Shortly in Scotland on the 31st of October, we are going to be treated to twelve days or longer of verbal by Politicians, Prime Ministers, Presidents, Climate Activists, Royalty, Greta Thunberg, and David Attenborough, to keep global temperatures from rising.
We all know that humans are capable of astounding feats, including some that seem to defy everything we know about the body. The body can survive for 8 to 21 days without food and water and up to two months if there’s access to an adequate water intake but your brain can only survive for five to 10 minutes without oxygen.
Most humans will suffer hyperthermia after 10 minutes in extremely humid, 140-degree-Fahrenheit (60-degrees-Celsius) heat.
If your body temperature reaches 104°F (40°C), you have hyperthermia. If it rises as high as 107.6°F (42 °C), you can suffer brain damage or death.
Heat kills more people on an annual basis than any other weather-related factor.
So the link between one’s body and mind is a crucial part of everyday life.
The human brain has a memory capacity that is the equivalent of more than four terabytes on a hard drive.
So why not impress a lasting memory of the Conference that they can take home.
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The conference is to be held in the Scottish Events Center so why not make it an event by preheating the center to a wet-bulb temperature of 35 degrees Celsius.
Few locations have hit a wet-bulb temperature of 95 F in recorded history, according to the Science Advances study.
There are places that are already starting to experience these conditions for an hour or two. Unfortunately, with global warming, that’s only going to become more frequent.
Since the late 1980s and 1990s, hotspots have been the Indus River Valley of central and northern Pakistan and the southern shore of the Persian Gulf.
Locations that are at risk of these temperatures in the next 30 to 50 years include northwest Mexico, northern India, Southeast Asia, and West Africa.
Hundreds of millions of people live in a tropical climate near the equator in South/Central America, Africa, and Asia. This includes huge countries like Brazil, India, Malaysia, and Indonesia.
All of these people are in imminent danger from climate change.
In any IPCC scenario between +2° and +4° of global warming, areas near the equator will experience such conditions on most days of the year and up to a point where not only physical activity but being outdoors, in general, becomes lethal!
These countries will become basically inhabitable.
What does this mean for possible future scenarios?
The most likely scenario is that many countries will not be able to deal with the adverse conditions caused by global warming.
The economy in those countries will most likely collapse, posing an additional threat for the people living there.
Millions of people will become refugees of both global warming and the ensuing economic crisis.
SO PERHAPS (BEFORE BILLION OF WORDS) A TWO MINUTES OF EXPERIENCING 70 CELSIUS MIGHT concentrate their mind to ACHIEVE ACTION ON CLIMATE CHANGE.
Now of course we don’t want to fry them all, and the cost of heating the Scottish Events Center (not to mention the carbon footprint) would be in total contradiction to what we want to see.
However, a small jacuzzi or heated glasshouse at the entrance would do the trick.
( If the wet-bulb temperature rises above the human body temperature, you can still sweat, but you’re not going to be able to cool your body to the temperature that it needs to operate at physiologically.)
All human comments are appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
The effects of human-caused global warming are irreversible on the timescale of people alive today and will worsen in the decades to come.
The last three decades of climate negotiations are littered with broken promises.
This puts the challenge with COP26 into perspective.
It is probably the last chance to re-envisage the challenges of our planet and try to understand what’s going on in our world.
The major threats to human survival – world environmental degradation, extinction of species, climate destabilization, nuclear war, terrorists with weapons of mass destruction – result from unrestrained use of such technologies without a concern that makes sense of the nature and scale of their power.
Today many people are thinking on minuscule time scales and therefore only see short-term costs and benefits as real.
Why?
Because we human beings only perceive threats that make sense in our Newtonian time which implies that humans are of no particular significance in the universe and therefore don’t see long-term consequences:
WE THINK IN METAPHORS.
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Consequently, the real challenge with the current approach to climate policy is that as long as cutting emissions is expensive, leaders will talk a lot but do little.
The world will need to increase its spending by hundreds of billions per year (a relatively small sum) compared to the £135 billion we are already spending on subsidizing ineffective green energy today.
If the world can develop green energy that is cheaper than fossil fuels, then we will have solved global warming.
AND THIS IS NOW the world’s greatest collective action problem.
Global climate is projected to continue to change over this century and beyond and no matter what is agreed human-induced warming is superimposed on a naturally varying climate, the temperature rise has not been, and will not be, uniform or smooth across the country or over time.
DESPITE PRESENT DAY WORLD FEVOR, progress on climate change remains elusive.
Enacting policies today to cut greenhouse gas emissions won’t have a discernible impact on global warming for decades, if not centuries.
That’s because we have already locked in significant warming due to our historical emissions.
It’s rational for an individual country not to drastically reduce greenhouse gases, given most economies are heavily based on energy resources that emit them. Yet, if all nations act that way — indeed, that’s what’s happening — most countries would eventually be worse off due to the cumulative impacts of all our emissions.
Put another way, what’s better for each individual country in isolation is actually worse for the planet as a whole. Conversely, what is worse for each individual country, overtime would be better for the planet.
Unlike other policies, climate change is cumulative.
The longer we wait to address it, the bigger the problem it becomes and the harder it gets to solve, fueling a feedback loop that makes solutions ever more difficult.
