Category Archives: Climate Change.

THE BEADY EYE SAY’S. WITH CLIMATE CHANGE WE AIN’T SEEN NOTHING YET.

10 Thursday Aug 2023

Posted by in Climate Change., Climate refugees., CO2 emissions, Environment

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( Five minute read)

Never mind the rising temperature, the rising seas, the rising migration, the rising costs, the rising dormant microbes , the rising fires, the rising floods, the rising food shortages, the rising in action.

The enormous, unprecedented pain and turmoil caused by the climate crisis is often discussed alongside what can seem like surprisingly small temperature increases – 1.5C or 2C hotter than it was in the era just before the car replaced the horse and cart.

Wildfire

But the single digit numbers obscure huge ramifications at stake.

We have being and will be building a civilization based on a world that doesn’t exist anymore.

Cranking up the temperature of the entire globe, within little more than a century is, in fact, extraordinary. Our oceans alone are now absorbing the heat equivalent of five Hiroshima atomic bombs dropping into the water every second.

We have now unmoored ourselves from our past, as if we have transplanted ourselves onto another planet.

The difference between 1.5C and 2C is a death sentence with world’s governments currently failing to avert a grim fate, for the sake of GDP – Re election – call it what you want, no amount of global warming can be considered safe and people are already dying from climate change. The fingerprint of climate change on recent extreme weather is quite clear.

Across the planet, people are set to be strafed by cascading storms, heatwaves, flooding and drought. Around 216 million people, mostly from developing countries, will be forced to flee these impacts by 2050 unless radical action is taken.

At 1.5C, about 14% of the world’s population will be hit by severe heatwaves once every five years. with this number jumping to more than a third of the global population at 2C.

Beyond 1.5C, the heat in tropical regions of the world will push societies to the limits, with stifling humidity preventing sweat. A severe heatwave historically expected once a decade will happen every other year at 2C. Nearly one in 10 vertebrate animals and almost one in five plants will lose half of their habitat. Ecosystems spanning corals, wetlands, alpine areas and the Arctic “are set to die off” at this level of heating.

Heat the world a bit more than 2c and a third of all the world’s food production will be at risk by the end of the century as crops start to wilt and fail in the heat.

Earth’s hotter climate is causing the atmosphere to hold more water, then releasing the water in the form of extreme precipitation events.

Meanwhile, in the past 20 years the aggregated level of terrestrial water available to humanity has dropped at a rate of 1cm per year, with more than five billion people expected to have an inadequate water supply within the next three decades.

Virtually all of North America and Europe will be at heightened risk of wildfires at 3C of heating.

A disquieting unknown is the knock-on impacts as epochal norms continue to fall.

What if permafrost melting or flooding cuts off critical roads used by supply chains? What if storms knock out the world’s leading computer chip factory? What happens once half of the world is exposed to disease-carrying mosquitos?

We don’t understand the non-linear effects,

The climate crisis is beginning to take a toll on food production.

Despite the rapid advance of renewable energy and, more recently, electric vehicles, countries still remain umbilically connected to fossil fuels, subsidizing oil, coal and gas to the tune of around $11m every single minute.

By the end of this year the world will have burned through 86% of the carbon “budget” that would allow us just a coin flip’s chance of staying below 1.5C.

A scenario approaching some sort of apocalypse would comfortably arrive should the world heat up by 4C or more, and although this is considered unlikely due to the belated action by governments, it should provide little comfort.

Every decision – every oil drilling lease, every acre of the Amazon rainforest torched for livestock pasture, every new gas-guzzling SUV that rolls onto the road – will decide how far we tumble down the hill.

The action is far too slow at the moment.Free Global Warming Ecology photo and picture

Playing down the potential worst effects of global heating and climate breakdown is nothing less than climate appeasement.

It does nothing to help spur the urgent action that is required, and by underplaying the climate threat, works – intentionally or not – to encourage a grudging and cautionary approach to emissions cuts that we simply can no longer afford.

Make no mistake, this is a war.

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

Contact: 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 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 )

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

Contact: bobdillon33@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: THERE IS NO MORE ROOM FOR OPTIMISM WHEN IT COME TO REVERTING CLIMATE CHANGE.

18 Tuesday Jul 2023

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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 SAY’S WHEN IT COMES TO CLIMATE CHANGE WE HAVE ALREADY PASSED A TIPPING POINT.

08 Thursday Jun 2023

Posted by in #whatif.com, 2021. The year for change., 2022: The year we need to change., Carbon Emissions., Civilization., Climate Change., CO2 emissions, Disasters., Human Collective Stupidity., Human Exploration., Humanity., Natural World Disasters, Our Common Values., Sustaniability, Technology v Humanity, Telling the truth., The common good., The Obvious., The state of the World., The world to day., THE WORLD YOU LIVE IN., THIS IS THE STATE OF THE WORLD.  , WHAT IS TRUTH, What Needs to change in the World, Where's the Global Outrage.

≈ Comments Off on THE BEADY EYE SAY’S WHEN IT COMES TO CLIMATE CHANGE WE HAVE ALREADY PASSED A TIPPING POINT.

( Four minute read)

Have we reached a tipping point, that moment from which a system irreversibly changes state?

I say yes.

Climate tipping points could lock in unstoppable changes to the planet, self-sustaining shifts in the climate system that would lock-in devastating changes, like sea-level rise, even if all emissions ended.climate tipping points approaching Degradation drought Amazon less resilient fire emit more carbon than they absorb

Inhabitants of New York on Wednesday are invited to stay at home and to use masks outdoors. More than 100 million Americans are now affected by air quality alerts due to wild fires in Canada.A section of an ice sheet on water in Greenland climate tipping points

In the mean time melting of the sea ice in the Arctic will inevitably lead to a warming of the region: a huge white space, the pack ice reflects light when the sun shines 24 hours a day in summer.

It lowers the temperature of the Arctic. The disappearance of the pack ice – icy water already present in the ocean – will not directly lead to a rise in the sea and the  rise in global temperature caused by the melting of the sea ice risks in turn leading to extreme climatic events: heat waves, droughts, floods, etc.

Are we all screwed?

Yes.

Why?

Because every fraction of a degree makes tipping more likely, but we can’t be sure exactly when tipping becomes inevitable as one tipping point speeds up the next.

