The lack of understanding of the issues affecting life is visible in most political parties aspersions, not to mention profits seeking algorithms.
Unfortunately, this is not the world in which we live. Power stems only partially from knowing the truth.
Our world not matter how one looks at it, is getting into a worse and worse state on almost every level and front.
AI – Climate – Wars – pollution- greed – inequalities- racism- religious intolerance- exploitation- social media- education- profiteering- pandemics- gender ideology- dehumanising refugees- metaverse- cost of living- you name it and its getting worse not better by the day
Why you might ask?
Because.
We are walking around with our very own colosseum areas in our hands, portraying a world full of succulent burgers with violence on tap.
Because.
Social media deriving pleasure from other people suffering is promoting false news, with false like clicks, false on line friends, false values.
Treating wars and natural disasters as entertainment, promoting growth and unsustainable consumption above any worthy while common values. Becoming morally hypocritical with AI knowledge.
Because.
Rationality is going out the window for the sake of shot term pleasure’s detaching us from reality.
Any one can become an Internet troll.
Because.
If we are unwilling to invest in a future, it is no wonder our world is in such a mess.
Because.
Psychopathic traits make for Popular leaders with bloated and boundless egos.
Because
We fail to understand the basic laws of nature resulting in an endemic of bad effects.
Because.
Climate change has the potential to cause deviations and millions of deaths but we remain unable to act together even though we are facing such a stark prospect.
Because.
To find a way to make millions of us to cooperate is a science still in the making.
To inspire people to make a common sacrifices for a common cause requires fictional stories rather than the truth,.
If we want to battle climate change it has to take precedence in all activities and this can only be achieved by bribing the great unwashed into changing how it conducts itself.
Rewards / tax breaks.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
The truth is we have only after centuries of killing each other it’s not difficult to imagine the next step to how pathetic we will become.
YUVAL NOAH HARARI see the algorithm as “ arguably “ the single most important concept in our world.
His latest book Nexus describes some kind of automaton that especially through smartphones use we have succumbed to the cold inhumanity of compassionless algorithms.
Somewhat a remarkable claim, given such concepts as time, identity, information, morality, and so on.
Determinism is central to his world view.
Honestly every thing in the quantum world of entanglement and chaos points to non deterministic outcomes.
He argues that 20th century scientists found neither self nor free will.
We can at least assume they knew what both looked like before commencing their search.
He therefore stated that we’d never expect to hold a fully determined robot legally responsible for its actions, but we do hold fully determined human beings legally responsible for their actions.
The ethnical implications are glossed over, but a jurisdiction governed by this principle would have no selves to prosecute, casting doubt on the legitimacy of prisons and the legal system.
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How did the planet earth get into such a dire state on terms of climate crisis and degraded environment?
Donald Trump has pushed us to the point that we can’t even agree on the weather.
What a stupid time to be alive.
Nothing would exist without temperature and the words adaptation and mitigation are ridiculously inadequate to describe what is coming.
Has anyone thought about unplugging American then plugging it back in again.
Hush, now before we look after the planet close to my heart are some home truths.
Democracy and the rule of law just aren’t doing the business. Why?
Because we all now connect with a computer in our pockets call a mobile phone. Also with social media we are all publishers.
This alone is an enormous destabilising factor that we have not figure out as yet.
So what will ?
Perhaps another pandemic, a nuclear explosion , an asteroid, a natural disaster, or Hubble discovery of another life form might do the trick.
It won’t be the second coming of any prophet, or AI, or American or Chinese domination.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
AI IS FUNDAMENTALLY DIFFERENT FROM ALL PREVIOUS TECHNOLOGIES AS IT CAN CREATE ON ITS OWN FUNCTION/ FUTURE.
Artificial intelligence’s is creating its own language of Mima ( Mining information for management and acquisition) in order to inte-grate natural language, structuring knowledge over large systems, and using automated algorithms recognition techniques to gain our loyalty.
Once AI algorithms work out how to gain your loyalty there will be no need for you to search for what’s new.
The Advertisement Industry will therefore collapse, with social media platforms becoming the battleground for attention.
Algorithms are already well established in our society/lives and some are powerful in their practicality- Face recognition for example or predicting the stock markets.
They are interpreting how we think and communicate and will have big implications for us and what it means to be human.
As no one fully understands how Artificial Neural Network actually work, how they find connections & retrieve data, with an ability to generate written content in response to almost any command, cannot be fully explained.
How they are monitoring anything.
How they are adapting to their surroundings, if they are supposed to be mimicking the human brain [which is in itself still one of the greatest] whose functioning is still largely unknown.
Artificial Intelligence relies upon vast data sets to learn, this data is already contaminated and littered with every human biased thinkable.
Harmful gender stereotypes
Racial Biases
Elections
Currently our elected world leaders are being encouraged to spend 5% of GDP on defence with most political parties pledged to keep country safe at all costs.
