Once more after what is now the 34th climate conference we have a weak agreement that will do little our nothing to solve the forthcoming climate disaster.
After a fortnight of verbal we get what only can be called Bull shit.
The time to urge countries to take action has passed a long time ago.
This blog has suggested that a 0.05% world aid commission be placed on all human activities that are not essential to one life.
≈ Comments Off on THE BEADY EYE SAYS. IN ORDER TO TURN THE WORLD AROUND FROM SELF DESTRUCTION WE MUST BUILD A WORLD ON TRUSTING EACH OTHER NOT ON POWER.
We can all see that we must change the direction we are presently persuading our lives before it’s too late. There is no point in living in a world looking over one’s shoulders afraid of being attacked just because we have not the ability to share our lives.
To achieve a peaceful world we must share its resources.
Build shared prosperity by extending the hand of friendship, building hospitals, health systems centres, retirement homes, rehabilitation facilities, schools, with grants free of charge or repayment.
We must make richer societies provide a bigger portion of its wealth to building trust between communities, cultures, countries, tying the world together, not pushing it apart for the sake of I am all right JACK.
The old proverb is true “ YOU CANNOT EAT MONEY “ but you can eat-away trust, which is exactly what Mr TRUMP & Mr PUTIN are doing for no reason other than self glorification.
WHO WANTS TO LIVE ON A WORLD RUN BY MACHINES FOR MACHINES.
NOT ME.
STOP THESE WARS AND START BUILDING TRUST. THEN AND ONLY THEN WILL WE LEAVE SOMETHING WORTH WHILE BEHIND.
THESE ARE THE WORDS OF FELLOW HUMAN, WHO IS RECOVERING FROM A TRIPLE BYPASS NOT A ARTIFICIAL GENERATED ASSHOLE ALGORITHMIC PLATFORM.
ALL HUMAN COMMENTS APPRECIATED. ALL LIKE CLICKS AND ABUSE CHUCKED INTO THE BIN.
≈ Comments Off on THE BEADY EYE SAY’S. WITH CLIMATE CHANGE WE AIN’T SEEN NOTHING YET.
( 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.
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.
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.
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.
≈ 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.
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.
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. 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.
≈ Comments Off on THE BEADY EYE SAY’S . THE ADVERTISING INDUSTRY MUST BE BROUGHT TO HEAL WITH NEW LAWS TO REDUCE CONSUMPTION.
( Seven minute read)
It is crystal clear that consumption is a major donator to the problems of both the environment and all of us are now facing. There is consistent evidence that exposure to marketing for unhealthy commodities – for example advertising for alcohol or food and drinks high in fat, salt, or sugar – is associated with consumption, including among children and young people.
To confront the climate emergency, the amount we consume needs to drop dramatically. Yet every day we’re told by the advertising industry to consume more.
The purpose of advertising is to boost revenue, gain an advantage over competitors, and build brand awareness, so it latch on to what ever is topical – Climate change – Energy – Sustainability – Cost of living etc.
Now with technology it has billion-dollar persuasion machines, promoting not quality of life but rather quantity of stuff.
It’s woven into our personal communications whenever we use social media platforms. In public spaces, where we have little choice over where we look, adverts are invasive, appearing without our consent, with the trend towards digital billboards only exposes us ever more.
Its so prevalent as to be invisible but with an effect no less insidious than air pollution.
We all have a role to play — from making sustainable choices to help safeguard the ocean and our environment, to urging world and business leaders to take the urgent, widespread, and ambitious action needed to tackle climate change and protect the planet.
———
This is an industry capable of quickly shifting global public opinion, with the power to change hearts, minds and behaviour resulting in action, potentially on a global scale and also with profound and rapid effect.
It must be made to take responsibility for consumption, instead of continuing to drive the high carbon lifestyles and hyper-consumption that is killing us.
If we were to introduce new laws restricting marketing agencies from taking work from clients who aren’t actively reducing their own contributions to climate change, earning money from high carbon clients, the sort of companies from whom the investment community is increasingly divesting; promoting unnecessary and over-consumption, these companies would eventually be forced to match their green advertising slogans with real green investment.
The questions for the advertising industry would become what are our obligations to tackle climate change i.e. how might we have contributed to climate change and how do we stop doing so, and what are our opportunities i.e. where can we make a positive contribution to the issue?
