Tag Archives: Climate change

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

21 Friday Jul 2023

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

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( Fourteen minute read)

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

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

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

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

But is this true?

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

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

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

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

It seems that nothing encourages stupidity more than group culture.

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

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

 ————–

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

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

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

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

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

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

. —————

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

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

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

Why?

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

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

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

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

So what can policymakers do about AI?

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

Virtual worlds should not become walled gardens. 

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

———

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

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

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

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

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The Dark Side — Collective Stupidity.

Collective stupidity can be perplexing and is often harmless.

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

How does collective stupidity happen?

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

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

Broad, anonymous social networks breed collective stupidity.

Top Social Media Statistics And Trends Of 2023

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All this has eroded public confidence.

——–

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

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

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

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

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

So we wildly overestimate our access to our own mind.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What would happen?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Contact: bobdillon33@gmail,com

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

18 Tuesday Jul 2023

Posted by in Climate Change.

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(Five minute read)

The truth is.

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

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

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

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

It mistakes the nature of the problem.

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

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

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

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

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

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

In sum:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The political consequences of this are hard to predict.

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

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

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

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

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

We are rarely able to predict those tipping points.

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

What other choice is there?

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

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

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

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

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

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

We don’t have time to have unquestioned assumptions.  

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

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

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

Contact: bobdillon33@gmail.com

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THE BEADY EYE SAY’S. Ten years from now, we may look back on this moment in history as a colossal mistake or it could be the greatest empowerment moment in human history.

11 Tuesday Jul 2023

Posted by in #whatif.com, 2023 the year of disconnection., Artificial Intelligence.

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( Four minute read)

This year, the world got a rude awakening to the insane power of AI when OpenAI unleashed ChatGPT4 onto the world. This AI text generator/chatbot seemed to be able to replicate human-generated content so well that even AI detection software struggled to tell the difference between the two.

This is not an alien invasion of intelligent machines; it’s the result of our own efforts to make our infrastructure and our way of life more intelligent.

It’s part of human endeavour. We merge with our machines. Ultimately, they will extend who we are.

Our mobile phone, for example, makes us more intelligent and able to communicate with each other. It’s really part of us already. It might not be literally connected to you, but nobody leaves home without one.

It’s like half your brain.

Thinking of AI as a futuristic tool that will lead to immeasurable good or harm is a distraction from the ways we are using it now.

How do we ensure that the AI we build, which might very well be significantly smarter than any person who has ever lived, is aligned with the interests of its creators and of the human race?

What if at some point in the near future, computer scientists build an AI that passes a threshold of superintelligence and can build other super intelligent AI.

An unaligned super intelligent AI could be quite a problem.

For example, we’ve been predicting for decades that AI will replace radiologists, but machine learning for radiology is still a complement for doctors rather than a replacement. Let’s hope this is a sign of AI’s relationship to the rest of humanity—that it will serve willingly as the ship’s first mate rather than play the part of the fateful iceberg.

No laws can prevent China ~ Russia ~ Terrorist network~  Rogue psychopath from developing the most manipulative and dishonest AI you could possibly imagine.

We can’t trust some speculative future technology to rescue us.

Climate change is already killing people, and many more people are going to die even in a best-case scenario, but we get to decide now just how bad it gets.

Action taken decades from now is much less valuable than action taken soon.

The first role AI can play in climate action is distilling raw data into useful information – taking big datasets, which would take too much time for a human to process, and pulling information out in real time to guide policy or private-sector action.

Everyone wants a silver bullet to solve climate change; unfortunately there isn’t one. But there are lots of ways AI can help fight climate change. While there is no single big thing that AI will do, there are many medium-sized things.

An attendee controls an AI-powered prosthetic hand during 2021 World Artificial Intelligence conference in Shanghai.

Most movies about AI have an “us versus them” mentality, but that’s really not the case.

Even if one were to stand on the side of curious skepticism, (which feels natural,) we ought to be fairly terrified by this nonzero chance of humanity inventing itself into extinction.

Whereas AI is, for now, pure software blooming inside computers. Someday soon, however, AI might read everything—like, literally every thing, swallowing everything into a black hole and not even god knows what it will be recycled.