These signals can’t tell us exactly how close we are to tipping points, only that destabilisation is underway and a tipping point may be approaching.

These changes are just the beginning of worse to come.

The scale of recent changes across the climate system are unprecedented over many centuries to many thousands of years, and it is unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land.

The most we can be sure of is that every fraction of further warming will destabilise these tipping elements more and make the initiation of self-sustaining changes more likely.

“It’s a huge red flag, but there’s still time to save everything else.”

The temporary reduction in carbon emissions caused by global COVID-19 lockdowns did not slow the relentless advance of climate change.

To implement climate change goals as geopolitical uncertainties threaten to undermine their efforts,

The world is yet to get to a “positive tipping point” in the fight against climate change. Air pollution from power plants contributes to global warming. It is now very likely that the 5-year average temperature for 2021–2025 will pass the 1.5 °C threshold.

Even if emissions are reduced to limit warming to well below 2 °C, the global average sea level would likely rise by 0.3–0.6 m by 2100 and could rise 0.3–3.1 m by 2300.

Three-quarters of people in the world’s wealthiest nations believe humanity is pushing the planet towards a dangerous tipping point and support a shift of priorities away from economic profit.

People know we are taking colossal risks, they want to do more and they want their governments to do more. We and they must move faster to implement more ambitious policies to protect and regenerate our global commons.

People in power seem to feel it is OK to fell old trees or destroy natural ecosystems for buildings or roads, or to dig up oil, so long as they then plant new trees. But this approach is not working.

Overall, 74% of people agreed that countries should move beyond focussing on gross domestic product and profit, and instead focus more on the health and wellbeing of humans and nature.

Its now or never for global cooperation to tackle shared challenges.

There is now a need for major economic and social transformation.

Currently the world is heading toward ~2 to 3°C of global warming; at best, if all net-zero pledges and nationally determined contributions are implemented it could reach just below 2°C.

One barrier appears to be media coverage. It is not helped the understanding of the issues, or what is at stake.

You don’t have to be told that it will not take much to tip us all into killing each other.

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

Contact: bobdillon33@gmail.com

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abn7950

THE BEADY EYE SAY’S: IT BEGGARS BELIEF AND IS BEYOND PATHETIC THAT WE ARE UNABLE TO FULLY UNDERSTAND THERE WILL BE NO FUTURE WITHOUT NATURE AND IT’S BIODIVERSITY.

16 Sunday Apr 2023

Posted by in 2023 the year of disconnection., Climate Change., State of the world, Survival., Sustaniability, Telling the truth., The common good., The essence of our humanity., The Future, The Obvious., The world to day., THE WORLD YOU LIVE IN., THIS IS THE STATE OF THE WORLD.  , Truth, Unanswered Questions., VALUES, We can leave a legacy worthwhile., Where's the Global Outrage., World Leaders, World Politics

≈ Comments Off on THE BEADY EYE SAY’S: IT BEGGARS BELIEF AND IS BEYOND PATHETIC THAT WE ARE UNABLE TO FULLY UNDERSTAND THERE WILL BE NO FUTURE WITHOUT NATURE AND IT’S BIODIVERSITY.

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( Twenty-six minute read)

We have heard all of this over and over, but it is impossible to get serious about climate change, because it has been turned into a product to be traded.

The very words Climate Change, Global warming, Biodiversity, Sea levels, Natural disasters, Droughts, Melting  ice, the list goes on and on as a result they are falling on deaf ears. For example  “sustainable development”: a phrase at which many people quietly glaze over and switch off.  Or “Global warming” is another of those deceptive phrases. It doesn’t sound that threatening.

So if words like “climate change” and “global warming” have become a turn-off for most ordinary people, maybe we should change the words.  Perhaps we should talk instead about what those things actually mean:

Killer weather, a world under water, and a mortgaged future.

We have been told for over three decades of the dangers of allowing the planet to warm.

We all know this and we know that it’s urgent. The world listened, but it didn’t hear. The world listened, but it didn’t act strongly enough. It hasn’t been enough to change our behaviours on a scale great enough to stop climate change.

As a result, climate change is a problem that is here, now. Nobody is safe. And it is getting worse faster and faster, till one tipping point is reached causing a rolling coaster of from here to eternity.

There are many tipping points to choose from.

Here is mind. The Arctic Ocean’s ice cover melts.

This is a feedback loop with teeth.

Back in the 50s it was more than ten meters thick, reflecting as much as 3% of the sun’s incoming light back into space.

That light is now heating the Oceans of the Arctic and the Antarctic, both becoming the fastest places on Earth with rising temperatures. Which means a greater and greater release of permafrost carbon and methane, 20 times stronger than Co2.

The Arctic permafrost contains as much methane as all the Earth’s cattle could create over the next six centuries.

If released this fart would push the Earth into an irreversible tipping point at which point the sea level would be 110 meters higher than at present, with the global temperatures 5/6 degrees Celsius higher. At that point civilisation would be over.

One would think that such a scenario would be sufficient to make all of us pay attention but not so.

Why?

A big part of the reason is our own evolution. The same behaviours that once helped us survive are, today, working against us.

We lack the collective will to address climate change, because of the way our brains have evolved. We have evolved to pay attention to immediate threats. We overestimate threats that are less likely but easier to remember, like terrorism, and underestimate more complex threats, like climate change. Too much information can confuse our brains, leading us to inaction or poor choices that can place us in harm’s way.

Our brains evolved to filter information rapidly and focus on what is most immediately essential to our survival and reproduction.

In our modern reality it’s causing errors in rational decision-making, known as cognitive biases. “Cognitive biases that ensured our initial survival make it difficult to address complex, long-term challenges that now threaten our existence, like climate change.

  • Hyperbolic discounting. This is our perception that the present is more important than the future. Throughout most of our evolution it was more advantageous to focus on what might kill us or eat us now, not later. This bias now impedes our ability to take action to address more distant-feeling, slower and complex challenges. While we may understand what needs to be done to address climate change, it’s hard for us to see how the sacrifices required for generations existing beyond this short time span are worth it.

Families carry water during a drought in Ethiopia; temperature rise already has altered weather and water systems in profound ways (Credit: Creative Commons)

  • To address the issue of climate change it requires collective action on a scale that exceeds our evolutionary capacities.
  • The larger the group, the more challenging it gets.