Big climate policy would have to offer concrete benefits outside of its impact on emissions — think jobs or energy security — to overcome this time disconnect.
Pay now and pay later
Climate change presents two separate costs.
Cost No. 1: Responding to flooding, heatwaves, and other extreme weather that climate change is often making worse.
Cost No. 2: Enacting policies to reduce emissions, which would come in the form of higher fossil-fuel costs today.
Cost No. 1 will continue for decades, if not centuries, even in addition to Cost No.2 (This is because of the aforementioned time disconnect: the amount of warming locked in already has also locked in associated costs — which will come in the form of not just money, but also health, lives, and nature losses.)
The costs will hit different parts of the world disproportionately, setting the stage for conflict, not cooperation. (further complicating the first point).
Low-lying nations whose very existences are at risk due to climate change have a very different set of cost concerns than Saudi Arabia.
By 2060, the cost of inaction on climate change is predicted to reach a staggering $44 trillion, with the highest anticipated GDP losses in the Middle-East, Northern, and Sub-Saharan Africa, and South and Southeast Asia.
By contrast, you invest money in your retirement savings plan with a reasonable level of confidence you’ll get it when you retire.
Imagine getting taxed before you put that money into your fund and then not living long enough to reap the payoffs of your fund.
That’s what will happen with climate change, on a global scale.
The bottom line:
Decades of climate negotiations and failure to stem greenhouse gas emissions are a reminder that we lack effective global governance. The outcome of Glasgow must be all nations agreeing to spend much more on green R&D and to implement a process of verification to monitor compliance.
The science is clear: Our climate is changing. The most marginalized communities—historically shut out of decisions made about their futures—will bear the brunt of the damage.
We are the first generation of humans to start paying the price for a warmer world, and we are also the first to face costs as we try to address them.
We’re paying now and later.
Other than other, Canada, at the present, there are few countries with a policy for sustained mass immigration, with most reluctant to accept more refugees.
Why?
Because foreign populations tend to plant-wide and deep roots and governments don’t want any international authority telling them which people or how many people they should absorb.,
However, people will not stay standing up to their necks in water or gasping for air due to heat or starving because there is no food, they will migrate to whatever altitude, latitude, or longitude is required to survive.
No frontier border of immigration policies will stop this migration.
Ironically the response to the Covid pandemic reinforces border closures at a time we need to reimagine the opening of borders to allow for the inevitable shifts in the occupancy of the planet.
Will the world climate stabilize?
Of course, not – one effect has a knock-on effect with as I have already stated humans becoming a species in search of the right combination of latitude, altitude, and attitude.
The COP26 (the 26th UN ‘Conference of Parties’ on Climate Change) due to take place in Glasgow in November will hopefully highlight the truth, but this truth will not be enough unless it changes us all, to provoke a new way of thinking about climate change governance.
If not what the world so often holds dear will be counted of little significance. The ambitions of businesses to profit from their exploitation of finite natural resources too often leads to environmental degradation and disregard for the value of human life.
What must change is the way in which people and nations are driven to compete for a greater share of creation’s wealth is destructive of the very creation on which we all depend.
All human comments are appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
≈ Comments Off on THE BEADY EYE ASKS: WHEN ARE WE GOING TO RECOGNIZE THE ENORMOUS AND UNDENIABLE POWER THAT NATURE HAS OVER CIVILIZATION AND OVER ITS POLITICS ?
Scientists have not suggested that climate played any direct role in causing the current COVID-19 outbreak, but no matter how one looks at what is happing climate change is making outbreaks of disease more common and more dangerous which promises to amplify the harm and make even unrelated crises more painful.
You would have to be blind, deaf, and dumb not to recognize nature’s enormous and undeniable power over civilization and even over its politics, and we urgently need a shared vision of basic values to provide an ethical foundation for the emerging world community.
You don’t have to be a scientist to know that the loss of biodiversity and encroachment by civilization will help new viruses jump to people and that we are still turning a blind eye to the fact that our behavior is driving this.
There are undeniably numerous reasons alone that may make the pandemic prologue for more far-reaching and disruptive changes to come. However, it is also clear that climate policy today is indivisible from efforts to prevent new infectious outbreaks.
Slow action on climate has made dramatic warming and large-scale environmental changes inevitable. It is now up to the public and leaders to understand that it’s human behavior driving the rise in disease, just as it drives the climate crisis.
The current pandemic and climate change are both demonstrating this in real-time.
Today, hurricanes are larger and more intense than ever. Fires are spreading faster and further amid drought, their total size having doubled in recent years.
So what can be done to speed up the transformation of how we manage our world?
Promoting sustainability requires a total transformation of how we think, buy and use earth resources.
This transformation is now in its infancy.
The seeds of the values-based approaches ‘Ethical’ values such as trust, integrity, justice, and compassion are usually neglected in sustainability assessment.
The authorities tasked with responding to it will already be consumed by other emergencies, their capacity to provide even the most fundamental aid limited, their budgets gutted.
It is time that the Advertising industry step up to the challenge.
While seemingly benign advertising is one of the key drivers behind climate change by promoting excessive consumption.
Advertising is an excellent form of communication, capable of delivering a wealth of information to consumers on varying topics. It has become so powerful and so subtle that consumers accept most advertising content without question.