Just shovel ever-larger amounts of human-created text into its maw, and wait for wondrous new skills to manifest. With enough data, this approach could perhaps even yield a more fluid intelligence, or a humanlike artificial mind akin to those that haunt nearly all of our mythologies of the future.

On the syllabus at the moment : Is a decent fraction of all the surviving text that we have ever produced.

To codify the philosophy in a set of wise laws and regulations to ensure the good behaviour of our super intelligent AI,  like laws to make it illegal, for example, to develop AI systems that manipulate domestic or foreign actors. Is pie in the sky –

In the next decade, autocrats and terrorist networks could be able to cheaply build diabolical AI that can accomplish some of the goals outlined in the Yudkowsky story. (The key issue is not “human-competitive” intelligence (as his open letter puts it); It’s what happens after AI gets to smarter-than-human intelligence.

Key thresholds here may not be obvious.

We definitely can’t calculate in advance what happens when, and it currently seems imaginable that a research lab would cross critical lines without noticing.

AT THE MOMENT ALL WE HAVE IS A COPING MECCHANISM.

Like non-proliferation laws for nuclear weaponry that are hard to enforce.

Nuclear weapons require raw material that is scarce and needs expensive refinement. Software is easier, and this technology is improving by the month.

Turing test: robot versus human sitting inside cubes facing each other

We have years to debate how education ought to change in response to these tools, but something interesting and important is undoubtedly happening.

If we figured out how people are going to share in the wealth that AI unlocks, then I think we could end up in a world where people don’t have to work to eat, and are instead taking on projects because they are meaningful to them.

But where do AI companies get this truly astonishing amount of high-quality data from?

Well, to put it bluntly, they steal it.

But as it stands, the AI boom might be approaching a flashpoint where these models can’t avoid consuming their own output, leading to a gradual decline in their effectiveness. This will only be accelerated as AI-generated content perfuses the internet over the coming years, making it harder and harder to source genuine human-made content.

AI is viewed as a strategic technology to lead us into the future.

So what should be done:

  • Many people lack a full understanding of AI and therefore are more likely to view it as a nebulous cloud instead of a powerful driving force that can create a lot of value for society;
  • Instead of writing off AI as too complicated for the average person to understand, we should seek to make AI accessible to everyone in society. It shouldn’t be just the scientists and engineers who understand it; through adequate education, communication and collaboration, people will understand the potential value that AI can create for the community.
  • We should democratize AI, meaning that the technology should belong to and benefit all of society; and we should be realistic about where we are in AI’s development.
  • Most of the achievements we have made are, in fact, based on having a huge amount of (labelled) data, rather than on AI’s ability to be intelligent on its own. Learning in a more natural way, including unsupervised or transfer learning, is still nascent and we are a long way from reaching AI supremacy.

From this point of view, society has only just started its long journey with AI and we are all pretty much starting from the same page. To achieve the next breakthroughs in AI, we need the global community to participate and engage in open collaboration and dialogue.

If this does not happen and happen (sooner than later) it will be AI that will be calling the shots

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

Contact: bobdillon33@gmail.com

https://time.com/6266923/ai-eliezer-yudkowsky-open-letter-not-enough/

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

16 Sunday Apr 2023

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

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( Twenty-six minute read)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There are many tipping points to choose from.

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

This is a feedback loop with teeth.

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

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

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

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

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

Why?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On a warming planet, no one is safe.

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

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

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

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

—–

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Peabody Energy

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

Kuwait Petroleum Corporation

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

ConocoPhillips

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

Chevron

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

Saudi Aramco

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

ExxonMobil

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

BP

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

National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC)

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

Royal Dutch Shell

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

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

The top plastic polluting companies

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

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

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

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

The health of the planet may hinge on the answers.

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

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

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

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

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

—

Biodiversity?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The results are scary.

Humans can’t have power over nature in nature.

—–

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For example

Recognising the power of small groups.

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

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

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

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

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

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

—–

If we don’t act, who will?

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

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

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

If you could ask one question of Global Leader.

What is the main motivation of your leadership?

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

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

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

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

Feel free to add your question.

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

Contact: bobdillon33@gmail.com

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

28 Tuesday Mar 2023

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

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( Seven minute read)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Do nature’s services need a monetary value?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

71% of Earth’s surface is water.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—–

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

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

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

Warming surface waters may be contributing to slowing ocean currents.