The future value is the value of it at some time in the future. The farther into the future we look, the fuzzier our view, but there will be no future unless we invest trillions and trillions into sustainability.

On a warming planet, no one is safe.

The air you breathe, the water you drink and the food you eat all rely on biodiversity.

Unfortunately, we have created a world where an asset from a business perspective, has no value unless it can produce cash flows in the future. The difference in value between the future and the present is created by discounting the future back to the present using a discount factor, which is a function of time that is running out right in front of our eyes.

The world’s ecosystems are capital assets that up to now have escaped valuation and have therefore been mismanaged.

Now they are being bought by rich privateers, together with financial instruments and institutional arrangements that will allow individuals to capture the value of ecosystem assets.  For example, Sovereignty Wealth Funds.  They buy environmental protection, but only by liquidating natural capital (for example, prairies, forests, fisheries) to generate the funds; even “information” economies are built in proportion to such liquidation. The reinvestment in natural capital never equals the amount liquidated because of procedural inefficiency and profit-taking.

—–

The process of valuation in the short term might lead to profoundly favourable effects on the stock market, but the decision of how much to spend now to avert climate changes hinges on assessing how much it is worth to us now to prevent that future damage.

Since most of us would prefer money now, over money later, economists typically figure that we’re willing to spend only less than a dollar now to prevent a dollar’s worth of damage in a year, or in a decade.

The percentage less is called the “social discount rate.”

This implies that we either accept an assumption that many argue is economically unjustified (a near-zero social discount rate), or conclude that we should just accept climate change without much of a fight. (A third alternative is perhaps even less appealing to economists: accepting that their calculations simply can’t illuminate the question.)

We’re much happier to have good stuff now than later, so our short-term discount rate is high.

But we hardly distinguish between goods in the pretty far future and goods in the very far future, so our discount rate in the future is far lower to manage the essentials to life.

Now more than ever we must use the power of the law to fight those who would harm our communities, our climate, and the natural world we value so deeply.

We have an International criminal court, why not use it to fine this lot of polluters.

Peabody Energy

Company summary: Coal company
Based in: Missouri, United States
Founded: 1883
Emissions per capita: 2,231,818 tonnes – or, 449,057 return flights from London to Sydney.

Kuwait Petroleum Corporation

Company summary: Petroleum company
Based in: Kuwait City, Kuwait
Founded: 1980
Emissions per capita: 2,133,248 tonnes – or, 445,354 return flights from London to Sydney

ConocoPhillips

Company summary: Crude oil and natural gas
Based in: Texas, United States
Founded: 1875
Emissions per capita: 1,464,423 tonnes – or, 305,725 return flights from London to Sydney

Chevron

Company summary: Oil and gas company
Based in: California, United States
Founded: 1879
Emissions per capita: 900,218 tonnes – or, 187,936 return flights from London to Sydney

Saudi Aramco

Company summary: Petroleum and natural gas company
Based in: Dhahran, Saudi Arabia
Founded: 1933
Emissions per capita: 750,126 tonnes – or, 150,930 return flights from London to Sydney

ExxonMobil

Company summary: Oil and gas company
Based in: Texas, United States
Founded: 1999
Emissions per capita: 559,412 tonnes – or, 116,787 return flights from London to Sydney

BP

Company summary: Oil and gas company
Based in: London, United Kingdom
Founded: 1909
Emissions per capita: 485,306 tonnes – or, 97,647 return flights from London to Sydney

National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC)

Company summary: Government-owned national oil and natural gas company
Based in: Tehran, Iran
Founded: 1948
Emissions per capita: 407,542 tonnes – or, 82,000 return flights from London to Sydney

Royal Dutch Shell

Company summary: Oil and gas company
Based in: The Hague, Netherlands
Founded: 1907
Emissions per capita: 384,939 tonnes – or, 77,452 return flights from London to Sydney.

Chevron topped the list of the eight investor-owned corporations, followed closely by Exxon, BP and Shell. Together these four global businesses are behind more than 10% of the world’s carbon emissions since 1965. The worst offenders are investor-owned companies that are household names around the world and spend billions of pounds on lobbying governments and portraying themselves as environmentally responsible.

The top plastic polluting companies

Company Examples of products             Number of countries plastic was found in Pieces of plastic found
Coca-Cola       Coca-Cola, Fanta, Sprite                                            51                                              13,834
Pepsico            Pepsi, Lays, Doritos                                                  43                                              5,155
Nestlé              Nescafé, Kit Kat, Nestea                                           37                                              8,633
Unilever          Persil, Cornetto, Sunsilk                                            37                                              5,558
Mondeléz International  Oreo, Cadbury, Milka                                34                                                1,171
Mars              Mars bars, M&Ms, Snickers                                      32                                                  678
P&G              Tampax, Pantene, Ariel                                              29                                              3,535
Philip Morris International  Parliament, Merit, Marlboro               28                                                2,593
Colgate Palmolive  Colgate Palmolive                                           24                                              5,991
Colgate, Ajax, Palmolive
Perfetti          Mentos, Chupa Chups, Fruittella                             24                                                465

It’s important to remember that, as a consumer, you do have the power to change the future of these polluting companies. As more people switch to renewable energy, cut down on plastic, and live a little more sustainably, these polluting companies will have no choice but to change their habits to stay on trend.

Economists develop new methods to quantify the trade-off between spending now and spending later.

To figure out how much we should spend fighting climate change, economists have some questions for you:

The health of the planet may hinge on the answers.

Most economic analyses of climate change have concluded that we should be spending only small amounts to combat climate change now, ramping up slowly over time. This conclusion mystifies most climate scientists, who argue that immediate action is the only way to forestall dreadful consequences. And at the heart of the disagreement are these very questions, about the value of future generations’ welfare in monetary terms.

The worst consequences of climate change are likely to unfold only over decades or centuries — in other words, in our children’s or grandchildren’s or great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren’s lifetimes, not ours.

The higher the price payed, also equates with a higher level of risk, which generates a higher discount and lowers the present value of any action.  The higher the level of risk is represented as beta in the capital asset pricing model, means a higher discount, which lowers the present value of  nature.