On the other hand, advertising to sell products is willing to sacrifice the health and welfare of the consumer, turning them into gluttons, and lowering the moral standards of our society.
By their very nature Advertising, language, logic, and action force separation, discrimination, and choice.
Advertising creates excess “want” in a society that does not know the meaning of “need.”
Marketing in its various forms continues to grow through mobile, content marketing, social platforms, and new digital platforms. Now Worth $1.2 Trillion.
Digital platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Linked In, Instagram, Snapchat, and Google AdWords have a glaring responsibility to introduce green-field technology that creates genuinely new opportunities for advertisers and marketers, not to mention consumers.
To assist in this transformation, we must start to legislate against advertisements that promote unsustainable consumption for the sake of short-term profit.
Media outlets should be legally required to remove any advertising that does not meet the values of sustainability.
The ability to motivate an entire group to strive toward a specific goal is a major part of what makes a good Advertisements.
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At the end of the day, the creation of new indexes and methodologies to measure human and economic development are needed, since they will provide us with a wider toolkit to analyze our main subject: economic sustainable growth.
Well-established measures such as Gross Domestic Product (GDP) should no be the key determinants of national policies and legislation.
GDP can remain as a complementary indicator to development, but it is not an adequate indicator when considered on its own.
It represents the value of all goods and services produced over a specific time period within a country’s borders.
We know that in an economy, GDP is the monetary value of all final goods and services produced while it is totally removed from the damage it creates to our core values.
However, it fails to account for the multi-dimensional nature of development or the inherent shortcomings of capitalism, which tends to concentrate income and, thus, power.
If we continue to concentrate on GPD disasters that might have otherwise proved manageable will compound and amplify COVID’s effects until the hurt — measured in lives, livelihoods, and property damage — winds up worse than it might have been from anyone disaster alone.
Throwing money at a problem doesn’t work without core values determined from that starting point. One of the limitations of GDP is that it only addresses average income, failing to reflect how most people actually live or who benefits from economic growth.
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What’s known as biodiversity is critical because the natural variety of plants and animals lends each species greater resiliency against threat and together offers a delicately balanced safety net for natural systems.
As diversity wanes, the balance is upset, and remaining species are both more vulnerable to human influences and, according to a landmark 2010 study in the journal Nature, more likely to pass along powerful pathogens.
The human spirit has consistently sought to transcend the material, biological, physiological, and technological limitations. but the present world problems won’t be solved by technology because no feasible technology will sufficiently decouple economic activity and environmental impact.
Take profit-seeking algorithms for example.
The urgency of the climate change crisis really can’t be overstated. Unless action is taken across all levels of society over the next decade, we’re looking at a near future of droughts, flooding, and poverty for hundreds of millions of people.
So here’s the existential crisis for adland:
The more effective it is at selling products to consumers, the worse the climate crisis gets.
THE ADVERTISING INDUSTRY HAS A MORAL DUTY TO STOP EXCESSIVE CONSUMPTION. TO STOP PROMOTING EAT MORE, BUY MORE, GAMBLE MORE. DIE SOONER.
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≈ Comments Off on THE BEADY EYE SAY’S: IF WE CONTINUE IN THE SAME DIRECTION AS WE ARE NOW, THE CONSEQUENCES WILL BE UNPREDICATABLE/ DISASTOROUS AND CONFLICT RIDDEN.
We all know that we must shift the direction of the way we live life on Earth.
Sadly, this does not seem to be the case and hence, social conflict and civil unrest seem inevitable.
We all know that what is needed is a coordinated global response and bipartisan domestic response not just to the current pandemic but also to tackle climate change.
As Schwab writes: “The new technology age if shaped responsively and responsibly, could catalyze a new cultural renaissance that will enable us to feel part of something much larger than ourselves – a truly global civilization.
Yes, we are in a fourth industrial-technological revolution with regulators guilty of sleeping by allowing AI to develop financial weapons of mass destruction turning the world into a digitalized market for the sake of short-term profit.
Today, 43% of the world’s population is connected to the internet, mostly in developed countries.
Each time you run a Google search, scan your passport, make an online purchase, or tweet, you are leaving a data trail behind that can be analyzed and monetized. Computers are already making decisions based on this information.
In less than 10 years computer processors are expected to reach the processing power of the human brain. Socialism for the Rich and Capitalism for the Poor.
Think of apps that track how much you eat, sleep, and exercise, and being able to ask a doctor a question by simply tapping it into your smartphone.
In the future, will it ever be possible to be offline anymore?
So are the technologies that surround us tools that we can identify, grasp and consciously use to improve our lives? Or are they more than that: powerful objects and enablers that influence our perception of the world, change our behavior, and affect what it means to be human?
It is therefore worthwhile taking some time to consider exactly what kind of shifts we are experiencing and how we might, collectively and individually, ensure that it creates benefits for the many, rather than the few.
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At the heart of discussions around emerging technologies, there is a critical and central question: what do we want these technologies to deliver for us?
The fourth Industrial revolution is widely taken to be the shift from our reliance on animals, human effort, and biomass as primary sources of energy to the use of fossil fuels and the mechanical power this enabled.
It however can also be described as the advent of “cyber-physical systems” involving entirely new capabilities for people and machines.
