The Battle of Thought

People tend to discuss environmental issues from a negative point of view. The discourse is about pollution, shortage of clean water and food, poverty, decreasing biodiversity, greenhouse effect and climate change. The biggest crook in the house of Misery & Trouble bears the codename CO2, the symbol of decline and entropy. People talk about CO2 as if it’s a poisonous gas. Something very, very bad and nasty. Well, it isn’t. It is a colorless, odorless, non-poisonous ‘growth stimulator’. In fact it is more basic to life than sex. It is plant food, and it drives the whole food chain. All life, every cell in every living organism on the planet is based on and contains carbon. Bacteria, algae and plants remove CO2 from the air and water and store it in their tissues. Together with water vapor, CO2 keeps our planet warm, preventing it from being covered in ice, from becoming too hot or devoid of liquid water.

The Battle of Thought between the so-called ‘deniers and sceptics’ on one side and the ‘believers’ of climate change on the other, is outdated before it reaches its climax. But even if the debate is over, still it is important and urgent to change our lifestyles. We will have to stop plundering nature, eat vegetarian food instead of costly meat, bike and walk before driving, use fewer materials and less not renewable energy sources. This is urgent for other reasons than climate change: namely for the health of the human supporting system and therefore the health and continuation of the human race.The discussion whether or not CO2 emissions are caused by human activities and damage the climate and thus the Earth is delusive and dangerous.

In the perspective of ‘the Deniers’ climate change defenders use the issue to create new business, like emission trade and carbon capture & storage, as well as to enforce more legislation and thus ‘to obtain more power over the masses they try to frighten into obedience’. According to some Deniers the issue ‘has become a strict religion, which endures no questions or criticism. Zero tolerance for dissent. They have become suspect because they entered politics. Power and wealth for some and oppression for others are the outcome of their advocacy’.

The Believers strike back with words grilled in sour undertones. Both sides try to pinpoint flaws in scientific reports and batter the arguments of their opponents. On one point they agree: their opinions on politics and politicians (see the following three statements).

Copenhagen (Dec 2009) recognized the case for keeping the rise in temperature below 2 degrees, but failed to produce a binding agreement …

…Leaving leaders with tarnished reputations…

Cancun Summit (Dec 2010) – Conclusion? They have now selected the paint for the deckchairs on the titanic?
Am I too cynical? I am sure a great deal of hard work has been done, but I worry that nothing binding has been agreed and it is all a lot of hot air (please excuse the pun!). Will countries actually do anything as a result?

The polarization – whether greenhouse gasses are or are not damaging the planet – is dangerous, because it puts the spot on the wrong place and has become a struggle for power and money. The stakes are high. Today in the European Union the primary energy supply is 80% dependent on fossil fuels. Economic growth and prosperity, one can argue, have been built on oil, coal and gas. It’s very important that regional opinion leaders learn to see through all manipulation and power lifting. That’s the highway to a learning region.

Energy has made Europe strong. At the same time it is Europe’s Achilles’ heel. Over 50% of the energy supply is mined outside the EU. The situation will worsen when oil and gas wells dry up. Without a transition the EU – especially in the short run - gets more and more dependent on instable monarchies and dictatorial regimes in the Middle East, Africa, et cetera. Thus making the EU still more vulnerable to energy supply disruptions from outside the union and to volatility in energy prices. The solution to this problem may be the entry into the EU of oil- and gasrich Russia. This isn’t science fiction. On the contrary! Russian Prime

Minister Vladimir Putin has said that he does not rule out the creation of a currency union between the Russian Federation and the European Union some time in the future. He was speaking during a joint news conference following his talks with the German Chancellor Angela Merkel, at the end of November 2010. As to this kind of currency union, he said, we understand, of course, that any currency union is a result of the combination of economies, of economic development. Things should grow ripe, the Russian Prime Minister said.

One thing is for sure: energy is a condition for economic growth. Without energy all machines, cars, electrical devices, and more, come to a standstill. The consequences can be huge. But don’t panic. For the next forty years there will be enough energy, especially if people and organisations will bring more efficiency in their use of energy. ‘More Energy, Less Carbon Dioxide,’ is the name of the game at Shell.

The oil company has developed two scenarios: Scramble and Blueprints. ‘The main difference is in the degree of cooperation between companies, governments and people,’ Richard Sears explains. ‘In Scramble everyone acts independently trying to solve their own supply/demand or environmental problem, whereas in Blueprints there is a greater sense of cooperating to find workable solutions for everyone. By acting together under Blueprints, the outcome is more likely an earlier transition to alternative energy sources.’

Systems tend to correct themselves and solve problems, like we’ve seen with oil and the CO2 issue. Another notion is that life supporting systems are too complex to be mastered on a central level by a government, the European Commission or the United Nations. Regionalism, decentralization, self-organization and citizenship are some coined concepts that dressed as leather eggs roll out of the climate scrum.

For more:check Beyond Oil - http://www.ecolutie.nl

Still Cool or Real Hot

Data by NASA show a world on fire. On the other hand geologists say: ‘global warming is over. The next thirty years global cooling makes the scene.' If global warming is dead, what will happen to CO2?