What other than laws will forced it to rethink their strategies so the industry will go through a transition period, to discover a purpose beyond profit?
In fact, many would argue that the move to “doing well by doing good” will only become truly mainstream when the corporate social responsibility agenda and the growth agenda become one and the same.
There is no reason that governments could not introduce restricted areas and venues where the advertising of consumption is not allowed.
For example: Sporting events, Natural Reserves/ Public Park’s, Billboards and bus stops, Out door digital advertising.
We could stop television programming being sponsored by consumption – Eat now.
Of course in a free society, businesses have the right to advertise their wares, and individual citizens are not the helpless brainless automatons that advertising industry’s considers them to be.
All advertising plays a crucial role in brand competition, drives product innovation, and fuels economic growth but would we not rather see community ads and art than have multi-billion companies putting logos and images everywhere?
If they are allowed to get the message out, the public has a right to reply to those ads.
We don’t want our city’s children bombarded with animated advertising on TV screens in the street.
Critically, the more that people prioritise materialistic values and goals, the less they embrace positive attitudes towards the environment – and the more likely they are to behave in damaging ways. If you think this is a fanciful aim, then you might need to think again with the state the world is in.
We’re in a place where major behaviour change is required.
To question the legitimacy of corporate outdoor adverting and draw attention to the impact they can have on social issues, mental health, wellbeing, the climate, and the communication of public space where governments are too inert/broke/ill-intentioned/in thrall to vested interests to take effective action.
Business leaders must increasingly look beyond short-term profitability to address the pressing need to reduce emissions.
——
.The advertising industry is in a very different place to where it was a year ago.
Where, how, and when you advertise will constantly change with the times. That’s one thing we can count on.
Culture has always defined marketing and brand marketers have a lot of power to dictate.
The rise of the internet, computers, and mobile devices only provided more platforms for video ads to appear. It’s probably still going to be one of the most important advertising trends in the next 5 years.
We have our hands on the levers of behaviour change, but in an era in which attention is often only ever partial, puncturing the collective consumer inertia with a complex message is no easy feat.
We spend every day thinking of ways to change people’s behaviours,
These skills are the ones needed more than ever by the world to halt the human causes of climate change.
——–
Advertising has always evolved with the technology at hand. This includes tracking of clicked links, customer behaviour, purchase history, survey responses, and more.
Marketers can then use that information to create custom messages or content that’ll match the target audiences’ interests.
Finding out which people to show a particular ad to and the right time to show them is crucial in the world of smartphones
Next step, profit.
——-
In a cut-throat and viciously competitive market, pioneering new technology can have a major impact on the effectiveness of advertising campaigns.
Another big use of mobile advertising is through games.
A lot of mobile games are created with the format of being able to purchase resources with real-world money.
This means that ads will now be geared towards targeting real people through emails and other registered user data. With more information available, marketers can provide customers with a better offer that’ll most likely translate into sales.
Social advertising is the use of Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, and other social media platforms for advertising potentials.
The format itself is undergoing rapid transformation because most people watch for content and not for production quality.
Data collection and cookies naturally have poor public perception, often being viewed as encroaching on private information and stealing data, with ads following consumers around the internet.
Now, these apps aren’t just for sending messages and emoji cause it’s also a place to find advertisements relevant to users.
As the climate crisis bites
————
We need new metrics and measurement tools – and new bonus and remuneration systems to underpin our value systems, not just legislation against high-carbon advertising, focusing on fossil fuel companies, petrol- and diesel-engine cars and aviation.
Because, marketing has been transformed by digital speed, relevance and reach of advertising campaigns.
Because, overconsumption in general, encouraged by advertising, has a climate and ecological impact.
Because, programmatic advertising uses AI to automatically buy ads that can target audiences more specifically. ( Programmatic advertising is a combination of big data processing, technical skills, and automation.)
Because, advertising works by getting under your radar, introducing new ideas without bothering your conscious mind.
Because, contextual advertising is a form of targeted advertising where site content and keywords are analyzed in real time to determine their suitability for a brand’s message.
Because, children are now at the mercy of so-called “surveillance advertising”. It is estimated that by the time a child turns 13, ad-tech firms would have gathered 72m data points on them. The more data collected from an early age, the easier it is for advertisers to turn young children into consumer targets.