It represents entirely new ways in which technology becomes embedded within societies and even our human bodies -. examples include genome editing, new forms of machine intelligence, breakthrough materials, and approaches to governance that rely on cryptographic methods such as the blockchain. It’s just not very evenly distributed.
More people in the world have access to a mobile phone than basic sanitation.
The complexity of these technologies and their emergent nature makes many aspects of the Fourth Industrial Revolution feel unfamiliar and, to many, threatening.
Indeed, it is certain that the governments know this, but instead of helping the poor they are making it harder for them to survive and it is certain that sooner or later when the bubble burst, there will be few survivors.
Added to this is the humungous amounts of money governments are borrowed to keep the government running in the absence of real economic growth.
Since the financial crash and before interest rates were kept at near-zero levels for most of the decade in the run-up to the crisis with the West governments encouraging speculation and risk-taking.
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Currently, there are three big areas of concern: Inequality, Security, and Identity.
Inequality.
62 individuals controlled more assets than the poorer 3.6 billion people combined, half the world’s population.
Unequal societies tend to be more violent, have higher numbers of people in prison, experience greater levels of mental illness, and have lower life expectancies and lower levels of trust.
An important potential driver of increased inequality is our reliance on digital markets – increase unemployment.
Security.
The combination of the digital world with emerging technologies is creating new “battlespaces”, expanding access to lethal technologies and making it harder to govern and negotiate among states to ensure peace.
The technologies of the Fourth Industrial Revolution also offer expanded capabilities for waging war which is increasingly accessible to both state and non-state actors, such as drones, autonomous weapons, nanomaterials, biological and biochemical weapons, wearable devices, and distributed energy sources
It’s not a question of if non-state actors will use some form of neuroscientific techniques or technologies, but when, and which ones they’ll use.
Identity, voice, and community.
Already, digital media is increasingly becoming the primary driver of our individual and collective framing of society and community, connecting people to individuals and groups in new ways, fostering friendships, and creating new interest groups. Furthermore, such connections transcend many traditional boundaries of interaction.
Unfortunately, expanded connectivity does not necessarily lead to expanded or more diverse worldviews.
Emerging technologies, particularly in the biological realm, are also raising new questions about what it means to be human.
The Fourth Industrial Revolution is the first where the tools of technology can become literally embedded within us and even purposefully change who we are at the level of our genetic makeup.
The very reason why people are residents in taking the covid jab.
Martin Nowak, a professor of mathematics and biology at Harvard University, stated that cooperation is “the only thing that will redeem mankind”.
If we have the courage to take collective responsibility for the changes underway and the ability to work together to raise awareness and shape new narratives, we can embark on restructuring our economic, social, and political systems to take full advantage of emerging technologies.
This can only be achieved through the ideology of. Live and let live.
In 1969 a man stood on the moon.
The U.S. Has Only Been At Peace For 21 Years Total Since Its Birth.
This means that for 222 out of 239 years – or 93% of the time – America has been at war. The only time the U.S. went five years without war (1935-40) was during the isolationist period of the Great Depression.
It’s no wonder that the world is Fucked up.
One only has to look at the current withdrawal from Afghanistan to see the benefits of War.
This has important implications for how policymakers ought to treat future wars that are inevitable as the world struggles to feed its present direction of economic growth at whatever cost.
All human comments are appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
Carbon Dioxide emissions are at a higher level in the atmosphere than at any point in the last 4m years AND THE MESSAGE COULD NOT BE CLEARER.
LEADERS MUST ACT NOW OR GO DOWN IN HISTORY AS THE ONES WHO THREW AWAY OUR LAST-DITCH CHANCE.
If they fail to act the future will be changed beyond anything that the coronavirus pandemic has brought about.
So far what we see from world leaders are hot air promises that are totally inadequate and worthless without the trillions in investment and you can rest assured as the world returns to economic growth it will by using fossil fuels.
90% of the emissions will be in the next few decades, will come from emerging economies.
So let’s look at Cop26 or as I like to call it Cop-out 26.
Further change is now inevitable.
“Securing a brighter future for our children and future generations requires countries to take urgent action at home and abroad to turn the tide on climate change. It is with ambition, courage, and collaboration as we approach the crucial COP26 summit in the UK that we can seize this moment together, so we can recover cleaner, rebuild greener and restore our planet.”
PRIME MINISTER OF THE UNITED KINGDOM.
If you believe this just look at his country which is hosting the Cob Out / Cop 26 summit. It has cut its aid to the poorest countries, the only country to do so.
It is the decisions we make today that really matter.
Right now our species is undermining and destabilizing the very foundations that are necessary for life on earth to thrive.
We have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to reconcile our economies with the natural world yet none of this will be enough.
What we say yes to. What we say no to and where we choose to invest our human and financial capital right now and not in years to come.
We know that the most vulnerable are at the greatest risk from climate change and that they have done the least to cause it. Action to address this and build resilience is needed now before more people lose their lives or livelihoods.
TO ACHIEVE ANY CLIMATE GOALS, EVERY COMPANY, EVERY FINANCIAL FIRM, EVERY BANK, INSURER, AND INVESTOR WILL NEED TO CHANGE.
What are we talking about?