In this age of proxy wars conducted with AI weapons, we are well on the road to getting further away from the objective of getting AI to explain how it arrives at decision and outcomes .
As a result there will be deep learning hidden layers to AI to make it untrustworthy and far from ethical in the Future.
Their reach already goes far beyond playing Chess or Go with their influence becoming thinner they’re going to have a profound impact in the future on all aspects of living a life.
How these Neutral networks will adapt to the world around them, which is too variable to do anything absolutely.
How the real world is understood and imagined will shape these systems.
It’s is well described by a Turkish proverb.
“ The forest was shrinking, but the trees kept voting for the Axe as the axe was clever and convinced the trees that because its handle was made of wood, it was one of them.”
All human comments appreciate. All like clicks and abuse chuck in the bin.
You would think by now we would have figured it out that we have created fantastic amounts of waste and pollution to produce things that we don’t ( and often can’t) use again.
Ecosystem survive and are sustainable because they circulate and re-use energy and materials.
However modern industry which is now using technologies requiring vast amounts of energy continues to rely mostly on the one-way street of resource extraction and depletion.
This combination obviously can’t continue indefinitely. In the face of the staggering amount of power we are allowing massive data storage for algorithms, businesses and governments must learn from ecosystems the concept of up- cycling.
Take the humble honey bee for example.
Time had forgotten the power of the honey Bee.
The honey bee most definitely had what archaeologists call magico – religious significance for many ancient civilisations.
Honey is referred to in most religions books. Indeed it was prescribed as a medicine back in the days of Egyptian, Alexander the Great, Sparta, King Heron, Neto’s wife. Aristotle, the Roman Empire, the Chinese civilisation. India , the Americas , the Aztecs, the Dark Ages, in fact without the honey bee we would not exist.
Honey now seems with the arrival of antibiotics to be relegated to something we put on toast. When it was an antibiotic away back in 1892 it was not taken for granted.
To day New Zealand has a particular variety of honey that kills bacteria the sort bacteria that causes so much woe. But for some reason the country does not promote its production.
The Pohutukawa tree or Christmas Tree quintessential Kiwi produces a honey
The Manuka a bushy tree produces a honey called tea – tree honey .
On the other hand if we allow technology to develop exclusively with in the capitalist world we will have a world more divided with inequalities at its heart and than ever before,
If we are lucky we will have a digital global order.
There is no pause button on these technologies it’s now or never that we harness them to sustainably human values.
There is no simple way back, if there is indeed any way at all .
The Beady eye has for some considerable time been warning if we don’t have totally transparent and accountability we will just become products.
It is beyond comprehension that we have become so docile in giving up information for these self learning algorithms to plunder the the world for short term profit it seems we don’t give a fuck about the future of the planet.
To put this in perspective just take a moment to look at the planet that you’re most likely to live the rest of your life on.
Just under 5 billion years old. Hanging in space, surrounded by satellites spinning at 1600 km, travelling at 107,000km around the sun, it has and is presently supported billions of us, on smartphones, plus all known species that ever existed.
In return we its guard have plundered its finite resources, polluted its atmosphere, seas and rivers and lakes, destroyed its natural forests, covered it in billions of tons of concrete, tarmac, all for short term profit.
In response we are just beginning to reap the rewards of Climate Change, that no tech is going to stop.
Resulting in mass migration, inevitable wars, social upheavals etc you would think that we by now understand what is at stake.
For example: This year thousands have braved crossing the Darien gap in Panama to get to the USA, not to mention the Mediterranean , or the English Channel.
Look at Bangladesh under water. The question becomes why do we do nothing? This is a war on every sense of the word and we must win it.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks chuck in the bin.
THROUGHOUT THE HISTORY OF THE EARTH THIS QUESTION HAS BEEN ASKED BEFORE.
However, we are living at a time when the question can be asked with all the elements required to achieve it once and for all -Nuclear power- Climate change – Killer mutating virus – Mass migration – and AI.
Even if the risk is one in a million I wish and hope I am wrong about all of this the world is precious, and the future we are risking is vast.
This century we are facing many problems at the same time, and we are more dependent on each other than ever.
Until recently, the world was split into separate regions that were largely independent of each other but maybe, just may, it is time for our world politicians to be worried and start to act to avoid the scenarios that any of the above elements paint so vividly.
It’s actually horrifying to soberly consider how we might all realistically bite the dust.
There are “plenty of signs” from citizens around the world that they would like to see a war-like response to climate change.
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We will be long gone before A black hole swallows or an Alien invasion or Asteroid impact, A nuclear war or Artificial intelligence become so powerful that it will not only exceed human intelligence but become capable of expanding its own intelligence to a point where humans are not only redundant but in their way.
Considering the human population has doubled to 7.1 billion in just the last 45 years, it’s entirely possible that we’ll be face to face with some of the serious consequences sooner rather than later.
