potentially alter our perception of what humans can do.

We still value human interaction, communication skills, emotional intelligence, and several other qualities in humans. What happens when an AI app takes over? What happened to AI doing mundane tasks and leaving time for us to do what we like and love?

The most important thing in artificial intelligence isn’t the fancy algorithms.

Let’s assume the worst case and we have a general purpose AI – that can do everything a human can.

What would happen?

Waiting for smartphone app to tell us what to do next and how we might be feeling now!

The enormous power carried by the grey matter in our heads may become blunt and eventually useless if we never exercise it, turning it into just some slush. The old saying, “use it or lose it,” is explicitly applicable in this case. Half knowledge is more dangerous than ignorance!

Trust me, a lot can happen in 24 hours. The lesson here is – in times like this, the first principles-based thinking is your best bet.

Our problem is that on one side, we have intelligent people, who are full of doubts, and on the other, we have stupid people full of confidence. Stupidity is not an intellectual failing, it’s a moral failing. And it happens because we believe only in feelings and not in facts or truthfulness

When we see and hear all this, we wonder if there is any antidote? If there is any way to stop this from happening?

The ultimate test of a moral society is the kind of world that it leaves to its children.

So the question now is, “How are we going to fight this AI pandemic?”

We will finally recognize that more computing power makes machines faster, not smarter.

If a problem is too difficult for a machine, it is we who will have to adapt to its limited abilities.

There is already a frustrating struggle for humans and machines to understand one another in natural language. Soon, we will live in a world where, regardless of your programming abilities, the main limitations are simply curiosity and imagination.

The Garland Test, inspired by dialog from the movie, is passed when a person feels that a machine has consciousness, even though they know it is a machine.

Will computers pass the Garland Test in 2023? I doubt it. But what I can predict is that claims like this will be made, resulting in yet more cycles of hype, confusion, and distraction from the many problems that even present-day AI is giving rise to.

This will force us to reconsider how our behaviours today might influence digital versions of ourselves set to outlive us.

Faced with this prospect of virtual immortality, 2023 will be the year we broaden our definition of what it means to live forever, a moral question that will fundamentally change how we live our day-to-day lives, but also what it means to be immortal stupid.

We tend to think we are the be all and end all—but we’re not. The sooner we can realize that the natural world goes its way, not our way, the better.”  “I hope as a consequence that the needs and wonder and importance of the natural world are seen. We tend to think we are the be all and end all—but we’re not.

We’re both the victims and benefactors, and the sooner we can realize that the natural world goes its way, not our way, the better.” Sir David Attenborough.

All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.

Contact: bobdillon33@gmail,com

THE BEADY EYE SAY’S: THERE IS NO MORE ROOM FOR OPTIMISM WHEN IT COME TO REVERTING CLIMATE CHANGE.

18 Tuesday Jul 2023

Posted by in Climate Change.

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(Five minute read)

The truth is.

Limiting the damage requires rapid, radical change to the way the world works.

A scientist standing in front of a globe delivers a speech at Cop in Copenhagen, 15 December 2009.

In this post I will lay out the true case for pessimism and the true case for (cautious) optimism.

“Is there hope?” is just a malformed question.

It mistakes the nature of the problem.

The atmosphere is steadily warming. Things are going to get worse for humanity the more it warms.

But there’s nothing magic about 2 degrees. It doesn’t mark a line between not-screwed and screwed.

We have some choice in how screwed we are, and that choice will remain open to us no matter how hot it gets.

Even if temperature rise exceeds 2 degrees, the basic structure of the challenge will remain the same.

It will still be warming. It will still get worse for humanity the more it warms. Two degrees will be bad, but three would be worse, four worse than that, and five worse still.

When temperatures reach 60c photosynthesis stops working and the need for sustainability becomes more urgent, not less. At that point, we will be flirting with non-trivial tail risks of species-threatening — or at least civilization-threatening — effects.

In sum:

Humanity faces the urgent imperative to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, then eliminate them, and then go “net carbon negative,” i.e., absorb and sequester more carbon from the atmosphere than it emits.