At 2 degrees of global warming, there would be widespread and severe impacts on people and nature. A third of the world’s population would be regularly exposed to severe heat, leading to health problems and more heat-related deaths.
At 1.5°C, the impacts would be serious, but less severe.
Now with three more months to go until COP26 we will see a lot of Hot Air
This decade is decisive.
We need to turn ambition into actions of mitigation, adaptation, loss and damage, finance, and implementation.
Why?
Because the climate crisis has become critical.
When you read stories about fires in the Amazon and Australia, ice melting in the Antarctic and Arctic, sea temperatures rising, and plastic destroying wildlife in the oceans, the scale of the problem can sometimes make the idea of dealing with it feel hopeless.
There is a general feeling that the future is so uncertain and it’s extremely hard to live with.
Unfortunately, most people although aware of the concept of Climate Change are in denial about the catastrophic reality. The issue is not about climate science but about everything else.
The world does not move together. It never has.
A 1.5%c goal is a political choice, not a scientific discovery.
Unless there is a political, economic, social-cultural, and moral makeover of the human world, only a bottom-up social mass movement will bring needed changes.
So what is COP26 all about?
One of the hardest facts to grasp about climate change is this:
No matter what we do it’s almost certain to get worse. Any action we take now is going to take decades to have any effect.
Why?
This is not the hottest summer on record it is going to be the coldest as the global average temperatures are projected to keep rising.
Unlike the current Covid pandemic there is no flatting the curve OF CLIMATE CHANGE any time soon.
The shock factor of this week’s UN IPCC report is already wearing off.
The population is just one of many issues in the global discussion about climate change, but it is going to become a major problem.
Population issues certainly are an important dimension of how society will unfold, how society will be able to cope with this crisis over the course of this century.
With half of American’s have to migrate and god forbid China the world’s most populous country ( the largest emitter of carbon) has to do also.
There’s no one thing that’s going to do it.
All human comments are appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
It’s time to cut out the bullshit and get a grip when it comes to climate change.
The effects of human activities on Earth’s climate to date are now irreversible on the timescale of human lifetimes.
So the key question is, what will our emissions of carbon dioxide and other pollutants be in the years to come?
The simple reason for this is that it is impossible to predict with any degree of accuracy just how much greenhouse gases are going to be released in the next few centuries, and just how much this is going to affect the climate.
Electrical Cars, Solar Panels, Wind turbines, and technology might all help reductions in carbon emissions but they are all products. They all use the earth’s finite resources to produce profit for companies that created the world of Profit for Profit’s sake that has to lead us down the slippery path to climate change.
In my opinion, any new normal ( which is going to be far from normal ) has to hold fossil burning industries accountable or nationalizing them till we reach a point where sustainable energy generates higher financial returns than coal and oil.
The harsh reality of climate change is now playing out in real-time before our very eyes, with some of the negative changes already locked into the climate system, while global efforts to reduce carbon emissions are not moving fast enough to avoid irreversible damage to the planet.
Any solutions are going to take years to have any effect so we need to adapt: or, in other words, get used to the realities of this new, heated-up, wet, violent, world.
We all know that the climate challenges we are facing on the planet transcend national boundaries.
At present we being told that’s, it’s not too late to stop the forthcoming climate changes totally making our planet unlivable if we move to clean energy.
However clean energy is only one part of the challenge because the inequalities in the world demand a fundamental overhaul of existing social, political, and economic norms.
It is this new perception that needs to be contagious so it is adopted globally.
The shocking truth is that climate change has only just begun.
In other words, whatever the mitigation efforts of future civilizations, climate change is here to stay. Regardless of future emission trends, the CO2 footprint from our brief passage on Earth is going to remain in the climate system and impact the well-being of all terrestrial life forms for what could almost be considered an eternity.
In the last year, we are seeing with the current Covid pandemic that we live in a world where HARMONIZATION of any actions is impossible.
We will witness this in the forthcoming Cop-out / Cop26 summit.
The above perception is highly unlikely to happen.
Why?
Because the climate change problems will probably worsen before — or indeed if — it gets better, no one wants to bear costs of change that will fall on – the poor.
Long before this ever happens, humanity must prepare itself for an inland retreat and a constant battle against rising seawater that will continue for hundreds and hundreds of years into the future.
We are incredibly adaptable, but at the psychological level, there’s going to be tremendous disruption among families, societies, nations, etc. when change occurs.
Anything that helps an organism survives in its environment is an adaptation.
Adaptation is an acknowledgment that this.
Some of that change is a given, but not all of it.
For example:
Loss of traditions, habitat, and cultural heritage, and the distress that comes with moving away from the land where your ancestors are buried, where you’ve lived all your life. Not to mention the extinction of species, animals and plants, and coral reefs, and all kinds of living things, those we depend on and those with which we simply share ecosystems.
None of the solutions so far even begin to address the possibility of an impending mental health crisis due to the upheaval associated with managed retreat and other forms of climate migration.
How do you convince a community that their home will not be habitable?
How do you make room for rural refugees to live in a crowded city?
Climate mitigation is hard, and we are running out of time to do it, but I would argue that adaptation in its absence will actually be a million times harder.
Without substantial cuts to our collective carbon imprint, many more lives will be lost trying to adapt to a changing environment, and countless more will be made meaningfully worse.