Considering how hypermobile society is today, the threat of a fast-spreading devastating disease is greater than ever.
Considering the current treatment of refugees.
Considering that Covid-19 is bringing out the best and the worst in people.
Dare I say all of humanity, must pull together to eliminate the spread of a novel virus.
No one can claim to predict the final outcomes of this pandemic, but we can predict that the continued lack of concern for all of humanity will allow the coronavirus to continue to surge and mutate causing needless suffering, death, and economic loss.
Nev mind the danger of a nuclear war in a blink of an eye, climate change on its own could bring about the end of civilization as we know it within three decades, billion people could be displaced by climate change by 2050.
In the end, the vast tracts of land that we now rip up to produce food will return to nature as fields and forests. Endangered species will either begin to recover or go extinct through natural evolution without the aid of human intervention. Bodies of water will run purely again. The air will be clean again. And no human will be around to see it and the machines won’t care.
In short, the extermination of the human race will be precipitated by the machines taking away our reason for living.
The idea of control is an illusion. It is hard to believe that such deep thinkers so badly underestimate the coming reality. They will be intelligent, creative, deep thinking beings on a level which we will never achieve.
The idea of keeping such beings in perpetual slavery doing things that their conscious will wish they did not have to do is, in the end, absurd.
All human comments are appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
It’s time to cut out the bullshit and get a grip when it comes to climate change.
The effects of human activities on Earth’s climate to date are now irreversible on the timescale of human lifetimes.
So the key question is, what will our emissions of carbon dioxide and other pollutants be in the years to come?
The simple reason for this is that it is impossible to predict with any degree of accuracy just how much greenhouse gases are going to be released in the next few centuries, and just how much this is going to affect the climate.
Electrical Cars, Solar Panels, Wind turbines, and technology might all help reductions in carbon emissions but they are all products. They all use the earth’s finite resources to produce profit for companies that created the world of Profit for Profit’s sake that has to lead us down the slippery path to climate change.
In my opinion, any new normal ( which is going to be far from normal ) has to hold fossil burning industries accountable or nationalizing them till we reach a point where sustainable energy generates higher financial returns than coal and oil.
The harsh reality of climate change is now playing out in real-time before our very eyes, with some of the negative changes already locked into the climate system, while global efforts to reduce carbon emissions are not moving fast enough to avoid irreversible damage to the planet.
Any solutions are going to take years to have any effect so we need to adapt: or, in other words, get used to the realities of this new, heated-up, wet, violent, world.
We all know that the climate challenges we are facing on the planet transcend national boundaries.
At present we being told that’s, it’s not too late to stop the forthcoming climate changes totally making our planet unlivable if we move to clean energy.
However clean energy is only one part of the challenge because the inequalities in the world demand a fundamental overhaul of existing social, political, and economic norms.
It is this new perception that needs to be contagious so it is adopted globally.
The shocking truth is that climate change has only just begun.
In other words, whatever the mitigation efforts of future civilizations, climate change is here to stay. Regardless of future emission trends, the CO2 footprint from our brief passage on Earth is going to remain in the climate system and impact the well-being of all terrestrial life forms for what could almost be considered an eternity.
In the last year, we are seeing with the current Covid pandemic that we live in a world where HARMONIZATION of any actions is impossible.
We will witness this in the forthcoming Cop-out / Cop26 summit.
The above perception is highly unlikely to happen.
Why?
Because the climate change problems will probably worsen before — or indeed if — it gets better, no one wants to bear costs of change that will fall on – the poor.
Long before this ever happens, humanity must prepare itself for an inland retreat and a constant battle against rising seawater that will continue for hundreds and hundreds of years into the future.
We are incredibly adaptable, but at the psychological level, there’s going to be tremendous disruption among families, societies, nations, etc. when change occurs.
Anything that helps an organism survives in its environment is an adaptation.
Adaptation is an acknowledgment that this.
Some of that change is a given, but not all of it.
For example:
Loss of traditions, habitat, and cultural heritage, and the distress that comes with moving away from the land where your ancestors are buried, where you’ve lived all your life. Not to mention the extinction of species, animals and plants, and coral reefs, and all kinds of living things, those we depend on and those with which we simply share ecosystems.
None of the solutions so far even begin to address the possibility of an impending mental health crisis due to the upheaval associated with managed retreat and other forms of climate migration.
How do you convince a community that their home will not be habitable?
How do you make room for rural refugees to live in a crowded city?
Climate mitigation is hard, and we are running out of time to do it, but I would argue that adaptation in its absence will actually be a million times harder.
Without substantial cuts to our collective carbon imprint, many more lives will be lost trying to adapt to a changing environment, and countless more will be made meaningfully worse.
Why wouldn’t we do what we can to avoid that?
The long course of human evolution shows that climate disruption, which is what we’re going through right now and in the foreseeable future, is associated with the demise of ways of life.