Discounting is the primary factor used in pricing a stream of tomorrow’s crises. .

By reiterating the importance of the world’s natural capital to the human prospect, the next step, is to focus on stabilizing the scale of human economy.  This requires taking on the advertising industry that is promoting consumption. It should be illegal to advertise any product that is not sustainable in their manufacture. Put restrictions on all advertising that is in contradiction to health of not just us, but the earth.  It has become a voracious top predator across the entire globe.

—

Biodiversity?

It is the variety of life on Earth, in all its forms and all its interactions. Bio means living, and diversity is the variety of life on earth. It represents different relationships (like ecological, cultural, or evolutionary) between several types of organisms on this planet. All living beings on from human beings to the tiny creatures like microbes combined to form Biodiversity.

Starting with genes, then individual species, then communities of creatures and finally entire ecosystems, such as forests or coral reefs, where life interplays with the physical environment. These myriad interactions have made Earth habitable for billions of years.

Wildlife is not something you watch on television. The reality is that the air you breathe, the water you drink and the food you eat all ultimately rely on biodiversity.

It represents the knowledge learned by evolving species over millions of years about how to survive through the vastly varying environmental conditions Earth has experienced. We all interdependent with one another. Hence each species plays an essential role to boost ecosystem productivity.

Some examples are obvious: without plants there would be no oxygen and without bees to pollinate there would be no fruit or nuts.

Humans and our livestock now consume 25-40% of the planet’s entire “primary production”, i.e. the energy captured by plants on which all biodiversity depends.

The intricate jigsaw of life, constructed over hundreds of millions of years, has been thrown into disarray in the last 10,000 years by humans relocating species around the world. These invasive species can devastate ecosystems that have never developed defences – from rats devouring albatross chicks in their nests to snakehead fish decimating native species.

If money is a measure, the services provided by ecosystems are estimated to be worth trillions of dollars – double the world’s GDP. Biodiversity loss in Europe alone costs the continent about 3% of its GDP, or €450m (£400m), a year.

From an aesthetic point of view, every one of the millions of species is unique, a natural work of art that cannot be recreated once lost. “Each higher organism is richer in information than a Caravaggio painting, a Bach fugue, or any other great work,”

The extinction rate of species is now thought to be about 1,000 times higher than before humans dominated the planet, which may be even faster than the losses after a giant meteorite wiped out the dinosaurs 65m years ago. The sixth mass extinction in geological history has already begun, according to some scientists.

The results are scary.

Humans can’t have power over nature in nature.

—–

Despite the fact that natural resources are limited and take millions of years in the formation, the human is exploiting them for their endless greed and comfort.

Species extinction provides a clear but narrow window on the destruction of biodiversity.

The huge global biodiversity losses now becoming apparent represent a crisis equalling – or quite possibly surpassing – climate change.

Billions of individual populations have been lost all over the planet, with the number of animals living on Earth having plunged by half since 1970. Abandoning the normally sober tone of scientific papers, researchers call the massive loss of wildlife a “biological annihilation” representing a “frightening assault on the foundations of human civilisation”.

Humans may lack gills but that has not protected marine life. The situation is no better – and perhaps even less understood – in the two-thirds of the planet covered by oceans. Seafood is the critical source of protein for more than 2.5 billion people but rampant overfishing has caused catches to fall steadily since their peak in 1996 and now more than half the ocean is industrially fished.

Even much-loathed parasites are important. One-third could be wiped out by climate change, making them among the most threatened groups on Earth. But scientists warn this could destabilise ecosystems, unleashing unpredictable invasions of surviving parasites into new areas.

Today, 75% of the world’s food comes from just a dozen crops and five animal species, leaving supplies very vulnerable to pests or disease that can sweep through large areas of monocultures. Add in the falling yields expected from climate change, and the world’s growing global population faces a food problem.

Locating the tipping point that moves biodiversity loss into ecological collapse is an urgent priority. This being the only living world we are ever likely to know, let us join to make the most of it.

Could the loss of biodiversity be a greater threat to humanity than climate change?

Yes – nothing on Earth is experiencing more dramatic change at the hands of human activity.

Changes to the climate are reversible, even if that takes centuries or millennia.

That call is more urgent than ever. Our posterity is running out of chances.

But once species become extinct, particularly those unknown to science, there’s no going back. To put the matter as concisely as possible, biological diversity is unique in the evenness of its importance to both developed and developing countries is beyond any technical advances.

To spread technical capability where it is most needed, arrangements can be made to retain specimens within the countries of their origin while training nationals to assume leadership in systematics and the related scientific disciplines. Science is the best way to establish links with other cultures because it is concerned not with ideology but with nature and humanity’s relation to nature.

Cognitive biases that ensured our initial survival now make it difficult to address long-term challenges that threaten our existence, like climate change.

It is already clear enough that the missing ingredient is political will.

For example

Recognising the power of small groups.

Humans are more likely to change behaviour when challenges are framed positively, instead of negatively. In other words, how we communicate about climate change influences how we respond.  To get people to act, we need to make the issue feel direct and personal by focusing the issue locally, pointing both to local impacts and local solutions: Like moving one’s city to 100% renewable energy.

The key is having a large-scale, organised effort – but one supported and understood by hundreds of smaller groups and communities.

It’s true that no other species has evolved to create such a large-scale problem – but no other species has evolved with such an extraordinary capacity to solve it, either.  If academia, business, government, and citizens act together toward this common goal, we can create a pollution-free energy system; form a prosperous, adaptable and resilient society; keep human, animal, and plant life flourishing; and create a better world for ourselves and generations to come.

We can’t undo the mistakes of the past. But this generation of political and business leaders, this generation of conscious citizens, can make things right. This generation can make the systemic changes that will stop the planet warming, help everyone adapt to the new conditions and create a world of peace, prosperity and equity.

The world is now experiencing the early effects of climate change.

The overall effect of inadequate actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is creating a human rights catastrophe, and the costs of these climate change related disasters are already enormous. The Colorado river in the USA is drying up, the ice shelf is the Antarctic is melting, the glaciers in the Himalayas are melting five time faster. Somali is no the threshold of a Famine.

—–

If we don’t act, who will?

We have evolved to be able to stop human-induced climate change. Now we must act.