By Frank van Empel

The world is getting warmer, NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies shows in global temperature maps. Whether the cause is human activity or natural variability, thermometer readings all around the world have risen steadily since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, the Institute states. Planet Ambassadors and other environmentalists are happy with the maps. ‘The next time anyone tells you that the world is actual cooling,’ one of them says on the internet, ‘simply point them to these global temperature maps’. Take a look at the slideshow yourself and make up your own mind. Do they really knock out all critics of global warming?

http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/21Tecb/www.good.is/post/real-heat-maps-watch-as-the-world-burns//r:t

According to NASA’s temperature analysis the average global temperature on Earth has increased about 0.8°Celsius (1.4°Fahrenheit) since 1880. Two-thirds of the warming has occurred since 1975, at a rate of roughly 0.15-0.20°C per decade. Housewives and stallholders may be impressed by this data, but geologists just laugh at it. They think in glacial and interglacial cycles of 10.000 up to 50.000 years. If we take the long-term view, geologists tell us, currently we live in an ice age that started 37 million years ago. In the meantime the Earth’s climate has changed with cycles of warming and cooling.

According to this special breed of scientists the acceleration of the increase in temperature since 1975 can easily be compensated by a 30 year period of global cooling. That’s the storyline of professor Mojib Latif, who works for the famous Leibniz Institut in Kiel, Germany, and who is a highly respected member of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). His specialism is cool: measuring the temperature 1.000 meter below the watersurface of the ocean. According to Latif, here in the deep water, oceans give birth to the next climate cycle of 30 years. ‘The two decades 1980-2000 formed a warmth cycle,’ Latif says early 2010 to reporters of Daily Mail and Guardian. ‘That has gone.’

We enter a thirty year long period of global cooling now, Latif says. And he knows he has a lot of experts behind him. Geologists and climatologists like Hays, Imbrie and Shackleton for instance, who already in 1976 have stated in Science that a surplus of greenhouse gasses like CO2 are warming up the Earth. Something that can be overcompensated by another period of global cooling. M.F. Loutie and A. Berger, have put the length of the present interglacial in 2002 at 50.000 years. Who then lives, then worries. ‘No,’ comments Berger in the slipstream of a presentation he gave for the European Geosciences Union (EGU) in 2005, we all have to care about emissions right now. Berger believes that the present CO2 perturbation will last long enough to surpress the next glacial cycle entirely.

Amidst this controversy between global warming and global cooling believers, the British quality magazine the Economist runs an article about 2010 as the warmest year ever recorded. Early December that was the measured reality for 2010. Who looks out the window in Amsterdam, Hamburg, Stockholm or London may think it’s an early Christmas dinner joke. But it isn’t. The global temperature record represents an average over the entire surface of the planet.

The temperatures we experience locally and in short periods can fluctuate significantly due to predictable cyclical events (night and day, summer and winter) and hard-to-predict wind and precipitation patterns. But the global temperature mainly depends on how much energy the planet receives from the Sun and how much it radiates back into space — quantities that change very little. The amount of energy radiated by the Earth depends significantly on the chemical composition of the atmosphere, particularly the amount of heat-trapping greenhouse gases.

The maps of NASA colour the past. They depict how much various regions of the world have warmed or cooled when compared with a base period of 1951 -1980. They can’t say anything about the future. We have to do here with one of the most complex, nonlinear systems: the weather. Greenhouse gases are just one element in this universe, where Nature still has the power to surprise people with holidays on ice instead of the anticipated hotdays on the beach.

Discussion:
What do you think or believe? Are we getting ‘real hot’, or staying ‘still cool’ in the coming 30 years? And what will happen to the discussion about CO2? Will it fade away too, like the acid rain issue?

Modern Materialism

No one in his senses favours inefficiency. But that doesn’t make efficiency a piece of cake or an attractive, let alone, sexy, subject. On the contrary. The whole concept is narrowed to management literature and practice. It relates only to the material side of things, to the supply side of economics and the ultimate goal of all business people: to make the highest possible profit.

‘Operational excellence,’ (managers’ term for milking out redundant expenses) has nothing to do with demand, planet, or people. ‘Operational excellence’ only has to do with profit. What we need is a whole new concept of efficiency.

Stop rushing for a moment and take some time for reflection. What is business doing with and to people? Daddies and Mammies go to the office or to a factory early in the morning. Their labour is treated as input of useful energy by bookkeepers and mainstream economists. Their bodies are just instruments.

The output of the office or factory is dead matter (paperwork, e-mails, improved commodities, signed documents), whereas the pappas and mammies at the machines get more worn out bit by bit every day. This entropy is labelled: heroic participation in a social-economic adventure, or something like that. Everybody has to shine, even when it is a fake glow.

The prevailing systems (energy, transport, environment, economy) have one thing in common: they are shaped by a technology that drives them into the direction of constantly bigger, more of the same, standardisation, infinite complexity, vast expensiveness, inscrutability and fierce competition.

New social network technology pushes the prevailing systems in the opposite direction, towards smallness, diversity, simplicity, cheapness, transparancy and cooperation. Internet technology supports systems that serve man instead of enslaving him. A kind of modern materialism, that brings organisations, politics and policymaking back to the human scale.

Modern Materialism suggests simple, small and smart solutions for complex environmental issues like the abundant and constantly growing energy-use, as can be seen in this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LcjgRms6ShQ

The message in three words: BACK TO BASICS.
QUESTION: DO YOU HAVE OTHER SUGGESTIONS?
THEN, PLEASE, POST THEM.