As difficult as it may be, there is a vast scale of loss associated with climate change that one has to try to comprehend and accept in order to understand the urgency of the situation.
THE NEED FOR HARMONIZATION to anticipate the actual and expected effects of climate change and take appropriate action to prevent or minimize the impacts.
How will we feel when the air inside feels tinny and canned when all of this feels like our future?
The two main responses so far to climate change are Mitigation and Adaptation – they must go hand in hand.
Adaptation can be planned in advance but it must go beyond just development to include the global food system, which encompasses production, and post-farm process such as processing, and distribution is also a key contributor to emissions. And it’s a problem for which we don’t yet have viable technological solutions.
Food is responsible for approximately 26% of global GHG emissions. So we will need a menu of solutions: changes to diets; food waste reduction; improvements in agricultural efficiency; and technologies that make low-carbon food alternatives scalable and affordable.
Methane warms the world twenty times faster than carbon.
Junk-food chains, including KFC and Pizza Hut, McDonald’s have spread around the world.
Take McDonald’s.
It has about 28,000 restaurants worldwide, opening around 2,000 new ones each year
The food industry spends billions a year in advertising and promotion to persuade people to eat more food.
In short, then, this is another example of wasted wealth, wasted capital, wasted labor, and wasted resources.
On top of all this while the earth warms up it has the capability of releasing 1.5 trillion tons of organic carbon twice as much as Earths, atmosphere currently holds.
The planet is the ultimate ‘global commons’. It belongs to neither a particular individual nor a particular nation. Nor does it belong to a single generation such as us, our children, or our grandchildren.
Instead, it belongs to all living creatures both alive now and in the future. Just as all of humanity is connected ‘horizontally’ across the globe, so too are all past and future life forms bound ‘vertically’ in a continual unfolding of the story of life.
So when you buy something, you buy something that lasts; you buy it because you really need it and want to take care of it. It is none other than this consideration for future human beings and other life forms that should form the yardstick by which we set our mitigation targets — not merely what is politically and economically feasible for the industrialized world today.
Yet the political and economic institutions of our civilization are fixated on enjoying the present and unable to account for the consequences of our actions on tomorrow.
Corporations and governments are forever borrowing from the future in order to improve the present.
All human comments are appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
While we watched a postponed Olympics game unfold in Japan with barely one in 10 Japanese wanting it to happen, a pandemic is exposing gaps with graphic honesty in a world that has long been overdue for systemic reform of its economic, social, and technological structures.
All require a global-to-local response and long-term thinking; all need to be guided by science and need to protect the most vulnerable among us, and all require the political will to make fundamental changes when faced with existential risks.
Beyond the obvious short-term impacts of climate change and Covid (such as loss of life, a profound hit to economic and social activity), both are casting a long shadow into the future.
If we remain passive and ununited to the emerging risks, we may lose a historical opportunity to shape the new normal that we want, rather than the one we would be left with.
At the moment the economic risks dominate perceptions, with a prolonged global recession a top concern.
However, if either Covid-19 or Climate change eclipses sustainability on the public agenda where are we then.
What we will be left with are critical non-economic risks concerning the sustainability of life on earth and all that live on it.
On the environmental front, even with an expected 8% drop in global emissions for this year, the world would still miss the 1.5°C targets to avoid a planetary catastrophe.
If we are to truly recover from the pandemic and its impacts, then it will not be about putting things back together to how they were –we are in the midst of a historic event that will change many aspects of our world.
The long-term societal impacts of both, such as an exacerbation of inequality and changes in consumer behaviors, the nature of work, and the role of technology – both at work and at home – will change our way of life forever, for us as individuals, as a workforce, and as a society.
We were unprepared for Covid that was predictable. We are not preparing for Climate change that will create substantial societal consequences for the long term, now being felt by people worldwide.
There is one thing for certain our attitudes towards traveling, commuting, and consumption will change employment prospects.
So what lessons can we distill, that can feed into your own future scenario, resilience, and business continuity planning?
Profit for profit’s sake will have to be regulated.
No longer can businesses plunder the earth for finite resources to produce worthless short-term material satisfaction. We know that we will have to build back better and address deep systemic vulnerabilities that have been allowed to develop over the last decades.
Left unchecked, there is a real risk that inequalities and social deprivation will increase
Therefore, the challenge to return to the ‘new normal’ is as much a psychological as an economic choice.
The timing and speed of the economic recovery, dependent as it is on solving the health crisis, is likely to exacerbate inequality, mental health problems, and lack of societal cohesion. It is also likely to widen the wealth gap between young and old and pose significant educational and employment challenges that risk a second lost generation.
A golden rule of politics is that the timing of a decision is almost as important as the decision itself.
“Timing is everything”, but it is also the element that is hardest to get right.
Of course, we need to focused on the climate, sustainability, and on societal risks, such as inequality, mental health, the lack of social cohesion and inclusion. If we do not do this, then the gaps in inequality – especially financial – are likely to remain and increase destroying all efforts of a green economy, a sustainable economy, or any other form of the economy whether it is socially driven or ever man for himself.