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

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

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

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

There’s no consensus on global warming.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Progress has flatlined and ground to a halt.

Living standards are declining in 90% of countries.

Each generation now does worse than the one before it,

Democracy’s in steep decline around the globe

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Contact: bobdillon33@gmailcom

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

21 Tuesday Mar 2023

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

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.( Twenty minute read) 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vermillion Cliffs at Paria Canyon Wilderness in Arizona

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

Why?

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

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

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

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

——–

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

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

Take the Fashion Industry’s for example.

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

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

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

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

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

 

——

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I shudder to think about this impromptu utterances.

———-

Earth on psychiatrist's couch.

 

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

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

Everything will have to adapt to the changing times.

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

Righteous outrage immediately mounted online.

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

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

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

Racism is a recently invented classification system that triggers xenophobia.

——-

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

You can see it already in Europe.

I suspect we’re going to see more nativism, more xenophobia, and more talk of building walls on our borders. Neighbour helping neighbour is a dying falsify.

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

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

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

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

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

——–

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

Ideology will always be a surface-level justification for conflict — people come up with narratives to justify whatever they’re doing in the political world. But if you look deeply at the source of future conflicts, I think you’ll see a basic resource conflict at the bottom of it all.

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

Are we prepared?   NO!

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

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

Can Western democratic society, which is built on a system of limitless growth and productivity, change its destructive relationship with nature?  NO!

Modern liberal democratic societies are successful at improving the lives and freedoms of people who live in them. The problem is that these systems are based on the exploitation of nature and our environment, and we’re sort of trapped in this paradigm.

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

Why?

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

——–

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Watch and weep.

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

Contact: bobdillon33@gmail.com

THE BEADY EYE SAYS: ALL AROUND THE WORLD CO2 EMISSIONS CONTINUE, WILLY NILLY

16 Thursday Mar 2023

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( Four minute red) 

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

Contact: bobdillon33@gmail.com

THE BEADY EYE ASK’S. CAN WE GET A GRIP BEFORE ITS TOO LATE? BECAUSE THE FUTURE IS NOT FOR THE FAINT OF HEART — OR THE POOR.

23 Thursday Feb 2023

Posted by in #whatif.com, 2023 the year of disconnection., Artificial Intelligence., Capitalism, Civilization., Climate Change.

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(Seventeen minute read)

It seems to be easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism; perhaps that is due to some weakness in our imaginations.” — Frederic Jameson, The Seeds of Time

The stakes facing our generation are much more than they first seem, because our actions might have the potential to bring about a far better world, or cut it short.

The shifting meaning of “capitalism,” and how societies hide their downside with culture.

We’re unclear on what “capitalism” is supposed to be.

  • From the proletarians, nothing is to be feared.
  • Left to themselves, they will continue from generation to generation and from century to century, working, breeding, and dying, not only without any impulse to rebel but without the power of grasping that the world could be other than it is.” — George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four

———————————–

Rather than us asking questions of this world, this world asks questions of us.

We need to listen to the world in new ways and hear the fundamental questions that it askes us.

WITH  CLIMATE CHANGE –  WARS – AI – INEQULITY. –  UNITED NATIONS

ALL AT THIS VERY M0MENT ARE ASKING:  DO WE WISH TO CONTINUE TO EXIST? 

Might it be, then, that we have trouble imagining the end of capitalism because we think capitalism is great, and we’d fear that any alternative would be worse?

It is not we who are permitted to ask about the meaning of life — it is life that asks the questions, directs questions at us… our whole act of being is nothing more than responding to — of being responsible toward — life.

Have we been indoctrinated so that we subscribe to an ideology or a myth of capitalism?

All are questing, just what are our values.

We have an easier time imagining an apocalyptic death of the planet than capitalism being surpassed by a superior economic system, promoting equality.

Do we trust in capitalism on what are effectively theological grounds, so that the specious neoliberal arguments in capitalism’s favour are so many superfluous rationalizations?

Will AI Have a Soul? And does it even matter? Everybody uses the internet, but nobody trusts it.

Even if capitalism is justifiable, it doesn’t follow that those who benefit from that system should be unable even to imagine a better kind of economy.