The risk that without intervention we could cross a threshold leading to runaway climate change. An inconvenient truth.

To save natural resources and to bring a change we have to change our habits that exploit our natural resources and directly or indirectly.

If you could ask one question of Global Leader.

What is the main motivation of your leadership?

Which competencies do you see as instrumental to develop in global leaders in order for them to thrive in this new world?

The key to multicultural leadership is in understanding the difference between intent and impact, as well as engaging in supportive interactions that cultivate a nurturing environment.

Sitting in Davis/ G20  ivory tower’s ONE cannot develop global mindset.

“The secret to success is sincerity. Learn to fake that, and you’ve got it made.”

Feel free to add your question.

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

Contact: bobdillon33@gmail.com

THE BEADY EYE: WHAT YOUR NOT BEING TOLD ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE AND THE RESULTING MONETIZATION OF NATURAL RESOURCES.

28 Tuesday Mar 2023

Posted by in 2023 the year of disconnection., Climate Change., Monetization of nature, Uncategorized

≈ Comments Off on THE BEADY EYE: WHAT YOUR NOT BEING TOLD ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE AND THE RESULTING MONETIZATION OF NATURAL RESOURCES.

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( Seven minute read)

Some things we can mitigate, some we can’t. Some things we can adapt to, some we cannot.

The question of how (or whether) we respond to climate change ultimately is a matter for policymakers to decide, but politics cannot (and should not) be separated from good science.  And so on, and so on. We’ve heard them all.

As CLIMATE CHANGE  impacts grow in frequency and severity, they will—and in many cases already have—create crises for people and nature around the world. If unchecked, these impacts will spread and worsen with more animal extinction and biodiversity loss, water shortages, and displaced communities.

Climate change is one of the most contentious issues facing society today.

Over the past several decades, we have seen not only increasing environmental degradation, but also the erosion of the concepts of the public good and collective responsibility to preserve nature.

In embracing the monetary valuation of nature as a strategy for mobilizing support for environmental conservation, environmentalists are resigning themselves to a political status quo that can only comprehend value in terms of money and markets.

By viewing ecosystems and their services through a pecuniary lens, monetization profoundly changes our relationship with nature, and, if taken to the point of commodification, can subject the fragility of nature’s balance to the destructive logic and volatility of markets.

Even though the trend toward the privatization of public goods has been pervasive over the past decades, we should not acquiesce so easily in allowing the privatization of the most basic public good of all—nature itself.

We must meet the grave environmental challenges of the twenty-first century with boldness and prudence, using the precautionary principle, along with the principles of fairness and democracy, to set boundaries that human action must not transgress.

Some argue that monetization, by revealing the economic contribution of nature and its services, can heighten public awareness and bolster conservation efforts. Others go beyond such broad conceptual calculations and seek to establish tradable prices for ecosystem services, claiming that markets can achieve what politics has not. Such an approach collapses nature’s complex functions into a set of commodities stripped from their social, cultural, and ecological context.

Although the path from valuation to commodification is not inevitable, it is indeed a slippery slope.

Do nature’s services need a monetary value?

Do conservation policy need an economic motive to get sufficient attention from policymakers and the public?

One approach seeks to monetize the value of nature simply in order to reveal its immense economic contribution to society.

Monetization is only meaningful and effective if there are markets to set prices for the ecosystem services in question. Markets for such commodified ecosystem services, they argue, can protect conservation policy from the vagaries of political will. Roll back bureaucratic red tape, and let the market work its magic to save nature.

The line between valuation and commodification, although clear in theory, becomes blurred in practice.

The monetization of any resource can cause long term problems for people.

To be sure, valuation alone does not inevitably entail the risks to the preservation of nature intrinsic to commodification. Nevertheless, it changes how we see and relate to nature and can inadvertently pave the way for the privatization of ecosystem services that the advocates of valuation often oppose.

Environmentalists, business leaders, and policymakers have all sought to make environmental protection an economic rather than just a political issue. The introduction of “no net loss” policies, which allow economic development to proceed as long as the net acreage of a specific type of ecosystem is maintained, has effected a paradigm shift in environmental policymaking. However, offsetting ignores how unique and interconnected biodiversity is, and it overlooks the importance of nature for local communities and the ways they suffer when their ecosystems are damaged. Land-use policies based on whether a company can pay for an offset, and not on what local communities and humanity need to survive, undermine basic rights and democratic principles

National economic accounts such as GDP remain blind to the services of nature. Such accounts likewise fail to distinguish between constructive and destructive economic activity with respect to human and ecological well-being. Needless to say, a deeper understanding and greater awareness of the relationship of society to nature is always welcome, but the rigor and usefulness of GDP-level information remains questionable.

Delineating an individual ecosystem from the complex fabric of nature poses numerous significant challenges. For example, the provision of oxygen for humans and animals to breathe is an ecosystem service of global scale.

But how do we value the contribution of individual sub-systems like a single forest to this global service?

We could all still breathe if one forest is cut down, but not if all forests were cut down.

Embarking upon the path of valuation also changes the way we see and understand nature.

The value of the whole ecosystem to society is more than the sum of its monetized parts:

Reducing its value to mere monetary terms, even if it were technically practical, strips away its cultural and spiritual value. A bad policy can be replaced, but the holistic functions of nature cannot.

Through disaggregation, each service can be rendered into a discrete monetizable “package” so that it can have its own market and its own price. Such an approach tilts policymaking in favour of the interests of the economically powerful. The least powerful actors—often local communities, indigenous peoples, women, small-scale farmers, etc.—get pushed to the margins, their voices ignored.

In order to prevent monetization from slipping into commodification, we must revisit one of the hallowed principles of environmental policy: the precautionary principle. It states that when an action or policy could pose a substantial risk to the environment, a very high burden of justification should fall on those seeking to take such an action. Like the classical mantra of medical ethics, the precautionary principle insists upon first doing no harm.

What if one of those billionaires manipulates the market by withholding or restricting the free flow of water?

71% of Earth’s surface is water.