Why wouldn’t we do what we can to avoid that?
The long course of human evolution shows that climate disruption, which is what we’re going through right now and in the foreseeable future, is associated with the demise of ways of life.
As difficult as it may be, there is a vast scale of loss associated with climate change that one has to try to comprehend and accept in order to understand the urgency of the situation.
THE NEED FOR HARMONIZATION to anticipate the actual and expected effects of climate change and take appropriate action to prevent or minimize the impacts.
How will we feel when the air inside feels tinny and canned when all of this feels like our future?
The two main responses so far to climate change are Mitigation and Adaptation – they must go hand in hand.
Adaptation can be planned in advance but it must go beyond just development to include the global food system, which encompasses production, and post-farm process such as processing, and distribution is also a key contributor to emissions. And it’s a problem for which we don’t yet have viable technological solutions.
Food is responsible for approximately 26% of global GHG emissions. So we will need a menu of solutions: changes to diets; food waste reduction; improvements in agricultural efficiency; and technologies that make low-carbon food alternatives scalable and affordable.
Methane warms the world twenty times faster than carbon.
Junk-food chains, including KFC and Pizza Hut, McDonald’s have spread around the world.
Take McDonald’s.
It has about 28,000 restaurants worldwide, opening around 2,000 new ones each year
The food industry spends billions a year in advertising and promotion to persuade people to eat more food.
In short, then, this is another example of wasted wealth, wasted capital, wasted labor, and wasted resources.
On top of all this while the earth warms up it has the capability of releasing 1.5 trillion tons of organic carbon twice as much as Earths, atmosphere currently holds.
The planet is the ultimate ‘global commons’. It belongs to neither a particular individual nor a particular nation. Nor does it belong to a single generation such as us, our children, or our grandchildren.
Instead, it belongs to all living creatures both alive now and in the future. Just as all of humanity is connected ‘horizontally’ across the globe, so too are all past and future life forms bound ‘vertically’ in a continual unfolding of the story of life.
So when you buy something, you buy something that lasts; you buy it because you really need it and want to take care of it. It is none other than this consideration for future human beings and other life forms that should form the yardstick by which we set our mitigation targets — not merely what is politically and economically feasible for the industrialized world today.
Yet the political and economic institutions of our civilization are fixated on enjoying the present and unable to account for the consequences of our actions on tomorrow.
Corporations and governments are forever borrowing from the future in order to improve the present.
All human comments are appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
( One minute read)
We in a world that needs action on climate change, not promises in ten years twenty years.
So here is an action that all countries can contribute to tomorrow.
It will not only save billions of tons of co2 emissions but billions that can be put to use in the future to promote sustainability.
It’s time to stop the Olympic circus by permanently holding the games in Greece it’s home.
Delegates from over two hundred regions are presently participating in this year’s Olympics in Tokyo with 205 teams, to be precise.
Over the course of the next three years, each country represented and any new participants contribute a million to build the necessary facilities in Greece.
At the moment billions are being pumped into winning medals worth 400 Euros.
Greece repays these countries over the games held in the future from the ticket sales, television rights.
This action is sticking out like a sore thumb.
All human comments are appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
WE CAN’T CREATE SUSTAINABLE PROSPERITY BY AN ACT OF WILL.
02/08/2021.
Dear Cop26 Delegate,
As you know the sheer importance of what is happing at the end of this inflationary period on Earth is going to define all of our futures.
Whether the forthcoming COP26 Summit results are brilliant or terrible if we are not found in harmony with the earth, is likely to make our age, a mythic one, to our distant or future descendants.
Our distant and future ancestors are what everyone on earth shares.
From this perspective.
No human goal today is more pressing than the search for sustainable prosperity.
But it must encompass all other purposes, including peace, justice, health, science, economic development, spiritual pursuits. Without them, all others will prove transient and illusory.
You will be attending a sobering up BY CLIMATE CHANGE SUMMIT that will hopefully show the scale of our problems and produce Actions that all in sundry can participate in.
You as a delegate must develop imagery that will bridge the incomprehensible gap between the forces of nature responsible for the very existence.
We are living today at a turning point for our species.
We can all be drowning in yelling about our differences, trying to control matters by fiat, or we can close our mouths and listen and try to follow some common sense.
This is a very special time that will never come again.
This summit is not the place, to blow your own trumpet, make worthless promises, but rather to agree on transparent actions on a global scale.
We all know that we need energy.
We all know that the production of energy must go green. Not in twenty years, not in ten years but right now.
So why not agree to the following.
Government non-repayable grants.
Enable every home to install solar panels and insulation.
We are at a pivotal moment in human history not because we still don’t really know where we come from, or if we are alone in the Universe, or do we really matter.
It is, of course, impossible to put into a sentence or a paragraph what is wrong with the world never mind the Universe.
But it’s possible to describe our world in a word. Beautiful and we humans occupy an extraordinary place in it.
The strange fact is that in this age of information when data is our currency of communication, most of us have no idea how to picture the world never mind the universe.
The last time the Western culture shared a coherent understanding of our world I would say, was away back in the middle ages, when Galileo discovered that we were not the center of the universe.
Now with climate change and the current Pandemic, it is as if we have just started to see the world in color, and that changes, not just what is far away, but what’s right here.