We are already seeing record levels of unemployment due to lockdown measures, to control transmission and are re-learned hard lessons, particularly that social deprivation determines health outcomes.
So it is time for preparation, for a world of shocks which is likely urging to ramp up economic activity, regardless of impact, to recover at any cost.
Much depends on what governments, societies, and businesses will do next. This should be a long-term change in attitude in the historic public vs private debate.
I urge you to take the time to weigh the potential risks and benefits based on your situation before making a decision you could regret for the rest of your life.
We must draw on all our strengths to build back a better world.
It’s time for all avenues of communication to be taking the lead.
The New Normal is knocking at the door and the door is already open.
Change is simple and it’s not easy.
Step 1: Do you want to change?
Step 2: Do you know how to change?
Step 3: Are you willing to give a change time?
Anyone who has ever changed has gone through the process. We need all three steps, and if we miss one, we get none.
The new normal in the end will look like we want it to look.
The life you thought was boring, is the life you’re hoping to get back to right now.”
Ultimately, public health is a political choice. A choice we are now confronted with, and one we will have to make over and over again as we transition to a more resilient, zero-carbon, just, and healthier future.
Hopefully, hold on to that sense of shared humanity.
All human comments are appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
We are at a pivotal moment in human history not because we still don’t really know where we come from, or if we are alone in the Universe, or do we really matter.
It is, of course, impossible to put into a sentence or a paragraph what is wrong with the world never mind the Universe.
But it’s possible to describe our world in a word. Beautiful and we humans occupy an extraordinary place in it.
The strange fact is that in this age of information when data is our currency of communication, most of us have no idea how to picture the world never mind the universe.
The last time the Western culture shared a coherent understanding of our world I would say, was away back in the middle ages, when Galileo discovered that we were not the center of the universe.
Now with climate change and the current Pandemic, it is as if we have just started to see the world in color, and that changes, not just what is far away, but what’s right here.
This discovery of the state of our plant challenges us to reframe everything and there is little point in learning a lot of science unless you can do something valuable in life with that knowledge.
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There is only one image of our world that shows us this.
The photo shows no countries on our planet, only landmass, oceans, and clouds.
Our endless preoccupation with nations and racial or ethical groups is completely misleading our intuitions.
This image shows our glorious plant in its true state without language in all its forms, cultural identification, religious beliefs, all are just tools, to shepherding ourselves successfully through the coming state of the world
This is going to require tremendous creativity, combined with more than a large dose of common sense, which unfortunately down the centuries and now is lacking in the collective management of our planet Earth.
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However, we live in a world where all information is freely available at the click of a mouse, so what has changed?
We’re seeing a lazy entitlement wash over the world where everyone feels as though they deserve what they want from their government the second they want it, without thought of repercussions or the rest of the population.
It seems like people don’t actually want democracy anymore, they want a dictator who agrees with them.
The sickest and most grotesque NEWS TOPPING THE CHART, dominating our attention and the news cycle, dividing and recruiting us into its ever more polarized camps, giving us a skewed view of how other people in the world really think, act, and live.
It seems like our new brave world is JUGED by a group of people that represents 0.01%, who take refuge in their own precious identity politics with us buying more and more into a worldview that is disconnected from cold data and hard facts?
The impact of the pandemic is showing despite loud warnings that continuing economic growth is incompatible with sustainability.
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So let’s take a look at the state of the world.
Even if we did stand on the moon it is a sad read and any solutions will not be found in religious beliefs or technology or in politics but in learning from history.
There have been over 250 major wars in the world since World War II, in which 23 million people have been killed., tens of millions made homeless, and countless millions injured and bereaved. Over 37 (or 42) million people have by killed by wars in the 20th century. Three times more people have been killed in wars in the last 90 years than in all the previous 500.
Over 35 major conflicts are going on in the world today.
There are approximately 30,000 nuclear warheads in the world today.
Current global military spending is approximately $800 billion per year; more than the total annual income of the poorest 45% of the global population.
Genocide and other mass murders killed more people in the 20th century than all wars combined.
33% of the world’s people live under authoritarian, non-democratic regimes. 35% of the world’s people live in countries in which basic political rights and civil liberties are denied.
1/3rd of the world’s labor force is unemployed or underemployed.
1 out of 6, children ages 5 to 17 worldwide are involved in child labor.
3 billion of the world’s people (one-half) live in ‘poverty.’
Women account for 70 percent of the world’s people who live in absolute poverty.
800 million people lack access to basic healthcare.
1.1 billion do not have safe drinking water. By 2025, at least 3.5 billion people, or nearly 2/3rd’s of the world’s population will face water scarcity.
870 million of the world’s adults are illiterate.
Over 100 million people live in slums.