A transformation of marketing is underway as we spend more time on our mobiles, tablets and laptops. The real-time conversations brands have with people as they interact with websites and mobile apps has changed the nature of marketing
We know that advertising is a key engine of the economy. There are visual images and marketing messages that have insinuated themselves into the nervous systems of humans.
There’s a long way to go and a lot to be done. The ad business, with strategy tools and processes that were for the most part developed in the 60s to accommodate the advent of commercial TV, is a lot closer to where it started the journey than where it needs to get to.
Let’s create a movement and band together to save the planet in a non-branded or political way.
New checks and balances need to accommodate the natural concerns of councils and residents around climate, air pollution, environmental light pollution, the “attention economy”, mental health and the dominance of non-consensual adverts in public spaces.
I’m sure most advertisers and agencies would rather work on solving this global crisis, and if we can use just 5% of the industry’s time toward this initiative.
It isn’t clickbait that is needed but a genuine concern for the fate of the planet or a cynical hunch that doing the right thing will drive growth and profit – if the improved behaviour is real.
I believe that would lead to greater satisfaction, retention and more.
Break the Silence and comment.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
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.
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.
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.
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.
———-
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.
WE ARE STILL BURNING GIGATONS OF FOSSIL CARBON PER YEAR. ( A gigaton is a billion tons)
At 40 gigatons’ a year another 500 gigatons will not take long to burn = 12.5 years.
This means an inexorable rise in temperature.
A wet- bulb temperature of 35 will kill humans, making swaths of the globe inhospitable to humans in the next century turning the essential resources of the earth, Fresh Air, Fresh Water into products. (Wet-bulb temperature is literally what a thermometer measures if a wet cloth is wrapped around it.) (35 °C, or around 95 °F, is pretty much the absolute limit of human tolerance)
Understanding our limits and what determines them will be more important as global temperatures creep upward and extreme weather events become harder to predict.
There are already hundreds of extreme heat events around the world. In a study published in 2020, researchers showed that some places in the subtropics have already reported such conditions—and they’re getting more common.
Around 30% of the world’s population is exposed to a deadly combination of heat and humidity for at least 20 days each year, that percentage will increase to nearly half by 2100, even with the most drastic reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions.
When your core temperature gets too hot, everything from organs to enzymes can shut down. Extreme heat can lead to major kidney and heart problems, and even brain damage.
We’re changing our planet.
It’s not just Australia one of the hottest countries on Earth, England is looking at a drought this year with other places already
pushing the limits of human tolerance.
Australia is a country on the brink of a water crisis.
With river flows expected to drop by 10- 25% within ten years, pressure on Australia’ water systems will grow as demand from
population rises.
Despite the continent’s vast size, nearly the entire population lives in cities. These are predicted to grow by an additional 20
million people in the next 30 years, with water consumption in larger cities expected to rise by 73% to more than 2,650 gigalitres.
Australia’s Murray-Darling Basin has one of the world’s most advanced water markets. Water can be bought by the highest bidder.
Water users can buy or sell their water rights, on a permanent or temporary basis. This encourages the best use of our scarce water
resources. Trading encourages efficient water use by allowing it to be used where it’s needed most.
Water rights can be traded in various ways. It can be as simple as a change of ownership. Trades may change either the ownership
or the location of the water right, or both.
all of this is contributing to appalling environmental damage on the planet’s driest inhabited continent.
It has allowed a ruthless market to form, exploited by traders who buy and sell water as if it were a currency like Bitcoin.
The widespread acceptance that environmental sustainability is a crucial goal of water management.
The deadly heat events already experienced in recent decades are indicative of the continuing trend toward increasingly extreme
humid heat, are underlining that their diverse, consequential, and growing impacts represent a major societal challenge
for the coming decades.
What do you do when there’s not enough of something to go around? “Put a price on it!”
MARK MY WORDS TURNING NATURAL RESOURCES INTO PRODUCTS FOR SHORT TERM PROFIT IS ONLY IN ITS
INFANCY.
CLEAN AIR WILL BE NEXT.
It’s important to remember that the causal links between climate and conflict are rarely direct.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin
It is now very likely that the 5-year average temperature for 2021–2025 will pass the 1.5 °C threshold.
bobdillon33blog 
You must be logged in to post a comment.