There are 326 million trillion gallons of it on and in the planet.  96.5% of the water is ocean water, and just 3.5% is fresh water.  Of that 3%, 69% of that water is locked up in glaciers.  Another 30% of that freshwater is underground and usually requires costly extraction.  That leaves 114 million billion gallons of readily accessible freshwater, not necessarily drinkable water, but water nonetheless.  That sounds like enough, but it represents just 1% of the Earth’s water for every man, woman, child, and animal on the planet.  That 1% of the water has to also serve every agricultural and industrial need on the planet.  In most cases, it also needs to be filtered and treated before it is safely consumable.

So, though there is plenty of water on the planet, not very much of it is drinkable.  Not very much of it is accessible, and the distribution methods are easily manipulated, legislated, and monetized.  That’s never good for the common man.  Nestle Water, for instance, extracted 36 million gallons of water from a national forest in California in 2015 to sell as bottled water, even as Californians were ordered to cut their water use because of a historic drought in the state.

Farmers, hedge funds, and municipalities alike can now hedge against — or bet on — future water.

While that may seem innocuous enough, the cost disparity probably gets passed on to the cities and individual consumers. It’s easy to imagine how many ways the monetization of water as a commodity is a dangerous first step in government and corporate overreach and intrusion. Mega-banks and investment firms such as Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, UBS, Deutsche Bank, Credit Suisse, Macquarie Bank, Barclays Bank, the Blackstone Group, Allianz, and HSBC Bank, among others, are consolidating their control over water.

Wealthy tycoons such as former President George H.W. Bush and his family, Hong Kong’s Li Ka-shing, Philippines’ Manuel V. Pangilinan, and others are also buying thousands of acres of land with aquifers, lakes, water rights, water utilities, and shares in water engineering and technology companies all over the world.

Complicit governments are legislating your rights to access and accumulate Earth’s free-flowing resources. It falls from the sky onto your property, but it is owned by someone else the minute it touches the Earth.

Water rights are conveyed as real property interests using the same formalities as real estate, but in most cases, everyone is tapped into the same source.  If fracking, mining, or industrial operations pollute that source, they spoil it for everyone.  So, merely having access to a water source is not enough.

The fact is that water is being restricted, legislated, and monetized more every year, and the rich are grabbing up the rights as fast as they can.

During periods of drought, when water levels are already low, it is easy to imagine how one person’s control over a large water area can lead to huge profits.  This is why the super-wealthy are snapping up water, water contracts, water rights, and governments letting them do so all over the world.  Two billion people now live in nations plagued by water problems, and almost two-thirds of the world could face water shortages in just four years.  Even on a planet covered and steeped with water, water is a resource.  As a resource, it can be monetized and controlled, and you could be denied or deprived of access to it.

Whatever you choose to call it, the most important thing is that we act to stop it.

If it is not the capitalization and exploitation of the resources of our planet  with climate change will continue.

I can assure you, the super-wealthy are not buying up the water around the planet for altruistic purposes.  They are doing so because they see a profit from it.  Freshwater first then fresh air.

—–

CLIMATE CHANGE IS NOW A PRODUCT AND NET ZERO A SLOGAN.

There is now no stopping sea levels rising.  A two meter rise would displace more than 2% of the world’s population and cut world food production/ supply by 25%. The rate of carbon emissions are the highest they’ve been in 66 million years and the amount of warming in the coming decades is expected to be 250 times greater than the average warming during the past century.

The rate of ocean acidification is the highest it has been in 300 million years!

Warming surface waters may be contributing to slowing ocean currents.

The warming climate is contributing to rising populations of insect / pests.

To mitigate the effects of climate change is going to cost quadrillions.

We are on course to match the worst extinction of earth species both on land and in the oceans.

We at a point where money will not suffice to make a difference.

There’s no consensus on global warming.

Many species are approaching—or have already reached—the limit of where they can go to find hospitable climates. In the polar regions, animals like polar bears that live on polar ice are now struggling to survive as that ice melts.

From straining agricultural systems to making regions less habitable, climate change is affecting people everywhere.

Climate change also exacerbates the threat of human-caused conflict resulting from a scarcity of resources like food and water that are less reliable as growing seasons change and seasons become less predictable. Around the globe, many of the poorest nations are being impacted first and most severely by climate change, even though they have contributed far less to the increase in carbon emissions that has caused the warming in the first place.

Higher temperatures are affecting the length of seasons and in some places, are already crossing safe levels for ecosystems and humans.

Now more than ever in order to enable a just transition to a low-carbon economy, gender and equality, human rights, and food security, with links to climate change we must use the power of the law to fight those who would harm our communities, our climate, and the natural world we value so deeply.

Recently, many countries have focused on mainstreaming net zero emissions targets: 138 states have now made a net zero pledge.

However, targets in all climate-related national laws and policies are currently far from the pledges made in NDCs (Simply put, an NDC, or Nationally Determined Contribution, is a climate action plan to cut emissions and adapt to climate impacts) and from enabling global warming to be limited to below 2 °C.

For NDCs to work, they need to be widely understood and used by businesses, civil society, academia and ordinary citizens. Each has roles to play, which is why many governments invite different constituencies to take part in defining NDC priorities.

For many reasons, including a lack of adequate finance, capacity and, in some cases, insufficient political commitment combined with the pandemic-related economic downturn is expected to constrain implementation.

For developing countries, moving forward depends on developed countries realizing their commitment to provide $100 billion in climate finance to developing countries. Dedicating half of this amount to adaptation, would help close significant financing shortfalls for vital measures to protect lives and livelihoods. Rapid policy developments are required to achieve this goal.

Climate change legislation is less a politically partisan issue than is commonly assumed:

Everyone is a climate actor and can be part of the change that needs to happen.

If we can slow or stop deforestation and manage natural land so that it is healthy, we could achieve up to one third of the emission reductions needed by 2030 to keep global temperatures from rising more than 2°C (3.6°C).

We must as a planet commit ourselves to reaching net zero carbon emissions by 2050.

The truth, however, is that even if we do successfully reach net zero carbon emissions by 2050, we will still have to address harmful climate impacts, and so the solution to climate change must also include measures to adapt to the impacts of global warming.

We need to increase renewable energy at least nine-fold from where it is today. This cannot be achieved without a major shift to renewable energy.

There is not a hard and fast deadline on climate action vs. inaction. There is no definitive line of demarcation that we can protect against; instead it is a matter of minimizing the effects of climate change.

We need to begin reducing carbon emissions RIGHT NOW to give our planet and our population the future that is least impacted.