Neoliberals will say that we can imagine an alternative to capitalism, after all, namely the communist one that failed in the Soviet Union. But that, too, is a red herring since the question is whether we can imagine improvements to capitalism, not worse economies.

Likely, you find your smartphone handy, but that doesn’t mean you can’t imagine improvements to it. You’d prefer to keep your phone, of course, and you may even be addicted to social media. But science fiction is replete with re-imagined technologies. For instance, we could miniaturize smartphones and hardwire them into the brain.

Science doesn’t demonstrate that the quantity of life matters more than its quality, nor can science show which qualities of life should matter more than others.

  •                                                        ——————————-

How do I get people to do what I want them to do?

Unfortunately there are collective forms of self-deception.

Individuals, of course, can prevent themselves from reckoning with unwanted truths, in that they can underestimate obstacles, confabulate, procrastinate, and so on, unable to realize the meaning of the present moment.

“You can get everything in life that you want if you’ll just help enough other people get what they want.”

Give and you will receive.

Maybe there are social mechanisms that operate in an analogous fashion, protecting whole populations by steering them towards the party line. The analogue of the individual ego, or of the conscious self, might be the upper class that dictates mass media narratives, such as by instilling neoliberal values via Ivy League education, as Thomas Frank explains.

Societies have worldviews called “cultures,” along with institutions that enforce their biases.

Once large, sedentary societies emerged in history, so too did mechanisms for managing mass opinion. Religion was one such device, but we can speak more neutrally about “ideologies,” as Karl Marx did, to account for how we may protect capitalism, too, with myths and collective fallacies.

If you’re looking for signs of such capitalist myths, have a look at advertising, at how thousands of misleading slogans and manipulative, hyperbolic messages stream through everyone’s consciousness on a daily basis.

In the boom-and-bust cycle in which government spending alone can stabilize.

————————————–

The recent pandemic, natural disasters, wars, all shine a light on the inequality that exist and have existed since time immortal.

If we want a world worth living in and on, we must make profit contribute to PROTECTING  all the essential values of life, not the pockets of the few.

Whether it’s turning promises on climate change into action, rebuilding trust in the financial system, or connecting the world to the internet.

OUR COLLECTIVE RESPONSIBILITY MUST BE TO REPAIRING THE DAMAGE OF CENTURIES OF GREED.

To achieve these objectives we will need to address a host of issues, with more than common sense but with trillions and trillions pumped into removing and protecting before the planet becomes uninhabitable.

_________________________

The Earth’s average land temperature has warmed nearly 1°C in the past 50 years as a result of human activity, global greenhouse gas emissions have grown by nearly 80% since 1970, and atmospheric concentrations of the major greenhouse gases are at their highest level in 800,000 years. We’re already seeing and feeling the impacts of climate change with weather events such as droughts and storms becoming more frequent and intense, and changing rainfall patterns.

By 2050, the world must feed 9 billion people. Yet the demand for food will be 60% greater than it is today. Despite huge gains in global economic output, there is evidence that our current social, political and economic systems are exacerbating inequalities, rather than reducing them. Rising income inequality is the cause of economic and social ills, ranging from low consumption to social and political unrest, and is damaging to our future well-being. More than 61 million jobs have been lost since the start of the global economic crisis in 2008, leaving more than 200 million people unemployed globally.

To function efficiently, the system needs to re-establish trust.

The internet is changing the way we live, work, produce and consume. With such extensive reach, digital technologies cannot help but disrupt many of our existing models of business and government. We are entering the age of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, a technological transformation driven by a ubiquitous and mobile internet. The challenge is to manage this seismic change in a way that promotes the long-term health and stability of the internet. Within the next decade, it is expected that more than a trillion sensors will be connected to the internet.

By 2025, 10% of people are expected to be wearing clothes connected to the internet and the first implantable mobile phone is expected to be sold.

Equality between men and women in all aspects of life, from access to health and education to political power and earning potential, is fundamental to whether and how societies thrive.

The growth of the digital economy, the rise of the service sector and the spread of international production networks have all been game-changers for international trade. Despite fundamental changes in the way business is done across borders, international regulations and agreements have not evolved at the same speed. In addition, negotiations to reach a new global trade agreement have stalled. There is a pressing need to reform the global trade framework.