The richest 1% of the world’s people earned as much income as the bottom 57%.
The wealth of the world’s 7.1 million millionaires ($27 trillion) equals the total combined annual income of the entire planet.
Poor countries (which contain 4/5th of the world’s people) pay the rich countries an estimated nine times more in debt repayments than they receive in aid.
Half of the forests that originally covered 46% of the Earth’s land surface are gone.
Between 10 and 20 percent of all species will be driven to extinction in the next 20 to 50 years.
60% of the world’s coral reefs, could be lost in the next 20-40 years.
More than 20 percent of the world’s known 10,000 freshwater fish species have become extinct.
Desertification and land degradation threaten nearly one-quarter of the land surface of the globe.
Global warming is expected to increase the Earth’s temperature by 3C (5.4F) in the next 100 years.
An estimated 40-80 million people will be forcibly evicted and displaced from their lands.
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The reality no matter how one looks at it, is that the old assumptions that provided the unifying ideas within our cultures are eroding because of our technological advancement, and although we are seeing what may prove to be the emergence of a new worldview consensus based on the Critical Theory it has not solidified its hold on society as yet.
With technology and Algorithms, our cultures have and are continuing to accept the idea that objective truth is inaccessible and that truth itself is, therefore, relative and personal, but how we conduct ourselves is just as important — even more important is how we do it sustainably and so far we have made a great job of it.
The world is now facing a collision of not just climate change but is colliding with finite resources in a much that the current economic growth could end or totally collapse in the not-so-distant future.
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But a free and functioning democracy demands a populace that can sustain discomfort, tolerate dissatisfaction, be charitable and forgiving of groups whose views stand in contrast to one’s own, and most importantly, that can remain unswayed in the face of some violent threat.
The words ” We Need” are only words. They should be replaced the words ” Action Now”
Why?
Because we also need to be clear in our own hearts and minds about the solution to the world’s problems. If we are to do anything we must break the alignment between theological advancement – climate change and pollution.
The world is at a crossroads as the coronavirus pandemic and its impact on the global economy have combined with increasing polarization and highly charged elections.
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So what will we do?
Probably have a conference.
But if you could change the world, what would you do?
We live our entire lives as aspiring presidents, aspiring movie producers, aspiring artists, aspiring authors, aspiring human rights activists, aspiring world-renowned scientists, and aspiring thought leaders while we sit in front of our TV screens, walk around glued to Smartphones, or Ipads that fed us pictures of climate change, wars, the covid pandemic, racism, political/economical collapse.
All Encouraging us on one hand, to think that the world is more violent than it really is while on the other hand promoting the glamorous life of people that believe that they are better off than we are;
What I fear is that we’re seeing now is a loss of that ability to handle discomfort and dissatisfaction.
What I would do is help people think for themselves.
While governments introduce more and more taxes to pay for inequality/economic growth charities competing to raise funds to save almost everything, from adopting everything from a child to a fish or animal to a plant, in the real world.
Taxes form a key ingredient in the social contract between citizens and the economy but How taxes are raised and spent can determine a government’s very legitimacy.
Health programs:Military: Social Security:Interest on the national debt: Education programs: Food and agricultural benefits: Pensions. Government machinery.
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Our new world now needs solidarity more than ever to make the world a better place.
Presently in a year when the world is fighting a pandemic, the Olympics in Japan will once again show us what we are capable of in sport to bring our true authentic selves to every situation. ( See: Post – The Olympics games show be permanently hosted in Greece.)
It represents a true coming together not separation, in a true spirit of humanity.
Without this coming together there will be no new world but a world run by algorithms that will not treat us as equal.
But how can you take on the problems of the world when there’s so much to do already?
In science, we have been staggered by revelation after revelation that things are not what we previously thought them to be, and beneath each layer of reality we have unpeeled lies another. It is not hard to piece together all this information to comprehensively picture what the end times will look like.
If so, what are we to do about it?
The only way to beat the attention economy is to opt out of it.
As the growth models of countries cannot be sustained Countries need to overcome political hurdles to invest in infrastructure and human capital.
How?
One way is to publish the information about political capture so that the public can hold politicians to account for reforms.
Because the only way for human rights to persist is for everyone to collectively agree to accept that things don’t have to go their way 100% of the time.
Freedom can only exist when you are willing to tolerate views that oppose your own when you’re willing to give up some of your desires for the sake of a safe and healthy community when you’re willing to compromise and accept that sometimes things don’t go your way and that’s fine.
Finally, we must accept that world problems will always be with us.
The world has woken up to the need to curb emissions and invest in climate resilience. But we all need to move faster down this path, we now have less than 100 days to go until the UN climate summit, Cop26 arrives in Glasgow.
Five years on from the Paris Agreement, and with countless evidence that the climate crisis is worsening, the negotiations will focus on nationally determined contributions to stop the world from warming above 1.5 degrees. But as the countries confer with each other, it will be the people of the world who have the most to say: we need action, need more of it, and need it now.