It will face that imperative for several generations to come, no matter what the temperature is.

What are the reasonable odds that the current international regime, the one that will likely be in charge for the next dozen crucial years, will reduce global carbon emissions enough to hit the 2 degree target?

Can we restrain and channel our collective development in a sustainable direction.    NO

For any hope of hitting 2 degrees, global emissions must peak and begin rapidly falling within the next dozen years. And they must continue rapidly falling until humanity goes net carbon negative sometime around mid-century or shortly thereafter.

That means developed countries must go negative earlier, to allow for a slower and more difficult shift in developing countries.

Accomplishing that would require immediate, bold, sustained, coordinated action. And, well … look around. Look at how things are going. Look at who is running things. Look at the established economic regimes of the last half-century.  Is this likely to happen, not on your nelly

As Enno Schröder and Servaas Storm of Delft University write in their blunt and unsettling recent paper, “the required degree and speed with which we have to decarbonize our economies and improve energy efficiency are quite difficult to imagine within the context of our present socioeconomic system.”

The dominant climate-economic models used to generate scenarios showing how to hit the 2 degree target produce a few key common outcomes.

One is that they require an extraordinary amount of energy efficiency. The bulk of the reduction in demand for fossil fuels through 2040 or so, in most successful 2 degree scenarios, is accomplished by reduction in overall energy demand. It is only around 2040 that displacement of fossil fuel energy by zero-carbon energy takes over as the dominant driver of fossil fuel reductions.

For centuries now, the growth of economies has been tightly coupled with rising energy demand and rising greenhouse gas emissions — a one-to-one correlation, more or less.

In recent years, however, several countries have seen their economies grow faster than their emissions.

The world’s current economies are not capable of the emission reductions required to limit temperature rise to 2 degrees. If world leaders insist on maintaining historical rates of economic growth, and there are no step-change advances in technology, hitting that target requires a rate of reduction in carbon intensity for which there is simply no precedent.

Despite all the recent hype about decoupling, there’s no historical evidence that current economies are decoupling at anything close to the rate required.

In fact, it’s worth noting that the vast majority of scenarios used by climate policymakers take continued economic growth as an unquestioned premise. And they also accept that historical technology improvement rates will hold in the future. The question they basically answer: “How much can we reduce emissions while continuing to grow our economies at historical rates, with technology developing at historical rates?”

Put simply, if we are determined to maintain the economic status quo, we cannot possibly mitigate climate change, so we must turn to adapting to it.

We have to come to terms with the impossibility of material, social, and political progress as a universal promise: life is going to be worse for most people in the 21st century in all these dimensions.

The political consequences of this are hard to predict.

The choice is radicalism today or disaster tomorrow, and from all signs, humanity is choosing the latter.

The fight to decarbonize and eventually go carbon negative will last beyond the lifetime of anyone reading this post. That is true no matter how high the temperature rises. The stakes will always be enormous; time will always be short; there will never be an excuse to stop fighting.

All of this needs collective action and a strong directional thrust which ‘markets’ or ‘private agents’ alone are unable to provide.

But rapid change is not just possible in technology. It is also possible in politics.

In both domains, there are “tipping points” after which change accelerates, rendering the once implausible inevitable.

We are rarely able to predict those tipping points.

Relying on them can seem like hoping for miracles. But our history is replete with miraculously rapid changes. They have happened; they can happen again. And the more we envision them, and work toward them, the more likely they become.

What other choice is there?

It will take close to half a million years before a ton of CO2 emitted today from burning fossil fuels is completely removed from the atmosphere naturally.

The world militaries contribution to green house gases ( and I am guessing ) alone is bigger than the economic out put of the whole of the African.

It has been 30 years since the Rio summit, when a global system was set up that would bring countries together on a regular basis to try to solve the climate crises.

The ink was hardly dry on the Glasgow pact when the world began to change in ways potentially disastrous for hopes of tackling the climate crisis. Energy and food price rises mean that governments face a cost of living and energy security crisis, with some threatening to respond by returning to fossil fuels, including coal.