The low carbon economy that we need to create will also give us cleaner air, better energy choices, new jobs and may even save us money. Likewise, many of the natural solutions that we need to adapt to even today’s climate change impacts benefit all of us: cleaner air and water, more natural recreation opportunities and jobs.

Nature, like climate, may be approaching irreversible tipping points where changes push systems into completely new states, even as more than half the global GDP depends on the planet’s natural systems.

For climate, the world has a clear net zero emissions goal.

But what’s the goal for nature? It hardly takes a genius to see things aren’t going well in the world or for our civilization.

When we actually look at the state of our civilization — in factual, empirical terms — the results are…well, you’ll be able to judge for yourself in just a moment.

Progress has flatlined and ground to a halt.

Living standards are declining in 90% of countries.

Each generation now does worse than the one before it,

Democracy’s in steep decline around the globe

The points above may in truth be small fry, compared to this one.

We are running out of our most basic, critical, fundamental resources.

People are more pessimistic now than at any point during the last century.

Anxiety, rage, anger, and despair are the defining sentiments of now — along with maybe the numbness of endlessly scrolling some algorithmically generated infotainment feed.

I could go on. But it’s hardly necessary. All the above are facts. They aren’t opinions, speculations, or even conclusions. They’re empirical truths about our civilization.

Each of the points above is its own crisis, and each one of them would be bad enough for any age, challenging, threatening, arduous enough.

But all of them, together, at once? That’s something new. They are painting a caricature without really thinking about the state of life as it is now. 

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

Contact: bobdillon33@gmailcom

THE BEADY EYE SAY’S. CIVILIZATION WITH CLIMATE CHANGE WILL BE A VERY THIN VENEER.

21 Tuesday Mar 2023

Posted by in Climate Change., CO2 emissions, Dehumanization., Environment, Green Energy., Human Collective Stupidity., Human values., Life., Reality., State of the world, Telling the truth., The common good., The Future, The Obvious., The state of the World., Truth, Unanswered Questions., What is shaping our world., WHAT IS TRUTH, What Needs to change in the World, Where's the Global Outrage.

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.( Twenty minute read) 

There are no words to describe the present state of our world.

Here below is a recent picture from Australia, it more than adequately does the job. Millions of dead fish float were seen floating on the Lower Darling in Far west NSW.

A thousand fish per square metre (caused “severe deoxygenation”)

We seen conflict raging for decades across the world, as if war is always and forever an ordinary routine, limited to developing third world nations, however wars are no longer something visited upon impoverished and remote populations. With the Coming Climate Change we ent seeing nothing yet when it comes to wars.

IT IS THE DEFINING ISSUE OF OUR TIMES, WITH PROFOUND CONSEQUENCES, FOR THE FOOD CHAIN, ENGERY  DISEASES, DWINDELING RESOURSE AND FUTURE WARS.

To date we have had summit after summit with countries promising to reduce their carbon emission at varying degrees and rates of time, with 60% not in the west returning home, PROBALY THINKING WHY SHOULD THEY BE CARRYING THE CAN WHEN ITS IS THE COUNTRIES IN THE WEST THAT CAUSED THE PROBLEM IN THE FIRST PLACE.

Vermillion Cliffs at Paria Canyon Wilderness in Arizona

We are already in a pivotal moment in deciding our planets future, which requires significant societal changes to mitigate it.

Why?

Because our current global political economy solves problems through business as usual growth, wasting precious time to effectively reduce emissions to prevent human suffering and ecological system collapse at an unimaginable scale.

Because we are unable to put the common good in front of short term profit.

Although we have been raising public awareness on climate change for years, this is not enough; the global temperature increases day by day.  Unless greenhouse gas emissions and global temperature are reduced within years, the world will face demanding consequences.

Because the fragility of life as we know it, will be shattered by Climate change.

——–

Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted. What we fail to remember is that we ourselves live in the very world we do not seem to care what happens to.

We do not realise is that with each day that passes without any action, the number of natural resources available also decreases significantly.

Take the Fashion Industry’s for example.

10,000 litres of water are used to produce just one kilogram of cotton.

WITH OVER 5 BILLIONS PAIRS OF JEANS PRODUCED A YEAR  – 60 PAIRS A SECOND USING – 1000 LITERS OF WATER PER PAIR = A MIND BLOWING WASTE OF WATER. 

The average jeans collection needs 36,250 litres of water. Hoodies and sweatshirts need 23,450 litres. T-shirts and shirts require 15,000 litres, while our undergarments combined use 45,950 litres of water. The average person drinks 691 litres of water per year.

This means that our jeans collection has used 52.5 years of drinking water for one person.

The next time you put on your best threads, think about the environmental cost of your outfit — you may just be dripping wet.

 

——

” We are now entering in the politics of eternity and the politics of inevitability.”

How is the Earth going to survive, if the only species it has the chance to lean on, turn their back to it?

Climate is the envelope within which all other environmental conditions and processes important to human well-being must function. ANY TIPPING POINT COULD opened the floodgates.

Inevitability politicians portray history as a journey from savagery to civilization and assume this trend will continue to their desired outcome.

We have witnessed in the past 30 years the degradation of liberal democracy, the spread of Islamic terror across borders, and the resilience of the illiberal Chinese political system.

Up to now very form of society has been based, on the antagonism of oppressing and oppressed classes…This is why Capitalism combined with democracy has provided the perfect balance for governance, and as a consequence took root in most countries.

The liberal arrogance shown at the end of the 20th century paved the way for the blowback of the 21st.

Liberals failed to confront the innate inequality of the post-war international order so liberal inevitability politics sealed its own fate. By failing to address the problems of the now rapidly collapsing global order, and those who are committed to democracy and strong institutions have spent this century trying to pick up the pieces.Vladimir Putin sits angrily at desk

Where eternity politics is best on display currently is in the Russian narrative on their invasion of Ukraine.

To the Russian eternity politician, the West is simply repeating its century-old tactic to assault Russian values and Russia’s greatness, as they did in the Crimean War, Great Northern War, or any other conflict they may pick.

But the eternity politician makes the same mistake as the inevitability politicians, they remove agency from individuals and movements with personalized beliefs, motivations, and tactics.