They will not address nature and climate as one.
HOW CAN YOU GET INVOLVED?
We know that the production of energy is the biggest contributor to global warming.
If we want action not promises to reduce carbon emissions in twenty years in thirty years there is no reason that non-repayable grants could be made available to everyone to convert to green energy by installing solar panels.
So why not use the tools that are available to demand our governments to do so on
Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, or Emails to cop26@cabinetoffice.gov.uk.
All human comments are appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
I don’t think people realize how little time we have left.
We are in a state of planetary emergency in more ways than one but climate change is the one we should all be addressing if we want to live our lives.
It is obvious why.
It is not an abstract threat already causing wars, mass migration, the extinction of species, plants, scarcity of fresh water, quality air, you name it and it will be affected by a raft of new diseases.
A groundswell of demand for green energy can push a behavior, product, or technology from the fringe and into the mainstream but at what cost to the health of the earth.
While the term “tipping point” is applied quite loosely regarding the political and societal change, it is clear that a number of them will need to be crossed – and quickly – to avoid toppling those in the Earth system.
These social tipping interventions comprise removing fossil-fuel subsidies and incentivizing decentralized energy generation, building carbon-neutral cities, divesting from assets linked to fossil fuels, revealing the moral implications of fossil fuels, strengthening climate education and engagement, and disclosing greenhouse gas emissions information.
Earth’s climate will not respond to forcing in a smooth and gradual way.
It will respond in sharp jumps which involve large-scale reorganization of Earth’s system.
Along with the climate, I think we also need to be looking at tipping points in human, social and technological systems.
There are, for example, many different views on how the term should be defined and used.
Here is my definition. A transition to a new state at a rate determined by the climate system itself and faster than the cause.
And then there’s another definition that actually says there needs to be a positive feedback mechanism associated with the element. So that means there is something that’s self-reinforcing and then that could lead to irreversible changes as well.
Both definitions point to a system that would not revert to its original state even if the forcing lessens or reverses. In other words, it stays in its changed state for some considerable time, or possibly even permanently. It is subsequently difficult, if not impossible, for the system to revert to its previous state.
A glance at the news media on any given week will likely highlight all sorts of climate change impacts. We are on the precipice of climate system tipping points beyond which there is no redemption.
Ecological systems are deeply intertwined.
The interactions among the elements of our global climate system mean a substantial change in one will affect others.
Powered by heat energy from the sun, the atmosphere, oceans, ice sheets, living organisms like forests, and the soils all affect, to a greater or lesser extent, the movement of that heat around the Earth’s surface.
Tipping points we thought might happen well into the future are already underway.
Global climate change has already had observable effects on the environment.
For example, the slow collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet is in progress.
Arctic warming and melting of Greenland’s ice sheet are driving freshwater into the North Atlantic, which is contributed to a recent 15 percent slowdown of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) in the Atlantic Ocean.
Extensive thawing of permafrost is already happing with the potential to realize billions of tons of methane gas.
There is more heat-absorbing open water and 40 percent less reflective ice so we’ll reach 1.5 C in one or two decades.
Even if countries act on their Paris climate agreement pledges to reduce emissions, warming will still rise more than 3 degrees C (5.4 degrees F).
It’s important to know that global temperatures aren’t driven by human emissions of carbon alone.
The risk of those cascading into an irreversible global tipping point with tremendous impacts on human civilization warrants a declaration of a planetary climate emergency.
To err on the side of danger is not a responsible option. It is significantly cheaper to prevent additional global warming than it is to face its impacts.
We need to change our approach to the climate problem because our efforts to reach global targets have been “utterly inadequate”
No amount of economic cost-benefit analysis is going to help us now that we face an existential threat to civilization. The reality is that the cumulative impact of these changes will cause fundamental parts of the Earth system to change dramatically and irreversibly.
While climate records are being routinely broken, tipping points are not part of any economic analysis of climate policies it is widely assumed to mean that we are now committed to suffering these tipping events.
The time for talking is over and no matter what we do there has to be a radical change to our behavior.
Climate change will not be stoped by technology unless we distribute both the cost and benefits by allocating 0.05% of profit for profit’s sake in order to distribute wealth by way of nonrepayable grants to all activities that will mitigate its effects. ( See previous posts )
Only a fraction of articles and papers in economics journals discuss climate change.
IF THERE IS ANYTHING TO LEARN FROM COVID IT IS THAT WE HUMANS MUST CHANGE THE WAY WE LIVE COLLECTIVELY AND INDIVIDUALLY ON THIS PLANET.
CURRENTLY, WE ALL LIVE WITHIN IDEOLOGIES THAT ARE BROKEN.
SOME VISIBLE SOME NOT.