Investing for the long term is vital for economic growth and social well-being, serious challenges to global health remain.

The number of people on the planet is set to rise to 9.7 billion in 2050 with 2 billion aged over 60. To cope with this huge demographic shift and build a global healthcare system that is fit for the future, the world needs to address these challenges now.

In short, the most pressing problems are those where people can have the greatest impact by working on them.

As we explained in the previous article, this means problems that are not only big, but also neglected and solvable. The more neglected and solvable, the further extra effort will go. And this means they’re not the problems that first come to mind.

First, future generations matter, but they can’t vote, they can’t buy things, and they can’t stand up for their interests. This means our system neglects them. You can see this in the global failure to come to an international agreement to tackle climate change that actually works..

We can’t so easily visualise suffering that will happen in the future. Future generations rely on our goodwill, and even that is hard to muster.

 We all know where the Solutions are to be found – in how wealth is distributed.

We should go beyond the focus on reducing the global poverty rate to below 3% and strive to ensure that all countries and all people can share in the benefits of economic development. Nearly half of the world’s population currently lives in poverty.  2/3 of the population in low-income countries is under 25 years old.

The world is facing multiple converging crises — growing food insecurity, rising fuel prices, economic instability, and the climate crisis — and they are all hitting poor countries the hardest. With 349 million people across 79 countries facing acute food insecurity, this is the worst food crisis in decades. While COVID-19, climate change, and conflict have been major drivers, political action has also fallen short.

Poverty entails more than the lack of income and productive resources to ensure sustainable livelihoods. Its manifestations include hunger and malnutrition, limited access to education and other basic services, social discrimination and exclusion, as well as the lack of participation in decision-making.

And we still wonder why the world we live in is going down the tube.

It is quite obvious that there is no point in been rich without giving – the power to solve some of the most pressing global challenges is not to be found in the words of the United Nations Declaration to end poverty in all its forms everywhere is Goal 1 of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.

Why?

Because it has to beg for funds to implement any of its aspirations.

What is needed is a preputial Fund to create a World Aid system with clout.

HERE IS HOW THIS CAN BE ACHIVED.

We now live in a world driven by technology – Apps for this and Apps that – Smartphone – Algorithms running world stock market, plundering everything for the sake of profit.

Why not introduce a World Aid commission algorithm to collect  0.05% on all activities that produce profit for profit sake.

This funding could be delivered by non repayable grants prioritising adaptation re climate change, vetted projects to reduce poverty, food sustainability, environment protection, etc ( Unlike The International Monetary Fund (IMF)  the lender of last resort.

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

Contact: bobdillon33@gmail.com

THE BEADY EYE ASK’S. IS 2023 GOING TO BE THE YEAR THAT HUMANITY FINDS OUT THAT IT IS NOT THE DOMINANT FORCE OF CHANGE ON PLANET EARTH?

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( Three minute read)

What can be achieved in this decade to put the world on a path to a more sustainable, more prosperous future for all of humanity?

Temptation is to say, that you may rest assured that it will be another year of unadulterated verbal dioramas diarrhoea.

With humanity waging war on nature the risks we are taking are astounding.

What did Earth look like from space in 2022?

It looked beautiful, it looked dangerous. It looked small and inconsequential, it looked incredible.iss066e109851

Nature always strikes back – and it is already doing so with growing force and fury.

About 96% of all mammals by weight are now humans and our livestock, like cattle, sheep and pigs. Just 4% are wild mammals like elephants, buffalo or dolphins. Seventy-five percent of Earth’s ice-free land is directly altered as a result of human activity, with nearly 90% of terrestrial net primary production and 80% of global tree cover under direct human influence.

We have grossly simplified the biosphere, a system of interactions between lifeforms and Earth that has evolved over 3.8 billion years. As the pressure of human activities accelerates on Earth, so, too, does the hope that technologies such as artificial intelligence will be able to help us deal with dangerous climate and environmental change. That will only happen, however, if we act forcefully in ways that redirects the direction of technological change towards planetary stewardship and responsible innovation.2022-05_geocolor_20220505180018_logos-1

Rising greenhouse gas emissions means that “within the coming 50 years, one to 3 billion people are projected to experience living conditions that are outside of the climate conditions that have served civilizations well over the past 6,000 years.