Despite pledges made at climate summit the world is still nowhere near its goals on limiting global temperature rise. The next summit will be on different as no one wants to carry the financial can. 

(In previous post I have suggested the establishment of a Perpetual green fund by placing 0.05% commission on all activities that are not sustainable.) This could spread the cost of tackling the climate crises Fairley.   

We don’t have time to have unquestioned assumptions.  

The real truth is that the earth in its billion of years of existence ( with our without us) has gone through many climate change disasters and survived.

We on the other had only need a further temperature rise to join a log list of extinction.  

All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin

Contact: bobdillon33@gmail.com

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THE BEADY EYE ASK’S: IS NATO GUMMING AT THE BIT FOR A WAR WITH RUSSIA.

13 Thursday Jul 2023

Posted by in Russia / Ukraine .

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(Three minute read)

NATO is a defensive alliance of 31 countries from Europe and North America. Ukraine is a NATO partner country, which means that it cooperates closely with NATO but it is not covered by the security guarantee in the Alliance’s founding treaty.

If Ukraine was to join while engaged in a war (or indeed any other country) Article 5, of the North Atlantic Treaty’s which says that an armed attack against one or more NATO members shall be considered an attack against them all, would plunge the world into a global war.

There is no doubt that we are going to have to pay the considerable price of a more militarized Europe for decades to come, but for NATO to be putting pressure on its members, by allowing the Ukraine to become a member while engaged in a war (legal or not) it is inviting its members to engage in all out war against Russia is unimageable, and away beyond its remit.

Yes military assistance can continue, and even increase, without admitting Ukraine to NATO.

Up to now NATO was purely defensive alliance an organisation, it does not directly provide weapons or ammunition to Ukraine, however individual NATO member countries are sending weapons, ammunition and many types of light and heavy military equipment, including anti-tank and air defence systems, howitzers, drones and tanks.

To date, NATO Allies have provided billions of euros’ worth of military equipment to Ukraine. Allied forces are also training Ukrainian troops to use this equipment. All of this is making a difference on the battlefield every day, helping Ukraine to uphold its right of self-defence, which is enshrined in the United Nations Charter.

Of course it is only right that any country can express its desire to be part of NATO or not.

But no country at war or not, has the right to demand membership, so all of this talk of securing membership is just political verbal.

Why ?

Because no matter how one looks at NATO membership for Ukraine, while its defensive war with Russia continued, its chances of securing membership  would necessitate direct U.S. involvement.

Even the clustered mind of American Presidents or the Russian warped mind of Putin’s would not want this to happen.

Volodymyr Zelensky

While political language about Ukraine’s future relationship with the alliance and the practical military help promised in the current conflict are likely to dominate coverage, NATO’s main task is to defend its 31 members so it is right to massively reinforce the security of member countries near to Russia, Ukraine and Belarus.

The territory of contemporary Ukraine “used to belong to several empires or states, so some versions of Ukrainian identity do not even have anything to do with Russia at all.

The two countries’ shared heritage goes back more than a thousand years to a time when Kyiv, now Ukraine’s capital, was at the center of the first Slavic state, Kyivan Rus, the birthplace of both Ukraine and Russia.

Over the past 10 centuries, Ukraine has repeatedly been carved up by competing powers.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Ukraine became an independent nation.

The Soviet Union is gone — and in the post-Soviet era, Ukrainian sentiment has only continued to sour on Russia, especially after its occupation of Crimea in 2014 and subsequent annexation.

Crimea was occupied and annexed by Russia in 2014, followed shortly after by a separatist uprising in the eastern Ukrainian region of Donbas that resulted in the declaration of the Russian-backed People’s Republics of Luhansk and Donetsk.

Today, the two countries find themselves in conflict yet again, fault lines that reflect the region’s tumultuous history.

We must not wait until the end of the war to embrace Ukraine unfortunately is an aspiration for the birds.

All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.

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