Herein lies the problem with both the politics of inevitability and the politics of eternity:

They ignore the fact that developments in the political and social conscience of individuals and societies determine history, not the other way around.

As an entire nation of people is stripped of its agency the war in Ukraine is boiling down into a proxy war between two great powers. However, what cannot be done is to create a single coherent narrative about the historical past, the political present, and the prospective future, because of the simple fact that human beings do not have omniscience.

We cannot possibly isolate the individuals and communities that shape historical development. We cannot aggregate history, and we should not try. Revolutions did occur in China and in Russia (along with many other places), regimes committed atrocities with impunity, as everything they did was in service of the righteous and inevitable world revolution, just as the dogma told them.

The most dangerous facet of the politics of eternity and politics of inevitability is not the gross oversimplification of history they embody, but rather the societal implications they necessitate.

In the case of liberal capitalist democracies, it leads to a small group of wealthy individuals amassing such great control that it threatens the very institutions liberals revere as eternal.

For the Marxist, it leads to the justification of mass arrest, disenfranchisement , and slaughter in the name of an inevitable world revolution that will never arrive. And for the nationalist, it means a constant paranoid struggle for dominance against their neighbours, no matter the cost.

So with the arrival of the Internet /Social media / The smartphone, are we in an “intellectual coma.” left with a form of Capitalism that is no longer working.

In denying historicism, we shouldn’t deny that progress is possible, rather we should accept that progress is not pre-determined, and relies on all of us as active participants to truly make history.

Climate change with out a doubt will lead to social disruption and potentially violent conflict.

I shudder to think about this impromptu utterances.

———-

Earth on psychiatrist's couch.

 

It’s not that difficult to see that, says mass migration, it will provoke more conflict in the world.

Our tribalism will become more apparent over the next decade or so. Social Media reflects this with the pervasive mentality in western journalism of normalizing tragedy in parts of the world, such as the Middle East, Africa, south Asia, and Latin America, Syria, Afghanistan, Ukraine, your name it and it is perversely turned into entertainment.

Everything will have to adapt to the changing times.

As culture change, so does the way we consume it – all digital and virtual viewing merging into a digital and physical worlds with  interactions changing into an endless cycle of content discovery, co-creation and sharing, which will deepen the emotional impact of content or by- pass it completely. This extends beyond our screens and newspapers and easily bleeds and blends into politics.

Righteous outrage immediately mounted online.

Xenophobia is an efficient tool to keep people divided. Colonial powers knew this early on. By separating people based on superficial characteristics, such as skin colour, and then assigning qualities to these features (such as being civilized vs. barbarian, or intelligent vs. backward), people started to believe that they were different from each other based on these highly unscientific classifications. To eradicate racism, we must become aware that our ancestors invented the notion of race for self-fulfilling reasons rooted in unscientific assumptions.

The question becomes how we classify people as strangers. This changes over time. Therefore, the classification of people as strangers is culturally constructed, with racism being one of its many forms.

Race and racism were non-existent during most of human history. To be human has always meant one thing -to be civilised. One was not born human. One had to become human.

Racism is a recently invented classification system that triggers xenophobia.

——-

After demonizing and abusing refugees, especially Muslim and African refugees, for years., now if one does not look like a refugee the chances of being excepted anywhere is almost zero.

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. Neighbour helping neighbour is a dying falsify.

Very concept of providing refuge is not and should not be based on factors such as physical proximity or skin colour.

The idea of granting asylum, of providing someone with a life free from political persecution, must never be founded on anything but helping innocent people who need protection. That’s where the core principle of asylum is located. If not we are showing ourselves as giving up on civilization and opting for barbarism instead.

On the one hand, there is something to be said about the idea of mankind as a group defined, beyond gender, race, or class, by a characteristic shared by all humans.

The history of the idea of human nature since the 5th century BC represents the history of Western violence and domination. It bears witness to some of the deepest conflicts and divisions the earth has seen.

The West identifies capitalism, liberalism and democracy as markers of civilisation and progress against Islamic fundamentalism, theocratic rule, and what it irresponsibly calls ‘the Muslim world’.

——–

These things exist with or without climate change, but the effects of climate change — migration in particular — will exacerbate them and help fuel reactionary movements around the world.

Ideology will always be a surface-level justification for conflict — people come up with narratives to justify whatever they’re doing in the political world. But 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.

We can say with some confidence that climate change will render huge parts of the world less hospitable to human beings, and that as a consequence, humans will have to change how and where they live.

Are we prepared?   NO!

Do we have the institutions, the structures, the systems of cooperation we need to deal with this problem?  NO!

Have we existing structure of peacekeeping that can hold up under these conditions?   NO!

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. The problem is that these systems are based on the exploitation of nature and our environment, and we’re sort of trapped in this paradigm.

The lessons for those of who lived through the coronavirus pandemic today, it that Civilization is a very thin veneer. That your well-being as individuals really depends on the flourishing of the greater society.

Why?

Because under even slight amounts of pressure, that social contract starts to break down, and [when] people lose that veneer … that can be very dangerous. If a pandemic finds a society that is fractured, where there is distrust, where the public health system is neglected or in decay … that is going to be revealed, as it was with profiteers during the pandemic “willing to make money off human misery”

——–

Putting the pandemic into perspective as a terrible episode, but nonetheless just one episode, in a much longer story. This however  is not an option when it comes to Climate Change. Overwhelmed by the disaster, people will see what our system of Capitalism has become.

I think one of the things that is clearly exacerbating matters is when the issue is what we’d call politicized.

With technology and social media we humans – we become the stories that we tell ourselves. Our stories are never just stories. They are self-fulfilling prophecies.

That’s because we tend to use history, which is at its heart the study of surprises, as a guide to the future. This should however not stop us from aiming to better understand the future: the knowledge gained through planning is crucial to the selection of appropriate actions as future events unfold. We don’t know the answer, but we can at least ask useful questions and catalyze the conversation!

It’s important to remember that technology is often value-neutral: it’s what we do with it day in, day out that defines whether we are dealing with the “next big thing”.

Is there a way to think of the human being beyond the opposition between the ‘civilized’ and the ‘barbarian’?

Or is such an idea of mankind yet to be invented?

 

Watch and weep.

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

Contact: bobdillon33@gmail.com