In this decade we must bend the curves of greenhouse gas emissions and shocking biodiversity loss. This means transforming what we eat and how we farm it, among many other transformations.

Nature has now become for us a kind of glossy cardboard, digitized and virtualized, increasingly distant from our lives.

The recent Covid-19 global pandemic is an Anthropocene phenomena. It has been caused by our intertwined relationship with nature and our hyper-connectivity. ( We order Pizza by sending messages into space.)

However our actions are making the biosphere more fragile, less resilient and more prone to shocks than before.

Humans use the majority of natural geo-resources, like minerals, rocks, soil and water.

Two of the biggest barriers are unsustainable levels of inequality and technology that undermines societal goals.

Inequality and environmental challenges are deeply linked. Reducing inequality will increase trust within societies.

It is time to flick the “green switch.   We have a chance to not simply reset the world economy but to transform it.

It is time to integrate the goal of carbon neutrality into all economic and fiscal policies and decisions. And to make climate-related financial risk disclosures mandatory.

It is time to transform humankind’s relationship with the natural world – and with each other. And we must do so together.

It’s is time to get off your smart phone and start to demand transparency of Algorithms that are plundering the world for profit. .

The state of the planet is much worse than most people understand and that humans face a grim.

Because as of yet there is no political or economic system, or leadership, is prepared to handle the predicted disasters, or even capable of such action

The problem is compounded by ignorance and short-term self-interest, with the pursuit of wealth and political interests stymying the action that is crucial for survival.

Most economies operate on the basis that counteraction now is too costly to be politically palatable. Combined with disinformation campaigns to protect short-term profits it is doubtful that the scale of changes we need will be made in time.

We need to be candid, accurate, and honest if humanity is to understand the enormity of the challenges we face in creating a sustainable future.

Without political will backed by tangible action that scales to the enormity of the problems facing us, the added stresses to human health, wealth, and well-being will perversely diminish our political capacity to mitigate the erosion of the Earth’s life-support system upon which we all depend.

Without fully appreciating and broadcasting the scale of the problems and the enormity of the solutions required, society will fail to achieve even modest sustainability goals, and catastrophe will surely follow.

So the Beady Eye wishes all a Happy New Year with the near certainty that the abovementioned problems will worsen over the coming decades, with negative impacts for centuries to come, if we dont now get our fingers out of where the sun does not shine.

No one has a right to pollute the air or the water, which are the common inheritance of all.

We have not inherited the Earth from our parents, we have borrowed it from our children.

The time has come to re-educate to nature and contact with it as a lever to ensure collective well-being, physical and mental; to restore beauty, kindness, ecosystem thinking, emotional intelligence and a formation of values, heritage inherited from the wisdom of the past but negligently neglected.

After all, this is what ecology is all about: looking at reality as it is, understanding its connections, accepting its complexity, and striving for harmony between all parts.

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

Contact: bobdillon33@gmail.com

THE BEADY EYE SAYS. WE ARE ALL BEING HOODWINKED WHEN IT COMES TO CONTROLLING CLIMATE CHANGE EMMISSIONS.

06 Tuesday Dec 2022

Posted by in Carbon Emissions., Uncategorized

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(FOUR MINUTE READ)

I recently came across this app that sums up where we are with – CLIMATE CHANGE.

Let’s calculate your Carbon Footprint. Climate Hero.  Pay x to offset your climate foot print.

God knows how many meeting we now have had of world leaders when it comes to Climate Change. From the UN to the Gs’ and Climate Summits, and it still remains beyond their comprehension that to reduce Carbon Emissions we must put a halt to producing energy with fossil and gas resources.

Instead:

We have are unenforceable Promises,  Declarations,  Proposals Agreement,  Accords, Groups and Organisations under ever letter of the alphabet turning a blind eye to the raw fact that carbon has being turned into a product to be traded.

This is a trading system through which countries / corporations can buy or sell units of greenhouse-gas emissions in an effort to  either meet their national limits on emissions or off set their emission’s  while they continue will – nilly to pump carbon into the atmosphere.

. The Kyoto Protocol assigned a unit of emissions payment to equal to 1 metric tonne of CO2 equivalent.

This TRADING comes with labels like Carbon Free, Net Zero, Offset, Mitigation

All ways of  (COP) out of  doing any think.