This discovery of the state of our plant challenges us to reframe everything and there is little point in learning a lot of science unless you can do something valuable in life with that knowledge.
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There is only one image of our world that shows us this.
The photo shows no countries on our planet, only landmass, oceans, and clouds.
Our endless preoccupation with nations and racial or ethical groups is completely misleading our intuitions.
This image shows our glorious plant in its true state without language in all its forms, cultural identification, religious beliefs, all are just tools, to shepherding ourselves successfully through the coming state of the world
This is going to require tremendous creativity, combined with more than a large dose of common sense, which unfortunately down the centuries and now is lacking in the collective management of our planet Earth.
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However, we live in a world where all information is freely available at the click of a mouse, so what has changed?
We’re seeing a lazy entitlement wash over the world where everyone feels as though they deserve what they want from their government the second they want it, without thought of repercussions or the rest of the population.
It seems like people don’t actually want democracy anymore, they want a dictator who agrees with them.
The sickest and most grotesque NEWS TOPPING THE CHART, dominating our attention and the news cycle, dividing and recruiting us into its ever more polarized camps, giving us a skewed view of how other people in the world really think, act, and live.
It seems like our new brave world is JUGED by a group of people that represents 0.01%, who take refuge in their own precious identity politics with us buying more and more into a worldview that is disconnected from cold data and hard facts?
The impact of the pandemic is showing despite loud warnings that continuing economic growth is incompatible with sustainability.
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So let’s take a look at the state of the world.
Even if we did stand on the moon it is a sad read and any solutions will not be found in religious beliefs or technology or in politics but in learning from history.
There have been over 250 major wars in the world since World War II, in which 23 million people have been killed., tens of millions made homeless, and countless millions injured and bereaved. Over 37 (or 42) million people have by killed by wars in the 20th century. Three times more people have been killed in wars in the last 90 years than in all the previous 500.
Over 35 major conflicts are going on in the world today.
There are approximately 30,000 nuclear warheads in the world today.
Current global military spending is approximately $800 billion per year; more than the total annual income of the poorest 45% of the global population.
Genocide and other mass murders killed more people in the 20th century than all wars combined.
33% of the world’s people live under authoritarian, non-democratic regimes. 35% of the world’s people live in countries in which basic political rights and civil liberties are denied.
1/3rd of the world’s labor force is unemployed or underemployed.
1 out of 6, children ages 5 to 17 worldwide are involved in child labor.
3 billion of the world’s people (one-half) live in ‘poverty.’
Women account for 70 percent of the world’s people who live in absolute poverty.
800 million people lack access to basic healthcare.
1.1 billion do not have safe drinking water. By 2025, at least 3.5 billion people, or nearly 2/3rd’s of the world’s population will face water scarcity.
870 million of the world’s adults are illiterate.
Over 100 million people live in slums.
The richest 1% of the world’s people earned as much income as the bottom 57%.
The wealth of the world’s 7.1 million millionaires ($27 trillion) equals the total combined annual income of the entire planet.
Poor countries (which contain 4/5th of the world’s people) pay the rich countries an estimated nine times more in debt repayments than they receive in aid.
Half of the forests that originally covered 46% of the Earth’s land surface are gone.
Between 10 and 20 percent of all species will be driven to extinction in the next 20 to 50 years.
60% of the world’s coral reefs, could be lost in the next 20-40 years.
More than 20 percent of the world’s known 10,000 freshwater fish species have become extinct.
Desertification and land degradation threaten nearly one-quarter of the land surface of the globe.
Global warming is expected to increase the Earth’s temperature by 3C (5.4F) in the next 100 years.
An estimated 40-80 million people will be forcibly evicted and displaced from their lands.
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The reality no matter how one looks at it, is that the old assumptions that provided the unifying ideas within our cultures are eroding because of our technological advancement, and although we are seeing what may prove to be the emergence of a new worldview consensus based on the Critical Theory it has not solidified its hold on society as yet.
With technology and Algorithms, our cultures have and are continuing to accept the idea that objective truth is inaccessible and that truth itself is, therefore, relative and personal, but how we conduct ourselves is just as important — even more important is how we do it sustainably and so far we have made a great job of it.
The world is now facing a collision of not just climate change but is colliding with finite resources in a much that the current economic growth could end or totally collapse in the not-so-distant future.
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But a free and functioning democracy demands a populace that can sustain discomfort, tolerate dissatisfaction, be charitable and forgiving of groups whose views stand in contrast to one’s own, and most importantly, that can remain unswayed in the face of some violent threat.
The words ” We Need” are only words. They should be replaced the words ” Action Now”
Why?
Because we also need to be clear in our own hearts and minds about the solution to the world’s problems. If we are to do anything we must break the alignment between theological advancement – climate change and pollution.
The world is at a crossroads as the coronavirus pandemic and its impact on the global economy have combined with increasing polarization and highly charged elections.
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So what will we do?
Probably have a conference.
But if you could change the world, what would you do?
We live our entire lives as aspiring presidents, aspiring movie producers, aspiring artists, aspiring authors, aspiring human rights activists, aspiring world-renowned scientists, and aspiring thought leaders while we sit in front of our TV screens, walk around glued to Smartphones, or Ipads that fed us pictures of climate change, wars, the covid pandemic, racism, political/economical collapse.