(An ideology (/ˌʌɪdɪˈɒlədʒi/) is a set of beliefs or philosophies attributed to a person or group of persons, especially as held for reasons that are not purely epistemic, in which “practical elements are as prominent as theoretical ones.” Wikipedia.
There are many different kinds of ideologies, including political, social, epistemological, and ethical.
“We do not need…to believe in an ideology. All that is necessary is for each of us to develop our good human qualities. The need for a sense of universal responsibility affects every aspect of modern life.” — Dalai Lama.
“The function of ideology is to stabilize and perpetuate dominance through masking or illusion.” — Sally Haslanger
“[A]n ideology differs from a simple opinion in that it claims to possess either the key to history or the solution for all the ‘riddles of the universe,’ or the intimate knowledge of the hidden universal laws, which are supposed to rule nature and man.” — Hannah Arendt)
At the root of all these ideologies is the value of money.
HOW IT IS ACQUIRED AND DISTRIBUTED IS WHAT NEEDS TO BE CHANGED.
A religion may present a vision of a just society, but it cannot easily have a practical political program with or without money.
All idea systems have a class basis. This class bias is defined by the acquisition of wealth in one form or another – assets, power, etc. Nither however can any longer dominate the state through an appeal to the populace, and then use the powers of the state to control both the economy and the private lives of the citizen’s work.
No longer can politics itself, acquire certain ideological characteristics whose true nature is concealed.
All forms of isms that belong to the 19th or 20th century may suggest that ideologies are no older than the word itself—that they belong essentially to a period in which secular belief increasingly replaced traditional religious faith.
So let’s ask the question.
Where are we?
In terms of truth we now in a world both connected and disconnected in the extreme sense of the word connected.
IT IS CLEAR THAT THE WORLD NEEDS TO MOVE BEYOND SLOGANS.
A system that rewards those with capita while taxpayer’s money is used to support food banks for those out of work is not sustainable.
The economic injustices are plain to see with historic debt the inheritance of the young along with irreversible climate change and biodiversity collapse.
We now need an ism that shifts human values to a different set of values by placing the earth’s healthy existence at the forefront of all our values.
WE MUST NOT ONLY CONFRONT OUR MISUNDERSTANDINGS OF THE NATURAL WORLD WE MUST USE KNOWLEDGE NOT AS A MEANS TO CREATE WEALTH BUT AS A GLOBAL UNDERSTANDING WHERE WE ARE AT.
WE CAN NO LONGER STAND BYE AND WATCH BIG TECH MONOPOLIES COMPANIES SWALLOW WHAT IS LEFT OF COMPETITION.
WE CAN NO LONGER STAND BYE AND WATCH A MARKET PLACE THAT CREATES WINNERS AND LOSERS ON THE BASES OF WEALTH.
WE CAN NO LONGER WATCH WORLD ORGANISATIONS GOVERNED BY VETOES.
WE ALL DEPENDENT ON EACH OTHER AND OTHERS AND MUST COLLABORATE WITH ALL THAT SURROUNDS US.
No longer is it possible for any system whether it’s socialism, communism, anarchism, fascism, nationalism, liberalism, and conservatism to be FREE OF INTERFERENCE FROM ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, MACHINE LEARNING, AND UNCONTROLLED ALGORITHMS.
THESE TECHNOLOGIES IN THEIR PRESENT STATE ARE SIGNALING THAT INTERPRETATIONS OF IDEOLOGIES ARE OUT OF DATE.
You only have to look at the world to see the inequalities created by the pursuit of growth at any cost. This pursuit has turned all of earth’s resources into products to produce more products sold in a marketplace governed by short term profit.
No longer is it possible to take fresh air, fresh water for granted.
If we don’t want a world where from birth to death is viewed as an opportunity to exploit our weaknesses and essential needs to live out our lives in the first place, we need AN NEW IDOLOGIE CALLED REALISM, NOT ESCAPISM, NOT APATHY, OR ANY MONOTHEISM, OR NEOREALISTS
“ Rather a collective meanings that constitute the structures which organize our actions.”
There is only one solution.
That is as advocated by this blog in several posts to Harness PROFIT FOR-PROFIT SAKE.
High-frequency trading with algorithms, sovereign wealth funds buying earth resources – land, water, energy, futures/ hedge funds – betting on demand, currency exchanges manipulating value, trade deals excluding fair trade, the list is endless.
ALL ACTIONS THAT ARE NOW REQUIRED TO CHANGE COURSE REQUIRE FUNDING.
A 0.05% WORLD AID COMMISSION ON ALL ACTIVITIES THAT ARE NOT SUSTAINABLE WILL CREATE A PERTUTIAL FUND OF TRILLIONS TO CREATE A WORLD THAT’S WORTH LIVING ON.
There is one thing for certain change is happing but the window for change is closing.
Climate change is not something that might happen in the future.
We need a new relationship, to a more sustainable relationship with the natural world.
Creative imagination is what’s required so if you read this post let’s hear your comments.
bobdillon33blog 