Like REDD:  Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation with Cop 27introduced Sovereign Carbon Credits paving the way for private trading and financing of nature.

You dont have to be a genius to understand that temperature rise is only the beginning of the story.

The consequences of climate change now include, among others, intense droughts, water scarcity, severe fires, rising sea levels, flooding, melting polar ice, catastrophic storms and declining biodiversity, mass migration by both animals and humans  that will eventually led to more wars.  Because the Earth is a system, where everything is connected, changes in one area can influence changes in all others.

There is no doubt that  Climate action requires significant financial investments by governments and businesses. But climate inaction is vastly more expensive.

So instead of worthless invisible funds why not give non repayable grants to every house hold to install solar panels.

To get to net zero emissions by 2050 it is not by giving Earth Shot millions to projects that deserve recognition in their innovative  to tackle Climate Change but to arm the peoples of the world to do something positive by converting to Green energy,  starting now.

Why not because the capitalist system is still between two stool profit for profit sake or profit for sustainability.

Progress is a metaphor

For benefitting man;

We know exactly what it’s for

But wonder if it can.

The next best thing to knowing a fact is said to be where to find it;

But more than that, its how to act, once you have truly defined it.

SO WE ALL KNOW THAT it is critical that all mitigation and adaptation policy are underpinned by not burning fossil fuels that are generating greenhouse gas emissions and methane even it there are offset by paying a few dollars more for your Flight or breathing.

Of course one would be naïve to think that Government’s who’s revenue comes from the use of energy are going to cut themselves off from this revenue by converting the production of energy to free for all. The primary source of revenue is taxation.

THIS IS WHERE THE  PANDORA  BOX.OPENS.

The problem is that these renewable sources aren’t super reliable and at present there is no way of storing the energy other than directing it into the Grid or private batteries that need to be attached to the grid.

There is no problem (in principle) with building enough solar panel arrays, wind farms, tidal, wave and geothermal energy plants to power our planet. There is nothing here that we don’t already know how to do. The only problem is with funding it and getting people to accept it.

We at the moment except.

Nuclear power plants: Highly stable and reliable. They are “dirty” because of the nuclear waste hype. There is also problem with uranium mining and processing as well.

Coal power plants: Operable and reliable. Their huge footsteps are mining processes, CO2 emissions, NOx, SOx, dust pollution, heavy metal pollution…

Gas/oil powerplants: Operable, reliable. Their drawbacks are mining process, CO2 emissions and political compromises.

Biomass powerplants: Low scale source. Extremely low power density (MW output per km2 needed for supply).

Water powerplants: very fast, reliable. Their drawbacks are huge or humongous dams for high-power ones or low power output; disruption of the stream.

Wind turbines: Power-grid disruptor #1, unpredictable source. Unrecyclable blades. High risk in bad weather (too windy)

Solar heat powerplants: Huge area consumption for mirror fields plus tower in the sky. Suitable only for scarcely populated areas.

Photovoltaics: Power-grid disruptor #2 (only because it does not disrupt after sunset). Unpredictable power source. Extremely low power density (MW per km2 of ground consumed). Extremely toxic production. Unrecyclable.

HOWEVER ITS NAIVE TO THINK THAT WE CAN HAVE GREEN ENGERY TOTAL FREE OF EMMISIONS.

Where are we?

World Climate Summits have become a key platform for connecting investment markets not policies to avert disaster.

With the last one in Egyptian promising trillions to countries that can claim Punch’s Pilot absolution that its not their fault.

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Energy is there and all we can do about it is change the forms. It is a direct follow of the conservation of energy.

There is no thermal engine that produces more (mechanical) energy than it consumes. Even solar and wind need raw materials.

Solar panel takes a little less than a decade to produce as much energy as was used to make it.

Anytime one is using energy, they are using it on the environment’s behalf.

IN A IDEAL WORLD WE COULD CONVERT tracts of unusable desert that has no significant ecological value and which gets uninterrupted sunshine for 300+ days of the year that could be covered in solar panels.

I have advocated that to tackle Climate change Governments must impower their people to do so.

Non Repayable grants to insulate their homes and install solar power would be a good start.

You have to start on time as nothing in the universe will produce more energy.

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

Contact: bobdillon33@gmail.com