All Encouraging us on one hand, to think that the world is more violent than it really is while on the other hand promoting the glamorous life of people that believe that they are better off than we are;
What I fear is that we’re seeing now is a loss of that ability to handle discomfort and dissatisfaction.
What I would do is help people think for themselves.
While governments introduce more and more taxes to pay for inequality/economic growth charities competing to raise funds to save almost everything, from adopting everything from a child to a fish or animal to a plant, in the real world.
Taxes form a key ingredient in the social contract between citizens and the economy but How taxes are raised and spent can determine a government’s very legitimacy.
Health programs:Military: Social Security:Interest on the national debt: Education programs: Food and agricultural benefits: Pensions. Government machinery.
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Our new world now needs solidarity more than ever to make the world a better place.
Presently in a year when the world is fighting a pandemic, the Olympics in Japan will once again show us what we are capable of in sport to bring our true authentic selves to every situation. ( See: Post – The Olympics games show be permanently hosted in Greece.)
It represents a true coming together not separation, in a true spirit of humanity.
Without this coming together there will be no new world but a world run by algorithms that will not treat us as equal.
But how can you take on the problems of the world when there’s so much to do already?
In science, we have been staggered by revelation after revelation that things are not what we previously thought them to be, and beneath each layer of reality we have unpeeled lies another. It is not hard to piece together all this information to comprehensively picture what the end times will look like.
If so, what are we to do about it?
The only way to beat the attention economy is to opt out of it.
As the growth models of countries cannot be sustained Countries need to overcome political hurdles to invest in infrastructure and human capital.
How?
One way is to publish the information about political capture so that the public can hold politicians to account for reforms.
Because the only way for human rights to persist is for everyone to collectively agree to accept that things don’t have to go their way 100% of the time.
Freedom can only exist when you are willing to tolerate views that oppose your own when you’re willing to give up some of your desires for the sake of a safe and healthy community when you’re willing to compromise and accept that sometimes things don’t go your way and that’s fine.
Finally, we must accept that world problems will always be with us.
The world has woken up to the need to curb emissions and invest in climate resilience. But we all need to move faster down this path, we now have less than 100 days to go until the UN climate summit, Cop26 arrives in Glasgow.
Five years on from the Paris Agreement, and with countless evidence that the climate crisis is worsening, the negotiations will focus on nationally determined contributions to stop the world from warming above 1.5 degrees. But as the countries confer with each other, it will be the people of the world who have the most to say: we need action, need more of it, and need it now.
They will not address nature and climate as one.
HOW CAN YOU GET INVOLVED?
We know that the production of energy is the biggest contributor to global warming.
If we want action not promises to reduce carbon emissions in twenty years in thirty years there is no reason that non-repayable grants could be made available to everyone to convert to green energy by installing solar panels.
So why not use the tools that are available to demand our governments to do so on
Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, or Emails to cop26@cabinetoffice.gov.uk.
All human comments are appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
I am no scientist but it stands to reason if the magnetic north is moving the earth is rotating differently than in the previous hundredths of years.
As a result as with any spherical shape that rotates, it is exposing a slightly different surface, either for longer or shorter to any light shining on it such as the Sun causing a difference in temperature to the exposed portion of the sphere.
What is causing the magnetic north to shift?
Whatever is causing it the weight distribution on the earth has to be contributing.
Human-made materials are now equal weight to all life on Earth.
The mass of everything people have built and made, from concrete pavements and glass-and-metal skyscrapers to plastic bottles, clothes, and computers, is now roughly equal to the mass of living things on Earth and could surpass that this year, according to research published today in Nature.
The Earth weight: 5,972,000,000,000,000,000,000 Metric Tons.
Freshwater.
Every year we use a massive 4.3 trillion cubic meters of freshwater = 4,260,000,000,000 m3 / tons.
Concrete. After water the single most widely used material globally. It outweighs the combined mass of all living plants. China production of 2 billion tons alone is predicted to reach four times the 1990 level. 2 billion tonne quantities per year, by 2050, concrete use
Plastic. – 8.3 billion tons
The world produces a million plastic bottles a minute – many for water. That’s 500 billion in a year!
Asphalt. – 30% of the world is Land of which 2% is urban which is covered let’s say to the extent of 10%. Therefore 30%x2%x10% = 0.06% of the world covered in Asphalt.
Sand. – 15 billion tonnes.
Crude Oil. – Nearly 100 million barrels per day. The average barrel of domestic crude oil weighs 302.82 pounds. You do the maths this time.
The mass of earth’s life is about 1.1 trillion metric tons.
In 2016, a team of scientists estimated the weight of the “technosphere”—including not just wholly artificial buildings and products, but also the approximate weight of the land and seafloor that we’ve excavated, modified, or trawled to build cities, plant crops, raise livestock, and catch fish.
They came up with a figure of 30 trillion tons.
Now add, for example, ( The World Steel Association estimates that for every ton of steel we produce) almost two tons of CO2 are added to the atmosphere.
Then add on all the rest of Cardon produced and the amount the whole human race emits every year is 35 billion roughly.
It is no wonder the magnet north has shifted.
To finish I invite any environmental to tell me that I am wrong.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
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